Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths
Harvard Environmental Law Review, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2024

This could be brilliant. A complete defence would be to show there is NO dangerous climate change. And a court of law would have to consider the evidence on that. And the evidence tracing deaths to climate change is non-existent. It's all just theory. So a ruling on this could put the whole climate change myth to bed. Bring it on!

Abstract

Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions cause unintentional deaths, as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths. Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that what they produced, marketed, and sold would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change. Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations, they worked to deceive the public about these harms and to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct. They funded efforts to call sound science into doubt and to confuse their shareholders, consumers, and regulators. And they poured money into political campaigns to elect or install judges, legislators, and executive officials hostile to any litigation, regulation, or competition that might limit their profits.

Today, the climate change that they forecast has already killed thousands of people in the United States, and it is expected to become increasingly lethal for the foreseeable future. Given the extreme lethality of the conduct and the awareness of the catastrophic risk on the part of fossil fuel companies, should they be charged with homicide? Could they be convicted? In answering these questions, this Article makes several contributions to our understanding of criminal law and the role it could play in combating crimes committed at a massive scale. It describes the doctrinal and social predicates of homicide prosecutions where corporate conduct endangers much or all of the public. It also identifies important advantages of homicide prosecutions relative to civil and regulatory remedies, and it details how and why prosecution for homicide may be the most effective legal remedy available in cases like this. Finally, it argues that, if our criminal legal system cannot focus more intently on climate crimes—and soon—we may leave future generations with significantly less for the law to protect.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4335779#

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‘Climate Change’ Now Top Priority for US Navy

With both China and Russia restive, this is a huge failure. Both Russia and China have substantial navies and they now seem to be in alliance

In a stunning, but not altogether surprising statement, America’s top Navy official declared that “fighting climate change” is a “top priority” for the U.S. Navy. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced this last week not at the Pentagon or the U.S. Naval Academy, but at a conference in the Bahamas.

It is likely that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting this week in Moscow to discuss closer military cooperation, shared a high five on hearing the Navy Secretary’s declaration.

Del Toro’s admission that strengthening America’s dwindling fleet of naval ships is no higher a priority than is “embracing climate-focused technologies” was not totally unexpected.

Since taking office two years ago, President Biden repeatedly has stated that “fighting climate change” is and will remain his top national security priority. This was made crystal clear in an October 2021 presidential “Fact Sheet” directed to our nation’s military, foreign policy, and national intelligence leaders.

Rather than resist such a priority directive, the Navy Secretary joined other top Defense officials and saluted their Commander-in-Chief’s warped policy decision; one that will further weaken our country’s defenses. Making matters worse, Biden’s latest defense budget submission to the Congress proposes a 40 percent increase in “climate spending” and a net decrease in the number of operational ships in our Navy’s fleet, continuing a troubling trend highlighted in the Administration’s FY 2023 budget proposal.

Such cuts reflect what one military expert refers to as “seablindness” — a short-sighted policy accounting for America’s shrinking dominance of the world’s oceans, a strength on which we and the entire Free World have relied since World War II.

In an insightful analysis just published in The Atlantic (“The Age of American Naval Dominance Is Over”), former Navy officer Jerry Hendrix chronicles the many shortcomings in our country’s civilian and naval shipbuilding capabilities, even as Russia and China aggressively continue to expand theirs.

In one striking example, Hendrix notes that Russia maintains a robust fleet of Arctic ships and has been moving in the direction of unilaterally declaring parts of the Arctic Ocean within its territorial waters, while the U.S. “has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s.”

Also questionable is our capability to quickly or timely build needed ships, considering the small number of U.S. shipyards capable of constructing such massive and complex vessels (as Hendrix notes, there remain only one dozen such “graving docks” certified to build or work on Navy ships).

Elsewhere, China has embarked on a massive, multi-year expansion of its Navy and is asserting claims to large swaths of the East and South China Seas.

Currently, neither of our two adversaries’ navies come near to matching our overall naval capabilities, especially when it comes to our premier warship the aircraft carrier. But our failure to expand, much less retain, a commitment to domestic maritime and naval shipbuilding, has created a long-term weakness in being able to protect oceanic trade routes on which we and almost all other nations increasingly rely.

Budget cuts by the current and prior administrations of both political parties, especially the Clinton administration, purposefully reduced the number of defense contractors able to build modern naval vessels, and policies have favored development and modernization of air power over naval power. The resulting slippage in the number of operational naval vessels in our fleet, now down to 293, imperils our ability to project power in the decades ahead and also to maintain the freedom of the oceans for commercial purposes.

One facet of naval power in which the United States maintains a clear advantage over every other maritime power is in the number of foreign bases and port facilities available to our ships; but even here, China is moving to close that gap. While China has a long way to go in this regard, it is aggressively expanding its reach on the west coast of Africa, and continues to use its “civilian” shipping company, Cosco, to build and operate container port facilities in areas long allied with the United States, including Israel, western Europe, and South and Central America.

If the United States continues the folly of focusing on “climate change” rather than taking concrete short and long-term steps to counter Chinese and Russian moves to assert sea power interests adverse to ours, we and the entire Free World will pay a heavy price in the decades ahead.

https://townhall.com/columnists/bobbarr/2023/03/23/climate-change-now-top-priority-for-us-navy-n2620991

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The Dutch attacks on nitrogen emissions

Visitors to dairy farms are always well advised to watch their step. Those inspecting the three dozen milking cows kept by Minke van Wingerden and her team have more to fear than landing in manure: the entire farm is set up on a floating platform, docked a 20­minute cycle ride away from Rotterdam’s central railway station. One wrong step and you will wind up spluttering in the Nieuwe Maas river—as a couple of the cows have discovered (firemen fished them out of the harbour). Forget vistas of the placid Frisian countryside: these animals spend their days overlooking tankers and trucks unloading wares at Europe’s biggest port. Throughout the day schijt­scooping robots scour the milking area, keeping it clean. On two lower floors of the barge, the cows’ output is variously turned either into cheese or fertiliser.

Ms Van Wingerden’s Floating Farm is the apotheosis of centuries of Dutch thinking about how to grow lots of food in a crowded corner of northern Europe. Since the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, land has been reclaimed from the sea and windmills erected to drain the plains. Town­size greenhouses are built to grow tulips or vegetables. A food shortage during the second world war convinced the Dutch they needed to grow as much as their fields could manage. Calvinist industriousness turned the Netherlands into an unlikely agrarian powerhouse: with more than €100bn ($108bn) of annual farming sales overseas, it is the world’s biggest exporter of agricultural products after America, a country more than 250 times its size. Some of that is re­exported imported food.

But the Dutch make twice as much cheese per head as France.

Two questions have long dogged Dutch farming. The first is whether quantity made up for quality: having tasted the tomatoes, cucumbers and chilies grown in its hyper­efficient greenhouses, one may be forgiven for not being able to tell them apart. The second is whether its approach made any sense. The Netherlands is the most densely inhabited country in the EU bar tiny Malta; officials joke it is a city­state in the making. Efficient as its farmers may be, the sector is a footnote to the modern Dutch economy, employing just 2.5% of workers. Countries usually pick between having lots of farms or lots of people. The Dutch approach was to have their Gouda and eat it. That has landed both farmers and politicians in a heap of natural fertiliser.

Limits to the Dutch model of turbo­farming have been suspected for decades. Already in the 1980s, authorities realised that importing lots more animal feed would result in lots more animal excrement. Yet the limits of the land kept being tested: each acre of Dutch farm supports four times as many animals, by weight, as others in Europe. The result of all those digestive tracts has been a surfeit of excreted nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants but one that in excessive quantities can destabilise ecosystems. Cars and industry emit nitrogen compounds too. All this has contributed to damaging the soil and polluting waterways. Flora that thrive on excess nitrogen have been killing off plants that would otherwise manage to compete for resources. That in turn has knock­on effects, not all of which scientists understand.

Ernst van den Ende of Wageningen University, a food­research hub, says there is not much wrong with individual Dutch farms, which are often models of sustainability. The problem is that there are too many of them, pumping out too much nitrogen. For more than a decade there have been efforts (mostly ineffectual) to cut back such emissions to meet EU rules that protect nature reserves. But in 2019 things came to a head. A decree from the highest Dutch court gave wishy­washy laws unexpected bite. Every activity that led to nitrogen being produced—including the construction of buildings, roads and other infrastructure—would henceforth require cuts in nitrogen elsewhere. The country has a housing shortage, but new building has been throttled by the rule. Daytime speed limits on motorways were cut from 130kph to 100kph in the hope that lower emissions might let other bits of the economy keep going. Schiphol airport, one of the world’s busiest, resorted to buying farms to shut them down so planes could take off.

The crisis has been all­encompassing. A bastion of free­market liberalism in Europe has morphed into something akin to a planned economy, with a “Minister for Nature and Nitrogen Policy” as lead commissar. In the end, it became clear a piecemeal approach would not cut it. Last year a sweeping plan to halve nitrogen emissions by 2030 was unveiled. The government said it would pay €24bn to buy out as many as 3,000 big emitters, meaning mostly farms. Livestock numbers would be cut by nearly a third. The era of ever­increasing agricultural exports was over.

Strangely, even in a country bursting at the seams, picking people over cows turns out to be politically fraught. The prospect of buyouts or expropriations fuelled farmer protests across the country. (Think burning hay­bales and nitrogen­rich animal matter dumped on motorways.) Last week the revolt hit the ballot box. A newish party representing farmers triumphed in local elections on March 15th, topping the polls that elect the nationwide senate as well as regional governments. The farmers’ party got 1.5m votes, 19% of the total, in a country that employs just 244,000 people in agriculture. City­dwellers backed it out of a nostalgic attachment to farmers and resentment against nagging authorities. Whether the government can force through its nitrogen cuts is up in the air.

Other countries are heading for nitrogen crises too; neighbouring Belgium, also pretty crowded, already has one. But the wider parallel is with carbon emissions, which Europe plans to cut to “net zero” by 2050. That will demand adaptations well beyond what the Dutch have experienced with nitrogen. The Netherlands, a generally well­run place, has made a hash of adapting its economy to ecological constraints it knew about for decades. That does not bode well for everyone else.

https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/23/the-cucumber-saudis-how-the-dutch-got-too-good-at-farming

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Woke Dem-Led Colorado City Bans New Gas Stations to Fight 'Climate Change'

A Democrat-run city in Colorado is taking it into its own hands to try and fight so-called "climate change" by banning all new gas stations in the area.

City councilors in Louisville passed an ordinance limiting the number of gas stations allowed to operate within the city to just six.

Legislators claimed they felt the decision was necessary to combat "global warming."

"We have an obligation to take every step possible to address the changes to our climate that are ravaging our planet and directly impacting the health, well-being, and livelihoods of the constituents we represent in Louisville,' council member Maxine Most told Fox News.

In the unanimous vote, the ordinance also mandates gas stations to be at least 1,000 feet apart from one another while requiring each one to install "electric vehicle (EV) fast charging stations for any expanded, modified or new gasoline or automobile service station equaling 20% of the number of gasoline pumps at the stations, with no fewer than two such charging stations."

Although Most admitted the proposal wouldn't end "climate change," she still advocates for the small town to continue with the plan anyways, saying she does not want to create additional fossil fuel infrastructure.

According to the ordinance, "gasoline station bans may also be seen as promoting the use of Electric Vehicles (EVs), thus, reducing vehicle emissions and encouraging low-carbon and cleaner energy options for transportation."

The town, which has about 20,000 residents, laid out goals such as meeting the city's municipal electricity needs with carbon-free sources, generating 75 percent of the town's residential, commercial, and industrial electric needs with carbon-free sources by 2030, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Earlier this month, the Louisville Sustainability Advisory Board recommended the city limit the number of gas stations to five, pushing people to switch from fuel-powered cars to electric vehicles.

Colorado is not the only blue state to push such measures. California Democrats banned the sale of new gas-powered cars beginning in 2035 also to get people to hop on the electric vehicle train.

https://townhall.com//tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/03/22/woke-dem-led-colorado-city-bans-new-gas-station-to-fight-climate-change-n2621001

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports reveals Great Barrier Reef could be destroyed

This is a thoroughly dishonest piece of reporting. It takes scenarios that the IPCC deems highly unlikely (3C+ warming) and treats it as if it were probable. It's just blatant propaganda from a fanatic below

The Great Barrier Reef could be destroyed and Queensland could endure extreme weather conditions if the planet warms more than 3C, a new report has revealed.

A United Nations report by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change warned that time may be running out for the world to only warm by 1.5C, saying it was already at 1.1C.

The report details what changes a rising temperatures would bring to Australia.

If they increaee by 4C globally, Australi’s temperaturs could possibly surge by 6C, meaning the potential for 50C days.

Director of Griffith University Climate Action Beacon Professor Brendan Mackey said to make sure the dire effects of global warming won’t happen we need to transition away from fossil fuels and accelerate to clean energy.

“Each government has made a pledge of policies and programs to achieve mitigation which is what the current government propose,” Prof Mackey said.

“If you add all the commitments it would limit global warming.

“A global warming of three would mean the end of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it,” he said.

“Every increment of warming, that makes it hard for everyone. For Queensland it would mean much heavier impacts for agriculture, huge impacts for Great Barrier Reef.

“If you have a temperature of 40C, it’s life threatening and the doctor would send you to hospital, when we talk about levels of warming a healthy temperature would be 0 above pre-industrial levels.”

Prof Mackey said the Reef couldn’t handle the amount of choral bleaching that would occur.

Prof Mackey said things were heating up fast. “That means we are going to see a big increase in climate impact, an increase of severity of extreme weather events,” he said.

“For Queensland this is interesting, as it is highly exposed to extreme weather events.”

“It would mean more heavy flooding, we will have more of everything that’s bad when it comes to weather.

“Every increment of warming, that makes it hard for everyone.”

But Prof Mackey said the report also revealed there was still opportunity to cap the amount of climate change and limit it at 1.5C.

“It’s really Queensland’s interest to prevent further climate change, while Queensland has a lot of fossil fuels, it also has the minerals that it needed for clean energy, there’s a huge opportunity to become a clean energy powerhouse,” he said.

“What the report is saying for Queensland is that climate change is going to get worse than its better. That’s going to be more climate risk for Queensland.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change-reports-reveals-great-barrier-reef-could-be-destroyed/news-story/a84013275ac983b1e53e37845f33e721

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Biden's EPA Is Lowering the 'Environmental Justice' Boom on Louisiana's Disputed 'Cancer Alley'

LAPLACE, La.―Along Interstate 10 where the Mississippi River threads from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, ever-expanding petrochemical and other industrial projects have long been fought by environmental activists, who have saddled the stretch with the disputed moniker “Cancer Alley.”   

Now the Biden administration is opening a new front in the war -- against a proposed expansion of the sector in St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes known to Louisianians as the River Parishes. Under its stated aims of “equity” and “environmental justice,” the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to block state-issued permits for two new complexes – while renewing objections to an existing plant – all on grounds of a negative “disparate impact” on minority populations in the area.

In a novel application of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which allows the federal government to defund entities found to discriminate based on race, creed or national origin – the EPA is threatening to withhold millions of dollars in general federal grants to Louisiana unless it enters into an “informal resolution agreement.” This would give federal regulators wide latitude to control a process currently run by Louisiana agencies.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry calls the move a breathtaking regulatory overreach, noting that the state has complied with existing environmental regulations.

But the EPA has notified Louisiana that it has subjected the state’s permitting process to a “civil rights analytical framework.” Just what that framework is, who wrote it and when are unclear, according to Landry’s office, and the EPA declined to discuss the matter or answer questions, citing the pending agreement and legal challenges.

Some light emerged last December, however. In a phone call between Landry’s office and EPA officials, Mary O’Lone, an agency attorney, said the problem in Louisiana isn’t any traditional environmental hazard. In state documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations, she said “compliance with environmental law does not guarantee compliance with Title VI.” The EPA team conducting the civil rights analysis said there was “no specific action at issue” but rather “the cumulative impact from [the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s] overall action.”

The new approach is being met with skepticism from critical attorneys familiar with environmental laws.

“This is not the way the EPA typically operates, and it looks like they are trying to expand their authority by using their muscle without clear authorization from Congress to infringe on a state permitting agency,” said Jeff Clark, who served in the Trump administration in the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division and is now with the conservative Center for Renewing America. “There is no authorization to apply cumulative impact analysis to Title VI regulations.”

“I've never seen this," said Steve Milloy, an attorney who has written extensively about what he and others characterize as EPA overreach. "Environmental justice is a hoax and the EPA has no statutory authority to pursue it with permits. The EPA is pushing the envelope here to see what it can get away with. They are trying to strongarm the state.”

At issue is the permitting process covering a cluster of seven existing plants in the River Parishes. The two pending projects would mark a huge expansion. The first is a $9.4 billion Formosa Plastics complex in St. James Parish, the second a $400 million grain terminal in St. John the Baptist Parish. In addition, an existing plant is being targeted by the EPA in its Title VI allegations: the Denka Performance Elastomers factory, which has been in St. John Parish for decades and has been partly owned by a Japanese company since 2015.  

Responding to the agency in January, Louisiana Assistant Attorney General Joseph Scott St. John wrote that “the EPA seems to be using complaints about two specific facilities as a springboard to a larger area.”

Issuance of the Formosa permit is already under legal challenge in Louisiana, where in an unprecedented ruling a district judge tossed it on “environmental racism” grounds last September. That ruling is under appeal.

The Denka plant is the nation’s only domestic producer of neoprene, a synthetic rubber used in surfers’ wetsuits, cell phone cases, and medical and military equipment. And environmentalists and the EPA are zeroing in on a chemical essential to neoprene production: chloroprene, which, they insist, is a dangerous carcinogen.

While studies have shown it can be a carcinogen in animals, scientists only suspect that it is cancerous in humans as well. An agreement reached in 2015 reduced by 85% the amount of chloroprene in the air, which, all sides agree, is released only intermittently. A state permit at the Denka plant that incorporates the regulations is currently pending.

For decades activists have alleged that the petrochemical industry is responsible for cancer in the local population, especially minorities. In 1997, however, the Journal of the Louisiana Medical Society found almost no evidence that the incidence of cancer was higher in the River Parishes than in the rest of the United States.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/03/23/bidens_epa_is_lowering_the_environmental_justice_boom_on_louisianas_disputed_cancer_alley_888605.html

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Canada: scientists discover new method to break down toxic ‘forever chemicals’

Researchers at a Canadian university have made a breakthrough they hope will dramatically shorten the lifespan of the thousands of toxic “forever chemicals” that persist in clothing, household items and the environment.

Scientists at the University of British Columbia announced on Wednesday they had developed a new silica-based material with ability to absorb a wider range of the harmful chemicals, and new tools to break them apart them.

“This is very exciting because we can target these difficult-to-break chemical bonds – and break them for good,” said researcher Madjid Mohseni, who focuses on water quality and water treatment.

The chemicals, also known as PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are used for non-stick or stain-resistant surfaces, including clothing, cookware, stain repellents and firefighting foam. But they are also notoriously difficult to break down naturally, giving them the name “forever chemicals”.

In recent years, scientists have found the chemicals, which were once assumed to be harmless, are also linked to elevated cholesterol, hormonal disruption, infertility, cardiovascular disease and cancers.

“They attach to the proteins in our blood and can accumulate in our bodies, particularly in the liver and the kidneys. And the older you are, the more PFAS you have in your body,” said Amira Aker, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Laval who was not involved in the UBC research. “And we can also pass the chemicals to a growing fetus, so even newborn babies have PFAS in their bodies from the moment they are born.”

While Canada has joined other nations in banning the manufacture of the chemicals, they are still found in household appliances and cosmetics and when discarded, can leach into the environment.

“We still don’t actually know how long some of these PFAS compounds will take to break down, because they were created back in the 1940s and they still exist within the environment,” said Aker.

Current technologies often use activated carbon to filter out the chemicals, but are largely only able to target what researchers call the “long-chain” versions of PFAS – those with more than six carbon bonds. Following recent bans, however, industry has shifted to creating “short-chain” iterations of the chemical.

“[Those versions] are equally toxic and they stay in the water better. And as a result, current technologies like activated carbon really aren’t as effective,” said Mohseni.

Most household water filters use activated carbon – and as a result, miss a wide range of possibly harmful chemicals.

His team also found that the current filters concentrate the absorbed chemicals, creating a “highly toxic” form of waste that consumers throw into the garbage.

Such filters “are not addressing the problem. We’re just temporarily fixing it and letting those chemicals stay in the environment,” he said.

To combat the deficiencies in combatting PFAS, the team has developed a new silicate absorbing material that captures a far wider range of chemicals. The thin material can also be reused repeatedly.

To destroy the chemicals, Mohseni says researchers use either electrochemical or photochemical processes to break the carbon-fluorine bond. The team first published their findings in the journal Chemosphere.

Mohseni says the technology could be used to combat the chemicals, both in drinking water, as government agencies bring higher standards in, and at industrial sites where high concentrations of the chemicals are released into water supplies.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/22/canada-toxic-forever-chemicals-pfas-researchers

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Why Britain has big plans to join the rush for small modular reactors

Sixty years ago, small nuclear power plants were the next big thing. A United States army promotional film from 1963 features square-jawed scientists and earnest GIs cooing over the ML-1, a reactor that could go anywhere on the back of a truck and provide power without need for resupply. “Epitaph for an unsuccessful operation,” says the narrator, in a Walter Cronkite baritone, “out of gas!”

The army’s portable atomic stations were meant to ensure no operation ever ran out of gas. Unfortunately they did not fulfil their promise, and the programme was shut down in the 1970s. A similar fate befell America’s flirtation with small civilian power plants.

Now small reactors are all the rage again. This time they are being touted as powerful potential weapons in the fight against climate change. Governments around the world are investing billions of pounds to push ahead with new designs; private investors, including Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, are piling into what they believe will be a lucrative market.

Britain is trying to secure its place in the rush. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, used last week’s budget to announce a competition to select a design for a small modular reactor — an SMR — for use in the UK. The successful applicant or applicants will be chosen by the end of the year and will receive co-funding from the Treasury.

The contest is part of what would be a substantial expansion of the UK’s nuclear fleet. Hunt said he wanted nuclear to provide one quarter of electricity by 2050, up from the 15 per cent provided by the current ageing plants, many of which will be decommissioned in the intervening years.

There is no standard definition of an SMR, but typical designs produce up to 400 megawatts, enough to power 400,000 homes. Traditional large nuclear plants have much higher outputs. The station being built by EDF at Hinkley Point in Somerset, for example, will generate 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, eight times as much.

More details of the competition are expected at the end of the month, but industry executives expect the government will commit to taking on close to half of the development costs of a prototype. There is also speculation that the government will underwrite construction of the first commercial plants with a contract to buy power at a guaranteed price — or that the funding of a station could be paid for from a levy on consumer bills.

It is thought that about six companies or consortiums will submit bids. The race is likely to pit the domestic champion Rolls-Royce, the aero-engine maker, against European and American contenders.

Regardless of how many companies enter, there is no shortage of interest in the UK among international constructors. “We are very happy with the idea of a competition, and we look forward to seeing what is proposed. We would like, though, to go ahead even without government funding,” said Stefano Buono, chief executive of Newcleo, a start-up in London that will announce plans today to raise €1 billion in equity.

“In general promoters like the UK because there is public support for nuclear power, and support across political parties too,” said Jeff Navin, director of external affairs at TerraPower, which is backed by Bill Gates.

“We look forward to working with the government,” said a spokesman for NuScale, an American company that has a design approved by the US nuclear regulator. Nuscale is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker “SMR”.

Small reactors have floated back to the top of the energy charts on the tide of renewed interest in nuclear power. After the initial enthusiasm of the 1960s and 1970s, governments and utility companies lost interest because of high costs and the risk of serious accidents — a fear stoked by the partial meltdown of a reactor in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and a more serious disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986.

These worries have been set against the need to tackle climate change. Nuclear power generation does not produce carbon dioxide, and, unlike wind and solar, is not intermittent.

Advocates of SMRs say their smaller size means they can be installed in a greater range of sites, in clusters where more power is needed, and can largely be built on factory production lines, eliminating many of the cost overruns that have dogged the building of large plants. Detractors point to the eventual failures of previous efforts to develop SMRs, and the potential higher cost than rival forms of generation.

Those issues have not deterred a rush of interest in the past five years. It is estimated that about 60 different SMR designs are at various stages around the world, split between established nuclear power companies, governments, universities and start-ups. China and the US both have large government-backed programmes. Britain has put money into the Rolls-Royce effort, and promised a wider programme, but progress has been held up by delays in setting up Great British Nuclear, an agency that will co-ordinate the government’s efforts.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-britain-has-big-plans-to-join-the-rush-for-small-modular-reactors-bjsjw7njx

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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The UN’s Newest Climate Report Is A Woke Dumpster Fire Masquerading As Science

Like clockwork, the United Nations is out with yet another climate report, and the usual suspects are already blaring the global warming alarm sirens.

The New York Times warned the planet is on track “to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade” and the only way to “hold global warming to relatively safe levels” would “require global cooperation, billions of dollars and big changes.”

The Associated Press declared the world is on “thin ice” due to warming. The BBC characterized the UN report as a “survival guide” — if we don’t follow it, we’ll see “the worst effects of climate change.”

The alarmist frenzy was joined by prominent scientists, eco-activists, Democratic politicians and even the UN chief himself, who called the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb.

In other words, the media, elites and the scientific establishment want you to take this report very, very seriously. The problem is no one who actually cares about sound science should give it the time of day.

Any scientific credibility the new UN report might have otherwise had is immediately called into question by its extensive use of “woke” buzzwords.

Variations of the words “equity” and “inequity” appear 31 times in the 36-page document. Variations of “inclusive” and “inclusion” appear 17 times. The document even mentions “colonialism” and repeatedly refers to climate and social “justice” for “marginalized” groups.

“Equity,” if you remember, is that word then-candidate Kamala Harris famously described as a system where “we all end up in the same place.” Sounds a lot like socialism, doesn’t it?

The UN report also contains an entire section titled “Equity and Inclusion,” which states “[e]quity remains a central element in the UN climate regime.” The report goes on to state that “[r]edistributive policies … that shield the poor and vulnerable, social safety nets, equity, inclusion and just transitions, at all scales can enable deeper societal ambitions and resolve trade-offs with sustainable development goals.”

In other words, the “woker” the policies, the better. How’s that for science?

Now, if you think “equity” is a fundamental pillar of scientific knowledge, then this is the report for you. But if you’re like most people and don’t think far left political priorities have a place in scientific documents meant to advise policymakers, this should alarm you.

No reading between the lines is necessary to decipher the real goal of this new UN report. In fact, the report’s accompanying press release is quite explicit about its goal: “Taking the right action now could result in the transformational change essential for a sustainable, equitable world.”

The release goes on to quote one of the report’s authors, who says: “Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected.”

Sounds like political science, not climate science.

Another author calls for “prioritizing climate risk reduction for low-income and marginalized communities, including people living in informal settlements,” adding that “[i]nsufficient and misaligned finance is holding back progress.” (RELATED: CARLA SANDS: Biden Admin Is Dazed And Confused When It Comes To American Energy)

The report’s scientific rigor is further called into question by its insistence that warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times represents a catastrophe. There is precisely zero verifiable, peer-reviewed science supporting a 1.5-degree climate threshold, but there’s tons of research on the staggering costs of complying with UN models.

One 2020 study in Nature found the cost of meeting the 1.5 degree goal would be “5 trillion dollars per year in 2020.” Given it’s 2023, the price tag is likely even higher.

An analysis by McKinsey & Company illustrates just how meeting the UN’s goal means more than shelling out trillions to overhaul global energy supplies. They note “a 1.5-degree pathway would imply a large dietary shift: reducing the share of ruminant animal protein in the global protein-consumption mix by half.”

Sounds like a dream for wannabe dictators. And they seem more than willing to peddle junk science in order to get it.

https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/21/opinion-the-uns-newest-climate-report-is-a-woke-dumpster-fire-masquerading-as-science-michael-bastasch/?mc_cid=5a1ee69a29&mc_eid=cc88839e92

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UN climate study proves the fight to lower global temps won’t work

Here we go again — another climate-change doomsday warning about the world’s failure to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. In reality, though, Monday’s report from the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change just highlights the absurdity of the climate war.

“By 2030,” it asserts (with just “medium confidence”), global temps “could exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850-1900 with a probability between 40% and 60%.”

And?

Well, limiting warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) is a key goal of climate warriors, though it’s a fundamentally arbitrary figure and past plans to achieve it were always a joke.

Naturally, the New York Times headline left no doubt: “Earth to Hit Critical Warming Threshold by Early 2030s, Climate Panel Says” — though the story did concede that a 1.5°C rise hardly spells Armageddon.

The UN folks say the world (er, wealthier nations) need to shell out three to six times as much as they are now on “climate action” to keep global warming between 1.5°C and 2°C.

Yet it’s only the West that’s chasing this goal. China, for one, last year issued 168 permits for coal-fueled power plants with a capacity equivalent to two large facilities a week, per the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. New construction on such plants soared 50% from the year before.

Beijing is adding new emissions faster than Western nations can reduce their own, at great cost to their economies.

India, too, has continued spewing emissions apace.

Temps are already up by 1.1°C compared to the late 19th century, the UN report notes. And for all the progress reducing CO2 output, “the challenge has become even greater” than flagged in the last report in 2018.

Anyone want to bet the IPCC’s next “assessment” likewise sees the “challenge” greater still?

Truth is, when push comes to shove, the costs of global warming don’t come anywhere close to the mind-numbing price of trying to halt it (if that’s even possible).

Climate warriors want to upend the entire global economy, reduce living standards in the developed world (though they pretend the “transition” will be a winner) and stop the developing world from developing.

China and India refuse to go along except in lip service; Western elites caught in a quasi-religious fervor are simply refusing to face facts, at huge cost to the non-elite majority. Yet if the world does nothing, climate change will slow economic growth only slightly.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore climate change, but the answer is in encouraging innovation, not sending us back to the Dark Ages. All the screaming is as useless as any other fit of hysteria.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/20/un-climate-study-proves-the-fight-to-lower-global-temps-wont-work/?mc_cid=5a1ee69a29&mc_eid=cc88839e92

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Eco-dread is a luxury belief we can no longer afford -- Climate-change hysteria is a menace to the lives and interests of working people.

Here we go again. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a new document – the final part of its mammoth sixth report – and we all know what that means. More doomsday porn in the papers. More shroud-waving from eco-agitators. More warnings of imminent apocalypse. The climate cult has not disappointed. Our world is on the ‘brink of catastrophic warming’, cries the Washington Post. We’re headed for ‘climate disaster’, warns the BBC. The ‘climate time bomb’ is ticking, says UN secretary general António Guterres. In short, the countdown to doom continues. Unless we repent of our eco-sins, we’ll cause the heat death of our celestial home.

It’s always like this. Every IPCC report gives rise to Revelations-style hysteria in elite circles. Its 2021 report – which gave a ‘code red’ warning to humankind – was heralded as a vision of the horrors that await humanity if we do not drastically cut our carbon emissions. The future will be ‘some kind of hell on Earth’, said an Oxford professor. Behold the ‘climate crimes’ of our species, wailed the Guardian, like a modern-day version of those potty millenarian preachers of old. The Biblical vibe was palpable. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, said a writer for the Hill. This view of humankind as being one new coal power station away from doom has found expression in response to the latest IPCC report, too. Humanity is on ‘thin ice, and that ice is melting fast’, quipped Guterres.

It all just washes over you after a while, doesn’t it? They’re the boy who cried apocalypse. Though at least the wolf in that fable did turn up eventually. I confidently predict that the eco End Times feverishly envisioned by the likes of Extinction Rebellion – who insist ‘billions will die ’ – will never materialise. Indeed, the IPCC says nothing even remotely as apocalyptic as that. As Michael Shellenberger has pointed out, pore over the thousands of pages of IPCC analysis and nowhere will you find the claim that ‘life on Earth is dying’. ‘No credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilisation, much less the extinction of the human species’, says Shellenberger.

As to the now mainstream belief that climate change will intensify ‘weather of mass destruction’, causing more deaths in natural disasters, ‘the science’ on that is also far from clear-cut. The IPCC only says it’s ‘likely’ that human influence is driving some instances of heavy rainfall, for example. It expresses only ‘medium confidence’ that climate change has impacted on water availability in parts of the world. Confidence is ‘low’, it says, that flooding on a global scale has been shaped by man’s impact on the climate. What we can be confident of, though, is that fewer people are perishing in natural calamities. As Shellenberger says, ‘In 1931, 3.7million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did.’ And that brilliant decline in death happened at a time when the human population quadrupled. Maybe that ice we’re skating on isn’t so thin after all.

Speaking of ice, recent studies suggest there has been a stabilisation and even growth in the Antarctic ice shelf, that thing we’re constantly told is disappearing thanks to dastardly mankind. The Great Barrier Reef is doing pretty well too, in defiance of the numerous obituaries eco-doomsters wrote for that natural wonder (a 2014 piece in the Guardian was literally titled ‘The Great Barrier Reef: an obituary’). The ozone layer is recovering nicely. Green hysterics are wrong about everything. The End of Days that keeps them up at night never materialises. No wonder Greta Thunberg deleted that tweet in which she shared the harebrained claim that ‘climate change will wipe out all of humanity’ if we don’t ‘stop using fossil fuels over the next five years’. A tweet she posted… five years ago.

Let’s be clear about this: nothing that resembles science says that all of humanity will be wiped out unless we stop using fossil fuels. That is delirium, a frenzy of existential fear, a medieval-style dread of terrible heavenly punishment for our hubris, which is about as far from science as you can get.

There was a line in the Guardian this week about the IPCC’s latest report that made it pretty clear that there’s a difference between what the IPCC says about climate change and what the doom-addicted media say about climate change. This vast tract ‘took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages’, said the Guardian, but it can be ‘boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late’. Call me a cynic, but I reckon a lot of things are lost in translation when thousands of pages of complex scientific discussion are ‘boiled down’ to a juvenile one-line slogan designed to panic the masses into behaviour change.

This is not to let the IPCC off the hook. Its dense tomes might be free of XR-style fever dreams about billions of deaths and Greta-style warnings of all of humanity being wiped out. But the IPCC’s treatment of climate change as the gravest challenge facing mankind is a problem. It has a warping effect on our political priorities, implicitly downgrading issues like global poverty or deaths from disease by dragging our gaze, always, to climate. And it lends legitimacy to the crankier bell-tolling of the green movement. Indeed, those one-liners spun by António Guterres – ‘code red for humanity’, ‘the alarm bells are deafening’, ‘humanity is on thin ice’ – do nothing to challenge the terror-mongering of green talking heads, and a lot to inflame it.

Indeed, the latest IPCC document makes a preposterous demand of developed countries – that they should aim for Net Zero by 2040 rather than 2050. Apparently we should devote ourselves to achieving that expensive, anti-industry, anti-jobs goal of Net Zero 10 years earlier than planned. Here is the entire problem with the climate-change obsession – it’s the luxury belief we can no longer afford. This new IPCC report, like its 2021 predecessor, has landed in a time of crisis. In our post-lockdown era of soaring inflation and energy shortages, we can ill-afford to carry on indulging the late-bourgeois fantasy that modernity is a planet-killing force. We can no longer nod along to this petrified ideology that bears a great deal of responsibility for today’s energy problems and for the stalling of development in poorer parts of the world. Luxuriant apocalypticism, with its provision of a sense of mission to our lost elites, might have been just about tolerable in good times – it’s a non-starter in bad times.

The true conflict today is not between humankind and Mother Earth. It’s between the needs of ordinary people and the fantasies of a global elite that dolls up its loss of faith in industry and progress as ‘climate-change activism’. That tension will explode soon. We should hope it does, anyway.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/21/eco-dread-is-a-luxury-belief-we-can-no-longer-afford/?mc_cid=5a1ee69a29&mc_eid=cc88839e92

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Hypocrite Biden blocks mineral mining his clean-energy goals require

President Joe Biden claims he wants America to lead in “clean energy” production, but he’s again blocking American producers from developing the critical, rare-earth minerals to make it happen.

The federal government owns huge chunks of America’s West, home to critical minerals like lithium essential to technologies like electric-vehicle batteries — yet Biden blocks their development beneath federal lands.

Biden banned access Tuesday to nearly 514,000 acres of public lands, including a new national park in Nevada, Avi Kwa Ame.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo says Biden failed to consult him before this designation, though the Silver State contains massive lithium deposits.

This is particularly frustrating because Nevada is a whopping 80% federally owned — compare that to New York, less than 1%, Pennsylvania (home to robust shale drilling) 2.2%, South Dakota 5.4% and Texas only 2%.

Blocking the critical mineral mining required to meet Biden’s “clean energy” goals denies reality — the mining infrastructure isn’t there.

China dominates, with around 80% of the market for mining these minerals, and undermines human rights to do so, through child and slave labor.

By the way, “clean energy” requires minerals mined using acid drainage, wastewater runoff and other environmentally sensitive factors, a big reason US resources have gone untapped.

“We believe it’s hypocrisy across the board. It’s illogical across the board, and it’s harming Alaska and the United States. Not everybody is buying their story that they’re really wanting to produce critical minerals,” Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy told me by phone.

“I’d be the first one to praise the Biden administration if I did see it, but all we see are a continual series of actions against Alaska’s ability to develop its resources, including minerals.”

Alaska is 61% federally owned, and Dunleavy pointed to Biden’s preemptive veto, through the Environmental Protection Agency, of the Alaskan Pebble project, which the governor said contains an estimated $1 trillion worth of copper — potentially the largest copper mine in the world. (It was blocked for supposedly endangering salmon streams.)

The governor said federal agencies stymied Alaskans trying to build a road to the Ambler mining district.

“It’s a continual fight with these guys,” Dunleavy said.

Dunleavy noted America’s energy-production regulations are more stringent than those of market leaders China and Russia.

He expressed disappointment about a Biden White House June 2021 report referencing critical minerals, a 250-page missive that mentions Australia 60 times and Canada 32 times but Alaska only once, as a footnote.

Last week, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise introduced HR 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act, which aims to revive America’s energy producers, in part through permitting reform for critical minerals.

Scalise told me he wasn’t surprised by the Biden energy report highlighting foreign countries ahead of Alaska and other US states.

“President Biden has made it clear from Day One, when he declared war on American energy, that he would rather make our country dependent on other countries for energy and critical minerals than making it here in America,” Scalise said.

“The energy costs are through the roof in part because President Biden’s made us dependent on foreign countries by shutting America down when it comes to energy production and critical minerals. It’s lunacy.

“But that’s the Biden agenda

https://nypost.com/2023/03/22/biden-blocks-mineral-mining-his-clean-energy-goals-require/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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"Christian" Warmist says all their disaster prophecies were not wrong

She appears to be claiming that the carbon-control policies that were adopted have prevented the prophesied disasters. Just one problem with that. The policies have NOT reduced or even slowed the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere. See the graph below

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe discussed a recent United Nations report that warned about the impact of global warming on Monday's "PBS Newshour."

"PBS Newshour" invited climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to discuss climate change predictions following the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Monday.

The IPCC, an organization of experts convened by the United Nations, published an extensive report warning about the disastrous effects that global warming predictions are expected to have on humanity by the early 2030s. Many social media users have called out these claims, pointing out that past climate doom predictions have been wrong for decades.

However, Hayhoe insisted the predictions were not wrong and instead the "uncertainty" comes from humanity.

"The previous predictions were not wrong. The uncertainty is us. The predictions were for what will happen depending on the choices we make. Prior to the Paris Agreement in 2015, the world was heading towards a future that was between four to five degrees Celsius warmer than today," Hayhoe said. "You might say, well, that does not sound that bad, it‘s four or five degrees warmer. But think of it in terms of the human body. The temperature of the planet has been as stable as that of the human body over the course of human civilization. If our body is running a fever of one or two degrees Celsius, or four to six degrees Celsius, that is life-threatening."

She insisted, "We have already, thanks to the Paris Agreement, reduced the amount of change we can expect by policies enacted by at least one degree. But we still need more, because every bit of warming carries a cost with it."

Nawaz commented on United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ statement also made that day when he warned that the "climate time bomb is ticking."

"Humanity is on thin ice, and the ice is melting fast," Guterres said. "Humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years. The rate of temperature rising in the last half century is the highest in 2,000 years."

Hayhoe commented that the "dire" warning from Guterres is "completely justified."

"It is completely justified. We scientists have been warning about the impacts of climate change on humans, and all other life on this planet, for decades. Yet our carbon emissions continue to rise. As the IPCC report says, the window of opportunity we have to make decisions that will lead us to a better future is closing rapidly," Hayhoe said.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/climate-scientist-says-previous-predictions-climate-change-not-wrong

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European farmers fed up with climate policies shock political establishment

A young Dutch political party seeking to push back on the government's climate agenda achieved a stunning victory Wednesday as it won the most seats for a single party in the Dutch Senate.

"This isn't normal, but actually it is! It's all normal citizens who voted," party leader Caroline van der Plas said. "But today people have shown they can't stay at home any longer. We won't be ignored anymore."

The Farmer-Citizen Movement Party, known as BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) in Dutch, built its victory on the back of protests against the government’s environmental policies, which aim to slash nitrogen emissions by dramatically cutting back on livestock numbers and buying out thousands of farms. Nitrate and ammonia pollution significantly impacts biodiversity, particularly air and water quality.

The party appears on course to take 15 of the 75 Senate seats — more seats than Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD party — with almost 20% of the vote, according to the BBC. Rutte built his victory on the back of a four-party coalition, which will now control 24 seats overall.

"Now is the time to take citizens seriously. I am open to talks with everybody. We are ready," van der Plas added.

Around 57.5% of voters turned out for the election, marking the greatest turnout in years.

Voters argue that the government’s approach does not support the farmers, and the government’s plan is "not good" for them as it stands.

However, the other big winner on the night was the Greens and center-left Labor Party coalition, an environmentally focused group that argued that climate problems will not just go away. The left-leaning coalition also won 15 seats, tying BBB.

The results mainly indicate that Rutte’s remaining time in office may prove difficult as he faces a challenge to push through any legislation that needs Senate support.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/european-farmers-fed-climate-policies-shock-political-establishment

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Britain's heat-pump fiasco

No one denies that changing the way we heat our homes will play a major role in eventually achieving a carbon neutral economy. Heating our houses accounts for 14pc of the UK’s carbon emissions, so unless we can find a clever offsetting scheme or make drastic changes to other parts of our economy, we will eventually have to find an alternative to the gas boilers that three-quarters of British households use right now

Right now, the Government's big idea is that we should all switch to heat pumps. These are electric devices that work like a fridge in reverse, taking warmth out of the air and then blasting it around our homes. Huge subsidies of up to £5,000 per home have been thrown at persuading us all to make the switch, and a target, because inevitably there is a target, of 600,000 installations a year has been set.

Indeed, for new houses, gas boilers will be banned from 2025, and existing homes may not be far behind. By the end of the decade, we may well be forcing people to rip out old heating systems. And yet amid some very stiff competition, the drive to install heat pumps as the country’s main source of domestic heating is turning into the greatest eco fiasco of the decade.

The latest blow to the Government’s agenda was delivered by Bosch. The German industrial giant has global sales of almost €90bn (£79bn), engineering expertise that stretches back to the 19th century, and is one of the world’s major suppliers of domestic heating systems.

By any reasonable standards, it can be said to know a thing or two about how to keep homes warm. And yet Vonjy Rajakoba, the managing director of Bosch UK, has pointed out an obvious problem: for heat pumps to work well in the cold, “you need well-insulated homes, [and] you also need space for heat pumps for the external unit”. Very true. Now, which homes lack these features?

Well, older ones. And as it happens, Britain, a country blessedly free of the ravages of war, has an exceptionally old housing stock compared to most major economies, with almost two fifths of our private homes built before 1945. Rajakoba, in turn, has noted that for Britain’s “fleet of Victorian houses or period houses and so on”, Bosch UK thinks “hydrogen, or in the interim hydrogen-ready boilers, are the solution”.

But the problems don’t stop there. Heat pumps don’t generate nearly as much heat as the equipment they are replacing, meaning that homes need to be insulated as well – and as we’ve just noted, it’s often virtually impossible to upgrade homes dating back to the 19th or even 18th century to the required standard. And insulation is not the only added expense involved.

The Government might be subsidising these things like there’s no tomorrow, but the current offers don’t cover the extra expense of installations or the additional running costs of a heat pump compared to a traditional gas boiler. Even with the grant, a pump based system could set you back more than £9,000 compared with less than £3,000 for a traditional alternative.

On top of that, we don’t have enough plumbers trained to install them all, and skills training is so poor in this country, and labour shortages already so severe, there is little prospect of that being fixed any time soon (indeed, the latest data showed the number of trained plumbing and heating engineers in the UK is currently falling by 4.1 per cent a year).

And even if by some miracle we did manage to get them all installed and they all worked, it’s not even clear we’d be able to generate enough electricity to power them all. We can’t seem to get a nuclear power station built or find a sensible way to manage the intermittent production of wind turbines.

It’s all too reminiscent of the HS2 debacle: an unnecessary product, consuming vast quantities of money, which is unsuitable for the UK, and which won’t be delivered on time or anything close to it. In short, a colossal white elephant.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/03/16/heat-pumps-have-become-eco-fiasco-decade

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Let’s stop pretending we are going to recycle all this plastic

The report in this newspaper that Australia stands no chance of reaching its goal of recycling 70 per cent of its plastic waste by 2025 is at once depressing and predictable.

Most of our single-use plastics cannot be recycled into a useful product at a reasonable cost. As voters and consumers we keep pretending it can, because we like plastic. It is cheap and useful.

So governments and industry go along with the charade, providing us with pantomime recycling efforts.

In turn, petrochemical companies, facing the end of the fossil fuel era, happily increase production.

You need only compare the economics of recycling streams to get a sense of how useless most of our waste plastic is.

Most metals and glass can be recycled endlessly, exhibiting the same quality in each of its new lives. That’s why people pay for scrap metal, while we had to pay China to take our waste plastic.

In 2017, China finally tired of taking the world’s plastic waste and banned new imports, leaving the rest of us to scramble to find something to do with our growing stockpiles.

In Australia, we have seen the collapse of REDcycle, the nation’s largest waste recycling scheme, with admissions that thousands of tonnes of warehoused plastic is bound for landfill.

In Europe, much of it is burned for energy in machines that might not release particulate pollution but do release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – burning plastic is after all burning oil.

In other parts of the world, plastic simply chokes rivers and seas and the creatures that live in them.

The New South Wales environment watchdog has issued ‘clean-up’ orders to the supermarket giants for 15 warehouses and storage depots around the state where soft plastics have been stockpiled.

Whether plastic is dumped under the ground or into the ocean, or burnt for energy, all plastic will eventually end up as a greenhouse gas.

In fact, according to analysis published in February by the Minderoo Foundation in conjunction with the global energy analysis firm Wood McKenzie, the climate consultancy Carbon Trust and KPMG, single-use plastics now generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as the United Kingdom.

Minderoo’s second Plastic Waste Makers Index found growth in single-use plastics made from fossil fuels was 15 times that of recycled plastics, and that between 2019 and 2021 global use of them surged from 133 million tonnes per year to 139 million tonnes, or about 1 kilogram per person on earth.

ExxonMobil remains the largest producer of polymers bound for single-use plastics – responsible for six million tonnes in 2021 – followed by China’s Sinopec, which produced 5.8 million tonnes, and US-based Dow third.

Growth in single-use plastics production was driven by demand for flexible packaging such as films and sachets, which grew from a 55 per share of all single-use plastics in 2019, to 57 per cent in 2021.

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/sustainability/let-s-just-stop-pretending-we-are-going-to-recycle-all-this-plastic-20230321-p5ctvq.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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‘On thin ice’: United Nation’s grim warning over climate change

Same old, same old. Just a routine false prophecy. Sad if anyone believes it

UN Secretary-general Antonio Guterres called on wealthy G20 countries to urgently bring forward carbon neutral goals by a decade to 2040 to “defuse the climate time bomb.”

Mr Guterres warned: “Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” during the release of a bleak and final Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which he called “a survival guide for humanity.”

In a fresh plea Mr Guterres called for OECD governments to phase out coal by 2030 and for poorer countries by 2040.

And in a new target, he urged countries to have carbon-free electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, meaning no gas or coal-fired power plants and a halting of all new fossil fuel exploration.

Mr Guterres said all countries had to make a quantum leap in climate action to limit average temperature increases to 1.5C, acknowledging: “It starts with parties immediately hitting the fast-forward button on their net zero deadlines”.

He said rich G20 countries, of which Australia is a member, should aim for carbon neutrality as close to 2040 as possible. He added that emerging economies, which includes China, must aim for net zero by 2050.

New synthesis report will play a pivotal role when governments gather in Dubai in December for the UN climate…
China has a net zero goal for 2060, while India’s goal is even further away, at 2070.

“This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every time frame,’’ he said.

“Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

The landmark IPCC “Synthesis” report brings together the latest scientific advice and was agreed after governments reviewed the documents in Interlaken, Switzerland over the past week. The report says a cut in carbon emissions has to be more extreme than the current plans because of continuing rising emissions, to ensure a “liveable and sustainable future”.

“The pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change,’’ the report says, adding that keeping warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors. “Emissions should be decreasing by now and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030, if warming is to be limited to 1.5°C.”

As well the report notes that cash for developing countries to help them reduce emissions must be increased six times above current levels to keep climate change to the 1.5C target.

IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee said multiple, feasible and effective options are available now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change. The report notes changes in the food sector, electricity, transport, industry, buildings and land-use can reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as encouraging low carbon lifestyles and people having a better understanding of the consequences of overconsumption.

IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said “This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.

“Transformational changes are more likely to succeed where there is trust, where everyone works together to prioritise risk reduction, and where benefits and burdens are shared equitably.

“We live in a diverse world in which everyone has different responsibilities and different opportunities to bring about change. Some can do a lot while others will need support to help them manage the change.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/on-thin-ice-united-nations-grim-warning-over-climate-change/news-story/48f636b7835711de75e2653c8bcce5ce

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Legalized Climate Grifting

Paul Driessen

Grifters have long fascinated us. These usually small-time lawbreakers excel at persuading their “marks” to hand valuables over willingly. If they ever represented a “distinctly American ethos,” they’ve been supplanted by con artists seeking bank accounts for funds abandoned by Nigerian princes.

Their artful dodging is epitomized by Frank Abagnale daring the FBI to “catch me if you can,” Anna Delvey inventing Anna Sorokin, Redford and Newman masterminding their famous Sting, and dirty, rotten scoundrels like Steve Martin, Michael Caine and Glenn Headly.

However, they were all pikers compared to the billion-dollar stratagems being carried off by Climate Armageddon grifters like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Elon Musk and Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry.

Their schemes are not only unprecedented in size and complexity. They represent the greatest wealth transfer in history, from poor and middle class families to the wealthiest on Earth. Most important, the plundering has been legalized by laws, regulations, treaties and executive orders, often implemented at the behest of the schemers and their lobbyists.

They and their politician, activist, scientist, corporate and media allies profit mightily, but legally, from foundation grants, government payouts and subsidies, and taxpayer and consumer payments based on claims that Earth faces manmade climate cataclysms. That we’re giving our money willingly to these wind, solar, battery and other programs is questionable.

Microsoft co-founder Gates’ estimated 2022 post-divorce net worth of some $130 billion enables him to donate hundreds of millions to social, health, environmental and corporate media causes. That usually shields him from tough questions.

But BBC media editor Amol Rajan recently asked Mr. Gates to answer charges that he’s “a hypocrite,” for claiming to be “a climate change campaigner” while traveling the world on his luxurious private jets – often to confabs where global elites discuss how we commoners can enjoy simpler, fossil-fuel-free lives: what size our homes can be, how and how much we can heat them, what foods we can eat and how we can cook them, what cars we can drive, whether we can fly anywhere on vacation, what our kids will learn in school, and more.

Caught flatfooted, Gates defended his use of fuel-guzzling, carbon-spewing jetliners by claiming he purchases “carbon credits” to offset his profligate energy consumption. He also said he visits Africa and Asia to learn about farming and malaria, and spends billions on “climate innovations.”

Indeed, Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need” calls for replacing beef with synthetic meat. Cattle emit methane, a greenhouse gas (00.00019% of Earth’s atmosphere) – so people should eat fake meat processed from vegetable oil, veggies and insects.

You may say, that’s disgusting. But Mr. Gates will profit mightily if his “recommendation” is adopted. He’s a major investor in farmland and the imitation meat company Impossible Foods, as is Mr. Gore.

How cool! Wealthy elites can save the world and get richer at the same time!

Beyond Meat’s stock may be down more than 75% from its one-time high, but investors will likely bring in lots more cash via new “climate-saving” mandates, while consumers are left holding bags of rotting bug and lab-grown burgers.

Carbon offsets? In the real world they’re part of the problem, not the solution. They don’t help Main Street; they too help rich Climate Armageddon Club members become wealthier.

Gates Foundation grants could prevent extensive African misery, brain damage and death from malaria, by spotting disease outbreaks and eradicating Anopheles mosquito infestations – today. But it’s spending millions trying to engineer plasmodium-resistant mosquitoes, which may pay off a decade from now.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. continues pocketing billions selling and trading carbon credits. In fact, between 2015 and 2020, the company received $1.3 billionfrom selling credits to other companies – more than twice what it earned from automotive sales. Times sure have changed since manufacturing tycoons got rich selling products, instead of hawking climate indulgences.

Musk also loves flying in private jets. Last summer, he even took a 9-minute, 55-mile flight from San Francisco to San Jose, instead of driving a Tesla. Wags might say that goes well with the way he’s made a science of lobbying government agencies to subsidize fire-prone cars and SpaceX rockets.

It’s all to protect the environment, of course – which is why Gore, Gates, Musk and Kerry think they’re entitled to travel by private jet and limousine. We’re also supposed to ignore how their cars and lifestyles are based on metals extracted and processed with African child labor and lakes of toxic chemicals.

Since Al Gore left the vice president’s office, he’s hauled in some $330 million railing about “rain bombs” and “boiling oceans,” and shilling for government and corporate “investments” in “green energy” that’s also reliant on supply chains running through Africa and China.

Never forget this fundamental rule: Wind and sunshine are clean, renewable and sustainable. However, harnessing these unreliable, weather-dependent energy sources to power modern economies requires millions of tons of metals and minerals extracted from billions of tons of ores, mostly using dirty, polluting processes in lands out of sight and mind.

In short, nothing about “renewable energy” is clean, renewable, sustainable, fair or equitable.

Moreover, the “climate crisis” is based on computer models that predict hurricane, tornado, flood, drought, sea level rise and other disasters vastly greater than the world is actually experiencing. The models also ignore five great ice ages and interglacial periods, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, the Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other inconvenient climate truths.

Topping it off, China, Russia and India are burning cheap coal to industrialize, lift their people out of poverty, and leave climate-obsessed Western nations in the economic and military dust. Even if the West went totally Net Zero, it wouldn’t reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases even one part per million.

The climate change movement’s deceptions and contradictions seem to have no bounds – and know no apparent limits to how much loot they can rake in by lobbying federal, state and local governments, and playing political science with similarly minded legislators and regulators who control climate and energy laws, mandates, grants and subsidies.

How can the general public be so oblivious to all of this?

FTX founder and alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried revealed the secret. He avoided media and regulator scrutiny by donating to influential media outlets, the way Bill Gates does. That garners favorable press and social media – which also ignore, cancel and deplatform critics and skeptics.

Fortunately, gutsy interrogators like Rajan are discovering and publicizing what most of the bought-and-paid-for “journalist classes” still won’t. This helps more people see behind the curtain and find the self-interest, double-dealing and pseudo-science that create the scary climate crisis monsters.

Climate Armageddon Club games are costing us trillions of dollars, in the name of saving people and planet. Hopefully, more real journalists, troves of Twitter emails (this time kudos to Mr. Musk!), and congressional investigations will save taxpayers and families from additional costly, destructive policies.

https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2023/03/20/legalized-climate-grifting-n2620875

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Greens refuse to discuss recycling of renewables and restoration of mining locations to pristine conditions

Decommissioning, recycling, and restoration of the landscaping back to its original pristine condition is not in the cards for wind, solar, and EV battery materials.

The reality is that all the mineral products and metals needed to make wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control. Decommissioning and restoration of those mining landscapes back to their original pristine condition is not in the cards in developing countries. Recycling of worn-out turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries, in wealthy countries is also not in the cards.

The sites for the mining of materials required to build wind, solar, and EV batteries are under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mere extraction of those exotic minerals presents social challenges, human rights abuses, and environmental degradations worldwide, but are of no significance to the wealthy countries benefitting from those “green” materials.

The climate cult COULD seek decommissioning and restoration standards in those developing countries down to the last dandelion, just like we have for decommissioned mines, oil, and nuclear sites in America, but the climate cult avoids the same in developing countries.

The life cycle for renewable electricity like wind and solar runs from design, procurement, and construction, through operations and maintenance, and repair, as well as the life ending decommissioning and disposal, but again, recycling and restoration of the landscaping back to its original pristine condition, is also not in the cards in the wealthy countries that are going green.

Since the blades and panels and EV batteries are very difficult to recycle, the waste stream created by them is a mounting problem. According to a 2017 study published in the scientific journal Waste Management, the world’s wind industry alone will be producing 43 million tons of blade waste annually by 2050.

Those worn out wind turbines will be the equivalent weight of 215,000 locomotives. The demand of the wealthy economies for more wind turbines are projected to cause 43 million tons of blade waste worldwide by 2050 with China possessing 40 percent of the waste, Europe 25 percent, the United States 16 percent, and the rest of the world 19 percent.

The size and weight of the blades vary, but the average length is around 120 feet, and they weigh around five tons. Some of the largest can be as long as a football field and weigh 20 tons. Currently, there are no scalable, cost-effective technologies to recycle the blades, and most of them are going to landfills.

Those 1,000-pound EV batteries present similar challenges. With more than 40 percent of all EV’s in America being located in California, there are no EV-battery recycling plants in California, and only five up and running nationwide, according to CalEPA. That’s even though used lithium-ion batteries contain valuable minerals that otherwise must be mined from the earth, mostly from overseas operations in developing countries. The” throw away” society is alive and well in America.

With wealthy countries obsessed with a “green” society, it looks like decommissioning, recycling, and restoration of the mining landscapes in developing countries and renewable generating sites in developed countries back to their original pristine conditions is not in the cards for the foreseeable future.

The vast majority of these critical minerals and elements are mined abroad, and almost all the refining of them is done by China alone.

What’s more, China is the largest single provider of most of the critical minerals and rare earths used around the globe, and is almost the only refiner of such products. This means minerals and rare earth elements mined elsewhere, often with Chinese funding, are shipped to China for processing into usable materials. Much of the mining and refining of materials in China is produced by forced or slave labor, often of persecuted religious minorities, like Falun Gong followers and Uighurs.

The Biden administration declared October 4, 2022 that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, yet the American government continues to enforce mandates, subsidies, and tax breaks to go green, that provides financial incentives for developing countries to continue their current practices of inflicting environmental degradation to their local landscapes, force labor atrocities upon their workforce.

Concerning China, the Biden administration acknowledged the problem of slave labor, having signed the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021.

Now, the Biden administration is leaning more on Africa to counter China’s control over U.S. energy.

Still, the reality of today’s globalized supply chain and America’s financial incentives that continuously encourage further exploitations of humanity and the environment makes it almost a certainty the massive green energy transition being pushed by the Biden administration will be built with minerals and parts produced using Chinese and/or African slave labor.

With insufficient intelligence on the ground in China or Africa to track forced-labor manufacturing, and less still the raw materials, wealthy countries will continue to exploit the folks with yellow, brown, and black skin in developing countries.

In economic terms, the wealthier countries climate hysteria is imposing severe negative externalities on developing countries. Ethically, the West’s climate obsession is immorally condemning present generations of impoverished peoples and nations to continued perjury and early deaths in the years ahead. Make no mistake, this ruse exists to further enrich people in developed countries while they simultaneously exploit those in developing countries.

https://www.eurasiareview.com/20032023-greens-refuse-to-discuss-recycling-renewables-and-restoring-mining-locations-to-pristine-condition-oped/

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The bank crises could take down the ESG push

Only three months ago the Credit Suisse bank issued its annual Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report, promising to set the bank at the centre of the global Net Zero carbon trajectory.

As shares of the legendary Credit Suisse bank tax haven plunged 24 per cent on Wednesday and fuelled another day of alarm over the risks imbedded in the financial system, green activists at Bill McKibben’s 350.org climate operation distributed invitations to an online Earth Day event titled “Divest/Invest: How we stop banks from fuelling the climate crisis.”

The message might have rung bells of support a week ago. The plan was to stop America’s big banks from investing in fossil fuel development and “shut down” the oil and gas industry.

Such action calls are likely to fall on deaf ears this week as the global policy and investment focus is on keeping the banking industry alive and well. Instead of forcing banks to divest fossil fuels assets, the challenge now is to stop institutions from divesting bank shares.

Today it’s the banking climate that needs to be protected in an environment filled with predictions that the world financial system is in some peril. Anybody scanning commentary surrounding the banking share price crash has heard the news. “We don’t have a credit risk yet,” said a not-very-reassuring Nouriel Roubini, the “Dr. Doom” forecaster of the 2008 financial crisis who posted a tweet: “An economic & financial hard landing has been my baseline for over a year. Now it is clearly unavoidable. Economic stability & fighting inflation require raising policy rates much higher.”

The head of the world’s largest investment firm, Larry Fink at BlackRock, issued his annual letter on Wednesday with a warning that the fall of Silicon Valley Bank could signal more failures to come. “We don’t know yet whether the consequences of easy money and regulatory changes will cascade throughout the U.S. regional banking sector (akin to the S&L Crisis) with more seizures and shutdowns coming,” said Fink. His letter to shareholders is usually issued in February, but the delay this year suggests Fink was grappling with the emerging risks.

Fink is the world’s leading green corporate activist. In 2022, he warned that “Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net-zero world. The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?” But this week he raised themes and issues he has seldom mentioned in past annual missives. The 2023 letter refers to “easy money” policies deployed by central banks and contains 18 references to “inflation,” a word not used in his 2022 statement.

Another caution came from Bob Michelle, the chief investment officer at JPMorgan Asset Management, who warned that Credit Suisse is “absolutely” a sign that there is more trouble on the horizon. It is, said Michelle, the “tip of the iceberg” of banking turmoil to come.

It’s a cold metaphor that neatly brings us back to the climate activist campaign. In their easy-money world, banking icebergs have long ago melted away and there is nothing to worry about except how to get the banks to divest their fossil fuel holdings to make the world safe and green. But this idea that the only problem facing the planet is climate change is going to be more and more difficult to maintain.

There are indications that banks, central bankers and regulators have been dedicating too much effort and resources to the management of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Tracking ESG risks, in other words, may well have been a distraction from managing the real risks foisted on the world economy by high government debt and inflationary monetary policies.

The Bank of England seems to be pulling back on climate change. In a report on climate-related risks issued Monday the Bank implies that climate risks in financial markets seem to be under control and “are appropriate.” It warned, however, that “Any use of macroprudential tools would need to be assessed carefully against how well they mitigate climate risks, their behavioural impacts, and the potential for unintended consequences.” In other words, now is no time to be flirting with unintended consequences of radical climate policy when real financial risks are being overlooked.

Notes of caution over climate management risk were issued in Canada last week by the federal government’s Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. While climate change is an issue, the biggest risk seemed to be coming from “transition risks” created by government policy. “These risks can emerge from current or future government policies, legislation, and regulation to limit GHG emissions, as well as technological advancements, and changes in market and customer sentiment towards a low-GHG economy.”

Within Credit Suisse, a heavy public focus on ESG and climate issues was accompanied by less obvious failures to manage financial risk.

Only three months ago the bank issued its annual Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report, a 106-page document signed by its top executives. The report, they said, “provides important information on how we apply our expertise as a bank.” Filled with graphs, metrics and explanations, the report promises to set the bank at the centre of the global Net Zero carbon trajectory.

Credit Suisse’s financial management regime is another story. This week — as its shares fell to near US$2 from highs of US$50 a decade ago — the bank’s annual report said there were “material weaknesses” in its internal controls over financial reporting.

When it comes to bank management of risk in the future, the new focus is likely to be on the books rather than the climate.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/bank-crises-could-take-down-esg-push?mc_cid=c664ef2ae2&mc_eid=cc88839e92

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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