UK: No growth while Net Zero is in place
Energy costs will close two major ‘green’ manufacturing operations
* BMW is moving manufacturing of the electric Mini from the UK to China where manufacturing is powered by cheap coal.
* Britishvolt, a major battery manufacturing startup, is on the brink of collapse.
Both companies have cited high energy prices as the reason for their problems.
Claims that the UK’s economy will be based around ‘green industries’ are clearly false.
* Manufacturing of renewables and EVs will be built in places where energy is cheap, which means places where it is derived from fossil fuels.
* European wind turbine manufacturers are financially struggling and cutting jobs, losing market share to Chinese competitors benefiting from cheap coal.
* Net Zero is driving the wholesale deindustrialisation of Britain which threatens to make the UK uninvestable.
The economic crisis can only be solved by cheap energy
* There will be no economic growth without cheap energy.
* Cheap energy can only be delivered through increased supply of fossil fuels and nuclear, and elimination of renewables.
Net Zero plans must be cancelled as a matter of urgency.
Net Zero is unattainable and a danger to national well-being
Contact
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Net Zero Watch
e: benny.peiser@netzerowatch.com
m: 07553 361717
https://mailchi.mp/42cab0fa853f/no-growth-while-net-zero-is-in-place-191899?e=cc88839e92
**************************************************Climate criminals
If an ordinary person walks up to a priceless work of art in a gallery and either glues themselves to the glass casing or throws food over it, they are arrested and fined – but if you vandalise art in the name of ‘climate’ you get to grace the headlines of the world’s Woke publications and bask in the gratitude of renewables barons and billionaire CEOs who stand to make a fortune from these childish antics.
Oh, and you might get a slap on the wrist if the cops manage to drag themselves away from policing wrong-think on social media.
When we say there is a ‘Culture War’ going on, conservatives didn’t realise that the physical treasures of Western culture would find themselves lobbed into the frenzy of misguided youth activism incited by communist lecturers still sore that their preferred ideology killed more people last century than Hitler.
It’s tricky, you see, to be a virtuous social warrior when the heroes of collectivism are all mass-murdering psychopaths. I imagine it’s also tough to reignite a Marxist revolution when the university-educated ‘working class’ use an underclass of UberEats drivers to summon their soy lattes, paid for by mummy’s credit card. They’re not exactly ‘workers’ so they’ve been re-imagined as terribly oppressed victims. There was nothing else left in Pandora’s Box of bad ideas.
Just Stop Oil – the group targeting art galleries – is a UK activist outfit founded in February of 2022 and funded largely by the American-based Climate Emergency Fund (CEF). There’s some heavy irony that the founder of CEF is quoted in a World Economic Forum article discussing the pressures of ‘climate anxiety’ – a phenomenon caused almost entirely by organisations telling children the world is going to end.
Groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, (and most of our politicians?) share cult-like doomsday rhetoric, quoting various ‘climate scientists’ who insist the world will either end or pass an irreversible moment of destruction in three or four years if we don’t agree to their demands. Conscripting impressionable young people into what amounts to a death cult used to be a matter for child protection services, now it forms the cornerstone of mainstream education.
There are thousands of these climate groups, continuously spawning and dying, shifting shells and shuffling their finances around – partly to hide the reality that their claims never come true, but also because it makes it more difficult to see who is behind them and how much money they are making from their ‘give us money or you’ll all die’ pleas.
The Christian Climate Action group assures us that the Just Stop Oil campaign is necessary. Oddly, their website is branded with the Extinction Rebellion logo topped by a cross – just as Rome is littered with Egyptian Obelisks with the same gesture.
‘Following our January gathering in Birmingham, and a recent zoom meeting with Roger Hallam, a growing number of people in CCA are feeling drawn to sign up for Just Stop Oil. The need for civil disobedience is greater than ever, as the world moves ever further towards climate disaster. Some have already signed up to take part in the action itself, others are acting in an admin / back office capacity, but whatever way you choose to be involved, please do consider carefully whether you can give your time and energy to this important campaign.’
Roger Hallam is the notorious co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.
‘Just Stop Oil is going to need lots of money,’ the website continues. ‘They are asking people to donate as much as they can.’
This is a religion and like all religions, it uses emotional manipulation as a means to convince people to hand over their money to the collective. Considering Just Stop Oil encourages people to commit crimes in the name of ‘activism’ – whether that be gluing their hands to artwork, holding up traffic, or interfering with the lives or ordinary people – one wonders why they are allowed to keep that money if it is in whole or part benefiting from criminal activity.
While many thousands of ordinary people are probably being fleeced of their cash based on some wishy-washy promise to ‘save the planet’, there are plenty of elite donors and philanthropists with green-shaped share portfolios that prop up these disruptive campaigns and ensure that the topic of ‘climate’ continues to rise to the top of the public conversation.
Those who stand to benefit from the sale of renewables technology, businessmen whose financial interests lay in the increased prices of minerals used in their production, CEOs who sell otherwise useless climate-stalking ideas (such as carbon credits and footprints), and banking interests who would love nothing more than to create a system of social punishment to ‘save the planet’ (and quietly control the behaviour of their customers) – are all lining the pockets of these rag-tag climate groups.
It’s time we look past the abuse of our children (who are told they will die if they don’t throw soup over a Van Gogh), and drag out the conspirators behind the curtain – the rich end of town that is using child soldiers to manipulate Western Civilisation onto a self-destructive path that uses our collective empathy against us.
While the kids think they are saving the planet, the businesses that fund them are tearing the planet apart. Renewables technology is driving the largest mining boom in human history while simultaneously robbing civilisation of reliable, affordable energy. The poorer we get, the more powerful and rich these CEOs become.
They are not saving the planet, they are buying it, one soup-splashed oil painting at a time.
Let’s pretend that we agree to the demands of Just Stop Oil. Most of these kids are vegans who like to eat a lot of food grown in different parts of the world. What do they imagine their avocados are going to look like after six months on a sailing ship? They aren’t ready for an oil-free world and I wager their masters have no intention of creating one.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/climate-criminals/ ?
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Western leaders must share the blame for the energy crisis
Since the beginning of the Ukraine war and the sanctions it triggered, energy prices have skyrocketed. Liz Truss has warned that soaring energy bills are a ‘price worth paying’ in order to stand up against Vladimir Putin. President Joe Biden has called this year’s rocketing bills ‘Putin’s price hike.’ Margrethe Vestager, vice president of the European Commission, has encouraged Europeans to take short, cold showers to conserve energy. ‘When you turn off the water, say ‘Take that, Putin!’’ she urged.
But are the high prices really Putin’s fault? He didn’t sanction himself, after all. It’s the West that chose to cut itself off from the Russian fossil fuels upon which it had come to rely. Moreover, the sanctions haven’t been an unqualified success — Russia’s corporate profits leapt 25 per cent between the imposition of the sanctions and the end of August.
So what are the origins of the current energy crisis? When did it really begin?
Let’s play a game. Guess which year these headlines are from: ‘Curtailed ammonia production in Antwerp and Ludwigshafen.’ ‘High natural gas prices lead to a shutdown of British fertiliser plants.’ ‘Diesel Shortage Amid Soaring Prices: Truck Stops Resort To Rationing.’ If you guessed 2022, you’d be wrong. Those are all from September 2021.
The truth is that the energy crisis began to take effect late last year. A combination of post-Covid demand rebound, a wind drought in Europe and depleted fossil fuel storage on the continent all collided to put serious pressure on the world’s industrial systems. Add the longstanding over investment in unreliable renewables, nuclear plant closures across the world in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and a global drop of more than 50 per cent in oil and gas investment — from $700 billion (£635 billion) to $300 billion (£270 billion) — between 2014 and last year, and you have everything you need to kick off a global energy crunch. Russian tank treads running from the Donbas to Kyiv just made it all worse.
When politicians point the finger at Putin, they’re deflecting from their own failures. It’s hard to blame them, especially if they’re European. Aluminium smelters in the EU have had to shutter operations, as have fertiliser plants, glass factories and various other manufacturers. Germany, the continent’s largest economy, is about to lose much of its manufacturing base to high energy prices. Industry and union leaders have been sounding the alarm for months, warning that Germany’s manufacturing sector could collapse without sufficient energy. And it’s not even clear Germany’s better-than-expected storage numbers are enough to get them through the winter without any flows from Russia.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the number of people behind on their utility bills mushroomed from three million to nearly 11 million between March and August. Eleven per cent of the British population — nearly six million people — are already forgoing food to pay their energy bills. Would you want to be on the hook for any of this? It’s way easier to blame the evil Russian guy.
Don’t be fooled into thinking America is immune from the crisis. Sure, the US has incredible domestic resources, but the country is also moving in the European direction. Over the last few years, America has shut down nuclear plants before their time, including Palisades in Michigan and Indian Point in New York. The fossil-fuel industry isn’t interested in risking capital on expansion when the Democrats continue to sabre-rattle about destroying it. Not since Truman has a president leased so few federal lands to the oil and gas sector. To make matters worse, most of the new capacity being added to the grid is intermittent and unreliable wind and solar.
The result of all this? America’s energy and electricity sectors look anaemic, fragile and expensive. Over the summer, the National Energy Assistance Directors Association reported that about 20 million households in the United States — one out of six homes — are behind on their utility bills. Some parts of the country have seen electricity prices increase by 233 per cent since last year.
The North American Electricity Reliability Corporation has warned that a huge swath of the country is becoming increasingly vulnerable to blackouts. In August, a heatwave pushed the Texas grid to new demand limits for a week straight. The next month, the California grid operator had to beg consumers to consume less juice to avoid rolling blackouts. And don’t forget New England. Despite its proximity to the Marcellus Shale Formation in the mid-Atlantic states, the region lacks the pipeline infrastructure to import natural gas from it. The Jones Act, which bars foreign-owned vessels from delivering goods between US ports, has also hamstrung the region. New England’s liquefied natural gas, or LNG, import terminals cannot receive from the Gulf of Mexico’s LNG export terminals because while the United States produces the most LNG in the world, it does not make LNG tankers. So New Englanders will have to compete with Europe and Asia for pricey LNG to light and heat their homes this winter. That’ll be painful: natural gas is 53 per cent of the New England grid’s resource mix.
But America doesn’t have to follow in Europe’s footsteps. Rather than doubling down on the ‘energy transition,’ America should desensitise itself to the sobering truths of external events and commit to energy realism. After all, energy is indispensable to maintaining the economy. So, what would a more realistic energy policy look like?
First, we need more hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels are the master resource, like it or not. Everything that could possibly move us away from fossil fuels in the long run will need cheap fossil fuels for their construction in the near and medium term: from nuclear power plants to battery storage. We need to cut the red tape on permitting to fast-track more pipeline construction. We should also eliminate all carbon taxes, which increase our energy costs. And we must lease more federal land to the fossil-fuel industry. Eliminating the Renewable Fuel Standard, which has turned into an expensive financial boondoggle the burden of which companies pass onto consumers, wouldn’t hurt either.
Second, we need to liberate the atom. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has adopted safety standards so extreme that no design offered since its inception in the mid-Seventies has ever been completed. Its chosen radiation safety standard — ‘As Low As Reasonably Achievable’ — relies on an incoherent measurement of radiation dosage and creates too much opportunity for regulatory activism. And the NRC’s approval process takes too long. The agency needs to be reworked so that its standards are fewer and clearer and its approval processes faster and cheaper.
Third, we need to harden our grid. Wind and solar, when built in large amounts, have a free ride on the reliable power plants that can be called on at will to ensure the grid keeps running. They also tend to stop producing power when they’re needed most. According to the Energy Information Administration, when California was on the brink of blackouts, solar and wind production plummeted. Natural gas stepped in to save the day, making up more than 50 per cent of the resource mix after sundown. The fastest way to curb their growth and spare the grid more entropy would be to eliminate all production tax credits for wind and solar in perpetuity. That removes the incentive for overbuilding and spares electricity markets the subsidised negative prices that push reliable power plants off the grid.
Of course, embarking on this plan will mean taking on the environmental establishment, which views anything outside of renewable energy as an existential threat to mankind. But the choice should be obvious: one road leads toward liberty and abundance, another leads toward tyranny and austerity. We can live in a country where bureaucrats decide when we get to run our washers and dryers to spare our poorly managed infrastructure, or one where we can enjoy the freedom to pursue our own interests. We’re years down the road of the former, and the Inflation Reduction Act won’t help: it makes us even more dependent on unreliable electricity from wind and solar, increases taxes on oil and gas, gives the EPA nearly limitless power to curb fossil-fuel use and utterly fails to decriminalise nuclear. But it’s not too late to correct course.
During the energy crises of the 1970s, Amory Lovins, godfather of the renewable energy ideology, also invoked a choice between two energy paths: the ‘hard’ path of large power plants or the ‘soft’ one of wind, solar and biomass. He premised his vision on a misreading of Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken.’
In the poem, the paths present no real difference. Only in hindsight, as a post-hoc rationalisation, does the illusion of choice appear. The speaker of the poem flatters himself by pretending he ‘took the one less traveled by.’ Lovins was a bad reader and a poor thinker — he also consulted on Germany’s Energiewende, its ‘turnaround’ to renewable low-carbon energy production. European leaders, and later American ones — not Putin — have chosen the soft path and volunteered for disaster. And that has made all the difference.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/western-leaders-must-share-the-blame-for-the-energy-crisis/
*******************************************Banks Try Quiet Quitting on Net Zero
For some bankers, net-zero is like a new year’s resolution—a pledge one makes and often breaks before a year has passed.
Several of the largest banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley, headed into the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) as members of the world’s biggest zero-carbon finance club. Their membership in the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group of roughly 500 financial sector entities, publicly committed their banks to reach net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury.
By September they were among a faction ready to quit, according to sources familiar with the matter. JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
A year on from COP26, some big banks seem worried they jumped on the bandwagon too soon, especially as oil and gas companies have experienced a market resurgence. What makes the prospect of net-zero—or at least the vow to come up with near-term benchmarks toward that goal—such an anxiety-provoking proposition?
The revived fortunes of fossil fuels, especially coal, may explain some of the weakened resolve for decarbonization. Global bank lending to fossil fuel companies is up 15%, to over $300 billion, in the first nine months of this year, from the same period in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
This is Wall Street just doing its job: making money. Banks earned more than $1 billion in revenue from fossil lending during the first three quarters, in line with 2021. Why quit business with a booming sector over a distant climate goal?
Harald Walkate, the former head of environmental, social, and governance investing at Natixis Investment Managers and now a sustainable finance consultant, says some banks may feel their hands are tied as their fiduciary duty requires them to maximize financial value for clients.
“While from an ethical or ideological perspective many people might not like the idea of investing in fossil fuels, it’s certainly not illegal,” he says. “And it may in fact be very good business for some time to come.”
GFANZ members voluntarily pledged to completely negate greenhouse gas emissions from their balance sheets by 2050. Some banks may have felt peer pressure to join GFANZ last year, perhaps swayed by its co-chair, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney. But no one forced them into it. (GFANZ is co-chaired by Michael Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg Green parent Bloomberg LP.)
Banks may not have originally understood the full litigation risks tied to signing net-zero commitments. DLA Piper is among the law firms saying any company making a net-zero claim without scientific underpinnings may be viewed as having misled consumers.
On this issue, banks were irked when a United Nations-backed group known as Race to Zero earlier this year proposed binding restrictions on fossil-fuel finance as a necessary condition for net-zero claims to be credible. GFANZ’s affiliation with Race to Zero started before COP26 as a way to boost its credibility, but this relationship now “looks like it will soon snap,” says Ben Caldecott, director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group.
In a statement sent to Bloomberg News in early October, GFANZ said each of its sub-alliances are “subject only to their own governance structures,” essentially giving GFANZ members freedom to ignore Race to Zero’s proposals. GFANZ also said the group has “received no indication from any of our members that they intend to leave.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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