The ‘greenlash’ is coming – just look at Europe

A “greenlash” is coming, as ­voters throughout the developed world realise how duped they’ve been by years of unscientific, uneconomic nonsense spouted by much of the media and the so-called “experts”.

The marketing genius of referring to wind and solar power as “renewable”, when the associated infrastructure needs to be replaced more often than for nuclear or fossil fuel power stations, is wearing off.

The recent European parliament elections should be a wake-up call for radical climate change evangelists. In France, support for local Green parties more than halved to 5.5 per cent. In Germany, it collapsed almost 50 per cent to 12 per cent.

Among voters under 25, the German Greens did worse than the so-called “hard right” Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, as veteran US political analyst Ruy Teixeira pointed out last week.

“There’s no doubt concerns about immigration were key to the right populist surge in these elections, but the role of backlash against green policies should not be underestimated,” he said.

In 2019, just five years ago, the Greens did seven times better than the AfD. That’s a political earthquake if there ever was one.

“Voters really don’t want to be forced, directly or indirectly, to get an electric vehicle when they’re perfectly happy with their internal combustion car,” Teixeira added. “Rather than fighting climate change, voter’s strong preference is for cheap, reliable, abundant ­energy.”

In the US, support for nuclear energy for domestic power surged from 43 per cent in 2020 to 57 per cent in 2023 after flatlining for years, according to Pew Research, published in August last year.

The prospect of even higher energy prices at a time when prices in general have risen at least 20 per cent and house prices even more – all directly as a result of rampant money printing and stimulus during the Covid-19 pandemic – is proving politically toxic.

The number of nuclear reactors in the US, which provide around 20 per cent of the country’s electricity, declined from a peak of 111 in the late 1980s to 93. But as the anti-nuclear hysteria wears off, more reactors are being proposed. Now the Biden administration has embraced nuclear power as the only realistic way to provide reliable zero-carbon dioxide energy.

France, which has safely produced the bulk of its electricity via nuclear fission for years, has announced it is building at least six and up to 14 new nuclear power stations in coming years. India is building at least 18 by the early 2030s, and China is planning at least 100 new reactors by 2035.

Yes, new nuclear power stations will be expensive until the tempo of production increased and local industry climbed the learning curve. In any case, the cost argument is laughable given state and federal governments just sprayed around $400bn of borrowed money against the wall during Covid-19 for a cumulative excess deaths outcome that was scarcely different from Sweden’s, a country that spent barely anything by comparison.

As for safety, far more people tragically died at a South Korean electric battery manufacturing plant last week, at least 22, than have died from nuclear power related accidents since the poorly run and designed Chernobyl plant broke down in the 1980s.

As eminent Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil pointed out in a recent essay, it hasn’t even started – despite all the trillions spent. “Since the world began to focus on the need to end the combustion of ­fossil fuels we have not made the slightest progress in the goal of ­absolute global decarbonisation,” he points out.

Since 1997, fossil fuel consumption in absolute terms has increased 55 per cent. Its share of the total has declined from 86 per cent to 82 per cent. “All we have managed to do halfway through the ­intended grand global energy transition is a small relative decline,” Smil writes.

For affluent nations to achieve the net-zero carbon goals outlined in the international treaties they have signed, they would have to commit to annual expenditure of at least 20 per cent of GDP, for decades. To put it in perspective this is even more than the Soviet Union spent for a few years in its existential struggle to defeat Germany in World War II.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/europes-electoral-earthquake-sounds-warning-for-greens/news-story/42814927c4157b5898e0243b9ec03bc4

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No, Canada’s Not On Fire!

Environment Canada has pumped out a Xeet with the summer temperature forecast map of Canada covered in flaming orange red almost from coast to coast to coast, with a thin band of blue/grey down the West Coast.

They also promise that within a week of an extreme hot temperature event, Environment Canada will be able to provide attribution to human-causation.

As Dr. Madhav Khandekar has shown in public presentations, extreme weather events are integral to climate; they are not evidence per se of climate change.

Climate change is measured in periods of 30, 50, 100 and millennial time-scales. Thus, when we look historically at the Holocene Epoch (the last 10,000 years) there is a clear change in climate during the Medieval Optimum, a warm period of stable weather and abundant crop growth, from 900-1300 AD.

By the early 1300’s, weather patterns changed dramatically. Year-long periods of heavy rain hit Britain and northern Europe.

Temperatures cooled, crops failed, and chaotic weather conditions set in. Things got much worse from 1560-1630, a period said to be marked by volcanic activity, only restabilizing about 1860 until today.

Weather extremes were so frequent and bizarre, that thousands of (mostly) women were burned at the stake for the alleged crime of ‘Weather Cooking’ with the help of satan, as reported by historians Wolfgang Behringer and Jacek Wijaczka.

As astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas said in her presentation on the subject, the witch-burning was “…an example of fear and ignorance of extreme weather events in the Little Ice Age.”

Witch burning is an example of attribution of climate change to human-causation, and today’s Environment Canada initiative is on the scale of such superstition.

Only now the witch-burning will occur in corporations, largely due to them being required to make formal climate-risk disclosures to investors and securities authorities.

What do I mean?

Canada is about to implement the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board (CSSB) requirements on Climate-related Risk Disclosure (aka “The Mother of All Sustainability Reporting Standards”).

This will require corporations to count every carbon dioxide/equivalent greenhouse gas molecule related to their operational use, emissions on site, and emissions downstream at the user level. By doing so, they will be providing the extreme weather event ‘attribution’ hunters with perfect grist for the lawfare mill.

As CBC’s “What on Earth?” reported on June 13, 2024, “This scientist helps link climate change to disasters. That’s helping victims sue.”

By reporting a corporation’s GHG emissions in such detail as required by the CSSB, the weather-attribution hunters will be handed their so-called ‘evidence’ on a platter; in fact, a corporation’s own good faith.

Soon-to-be mandatory public reporting will be used to draw and quarter any company every time some individual or community is victimized by a flood, wildfire, heavy snowfall, tornado, severe thunderstorm, damaging hail, killing frost, or blazing heat dome.

Long-time climate policy analyst Roger Pielke, Jr. and colleagues have done yeoman’s work exposing the misuse of implausible climate scenarios as if ‘business-as-usual.’ He doesn’t stand for nonsensical attributions of wildfires or extreme weather events as human-caused.

Roger Pielke, Jr. explained in a recent post, “…for those who believe that climate policy can be used to detectably affect the weather that you or I experience.

That is simply a fantasy borne from today’s overheated claims of attribution and the fanciful idea that emissions are a disaster control knob.

In the lifetimes of everyone reading this and our children’s lifetimes, the attribution of changes in extreme weather to climate policy at high levels of confidence is not expected to be possible. Don’t take it from me, that’s straight from the IPCC.”

“But…but… muh killer heat dome!” climate activists will cry.

Caused by a Mobile Polar Anticyclone. Aka Mother Nature.

“But…but… high winds and May wildfires in 2023!” cry the climate activists.

An Omega block – also due to a Mobile Polar Anticyclone. Aka Mother Nature.

“But…but… Calgary’s 2013 catastrophic flood,” cry the climate activists.

A rare but known meteorological event, my friends.

“But…but… Guterres said it’s global boiling!” cry the climate activists.

Not human-caused, but Hunga Tonga. Expect at least 5 more years of warming or strange weather due to Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption pumping 146 metric megatons of water into the stratosphere like a geyser, based on a new study published in Nature Climate Change.

Canadians have been paying huge carbon taxes on the promise by the federal government that this will somehow stop extreme weather events. Now we know it was all just expensive witchcraft.

https://principia-scientific.com/stirling-no-canadas-not-on-fire/

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School Bus Mechanic Warns of ‘Economic Disaster’ in Deploying Electric Buses Nationwide

In the rush to replace diesel school buses with electric ones, the U.S. educational system is financially endangering future generations, says a school bus mechanic in Colorado.

“Electric is just going to be an economic disaster for the entire country,” said Nick de Haan, who has inspected, repaired and maintained school buses since 2005. He requested the school district he works for to remain unnamed.

“I’m not against doing my part for the environment, but I think we’re being pushed into this before it’s financially feasible.”

De Haan called for a closer look at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) clean school bus program, which recently awarded $900 million to 530 school districts in an effort to replace 3,400 diesel buses with electric ones.

“Politicians are pushing to upgrade, but they don’t really think about the back end that needs to be done,” he told The Lion.

‘Double-edged sword’

De Haan joins a growing list of journalists and school officials raising maintenance and safety concerns over these buses. Perhaps the most important issue involves the electric batteries, which require substantial monitoring.

As de Haan lives in a high-elevation area at 8,000 feet above sea level, he says such conditions have repercussions for any type of battery.

“The colder it gets, the less amperage you have available,” de Haan said. “And so, the batteries actually have to be heated, or climate-controlled.”

As a result, all electric buses come with a diesel heater provided by Webasto, an automotive supplier de Haan says often equips school buses.

“These Webasto diesel-fired heaters literally heat the cooling system with the sole purpose of heating up the batteries and maintaining them at a specific temperature, whatever the engineers have designated,” he said, adding a typical temperature is around 50 degrees.

“If they’re stored outside and you’re in single digits overnight, that heater’s running all night to keep those batteries at the optimal temperature.”

Regions with warmer temperatures such as Arizona face the opposite problem – electric batteries need to be cooled before they are usable, de Haan explains. “They have a higher chance of failure rate. It’s a double-edged sword unless you have indoor parking for these buses, which is financially irresponsible.”

Strains on the electrical grid

In addition to parking challenges, other important utility upgrades involve boosting the current electrical grid.

Utility companies in de Haan’s school district have agreed to upgrade their facilities to handle additional requirements for e-buses. However, they added a stipulation to pull electricity from the buses during high-demand times for power.

Such demand times during the day could leave bus drivers stranded if they haven’t finished charging batteries for their afternoon drive.

“If the utility companies pull power during the day and those batteries are not at 100% when they get ready to leave in the afternoon, they’re kind of up the creek essentially,” de Haan told The Lion.

As 67% of the EPA’s funding will go to school districts in low-income, tribal and rural communities, these districts often have the least-developed infrastructure to handle e-buses.

“In order for the bus to be viable, it would need a fast charger,” de Haan argues. “And from what I understand, the charging requirements require a lot of amperage. For keeping five buses or more, you’re talking about a major upgrade to the infrastructure at your location. The utility company is not going to do that for free. And so, the districts would be responsible for that.”

De Haan cited one school district in the Denver metro area that ordered about 12 e-buses, which sat in the school’s parking lot for two years until enough infrastructure developed to support them.

A similar incident occurred in Philadelphia, where 25 e-buses that debuted during the 2019 Democratic National Convention remain unused “due to breakdowns and lack of parts,” according to GovTech.com.

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/06/school-bus-mechanic-warns-economic-disaster-electric-buses/

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Windless nights make net zero impossible

It is very simple. The cost of storing electricity is so huge it makes getting through a single windless night under a net zero wind, solar, and storage plan economically impossible.

This is especially true of cold nights where blackouts can be deadly. I recently made a legislative proposal to Pennsylvania along these lines so let’s use them as our example, keeping in mind that this is true everywhere.

Pennsylvania peaks at around 30,000 MW so let’s consider a windless night with a constant need of just 20,000 MW. There should be lots of these, especially in winter. Cold snaps are typically due to windless high pressure systems of arctic air with lots of overnight radiative cooling.

In the world of solar, “nights” are 16 hours or more long since solar systems just generate a lot of energy for 8 hours a day. It is likely less in a Pennsylvania winter where it is dark at 4 pm.

So, to get through the night we need to have stored at least 20,000 MW times 16 hours or 320,000 MWh of juice. For simplicity, we ignore all sorts of technical details that would make this number larger, like input-output losses.

The present capital cost of grid scale batteries is around $600,000 per MWh. Again this ignores all sorts of technical factors that make that number larger, like buildings, transmission, etc.

Simple arithmetic says this works out to an incredible $192 billion dollars just for the batteries. Clearly this is economically impossible. In round numbers two hundred billion dollars just to get through the night! Wind and solar plus batteries simply does not work. Even if the cost magically dropped 90% it would still be an impossible $20 billion just to buy the batteries.

This is so simple one wonders why none of the utilities, public utility commissions, independent system operators, and reliability agencies ever thought of it. Or maybe they did and decided not to mention it.

Moreover, on really cold nights the need for electricity can easily get to peak demand, which would require more like $300 billion in batteries. Then, too, there might be a cloudy or even snowy day pushing the need to 16 + 8 + 16 = 40 hours. Or several cloudy windless days at which point we are talking about a trillion dollars or more.

Clearly these simple numbers make net zero power based on wind, solar and batteries impossibly expensive. Other forms of storage are likely no cheaper. The reality is we are talking about storing an enormous amount of energy which simply cannot be done. The obvious solution is to have lots of reliable generation.

Which brings me to my legislative proposal which is also very simple. It merely requires the utilities to figure out how to meet the need for electricity on brutally cold windless nights that are likely to occur.

You can read it here. The title is “Avoiding deadly blackouts” because in severe cold, a blackout can kill people. In the horrible Texas blackout estimates run to over 700 deaths. Cold kills.

In fact, this is a requirement for today, not just some distant net zero fantasy. We are already to the point where a lot of States could not keep the heat on if they got a severe cold snap like they have already had in the past.

In “Avoiding deadly blackouts” I point out that Pennsylvania and the rest of PJM narrowly avoided blacking out in winter storm Elliot. On paper, they had a 30% margin of safety which was wiped out by the cold. But Elliot was actually mild compared to several earlier severe cold spells. We must prepare for these extreme events.

We use a tremendous amount of electricity which net zero cannot possibly provide on windless nights. But we are already under severe threat. The States must act now to prevent deadly blackouts. Storage is not the answer. We need reliable generation, much of which will be fossil fueled.

https://www.cfact.org/2024/06/10/windless-nights-make-net-zero-impossible/

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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