The Net Zero Agenda Threatens Your Future Clothing Purchases
Whether living in the United States or in a European country, there is a greater chance of wearing a garment made in Bangladesh than in one’s homeland.
However, the south Asian country’s dominance in the manufacture of clothing is being threatened by a “green” agenda undermining the power supply.
With availability of cheap labor and plentiful raw materials, Bangladesh is the world’s second biggest garment exporter and trails only China, having surged ahead of other Asian competitors such as India, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. A key to sustaining this manufacturing boom is maintaining supplies of electricity to run factories.
The “Made in Bangladesh” label has become synonymous with affordable, quality garments for much of the globe and with the economic growth of a country that achieved independence from Pakistan in 1971 and now shares borders with India and Myanmar. Bangladesh garment-making is more than just another economic sector; it is the lifeline of the national economy.
In a nation of 168 million, the industry employs more than 4 million workers, the majority of whom are women, and accounts for approximately 84% of the country’s total exports. Bringing in $47 billion to the economy, Bangladeshi clothing supplies global brands such as Walmart, H&M of Sweden and Zara of Spain.
In 2023, knitwear export earnings reached nearly $26 billion, while woven garments earned more than $21 billion. Both categories realized year-on-year growth of approximately 11% and 9% percent, respectively.
This success is built on factories that operate within tight schedules to meet international demands and deadlines. They require a steady flow of electricity to light facilities and operate machinery. Any disruption can result in significant financial losses for factory owners and hourly workers.
In a country where the minimum wage for garment workers is around $113 per month (about $4 a day), even a small reduction in working hours makes a huge difference in a person’s life.
Nonetheless, intentional disruptions in the power supply occur almost every day to manage Bangladesh’s chronic shortage of electricity. The exception to these interruptions has been winter when overall energy demand is lower.
The large gap in the supply and demand for electricity also sometimes leads to sudden, unplanned blackouts such as one in October 2022 when 80% of the country (including key industrial hubs of Dhaka, Chattogram, Sylhet, and Mymensingh) were left without electricity.
Lasting for up to eight hours, the “outage affected production in garment factories and small and medium industries” as millions suffered in sweltering heat, according to news reports.
Net Zero and Green Fantasies Present More Uncertainty
Now, the national government in Dhaka has announced plans to saddle the struggling power system with the reliability issues of the so-called green energy of wind and solar as part of a net zero scheme to be “carbon neutral” by 2050. This would be disastrous.
Relatively reliable fossil fuels provide more than 98% of Bangladesh’s electricity and still the grid has issues managing the supply-demand gap.
The well-known intermittency of solar panels and wind turbines makes them available only 10% to 30% of the time and sometimes overproducing when they are. Such erratic operational features add complexity, risk of damage to equipment and more uncertainty to an already shaky grid.
Instead of wasting time and money on renewables, the country should focus on increasing its power capacity from conventional energy sources like coal and natural gas. Even analysts supporting “green” energy say the country must allocate more funds towards oil and gas exploration in order to reduce dependency on imported liquified natural gas to fuel plants that now generate 70% of the electricity.
Bangladesh should stick to its current course of giving energy security top priority and reject pseudoscientific theories about climate change that promote unreliable energy sources. The beneficiaries would be millions of Bangladeshi workers, the country’s development goals and clothing shoppers worldwide.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-net-zero-agenda-threatens-your-future-clothing-purchases/
************************************************Virginia Breaks Free From California’s Electric Vehicle Mandate
Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced recently that Virginia would decouple from California’s onerous mandate requiring all new vehicles sold in the commonwealth to be electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles (EVs) by 2035.
This regulation—a ban on sales of new gas, diesel and traditional hybrid vehicles—promulgated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), would have taken effect as soon as next year when 35% of all model year 2026 cars sold would be required to meet California’s definition of “zero emission.”
This all stems from a 2021 bill championed by then-Gov. Ralph Northam and his allies in the General Assembly. They enacted policy directing the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board (APCB) to adopt regulations tying Virginia law to California’s vehicle emission standards. And if you can believe it, the law was intentionally exempted from the Administrative Process Act, denying Virginians any opportunity to give input on the regulatory process and dodging larger economic review for the policy.
It sounds brazen, but that’s exactly what happened: the previous administration in Richmond put Virginia vehicle policy in the hands of Californians.
In November 2022, California finalized entirely new regulations at the direction of their Gov. Gavin Newsom. Under the new California policy, selling any new gas, diesel, flex-fuel or traditional hybrid cars and trucks would be unlawful and subject to severe penalties, whether in California or in states aligned with California.
California’s gas car ban would have been devastating for Virginia drivers and small businesses and damaging to U.S. national security. Consumers would have paid dearly under the ban, facing higher costs in both the new and used car markets and finding more and more vehicles simply priced out of reach for families. Any compliance penalties levied on automakers—roughly $20,000 per vehicle—would also likely be passed on to Virginia consumers.
The absurd and un-American mandate to “go electric” on California’s timeline would also have increased Virginia’s and the U.S. dependence on China, since China controls the global EV battery and mineral supply chain.
Make no mistake: criticism of California’s gas car ban and EV mandate policies—and fervent opposition to the spread of those policies in the commonwealth of Virginia and to any other state—should not be construed as an indictment of EVs themselves. EVs are a good choice for many Americans, and if those cars and trucks work for a family’s needs and fit within their budgets, that’s wonderful. Families have every right to make the choice to buy an EV, but no government mandate should compel them toward that purchase or restrict their access to other vehicle options.
When the stakes are absolutely clear and the choice is between government mandates and consumer freedom, the right move is to err on the side of consumers. And that’s exactly what Youngkin did when he chose to end California’s control over the vehicles that can and cannot be sold in Virginia. Virginia drivers, not California regulators 3,000 miles away, should be able to choose for themselves which vehicles to purchase. When people are free to choose, they make decisions that work best for them, their businesses and their families.
Other states tethered to California’s EV mandate should follow Youngkin’s bold and necessary leadership and free their residents, too, from the tyranny of California’s gas car ban.
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UK: Green MP Opposes 100-Mile Corridor of Wind Farm Pylons in His Suffolk Constituency
The co-leader of the Green Party is objecting to the Labour Government’s plans to build a 100-mile stretch of pylons through his constituency as part of their Net Zero plans. The Telegraph has the story.
Adrian Ramsay, one of the party’s four newly elected MPs, has said that he will seek a pause to the plans to build a 100-mile corridor of pylons stretching through his constituency of Waveney Valley.
The plans, which are currently under consultation by National Grid, will bring power from wind farms off the coast of East Anglia, and stretch from Norwich to Tilbury.
A spokesman for the Green Party said that the Government had “tried to force through one option” and Mr. Ramsay was “focused on securing a proper options assessment to ensure that the alternatives are properly considered, including an offshore grid”.
The new Labour Government has a target for the electricity grid to be run from 100% green sources by 2030, and will set out plans in its first days to lift the ban on onshore wind farms, and encourage community backing for local renewable projects.
But the opposition from within the Green Party, which has urged the country to move even faster to Net Zero, shows the challenge of getting the public onside, even when they support action on climate change. …
The Norwich to Tilbury pylon plan has been the subject of controversy in the local area, with campaigners saying the proposals for 110 miles of cabling using 50m high pylons will “destroy our historic landscapes and will require huge loss of trees”. …
Speaking after his win in Waveney Valley, Mr. Ramsay said he would “stand up for the issues that really matter to people here”.
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Wind droughts
Rafe Champion
Severe wind droughts are prolonged spells with next to no wind across continental areas. They also exist offshore as any sailor who has been becalmed knows full well. Wind droughts will kill the green-power fantasy, and they have the potential to deal a massive blow to our lifestyle, depending as we do on abundant, reliable and affordable power. While meteorologists don’t mention them, independent Australian observers discovered wind droughts over a decade ago but nobody took any notice. We may pay a bitter price for this neglect.
Serious questions have to be asked about the silence of meteorologists on wind droughts. At the same time the responsible authorities should be called to account for their failure to check the wind supply before connecting intermittent energy to the grid.
Why wind won’t work
Wind and solar cannot provide reliable power at grid-scale and the reason is as simple as ABC: Input to the grid must continuously match the demand, and the continuity of wind and solar input fails on nights with little or no wind.
The amount of storage required to bridge the gaps is not feasible or affordable.
Supporters of the transition to intermittent energy invoke a “holy trinity” of strategies to ride through wind drought. These are (1) long-distance transmission lines to shift power from areas of plenty to drought zones, (2) pumped hydro storage, and (3) battery storage.
Long distance transmission lines will not help because wind droughts can extend across the whole of SE Australia. On the other side of the world they have been known to extend across all of western Europe.
Pumped hydro at the scale required appears to be out of the question. There is no substantial pumped hydro scheme in the world that runs on wind and solar power alone.
As for batteries, we read practically every day that more “big batteries” are coming but “big” is an abuse of language in this context because the capacity of even the biggest batteries, like the 1.4GWh Waratah Super Battery in NSW, is negligible compared with the power required in a single night in the grid. That is in the order of 300GWh, while the total capacity of all the battery projects in the pipeline amount to some 60GWh and the batteries at work in the system at present can deliver only 3GWh.
The plan devised by the market operator (AEMO) calls for a ninefold increase in the amount of installed wind and solar capacity, but all that capacity will deliver a pitifully small amount of power on nights with little or no wind. Such nights are the limiting factor for the whole system like the slowest ship in a convoy or weakest link in a chain.
The threat of wind droughts
Subsidised and mandated intermittent energy providers drive out conventional power plants because they can make money when the market price is too low for conventional providers to run profitably. The unreliables can displace conventional power but they can’t replace it! Eventually there will not be enough reliable (dispatchable) power to meet 100 per cent of the demand. At that point, the power supply will be compromised whenever the wind is low overnight.
The day of reckoning has been delayed by the modest increase in demand in recent years due to creeping deindustrialization — directly caused by the increasing cost of power. As the coal generating capacity runs down, the pinch will first occur for a few hours at the dinnertime peak of demand. That can be met using the deceptively named Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader Scheme (RETS). This sounds like a reserve supply, but it functions by diverting power from major users (with compensation) to protect the integrity of the grid and avoid inconvenience for the community at large. In other words, industrial production stops so he the community’s lights stay on!
If the RETS diversions of supply is not enough, rolling blackouts can be organized to handle the shortfall. As the process goes on, there will eventually not be enough conventional power to service the base load, the minimum that is required day and night. At that point, whenever the wind is low overnight there will be blackouts, and we will officially achieve the status of a Third World country.
Since 2012, 12 coal power stations have closed in South-Eastern Australia, taking out some 8GW of capacity, which in total is down to 22GW. We are now only one coal station closure away from a power crisis whenever the wind is low overnight. The problem surfaced in June 2022 when outages in some coal stations created a crisis that was met by using gas, which spiked the price of gas, and hence the wholesale price of power.
This was seen as a problem with the price of gas, to be solved by government intervention and a price cap. It should have been seen as an early warning of what was coming if the capacity of coal power continued to run down. Gas is too expensive to be used outside peak periods. In addition, there are serious concerns about the availability of gas going forward.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2024/06/things-that-go-slump-in-the-night/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
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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Jim Hansen and his twin
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