Thursday, March 25, 2021
The Story About Offshore Oil Drilling Environmentalists DESPERATELY Don't Want You to Hear
“Louisiana officials say the state’s oil and gas industry is in danger. This comes after President Joe Biden cancelled a March oil lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. Nearly 80 million acres of available leases would have been sold this week. The damage to Louisiana’s (and the nation’s) oil and gas companies started in January when President Biden signed an executive order banning all new oil and gas leases on public land and waters for 60 days," reports KLFY.
Now for the cheering:
“Cancelling this huge offshore Gulf oil auction helps protect our climate and life on Earth. President Biden understands the urgent need to keep this oil in the ground…This is a great step toward phasing out all offshore drilling and bringing environmental justice to the Gulf Coast and Alaska. We need to help restore coastal communities and marine life," the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement.
And speaking of “marine life.” If bona-fide science has crowned “Global Warmists” with 10-foot dunce caps, then over half a century of scientific evidence has crowned anti-offshore drilling activists with 50-foot dunce caps. That offshore oil drilling—far from an environmental disaster, is empirically an environmental bonanza—has been pounded home with a vengeance in study after study. The science, you might say, is settled. To wit:
According to the Energy Information Administration, "Gulf of Mexico federal offshore oil production accounts for 17% of total U.S. crude oil production." Yet with over 3000 of the 4000 plus offshore oil production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico off her coast, Louisiana provides almost a third of North America’s commercial fisheries.
A study by LSU’s sea grant college showed that 70 percent of Louisiana’s offshore fishing trips target these structures. “Oil platforms as artificial reefs support fish densities 10 to 1000 times that of adjacent sand and mud bottom, and almost always exceed fish densities found at both adjacent artificial reefs of other types and natural hard bottom,” revealed a study by Dr. Bob Shipp, professor at the Marine Sciences department of the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama. “Evidence indicates that massive areas of the northwestern Gulf of Mexico were essentially empty of Red Snapper stocks for the first hundred years of the fishery. Subsequently, areas in the western Gulf have become the major source of red snapper, concurrent with the appearance of thousands of petroleum platforms.”
In brief, “villainous” Big Oil produces marine life at rates that puts to shame “wondrous” Earth Goddess Gaia. “The fish Biomass around an offshore oil platform is ten times greater per unit area than for natural coral reefs,” also found Dr. Charles Wilson of LSU’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Science (emphasis added). "Ten to thirty thousand adult fish live around an oil production platform in an area half the size of a football field.”
But you’re very conveniently “forgetting” the infamous BP oil spill! comes the retort from Environmentalist Whackos.
Glad you mentioned that. Because only one year after the infamous spill, the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Seafood Inspection Laboratory, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, along with similar agencies from neighboring Gulf coast states, have methodically and repeatedly tested Gulf seafood for cancer-causing “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.”
“Not a single sample [for oil or dispersant] has come anywhere close to levels of concern,” reported Olivia Watkins, executive media advisor for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
“All of the samples have been 100-fold or even 1,000-fold below all of these levels,” reported Bob Dickey, director of the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory. “Nothing ever came close to these levels.”
That this proliferation of seafood in the Gulf of Mexico came because – rather than in spite – of the oil production rattled many environmental cages and provoked a legion of scoffers.
Amongst the scoffers were some Travel Channel producers, fashionably greenish in their views. They read these claims in a book by yours truly—"The Helldiver’s Rodeo”—that Publishers Weekly hailed as “highly-entertaining!” (Ted Nugent’s blurb certainly didn’t help against their scoffing!)
The book describes an undersea panorama that (if true) could make an interesting show for the network, they concluded, while still scoffing. They scoffed as we rode in from the airport. They scoffed over raw oysters, grilled redfish and seafood gumbo that night. More scoffing through the Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s. They scoffed even while suiting up in dive gear and checking the cameras as we tied up to an oil platform 20 miles in the Gulf off the southeast Louisiana coast.
But they came out of the water bug-eyed and indeed produced and broadcast a Travel Channel program showcasing a panorama that turned on its head every environmental superstition against offshore oil drilling. Schools of fish filled the water column from top to bottom – from 6-inch blennies to 12-foot sharks. Fish by the thousands. Fish by the ton.
The cameras were going crazy. Do I focus on the shoals of barracuda? Or that cloud of jacks? On the immense schools of snapper below, or on the fleet of tarpon above? How ’bout this – whoa – hammerhead! We had some close-ups, too, of coral and sponges, the very things disappearing off Florida’s pampered reefs—a state that bans offshore oil drilling. Off Louisiana, they sprout in colorful profusion from the huge steel beams —acres of them. You’d never guess this was part of that unsightly structure above. The panorama of marine life around an offshore oil platform staggers anyone who puts on goggles and takes a peek, even (especially!) the most worldly scuba divers. Here’s a video peek at this seafood bonanza.
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Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?
Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.
GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.
All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.
When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.
Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”
Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.
Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.
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Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring pricetags down.
The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.
Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.
Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.
But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.
We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternative current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill.
That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.
Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.
Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.
Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.
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Nations Aren’t Acting as If Climate Change Poses Existential Crisis
Political leaders and media personalities are fond of saying climate change poses an existential threat to humans and the planet. The weight of scientific evidence doesn’t support this oft-made claim.
Despite what is reported almost daily by the mainstream media, data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show no increase in extreme weather events as the earth has modestly warmed over the past 150 years. Indeed, IPCC and NOAA data show the number of extreme cold spells, drought, floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires have all either declined modestly or remained relatively stable since the late 1870s.
Despite these irrefutable facts, leaders from nations around the world have signed multiple international agreements, the latest being the 2015 Paris climate agreement, intended to avert a supposed pending climate disaster.
However, their actions do not match their words. The U.N. recently reported the same political leaders who publicly signed the Paris Climate Agreement committing them to restrict emission from their countries, have enacted domestic policies that actually increase emissions.
As of February 26, the U.N. says only 75 of the more than 190 countries that have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement have tendered firm commitments and detailed plans to cut emissions, despite having committed to deliver those plans by 2020. Adding insult to injury, the U.N. says “the level of ambition communicated through these NDCs indicates that changes in these countries’ total emissions would be small, less than -1%, in 2030 compared to 2010 … [whereas the] IPCC, by contrast, has indicated that emission reduction ranges to meet the 1.5°C temperature goal should be around -45% in 2030 compared to 2010.”
Whether it is large emitters or small, the reality is nations are putting poverty reduction and economic growth (rightly in my opinion) ahead of climate action.
Let’s look at a few examples.
India is the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter. Under the Paris Agreement, India did not pledge to cut its emissions, rather it said it would reduce emissions intensity (emissions as a percentage of GDP). The problem with this is, even if India exceeds its carbon intensity reduction goals, its total emissions will still have increased substantially. As a result, the U.N. observes, “with current energy targets and policies, emissions are projected to keep increasing (by 24-25 percent above 2019 levels in 2030) and show no signs of peaking, in particular due to the lack of a policy to transition away from coal. Such an increase of emissions is not consistent with the Paris Agreement.”
Indeed, 70 percent of India’s electric power is generated by burning coal. And India’s most recent estimate is that by 2030 coal use for energy will increase by 40 percent.
The news is even worse out of China, the world’s biggest emitter. China, which is responsible for approximately 25 percent of the world’s emissions, vaguely indicated it expected carbon dioxide emissions to peak by 2030. Peak at what level?
The Chinese Communist Party recently released its five-year plan for economic development and it contained no reduction in coal use. It would be surprising if it did. In recent years, China has built dozens of new coal-fueled power plants, with hundreds more in various stages of construction, development, and planning. China intends to build coal-fueled power plants in Africa, throughout Asia, and the Middle East.
Simultaneously, China is disincentivizing new construction of wind and solar facilities, which the National Energy Administration (NEA) referred to as “unreliables.”
Even Argentina, a relatively small emitter, will have trouble squaring its development goals with its Paris climate commitment. At a recent conference, President Alberto Fernandez said Argentina’s goal was to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Meanwhile, back home, far from the limelight of international climate conferences, Fernandez announced the government was doubling down on fossil fuels, saying, “Today we are relaunching the oil and gas economy,” starting with $5 billion in government subsidies, to develop its shale fields.
Political elites don’t really fear a climate apocalypse is in the offing. Rather, they are using the threat of the “climate change” hobgoblin to accrue ever more power and control over peoples’ lives. For politicians, this is what the climate scare is and always has been about.
H.L. Mencken once famously quipped, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” Nowhere is this truer than in the push to save the world from climate change.
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What Australians really think about climate change
Sampling, sampling, sampling. The revelation that only one in seven Australians take climate change seriously is very encouraging but ALL the figures below have to be taken with a large grain of salt.
The "sample" was derived from an online panel study and the biases of online studies are well-known, to say nothing of the inaccuracies in panel studies. Online samples tend to skew Left. So even the 7% is probably an overstimate
The journal article is "Australian voters’ attitudes to climate action and their social-political determinants" in https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0248268
Just one in seven Australians considered climate change their decisive issue when voting in the 2019 federal election.
But some 80 per cent say action to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions is important, including almost 70 per cent of Coalition voters.
They are two key findings from new ANU research published today in the journal PLOS ONE, based on online and telephone surveys with more than 2000 Australian voters after the 2019 poll.
In the paper, researchers Dr Rebecca Colvin and Professor Frank Jotzo looked at some of the reasons why, in the “climate election,” the party that was offering the more “status quo” emissions policy was returned to government.
They found 52 per cent of survey respondents said climate change was a factor in how they voted in 2019, but it was the single biggest issue for just 13 per cent of voters – or slightly more than one in seven people.
Asked whether this finding could be a source of hope or despair for supporters of climate action, Dr Colvin said both interpretations were possible.
“One way to look at it is that there isn’t a massive unbridgeable divide across the political spectrum on climate change,” she told News Corp. “There are lots of people who say they want to see action on climate change but they’re not determining their votes on it – but that broad based of social support is there.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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