Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Reporters Exploit Normal Weather to Fan Climate Fear
Exaggeration of weather events to sell climate crisis is not something new. In the case of a Sky News account of flooding in one Indian city, my own observations — backed up by independent data — are absolutely contrary to the news report.
Chennai — my home state’s capital, formerly known as Madras — is prone to floods, whose severity I’ve personally witnessed. In fact, the last time Chennai was flooded, I narrowly escaped by fleeing the city at the last hour. But, for me, that trauma does not make any more reasonable the media’s melodrama about climate’s role in floods.
The city is prone to yearly deluges from the strong Northeast Monsoon system during the months of October – January. This, coupled with poor planning and destruction of natural waterways, has led to an urban nightmare of flooding as a common event.
However, Sky News’ international Twitter report did not let the facts get in the way of its climate narrative. Standing in knee-high water, the reporter said, “We know that as a result of our warming planet, we are going to see more radical and frequent shifts in extreme weather – extreme heat to extreme rain.”
Except for a massive deluge in 2015, Chennai — located on India’s southeastern coast — has had a relatively steady amount of rainfall since 1969. For example, yearly rainfall variation (in the image below) shows that years of both intense and light rainfall have been common for the city.
Monthly data for the city also show the sporadic nature of rainfall in the city with many high rainfall months since 1969. This means that intense downpours are not uncommon in the city.
Speaking to Hindustan Times, a meteorological expert said, “These extreme rains have happened several times in the past too. It is not due to any climatic change. The record for the highest rainfall in Chennai on a single day in November is still 1976.”
The main reason for the flooding is the unplanned expansion of the city, which resulted in the encroachment of natural reservoirs and the blocking of key natural drains for rainwater. This is a well-established fact backed up by satellite imagery.
A 2020 report from the Indian Government, titled Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region, laid out a comprehensive analysis of various factors affecting the climate in the country. According to the report, a medium-range analysis of cyclone frequency in the North Indian Ocean Basin revealed a decrease in frequency of severe cyclones between 1951 and 2018.
The data may be surprising to the reader because the mainstream media — like the Sky News journalist — regularly claim that extreme weather events increased in this period because of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. But the reality is completely different.
“Long-term observations (1891–2018) indicate a significant reduction in annual frequency of tropical cyclones in the North Indian Ocean basin.”
In addition, there has been no significant warming in the city since 2004. In fact, satellite measurements captured a global pause in warming between 2000 and 2020, a trend like that observed in Chennai.
So, rainfall, cyclone landfall, and temperature have shown no dangerous increase in the city of Chennai. This case of interweaving the theory of climate crisis into a normal weather event by Sky News is typical of mainstream media. Either Sky News assumed its international viewers were unlikely to research the real reasons behind the flooding, or the news channel is ignorant of the facts itself.
We recommend applying a healthy dose of skepticism to assertions of climate-induced weather events. You also might want to follow more responsible outlets for your facts, such as the CO2 Coalition.
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Bill Gates’ vision for next-generation nuclear power in Wyoming coal country
KEMMERER, Wyoming — In a triangle-shaped park, a bronze statue honors the legacy of J.C. Penney. In 1902, he opened a dry-goods store here to serve workers who dug coal from a nearby mine. The entrepreneur would go on to forge a nationwide retail empire.
More than a century later, a J.C. Penney department store still sells clothing in this town of fewer than 3,000 people. In the blocks surrounding the park, many businesses have closed, leaving behind aging storefronts. Some that remain open have “for sale” signs in the windows.
Kemmerer’s decline has come as the coal industry, despite a recent surge in demand, has suffered a long-term loss of markets to cleaner, cheaper sources of electricity. In 2025, the town faces a stark reckoning when Rocky Mountain Power’s Naughton coal plant is scheduled to close, which also will leave a more difficult future for a nearby mine.
“With the power plant shutting down in five years, would you open a new restaurant or new business of any kind?” said Tom Crank, a former state legislator and civil engineer who has lived in Kemmerer since 1968. “This is slowly eating away at the community.”
This week came big news, and fresh hope for an economic revival of Kemmerer.
TerraPower, a Bellevue-based nuclear energy company founded by Bill Gates, announced plans to build a new reactor called Natrium — cooled by liquid sodium — at the site of the Naughton coal plant.
The plant was one of four scheduled for closure that were under consideration for TerraPower’s Wyoming Advanced Nuclear Demonstration Project.
“We think Natrium will be a game-changer for the energy industry,” Gates said in a June virtual appearance in Wyoming. “Wyoming has been a leader in energy for over a century. And we hope that our investment in Natrium will allow Wyoming to stay in the lead for many decades to come.”
Nuclear power generates electricity without the direct combustion of fossil fuels that releases greenhouse gases. And Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has been one of America’s most high-profile proponents of nuclear power to help the nation reach net-zero emissions by 2050. In his virtual appearance, Gates promoted Natrium as a safer, more flexible and less-expensive reactor than those cooled by water in conventional plants.
Gates’ advocacy has earned him praise — and pushback — amid a global debate about nuclear power’s role in the 21st century. In Europe, Germany plans to shut down its last nuclear power plants in 2022, while France remains dependent on nuclear for most of its electricity. In China, the government is backing a program of nuclear expansion that until U.S. restrictions were imposed in 2019 included a TerraPower proposal to build an experimental reactor south of Beijing.
In the United States, where nuclear provides 20% of the electricity, critics say it remains a costly option with unresolved issues over long-term waste storage. And they say the potential of advanced reactors is being oversold.
“Many of the claims that are being made about these types of reactors are simply untrue or highly misleading,” said Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists who this year published a report on advanced nuclear technology that included a harsh critique of TerraPower’s project.
Shannon Anderson, staff attorney with Wyoming’s Powder River Basin Resource Council, said the TerraPower reactor is “no silver bullet solution,” and would be too little, too late to address climate change or the economic impacts of coal’s decline in Wyoming. “It doesn’t answer the tough questions that we really need to have answered in the state,” Anderson said.
Since 2009, TerraPower has spent more than $1.4 million on contributions to national campaigns and lobbying, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit tracking money in politics.
TerraPower has benefitted from bipartisan political support.
During the June announcement of the four sites, Gates was joined by U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso and Gov. Mark Gordon — eager to launch nuclear power generation in the nation’s largest coal-producing state.
TerraPower’s Wyoming project is projected to cost nearly $4 billion. Taxpayers, under contract terms, pick up half that, matching private sector spending dollar for dollar.
Congress already has allocated most of the nearly $2 billion to the Energy Department to spend on TerraPower, much of it in the infrastructure bill signed into law Monday by President Joe Biden. The company’s CEO, Chris Levesque, calls it the largest public investment in an advanced nuclear power project in the nation’s history.
The Energy Department’s contract stipulates the Natrium reactor must be operating by 2028 — lightning speed in the nuclear world. A partner in the project is Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company, PacifiCorp, controlled by Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company led by Gates’ billionaire friend Warren Buffett.
The 345-megawatt TerraPower reactor is designed to generate electricity around the clock and would be coupled with a molten-salt system to store heat and enable the plant to surge up to 500 megawatts for over five hours — enough electricity for about 400,000 homes.
The project would employ 2,000 workers during construction and 250 others to operate the plant. TerraPower officials hope this project can be replicated at other U.S. coal plants.
“This [TerraPower] technology is amazing — there’s no other word for it,” said Gary W. Hoogeven, president and CEO of Rocky Mountain Power, which plans to close 19 coal-fired power plant units by 2040.
“I couldn’t be more excited for you, those communities and our employees that there is a solution. It’s coming, and TerraPower, I believe, is it,” Hoogeven said as the project was announced.
In Kemmerer, a conservative town in a fiercely Republican state, some are wary of Gates’ wide-ranging agenda, from combating climate change to developing COVID-19 vaccines.
But many people strongly support the new nuclear plant.
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Biden’s Energy Secretary Has No Idea How Much Oil Americans Need
Speaking to reporters at the White House Tuesday afternoon, Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked how many barrels of oil Americans consume and need each day. She claimed she didn't have the answer.
The answer is 18 million barrels, which exposes President Biden's move to release 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a futile, political move.
In recent weeks, Granholm laughed off riding energy prices and admitted during remarks this week that the United States is in the middle of a "transition" away from oil and gas, which is causing pain at the pump.
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Australian Labor Party senator warns party about reacting to climate ‘extremists’
Victorian Labor senator Raff Ciccone has warned his colleagues against demonising regional industries, particularly forestry, as the federal opposition prepares to finalise its climate policy ahead of next year’s election.
In a speech to the Senate on Tuesday night, Senator Ciccone said “extremists” who sought to damage or disrupt the activities of timber workers were not only hurting the livelihoods of families but would make it harder for Australia to hit its climate goals.
The senator has been a vocal advocate for timber workers and has criticised his side of politics over the Victorian Labor government’s decision to phase out native forest harvesting from 2024, with a full shutdown by 2030.
The federal opposition is close to settling its climate policy, which is likely to include revised emissions reductions targets, but is wary of creating a blue-collar worker backlash after failing to convince voters over climate change during the past decade.
Senator Ciccone told the Senate on Tuesday evening the timber industry would prove critical to Australia’s hopes of hitting net zero by 2050, which the federal government officially signed up to at this month United Nations climate summit.
Labor climate policy poised to respond to PM scare tactics
“We cannot afford to be distracted by radicals more concerned with making themselves feel good than protecting our planet,” Senator Ciccone told the Senate.
“The real climate heroes are providing sustainable, green building materials to our construction industry. They are taking and storing carbon from our forests and re-growing the harvested trees to store even more carbon.”
He cited research from the Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University, released earlier this month, which found the forestry industry would almost double as decarbonisation boosted tree planting to take advantage of bio-sequestration opportunities.
The report found a net-zero policy would lead to significant increases in forested land and increased sales of logs for processing and export as forest pulp.
Senator Ciccone said the paper showed the forestry industry was Australia’s greenest form of carbon capture and would need to grow to meet climate targets.
“Radical activists need to understand that attacking the timber industry is not going to prevent climate change. You are targeting an industry that needs to get bigger, not smaller, to protect our planet.”
He said the Coalition government also needed to show greater support for the industry by spruiking the role forestry would play in reaching emissions targets over the coming decades.
“The Morrison-Joyce government needs to understand that leadership isn’t just waving a brochure around at a press conference,” he said. “Leadership is assessing the impact of your decisions on the Australian economy, so we can help those who will need a leg-up and create the jobs of the future right here in Australia.”
The industry has argued Australia has untapped potential as a bioenergy powerhouse through industrial heat in the future renewable energy mix. The federal government’s road map forecast that bioenergy could make up a fifth of Australia’s resource potential.
Veteran CFMEU forestry union leader Michael O’Connor has criticised Victorian Labor’s “disgraceful” treatment of timber workers in the state and warned it was undermining federal Labor’s pitch to voters that workers and communities reliant on transitioning industries would be looked after.
“Federal Labor’s task of convincing blue-collar workers and communities they will be looked after is threatened by the approach of the Andrews government toward timber workers and their communities. Because these workers are being thrown on the scrap heap,” Mr O’Connor said last month ahead of the Glasgow climate summit.
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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)
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Tuesday, November 23, 2021
After Glasgow, The 1.5°C Target Is Dead – Get Over It
The Glasgow climate conference represents a strategic defeat for the West, and for Britain in particular. Boris Johnson unleashed everything he could muster. The royal family hosted receptions for multibillionaires. The Foreign Office sent climate envoys around the world.
Glasgow would show the world that Britain could outdo France’s performance six years ago at the Paris climate conference.
Wrong. Whereas the French knew what they were doing in Paris, the British were at sea in Glasgow. The result was a display of the rank amateurishness of the British state.
If Boris Johnson and his ministers had done their homework, they would have known they were on a road to nowhere. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol failed because it exempted the developing world from cutting its emissions.
The West attempted to remedy this at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 with a climate treaty that would bring the major emerging economies under a multilateral regime of emission targets and timetables.
The attempt was sunk by China, India, South Africa, and Brazil acting in concert.
The West accounts for a declining share of global emissions. “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Barack Obama had boasted in 2008.
Obama and the West were desperate for a climate agreement to justify increasingly punitive domestic climate policies.
The Paris agreement is the climate equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine, under which the captive nations of eastern Europe could do it their way. It signaled that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War.
In a similar fashion, the Paris agreement signaled that the West had accepted its defeat and had given up its attempt to create a multilateral regime of emission cuts.
Instead, the Paris agreement is based on nationally determined contributions. Each party to the agreement would do it its way.
After Copenhagen, small island states lobbied intensely to tighten the temperature target from 2 degrees above industrial levels to 1.5 degrees.
Their islands, they claimed, were in danger of sinking beneath the waves. The West swallowed the sinking island sob story, which is how 1.5 degrees came to be included in the Paris agreement as a subsidiary ambition to the 2-degree target.
It was fake science, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) later confirmed.
“Observations, models, and other evidence indicate that unconstrained Pacific atolls have kept pace with [sea level rise], with little reduction in size or net gain in land,” the IPCC said in its net-zero report.
Because Paris included 1.5 in its text, the IPCC brought forward the indicative timetable for net-zero from the second half of the current century to 2050.
In the waning days of her premiership in 2019, Theresa May decided to make net-zero her legacy. She was effectively setting the UK on a path of economic suicide.
It was incorporated as a binding target under the 2008 Climate Change Act after a ninety-minute debate in the House of Commons, even though MPs had no idea how much it would cost or whether it was remotely feasible.
But one thing is clear: whatever net zero costs Britain, it is pointless for Britain to decarbonize if the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit.
The regulatory-impact assessment accompanying the Climate Change Act signed by Ed Miliband as climate and energy secretary could not have been clearer: “The UK continuing to act while the rest of the world does not, would result in a large net cost for the UK.”
The benefits of UK climate action would be distributed around the world, but the UK would bear all the costs.
The Climate Change Act was passed in the runup to the Copenhagen climate conference, which was supposed to produce a binding climate treaty.
“Showing leadership through the Climate Change Act, the UK will help to drive a global deal,” Miliband asserted, showing that climate hubris is embraced by all Britain’s political parties.
Now, for a second time, a UN climate conference has produced a dud. The fantasy that Britain would lead and the rest of the world would follow has been exposed.
The question mark over net-zero has been answered. After Glasgow, we now know that net-zero is all pain for no gain.
https://principia-scientific.com/after-glasgow-the-1-5c-target-is-dead-get-over-it/
***************************************************How green activists mislead and hold back progress
Exaggerating and impractical, the climate movement undermines its cause and everyone suffers, says environmental writer TED NORDHAUS
TWELVE YEARS ago, the UN’s climate summit in Copenhagen, COP15, was dubbed “Hopenhagen”. The 11-day event opened with a short film depicting a fictional Scandinavian girl having a nightmare: an Earth wracked by climate change opens up to swallow her and violent waters threaten to drown her. She wakes up screaming, watches world leaders giving speeches about climate change on the COP15 website, and then videos herself begging the politicians to “please help the world!”
But the proceedings ended in failure. Environmental groups and European officials blamed America. Small island nations blamed China. China and India blamed rich countries.
Today, a real Scandinavian girl insists the nightmare has come true—and blames world leaders for failing to act. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood,” Greta Thunberg thundered, to cheers from the global climate commentariat at the UN General Assembly in 2019. “There is no Planet B,” she sneered, “blah blah blah,” mocking the French president, Emmanuel Macron, for adopting the long-time slogan of environmental activists, at a youth climate summit in September.
At the UN climate conference in Glasgow, COP26, the phony optimism of Hopenhagen and the adolescent cynicism of Greta were present in roughly equal measure, two sides of the same apocalyptic coin. Activists, scientists and commentators conjured up catastrophic futures and bemoaned the lack of progress, while inveighing against “doomism” and demanding an immediate, dramatic social and political transformation.
Taken at face value, doom would not be an irrational reaction to the claims of the climate movement. If planetary catastrophe, societal collapse and perhaps even human extinction are likely (absent a complete transformation of human civilisation), then fatalism is a reasonable response. But the realities of climate change are less terrifying and the global response more promising than the reductive claims of environmental activists might lead people to believe.
Neither dystopian not utopian
Deaths around the world from climate-related disasters are at an all-time low. People’s vulnerability to extreme weather has fallen rapidly in recent decades. Recent research in Global Environmental Change shows that climate vulnerability has declined the most in recent decades among the poor globally, owing to the resilience that comes with economic growth and development.
At the same time, long-running efforts to slow the growth of emissions appear to be working. Global emissions appear close to a peak and the International Energy Agency projects that the world is on track for less than 3°C of warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century, a far cry from forecasts of 5°C or more that many thought likely a decade ago. Admittedly, a warming of 3°C is not a walk in the park. But given continuing economic growth and development, it is likely to be a future in which human societies will fare reasonably well. The good news is that if countries uphold their commitments from the past several years to sharply cut emissions, the world will be in position to limit warming closer to 2°C, the long-standing international target for climate stabilisation.
Unfazed by these less-than-dystopian assessments, the global climate-industrial complex—a nexus of campaigners, green charities and sustainable-business practitioners who are aided, abetted and amplified by their ideologically (and socially) aligned handmaidens in academia and stenographers in media—has simply moved the goalposts for climate stabilisation, from 2°C to 1.5°C warming above pre-industrial levels, precisely when major emitting countries had found a workable framework to limit warming to 2°C, or at least be within shouting distance of it.
The 1.5°C target, by contrast, is implausible (and, like all temperature targets, largely arbitrary). Achieving it would require rebuilding the entire global energy economy within a decade or so. That means inventing technologies to make steel, cement and fertiliser, and to power ships, aircraft and much else on a similar timeframe, as well as removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere over the latter half of the century. The activist community further insists upon re-engineering the global economy without many of the technologies that most technical analyses conclude would be necessary, including nuclear energy, carbon capture and carbon removal.
The exaggerations and impractical demands of the global climate movement are frequently excused as useful idiocies, a prod to national leaders to take more ambitious action. But there are other consequences that are far less salutary. To appease influential domestic environmental constituencies, Western political leaders have made far-reaching but non-binding commitments to cut emissions that they almost certainly cannot keep. To justify those commitments politically, even as theatre, those same leaders need to demonstrate that they are demanding similar commitments from emerging economies, notably China and India.
And so, even as China has promised to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 and India by 2070, many national leaders and environmentalists demand ever more, such as a phase out of all new coal generation by the end of the decade, despite the fact that most wealthy nations continue to depend heavily on coal, oil and natural gas themselves.
China and India are large and powerful enough not to be bullied. But other poor countries are not. Finance for even natural gas, the least emitting of all fossil fuels, has dried up across Africa and much of the developing world, under pressure from Western countries and Western-led development institutions.
From the perspective of fairness, economic development and (not incidentally) climate resilience, fossil-fuel infrastructure arguably has the highest value in poor countries. Historically, international-development finance has underwritten those investments. But in the hothouse that is international climate politics, those are the investments that the climate movement and Western political leaders insist must be abandoned, ironically in the name of climate justice, even as rich countries pursue projects like the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and the Cumbria coal mine in the name of energy security.
The resulting contradictions are head-spinning. Tough talk by Western leaders to appease the climate movement is followed by commitments that are modest, symbolic and unenforceable. Grand agreements to end deforestation and phase out fossil-fuel infrastructure within a decade, turn out, upon closer examination, to be vague and subject to wildly different interpretations.
The costs, predictably, fall on the global poor. Stoked by an apocalyptic panic among the chattering classes in the richest countries in the world, unable to give up fossil fuels domestically or force their emerging economic competitors to do so, Western leaders punch down on the poorest nations in the world.
See the world as it is
Therein lies the fundamental tension within the climate movement. To acknowledge progress or recognise that climate-mitigation objectives need to be balanced with other societal priorities—not least the adaptive capacity that is enabled by the continuing use of fossil fuels—would require abandoning pseudo-scientific claims that hard biophysical boundaries loom, and jettisoning utopian fantasies of global government and a world powered entirely by renewable energy. Moreover, it would mean giving up self-flattering notions that the future of humanity hangs on the outcome of an epic struggle between corporations and environmentalists.
A climate movement less in thrall to fever dreams of apocalypse would focus more on balancing long-term emissions reductions with growth, development and adaptation in the here and now, recognising that the former will take decades to achieve while the latter confer not only much greater climate resilience today, but a range of further benefits for people far into the future.
Unfortunately, doing this serves none of the discursive needs of the climate-industrial complex, which seems to grow both larger and wealthier with every failure. The real outcome of the COP26 meeting is to further entrench the sad reality that the global poor are on their own. Practical action to cut emissions and improve resilience will remain primarily a national, not global, enterprise.
More than a decade after COP15, poor nations are still waiting for the modest pledges of technology transfer and climate-adaptation aid made at Copenhagen. Meanwhile, Western nations and development institutions, egged on by the climate movement, will proceed with efforts to choke off virtually all finance for fossil-fuel-based infrastructure in poor countries. It’s easy pickings for Western environmentalists, UN functionaries and political leaders alike, and there is no one capable of stopping them.
What would a constructive way forward look like? An activist movement that took its concerns about climate justice seriously would acknowledge that the environmental impacts happen at the intersection of a warming climate and poverty—and it would support, rather than oppose, continuing access to fossil fuels for the poorest people in the world, since they’re too expensive to replace for the moment and they make poor countries more resilient to the impact of climate change. Moreover, the movement would understand that because energy economies are path-dependent and emergent, they won’t yield quickly to calls for sweeping and immediate transformation and that, as such, there are limits to what both politics and protest can accomplish.
Most importantly, a wiser green-activist movement would recognise that when it places Western leaders between impossible demands and the realities of their domestic political economies, it is the poor, not the activist class, that end up paying for it.
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Metals firm fights Peru’s plans to close mines over environmental impact
UK metals firm Hochschild Mining is to fight plans by Peru’s government to hasten the closure of four mines in the southern Ayacucho region because of concerns over their environmental impact.
The London-listed mining company has promised to “vigorously defend” its plan to continue mining gold and silver from two mines – Pallancata and Inmaculada – which it claims operate under the “highest environmental standards”.
Ignacio Bustamante, the Hochschild chief executive, said he was “surprised” by the “illegal nature” of the government’s planned action and would “vigorously defend its rights to operate these mines using all available legal avenues”.
Shares in Hochschild plunged nearly 40% on Monday morning, wiping more than £300m off the value of the company, after the Peruvian prime minister, Mirtha Vásquez, told local media over the weekend that four mines in the southern Ayacucho region would be barred from further expansion, and would be closed “as soon as possible”.
Hochschild said it had “not received any formal communication from the government regarding this matter”.
The plan could have severe consequences for Lima-headquartered Hochschild, which sources more than two-thirds of its gold and silver from its Peruvian mines.
The announcement is likely to raise hackles throughout the mining sector in Peru, the world’s second largest producer of copper, which includes UK miners Anglo American, Newmont, Glencore and Freeport-McMoRan. Peru’s mines are also operated by China’s MMG and Chinalco alongside local producers such as Buenaventura.
Peru’s mining industry has been linked to a string of environmental issues in recent years including deforestation, pollution and the mistreatment of environmental activists.
Bustamante said: “Our goal is to continue investing in Peru, growing our resources and extending mine lives, in accordance with the Peruvian legal framework.”
Hochschid said it was a significant employer in the region, employing more than 5,000 people directly and about 40,000 indirectly, and has long-term investment plans for the local region.
“We are prepared to enter into a dialogue with the government in order to resolve any misunderstandings with respect to our mining operations. However, given the illegal nature of the proposed action, the company will vigorously defend its rights to operate these mines using all available legal avenues,” Bustamante added.
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Australia: Climate weed sentenced to 12 months in prison over coal train disruption
Eric Serge Herbert was sentenced in Newcastle Local Court to 12 months' imprisonment with a non-parole period of six months.
The charges included causing obstruction to a railway locomotive or rolling stock, attempted hinder working of mining equipment and attempted assist in obstruction of rail locomotive or rolling stock.
A police strike force was established last week in response to the ongoing protest action, which impacted coal, grain and passenger trains trying to access the Port of Newcastle.
The NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller delivered a stern warning to protesters, announcing that the continued behaviour could result in charges laid under the Criminal Act that carry a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.
The ABC approached Police Commissioner Mick Fuller to comment on the sentence but he was unavailable.
Group says it's a 'matter of concern'
Climate activist group Blockade Australia held a press conference in Newcastle this morning, describing the police action to stop the ongoing protests as "repression" and an "outrage".
One spokeswoman, 21 year old Hannah Doole, said she was "angry and scared on Sergio's behalf".
"This is a matter of concern for everybody that expresses dissent to the current political system and to politics in this country in whatever form.
"This is a young person who is fighting for their life, fighting for all life on the planet.
"And they have just been sentenced to six months no parole. 12 months imprisonment is an outrage," she said.
Another Blockade Australia representative, 24 year old Jarrah Kershaw, said he did not believe protesters would be deterred.
"Last week, people were threatened with 25 years in jail. And for the next three days, people continued to take action despite that," he said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-23/12-month-jail-sentence-for-newcastle-coal-protester/100642414
***************************************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)
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Tesla drivers angry after app outage stops them using their cars
I use a metal key to enter and start my conventional car and it has never yet had an "outage"
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has apologised on Twitter after hundreds of car owners were locked out of their vehicles due to an outage of the manufacturer’s app.
A number of Tesla drivers around the world complained on social media on Friday that they were unable to use their cars with their phone apps and had to rely on keycards if they happened to be carrying their keycards with them.
Eventually, Mr Musk announced late on Friday that “server issues” which had caused the problem with the app had been resolved.
Musk responded directly to a South Korean driver who reported receiving a message about a server error while attempting to connect with his Tesla Model 3 via the app on his iPhone.
Functionality should “be coming back online now. Looks like we may have accidentally increased verbosity of network traffic,” Musk tweeted. “Apologies, we will take measures to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” he said.
But drivers had already posted a multitude of complaints online, such as one who tweeted: “I’m stuck an hour away from home because I normally use my phone to start car.”
Another wrote: “THOUSANDS of @Tesla owners are locked out of their vehicles because Tesla servers went down over two hours ago.
“I’m one of them. They said we’d be helping the environment by owning an electric vehicle, but ‘walking’ isn’t what I had in mind.”
The problem seemed to be widespread, with tweets surfacing in countries such as the US, Canada, Denmark and Germany.
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Climate change: Wet wipes face ban in the war on waste
A ban on wet wipes in England is being considered in government plans to tackle plastic pollution in rivers and seas.
Ministers announced a call for evidence on how to tackle common plastic litter including wet wipes, tobacco filters and single-use cups.
It comes after a consultation was announced in August over the use of other plastic items including single use plates and cutlery. It will also look at alternatives to plastic balloon sticks.
Campaigners have long called for a ban on wet wipes that contain plastic, warning that they pile up on beaches and riverbanks and turn into tiny plastic fibres when broken down.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/climate-change-wet-wipes-face-ban-in-the-war-on-waste-hd7f8pr80
******************************************A Convenient Myth: Climate risk and the financial system
In an October 21 press release, Janet Yellen — Treasury secretary and head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), the umbrella group that unites all U.S. financial regulators — eloquently summarized a vast program to implement climate policy via financial regulation:
"FSOC is recognizing that climate change is an emerging and increasing threat to U.S. financial stability. This report puts climate change squarely at the forefront of the agenda of its member agencies and is a critical first step forward in addressing the threat of climate change."
You do not have to disagree with one iota of climate science — and I will not do so in this essay — to find this program outrageous, an affront to effective financial regulation, to effective climate policy, and to our system of government.
Of all the threats posed by a slowly warming climate, why is Ms. Yellen talking about financial stability? The answer is simple: Financial regulators are not supposed to implement each administration’s policies on non-financial matters. Financial regulators may only act if they think financial stability is at risk.
Why? Imagine that Trump returns. He declares, “Illegal immigration is an existential crisis. I can’t get Congress to do anything about it. Financial regulators: Tell banks to freeze the bank accounts of any customers who can’t prove legal status. Scour people’s accounts for payments to illegal employees. Freeze out any business that hires an illegal.” You would be shocked. The nation would be shocked. Ms. Yellen would be shocked. There is no financial risk here, we would all say. This is a vast abuse of power.
Financial regulation can only touch climate policy if there is a risk to the financial system that only coincidentally involves climate. But how could climate possibly pose a risk to the financial system?
A “risk to the financial system” does not mean that someone, somewhere, someday, might lose money on an unwise investment. A risk to the financial system means an event like 2008: a shock so big, so pervasive, and so fueled by short-term debt that it sparks a widespread run, a wave of defaults, and threatens the ability of the whole system to function. “Financial regulation” means looking at the assets and liabilities of financial institutions to mitigate such a risk. It can at best look a few years in the future.
So, if we use plain English, a “climate risk to the financial system” that “financial regulators” can contain must mean the climate might change so drastically, so abruptly, and so unexpectedly, in the next five years, that the economy tanks so terribly that financial institutions blow through the cushions of equity and long-term debt, to spark a widespread systemic crisis like 2008 or worse.
The trouble is, there is absolutely nothing in even the most extreme scientific speculations to support that possibility. Climate is the probability distribution of weather: the chance of heat and cold waves, floods, fires, and so forth. We know with great precision what the climate will be for the next five years. Nobody writing insurance in Florida is unaware of the chance of hurricanes. The chances of extreme weather are not going to change unexpectedly in even ten years. The sea level is rising. It will continue to rise, about 4 millimeters per year – 2 cm in the next five years – slowly and predictably. Risk is the unknown. This is known.
Moreover, even weather extremes just don’t move the economy that much. We have had many financial crises in history. Not one was sparked by an extreme weather event. Our modern, national economy is remarkably immune to weather.
It is simply not true that the economic damage of extreme weather events is either large or substantially increasing. Weather-related damages were 0.18 percent of global GDP in 2020. That’s tiny, and it’s decreasing, down from 0.26 percent in 1990. The part of it that could be described as unexpected, threatening financial reserves, is tinier still. GDP fell 10 percent during the COVID recession. Unexpected climate risks would have to be 50 times larger in the next few years to approach that level of damage. Even the most extreme weather events are local, a blip on the national economy and the assets of diversified banks.
In 1900, half a million people died in storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. By 2020, the number had declined to 14,000. So far, 5,500 people have died from climate-related disasters in 2021. There are about 35,000 car crash deaths each year in the U.S. alone, and COVID has killed 750,000 Americans.
Still, one could defend the effort. Our financial regulators completely missed the possibility that mortgage-backed securities might bring down the financial system in 2008. Despite the army of Dodd-Frank regulators and stress-testers, regulators missed the possibility that a pandemic threatened to do the same in 2020. Only another massive round of bailouts saved us from another 2008. The Fed went on to completely miss the chance that inflation might break out, while it orchestrated the printing of $3 trillion sent out to people as checks. A dispassionate, honest effort to look at out-of-the-box risks to the financial system, together with a humble attitude towards regulators’ ability to foresee them, is a good idea.
What might that effort find? What if (when?) China invades Taiwan, and the U.S. and allies blockade China? A huge global recession. What if the U.S. chooses to fight and loses? Greater catastrophe. What if the Middle East blows up, or a nuclear weapon goes off? What if we have a real pandemic, one that kills 10 percent of the people it infects as plague, cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis did? What if that pandemic comes out of a lab, this time deliberately? What about a massive financial cyberattack? What if bond investors give up on U.S. Treasury debt and force a sovereign-debt crisis? These are all unlikely. But the chance of any of these is thousands of times greater than the danger of climate change to the financial system.
And what should one do about such risks? Does it make sense for bank regulators and stress testers to demand that each bank rank the sensitivity of each loan it makes for its exposure to Chinese-invasion risk, and calibrate its portfolio accordingly? Or, as is increasingly popular, to interact these risks and model general-equilibrium effects? No. The response to out-of-the box unquantifiable risks is simply to demand that banks finance themselves with much more equity capital, which can absorb unforeseen losses without imperiling the bank and financial system.
It is patently obvious that regulators did not evenhandedly open this Pandora’s box, or consider why, of all the risks to the financial system, climate change is the only one worth talking about. Regulators want to tell banks to stop lending to fossil-fuel companies while, coincidentally, the political parts of the administration decided on the same climate policy. And given their method, to regulate bank investments against “climate risks” that they cannot even define, rather than protect the system with equity (financial adaptation!), they are clearly not interested in actually protecting the financial system against unknowable catastrophes.
Pressed, advocates will quickly admit that’s not what they mean. Instead, they say, they worry about the risk of “stranded assets,” “transition risks,” losses in fossil fuel and other legacy industries.
Will environmental regulators, legislators, presidents, prime ministers, really fly back from Glasgow and pass laws and regulations so onerous that they tank the economy and financial system? Well, they just might. But then at least one might be honest and call it “climate-policy risk!”
But even this story does not pass muster. Climate-policy advocates are turning to financial regulation precisely because presidents and legislatures, accountable to voters, are refusing to impose draconian carbon-killing policies. It has some chutzpah, too: Carbon regulations might kill the fossil-fuel industry. So we have to. . . kill the fossil-fuel industry first.
This view has resonated through financial-policy circles for the last few years, though a tiny dose of econ-101 common sense told us that if you restrict fossil-fuel supply, prices and profits go up, not down. Today’s spike in coal, natural-gas and oil prices illustrates just how competent this effort is.
We are in an energy transition. But old, dying technologies never cause crises. New ones do. The 1929 stock-market crash did not come from the horse and buggy industries; radio, movies, and cars crashed. The 1999 stock market crash did not come from the typewriter, slide rule, carbon paper, and landline-telephone industries. Tech, slightly ahead of its time, failed. Tesla, valued at $1 trillion, upwards of ten times more than GM — now there is a teetering domino! Since the tulips themselves, so-called bubbles have always come from exciting new technologies, often fueled by subsidies and cheered on by central banks and regulators, not from slowly decaying legacy industries.
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-convenient-myth-climate-risk-and.html
*******************************************Australia: Natural gas mining project under fire from Greenies
Woodside is set to make a final investment decision on a major LNG project in Western Australia's north within weeks, but opponents are vowing to push on with their attempts to stop it.
But Woodside says the project has been through rigorous environmental assessment processes
The project — which has been labelled Australia's biggest new fossil fuel investment in nearly a decade — involves developing the Scarborough gas field, west of Karratha, and expanding its current Pluto facility on the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara, where the gas would go for processing.
If the project goes ahead, it is expected to emit millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually at a time when countries are being urged to decarbonise.
large pipe with gas plant infrastructure in the background
Woodside says it's set a target for its expanded Pluto LNG facility to reach net zero emissions by 2050. (Supplied)
Woodside received an important financial boost this week, selling a 49 per cent stake in its $7.6 billion proposed second train at Pluto to New York-based Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).
As the clock ticks on Woodside's financial commitment to the project's future, former WA Labor Premier turned Conservation Council President, Carmen Lawrence, has spoken out against the plan, fearing the environmental impacts it could cause.
"I don't see how anyone living in Western Australia can ignore this because it adds to our emissions," Dr Lawrence said.
"Climate change is happening now, it's real, it's destructive and anything that adds to it, surely has to be questioned."
Woodside's chief executive Meg O'Neill received a fresh legal letter from the Conservation Council of WA last week, warning the project could have a negative impact on the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, on the other side of the country.
The ABC requested to interview Ms O'Neill, but she was unavailable all week.
A spokesperson for Woodside said the primary environmental approvals from both the Commonwealth and state governments were in place to support the final investment decision, but requests to start drilling were still being assessed by Australia's offshore energy regulator.
"The development of Scarborough has been assessed by the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority, the Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment and the Australian National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority," the spokesperson said.
"These environmental assessment processes concluded the proposal may be implemented, subject to conditions and activity-specific Environment Plans."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-22/woodside-scarborough-gas-project-under-fire/100570746
***************************************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)
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Sunday, November 21, 2021
EVs in Norway are CHEAPER than regular cars
Money talks: EVs have gone from making up less than 2 per cent of new car sales to more than three quarters
In the early 1990s, Norway began introducing the policies that would later drive an EV transition, including abolishing or waiving various taxes to reduce the up-front and lifetime cost of EVs.
Strangely enough, one catalyst for this was the Norwegian '80s synth-pop band A-ha, otherwise best known for the song Take On Me.
In 1989, two members of the trio bought a converted EV (range: 45km) and drove it around Norway, stubbornly refusing to pay road tolls or registration, to protest the disincentives to owning an electric car.
The government caved and waived the tolls and fees for EVs, which cost little because there were so few EVs at the time.
Unintentionally, however, it had introduced the first EV purchase incentives and laid the groundwork for the coming boom in EV sales.
In 2001, the most important of these incentives was introduced when EVs were made exempt from the hefty 25 per cent GST.
All up, EVs in Norway are cheaper to buy than regular cars.
The tax breaks, combined with lower ongoing fuel and maintenance costs and reduced fees for toll roads and parking, makes a persuasive economic argument, says Snorre Sletvold, business developer for the Norwegian EV Association. "I think you need purchase incentives," he said.
"Maybe not zero per cent sales tax like we have in Norway, but some subsidies to kick off the markets."
Once enough people start buying EVs, others follow, he says. Sales snowball through personal recommendations, or what he calls "neighbourhood effect".
"We have the people talking to each other in the neighbourhood, they say, 'You're using an EV, don't you run out of energy on your battery?' "They say, 'No, not at all, it works pretty well.'"
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Prince Charles's dirty secret: Diesel generators power winter lights display at Sandringham
At the Cop26 summit this month he made an impassioned plea to stop climate change and warned we were in the ‘last chance saloon’. But Prince Charles’s green credentials were called into question yesterday as it emerged a winter lights display at Sandringham is running on diesel generators.
The Luminate attraction at the Queen’s Norfolk estate is powered by the generators, along with a funfair and car park floodlights erected for the five-week event.
Visitors saw six machines around the estate, which is now largely run by Charles in an effort to shoulder some of the Queen’s day-to-day tasks.
At the summit in Glasgow, Charles warned that ‘the future of humanity and nature herself are at stake’.
Despite his powerful speech, the Luminate show uses some 60,000 bulbs. Visitors pay up to £18.50 to follow the mile-long trail, which features 13 installations. The night-time light displays operate for at least four hours a day.
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Climate campaigners take South Africa to court over coal policy
South Africa’s plan to build new coal-fired power stations during the climate crisis is being challenged in court for breaching the rights of current and future generations.
Three civil society organisations have launched a constitutional lawsuit in the North Gauteng high court against the South African government, arguing that its energy policy is incompatible with the national constitution.
Coal makes up about 80% of South Africa’s energy mix, and the government intends to add 1,500MW more over the next six years as part of its 2019 integrated resource plan.
Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency said no new coal-fired power stations could be built if the world is to stay within safe limits of global heating.
Although South Africa has not explicitly agreed to phase out the fossil fuel, it was one of 197 countries to commit to “phasing down” coal at the Cop26 global climate summit in Glasgow last week.
Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African president, admits the climate crisis is “the most pressing issue of our time” and that developing economies are particularly vulnerable. As well as the direct dangers of rising temperatures, the climate emergency poses a particular threat to South Africa because of its existing water and food insecurity.
But, despite being given about $8.5bn (£6.3bn)_from European countries and the US to help it move away from coal, Gwede Mantashe, the energy minister, said it would continue to play a significant role in the nation’s electricity generation.
Campaigners say the problem is not being taken seriously enough, pointing to research by the University of Cape Town and the Climate Equity Reference Project that shows the coal plans are not compatible with South Africa meeting its climate commitments.
The youth-led African Climate Alliance, the Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action and Groundwork argue that continuing coal development breaches constitutional rights to life, dignity and equality, the right to a healthy environment and children’s rights.
The campaigners say there is no justifiable basis for limiting their constitutional rights because renewable energy is a feasible alternative and is cleaner and cheaper than new coal power.
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Australia: Greenies don't like hydrogen either
Owners of Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) shares may want to know about a threat to Fortescue Future Industries’ (FFI) hydrogen plans.
Fortescue Future Industries says it’s taking a global leadership position in the renewable energy and green products industry and has a vision to make green hydrogen the most globally traded seaborne commodity in the world.
But not everyone likes the plans that Fortescue Future Industries is doing.
According to reporting by the Australian Financial Review, the former leader of the Greens, Bob Brown, has said that green hydrogen must not be “based on mega dam projects, bird-killing wind farms or without a “social licence” that returns foreign earnings to communities.”
Energy Minister Angus Taylor reportedly released modelling that showed green hydrogen could replace LNG as the top energy export, with $50 billion of revenue by 2050.
The AFR speculated that the Greens could use any balance of political power to block hydrogen projects that sustain fossil-fuel industries, like ‘blue hydrogen’.
The Bob Brown Foundation took out a full-page advert in the AFR this week to challenge some of Dr Forrest’s claims and Fortescue Future Industries’ potential projects including hydroelectric dams in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea.
What’s the problem?
Why doesn’t Dr Brown like these projects? The Bob Brown Foundation said the aim is to foster debate about the environmental and social impacts of Fortescue Future Industries’ global hydrogen production. Bob Brown said:
He is promoting huge hydro-electric schemes on some of the world’s last remaining great rivers and there would be massive social and environmental consequences. As reported in the AFR, he has contracted with the president of the DRC for a scheme on the Congo River twice the size of China’s Twin Gorges Dam. It is reported to threaten the displacement of 25,000 people, involves massive transmission lines, and has been dropped by previous interested parties including the World Bank.
In Papua New Guinea, Forrest’s hydrogen vision brings dams on a number of major rivers into focus. There can have been no time to consult the local populations nor to assess the impact on some of the most spectacular tropical gorges on Earth. His global vision deserves global scrutiny. We want him to get social licences. That is what we seek.
We support a hydrogen economy based on renewable energy where the production of that energy does not contribute to climate change, damage the environment or cause social dislocation. That is going to take a lot more considered judgement than is evident in Dr Forrest’s global mission.
Time will tell what impact, if any, this has on Fortescue Future Industries, the Fortescue share price and FFI’s green hydrogen plans.
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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)
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Friday, November 19, 2021
Garbage in, Garbage out in Glasgow, Scotland
By DAVID R. LEGATES
No doubt you’ve heard—and always at ear-splitting decibels—that “97 percent of all climate scientists agree” that climate change is real, will be devastating to life on earth, and is largely or entirely due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. The participants at the COP26, United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, have been screaming pretty much nothing else for days.
Problem is, the “97 percent” is pure fiction.
I should know. In 2013, I and several other researchers wrote in Science & Education that the “97 percent” figure came from John Cook and colleagues at the University of Western Australia—who basically cooked the books.
Cook and his comrades did not in fact poll the world’s climate scientists. Not even close. They simply collected the abstracts of nearly 12,000 journal articles and then subjectively designated whether the abstract of a given paper either endorsed or rejected “the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
Two-thirds of the abstracts, however, expressed no opinion, and of the remaining nearly 4,000 very few explicitly agreed—by the authors’ own assessment—with the stated consensus position. My colleagues and I were forced to conclude that “the 97% consensus claimed by Cook et al. turns out upon inspection to be not 97.1% but 0.3%.”
The “97 percent” consensus is, as we said then, “one of the greatest items of misinformation that has been circulated on either side of the climate debate.”
But the propaganda continued; and continues to this day—and is now more extreme. Just in time for COP26, and published in the same journal in which the first “consensus” was announced, a new group, led by researchers at Cornell University, wrote an article entitled, “Greater than 99% Consensus on Human Caused Climate Change in the Peer-reviewed Scientific Literature.”
Incredibly, the methodology in that article is even more flawed than that employed in the first. This latest clutch of climate alarmists randomly selected a mere 3,000 papers from more than 88,000 climate-related papers published since Cook—and then applied Cook’s subjective assessment to this tiny fraction of the available abstracts. Surprised to learn that only four were determined to be skeptical of human-caused global warming?
And the authors were also biased regarding the rest of the abstracts. For example, they noted that “a majority” did not state a position on whether climate change was human caused. But unlike Cook et al., who discarded such papers, this new group of researchers simply asserted that the act of publishing on climate change— in fact, just the authors’ mentioning of the term—was enough to have those articles logged as favoring the consensus. One would be hard pressed to come up with a more perfect example of circular reasoning.
The situation would be laughable but for the draconian measures the climate alarmists, citing this “99 percent” so-called consensus, have been calling for in Glasgow—which, mercifully, ends today. If these persons get their way, the needless human suffering will be no joke; and, as always, it will be the poor in all countries—who can stay alive only when affordable energy is plentiful—who will be harmed the most. And, unless the thinking part of US electorate starts a sustained revolt at the polls, you, thanks to your tax dollars, will be helping to finance that misery.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13866&omhide=true
******************************************Hydrogen planes may offer a possible solution to 'flight shame'. But can they safely provide greener air travel?
Why religious freedom bill is a culture war sugar hit — and not much more
As the world looks for new ways to combat climate change, hydrogen has emerged as a potential saviour for polluting industries like aviation.
It's the most common element in the world, and packs more energy than conventional aviation jet fuel without the side effect of producing massive emissions of carbon dioxide.
But hydrogen and air travel have a complicated history.
More than 80 years ago the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg airship burst into flames when attempting to moor at Lakehurst in New Jersey.
The extent to which the buoyant hydrogen gas can be blamed for the disaster has been the subject of much debate.
But the image of the airship crashing to the ground is something the aviation industry is hoping to leave behind as it re-embraces hydrogen.
One company is confident it can make it work, and is hoping to take paying passengers on a hydrogen-powered flight within just a few years.
The push for hydrogen flight
From its base at Kemble in England's scenic Cotswolds, ZeroAvia is developing an aircraft that could make the world's first commercial hydrogen-electric flight in 2024, between London and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
The benefit of using hydrogen fuel cells, ZeroAvia argues, is that the only waste product is clean water.
"It's essentially a zero-emission process," says Sergey Kiselev, who heads ZeroAvia's Europe division.
"The only by-product is water vapour."
The concept has won financial backing from the UK government and from IAG, the parent company of British Airways.
While hydrogen played at least a partial role in the Hindenburg crash, the team at ZeroAvia says modern storage systems make it a reliable fuel.
"Certainly hydrogen is safe," says John Kells, the company's head of technical operations.
"Today there are electric vehicles with hydrogen fuel cell systems and it's not more dangerous than kerosene [which fuels modern-day jets]."
Hydrogen is much lighter than air, so will quickly dissipate when released, unlike regular fuel, ZeroAvia says.
But developing the plane hasn't been easy.
In September 2020, the team from ZeroAvia reached a major milestone after performing a take-off, circuits and landing in a six-seater Piper Malibu powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
The plane carried out dozens of successful test flights. Then in April this year, it crashed.
The plane made a forced landing in a field near Cranfield airport, in Bedfordshire. While trying to come to a stop on the uneven surface, one of its wings was torn off. Nobody was hurt.
"I think when you test novel technology, things like that happen," Mr Kiselev tells the ABC.
He says while the incident is still being investigated, the hydrogen itself was not the cause.
"We've gone through quite a bit of learning … to avoid that and make sure that doesn't happen again."
Stephen Lawes, who was on the plane when it crashed, is still convinced hydrogen is the future. "The technology we've got today works," he says. "You don't have to wait until 2030, 2040, 2050. You can do it now, basically."
Just outside ZeroAvia's hangar at the airport in the Cotswolds are dozens of fossil-fuel-guzzling passenger jets.
They were sent there for temporary storage during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the long-term future of some of these jets is in doubt, amid a push for greener flying.
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‘King Coal’ Roars Back
Although the COP26 virtuous don’t want you to know it, rebounding economies and the ongoing global energy crisis have vaulted much-maligned coal to the top of the energy food chain, once again.
President Biden’s energy-climate policies have apparently been more friendly to coal than those of President Trump.
New federal data has U.S. coal-fired power generation leaping 22% in 2021 to 945 terawatt-hours - the first annual increase for coal since 2014.
Coal will generate nearly a quarter of U.S. electricity this year, with competitor natural gas prices doubling since June to over $6.00.
The demand boom has U.S. coal companies now offering miners six-figure salaries. Not too shabby for a commodity that the media has loved to leave for dead for well over a decade now. “Coal’s burnout,” The Washington Post declared on January 2, 2011.
Personal politics permeating “journalism” continues to leave us energy-climate stupid.
Adding a whopping 38,400 MW, China built more new coal generation capacity last year than the rest of the world retired.
The International Energy Agency says that China’s coal demand will hit a new record this year, some seven years after the Sierra Club promised that China’s coal use was “drying up.”
In addition, after decades of trying to “get off coal,” even small-growth Europe is realizing what happens when the real alternative becomes unaffordable: “Coal Is Making A Comeback In Europe As Gas Prices Explode.”
Yet, the rebound in coal is not surprising when we look at the numbers.
Only ~20% of global coal usage is internationally traded, making coal a largely domestic resource with huge energy security advantages for consumers. By comparison, ~33% of gas and ~75% of oil are swapped from country to country.
Coal is a foundational resource in all-important Asia, so demand typically grows as the population and economy expand.
Globally, coal is still easily the main source of electricity at 37-40% of all generation.
Coal accounts for 60-65% of the electricity generation in China and 68-73% in India – the two most significant incremental energy users that hold ~35% of humanity.
Coal demand has been so high in China this year that supply shortages have forced electricity to be rationed, with “alternatives” to coal not quite as available as some like to insist.
In the most energy-deprived nation on Earth, booming coal demand in India has also left the country short of supply: “Without coal, you cannot survive...It’s not possible to keep the lights on without coal.”
With 85% of the global population struggling in the still developing countries, the United Nations has affirmed that human progress trumps all:
“Economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing countries,” United Nations
And I doubt very highly that the American taxpayers want tens of billions of their dollars going into some ambiguous, and surely untrackable, global “climate fund.”
Sorry, but I choose our precious resources to go to educational equity and economic opportunity for the poor and neglected Black neighborhoods of Homewood in Pittsburgh and Adamsville in Atlanta…..not for windmills in India. The American voting public deserves and should be demanding that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2021/10/27/king-coal-roars-back/
*************************************************Australia: Dark roofs ditched, commercial buildings must be net-zero from 2022
Coming from a warm climate, I have always favoured white or silver-coloured roofs as they help keep the house cool -- so the policy below has its merits
All large commercial buildings designed from next year will be required to operate at net-zero in a major climate policy announcement by the NSW Planning Minister.
Rob Stokes said dark roofing will be discontinued on homes built across Sydney and has taken a swipe at the Commonwealth’s climate agenda while unveiling a suite of measures to ramp up the state’s emissions reductions response.
Speaking to an online forum for urban think-tank Committee for Sydney, Mr Stokes also targeted parts of the property sector for their backlash over an earlier decision this year to mandate paler roofs in the south-west growth area, saying he found it “incredible” legislation was required to force change.
“There are no practical reasons why we shouldn’t be ditching dark roofing on new homes permanently to ensure that future communities of Sydney’s west don’t experience the urban heat that many communities do now,” he said, revealing he had asked planners to include the policy switch under a new umbrella approach to emissions.
The proposed rules will be contained in planning mechanisms developers must adhere to under Mr Stokes’ showpiece Design and Place policy, a wide-ranging document that aims to lift the statewide standards of sustainable urban design.
In his speech Mr Stokes referenced recent University of NSW research, commissioned by the federal government, that found switching to cool roofing would lower Sydney’s summer temperatures by up to 2.4 degrees.
He also revealed office skyscrapers, hotels and shopping centres would be among commercial developments in which energy usage must run at net-zero emissions from 2022. He said the vast majority of buildings operating under the NABERS emissions rating system already had net-zero commitments well ahead of 2050.
Stockland, which runs major shopping centres as well as residential developments and retirement villages, has committed to achieving net-zero by 2028.
The announcement was lauded by Committee for Sydney chief executive Gabriel Metcalf, who said it would “propel NSW event further into a leadership role on climate action”.
The Green Building Council’s chief executive Davina Rooney said constructing buildings powered by renewable energy was the best way to achieve this.
“We’d also encourage owners of large commercial office buildings to take strong action in reducing upfront carbon emissions from products and materials,” she said, referring to a new focus within the industry to cut down on embodied carbon.
As part of the state government changes, new residential developments will also be asked to meet higher energy ratings standards.
Property Council of Australia western Sydney director Ross Grove urged the government to allow time “to ensure building designers and developers can make the necessary upgrades”.
Steve Mann, chief executive of the NSW branch of the Urban Development Institute of Australia, said policy changes needed to be considered in light of the crisis around housing affordability and supply.
“Anything that means we’ve got to reset our supply pipelines would have some short-term impacts,” he said, adding that certain councils mandated against lighter roofs because of reflectivity. He said there could also be cost impacts to material supply chains: “[Colorbond] Ironstone is the strongest in demand at the moment.”
NSW Treasurer Matt Kean announced earlier this month that the state had signed a pledge with the United Nations Climate Change Conference to boost electric vehicle sales and was on track to make 50 per cent of all new vehicles sold in the state electric by 2030.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has hit campaign mode with a “technology not taxes” mantra in regard to emissions reduction, announcing plans such as investment in charging stations for electric vehicles and a $1 billion scheme to be co-funded by private investors to decarbonise the economy.
Mr Stokes, who is temporarily juggling the transport portfolio, said he was left “bemused” by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments to a business forum earlier this year during which he said net-zero wouldn’t be achieved in inner-city cafés and wine bars.
“He was making a different point but ... actually we won’t achieve net-zero without including our wine bars and inner-city cafes,” Mr Stokes said.
“Thankfully, the anti-climate rhetoric emanating from sections of Canberra has cooled significantly over recent months.”
He added that, while COP26 didn’t go as far on commitments as hoped, “it did put climate firmly on the agenda of our federal counterparts”.
Conversely, Mr Stokes said NSW’s response had shown a Coalition government was capable of an “ambitious” climate response while managing economic factors. He said his government not only wanted to act but, in light of recent legal and oversight decisions, was obliged to.
NSW independent MLC Justin Field said caution was needed in regard to increasing the role for timber in net-zero buildings.
“Expanding sustainable softwood timber plantations as a renewable construction resource makes sense, however we get exponentially greater carbon benefit from allowing our native forests to grow old while also building the resilience of the environment to adapt to a climate change,” he said.
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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)
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Thursday, November 18, 2021
British obstructionists are all JAILED: Judge sends eight eco-warriors to prison for four months for breaking injunction... and locks up ninth for six months
The British bulldog finally barks
Nine Insulate Britain activists were today jailed at the High Court for breaching an injunction designed to prevent the group's road blockades on the M25.
Most will given four months in prison, but one of them - Ben Taylor - received six months after telling the judge he would immediately block the motorway again.
An Insulate Britain spokesman said today: 'This morning our Insulate Britain supporters have been sentenced. We are being failed and betrayed by our government. Our nine chose not to standby and be complicit in genocide.'
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Climate Activists Aren't Going to Like Biden's Latest Move
After President Biden — along with a good portion of his cabinet — returned from a U.N. climate summit in Scotland, his administration proceeded with the sale of oil drilling rights covering more than 100,000 square miles — some eight million acres — in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday in the latest instance of Biden's pandering to the woke crowd not working in the real world.
As The Associated Press reported from Scotland, Biden bowed before climate change fanatics as he told world leaders that "the United States and other energy-gulping developed nations bear much of the responsibility for climate change, and said actions taken this decade to contain global warming will be decisive in preventing future generations from suffering."
But back in the United States — and apparently reality — Biden's lofty but delusional talk of a future without fossil fuels just doesn't add up.
Wednesday's auction for rights to drill in federal waters in the Gulf is something Biden fought against in court, apparently trying to keep his word, but it was a battle he ultimately lost to Republican attorneys general who sued to allow the auction to take place.
The oil rights being auctioned off by Biden's Interior Department will allow some 1.1 billion barrels of crude oil to be produced, also according to AP. It's another broken campaign promise for Biden, AP's report points out, who wooed progressives by promising them he would prevent federal lands from being used for new fossil fuel projects:
Biden campaigned on promises to curb fossil fuels from public lands and waters, which including coal account for about a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
During the Democratic presidential primary, Biden said in a debate that his position would be "no more subsidies for [the] fossil fuel industry, no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period."
As the Green New Deal crowd is learning along with the rest of the country, what Biden said on the trail and what he does in office are often two very different things.
Even NBC News called Biden out for promising one thing and doing another:
The Guardian didn't blunt its criticism of the Biden administration, either:
The enormous size of the lease sale – covering an area that is twice as large as Florida – is a blunt repudiation of Biden’s previous promise to shut down new drilling on public lands and waters. It has stunned environmentalists who argue the auction punctures the US’s shaky credibility on the climate crisis and will make it harder to avert catastrophic impacts from soaring global heating.
Those poor stunned environmentalists? The joke is really on other nations that attended the climate summit in Glasgow and agreed to stunt their own economies based on Biden's "leadership" on the issue only to find him selling oil rights to the energy companies demonized by climate activists
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Low emission zone a failure
Campaigners today called for London's 'money-grabbing' Ultra Low Emissions Zone to be scrapped after scientists warned it has barely had any impact on improving the capital's dirty air in the month after it launched.
Researchers from Imperial College London say the controversial scheme – which was last month expanded and made 18 times bigger – is not effective on its own.
The team looked at the level of pollutants over a 12-week period, starting before and ending after the ULEZ was launched by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan in April 2019.
They found just a 3 per cent reduction in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels over this time, and 'insignificant' drops in levels of ozone (O3), which can damage the lungs, and tiny particles of dirt and liquid called PM2.5 that are thought to reach the brain.
Amazingly, at some sites around the capital, air pollution actually worsened, despite the ULEZ coming into force.
These new findings show that the ULEZ – which costs drivers of diesel vehicles that do not comply a whopping £12.50/day – is 'not a silver bullet' in tackling air pollution. It comes less than a month after London's ULEZ zone was widened to include all areas within the North and South Circular roads, catching another 130,000 drivers.
Hugh Bladon, from the Alliance of British Drivers, called ULEZ 'ridiculous' and suggested it should be scrapped.
'There is a mindset in this country of having a hatred of people driving around in cars and vans - they don't seem to realise that people need to get about,' he told MailOnline.
'If you've got to go in five days a week it's going to cost more than £60 - that is ridiculous. And the biggest problem is it hits those who can least afford it, as better-off people are able to buy newer cars.
'This is an example of officials trying to rob motorists of whatever pennies they have in their pockets.'
AA spokesman Luke Bosdet told MailOnline: 'I think we have to bear in mind that confidence in public transport has not yet returned to pre-covid levels. Some of those would-be passengers will be making car trips. Road traffic is only one source of low-level pollution but is the easy hit for trying to reduce levels. It is also very lucrative in generating charges and fines income for London.
'One of the big failures of London transport planning has been not providing the means for commuters and drivers to leave their vehicles on the outskirts and take public transport or cycle into the city.
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Peter Ridd and the reef
The essay below by Jennifer Marohasy dates from October 13. I have hesitated in putting it up because it is so long. It does however provide an excellent coverage of a number of points so repays the effort of reading it.
I was pleased that she mentions water-level variations as a factor in coral death. I had thought I was the only one pointing that out
Coral reefs can be messy, and so can court cases. And so it is with the case of Peter Ridd, sacked by James Cook University because he exercised his intellectual freedom. The only thing that is neatly settled from this case is apparently ‘the science’, never mind that this is only because anyone who publicly disagrees with it is censored or sacked. In the case of Peter Ridd, even after he managed to raise over A$1.4 million to appeal his sacking by James Cook University all the way to the High Court of Australia, he lost.
This sends a very strong message to all politically astute academics: if they are likely to make findings that do not accord with the consensus, these findings should be hidden within phrases that are unintelligible gobbledygook. In other words, their findings should be communicated in language that is meaningless, or is made unintelligible by the excessive use of technical jargon. They should certainly not translate their findings into plain English, or, worse, air them on national television, because that way the average Australian would have some understanding of what they are actually funding with their hard-earned taxes.
The climate science literature is replete with hidden meaning and technical jargon. The extent of the gobbledygook is such that the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently concluded that humans are the main cause of global warming and the role of the sun is inconsequential, never mind that there is prestigious scientific literature that arguably comes to the opposite conclusion – which is that much of the global warming we have been experiencing can be explained in terms of solar variability. This extensive literature was recently reviewed by Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon and 20 of their colleagues from 14 countries and published in the international journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (Volume 21). However, it appears that tenured academics are not allowed to argue, at least not publicly.
There was a sense of irony this morning that made me smile. As I waited for the High Court judgement, I looked through a paper by Peter Ridd’s former colleagues – Emma Ryan, Scott Smithers and others – entitled ‘Chronostratigraphy of Bramston Reef reveals a long-term record of fringing reef growth under muddy conditions in the central Great Barrier Reef’ published in the very respectable journal Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Palaeoecology (Volume 441, page 734–747, 2016).
It would be difficult for the non-specialist to decipher this jargon-filled technical analysis that essentially supports what Peter Ridd has been saying for some years – and which earned him his first censure by the University, but, in short, it says there is still healthy coral reef in Bowen Harbour.
It’s cold comfort, by the way, for the High Court to find in passing that the 2016 censure was unlawful, especially when it led directly to the 2018 censure, which, in turn, resulted in Peter’s employment being terminated.
Anyway, I’m told Scott Smithers is a very competent scientist and an all-round good guy. He never replies to my emails. Perhaps this is because I could translate his gobbledygook into plain English. His potentially subversive publications would then be understood by the intelligent layperson for what they are – which is that they back up what Peter Ridd is saying and provide a very detailed explanation of how many inshore reefs of the Great Barrier Reef have been in decline for more than 1,000 years because of falling (yes, falling) sea levels.
Because academics are not allowed to speak freely about controversial subjects most people have no understanding the cyclical nature of sea levels. The general public are under the misconception that the most important global trend is one of sea-level rise. There are cycles within cycles and the most significant cycle has been one of sea-level fall, by some 1.5 metres over the last 2,000 or so years, notwithstanding that there has been sea-level rise of some 40 centimetres since the industrial revolution, which coincides with the end of the Little Ice Age (circa AD 1303 to AD 1835).
To put all of this in some context, along the Great Barrier Reef there is a large and variable daily tidal range. For example, at Hay Point the tide varies by as much as 7.14 metres; at Mackay by 6.58 metres; and at Gladstone by 4.83 metres.
The daily cycles can be averaged to show that sea levels can change even more dramatically over geological time frames. For example, just 19,500 years ago, during the depths of the last major ice age, sea levels were 120 metres lower (yes, lower) than they are today. And the Great Barrier Reef did not exist. This very long record shows changes in temperature precede their parallel changes in carbon dioxide by 800 to 2000 years. This vital point establishes that carbon dioxide cannot be the primary forcing agent for temperature change at the glacial-interglacial scale, but this reality is mostly hidden by the modern astute geologist and ice-core expert who arguably cares more for his career than the truth. If this were not the case, they would be marching on Glasgow.
The modern Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system to have ever existed on planet Earth, according to Peter J. Davies writing in the Encyclopedia of Modern Coral Reefs. It is but a thin veneer growing on top of at least five previous extensive reef systems, each destroyed by dramatic falls in sea level in the past. The modern reef has grown up on top of extinct reefs, the last of which existed 120,000 years ago. In some places the depth of the coral growth since the last ice age, which had begun by 100,000 years ago, is 28 metres – layer upon layer. This growth is now constrained by sea level.
Many of the nearly 3,000 reefs that make up the modern Great Barrier Reef have a crest that is flat-topped because the most recent 1.5 metre drop in sea level has sliced this much off their tops. So, the crests of these reefs expose dead coral that is thousands of years old, sometimes capped with coralline algae. These reef crests were dead long before European settlement. Yet it is surveys of exactly this reef habitat, taken from the window of a plane by Peter Ridd’s nemesis Terry Hughes flying at an altitude of 150 metres, which have made media headlines around the world, and which suggest that the Great Barrier Reef is more than half dead. Worse, they were used in a recent Australian Academy of Sciences report (March 2021) to claim the imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef due to carbon dioxide emissions and thus the need for a commitment to net zero greenhouse gas emissions in Glasgow. It is all nonsense, and politics. But beware the academic who explains as much in plain English, especially following this morning’s ruling by the High Court of Australia.
On 2 May 2018, Peter Ridd was sacked by James Cook University for serious misconduct. It all started when he called-out Terry Hughes, whom he believed was falsely claiming that the inshore coral reefs at Bowen, specifically Bramston Reef, were dead because of climate change and the deteriorating water quality.
Professor Ridd had been complaining quietly for years. He had already published peer-reviewed papers explaining in detail some of the serious issues with the official science. It was nevertheless a tough decision to go public, which he made in full knowledge that there could be consequences. At the same time there was a feeling of optimism; eventually, the truth would win out and the University would acknowledge the importance of implementing some form of quality assurance over the various pronouncements made by one or two high-profile academics. These academics, whom he believed were speaking beyond their area of expertise and hammering the theme of the reef being dead in order to progress their own personal political agenda and, at the same time, their careers.
Former Chairman of the Institute of Public Affairs, Janet Albrechtsen, wrote in The Australian on 25 July 2020:
“Remember that Ridd wasn’t querying the interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He was raising questions, in one particular area of his expertise, about the quality of climate change science. One of the fundamental challenges of our generation is to get the science right so we can settle on the right climate change policies. JCU told Ridd to keep quiet, then it sacked him.”
Peter Ridd did win the first round in the Federal Circuit Court back in April 2019. Judge Salvatore Vasta found in his favour and order that the 17 findings made by the University, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction and the censure and the final censure given by the University and the termination of employment of Professor Ridd by the University were all unlawful.
Then the University appealed, and the Federal Court of Australia overturned the decision of the Federal Circuit Court. That decision, according to Dr Albrechtsen, has sent intellectual inquiry down the gurgler in the 21st century at an institution fundamental to Western civilisations:
“Is that to be the legacy of JCU’s vice-chancellor Sandra Harding? And what oversight has JCU’s governing council provided to this reputational damage, not to mention the waste of taxpayer dollars, in pursuing a distinguished scientist who was admired by his students?
"Following this decision, no academic can assume that an Australian university will allow the kind of robust debate held at Oxford University in 1860 between the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and Thomas Henry Huxley, a biologist and proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
"The Historical Journal records how this legendary encounter unfolded: ‘The Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone, florid and fluent he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution: rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons have always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words ... He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.’
"Not for nothing, Ridd’s lawyers submitted this example of intellectual freedom during the first trial. In sacking Ridd, and to win in court, JCU had to argue against the means that seeks the truth – intellectual freedom.
"In deciding whether to grant special leave for the appeal, the High Court considered whether the case involved ‘a question of law that is of public importance’. It was the first time the High Court had been called upon to consider the meaning of ‘academic and intellectual freedom’, a term that is used in enterprise agreements covering staff at almost all Australian universities.”
We now have a judgement. For the High Court, it seems that intellectual freedom is like a delicate flower that does not survive being plucked. It can be contemplated from afar but cannot be held or given as a gift. Intellectual freedom survives in academia only if limited to gobbledygook that alludes to the truth in such a way that no member of the pubic could understand how deeply that truth contradicts the official scientific consensus. Perhaps I already knew that.
Some argue there are other legal avenues – not through the courts – that could, perhaps, have been pursued and may have achieved a different outcome, but which may or may not have provided some vindication. But as for the courts: if you have to raise A$1.4 million and put in a further A$300,000 of your own money, as Peter Ridd has done, just to run one argument all the way to the High Court, how much would you need to fight on the substance of each issue?
This alternative strategy might have been to try and get the matter raised under the Queensland whistle-blower legislation. Peter Ridd would at least have been, theoretically, protected while an investigation was conducted. The focus would have been on science rather than a narrow construction of employment law and the procedures laid out in the University’s Code of Conduct. But given the determination of James Cook University to silence its critics, and the need for this to have included testimony from colleagues desperate to avoid controversy – lest they are admonished by their family and communities for failing to be respectable, thereby jeopardising their own careers – it is unclear this would have been any more fruitful.
And so to this day there has never been any consideration given by the courts or any other independent body to the actual state of the corals in Bowen Harbour, including at Bramston Reef, even though this was the reason for the first censure that the High Court has ruled should not have been issued in the first place. Yes, the ruling this morning clearly states, in agreement with Judge Vasta, that Professor Ridd’s initial comments about his colleague Terry Hughes and the state of the corals in Bowen Harbour were reasonable and that the censure should not have been issued. Yet that is where all the other allegations subsequently came from as Peter Ridd tried to defend himself in the public domain.
Following today’s decision, Peter Ridd has accepted an invitation to join the Institute of Public Affairs as a Research Fellow, without salary, to lead a newly established project for ‘Real Science’. The Project’s aims are to improve science quality assurance and to support academics speaking out for integrity in science and research. You can support this project by way of a tax deductable donation to the IPA. It is the case that long ago scientific inquiry was mostly privately funded, now is your opportunity to be a part of this new initiative for open and honest inquiry.
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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)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
