EPA cracks down on coal power pollution
No word on HOW ozone levels can be reduced
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, finalized a regulation that will cut smog-causing air pollution from coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities. The new "Good Neighbor" rule requires 23 states to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions blowing across state boundaries. The air pollutants — which form ozone, the main ingredient in smog — can travel downwind into neighboring states, harming the health of communities miles away.
The EPA estimates the rule will halve nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants by 2027, compared to peak 2021 levels. And that cleaner air will lead to major public health improvements. According to the EPA, the new rule will prevent approximately 1,300 premature deaths, 2,300 hospital and emergency room visits, and 1.3 million cases of asthma in 2026 alone.
Ozone is one of the most widespread air pollutants in the U.S. Research has found that ozone raises the risk of premature death and can be particularly dangerous to children, older adults, and people with asthma and other chronic conditions. Asthma attacks and other health effects from ozone can drive people to the emergency room and take them away from schools and jobs.
Paul Billings, national senior vice president of public policy for the American Lung Association, describes ozone's health effects as "a sunburn of the lungs." Ozone can cause even healthy adults working or moving outdoors to wheeze, cough, and experience shortness of breath. During peak ozone season, from March to November, people across the country experience its harms. Ozone pollution particularly impacts those who live close to a major polluting source, disproportionately low-income communities and communities of color.
"We know this harmful pollution doesn't stop at the state line," EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement Wednesday. "Today's action will help our state partners meet stronger air quality health standards beyond borders, saving lives and improving public health in impacted communities across the United States."
Initially proposed in February last year, the plan implements a part of the federal Clean Air Act known as the "Good Neighbor" provision. Under the law, states are required to submit a plan for ensuring that their air pollution does not spread significantly to other states. If they fail to submit or if the EPA disapproves of their plan, the agency must issue its own rule to protect downwind states.
The new "Good Neighbor" plan also aims to achieve coast-to-coast adherence to national ambient air quality standards set by the EPA for ozone back in 2015. Billings says given the eight-year gap, the new plan is "long overdue" — and that the EPA has more work ahead if it wants to take ozone seriously.
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to review — and update if needed — air quality standards every five years. In 2020, the Trump administration decided to not update the 2015 ozone limits. The agency announced late last year that it would reconsider that policy, aiming to reach a final decision by the end of this year.
The current ozone standards set a ceiling of 70 parts per billion; the American Lung Association and other public health and environmental justice advocates call for "standards no higher than 60 parts per billion."
"The president has made addressing environmental injustice a priority," Billings told Grist. "And rules like the revision of the ozone health standard will be an important test to see if the policies are going to match the rhetoric."
***********************************************
New EPA regulation on water quality is poorly advised
John Doolittle
A recent proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enact the first-ever federally enforceable water quality standards for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has prompted discussions about the potential impacts of these regulations on public health, the environment, and the economy.
As a former Member of Congress who served on several committees of jurisdiction that handled water issues, I have always been an advocate for safe and clean drinking water. But any such standards must be viewed within the broader portfolio of drinking water priorities and developed based upon the best available science. Unfortunately, this proposal misses that mark.
By way of background, PFAS is a broad term for a family of chemicals that have been used for decades across industries and that are essential to modern life. Consisting of more than 5,000 different chemistries, each PFAS compound has its own unique chemical makeup and uses as well as environmental and health profiles. However, despite this fact, the EPA is pressing forward with a regulation that would lump many of these chemicals together in one basket.
While some advocates for this aggressive regulation have cherry-picked data to claim that the science is settled on this issue, the fact remains that there is no clear evidence that exposure to the PFAS chemicals used today causes cancer or any other serious health effects. The EPA's own website says that it doesn’t fully understand "how harmful PFAS are to people and the environment", and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has similarly found that “human health effects from exposure to low environmental levels of PFAS is uncertain.”
In fact, many PFAS chemicals have never even been evaluated by the EPA for health risks, including two that would be swept up in these new water quality standards. In other instances, the EPA has violated the scientific integrity of its process by using studies that had not yet been peer reviewed to set previous “Advisory Guidelines” that subsequently helped to inform this newly proposed rule.
This background now leads to a new regulatory regime proposed by the Biden-Harris Administration that will vastly expand the difficulties facing water utilities, which have expressed concerns about the impacts the rule may have on state staffing levels, lab capacity for monitoring needs, and water treatment capabilities. As the State Water Drinking Association has pointed out, this new rule will also result in “significant rate increases” for customers of water systems that will suddenly find themselves required to test for and remove PFAS to exceedingly stringent standards.
This newly proposed rule sets Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) for PFAS chemicals well outside international norms, as much as 25 times stricter than World Health Organization guidelines in some cases. Given that this rule will also impose a whole new set of monitoring requirements and that these MCLs were in some cases set at the lowest level that can be detected in lab settings, such testing may likely be expensive and time-consuming. Some experts fear that a bottleneck in such testing capabilities may be on the horizon, resulting in possibly lengthy delays as a result.
Water utilities that are already struggling to staff up to implement the new bipartisan infrastructure law as well as the lead and copper rule, could find that this new PFAS rule would create an additional competing priority. In some cases, this result may come at the expense of dealing with more pressing and better-known threats to public health and water quality such as removing and replacing the lead pipes that are poisoning communities across the United States and are responsible for the well-publicized water safety issues in Flint, MI and Jackson, MS
I am concerned that the Biden-Harris Administration would be willing to move forward with proposed regulations that could result in unnecessary costs and disruptions for water utilities and their customers, given the shortcomings of the underlying science, which are quite substantial. The fact remains that the EPA has failed to determine safe exposure levels and has not even proven whether PFAS chemicals pose a health hazard to humans – two major milestones that should be achieved before instituting such an onerous regulatory regime.
The public will have a chance to comment, and the EPA would be wise to make changes before issuing a final rule, which is expected by the end of the year, or scrap it all together and start anew. Given the paucity of substantial evidence as to the risks posed to humans by PFAS chemicals, it is simply premature for the EPA to impose these new ill-advised regulations.
********************************************************
Lights Out: Midwest Grid Groans, Plants Close as Green Regulations Hit Home
Detroit – From idled Illinois manufacturing plants to rising electricity costs to Michigan residents shuttered in their cars without power, the Green Revolution is wreaking havoc on the Midwest.
Governments are regulating America’s industrial heartland into an era of carbon prohibition. Scientists say the transformation will have little environmental benefit, but their effects are being felt by workers and consumers as jobs and power reliability suffer.
“I’m as cold as hell,” Ron George, 63, told The Detroit News from his van, where he’d lived for five days in front of his powerless Redford Township home after a February 22 winter storm left over 700,000 residents without power.
Electric grid strain
The Midwest is in the midst of another cold winter, and electric grid operators have warned they don’t have the energy resources to provide power. The reason? Governments are forcing utilities to abandon fossil fuels in favor of less reliable renewables.
“Everybody in the Midwest should be aware that there are issues with our grid,” Tom Sobeck, president of northern Michigan-based utility Presque Isle Electric & Gas, told The Detroit News. “You get a perfect storm of weather and a maintenance outage on one of our generation plants and. . . . It could be bad.”
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), grid operator for most of the Midwest and the Canadian province of Manitoba, says that in five years, 30% of its energy will come from wind and solar power. Yet, with renewables currently at 15%, states like Michigan are already at a breaking point. This winter the state was found to be short of planning standards developed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
“(MISO says) that we were on the wrong side of that planning standard," said state utility regulator Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission, with "an increased likelihood of outages because we didn't have enough resources available."
MISO suggests there needs to be a more stable energy source to keep the lights on, but there is a rush to renewables instead. Michigan, led by Detroit’s DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, have spent $3 billion on windmills, solar panels, and biomass in the last 15 years.
That has come at the expense of infrastructure reliability, and the state’s grid is increasingly vulnerable. A decade ago that wasn’t an issue, Melissa Seymour, MISO’s vice president of government affairs told The News. “We had plentiful generation. It was 30% above our reserve margin. Nobody was worried about resources. Now, we are at our reserve margin.”
Commented Redford Townships’ George, who says power outages appear more frequent: “I don’t know what, but something needs to be done. This happens too much."
His hunch is borne out by data as Michigan has recorded more power outages than any state this side of Texas, which has also aggressively pursued wind power.
Credit Jennifer Granholm, governor from 2003-2010, who began Michigan’s renewable push with a 2008 renewable energy mandate with an eye on eliminating fossil fuels. She warned that, among other environmental calamities, the Great Lakes would dry up. That hasn’t happened. Indeed, scientists like John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama-Huntsville who monitors global satellite temperature data, says that “if you apply the different (national) regulations, they will have no climate impact. If you eliminate the US from the face of the earth, it will have no impact on global temperature. Climate is not as sensitive to CO2 as the models say it is.”
Granholm’s zealotry has been rewarded with a promotion to Secretary of Energy where she is implementing her Michigan energy policies on a national scale.
Her Democratic successor, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has kept the pedal to the metal. Whitmer’s Michigan Healthy Climate Plan proposes to “generate 60% of the state’s electricity from renewable resources and phase out remaining coal-fired power plants by 2030 (and) build the infrastructure necessary to support 2 million electric vehicles on Michigan roads by 2030.”
**************************************************
Net Zero could cost Americans more than $50 trillion, new paper warns
An eminent researcher has warned that any attempt to decarbonise the US economy by 2050 is doomed to failure.
Professor Michael Kelly, from the University of Cambridge in the UK, has previously studied the impact of Net Zero projects in the UK and his native New Zealand, and has now turned his expertise to the United States.
His headline findings are a stark warning for politicians across the country.
“The cost to 2050 will comfortably exceed $12 trillion for electrification projects, and $35 trillion for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. A work-force comparable in size to the health sector will be required for 30 years, including a doubling of the present number of electrical engineers. The bill of specialist materials is of a size that, for the USA alone, is several times the global annual production.”
Professor Kelly warns that politicians are not thinking through the scale of the project they are pursuing.
“It’s clear that no country has the manpower, the materials, or the money to deliver Net Zero. It cannot be attempted without establishing a command economy, and even then it would fail. This is a fool’s errand.”
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Monday, March 20, 2023
Sunday, March 19, 2023
Liberal Area to Phase Out Natural Gas Furnaces and Water Heaters -- but not stoves
Aiming for cleaner air is reasonable but electric heating does not do as good a job and looks set to be costly. If this goes ahead, the smarties will invest in an AGA -- a mainly British stove that has long been used to double as a heater. It was originally designed to burn hard coal!
The San Francisco Bay Area will begin a “gradual phaseout” of gas-powered water heaters and furnaces, which will be banned after 2026, The Hill reported Thursday.
Reportedly, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) voted this week to approve new rules to eliminate nitrogen oxide emissions from water heaters and furnaces. Going forward, the sale of NOx-emitting natural gas water heaters will be prohibited beginning in 2027. In 2029, the sale of NOx-emitting furnaces will be banned. “Large, commercial” water heaters that emit NOx will be banned in 2031.
“The 1.8 million water heaters and furnaces in the Bay Area significantly impact our air quality, resulting in dozens of early deaths and a wide range of health impacts, particularly in communities of color,” Philip Fine, executive officer of the Air District, said in a statement to the outlet. “This groundbreaking regulation will phase out the most polluting appliances in homes and businesses to protect Bay Area residents from the harmful air pollution they cause.”
The Hill noted that a separate fact sheet from the agency said that the only zero-NOx appliances available in the are electric appliances. A press release from the BAAQMD said that the regulations do not affect appliances used for cooking, such as gas stoves, which was previously a target for Democrats.
“The new amendments will safeguard public health against the hazards of these pollutants and prevent an estimated 85 premature deaths, as well as dozens of new asthma cases, in the Bay Area each year,” a statement from the agency added.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/03/16/san-francisco-n2620704
**********************************************Climate change experts' bullying is not about helping the Earth, it is about controlling us
It's been a tough couple of years for the experts. When it comes to big public policy questions, complicated adult stuff like war and disease and the economy – really the only things that matter – the assumption in Washington has for many years been that you should not worry about it. Don't sweat the details. That's not your role as a citizen and as a voter. We don't have that kind of democracy, the kind where you might actually participate. No, your job is to trust the experts and their conclusions and then obey them.
But COVID kind of blew that up. If there's one thing we learned from that disaster, it's that public policy experts very often had no clue what they were talking about. Your hippie aunt in Mendocino County knew a lot more about how to beat a flu virus than your average virologist on CNN. They're not going to tell you to go outside, get some exercise, some sunlight, some fresh air, stop eating junk food, turn off your computer once in a while, spend time with other people. Be healthy. That advice worked. The experts, by contrast, made you get the vaccine and that did not work.
By March of 2021, people are starting to figure this out. Anyone who was paying attention in America understood that the experts, many of them, were full of it. And it was exactly at that moment that The Atlantic Magazine in Washington published a piece pushing back against a growing consensus. That story was entitled "Following Your Gut Isn't the Right Way to Go."
It's hard to think of a funnier headline, really mostly because it's so spectacularly absurd. You should always trust your gut, obviously. It is the one thing that will never betray you. But The Atlantic Magazine wanted you to know that your natural instincts are, in fact, worthless. "The experts had a rough year," the magazine concedes, "but we still have to trust them." Right.
Actually, we don't have to trust them and on big questions of public policy, we absolutely should not trust them. It's a democracy. But Washington is continuing to demand that we do trust them. Why? There may be a reason. Maybe COVID isn't the only big project they have in mind for us, a project the experts will justify and MSNBC.
And indeed it's not. There is the climate change agenda and the climate change agenda is the single most ambitious effort to remake human civilization in all recorded history, and it's coming. In fact, it's already in progress. The only reason that millions and millions of Americans aren't protesting in the streets tonight over this effort to completely overturn their lives is that on some level, many people still do trust the experts, at least on climate change, but should they?
We were pondering that this morning when we saw that the world's most famous climate change expert, Greta Thunberg of Sweden, just deleted a tweet she wrote in June of 2018.
Fridays For Future climate activist Greta Thunberg attends a news conference with climate activists and experts from Africa, in Stockholm, Sweden January 31, 2020. TT News Agency/Pontus Lundahl via REUTERS
Fridays For Future climate activist Greta Thunberg attends a news conference with climate activists and experts from Africa, in Stockholm, Sweden January 31, 2020. TT News Agency/Pontus Lundahl via REUTERS (TT News Agency/Pontus Lundahl via REUTERS)
Here it is: "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years." That scientist, of course, was a Harvard professor so obviously that prediction was going to be correct, but here we are still driving our Silverados and still alive and some of us are still happy.
So, it does make you wonder if Greta Thunberg, the greatly revered Greta Thunberg, a perennial finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize, could have gotten that so wrong, what else have the climate experts gotten wrong and how long have they been getting it wrong? Well, fortunately, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has done the research on this, and it turns out these people have been very wrong for a very long time. In 1969, The New York Times was printing climate hysteria from an expert called Paul Ehrlich "We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years."
That was Paul Ehrlich in 1969. Well, here it is, 2023, and that same Paul Ehrlich, who's now 90 and still publishing books and still being cited on "60 Minutes," is still telling us that we're all going to die. Now, clearly, Paul Ehrlich had some sort of traumatic childhood. He's been inflicting it on the rest of us for over 50 years, and for 50 years, his fellow experts have taken him seriously.
Jordan Peterson tells Tucker the religious structure behind the climate cult of the leftVideo
Now, back then, of course, climate change didn't mean global warming. It meant a new ice age. In 1970, The Boston Globe reported, "Scientists predict a new ice Age by 21st century." According to the Globe, "air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century." An ice age!
In 1972, Brown University's science department sent a letter to the White House explaining that they had "deep concern with the future of the world because this ice age falls within the rank of processes which produced the last Ice Age." Two years later, in 1974, the Guardian reported, "Spy satellites show new ice age is coming fast" and the report cited for moral weight analysis carried out at Columbia University. Then, a few years later, 1977, the actor Leonard Nimoy – who was not a science expert technically, but played one at one point on television – shot this video.
LEONARD NIMOY: If we are unprepared for the next advance, the result could be hunger and death on a scale unprecedented in all of history. What scientists are telling us now is that the threat of an ice age is not as remote as they once thought. During the lifetime of our grandchildren, arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn most of the inhabitable portions of our planet into a polar desert.
Hunger and death are an unprecedented scale! Someone else with a tragic childhood he inflicted on the rest of us.
But by the early 1980s, when the ice didn't arrive well, the expert decided the problem wasn't too much cold. It was too much heat. It was global warming. In 1989, the Associated Press ran this story "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." In other words, 23 years ago.
That same year, 1989, a climate expert called Jim Hansen met with a reporter from Salon. According to Salon, Hansen explained that within 20 or 30 years, "The West Side Highway, which runs along the Hudson River in Manhattan, will be underwater," Underwater! We checked tonight, and actually it's congested, but still a road.
Then in March of 2000, the Independent newspaper had a piece explaining that snowfalls are now just a thing of the past: "Snow is starting to disappear from our lives." The piece quoted a climate expert claiming that "children just aren't going to know what snow is." No idea what snow is! It'll be a relic of the Ice Age, but of the great inferno of global warming.
Then in 2004, amazingly, civilization still existed. The Guardian predicted that, "Major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020" – which is a little confusing because global warming doesn't typically produce a Siberian climate. And it was around this time that they decided, "Hey, we don't want to get pinned down on the details. Will it be too hot? Will it be too cold? We don't want to say. Something bad is going to happen, so we're going to call it climate change."
And that paved the way for Al Gore, who in 2006 released his famous documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." The beauty of An Inconvenient Truth is now that it's been well, inconveniently more than 15 years since it came out, we can fact-check its claims. Here's the trailer.
AL GORE: If you look at the ten hottest years ever measured, they've all occurred in the last 14 years and the hottest of all was 2005. This is Patagonia 75 years ago and the same glacier today. This is Mount Kilimanjaro 30 years ago and last year. Within the decade, there will be no more "Snows of Kilimanjaro."
Al Gore also said there would be no ice in the Arctic. He quoted researchers, climate researchers, experts, and he explained that, "The North Pole will be ice-free in the Summer by 2013 because of manmade global warming." Now, it does take a certain level of hutzpah to make a prediction that precise and Al Gore made many of them and all of them turned out to be wrong and for a normal person, that would be a cue maybe it's time to retire. I'm rich on Google stock. Maybe I could just stop talking because, of course, I've been disgraced by my own foolish predictions,
But no, he kept going, and he was helped in that by the entire news media. It makes you wonder why? News organizations exist to bring you the news, to assess whether things are true or not, but if all of them collude to hide lying, you have to ask, is there something else going on here? We will let you decide. We do know that by 2006, NBC News informed the world that, "a leading U.S. climate researcher says the world has a ten-year window" (till 2016) "a window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe." Of course, by their predicted date, Donald Trump became president, but that's not what they were predicting.
In 2008, the Associated Press reported that according to a top NASA scientist, "in 5 to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer." That didn't happen, but of course, no one was ever held to account for bad predictions. So, this kept going. John Kerry, now our climate czar, cited that very same science in 2009. Watch.
JOHN KERRY: You have sea ice, which is melting at a rate that the Arctic Ocean now increasingly is exposed. In five years, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic summer.
What's hilarious is this is a guy who's never had a job. He's only been in politics. He never did one useful thing. He's not a scientist. He has never done research. He's actually not an expert. But because he's way more aggressive than you are and because he has access to the media, which amplify his claims, he poses as one.
Now, what's strange about the prediction you just heard is that John Kerry's prediction contradicts Barack Obama's famous climate prediction from a year earlier. You probably remember this.
BARACK OBAMA: Because if we are willing to work for it and fight for it and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise in the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
Sad to watch that. All the cheering people, they seem so sincere. He's going to save the world and control the weather. He's Jesus. But in fact, the global healing Obama promised at the beginning of his first term never came and neither the global destruction. Here, by the way, is Neil deGrasse Tyson, another great predictor of things, saying that by 2014, the Statue of Liberty will soon be underwater.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You know what I tell people? This really wakes them. Here in the New York metropolitan area, I say, you know, if we lose the ice caps, you know how high the water will be? "Oh maybe a couple of feet." No, it would come up to the Statue of Liberty’s elbow, the one that's holding the Declaration of Independence. That's where the waterline will be.
That man is a scientist and of course, climate does change it, as always, change. In fact, the landscape we live in now is formed by climate change. The glaciers are a product of climate change. The climate is changing now. It never stops changing. That is a process that we didn't cause and that we can't control to any great degree, we will never be able to control and there are upsides to it and downsides to it.
Biden warns climate change 'damning' entire generation: 'Mother Nature let her wrath be seen'Video
By the way, if the Earth is indeed getting warmer and it seems to be, well, then that will make more arable land in places like Canada and Northern Europe. So, like everything in this life in the temporal world, it's a mixed blessing, but you only hear the downsides, which tells you a lot. It tells you this is not science. It's manipulation. These aren't reports from the experts. These are threats.
*********************************************
No—ESG Doesn’t Offer Investors More Choices, Nor Is It Part of the Free Market
On Feb. 28, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote an impassioned appeal in The Wall Street Journal for Republicans to support environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores because ESG ostensibly represents the free market at work, by offering investors more “choices.”
Schumer appears to be deeply confused about how ESG operates. Or, more likely, he’s pandering to his powerful donors; pro-ESG asset management titan BlackRock reportedly donated more than $100,000 to Schumer’s reelection campaign in 2022.
Whatever the case may be, in reality, ESG results in the complete opposite of what Schumer claims. Putting aside the highly problematic “woke” metrics ensconced in all ESG frameworks, ESG at its core is designed to centralize decision-making power among an enormously powerful public-private cartel of elites and international organizations. It blatantly attempts to fundamentally transform the economy by severely altering traditional methods of assessing risk and allocating capital and credit. Rather than being judged solely based upon material factors such as revenue and the quality of goods and services, entities under ESG are judged based upon their commitments to arbitrary, subjective, political goals such as mitigating climate change and advancing social justice causes.
Businesses deemed by this elite cabal to be sufficiently committed to said goals are given a “high” ESG social credit score, and are rewarded with substantial capital in-flows, tax breaks, grants, access to special financial vehicles, preferential contracting, and other advantages. Businesses assigned “low” ESG scores suffer from reduced or eliminated access to capital, credit, and even insurance.
Just listen to Bank of America CEO and Chairman Brian Moynihan, who also runs the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council. At the WEF’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Davos, Moynihan committed to using the financial clout of his entire institution, including the funds of individual investment account holders. As Moynihan put it, “200,000 people, a three trillion-dollar balance sheet, 60 billion in expenses; you start aiming that gun, and you take that across all these companies, it is huge. … [The companies] delivering on the metrics will get more capital, the ones that won’t will get less.”
With so much wealth in the hands of a relatively small group of players who are committed to using their capital for ESG objectives, companies have little choice but to comply and pursue those objectives, lest they risk dying on the vine. There’s little to no actual choice involved, for the business or the investor.
For instance, entire industries such as oil and natural gas extraction, tobacco sales, and firearm manufacturing are often designed to be screened out from investment funds, loan offerings, and insurance underwriting, with many large asset management firms like BlackRock divesting heavily from critical economic sectors. These fund managers even target much of the agriculture sector due to its supposedly high carbon dioxide emissions, further exacerbating negative food supply shocks. This occurs, regardless of whether investing in such industries would result in financial gains for the investors who have entrusted asset managers with their hard-earned money.
Asset managers—including the fund fiduciaries charged with safeguarding and growing retirement accounts and pension funds—have a legal responsibility to their investors. And, investors often don’t even know that these fiduciaries are using their funds to pursue political objectives at the expense of financial returns.
The result is that investor choices are limited by the fund managers to those companies that produce less greenhouse gas emissions, have the “right” ratio of white, black, Asian, and Latino employees, and donate to the “proper” political causes such as Black Lives Matter and Planned Parenthood.
I would bet that if these investors’ wealth had been allocated based purely upon financial metrics, and diversified to include companies involved with fossil fuels, firearms, or agriculture, they would have seen substantially higher returns on their investment in recent years. In fact, many studies have shown ESG-centric funds significantly underperform compared to traditional funds.
Using a natural experiment, University of Chicago researchers found that none of the highest-rated sustainability funds they studied outperformed any of the lowest-rated sustainability funds—though the former received more capital than the latter.
In December 2022, Bloomberg analyzed the 10 largest ESG funds by assets as compared to the S&P 500 index. Eight of the 10 funds performed worse, many substantially so. For instance, Vanguard’s FTSE Social and its ESG U.S. Stock both suffered year-to-date losses of minus-20.6 percent, compared to S&P’s minus-14.8 percent. The Brown Advisory Sustainable Growth Fund suffered a staggering minus-28.1 percent loss, nearly double that of the S&P index fund.
Regardless of the financial performance aspect of ESG investing, intentionally screening out companies involved with certain industries distorts the marketplace and the macroeconomy, and limits choice. Moreover, decreasing investment flows to vital industries such as energy—which is the lifeblood of any economy—results in reduced research and development that drives economic growth, and less prosperity for everyone.
Ultimately, rather than letting the invisible hand of the free market decide where investment should flow, the intervention of ESG factors into investment decisions fundamentally changes our entire financial and economic systems. Controlled investment is the antithesis of a free market, and is very similar to a socialist or fascistic command-and-control economic model. And, unsurprisingly, those advocating for this new economic model stand to gain the most.
************************************************
‘Climate Alarmism’ Is New Form of ‘Colonialism’ That Infringes on Sovereignty, Researcher Says
OXON HILL, Md.—The Earth is warming, and while many worry about the potential consequences of the change, it is not unprecedented or dangerous, and will be a net benefit for humanity, Vijay Jayaraj said.
Numerous figures in the mainstream media have pushed “climate alarmism,” but Jayaraj, a research associate at the nonpartisan, nonprofit CO2 Coalition, debunks the claim, calling it a new form of colonialism.
“There is a growing sentiment among the leaders in the developing world about imperialism and reemergence of colonialism, in which they see an enforcement of restrictive energy policies from the Western leaders,” Jayaraj told The Daily Signal during an interview at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month. “So, it’s in a form of an imperialism and climate alarmism, which is now infringing upon the rights of the poor people and dashing their hopes about having a future where they can have reliable energy access.”
The consensus of the climate change narrative is not being determined by scientists, but by “unelected political leaders” who use climate policies as “the Bible for policymaking,” he said.
“And we have a fair number of people in the conservative movement who do embrace, or are sympathetic towards, these reports,” said Jayaraj, who holds a master’s degree in environmental science. “And that is a problem, because this is a war against human well-being, not only in the developing world, but also in the developed West.”
He discussed the benefits of using nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels, and how even evidence from the meltdowns at Fukushima and Chernobyl have not been as “detrimental to human health,” but “the left runs with the idea.”
Fighting back against the set climate narrative is difficult due to the potential for professors and scientists to lose their funding “or position,” Jayaraj warned. “So, it’s unfortunate, but we do have a lot of peer-reviewed scientific journals that are not talked about in the mainstream media,” Jayaraj emphasized. “And all people have to do is access Google Scholar and search for the terms that they’re interested in, their wide range of articles and scientific publications that do not agree with the current dominant climate narrative.”
Jayaraj thinks the American people are unfortunately in the grip of the mainstream media, which push the exaggerated climate crisis to those who do not have the time to look more closely at those issues.
“So, if you don’t have time to look into facts and read for yourself, you are just going to look at the headlines, and you are just going to assume that that is true because it’s on every leftist media,” he laments. “And you go, ‘Well, I think that’s the consensus, and I’ll go with that.’ But we do know that science is not based on consensus.”
“Science is based on scientific methodology, where you refute and challenge whichever theory is being put forward,” Jayaraj said. “And I think that’s all the more reason for media groups like yours to educate people on this.”
Jayaraj thinks the best way forward is to be more “people-centric,” in a way that “enables people to flourish.”
“So, that’s a way forward. I believe there are a lot of lawmakers in the conservative party who are very good at this, and I hope the tide turns in the coming years, and they are elected, and they can come forward with sensible energy policies,” Jayaraj concluded.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Friday, March 17, 2023
Unpublished!
Google have stepped up their "unpublishing" activities lately. They delete posts that they dislike on blogspot, which they own. The odd thing is that they mostly delete posts from years ago. And just why is not immediately apparent. The latest post on this blog that they have deleted was from November 2009. It does appear in my backups here so you can still read it. Just scroll down to 23rd. I think it was the second last post of that day that was the problem -- in which I quote some pretty fiery words of John Hinderaker. His original post is still up. Marc Morano quoted that post too so Google's efforts are not going to make it go away
The second one that they have deleted is more mysterious. I suspect that it was a quote from Peter Berger that offended. Scroll down to the third post on January 12 here
*****************************************************
Is Greta Thunberg a stooge?
The more I dug into @GretaThunberg's story, the more I realized that something stinks here. It's no COINCIDENCE that her first appearance was on August 20, 2018, with a sit-in protest in front of the Swedish Parliament, followed COINCIDENTALLY four days later by the release of a book she co-authored with her mother.
But that's not all - the PR machine for her was already in full swing on August 20, thanks to a man named Ingmar Rentzhog, who financed and drove the campaign through his company, @WeDontHaveTime
And guess what? Rentzhog is also COINCIDENTALLY the chairman of the think tank "Global Challenge" (@ChallengesFnd), which is now COINCIDENTALLY fully financed by a billionaire named Kristine Person, a member of the Swedish Social Democratic Workers' Party and former minister in the government under Stefan Löfven.
And if that's not enough, Rentzhog purely COINCIDENTALLY happened to walk by the Swedish Parliament on August 20 and encounter Greta during her sit-in protest, taking a photograph of her. But wait, there's more - Rentzhog and Gretas mother had already met before at a climate conference on May 4, 2018, which is COINCIDENTALLY the exact date when Rentzhog became CEO of the aforementioned think tank.
And here's something interesting - both Kristine Person and Stefan Löfven happen to be members of Klaus Schwab's
@WEF. It's amazing how all these connections seem to come full circle, isn't it?
It's clear to me that something fishy is going on behind the scenes here. These people are manipulating the public and abusing their power for their own political gain. We need to be aware of their tactics and warn everybody we know about the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
https://twitter.com/goddeketal/status/1636465572153008134
******************************************The War on Affordable Energy Continues
The Biden Administration’s war on American energy commenced on his first day in office when the president issued seven Executive Orders limiting oil exploration, imposing massive new costly regulations on the energy industry, and rescinding support for the Keystone Pipeline. Americans are feeling the impact of these policies through astronomical prices for electricity and natural gas.
Even states like Kentucky, which boasts one of the most robust energy industries in the country, are feeling the pain. Out of nowhere, the Blue Grass State suddenly found itself stuck in rolling blackouts this winter as scores of residents couldn’t even so much as turn on their lights, heat their homes, or power on their electric cars or stoves. The fact that something like this happened in Kentucky, a state that uses more energy per dollar of Gross Domestic Product than nearly any other, shows that it can happen anywhere.
This should not come as a shock when considering how coal country has been under assault for more than a decade. Liberal billionaires have spent hundreds of millions of dollars convincing policymakers to shut down American energy sources and the jobs connected to them. President Biden has bought what they’re selling, and despite the pain Americans are feeling, he is showing no signs of backing down.
President Biden’s position is nonsensical. There’s a reason that coal still generates a large portion of the United States’ electricity: it’s one of the most reliable and effective energy sources on the market today. Biden says that it’s not clean, but that’s not true either. States like West Virginia and Kentucky have proven that coal can be mined with little to no environmental impact.
In addition to being wrong on the facts, the war on affordable energy generally and coal specifically, is dangerous because it involves government bureaucrats rather than the marketplace picking winners and losers. Under White House policy, the government is putting its fingers on the scales to boost solar and wind power while building every impediment possible to other energy sources.
This temptation works both ways, with some state legislatures considering bills, such as Kentucky’s SB 4, that would use the power of big government to strong-arm coal use at all costs. Supporters of bills like these ignore the fact that coal plants, like everything else, have limited lifespans, and sometimes need to be shut down for taxpayers’ and energy consumers’ own good.
Government shouldn’t put its thumb on the scale in either direction. Weakening the competitive marketplace, increasing costs, and reducing the availability of reliable electricity is not in anyone’s interest.
The data proves it. In 2022, consumers paid nearly 15% more for their electricity than they did the year prior. President Biden and other advocates of the war on affordable energy may argue energy cost increases came about due to general price inflation, but this figure is two times higher than the country’s annual inflation rate of 6.5%.
The more President Biden and others push the country to move away from the cheapest and most effective sources of energy at their disposal (whether those may be coal, renewables, or something else), the more jobs and economic activity the American people will lose, and the more horror stories we’ll hear from people paying hundreds of dollars more every month for gas and electricity.
Let’s not reflexively black out any particular source of power in the energy industry. Let’s allow them all to continue to grow, innovate, thrive, and shine bright. It’s the only way to ensure our power remains on and our utility bills don’t become as big as our mortgage payments.
*****************************************************
Australia has already achieved net zero. What climate crisis?
Australia has more than reached net zero emissions, and we are in surplus, argues the nation’s leading climate scientist.
So why is the Albanese government pouring billions into going even further with this agenda, and in the process wrecking lives by replacing one of the cheapest and most reliable electricity systems in the world with one of the most expensive and least reliable?
And with a leading Scandinavian car ferry line banning electric cars for safety reasons, why is the NSW Liberal National party government pushing apartment buildings into making it easier to charge EV’s when it should be banning such dangerous death traps from all car parks?
Fortunately, there are those who stand out against this. Prominent among these is the nation’s best-known geologist, the highly credentialled Professor Emeritus Ian Plimer.
Notwithstanding the frequent calls by politicians to ‘follow the science’, few consult or even read Plimer just as few media outlets publish or broadcast him.
However, he recently gave an extended interview, ‘What climate crisis?’, available free on demand on ADH TV
Plimer challenges the elites’ determination to move to net-zero emissions. Even if the discredited global warming theory were true, he says net zero is unnecessary for Australia.
He has come to the startling conclusion that Australia has already achieved net zero. He explains that when we burn coal and petroleum products and release CO2 into the atmosphere, this is sequestered into grasslands, crops and forests and dissolved in the coastal sea.
Incidentally, never fall for yet another linguistic trick from the Orwellian Minitruth, the Ministry of Truth, and call CO2 ‘carbon’. That’s done to suggest something unclean. Similarly, for reasons explained previously, never ever use ‘gender’ when you mean ‘sex’.
Returning to the sequestration of CO2, this occurs during photosynthesis, the process by which a plant uses CO2 from the air and water with energy from the light of the sun to produce its own food and what we need, oxygen.
Now, unlike politicians, plants do not distinguish between the 3 per cent of CO2 which is man-made and the rest. To a plant, it’s all food and not a pollutant, the silliest claim the elites could make .
Since Australia is lucky enough to be a continent with very few people, says Plimer, we absorb far more CO2 than we need.
Far from net zero, we are in a massive surplus, absorbing ten times our CO2 emissions. To achieve what we already have, our politicians are wasting billions and billions.
Plimer argues we should become the centre of every CO2 emitting industry in the world. After all, if a politician is under the delusion that CO2 is a pollutant and that it’s going to change the climate, he or she should campaign to locate heavy industry, smelting, metal manufacturing, in Australia.
Plimer’s thinking is impeccable. Why is he being silenced? Why don’t the global warmists try to prove this eminent scientist wrong? Is it because they cannot?
Asked what he would do if he were in power, he says he would stop subsidies and get rid of ‘foolish policies’ that as soon as you have electricity from wind or the sun, coal-fired power stations are to be blown up.
Rejecting claims about fossil fuel, he’d repeal legislation banning nuclear energy. Wholesale electricity contracts would be for the life of a nuclear power station, 80 or 100 years, to protect investors from politicians trying to stop them from providing cheap and reliable electricity ‘24/7, 365 days a year’.
Professor Plimer is right. What climate crisis indeed?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/australia-has-already-achieved-net-zero/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Thursday, March 16, 2023
Greta Thunberg is yet another false prophet
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg has deleted a 2018 tweet saying that climate change would 'wipe out humanity' unless the world ceased using fossil fuels by 2023.
The Swedish campaigner had tweeted an article by gritpost.com detailing Harvard University professor James Anderson's warning that humanity would cease to exist if use of fossil fuels was not stopped within five years.
Thunberg's now erased post stated: 'A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.'
The article on gritpost.com - whose website no longer exists - quoted Anderson, an atmospheric chemistry expert, where he argued there would be 'essentially zero' ice left in the Arctic by 2022.
It is unknown when exactly the tweet was deleted, but it was captured by internet archive Wayback Machine last week on March 7, just before 10pm.
The WayBack Machine also captured some of the replies to Thunberg five years on from the tweet. One user asked: 'It's been five years GT, what's up?'
Another wrote: 'Is this the afterlife? I thought it'd be... better.' A third wrote: 'Why are we still here?'
Many high-profile conservatives have been quick to taunt the environmentalist over the apparent gaff - something Thunberg is not averse to after past run-ins with Andrew Tate and Donald Trump.
Charlie Kirk, the founder of right-wing group Turning Point USA tweeted: 'One of the best headlines of the year so far... 'Greta Thunberg deletes 2018 tweet saying world will end in 2023 after world does not end.''
Conservative film maker Dinesh D'Souza also tweeted: 'Climate Radical Greta Thunberg Caught Red Handed: Deletes 2018 Tweet That Says World Will End Without Action by 2023.'
**************************************************
Antarctic Sea Ice: ‘The beginning of the end!’ – again
There is a small recent dip but nothing dramatic
The great sleeping giant that is Antarctica that — apart from the Antarctic Peninsula — refuses to respond to global warming may just have begun to stir, and the implications are, well, apocalyptic.
According to CNN “Antarctic sea ice hits record lows again. Scientists wonder if it’s “the beginning of the end.” CNN also reports that, “90% of ice around Antarctica has disappeared in less than a decade.”
CNN are not the only media outlets to report on this years’ record low sea ice around Antarctica in apocalyptic terms, other media extremists are available. For Sky News it’s the accelerating melt of polar regions. For the BBC “There is now less sea-ice surrounding the Antarctic continent than at any time since we began using satellites to measure it in the late 1970s.” All this is technically true, but misleading. When it’s put into context one sees a different picture.
So let’s have a look at the actual satellite data of Antarctic sea ice collected monthly since 1979. The NSIDC gives two data sets for what it calls i) sea ice extent, and ii) sea ice area. So let’s examine both of them.
The first graphs is sea ice area, the second sea ice extent.
From the empirical data it is evident that there is hardly any change of sea ice over the 44-year time span. Since 2016 there is a dip with possibly more variability (of which more later), and the lowest month (February) does show a record low, but by hardly anything (and also look at the data for 1992). Does this actual data look like the beginning of the end to you? Where is CNN’s 90% loss or Sky News acceleration?
Antarctic sea ice evolution has no significant trends along the whole period, but a volume drop is observed since 2016. Some scientists say there was a rapid decline in 2015/16, and record minima because believing that this ice loss marks an abrupt transition from a high to a low ice state that cannot be explained by year-to-year variability. Such a change is possibly associated with a long-term variability arising from ice–ocean feedbacks. Some evidence for this is that the transition was preceded by an increasing upper Southern Ocean density stratification, and an accumulation of heat at the subsurface; suggesting a decoupling of the surface from the subsurface ocean. In 2015/16, the upper ocean density stratification in the ice-covered region suddenly weakened, leading to a release of heat from the subsurface, contributing to the sea ice decline during winter. Perhaps this is a significant change in the coupled circumpolar ice–ocean system. Time will tell.
One could say that this prime example of science miscommunication is the fault of the NSIDC scientists and their comments posted on their website which were taken by journalists, and repeated without analysis or true context. So much of science journalism these days consists of “turning around” a press release.
************************************************
Woke, go broke: Vanguard ditches ESG investing
The world’s second largest asset management firm, Vanguard, with $8 trillion AUM, has pulled out of the ESG madness.
This is massive.
I recently pondered the question, ‘Is it possible that we are winning?’ and hailed Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open win as an omen of a turning of the tide in the war against globalism and Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.
But I also remarked on other more tangible signs of the faltering program of global homogenisation that would see national sovereignty surrendered to world government, and individual freedom sacrificed to the greater good of ‘climate justice’ and ‘DEI’ (diversity, equity, and inclusion) – signs such as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover (ostensibly to restore free speech to the platform), the fall of Jacinda Ardern (significant, but not to be overstated), the rise of the Freedom Caucus in the US House of Representatives, and the rather lacklustre showing by global elites at this year’s annual World Economic Forum junket in Davos.
These signs and many more suggest that people are waking up to the social engineering, and they don’t like it.
Paul Joseph Watson this week discussed a recent UK poll that showed nearly half of the British public believe LGBTQ+ people and ethnic minorities are over-represented on television (which they are, both in the UK and throughout the West). What’s striking about this is that a previous poll showed British people believed 20 per cent of the UK population was black (it’s actually only 3 per cent) and that 30 per cent was LGBTQ+ (it’s only 3 per cent). This new YouGov poll suggests a recalibration in public perception has occurred.
It now seems people are catching on to the ESG scam too.
ESG (environment, social and corporate governance) is a credit score system for corporations dreamed up at the UN and WEF and enforced by the world’s asset management behemoths such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity, just to name the top three. The ESG matrix attempts, by withholding investment capital, to force companies into adopting ‘sustainable’ business practices which benefit not only shareholders, but ‘stakeholders’ also (for stakeholder read: any class of professional victim the establishment wishes to use as a political pawn). These ‘sustainable’ practices include things like carbon offsetting, hiring of ‘minorities’, and enforcing an equal gender split in senior management and on boards of directors.
This is all part of Klaus Schwab’s concept of ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’, which is really just communism rebranded and refitted to benefit those who are already super rich, and it has gained pre-eminence in the past decade. All those TV ads you see that bang-on about ‘sustainability’; those puff pieces in the corporate media about LGBTQ+ Pride; the weird focus on gender, race, and sexual identity in your workplace; the sudden politicisation of your favourite sport … it all comes from ESG.
ESG is what underpins the new religion of Wokeness – it is a centralised, top-down program designed to reorganise the global economy and permanently transform society. Even the credulous sceptics in the culture war, who laugh at me and the rest of the ‘tinfoil hat brigade’, ought to be wary of ESG and the impact it is having on their retirement funds.
ESG has completely dominated almost every aspect of our lives for at least five years. Most people have been largely unaware of its very existence, instead putting the recent tidal wave of identity politics and climate hysteria down to natural grassroots political upheaval; for more on this check out my article The Mistake Everyone Makes About Wokeness.
People are waking up though.
As Terrence Keeley recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley ‘knows that Vanguard can’t promise to be a fiduciary to its clients while also committing to align its assets with the 2050 Net Zero target. Signatories to such initiatives effectively commit to reducing their volume of investments in companies not aligned to the Paris Agreement without ever knowing how much of the global economy will be compliant or investable’.
Finally, some common sense from the financial sector! Buckley’s withdrawal from the $59 trillion Net Zero Asset Managers initiative suggests he’s done with the ESG program as a whole and is an overdue breath of fresh air not only for regular working folk whose life savings and retirements are under threat from this absurd fusion of Marxism and capitalism, but for the world at large for, as noted above, ESG is in everything now.
Delightful though it is to witness the humiliation of the sanctimonious commissars of globalism, we can take small comfort from such news for, as Investment renegade Tom Luongo concedes, it represents nothing more than gang warfare of the most rarefied kind. But as he also points out, the lesser of two evils is always preferable, and I for one would be much more comfortable continuing to live under the yoke of the devil we know, than overhauling the entire system in the image of Klaus Schwab’s glorious Reset.
With Vanguard now joining this interesting alliance, the cracks in the edifice are really beginning to show. Like Jamie Dimon, we must not conflate Buckley’s reticence with some latent form of heroic populism or love for the little man. Vanguard is apparently jumping ship for selfish reasons, but I believe it is not without regard for popular sentiment.
Consider Buckley’s stated reasons for getting out of ESG: ‘Our research indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing.’ He’s saying that he can’t fulfil his fiduciary responsibilities within this framework. Well, Tim, that should have been perfectly obvious to you from the start.
When I first heard about ESG, I knew immediately that the ludicrous ideological tenets it espoused would have virtually zero correlation with profitability. If I, a lowly copywriter and aspiring novelist knew this, then surely the CEO of the world’s second largest asset manager knew it.
By all means, Tim Buckley is getting his company out of ESG for practical, fiduciary reasons – get Woke, go broke – but why has it taken this long? I suspect there’s another reason he’s pulling out. I suspect he’s seen the writing on the wall. I suspect that the rising tide of public consciousness around ESG and all its offshoots is making him nervous.
Much like we’re now seeing major institutions distance themselves from the lockdowns and the masks and the vaccine mandates as the truth begins to seep out, the big financial fish are starting to question the wisdom of going all in on this radical new agenda.
I suspect Tim Buckley wants to take a step back and see which way the wind blows for the next couple of years. Because the fact is, people are waking up. The word is out, thanks in no small part to people like US Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (he breaks the issue down succinctly in these two short clips from Timcast IRL: here and here) and, as always, the oddball Boomers who run the world have underestimated the power of the internet – it’s small wonder, most of them probably still think we get our news from CNBC like they do.
Just this last week I received my annual client satisfaction survey from my asset management company (the New Zealand government forces us to save for retirement but does not allow us to manage our own funds, as is possible here in Australia, so I still have a portion of my retirement savings under institutional management back home).
One of the questions was: ‘Did you know that we consider ESG when investing your money?’
I had been anticipating this question, as they asked it last year as well, only back then I was less impassioned about the whole thing and merely told them I thought ESG was corporate communism. This time I let them have it with both barrels.
‘You are mismanaging my money,’ I told them. ‘You are in dereliction of your fiduciary responsibility and when this whole sorry scam is finally exposed, you will be held accountable.’
I wonder, has Tim Buckley been receiving similar feedback from Vanguard’s customer satisfaction surveys?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/get-woke-go-broke-vanguard-ditches-esg-investing/
**************************************************"Red Alert" for 900,000 car workers in Germany as EU plans to ban combustion engine
The Bosch works council and the IG Metall union are reacting to the EU decision to phase out combustion engines from 2035 and are announcing a works meeting at ten locations in Germany. There is fear of massive job cuts, Bamberg's works council chairman, Mario Gutmann, told the "Bayerischer Rundfunk".
Many employees are also worried about the possible relocation of production facilities abroad. Gutmann warned that parts for combustion engines are manufactured in Germany which are unusable after the EU ban from 2035 at the latest.
Two thirds of the approximately 6,300 employees in Bamberg are currently concentrating solely on the production of parts for combustion engines.
Martin Feder from the IG Metall union issued a "red alert" and warned: "The future of industrial production is in danger." This is not only felt at Bosch, but applies to many companies. 900,000 employees are currently involved “directly and indirectly” in the production of combustion engines in Germany.
Feder cites the actions of the car manufacturer Ford as a cautionary tale. Almost 2,300 jobs are to be cut in Cologne and Aachen. Meanwhile, Ford is already building a new factory in the US that will cost several billion dollars. Ford soon wants to produce batteries for electric cars there.
Thanks to subsidies and tax breaks, the USA and China are particularly strong promoters of production in their own countries. The head of the Bamberg works council, Gutmann, warned about the resulting de-industrialization in Germany.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
There Is No Energy Transition, Just Energy Addition
As Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright explained in his viral video a few weeks ago, dishonest terminology surrounds the climate debate. One of these terms is “Energy Transition”. The term’s use gives the impression that there exists a quick, easy and scalable alternative to eliminate fossil fuel use without serious impact on people.
Current primary energy distribution by source, and forecasts by organizations like the EIA in their International Energy Outlook 2021, show that this “energy transition” is non-existent. As you can see in the title graph above, and also in Liberty’s ESG report on Bettering Human Lives, on a net basis no present quantity of primary energy generated by fossil fuels is currently replaced by renewables. A couple of headlines from the report that you don’t hear a lot:
Global primary energy use is about to grow by almost 50% between 2020 – 2050 as impoverished people rise from poverty;
Oil consumption rises in all EIA scenarios. In their “Reference Scenario”, oil consumption rises at about 1 million bopd/year for the next 30 years, almost the same steady yearly increase of the last 5 decades;
Natural gas consumption will continue to growth through 2050.
The reason for this growth is simple: fossil fuels are abundant, cheap and efficient to provide reliable and dense energy at scale. They have helped to generate a quality-of-life revolution for a portion of humanity, and people in poverty who have missed out on this blessing rightfully want what you and I already have.
Sadly, few report on this blessing we take for granted. Good news about renewables breaking records, however, is widespread and often inflated. There are a few marketing strategies renewable advocates have used that make it appear as if renewables have a larger market share than they really do:
First, using the word “energy” or “power” when they mean “electricity”. Take this Reuters report as an example: “Renewable energy is expected to account for around 46% of German power consumption this year….” This sounds like Germans are running on renewables for almost half of their energy needs. But this is JUST for electricity. According to the BP Statistical Review and graphed below by OurWorldInData.org for world electricity vs primary power, worldwide electricity represents only 17% of all primary power. That’s also where is currently stands in Germany. In 2021, Germany’s top three primary energy sources were oil, natural gas and coal.
Second, reporting renewable records without mentioning they only last a short time. As an example, this article boasts renewables powering 85% of Germany’s electricity needs. But like electricity's primary power sources reported in the plot below by Timera Energy, records in wind and solar don’t last very long, and there are times when they don’t provide anything at all. Fossil fuels are there to back them up. Energy reliability is a marathon, not a sprint.
Third, reporting power capacity, not energy output. Renewables really shine using this metric because they don’t work most of the time. If you have ever spent time in western Europe, you will know that the sun there, like most Europeans, only has a 32-hour work week, while it gives little heads up when it will show up. What to do during the remaining 136 hours that week? You need to build a lot of power capacity to harvest a little energy. As per BP Statistical Review, the world capacity factor is only 14% for solar and 26% for wind. Therefore, if you see a historical power capacity growth curve, divide the solar curve’s slope by 7 and the wind curve’s slope by 4 to get energy output. Consumers pay for MWh, not MW.
Lastly, lumping in “traditional biofuels” to boost the share of renewables as part of total energy needs. These traditional biofuels kill millions of people yearly through PM2.5 particle release during indoor cooking. If there is an “energy transition” humanity needs ASAP, it is the transition from the traditional renewable cooking fuels to clean-burning fossil cooking fuels.
These unfair reporting methodologies have led to confusion and a belief that an “Energy Transition” is currently in the making. It is not.
The EIA primary energy forecast for the next 30 years shows that ALL sources of energy are growing. While renewables are expected to comprise a larger fraction of a growing pie, fossil fuels are expected to grow more in absolute terms.
Recently, a spark of sanity has returned to the debate about nuclear power. For a reliable, cost-effective, low-carbon and scalable energy transition, we need to take the path proposed by Robert Bryce in his book Power Hungry. In the near-term, we need more natural gas, which reduces our CO2 footprint and is cheap, reliable and abundant. For the long-term, we need to build nuclear energy, hopefully eventually nuclear fusion. Before that, let’s hope a spark of sanity returns to the discussion about the “Energy Transition”.
***************************************************
Now Biden's Coming For Your Washing Machine, New Regulations Could Ruin Laundry Day Forever
Biden’s Energy Department last month proposed new efficiency standards for washing machines that would require new appliances to use considerably less water, all in an effort to “confront the global climate crisis.” Those mandates would force manufacturers to reduce cleaning performance to ensure their machines comply, leading industry giants such as Whirlpool said in public comments on the rule. They’ll also make the appliances more expensive and laundry day a headache—each cycle will take longer, the detergent will cost more, and in the end, the clothes will be less clean, the manufacturers say.
The proposed washing machine rule marks the latest example of the administration turning to consumer regulations to advance its climate change goals. Last month, the Energy Department published an analysis of its proposed cooking appliance efficiency regulations, which it found would effectively ban half of all gas stoves on the U.S. market from being sold. The department has also proposed new efficiency standards for refrigerators, which could come into effect in 2027. “Collectively these energy efficiency actions … support President Biden’s ambitious clean energy agenda to combat the climate crisis,” the Energy Department said in February.
While the Energy Department—which did not return a request for comment—acknowledged in its proposal that “maintaining acceptable cleaning performance can be more difficult as energy and water levels are reduced,” it expressed confidence that Whirlpool and other appliance manufacturers can comply with its regulations without sacrificing stain removal and other performance standards. For the Heritage Foundation’s Travis Fisher, however, manufacturer concerns over the proposal are justified.
“When you’re squeezing all you can out of the efficiency in terms of electricity use and water … you by definition either make the appliance worse or slower,” said Fisher, who serves as a senior research fellow at the foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment. “Why are we so focused on the energy output, as opposed to if it’s helping me wash my clothes? That standard has kind of gone off the rails.”
Beyond the performance standard debate, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers argued that the Energy Department’s washing machine regulations “would have a disproportionate, negative impact on low-income households” by eliminating cheaper appliances from the market. The Energy Department estimates that manufacturers will incur nearly $700 million in conversion costs to transition to the new machines.
Biden and his Democrat buddies won’t rest until your life is totally miserable.
*********************************************
Germany leads renewed calls to oppose Europe’s 2035 new petrol and diesel car ban
The German government has formed an alliance with six countries to push back on the European Union’s proposed effective ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035, centring its case around synthetic fuels, according to overseas reports.
Last month, European Parliament members approved a proposal which would effectively bring an end to the sale of new petrol and diesel cars – also referred to as internal-combustion engine (or ICE) vehicles – from 2035.
While a vote by the European Union to enact the laws is considered a formality in proceedings, the process was delayed last week after the German government entered talks with the EU over the allowance of synthetic fuels, which would mean new cars powered by petrol or diesel could continue to be manufactured and sold after 2035.
According to news agency Reuters, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia support Germany’s proposed concession to allow synthetic fuels to keep combustion engines alive.
"The (EU) proposal needs changes urgently," German transport minister Volker Wissing told news agency Reuters. "A ban on the combustion engine, when it can run in a climate-neutral way, seems a wrong approach for us."
As previously reported, German car-maker Porsche has been at the forefront of synthetic petrol development – where carbon is captured from the atmosphere and recycled into fuel – having spent more than $US100 million ($AU144 million) on biofuels since 2020.
German car giant BMW (and its sister brand Mini) and Italian marque Lamborghini have also been investing in separate synthetic fuel projects, while Ferrari has reportedly also been pushing for the adoption of synthetic fuels as a carbon-neutral alternative.
When the proposal was passed by the European Parliament in February, low-volume car-makers were granted an extra year to meet the new emissions rules – allowing manufacturers which produce fewer than 10,000 vehicles per year until 2036 to comply with the regulations.
As reported last week, the German Government has also expressed concerns over the proposed 'Euro 7' laws, which would require a significant reduction in tailpipe emissions by 2025.
These regulations have been signalled by many manufacturers as making it no longer feasible to produce small and affordable petrol-powered city cars from the middle of the decade.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/germany-opposes-europe-2035-petrol-diesel-car-ban/ ?
*********************************************
Net Zero Watch has welcomed the decision by the Bank of England to demote its Net Zero agenda and cut its spending on climate change
According to reports, the bank’s climate programmes will be downgraded so that officials can return to work on its main remit, namely the nation’s financial stability.
The bank has been widely blamed for allowing inflation to rocket to more than five times the bank’s 2% target.
Its obsession with climate change, promoted and pushed through by its former governor, Mark Carney, in tandem with government ministers, has for years distracted it from its main responsibilities. Instead, it has been enforcing ESG disclosure guidelines, carbon-testing balance sheets and promoting Net Zero policies.
During his time as Governor, Net Zero Watch criticised Mr Carney repeatedly, warning that his climate activism and his intimidation of financial institutions and pension funds into costly Net Zero targets would eventually lead to policy failure and a distressed correction. This correction appears to have now begun.
Last year, Net Zero Watch criticised the Bank’s so-called ‘climate stress test’, which used discredited projections of a global temperature change of 3.3°C by 2050, far exceeding even the IPCC’s much-criticised SSP5-8.5 scenario.
Dr Benny Peiser, Net Zero Watch’s director, called on the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority to accept that the risk of costly climate and Net Zero policies have become a bigger threat to the UK’s economy and financial stability than climate change.
"Unless the Bank of England abandons its fixation with green virtue-signalling, it is only storing up more problems for the economy and the UK’s financial system."
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Air Pollution, Mass Killer or Mass Fraud?
Over the years I have examined here many research reports which claimed to show harm from air pollution. Not one was methodogically sound. The article below adds to the evidence that air pollution as we normally encounter it does no harm
Fine particulate matter in outdoor air, also called PM2.5, is the most toxic substance known to man. PM2.5 is responsible for 8 million, or one-in-seven deaths per year on a global basis. A single molecule can kill within just a few hours of inhalation. Or at least that what environmental and health regulatory agencies around the world claim.
PM2.5 is so dangerous that no one noticed it until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started trying to regulate it in the early 1990s. PM2.5 kills, in fact, no one. A point that is easily demonstrated and will be done so here. That we still must talk about PM2.5 is a testimony to the stubborn commitment of regulatory agencies to science fraud.
What is PM2.5?
PM2.5 is fine airborne soot and dust. A PM2.5 particle is about one-twentieth the width of a human hair. The soot form of PM2.5 is emitted by all forms of manmade and natural combustion: from fossil fuel plant smokestacks; truck and automobile exhaust pipes; and furnaces, fireplaces and barbeques to wildfires and volcanoes The dust form of PM2.5 exists as pollen, pet dander, dust and mold. Smokers of all sorts inhale PM2.5 in massive amounts, especially compared to PM2.5 levels in outdoor air. You may think that last point condemns PM2.5 as a killer. But it actually is the among the best evidence that PM2.5 doesn’t kill anyone.
What is the history of PM2.5 regulation?
Having eliminated virtually all large and visible particulate matter from US skies by the late 1980s and having established a massive regulatory program in the proicess, the EPA hit on the idea of regulating smaller PM2.5 to keep its regulatory bureaucracy going.
In the late-1980s, the EPA began funding PM2.5 research at the Harvard University School of Public Health. In 1993, the Harvard group issued an epidemiologic study of six cities in the US claiming to associate higher PM2.5 levels with higher death rates. Another larger EPA-funded study reaching the same conclusion was published in 1995.
These studies caught the eye of EPA’s legally mandated panel of independent scientists and experts (the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council or “CASAC”) who asked EPA for the raw data so that it could review the studies. The agency refused to provide the data. A subsequent request from Congress for the data was also rebuffed.
Based on these two studies, EPA proposed for the first time in 1996 to regulate PM2.5 in outdoor air. The agency claimed that its new regulations would prevent 15,000 deaths in the U.S. per year. As EPA valued human lives at the time at 5 million dollars each, the agency claimed that saving these lives would provide $75 billion worth of economic benefits to the economy per year.
When called upon to review the scientific basis of the proposed rule in 1995, CASAC balked and stated there was insufficient evidence showing that PM2.5 killed anyone. Although the EPA was legally required to obtain the advice of CASAC, the law does not require that the agency accept CASAC’s conclusions. And the EPA did not.
The agency proceeded to regulate PM2.5 for the first time anywhere on the basis that PM2.5 kills. Its success in issuing these regulations emboldened and empowered the agency over the next 15 years to convert and an unknown killer into the most potent killer known to man. The EPA used these claims in a series of regulations during the Obama administration that destroyed 50 percent of the U.S. coal industry.
Does PM2.5 kill anyone?
The EPA, of course, knows that PM2.5 doesn’t kill anyone. Here’s how we know that, too.
Recall that the EPA’s crusade against PM2.5 was launched by the previously-mentioned 1993 and 1995 epidemiologic studies. Epidemiology is the statistical study of disease in human populations, the key part of that description being “statistical.” I could spend pages and pages describing the flaws in EPA’s data and statistical analysis, but your eyes would gloss over and it’s unnecessary thanks to EPA.
In 2012, a group with which I am affiliated, sued EPA for conducting illegal human clinical research experiments involving PM2.5. By the early 2000s, EPA had concluded that any exposure to PM2.5 could kill in a matter of hours and that elderly and sick people were most at risk. To prove its point, conducted numerous experiments on elderly and sick people in which diesel exhaust from a truck was pipelined into an actual gas chamber where the human guinea pigs inhaled very high levels of PM2.5 for hours at a time. This was illegal because researchers are not allowed to conduct Nazi-like experiments where the purpose is to cause harm, especially without the informed consent of the human guinea pigs.
In its defense to our lawsuit, the EPA stated that it conducted the PM2.5 experiments because the PM2.5 epidemiology was only statistics, and as all researchers know, statistics only demonstrate correlation and correlation is not the same as causation. The EPA told the court that the human experiments were needed to establish needed biological plausibility for the claims of the epidemiology studies.
The EPA’s unequivocal admission that epidemiology alone was an insufficient basis to conclude that PM2.5 kills obviates any further need to consider the many significant flaws of the PM2.5 epidemiology.
And what were the results of those clinical experiments?
Despite exposing hundreds of elderly (as old as 80) and sick people (with asthma and heart disease) to extraordinary levels of PM2.5 (as high as 75 times the level in average US outdoor air), not so much as a gasp, wheeze or cough, much less any death, was reported. The clinical research, in fact, provided not an ounce of biological plausibility to the (dubious) epidemiology.
There is one last important point to make about EPA’s PM2.5 epidemiology. Recall that EPA refused to produce to the CASAC and Congress the raw data used in the epidemiology studies it funded. Frustrated by this most unscientific refusal to share data, I sought a way around the EPA refusal and discovered one.
The state of California provides vital statistics, such as death certificates, to researchers. The state also has the best and most localized air quality readings that can be readily matched to the death certificates. After obtaining some of these death certificates and related air quality data, I did a rough epidemiologic study of my own to see if deaths were in fact correlated with PM2.5 levels. They were not.
I subsequently convinced prominent and expert researchers to obtain 12 years-worth of California death certificate and air quality data and do their own rigorous study. Their study of all deaths in California between the years 2000 to 2012 (more than 2 million) reported no correlation between PM2.5 and death.
Although PM2.5 levels in Chinese and Indian cities can reach quite high levels e.g., 100 times average outdoor levels in the US no actual deaths are ever reported. The reason for this is that the level of acidic gases always remains in a safe range. Simply inhaling PM2.5 alone kills no one.
https://junkscience.com/2023/03/pm2-5-mass-killer-or-mass-fraud/
******************************************************US to drill for oil in Alaska as Biden OKs $8B Willow Project, 180K barrels a day
The Biden administration on Monday approved a massive oil drilling project in Alaska that is sure to put the president on a collision course with far-left factions of his Democratic Party.
The Willow Project has come under fire from environmental groups, who are already accusing President Biden of reneging on campaign promises to battle climate change and end drilling on public lands.
Some Republicans, meanwhile, lauded the move by Team Biden to finally do something to offset the rising cost of gasoline and start to make the US energy-independent.
Under the plan announced by the Department of the Interior, Houston-based ConocoPhillips can drill at three sites on Alaska’s North Slope — about 219 wells in all — but the federal agency denied the company’s proposal for another two sites.
ConocoPhillips, which is seeking to develop oil and gas leases it purchased in the 1990s, will also have to give up rights to about 68,000 acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
The $8 billion Willow Project, according to the company, could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day and create as many as 1,800 jobs during construction and 300 long-term jobs, as well as generating billions of dollars in royalties and tax revenues for the state and federal government.
While the project enjoyed widespread support in Alaska, it has been the subject of an aggressive social media campaign by environmental groups.
The Biden administration has also been under increasing political pressure to ramp up domestic energy production after historic highs in gasoline prices.
The Natural Resources Defense Counsel said in a Twitter posting that it would continue to fight against the project.
”It’ll escalate the climate crisis and lock us into decades of dependence on Big Oil executives hell-bent on destroying the planet. The fight isn’t over and we will consider every tool available to stop this climate bomb,” the organization said.
Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement that by giving the Willow Project the green light, the Biden administration has “made it almost impossible to achieve the climate goals they set for public lands.”
The environmental group also addressed the administration’s attempt on Sunday to offset the blowback it would receive for approving the ConocoPhillips plan by preventing or limiting oil drilling in 16 million acres in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean.
“While we celebrate the administration’s unparalleled protections for Alaskan landscapes and waters, the decision to approve the Willow Project may very well wipe out many of these climate and ecological benefits,” Jealous said.
“And by approving one of the largest oil and gas extraction projects on federal public lands, one must ask the question what the Biden administration has in store for the Arctic Refuge,” he said.
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) called the Willow Project “critically important” to the state’s economy and national security.
“Producing much-needed American energy in Alaska with the world’s highest environmental standards and lowest emissions enhances the global environment,” Sullivan said in a statement.
Alaska’s other GOP senator, Lisa Murkowski, said approval of the project is a “huge and needed victory for all Alaska.”
”This project will produce lasting economic and security benefits for our state and the nation,” she said on Twitter.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/13/biden-greenlights-8-billion-oil-drilling-project-in-alaska/
**********************************************************Greenies no longer want to save the whales
For about twenty years the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC] engaged the US Navy in a legal battle over the effects of the Navy’s use of Mid Frequency Sonar in training exercises and its impact on marine mammals and other creatures, with one case even reaching the US Supreme court. While there are many different aspects of NRDC’s legal actions, the results of the litigation have produced an enormous amount of scientific data and research regarding the effects of underwater sound on marine creatures, with an emphasis on Sonar and marine mammals.
They forced the Navy to admit that their use of sonar had resulted in the unintentional mass strandings of many different marine Mammals in a dozen different instances around the world, primarily involving Beaked whales, that are classified as being low to mid frequency cetaceans. These mammals communicate, navigate and feed using low to mid frequency sounds.
While this series of lawsuits resulted in the recognition of the harm that high powered Sonar can cause to marine creatures, it did not address the issue of the damage that lower sound levels can cause. This also coincided with a growing recognition that the amount of human caused noise in the natural marine environment was reaching a dangerous level, and was having impacts on the creatures that reside there, which may be worse that many of the more visible signs of pollution.
The efforts of NRDC regarding the damaging effects of Naval sonar has saved the lives of many marine creatures by forcing the Navy to comply with the many US laws that protect the environment. They have become one of the worlds leading experts on the effect of noise on marine mammals, yet
curiously they remain silent on the issue of the recent strandings of Whales along the US east coast, as coincidently research vessels using low frequency sonar have inundated the area for geological mapping of the seafloor and substrates for industrial wind power turbines. A group that was so concerned about saving the Whales from underwater noise, has conveniently forgotten their concern because that noise is created by vessels employed by wind companies. Those companies and the US government have worked in unison to deny any link at all between the recent strandings and the work being done for offshore wind development. High level US officials have categorically denied that there is any evidence of the noise being produced having a detrimental effect on marine mammals despite decades of work in regard to the harm being caused by human produced noise in the marine environment. Existing science suggests the link is there.
In a paper by NRDC’s Joel Reynolds, titled “Submarine’s, Sonar, and the death of Whales”, published by William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Revue [vol. 32:759] in 2008, Reynolds writes; “There is no longer a serious scientific debate about the connection between sound and marine
mammal mortality. A range of experts, from the international Whaling Commission’s {IWC} Scientific committee [2004 report] to the U.S. Navy’s own commissioned scientists, have agreed that the evidence linking mass strandings to mid-frequency sonar is “convincing” and “overwhelming”. Consultants retained by the Navy concluded that the evidence of sonar causation is in our opinion, completely convincing and that therefore there is a serious issue of how best to avoid/minimize future beaching events.
Potentially related strandings have occurred repeatedly around the world, with stranded animals found with bleeding around the brain, emboli in the lungs, and lesions in the liver and kidneys, symptoms resembling a severe case of decompression sickness, or the “bends”. Because these injuries occurred in the water, before the animals stranded, scientists are concerned that Whales turning up on shore may represent only the tip of the iceberg, with substantially larger numbers dying off-shore. Other sources of noise, such as the airguns used in seismic surveys, may have similar effects.”
The paper also has this statement; “Though a prominent focus of public concern and reporting in the media, these stranding events represent only one manifestation of injury related to exposure to intense noise. Indeed, it is the cumulative impact that these stressors have on the behavior of marine mammals, particularly in already depleted populations, that may pose the greatest threat; what has been called a “death of a thousand cuts”. Because marine mammals depend on sound to navigate, find food, locate mates, avoid predators, and communicate with each other, flooding their habitat with high intensity, anthropogenic noise poses a substantial risk of interference with these and other activities”.
Footnoting this point; NRDC’s Michael Jasny, quoted Dr. Sylvia Earle’s “death of a thousand cuts “, and stated that “preliminary attempts at modeling the energetics of marine mammals [the amount of energy an animal has to spend to compensate for an intrusion] suggest that even small alterations in behavior could have significant consequences for reproduction or survival if repeated over time”.
Further in the document are these statements; “Also in November 2005, the parties to the Convention on Migratory Species [CMS] passed a resolution naming marine noise among six human threats to cetacean populations. The resolution calls on the CMS’s Scientific Council to assess whether marine noise is adequately addressed in the convention’s threat abatement activities.”
“The UN General Assembly established an “Ad Hoc Open-Ended Informal Working Group to study issues relating to the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction” [i.e. on the high seas] In February 2006 that working group convened its first meeting, where it recognized ocean noise as a “growing human pressure” that requires urgent action through international cooperation and coordination.”
Lastly, starting off the recommendations section of the paper is this; “The accumulating scientific evidence of noise-induced harm, including mass strandings of marine mammals around the world, is a wake up call to a significant environmental problem. While its complexity precludes a simple
or an immediate solution, some progress has already been made, both domestically and globally. But much more is clearly needed now, at a point where meaningful and effective solutions can have an impact BEFORE the problem proliferates out of control, it’s causes intractable and it’s impacts
irreversible”.
This last sentence is critical, because we are already near the point where long term damage from the multiple noise sources involved in the production of offshore wind energy is intractable, and its impacts to marine mammal populations irreversible. Extinction is forever.
Many marine mammal species migrate annually along the North American coast and they have had to adapt during their lifetimes to a growing amount of human created noise, some of it deadly. It has created a high stress life for them with a confusing array of sounds including low frequency noise from distant sonar and seismic testing, which can trigger fight or flight responses. Repeated stress responses can be detrimental physiologically to animals and could lead to premature death. The average life span of every species of Whales along the US coast has dropped dramatically in the last few decades, coinciding with the rise in human produced noise in the marine environment. Have Whale species in the North Atlantic reached the tipping point in how much human produced noise they can withstand and still survive, or have they passed the point of no return with the recent introduction of almost relentless noise from low frequency sonar research vessels along the coast?
NOAA and BOEM are closing their eyes to science and scientific protocol in regard to the recent Whale strandings. They ignore a growing mountain of evidence indicating that many species of whales are more sensitive to sound then previously thought, with research showing tagged Cuvier’s beaked
Whales responding to only 89 dB re 1 u Pa. A paper published by Frontiers in Marine Science, entitled; “Impacts of Navy Sonar on Whales and Dolphins: Now beyond a Smoking Gun? By E.C.M. Parsons in 2017 cites numerous recent studies showing Whales sensitivity to sound is greater than believed, and he reasons then that the US harassment levels of sound are far higher than they should be, with TTS and PTS being reached at lower levels then acknowledged. Almost all of the research that’s been done has admitted to not having enough science to be certain of any effects of under water noise but they all urge the use of the Precautionary Principle in regard to its possible effects. This important paragraph highlights that:
“The importance of not delaying conservation action when a concern exists, but scientific data and analysis have not incontrovertibly established the threat exists, i.e. “the precautionary principle”, has been enshrined in a number of international laws [Hey,1991] including the 1992 Convention on
biological Diversity [Principle 15 of the so-called “Rio Summit”]. Because of this level of uncertainty and difficulty in establishing beyond a reasonable doubt trends and threats in cetacean populations, it has been argued that in order to effectively conserve and manage populations one must be precautionary, as otherwise catastrophic declines in cetacean populations could occur before science catches up with the problem”.
We only have one last chance to save the North Atlantic Right Whale from extinction, scientific protocol calls for us to make the most of it. Endangered marine mammals are facing a survival crisis that is complicated by the increase in human made noise, which may even have more population level effects then ship strikes and fishing gear encounters. The sheer enormity of Biden’s offshore wind projects dwarfs in size and scope any previous usages of the marine environment throughout history, its effects are bound to be enormously destructive to the entire marine ecosystem of the east coast. No one should be able to ignore science just because it doesn’t suit their purposes.
https://fisherynation.com/noaa-and-boem-ignorance-is-bliss-by-jim-lovgren
**************************************************Renewables: the more you have, the more you pay for backups
Cold, still weather in the UK this week triggered high demand for electricity at a time when wind turbines were idling. That forced National Grid to use a back-up coal(opens a new window)-generation plant for the first time this winter.
Depending on Mother Nature for electricity means accepting her inconsistencies. Back-up is required, and keeping it available has a cost.
In the US, electricity demand is on average 15 per cent higher during July than January according to the US Energy Information Agency. In the much cooler UK, a government study during 2012-2013 revealed that demand rose 36 per cent in the winter.
Lex charts showing the mix of UK’s electricity generation and the penetration of intermittent renewables
Intermittent supply adds to the challenge of balancing the grid. Wind and solar power made up 31 per cent of the Texas grid’s capacity last year, up from 9 per cent ten years prior. That intermittency is a vulnerability.
Indeed, an unusually cold snap in early 2021 forced a system increasingly dependent on intermittent power into blackouts. That prompted calls for more nuclear and gas-fired power plants. Consumers would pay, though it could add just $2 on a typical $100 power bill, say power researchers E3.
Lex charts showing how gas-fired power generation will still be needed to cover demand peaks in 2030
In contrast, UK power needs are reasonably well anticipated via capacity auctions. Run by government, these aim to provide generation for expected demand. A recent auction for capacity in 2026/27 cost £5.7bn over the 15-year period of the longest contracts, according to analysis by Aurora Energy Research. Consumers also pay for this, partly through the environmental levies which can make up a quarter of bills.
Power capacity differs from “firm” power capacity, Lambert Energy Advisory points out, depending on reliability and intermittency. In winter months, the UK government gives the accolade of “firm” to gas-fired turbine power plants at 90 per cent of capacity, wind at 9 per cent and solar at under 3 per cent.
Consumers end up paying to build little-used firm power capacity. The conundrum is that the greater the overall share of renewables in the energy mix, the more customers will have to spend on these largely redundant backups.
https://www.ft.com/content/91d341f8-b945-4f3a-85b2-ba738a5b4f2f
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Jim Hansen and his twin
