AOC’s Green New Deal Documentary Gets Emmy Nomination

Most Americans are well aware that Hollywood leans to the left end of the political spectrum. However, for those who still question Hollywood’s penchant for liberal politics, the latest Emmy nominations should erase any such doubt.

On August 6, The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) announced its nominees for the 41st Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards. In a press release, NATAS said, “As we continue to innovate and honor the best in our industry, we are for the first time honoring our news and documentary communities with distinct ceremonies … We will honor those professionals that consistently deliver crucial, clear and factual reporting so critical during these unprecedented times.”

Pardon my French, but that is a bunch of bulls***. After perusing the list of Emmy nominees for news and documentaries, one thing is crystal clear: Hollywood only nominates news networks and documentaries with a decidedly leftist agenda.

Just look no further than the fact that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was nominated for an Emmy for her short film, “Art of the Green New Deal.” Upon hearing the news, AOC immediately tweeted, “So... while 2020 is highly unpredictable, I *definitely* did not expect to be nominated for an Emmy Award for our Green New Deal project with @theintercept, @mollycrabapple, @NaomiAKlein & others. Rather shocked & very grateful.”

AOC, trust me, you are not the only one who did not expect that you would be nominated for an Emmy. I am just as shocked as you are, if not more.

Yet, should I be all that shocked that a socialist congresswoman would be celebrated by Hollywood for making a seven-minute film about climate change? Of course not. That is par for the course these days in Tinseltown.

Just in case you were wondering, AOC’s film will face some stiff competition. AOC’s pet project is up against “Tiller and Beyond: Abortion Wars in Kansas” from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, “Equal Play” from The New York Times, “Detained by a Dictator” from Real America with Jorge Ramos, and last but not least, “‘Infested,’ He Says” from CNN’s New Day Weekend.

Yeah, Hollywood really went out on a limb in making sure its nominations covered the full spectrum of political philosophy. Not!

Actually, Hollywood went well out of its way to guarantee that its nominees only spouted the all-too-typical Leftist ideology. If you think this is hyperbolic, consider the breakdown of media entities that garnered nominations—and those that did not.

PBS was the leader of the pack with 48 nominations. This was followed by CNN with 30. Rounding out the top 10 were HBO with 27, Univision with 18, CBS with 17, Netflix with 15, The New York Times with 14, NBC with 12, ABC and FX Networks with nine each, and Al Jazeera International USA with six.

Shockingly, FOX News did not garner a single nomination. In fact, the only media entity to receive a nomination that could be portrayed as right-of-center was The Wall Street Journal, which got two. For comparison, MSNBC received five nominations. Even CNN en Espanol (three) and VOX (two) received nominations!

For decades, Hollywood has trended in a liberal direction. However, it sure seems like those in La-La-Land have abandoned any notion of objectivity in deciding who gets Emmy nominations for news and documentaries these days. Unlike FOX News’ slogan, Hollywood is far from “fair and balanced.”

SOURCE 





Green activists get litigious

It has been a busy few weeks for climate litigators. On July 31st the Supreme Court in Dublin compelled the Irish government to devise a more detailed plan for the country’s transition to a low-carbon economy by 2050. This is one of the few times a court has forced a government to up its climate game. In another case in December, the Dutch Supreme Court found the government’s emission-reduction goal insufficient and ordered further cuts.

Meanwhile Katta O’Donnell, a student, filed a class-action lawsuit against the Australian government last month, alleging that it failed to disclose the risk that climate change poses to sovereign-bond holders like herself. That echoes another Australian case in which a young man is suing his pension fund for not revealing climate-related risks to his investment. Indeed, climate litigation is something of a burning issue down under. A recent study found that Australia saw the second highest number of climate-related lawsuits between 1986 and 2020, trailing only America.

Non-profit organisations and green activists, frustrated by the lack of state action, are increasingly turning to the courts, leading to a spike in climate-related lawsuits in recent years. Often these suits invent clever new ways to promote climate action. The two Australian cases, for instance, are thought to be the first of their kind. If successful, they could inspire cases in other countries.

It is not just governments in the dock. Businesses are increasingly common targets. There are at least 40 ongoing cases against fossil-fuel producers, mostly in America. They range from claims by shareholder that oil firms misrepresented climate risks to cases in which cities and citizens are seeking damages for natural disasters made worse by global warming. Because causation is so hard to prove, the latter are particularly difficult to win.

But climate activists expect that winning such cases will be easier in the future. The science of linking disasters to climate change will improve, and they hope that next generation of judges will be better acquainted with climate-change issues and may take a tougher stance. Political pressure may help, too. Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential contender, recently unveiled a climate plan that promises to support legal action against polluters. The courts may become an important weapon in the fight against climate change.

SOURCE 





Offshore wind power vast boondoggle that New York can no longer afford

Advocates claim offshore wind will contribute to a low-carbon future, spur an economic renaissance and create thousands of jobs. Don’t buy it. The mandates are yet another boondoggle that will benefit a well-connected few, saddling everyone else with even higher power costs.

Consider Rhode Island’s 30-megawatt, six-turbine offshore wind project located off Block Island and operated by Deepwater Wind. A decade ago, Rhode Island’s public utility commission rejected the project, concluding that the sky-high prices it would charge the local electric utility would adversely affect consumers. Yet the Rhode Island legislature ignored consumer interests and forced the commission to approve a 20-year contract.

At the start, in 2016, the local utility paid $245 per megawatt-hour for the project’s electricity, with a guaranteed increase of 3.5 percent each year. In 2035, the last year of the contract, the price will be an eye-popping $470 per MWh. By contrast, the average price of wholesale electricity in New England last year was about $31/MWh. In New York, average prices ranged between $22 per MWh upstate to $51 per MWh in Gotham.

Elsewhere, the dozen offshore projects now under development have lower-priced contracts, but they are still far higher than market prices. In New York, the first-year prices for the 816 MW Empire Wind and 880 MW Sunrise Wind projects will be $99/MWh and $110/MWh, respectively. And that’s cheap compared to electricity from some other wind projects in the Atlantic, which range from $77.76/MWh to $202/MWh.

Yet these prices, which are already high, are understated — because offshore wind projects have two dirty secrets. First, a detailed analysis of similar European projects has shown that their output decreases by an average of 4.5 percent a year (almost half after 10 years), with newer, larger turbines tending to suffer the most failures. Operation and maintenance costs also have proved to be much higher than anticipated.

These operational realities lead to a second, even more pernicious impact: The higher-than-expected operating costs mean that the projects are likely to be abandoned prematurely, creating a cascade of costs that consumers and taxpayers will absorb.

Although the offshore projects will be developed by large, international firms headquartered in ­Europe, they are structured as single-purpose, limited-liability companies whose only assets are the turbines themselves. So when the projects are no longer profitable to operate, the owners of these LLCs can walk away, with virtually no ­financial consequences.

Offshore wind projects must be decommissioned at the end of their lives. But unlike nuclear power plants, which have strict ­requirements to fund their eventual decommissioning, there are no such requirements for offshore wind facilities.

And those decommissioning costs will add up. A 2017 decommissioning study in Britain pegged the cost at around $240,000 per MW. With New York aiming to build 9,500 MW of offshore wind projects, that translates into over $2 billion in eventual decommissioning costs.

All this is against a backdrop of staggering economic losses thanks to the lockdowns. According to New York’s Division of the Budget, the budget shortfall for fiscal year 2021 alone is expected to be north of $13 billion, and $61 billion through fiscal 2024. The state now wants to raise New Yorkers’ electricity costs — already 50 percent above the national average — to pursue a virtue-signaling policy that will have no measurable impact on world climate. That will encourage even more businesses and jobs to flee.

The situation is akin to states that promise lavish pensions, while failing to fund them. When the bill’s due, there are only two options: renege on the promises or collect the money from someone else.

In the case of offshore wind, expect the result of higher-than-anticipated operating costs and premature abandonment to either be “renegotiations” with state regulators to raise contract prices — or a green middle finger to taxpayers. Either way, the public will lose.

SOURCE 





Australian state grants Whitehaven's controversial coal mine expansion

A New South Wales state regulator on Wednesday gave the green light for Australian miner Whitehaven Coal Ltd to proceed with the expansion of a controversial coal mine, in a blow to local farming communities.

Whitehaven applied in 2018 to expand the Vickery project, asking for approval to increase coal extraction by nearly 25%, increase the peak annual extraction rate more than three-fold and also expand the so-called disturbance area.

The state's Independent Planning Commission (IPC) said it had received 1,928 unique submissions regarding the application – with 40% in support, 57% against and 2% neutral – as well as 935 campaign emails objecting to the application.

However, the IPC said it found that the impacts associated with the expansion were "acceptable" and "in the public interest", when weighed against an increased disturbance footprint and additional environmental impacts.

Whitehaven welcomed the decision, saying the A$700 million ($498 million) expansion would generate jobs for 500 people during construction and 450 ongoing roles thereafter.

The Lock the Gate Alliance community action group described the outcome as bitterly disappointing and an indictment of the New South Wales state government's failure to protect farmland, communities, and water resources.

"Following this approval, if the company decides to proceed with the new 10 million tonnes per annum coal mine, it will irreparably alter the social fabric of the Boggabri farming community and hurt agriculture in the district," it said in a statement.

The IPC's decision comes ahead of its ruling due in September on a coal seam gas project at nearby Narrabri proposed by Santos Ltd.

The project has also drawn strong opposition from farmers and environmental groups due to concerns about potential damage to water supply and a state forest.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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The staggering human costs of “renewable” energy

By Paul Driessen

Marathon Petroleum recently announced it will “indefinitely idle” its Martinez Refinery. The decision will remove hundreds of jobs, billions of dollars, and nearly 7 million gallons of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum liquids per day from the energy-hungry California economy. It will also send fuel prices even higher for minority and other poor families that already pay by far the highest gasoline prices in the continental United States: $1.32 more per gallon of regular than in Louisiana and Texas.

California’s green and political interests don’t want drilling or fracking, pipelines, or nuclear, coal or hydroelectric power plants – or mining for the materials needed to manufacture electric cars. They prefer to have that work done somewhere else, and just import the energy, cars and consumer goods.

They’ve long wanted a totally electric vehicle (EV) fleet, which they claim would be clean, ethical, climate-friendly and sustainable. Of course, those labels hold up only so long as they look solely at activities and emissions within California state boundaries – and not where the mining, manufacturing and electricity generation take place. That kind of “life cycle” analysis would totally disrupt their claims.

Consider copper. A typical internal combustion engine uses about 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of this vital everyday metal, the International Copper Association says. A hybrid car requires almost 90 lb (40 kg); a plug-in EV needs 132 lb (60 kg); and a big electric bus can use up to 812 lb (369 kg) of copper. If all 15,000,000 California cars were EVs, they would need almost 1,000,000 tons of copper.

But copper ores average just 0.5% metal by weight, notes energy analyst Mark Mills. That means 200,000,000 tons of ore would have to be dug up, crushed, processed and refined to get that much copper. Almost every step in that process would require fossil fuels – and emit carbon dioxide and pollutants.

That’s just California. According to Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of Technology Michael Kelly, replacing all the United Kingdom’s vehicles with next-generation EVs would require more than half the world’s annual production of copper; twice its annual cobalt; three quarters of its yearly lithium carbonate output; and nearly its entire annual production of neodymium.

Just one electric car or backup-power battery weighs 1,000 pounds and requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of various ores, Mills says. The true costs of “green” energy are staggering.

Imagine replacing all of the USA’s nearly 300,000,000 cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, buses, trucks and other vehicles with electric versions under the Green New Deal – and then charging them daily. The millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of backup-power batteries, thousands of miles of new transmission lines, grid upgrades and million or so fast charging stations all across America would also require copper, concrete, all these other metals and many more materials, in incomprehensible quantities.

Alaska’s Pebble Mine deposit has an estimated 35 million tons of high-grade copper ore and 3 million tons of molybdenum and other critical GND ores. The copper alone is nearly two times the world’s 2019 output of that essential element. Permits were blocked for years for questionable reasons. But the US Army Corps of Engineers recently found that mining would not have a “measurable effect” on sockeye salmon numbers in the Bristol Bay watershed and should be allowed to proceed, under tough US pollution control, reclamation, wildlife protection, workplace safety, fair wage and child labor laws.

Environmentalists intend to delay the Pebble Mine as long as possible – and block other US exploration and mining projects. That’s why most mining and processing is done overseas, much of it in China and Mongolia or by Chinese companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where none of these laws apply.

Most of the world’s rare earth ores are extracted near Baotou, Inner Mongolia by pumping acid into the ground, then processed using more acids and chemicals. Producing one ton of rare earth metals releases up to 420,000 cubic feet of toxic gases, 2,600 cubic feet of acidic wastewater, and a ton of radioactive waste. The resulting black sludge is piped into a foul, lifeless lake. Numerous local people suffer from severe skin and respiratory diseases, children are born with soft bones, and cancer rates have soared.

Lithium comes largely from Tibet and arid highlands of the Argentina-Bolivia-Chile “lithium triangle.” Dead, toxic fish join carcasses of cows and yaks floating down Tibet’s Liqi River, which has been poisoned by the Ganzizhou Rongda mine. Native people in the ABC triangle say lithium operations contaminate streams needed for humans, livestock and irrigation, and leave mountains of discarded salt.

The world’s top producer of cobalt is the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some 40,000 children as young as four toil with their parents for less than $2 a day up to 12 hours a day. Many die in cave-ins, or more slowly from constant exposure to toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air that puts dangerous levels of cobalt, lead, uranium and other heavy metals into their bodies. The cobalt ore is sent to China for processing by the Chinese-owned Congo Dongfang International Mining Company.

That’s just to meet current raw material requirements. Try to picture the raw material demands, Third World mining and child labor conditions, and ecological destruction, under the Green New Deal.

Liberals often say they support sustainable, ethical coffee, sneakers, handbags and diamonds. No child labor, sweat shops or unsafe conditions tolerated. But it’s a different story with green energy and EVs. In 2019, California Assembly Bill 735 proposed that the state certify that “zero emission” electric vehicles sold there are free of any materials or components that involve child labor. Democrats voted it down. The matter is complicated, they “explained.” It would be too hard to enforce, cost too much and imperil state climate goals. And besides, lots of other industries also use child labor. (So shut up about it.)

Last month, the US House of Representatives had an opportunity to legislate a national certification that federally funded electric buses and charging stations would not include minerals mined with child labor. The Transportation Committee approved the amendment 43-19 (all 19 nay votes were Democrats). But Pete DeFazio(D-OR) quietly replaced the enforceable certification language with a meaningless statement that “it is the policy of the United States” that funds “should not be used” for items involving child labor.

DeFazio claimed certification is unnecessary because US trade agreements prohibit child labor. But there is no agreement with Congo, and China has shown no interest in ending child labor in its supply chains. (Plus, the matter is complicated, hard to enforce and perilous for climate and Green New Deal goals.)

It’s easy for Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues to wear Kente cloth stoles in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. And for Sierra Club staff to criticize the organization’s “history and culture of white supremacy” – what I call callous, deadly and arguably racist eco-imperialism and carbon colonialism. We need real reform, and an end to the cancel culture that silences discussion about the horrors of what’s going on in too many non-white areas of the United States and world.

The human and ecological realities of GND policies cry out for debate. So do the violence and death that preceded and followed George Floyd’s inexcusable death. Not just the 25 police killings of unarmed blacks all across America in 2019 that have become the narrow focus of Black Lives Matter, politicians and rioters. But also the murders of David Dorn, Patrick Underwood and other police officers; Mekhi James, LeGend Taliferro, Secoriea Turner and other black children gunned down by their fellow blacks; and as many as 7,000 American black men, women and children murdered by blacks every year.

In Chicago, over the July 4 weekend, police reported 87 shootings and 17 deaths, and nearly a dozen of those shot were children caught in the crossfire, the New York Post despaired. In fact, the black-on-black Windy City murder toll over almost any two recent successive weekends exceeds those 25 police killings.

“Every single person who has been shot in New York City [so far] this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community,” NBC News reporter Tom Winter tweeted, “and 97% of shooting victims in June were members of the city’s minority community.” The solution is defunding the police?

ALL these African, Asian, Latin American and minority American lives matter. It’s time to talk about it honestly, figure out what’s really driving the inhumanity, and create a world we can be proud to live in.

SOURCE





Harris Poll: Americans No Longer Care About Climate Change

We asked a panel of U.S. adults a series of questions about today’s most crucial issues, environmental policy options, and their own behavior.

In all three categories, I was personally surprised and discouraged to discover that our devotion to the world around us is flagging.

In a survey we at the Harris Poll conducted last December, American adults said climate change was the number one issue facing society.

Today, it comes in second to last on a list of a dozen options, ahead of only overpopulation. Among Gen X men, in fact, more than third dismiss climate change as unimportant.

COVID-19 and the recession have, of course, reordered priorities around the world. Still, the coronavirus didn’t elbow aside other issues as muscularly as it did climate change. (Incidentally, global warming is a bigger concern to retirement-age women than any other age group except millennial men.)

Additionally, we asked about policies the government could adopt to fight global warming or help the environment generally.

There was majority support for only one of nine initiatives, with 51% endorsing tax credits or rebates for greater energy efficiency in buildings.

Moreover, 13% of all respondents say the government should do nothing to improve the environment, a stance that rises to nearly one in five of all survey takers in the South.

More telling is what we are doing—or should I say, what we no longer are doing.

We know from this survey, conducted on July 24, that American adults are burning less fuel than they did before the pandemic hit.

In pre-COVID-19 America, 77% of adults said they used to drive. Today, with more people working from home, or not working at all, just 61% say they are using their cars to get around.

Similarly, only 14% of adults say they are still flying, down from 21% last winter. That’s an environmental plus since it means we’re pumping less greenhouse gas into the air.

But we are also reverting back to a society that throws too much away. Younger men, in particular, are ordering more takeout food, packed in single-use plastic bags and disposable boxes, often with those plastic straws scorned for littering the landscape and polluting waterways.

We are toting reusable bags less often on errands. Probably because more of us are home, we also are consuming more energy to keep our homes cooler in the summer and warmer in chilly months than we used to.

And when the pandemic ends—or at least is suitably controlled—American adults say they’ll behave in ways that would increase their carbon footprint.

According to our survey, we’ll drive as much as we did before, take public transportation less, bicycle or walk less, buy more clothes, and have more stuff packaged up and shipped to our homes.

And most of us plan to jack up the home AC and heat even more than we already have.

SOURCE




Cascading fallacies in climate risk assessment

As a logician, I am always on the lookout for fallacies and there is no lack of them in climate change alarmist policies. New Zealand’s newly released climate risk assessment not only has multiple fallacies, they build on one another in a cascade.

This is not about New Zealand. The authors of the assessment make clear that theirs is a new approach which they hope will be used globally. So this is about the world, including America.

The massive report is titled “First national climate change risk assessment for New Zealand.” Under New Zealand’s climate law, these assessments are supposed to be done every five years and this is the first.

The scope is breathtaking. The idea is to identify all of the significant risks due to human caused climate change that will be present in 2050 and 2100. Moreover, these supposed risks are prioritized.

Unfortunately this elaborate procedure is just a cascade of fallacies. Some of the major ones are listed below.

First, they use computer models to say precisely what the average weather will be in 2050 and 2100. This includes short and long term temperatures, precipitation patterns, and other climate features.

The fallacy is that there is no computer model today that can accurately make such forecasts. Different major models disagree strongly in predicting all of these features. For example the model sensitivity to doubling CO2 ranges from 1 to 6 degrees C, which is a huge range.

Second, they use the average of what is called the CMIP5 climate model runs. These are runs on a large number of climate models that are made to feed into the IPCC process. (Here there are several problems. In particular the models are all constrained so that all the significant forces are human, but that is a different issue.)

The fallacy is that there is no reason to believe that the average of a bunch of bad models is good. In fact the CMIP5 average has been shown to run very hot compared to observed warming. (CMIP6 is even worse.)

Third, they then choose to use the modeling of a wildly worst case emissions scenario called “RCP 8.5”. This scenario for future emissions is so high that it has been criticized as impossible. Using RCP 8.5 is certainly a fallacy.

Fourth, they do what is called “down scaling” of these questionable modeling results. Down scaling means taking the crude modeling results for a large area and somehow generating results for specific places. There is no scientific way to derive fine scale forecasts from the model’s large scale ones. The data simply is not there. However it is done is arbitrary.

New Zealand is geographically pretty small with a land area of just over 100,000 square miles, roughly the size of Colorado. The risk assessment divides New Zealand into 8 tiny zones, with a unique climate forecast for each. This is a glaring fallacy.

Fifth, these impossible fine scale forecasts were then discussed by a large number of people, in a variety of ways, to define all the significant risks. This is an exercise in imagination, not science. It is well known in decision theory that the results of group gropes like this depend heavily on who is there, what they are given and how they are guided.

The fallacy here is to pretend that this is a systematic inventory of risks, suitable for policy making.

Sixth, the supposed risks were ranked based on polling the participants. In addition to the group grope problem there is the pesky fact that risk is a two dimensional concept so risks cannot simply be ranked in one dimension. Each risk has both a severity and a probability.

Generally speaking, high severity but low probability risks are not worth addressing. Meteor strikes are a standard example (the impact really is an impact). The same is true for high probability but low severity risks. What one looks for are risks that combine relatively high severity and probability.

This 2-value ranking was not done, giving the fallacy of the single ranking of risks.

The seventh fallacy is yet to come. This wrongly ranked list of imagined risks based on arbitrary down scaling of an average of questionable computer model results running an impossible scenario is supposed to lead to a National Adaptation Plan in two years. That would be a mega-fallacy.

On the amusing side, I think they got the highest ranked risk right. This is the risk that the government will do the wrong thing. I agree completely, especially if they use this risk assessment.

Also very funny is the “Give us a lot more money” risk. It goes like this:

“Risk of delayed adaptation and maladaptation due to knowledge gaps resulting from under-investment in climate change adaptation research and capacity building.

Risk summary:
Under-investment in research and capacity building to inform understanding of climate change risks and impacts is undermining New Zealand’s ability to develop evidence-based adaptation policy. Critical research gaps relate to:

–atmospheric processes
–hydrological cycle impacts
–ecosystem responses
–biodiversity and biosecurity
–New Zealand’s rural and urban communities
–the economic costs of climate change
–impacts on the primary sector
–impacts on heritage
–effects on health and health services
–use of mātauranga Māori to inform adaptation
–cascading impacts
–how to govern climate change adaptation at a number of scales.

These research gaps are a critical barrier to informed decision-making. While these gaps remain, maladaptive actions are a key risk.” (Page 188)

Given all these significant gaps one would think that an accurate assessment would conclude that no risk assessment is possible at this time. That is my assessment.

Conclusion:

The New Zealand climate risk assessment is a cascade of fallacies, unfit for policy making.

SOURCE





Sydney dams start to spill after a saturated six months

The Greenies were telling us that the drought was due to global warming.  So does this show global cooling?

The fact of the matter is that rainfall in Australia is erratic but can be made adequate by use of dams

Sydney's dams have started to spill after the latest big rain event over eastern NSW filled most reservoirs to the brim, with more rain forecast.

By Tuesday, the storages had gained more than 10 per cent in a week, or a net 253 billion litres, to climb to 95 per cent capacity, WaterNSW data shows.

The giant Warragamba Dam, which accounts for about 80 per cent of Greater Sydney's reservoir capacity, had risen to almost 96 per cent full, or about double the storage of a year ago.

The smaller Nepean Dam on the Upper Nepean River has started to spill after gaining almost a quarter of its capacity in the past week.

Tallowa Dam is also spilling, into the Shoalhaven River, with flows contributing to the highest flood levels downstream at Nowra in 29 years.

At its peak spill rate on Monday, Tallowa was releasing water at the rate of 375 billion litres a day, WaterNSW said.

The near-full capacity comes just six months after the storages dropped towards 40 per cent before a huge three-day rain event in February doubled water levels. The jump in inflows allowed the Berejiklian government to ease water restrictions and delay plans to double the size of Sydney's desalination plant.

A spokesman for WaterNSW said Warragamba was not expected to spill as a result of current inflows generated by the rain event.

"However WaterNSW will be making small operational releases from the dam’s spillway gates in order to bring the storage back to target level in anticipation of further rainfall," he said.

The forecast rainfall for the coming weekend had been scaled back, including 5 to 15 millimetres for Friday, but those predictions could change, the spokesman said.

Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Olenka Duma said "we're not expecting a huge amount of rain" from the strong cold front that will move eastwards towards the end of the week. Still, there remains the prospect of thunderstorms over much of NSW as the front draws in tropical moisture from the north.

In addition, the bureau is putting the odds of a wetter-than-normal September-to-November period for the eastern half of mainland Australia at greater than 65 per cent.

Stuart Khan, a professor in the University of NSW's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said the rapid shift from water restrictions to full storage "is something we haven't seen since 1998".

Professor Khan said it was "pretty likely" Warragamba would start to spill soon. The Wingecarribee Reservoir, for instance, was 99.6 per cent full, and any spill from there would largely end up in Warragamba via the Wollondilly River.

The rapid rise inflows has meant NSW Water Minister Melinda Pavey had been vindicated in her decision to stop work on preparations to double Sydney's desalination plant, he said. The high flows, though, should not put a halt to consideration of water-saving measures such as water recycling.

"It's exactly the time we should be talking about long-term water supply strategies," Professor Khan said.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Federal Program Leaves Taxpayers on the Hook for Another Green Energy Company Failure

Solar thermal sounds great but I have yet to hear of one that pays off.  The thing they are best at is chewing up subsidies from deluded governments

The best known example was the huge Ivanpah project in the Mojave desert.  It eats up 3,500 acres in the California desert where rare desert vegetation used to grow.  And it kills birds in their thousands.

You don't hear much about it now as it never functioned anywhere near its capacity and produced very expensive electricity.  And there has NEVER been any return on the couple of billion spent constructing it.

The most amusing thing about it is that it used vast amounts of natural gas to get itself going in the morning and when it was cloudy.  There was at one stage a proposal to reclassify it as a gas-powered power station because on many occasions more of its output came from burning gas than from its solar furnaces


Tonopah Solar Energy LLC, which built and operated a huge solar-thermal power plant in Nevada, has filed for a bankruptcy that is likely to cost U.S. taxpayers more than $225 million.

Novel Technology Fails

The Spanish infrastructure company ACS and Banco Santander SA, which jointly own Tonopah through companies they specifically created to develop the power plant, advertised Tonopah as the first concentrated solar power facility to be able to store solar energy for use at night or during cloudy days, thus removing the need for other power sources as a back-up.

Tonopah’s more than 10,000 mirrors were to focus the sun’s heat on a tower to produce steam and heat a tank containing molten salt that would generate power at night. However, the technology proved unreliable and expensive to build and operate.

Since it began operating in 2015, repeated leaks from its molten salt tank resulted in the power plant going off-line repeatedly. Unable to solve that and other problems at the facility, the power plant ceased all operations in April 2019.

During its best year of operation, Tonopah never produced more than 40 percent of its 400 Gigawatt per hour annual rated capacity, and in most years due to technology failures it produced considerably less power than that. Additionally, the cost of the power it was generating was two to four times the wholesale cost of power from existing conventional electric power sources such as coal and natural gas and even competing renewable power sources such as wind and solar photovoltaic power.

Failed, Costly Loan Program

Tonopah’s 1,670-acre solar facility received expedited approval from the Obama Administration for its construction on public land and $737 million in loans from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

DOE’s loan to Tonopah came from a loan guarantee program created in 2005 under the Bush administration. The government designed the program to support development of new energy-related technologies that traditional banks and venture capitalists shied away from as being too risky.

And risky they have proven to be—for taxpayers, at least.

No loan guarantees were issued through the program for renewable energy projects until 2009, when the Obama administration issued a number loan guarantees for renewable energy projects as part of the federal economic stimulus program.

A 2012 analysis of the approximately $10 billion in federal loan guarantees and tax credits offered by the Obama administration to companies in the renewable energy field, found more than $3.2 billion of that support had been given to companies that subsequently declared bankruptcy. For instance, solar panel manufacturer Solyndra defaulted on more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees before it went bust in 2011. Other companies that received DOE loan guarantees and subsequently declared bankruptcy include lithium-ion battery manufacturer A123, which received $300 million in federal grants and $135 million in additional grants from the state of Michigan before declaring bankruptcy in October of 2012, and Fisker Automotive, which declared bankruptcy in October 2013, despite having received federal loan guarantees of nearly $529 million.

Tonopah can now be added to the list of DOE loan recipients to declare bankruptcy. If the court approves the company’s agreement with the federal government, Tonopah will have to repay $200 million of the remaining $425 million it currently owes the government, leaving U.S. taxpayers holding the bag for the remaining $225 million.

‘Pet Energy Projects’

Reuters reports DOE spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes issued a statement saying the settlement decision “was made after years of exhausting options within our authority to get the project back on track.”

A senior Trump administration official said the settlement “secures taxpayer money that was squandered by the previous administrations’ failed energy pet projects,” according to Reuters.

Tonopah was supposed to be sited in an ideal location to generate cheap solar power, yet even with generous government support, it failed, providing further evidence solar power can’t compete with conventional electric power sources, says James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.

“Here is yet another real-world answer to propaganda that solar power is now less expensive than conventional energy,” Taylor said. “Everywhere solar power is added to the grid, it raises energy costs.

“There is no clearer example than this heavily subsidized solar project located in a place supposed to be ideal for solar power generation,” Taylor said. “Despite massive taxpayer subsidies, including a federal subsidy paying for 30 percent of all its equipment, solar power cannot generate cost-competitive power even in the middle of a desert, yet, we are supposed to believe solar power will generate cost-competitive power in places like Michigan or New Jersey?”

SOURCE




Southern Ocean Site Has Just Cooled To Ice Age-Era Temperatures

A new temperature reconstruction indicates today’s sea surface temperatures are colder than all but a few millennia out of the last 156,000 years.

A Southern Ocean site analyzed in a new study (Ghadi et al., 2020) has averaged 1-2°C during glacials and 4°C during interglacials. Today, with a 410 ppm CO2 concentration, this location has again plummeted to glacial/ice age levels (2°C).


The site was 2°C warmer than now when CO2 concentrations were 180 ppm about 20,000 years ago, or during the peak of the last ice age.

During the Early Holocene (10,000 to 8,000 years ago), summer sea surface temperatures were also 2°C warmer than today.

There is no indication that CO2 concentration changes are in any way correlated with temperature changes throughout this entire 156,000-year epoch.

SOURCE





Greta Thunberg’s Message Of Doom Is Religion, Not Reality

IAIN MARTIN

In January, the great and not so good of the corporate elite gathered at Davos for another telling off from Greta Thunberg.

“One year ago I came to Davos and told you that our house is on fire,” the climate activist reminded delegates. “I said I wanted you to panic.” In the intervening year they had not panicked enough, she said.

Although the meeting of the World Economic Forum was dedicated to creating a “Cohesive and Sustainable World”, and corporate culture has gone obsessively green, the naughty capitalists and greedy governments refused to end the use of fossil fuels instantly.

The rotters refused to extinguish commercial lifestyles to save the planet from imminent immolation.

Ironically, even as the high priestess of the Extinction Rebellion religion preached her sermon, Covid-19 was sweeping in from China and weeks later would shut down the world economy.

Since then we have all been treated to a live experiment in what happens when economic activity is cut by 25 percent.

While there are undoubted upsides and lessons to be learned about cleaner air in cities, the downside is looming mass unemployment, the ruin of the global aviation industry, and worsening health and educational inequalities.

This is not enough for Extinction Rebellion campaigners who want to go even further in shutting down activity.

Earlier this month, Thunberg set out in an open letter a list of demands that, if implemented, would make the economic effects of Covid-19 seem mild. Her co-signatories included assorted celebrities, activists, and, inevitably, Coldplay.

Climate catastrophists are clearly keen to get the alarmist show back on the road, perhaps because they have been eclipsed by the pandemic.

I am not someone who denies that protecting the environment is important. Cleaner air is required. When it comes to more efficient energy, less wasteful consumption, and rewilding our countryside, I’m all for it.

But the hysteria of the XR crew, amplified by the media, is counterproductive because it frightens people and could lead to panicked policy-making.

The risk is that overreaction by governments will turn voters against any kind of environmental policy. It need not be this way. With the intelligent use of technology and mitigation measures, mankind is more than capable of adapting to warmer conditions.

This is one of the points made in Bjorn Lomborg’s important new book False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.

Mr. Lomborg is a long-standing environmentalist regarded as a heretic by hardliners in the movement because he is an optimist who says that humanity is not doomed.

Global warming is happening, he says, but populations have been “scared witless” into thinking that it means the end of life on Earth.

“The rhetoric on climate change has become ever more extreme and less moored to the actual science,” he says. “The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem.”

Lomborg advocates a “well-designed” carbon tax and reduced emissions but also more adaptation of the kind that, unheralded, is already happening. For 150 years sea levels have been rising and we have adapted by improving coastal protection.

We’re learning more about rivers and flood protection too. On heatwaves, economic growth will help to pay for better and more fuel-efficient air conditioning.

Cities can be adapted with more green spaces. Even something as simple as ensuring that roofs and roads are lighter in color — not black, which absorbs heat and warms urban areas — can make a difference.

For the sin of deviation from the apocalyptic consensus, The New York Times — woke bible and host of the Greta event at Davos in January — unleashed the eminent economist Joseph Stiglitz to lambast Mr. Lomborg, who has since responded with an amusing line-by-line demolition of Mr. Stiglitz’s claims.

But what may make the biggest difference to the debate is population decline.

A study published this month by the Department of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle suggested that a declining global fertility rate would cause population levels to plummet from 2064.

Twenty-three countries including Japan, Thailand, and Spain will have their populations more than halved.

This threatens to undermine one of the foundations of climate alarmism: the assumption that there are too many ghastly people and, by breeding and consuming resources, we will all soon destroy Mother Earth.

The prospect of population decline could be bad news for the fundraising efforts of the Greta crew if it becomes clear that climate change is even more manageable than thought.

I doubt that hardline climate campaigners will for one second allow this to dilute the purity of their doom-laden message, though. They have founded a religion and anything that distracts from it is heresy.

In that respect, they have much in common with woke calls for a social justice revolution. The best parallel for both of these is perhaps with the 16th and 17th centuries and the spread of Puritanism, a campaign to purify worship and signal virtue.

As the more extreme Puritans knew, declaring the apocalypse — a simple message — is strangely seductive and exciting.

Once again, on climate, the less intoxicating and more cheeringly mundane reality is that human beings are ingeniously adaptive. We’ll find a way through if we all keep our heads.

SOURCE





Federal Court Denies Oakland’s Efforts to Block Coal Shipments to Port Terminal

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has lost the latest bid by public officials in the state to block shipments of coal through the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal (OBOT).

Becerra gambled and lost, betting if the state of California joined Oakland in opposing the shipment of coal through the terminal, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would overturn a district court’s ruling as well as its own, which decided Oakland could not bar shipments of coal through the city to the terminal for export.

Terminal Contract Upheld

The city of Oakland approved Phil Tagami’s development of the $250 million OBOT, located on Oakland’s outer harbor, in 2013. Tagami subsequently signed a contract with Utah coal producers in which they would transport their product by rail to OBOT to be shipped overseas. In July 2016, in an attempt to block coal shipments to and from the terminal, Oakland’s city council voted unanimously to prohibit the storing and handling of coal within city limits.

Tagami filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 2016, arguing Oakland’s ordinance violated his agreement with the city to develop the land.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria heard the case and ruled in Tagami’s favor, finding Oakland’s action amounted to an illegal breach of contract.

The city’s justification for the ban was “riddled with inaccuracies, major evidentiary gaps, erroneous assumptions, and faulty analyses, to the point that no reliable conclusion about health or safety dangers could be drawn from it,” Chhabria wrote.

Oakland appealed Chhabria’s decision to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in 2018, only to have the majority of a three judge panel of the Appeals Court hearing the case affirm the ruling.

“In affirming, we do not opine on the ultimate issue of any alleged health or safety impact of OBOT’s proposed plan,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Kenneth Lee, in his majority opinion. “Nor do we judge the economic or environmental merits of the agreement to develop a commercial terminal that may house and transport coal.

“Rather, we affirm … the district court’s bench trial ruling that Oakland breached the agreement,” Lee ruled.

The District and Appeals Courts rulings were well-founded in the law, Tagami said in a statement issued after the Appeals Court’s decision in May.

“The district court issued a thorough, thoughtful and comprehensive ruling invalidating the city’s action,” Tagami stated. “We remained confident that the Ninth Circuit would uphold that ruling, which they now have.”

California Jumps In, Denied

The latest action in the case came when Becerra appealed to the Ninth Circuit to reopen OBOT vs. The City of Oakland, allowing the state to intervene on Oakland’s behalf, either in a rehearing before the three original judge panel or before an en banc hearing of the full court.

On August 3, a majority of the three-judge panel denied Becerra’s appeal for a rehearing by the panel with additional arguments to be made by the AG’s office, and recommended against an en banc hearing by the full court.

The federal appeals court denied Becerra’s request for a hearing before the full court, writing in its August 3 docket, “The full court has been advised of the suggestion for rehearing en banc, and no judge has requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter en banc. … The petition for panel rehearing and the petition for rehearing en banc are therefore DENIED.”

Oakland’s recourse at this point if they wish to prevent coal shipments from the OBOT terminal is to appeal their case the U.S. Supreme Court and win there, or to negotiate a settlement with Tagami that satisfies the developer and the Utah coal producers.

Attorneys for OBOT have filed a lawsuit against Oakland, seeking to be awarded court costs and damages for the delays created by the lawsuit.

“Now, after all this time and continued rejection by the federal courts, I would hope there is a responsible city official with whom OBOT can sit down and resolve its differences,” said Robert Feldman, of law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, the lead attorney for OBOT, in a statement.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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Greta Thunberg – Master of Self-marketing

Once again Greta Thunberg has demonstrated her PR genius. She just met a researcher from neighboring Norway for a conversation on the border between their two countries. And Greta didn’t waste any time posting the pictures of their meeting on Twitter and Instagram. In one of the photos, the two are seen greeting each other by touching their right feet together over the Morokulien border crossing – without physically entering the other’s country.

According to Thunberg, she was interviewing the climate and environmental scientist Per Espen Stoknes for an upcoming BBC documentary series. However, because she was not allowed to enter Norway, she and Stoknes decided to stay on their own sides of the Swedish-Norwegian border.

Greta Thunberg is without a doubt one of those very rare individuals with an almost unique talent for self-marketing, although much controversy surrounds the role she played in developing her distinctive PR strategy and how much of her rise to global fame she owes to her mother and professional PR consultants.

Distinctive brand identity and positioning

Like other masters of self-marketing before her, Greta Thunberg has turned her hair into an unmistakable visual trademark. Donald Trump has his outrageous, shiny golden combover; fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld had his powdered braid; and Albert Einstein’s hair underscored his image as the quintessential nutty professor. And Greta? She has her pigtails.

Hardly any young women still choose to wear their hair in pigtails at the age of 17. Greta’s pigtails are designed to emphasize her childlike nature, as is her slight figure and the fact that she refuses to wear make-up. Her famous outburst of anger when she addressed the United Nations was also a key element of her self-stylization – she spoke more like a fuming child than an adult: “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” Her childlike aspect is important because she wants to speak for the children of this world who have had their lives and their futures stolen from them by adults.

She stylizes herself to an unbending idealist, that is her positioning. Her motto could well be the words traditionally attributed to Martin Luther: “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Even her harshest critics credit her idealism, as if idealism were something to be admired. After all, history is full of idealists who did more harm than good.

Perfectly staged PR

Greta Thunberg’s PR image is so perfect that her critics seek to portray her as nothing more than a puppet controlled by professional PR consultants. No one could deny that she is supported by a team of PR professionals, but it still remains to be seen whether she was “made” by them or has her own natural talent for self-marketing. In reality, it is probably a mixture of both.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Greta always manages to produce perfect pictures for her public relations campaign, just like when she set off for the United Nations climate summit in New York on September 23, 2019, to warn the world of its impending doom. As the world’s leading eco-evangelist, she did not fly, she set sail on the ocean-going yacht Malizia II. It was a powerful media spectacle of global proportions: the fragile child plunging into the life-threatening Atlantic currents to prevent the apocalypse at the very last minute. There was no question her voyage would dominate the front pages and grab the headlines around the world.

Turning weaknesses into strengths

In any case, an adept PR strategy involves skilfully recasting obvious weaknesses as strengths. Just like the self-marketing genius Stephen Hawking, who embraced his disability (ALS) as a core component of his marketing strategy (the cover of his bestseller depicted him in a wheelchair), Greta incorporates her own disability as a central feature of her self-promotion. It is widely known that she suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and she is completely open about her condition: “I have Asperger’s syndrome, and to me, almost everything is black or white.” But what Greta and her supporters have done is transform a weakness into a strength. When a reporter asked her whether living with Asperger’s syndrome made her life more difficult she responded by saying that her autism “means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm. And – given the right circumstances – being different is a superpower.” On her Twitter bio, she originally described herself as a “15 year old climate activist with Asperger’s.”

All of this became part of the Greta Thunberg story and was enthusiastically communicated by her sympathetic supporters in the media. As one paediatric psychiatrist explained in an interview: “Without Asperger’s, she would never have made it this far. Let’s not forget, teenagers do not normally focus so narrowly on a single topic; they are usually highly animated and easily distracted by a host of different influences. But Greta has a kind of tunnel vision, she focuses entirely on this one topic. People are aware of climate change, but don’t really do anything about it. At the same time, Asperger’s sufferers can’t stand contradictions, so Greta cannot understand why people are not doing more. And that’s also why she is so unflinching and stubborn.”

Surrounding yourself with celebrities

Like others who want to become famous, Greta likes to surround herself with celebrities. She meets Hollywood stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Arnold Schwarzenegger, statesmen like Barack Obama and other leading figures from the worlds of business, politics and show business. By doing so, she is again exploiting a proven PR strategy that has been knowingly used again and again by other masters of self-marketing – from Andy Warhol and Oprah Winfrey to Kim Kardashian – to strengthen their own brands. And even when she doesn’t actually meet someone – Donald Trump, for example – she turns not wanting to meet them into a huge PR story. And hardly anyone bothers to mention the fact that Trump would never have agreed to meet her anyway. Despite their differences, as masters of the art of self-publicity, Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg have more in common than one might think.

A desire to provoke, a focus on publicity stunts that produce a constant stream of stories and images, an ability to redefine weaknesses as strengths and integrate this into a coherent PR story, and finally an appreciation of the value of visual trademarks (e.g. the pigtails) as a key component of a successful positioning strategy – these are all characteristics of highly professional self-marketing.

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. His book Die Kunst, berühmt zu werden – Genies der Selbstvermarktung von Albert Einstein bis Kim Kardashian (English: The Art of Becoming Famous – Geniuses of Self-Marketing from Albert Einstein to Kim Kardashian) has just been published in Germany. Zitelmann was the owner and managing director of one of Germany’s leading PR agencies for 15 years.

SOURCE 





FDA Approves Salmon as First GMO Animal Fit for Food Supply

The Food and Drug Administration gave the green light on Nov. 19 for genetically engineered salmon to be sold to consumers. AquaBounty’s application to sell its quick-growing salmon was finally approved 20 years after initially being filed.

Whereas plant-based genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are already common in the U.S. food supply chain, the FDA had yet to approve a genetically modified animal—until now.

“The FDA has thoroughly analyzed and evaluated the data and information submitted … regarding AquAdvantage Salmon and determined that they have met the regulatory requirements for approval, including that food from the fish is safe to eat,” Bernadette Dunham, director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, said in a statement.

The FDA stated that AquaBounty’s salmon was found to be as nutritious as regular, nongenetically modified Atlantic salmon, and that the agency found no “biologically relevant differences” between the two.

AquaBounty combines growth hormone genes from Pacific salmon with DNA from the anti-freeze genes of an eel-like ocean pout to create a fish that produces growth hormones year round and thus grows faster than natural varieties. The AquAdvantage Salmon still reaches the same size when mature.

Lack of Labeling

In a 2013 New York Times poll, three-quarters of Americans said they wouldn’t eat genetically modified fish.

Despite obvious discomfort with the idea, it’s likely many consumers who are against the practice may end up buying it anyway.

Currently, labeling of GMO products is voluntary, and the CEO of AquaBounty told the Washington Post that the company will most likely label the genetically modified fish as regular “Atlantic salmon” because selling the only GMO fish on the market would be a “dangerous” marketing decision.

The same poll found that 93 percent of Americans support labeling of GMO products, but efforts to legislate mandatory labeling have stalled. Ballot measures to make GMO labeling obligatory have successively failed in California, Washington, Oregon, and Colorado.

Meanwhile, Congress is working on legislation that will pre-emptively stop individual states from requiring food suppliers to label GMO products, with the stated purpose of preventing the creation of a patchwork of state regulations that could disrupt the food supply and raise prices.

The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act was passed in the House with bipartisan support in July, and expects to enjoy a similar level of support in the Senate.

The bill has been dubbed the DARK Act, or Deny Americans the Right to Know, by its critics.

President Obama has been reticent about the issue, although on the campaign trail in 2007 he said that every American should have to right to know if their food is genetically modified.

FDA Approval Denounced

The FDA’s approval of genetically modified salmon was roundly denounced by anti-GMO activists.

The main concern is that GMO salmon could escape into the wild and threaten existing salmon populations.

AquaBounty maintains that no such risk exists because all its fish are female and sterile, and physically stored in facilities on land. But Friends of the Earth, an environmental organization that’s been campaigning against what it calls “Frankenfish,” said that once the salmon is approved, it becomes much easier to change farming practices down the road.

Friends of the Earth said that more than 60 grocery chains in the country have promised not to carry GMO salmon, including Safeway, Target, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. In August, Costco made headlines when it refused to sign the pledge.

“Despite FDA’s flawed and irresponsible approval of the first genetically engineered animal for human consumption, it’s clear that there is no place in the U.S. market for genetically engineered salmon.” Lisa Archer, Food and Technology program director at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement.

The organization warns that FDA approval of the salmon will set a precedent for the 35 other species of genetically modified fish in development, as well as similarly modified chickens, pigs, and cows.

SOURCE 






Bishops Tout ‘European Green Deal’ as Response to COVID-19 Pandemic

The Catholic bishops of the European Union (COMECE) have endorsed the European Green Deal as an “underpinning strategy” for a continent-wide plan of recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

“Ecological justice” must be at the core of Europe’s response to the pandemic, the bishops stated in a position paper Wednesday, because the coronavirus outbreak “has revealed both our dependence as well as our disastrous impact on a heavily fragile eco-system.”

“A virus that causes a lung disease made us realise that we cannot live healthy on a sick and polluted planet,” the bishops said.

“We should acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to the larger socio-ecological crisis that has become increasingly visible to us through climate change, biodiversity loss and its devastating consequences on the most vulnerable,” they said, while urging the EU to “seize this moment as an opportunity to work for radical change.”

“We therefore welcome the Commission’s proposal to integrate the European Green Deal as an underpinning strategy into the recovery plan and call upon EU member states to translate their pledges towards climate neutrality and the care for the environment into tangible actions that will spur ecological conversion in Europe,” they said.

“This pandemic should be proof for us that urgent action is needed,” the bishops added.

In rolling out the European Union’s proposed €750 billion pandemic recovery fund Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the recovery plan “turns the immense challenge we face into an opportunity, not only by supporting the recovery but also by investing in our future: the European Green Deal and digitalization.”

The European Commission has said that 25 percent of the EU’s updated seven-year €1 trillion budget proposal and €750 billion recovery plan will be set aside for climate action.

Last December Ms. von der Leyen called the Green Deal Europe’s “man on the Moon moment,” aimed at making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.

According to the European Commission, “climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat to Europe and the world” and therefore Europe needs to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and decouple economic growth from resource use.

“The European Green Deal is our roadmap for making the EU’s economy sustainable,” the EC declares. “This will happen by turning climate and environmental challenges into opportunities across all policy areas and making the transition just and inclusive for all.”

The progressive leader of the European bishops’ conferences, Jesuit Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, has stated his belief that climate change is the most urgent problem facing humanity.

Backing up Pope Francis’ call for “ecological conversion,” the cardinal says that he buys fair-trade coffee instead of Nespresso, no longer uses plastic bottles, and has changed his diesel car for a hybrid one.

“We bishops have to change our lifestyle, and if we older people succeed in doing it, then the younger ones can do it too,” he said. “But if I cannot change my own lifestyle, how can I say to young people to do so?”

In late 2018, Hollerich signed an appeal calling on government leaders to take immediate action to overcome the “devastating effects of the climate crisis.”

The appeal called for keeping global warming below 1.5º C as well as a shift toward sustainable lifestyles, respect for indigenous communities, and the implementation of a “financial paradigm shift” in line with global climate accords.

This entails “putting an end to the fossil fuel era and transitioning to renewable energy” as well as rethinking the agriculture sector to ensure it provides healthy and accessible food for everyone, with a special emphasis on promoting agroecology, the appeal said.

Following last year’s European elections, Hollerich said he was delighted with the successes of green parties while lamenting the rise of populist-nationalist groups.

“It is positive that in several places numerous young people voted for ecological parties, which means that the themes of environment and creation can become important in the future,” Hollerich said, noting that “as a Church” the victory of the green parties “makes us happy.”

SOURCE 




The Australian Press Council Is A Hive Of Climate Zealots

By Prof. Ian Plimer, geologist

As a result of an activist campaign, the Australian Press Council took exception to my article in The Australian on November 22, 2019.

They claimed that my statement that there “are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims” was false.

Journalists in the Press Council should know basic English and the difference between an element (carbon) and a compound (carbon dioxide).

This is elementary schoolkid’s science. For the Press Council to claim that this is factually incorrect shows breathtaking ignorance.

There are eight forms (allotropes) of carbon, one of them (diamond) is not black which is why the word ‘most’ was used. I was showing that to call the odorless, colorless, tasteless gas that is the food of life as ‘carbon emissions’ is Orwellian.

The Press Council objected to the use of ‘fraudulent’ in my statement about ‘fraudulent changing of weather records’.

It is clear that the council is not aware of the widely publicized fraudulent expunging of the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age by Michael Mann and failed court cases initiated by Mann. They are clearly not aware of the admission of fraud in the Climategate emails.

The Press Council wrote, “The Council considers that the statement concerning the Bureau of Meteorology fraudulently changing weather records is one of fact and implies an element of dishonesty or deception on its part.”

I made absolutely no reference whatsoever to the Bureau of Meteorology. I have been verballed. When can I expect an apology?

It was claimed that my statement, “unsubstantiated claims polar ice is melting,” was wrong. Polar ice concurrently melts, grows and moves and polar ice includes terrestrial ice and sea ice.

Changes in polar ice are due to a diversity of reasons and my point was that we only hear from activists who claim that polar ice is melting due to human-induced global warming.

We don’t hear that glaciers move due to recrystallization, that many glaciers are growing, or that there are more than 150 volcanoes and areas of hot rocks beneath the Antarctic ice.

The Press Council claimed that my statement “the ignoring of data that shows Pacific islands and the Maldives are growing rather than being inundated” was false.

There is a huge amount of scientific literature based on aerial photographs and satellite images showing that atolls are increasing in the area.

A ten-second Google search would have shown peer-reviewed publications supporting this statement. Why was this not done? Or maybe the Press Council has become yet another activist institution?

As soon as the words carbon footprint, emissions, pollution, and decarbonization, climate emergency, extreme weather, unprecedented and extinction are used, I know I am being conned by ignorant activists, populist scaremongering, politicians, and rent-seekers.

Pollution by plastics, sulfur and nitrogen gases, particulates, and chemicals occurs in developing countries. That’s real pollution. The major pollution in the West is the polluting of minds about the role of CO2.

There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we would not be able to see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims.

But then again, we should be used to this after the hysteria about the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve had reefs on Earth for 3,500 million years.

They came and went many times, thriving when water was warmer and there was an elevated CO2 content of the atmosphere. Reefs need CO2; it’s their basic food.

It has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. Climate models have been around 30 years. They have all failed.

Balloon and satellite measurements show a disconnect from climate model predictions. We emit a trace atmospheric gas called carbon dioxide at a time in the planetary history of low atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Earth’s climate dances to rhythms every day, every season and on far larger lunar, oceanic, solar, orbital, galactic, and tectonic cycles.

Climate change is normal and continual. When cycles overlap, climate change can be rapid and large. Sporadic events such as supernovas and volcanic eruptions can also change the climate.

The main greenhouse gas is water vapor. It is the only gas in air that can evaporate, humidify, and condense into clouds that precipitate rain, hail, and snow. Earth is unevenly heated. Oceans hold most of the planet’s surface heat, not the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is plant food. It is neither a pollutant nor a toxin. Without carbon dioxide, all life on Earth would die.

Plants convert carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight during photosynthesis into sugars, cellulose, fruit, vegetables, and grains, which animal life uses as food. Marine organisms also take up and use carbon dioxide.

Plants need almost three times today’s carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to thrive. For decades horticulturalists have pumped carbon dioxide into glasshouses to increase yields.

The fossil record shows that a thriving and diversification of plant and animal life occurred every time the atmosphere had a very high carbon dioxide content.

In the past, warming has never been a threat to life on Earth. Why should it be now? When there is a low atmospheric carbon dioxide content, especially during very cold times, life struggles.

For the last 500 million years, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content has been decreasing, and if we halved today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide content, all life would die.

This carbon dioxide has been removed into the oceans and is sequestered into coral, shells, limey sediments, and muds and on the land into coals, muds, soils, and vegetation.

In our lifetime, there has been no correlation between CO2 emissions and temperature. Geology shows us again there is no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature.

Each of the six major past ice ages began when the atmospheric CO2 content was far higher than at present. The idea that a slight increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to unstoppable global warming is demonstrably wrong.

In the past decade, China has increased its CO2 emissions by 53 percent, 12 times Australia’s total output of 1.3 percent of the global total. The grasslands, forests, farms, and continental shelves of Australia absorb far more carbon dioxide than we emit.

The attack on emissions of the gas of life is an irrational attack on industry, our modern way of life, freedoms, and prosperity. It has nothing to do with the environment.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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New Climate Summary: Meat, Livestock Have Little Climate Impact

American ranchers and U.S. meat consumption have virtually no impact on greenhouse gas emissions or climate, reports a compelling new climate summary. The new climate summary, “Climate at a Glance: Livestock and Methane,” documents that cattle and beef account for just 2% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. All livestock combined account for less than 4% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate activists, many of whom are vegans for other reasons, often claim that ranchers, livestock, and meat production are a leading cause of rising greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Yet, EPA data show crop production accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than total livestock production.

The Climate at a Glance portal provides more than two dozen concise, compelling summaries of topics related to climate change. Bullet-points at the top of each summary provide an easily understandable summary of the topic. A Short Summary section under the bullet-points provides a concise, supporting explanation with links to scientific evidence. Most summaries also include a compelling visual graphic.

SOURCE





Banning The Sale Of Combustion Cars Would Be ‘A Colossal Error’

A new paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals another major flaw in plans to electrify the economy.

According to the author, Professor Gautam Kalghatgi, because most vehicles will still run on fossil fuels in ten years’ time, banning the sale of new ones would prevent any improvement in the efficiency of most of the vehicle fleet.

As Professor Kalghatgi explains:

“Even with an improbable hundred-fold increase to 10 million in battery electric vehicle numbers in 2030, 75% of cars will still run on petrol and diesel”, says Professor Kalghatgi.

“But no manufacturer is going to invest in more advanced cars if they are banned from selling them”.

And Professor Kalghatgi says those advances could bring about significant improvements in efficiency:

“If a battery car delivers a 25% saving in greenhouse gas emissions on a life cycle basis, the overall reduction for the UK would be less than 4% by 2030. A larger reduction emissions could be delivered with a 5% improvement in fuel consumption of petrol and diesel vehicles.”

“Banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars simply means abandoning the possibility of future emissions reductions in this sector by freezing the technology of a vast majority of vehicles running U.K. transport for decades to come “.

SOURCE





Mendacious Media enables climate alarmism

I have been a news junkie since high school. Media bias favoring left-of-center public policies and politicians is nothing new, yet this 40-year-plus reality never gets shopworn.  The flagrancy of skewed news coverage to favor one political agenda and oppose another is worse than ever and still surprises.

There is no shortage of examples of media slant and mendacity, including coronavirus reporting, downplaying the riots in American cities, and peddling the bogus Russia collusion narrative. The climate change issue is another glaring example that goes beyond mere bias. Most media coverage portrays the subject as a singular truth, that is, human exhaling and industry are causing the planet to warm to an imminent doomsday. Typically, no other evidence or viewpoints are acknowledged, much less given credence.

The prevailing media treatment of climate change and other issues exhibits a combination of myopia, laziness, dishonesty and censorship, which CFACT itself has been recipient.  It has gotten so bad, two major media outlets recently were exposed by very public resignations and several newsrooms displayed infantile wokeness.

Chief among this journalistic dereliction is NBC’s Chuck Todd, a wind-up doll for climate credulity and former congressional aide. Todd announced he would give no airtime to skeptics of the prevailing mantra of man-made global warming. No counterpoint allowed is standard for “mainstream” climate reporting.

Time magazine, another substantial media outlet, has long obsessed about the “Endangered Earth,” as far back as the late 1980’s. By then, global warming had replaced the coming-ice-age mantra from the 1970’s. Time’s annual “Person of the Year” was replaced for 1988 as “Planet of the Year.”  Time has been beating the same drum in the 30-plus years since, even as Earth’s environment improved, global poverty declined, and U.S. carbon emissions more recently dropped. No matter, its 2019 “Person of the Year” was the indefatigable and exploited Greta Thunberg.

Media myopia toward climate change issues is so widespread, some younger reporters themselves may not realize it having grown up in the “Captain Planet” generation when Ted Turner’s cartoon began the brainwashing process.

Journalists have long practiced as stenographers for celebrities and politicians who make absurd catastrophic climate assertions. Reporters surely know how pervasive is lying in politics, yet so many accept climate sound-bites without scrutiny.  Has any reporter ever questioned the many preposterous claims by Sen. Bernie Sanders or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?  Has either been asked how cooling the planet by one degree in 30 years would stop icebergs from melting in summer, or how wind and solar can “replace” fossil fuels when they rely on them so extensively? The list goes on.

Now and then there are modest exceptions, as when Foxnews host Chris Wallace interviewed Al Gore in 2017, and pushed back some. Yet, even in that instance, Wallace let pass several ludicrous claims by Gore, including supposed rising sea level from global warming that allegedly resulted in ocean fish on Miami streets.

Part of the problem is that while climate change ideology is now unchallenged dogma among Democratic politicians, few Republicans are willing to go on the record with reporters to counter them beyond complaining about the multi-trillion dollar price tag of the Green New Deal. For such Republicans, the calculation is to avoid controversy, rather than offer perspective on–much less rebut–the underlying assumptions of the climate agenda.

Commonplace in climate reporting is when a new global warming “study” is released with some outlandish prediction in 12 to 80 years that is accepted at face value by reporters.  Regardless of political leanings or personal bias, every journalist should be a skeptic and report both sides since there are numerous scientists on either side of the climate change issue.

Last spring, for example, the journal Nature Climate Change published a whimsical study that claimed half the world’s beaches would disappear by the year 2100 due to climate change. Every media outlet I found which reported on the study parroted its findings, with nary a perfunctory critic to round out the story.

More impactful media negligence has been its reporting on findings of the International Panel on Climate Change. Michael Shellenberger, in his new book, Apocalypse Never, documents how this sensationalist reporting is regularly at variance with the actual IPCC research.

The cumulative effect of years of robotic reporting of man-made global warming trope has contributed to the growth and political power of the climate change industry. If not countered, it will further lead to a misinformed public, and gullible politicians imposing more destructive and wasteful climate policies on the populace in America and worldwide.

SOURCE




What Global Warming? Snow Line In Alps Increases

It’s been a rather cool summer in much of Europe so far. And just before some hot weather is about to sweep across Central Europe starting tomorrow, winter made a brief comeback – at the peak of summer – in the Alps!

“At high altitudes of the Alps, the precipitation turned into snow overnight,” reported Wetteronline.de here. “In some areas, the snowfall line dropped to an altitude of around 2,300 meters.”

Wetteronline.de also noted that on Germany’s highest mountain, Zugspitze, “about 30 centimeters of fresh snow fell in the morning at minus 2 degrees.”

“Employees of the Zugspitzbahn were in continuous operation to clear paths and the visitor platforms from the summer snow masses.”

DWD national weather service labels a cooler than normal July “quite warm”

Meanwhile, Germany’s DWD national weather service recently issued what I’d call a press release that is designed especially for stupid and lazy journalists who won’t bother fact-checking.

In its preliminary report on July weather in Germany, the DWD announced that the mid-summer month this year was “rather warm.”

According to the DWD, the average temperature in July for Germany was 17.7°C (64°F), which was “0.8°C (1.44°F) above the value for the internationally valid reference period 1961 to 1990.”

But what the DWD fails to tell us is that the 1961-1990 period was a cold one. And not only that, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) no longer uses the 1961-1990 reference period. Instead, it uses the 1981-2010 period to calculate the means.

The DWD does mention that July 2020 was 0.3°C (0.54°F) too cold compared with the valid reference period 1981 to 2010. So at the DWD, 0.3°C below the valid mean is in their eyes “rather warm.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Shocking 'before and after' pictures of glaciers in Patagonia reveal the dramatic impact of global warming over the last century

Worldwide some glaciers are always growing and some are shrinking.  The primary influence on them is precipitation, not small variations in temperature

A 'before and after' photography project in the Patagonian mountains using images taken in 1913 and modern day equivalents exposes the dramatic impact global warming is having on the world.

Explorers Cristian Donoso has dedicated the last 24 years of his life to exposing the dramatic effect of climate change on nature.

As part of a 2018 project called 'Ice Postcards' he, along with co-author Alfredo Pourailly, tracked down locations first captured by explorer Alberto de Agostini in the early 20th century to show how the landscape has changed.

Two pictures were taken at the same location and at the same time of year, but one was in 1913 and one was in 2018. They demonstrate the alarming physical impact of global warming on ice caps around the world

Chilean explorer Cristian Donoso has dedicated the last 24 years of his life to exposing the impact of climate change in a stunning photography project. These pictures in Patagonia reveal the loss of ice since 1913

Ice Postcards saw Donoso and Alfredo Pourailly De La Plaza travel to the Cordillera Darwin (a mountain range named after British biologist Charles Darwin) in Tierra del Fuego.

They tracked down locations of images taken by Alberto de Agostini, who regularly frequented the glaciers and took more than 11,000 photos. 

Jagged ice flows dominated the early images, but many of these have either vanished or dwindled by 2018.

Patagonia is a harsh environment and is home to the largest body of ice in the southern hemisphere, outside of Antarctica. 

Side-by-side comparisons of modern images with their historical equivalents lay bare the horrific impact climate change has had on this region.

'It was much more dramatic than what we believed would be the case,' Donoso told CNN.

'Places that we have yet to really understand, that we haven't explored, that we haven't photographed or that we have yet to chart have been profoundly impacted by humans. The world is a much smaller place than we think.'

The explorers hope that their images will inspire people to tackle climate change and preserve the only planet we have left.

Ice Postcards is a long-term project and a second set of comparative photos on different glaciers in Tierra del Fuego will be produced in an upcoming expedition by the two photographers, courtesy of a Rolex Explorer Grant.

Pictured, the jutting the Negri glacier terminus, captured by de Agostini in 1913 (left) and how the same patch of land looks at the same time of year today

The 2018 image from Donoso and Pourailly (right) of the Marinelli glacier shows the ice has receded more than six miles (10 kilometers) since 1914, when it was captured on film by de Agostini

SOURCE






Media Blame Hurricane Isaias on Climate Change – As Hurricane Numbers Decline

Hurricane Isaias hadn’t even made landfall in the United States before the media began proclaiming Isaias was the result of human-caused climate change. Not only is there no evidence for such a claim, but hurricane numbers have been declining as global temperatures modestly warm. Also, even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disputes any connection between global warming and hurricanes.

A New York Times article, titled “Hurricane, Fire, Covid-19: Disasters Expose the Hard Reality of Climate Change,” provided typical media coverage of Isaias. The article asserted, “Twin emergencies on two coasts this week — Hurricane Isaias and the Apple Fire — offer a preview of life in a warming world and the steady danger of overlapping disasters.” There is nothing unusual, however, about hurricanes forming and wildfires burning simultaneously, since the hurricane and wildfire seasons overlap.

TV weatherman Dan Satterfield added to the misinformation, publishing a blog post titled “Hurricane Isaias Will Be Wetter and Stronger Because of Climate Change.” Satterfield cited no evidence for this claim – because there is none.

To the contrary, and as detailed in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, hurricane impacts are at an all-time low. “The United States recently went more than a decade (2005 through 2017) without a major hurricane measuring Category 3 or higher, which is the longest such period in recorded history,” notes the Climate at a Glance summary. “The United States also recently experienced the fewest number of hurricane strikes in any eight-year period (2009 through 2017) in recorded history. Additionally, America’s most vulnerable state, Florida, recently concluded an 11-year period (2005 through 2016) without a landfalling hurricane of any size—the longest such period in recorded history.”

Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018 “Interim Report” observes there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”

Applied to Isaias, strong upper-level wind shear battered Isaias in the Caribbean Sea. That wind shear prevented Isaias from becoming very organized, and was the primary reason the storm struggled to barely reach Category 1 strength. As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, “Wind shear inhibits strong storms from forming and rips apart storms that have already formed. Scientists have learned that global warming is likely to cause more wind shear in places where hurricanes form and intensify.” And indeed, the much-ballyhooed warmer ocean waters due to global warming were no match for the global warming-fueled wind shear that stunted Isaias’ growth.

In summary, real-world hurricane data, the United Nations IPCC, and the particular history of Isaias show global warming did not cause Isaias or make the storm any worse. Any assertion to the contrary is fake science, even in the eyes of the United Nations. Therefore, we can thankfully expect Facebook and Twitter to soon issue a warning label, or block anyone from linking to or reposting, the media’s false claims that global warming spawned or worsened Isaias.

SOURCE




Two New Papers on Energy Economics

The CO2 Coalition this week published two new Science & Policy Briefs by energy economist and Coalition Director Bruce Everett, Ph.D. Both Briefs review claims made by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and repeated elsewhere, about the cost of "renewable" energy and the calculation of the Social Cost of Carbon. 

In the first, Wind and Solar are Competitive with Fossil Fuels only in Subsidized Price, Not in True Cost, Dr. Everett tackles a vital question in determining America's energy future: are "renewable" forms of energy truly competitive with traditional fossil fuels?

Says Everett: "The June 25 Wall Street Journal has a news piece by Rochelle Toplensky entitled 'Green Energy is Finally Going Mainstream.'  Ms. Toplensky claims that 'the cost of renewable energy can now be competitive with fossil fuels.' Unfortunately, her argument is based on one of the oldest and most common economic fallacies: confusing cost and price."

In the second Brief The President, not the New York Times, Is Right on the Social Cost of Carbon, Dr. Everett points out that the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) is an estimate of the present value of the future impact of climate change and is supposed to serve as the basis for climate regulations.  Like everything else in the climate debate, the SCC is a political exercise.

He continues: "In a July 14, 2020 New York Times article, Lisa Friedman claims 'G.A.O.: Trump Boosts Deregulation by Undervaluing Cost of Climate Change.' In fact, the GAO (Government Accountability Office) says no such thing.  Responding to Congressional requests, the GAO considered (1) why the Trump administration's SCC is lower than the Obama administration's, (2) why the recommendations of a 2017 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have not been implemented and (3) how do states and other countries estimate SCC.  Neither the GAO nor Ms. Friedman bothers to ask the only important question: do estimates of the SCC make any sense?"

Both Science & Policy Briefs are available on the CO2 Coalition website at www.co2coalition.org

Via The CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org





Australian PM prepares a natural gas plan to boost economy out of the pandemic

Not enough, say Greenies

Gas projects will gain federal support to drive down energy costs for industry and households in what Prime Minister Scott Morrison calls a broader plan to lift the economy through the pandemic.

Mr Morrison backed the use of gas to help Australian industry solve its energy challenges, signalling he would act "in the months ahead" to tackle the problems caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Three cabinet ministers are working on ways to cut gas prices, raising the prospect of measures in the October budget to address years of industry calls to boost domestic gas supplies.

The next test is a NSW regulatory decision due on September 4 on whether Santos can develop the Pilliga gas field in the state’s north on the condition all the gas goes to the domestic market.

Mr Morrison said the "energy challenges" were a factor in his goal of running the national economy in a "COVID-safe" way when there was no certainty about when a vaccine might arrive and the pandemic might end.

"I have talked a lot of times about what we need do in the gas sector and I’ll have a lot more to say about that in the months ahead," he said.

"What we’re doing in our manufacturing sector, what we’re doing to get infrastructure, getting almost $10 billion brought forward – that’s the plan.

"That can give the confidence and the assurance, because that plan goes in place, vaccine or no vaccine. Operating in a COVID-safe economy is then the challenge."

Greens leader Adam Bandt has attacked the government for backing new gas projects, following a series of leaks from the National COVID Commission chaired by Nev Power, former chief executive of Fortescue Metals.

The commission's manufacturing taskforce set out plans to put taxpayer support behind a significant expansion of the domestic gas industry.

"Gas is not only a toxic fossil fuel, it's becoming too expensive to compete with clean energy," Mr Bandt said.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor addressed the media on Wednesday about wanting Australia to capitalise on depressed global oil and gas markets to deliver cheap energy for industry and boost the strategic oil reserve during the coronavirus crisis.

"More and more, industrial users are keen to make the switch to renewable energy, but are being hamstrung by a government desperate to prop up dirty coal, oil and gas."

Industry Minister Karen Andrews, Resources Minister Keith Pitt and Energy Minister Angus Taylor are all working on the gas and energy agenda with a team from the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.

Federal government sources named problems with red tape, environmental regulation and state moratoriums on gas projects as key obstacles to driving down the price and clearing the way for new power stations fuelled by gas.

While one option is an import terminal on the east coast, the other is federal approval for the Santos project under the Environment and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

Santos is waiting on a decision from the NSW Independent Planning Commission by September 4 on whether the company can extract coal seam gas from the region around Narrabri, but the project must also gain federal clearance under the EPBC Act.

Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher said the company needed certainty about the Narrabri project after starting the process six years ago.

"Narrabri means more jobs and more investment in NSW and the local region, and lower gas and electricity prices for customers in the state," he said.

The Prime Minister's comments signal the agenda for the October budget after Mr Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg committed another $15.6 billion to fund JobKeeper payments for millions of workers through to March.

While the total cost of the JobKeeper scheme has now reached $101.3 billion to pay a wage subsidy to four million workers – albeit not all of them at the same time – the government is facing calls for a bigger stimulus.

Mr Morrison discussed new measures in skills policy with state and territory leaders in national cabinet on Friday, as well as agreeing a new freight code to keep food and other supplies moving despite Victoria’s business shutdowns.

The Prime Minister said the pandemic would force Australia to adjust the way it does business and named the digital economy as a potential opportunity.

"There is a broader plan when it comes to the economy and that continues to be rolled out, vaccine or no vaccine."

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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