Shocking moment £47,000 electric Jaguar goes 'rogue' and reverses into a Porsche before shooting forwards and smashing into a Tesla and Mercedes in crash which caused £150,000 of damage

Business owner Andrew Key was powerless to act as his £47,000 Jaguar E-Pace suddenly reversed at speed into a Porsche Boxster parked behind him.

The Jaguar mounted the black sports car and ended up on its roof.

Mr Key, 60, said despite slamming on the brakes his car then shot forwards and smashed into a Tesla Model Y parked in front. The Tesla in turn shunted a Mercedes C-Class car.

Luckily, nobody was in the Porsche at the time but a woman who was sat in the Tesla was left in shock.

The dramatic incident, which caused over £150,000 damage to all four cars, was captured on the dashcam of the Jaguar and Tesla.

It happened in the drop-off zone outside a busy Bournemouth railway station last October. Mr Key, the managing director of a private health care company, said it was a miracle nobody was seriously hurt or killed.

To add insult to injury, he received a fixed penalty notice by Dorset police for a 'driving offence' following the incident.

Mr Key, who has passed an advanced driver course, is adamant he was not to blame for the collision and insists his Jaguar had 'become faulty'.

But he was livid when Jaguar examined his car and reported there was nothing wrong with it and the accident must have been down to driver error.

It is the third reported incident of a Jaguar electric car apparently going 'rogue'.

Craig Phillips, the first winner of Big Brother, claimed the brakes on his electric Jaguar I-Pace failed as he was driving with his young children near his home in Merseyside on New Year's Eve.

Earlier this month the driver of a Jaguar I-Pace claimed his vehicle accelerated at up to 100mph on the M62 and had to be brought to a stop by police. However, the driver has since been charged over the matter.

Mr Key said: 'They said it was my fault and that I hit the accelerator. I didn't. I'm a civilian advanced driver and I've had a really excellent safety record and I haven't done anything like this before.

'I even went to hospital later on just to be sure I've not had a brain episode or a stroke, but I'm fine.

'My contention is that Jaguar provided me with a defective and dangerous vehicle, which resulted in a dramatic crash in which, miraculously, no one was seriously hurt.

'Given that this occurred outside a busy train station, next to a large Asda and a busy coach and bus station at rush hour, someone could easily have been killed.

'It was an event in which significant energy was deployed. So why didn't the following systems deploy: collision avoidance, seatbelt warnings, SOS assistance, air bags.'

Mr Key, from Bournemouth, was given the 2022 Jaguar 18 months ago as a semi-retirement gift.

He had gone to Bournemouth station to pick up a friend when the incident happened. He said he put the automatic car in park mode, undid his seatbelt and was about to get out when it went into reverse.

He said: 'The engine was off and I was in park. I reached over to get my hat from the passenger seat and suddenly I was aware the car was moving backwards.

'I didn't know why, my feet were nowhere near the pedals. I hit the brake pedal thinking that would stop it but nothing happened. I hit it several times and there was just nothing. I couldn't understand how it was moving from a standing stop.

'It impacted a Porsche Boxster parked behind it. Not only did it impact it, but my car mounted it. I realised my car was on top of it and I just thought 'I really hope there is nobody in it'. Thankfully nobody was.

'My car then shot forward and I saw the Tesla in front and knew I was going to hit it and the Tesla then shunted a Mercedes.

'There was a lady in the Tesla and she was really upset. Then the Porsche owner appeared and she was very upset and was crying and distressed.

'All I could do was tell them it wasn't my fault and that the car moved on its own accord and that it wasn't my fault but they didn't believe me.'

Mr Key said he had experienced a previous faults with the electronics on his Jaguar when the collision avoidance system suddenly activated and brought the vehicle to a dead stop in the middle of the road.

He initially complained to Jaguar Hendy of Christchurch, where he bought the car, after the incident outside the train station but said they stopped responding to his emails.

He then went to Jaguar's head office in Coventry and made a complaint to them. They checked his car's telematics, the black box and send a report.

Mr Key said: 'They said I must have put my foot on the accelerator but I replied to sat 'no, that didn't happen.'

'It's an automatic and it's controlled by software and apps and stuff. There is a fault with these Jaguar models.

'I'm not interested in compensation, a new car or anything like that. There is something wrong with these cars and Jaguar needs to do something about it before someone is killed.'

Mr Key's Jaguar was written off following the incident and he has now replaced it with a Dacia Stepway.

It comes as the first-ever Big Brother winner revealed to MailOnline how he became trapped behind the wheel of his £76,000 Jaguar I-Pace while his wife and two young children were in the car after the brakes stopped working.

TV personality Craig Phillips, 52, is the latest electric vehicle driver to come forward with a horror story about being 'kidnapped' by a runaway car.

He revealed how within days of having his Jaguar returned from the manufacturer for a separate issue, he was unable to use his brakes as he approached a red light with two cars in front of him and traffic coming towards him in the opposite lane.

A Jaguar spokesperson, disputing Mr Key's claims, said: 'Following an investigation into this, it was found there had been no brake failure, nor any other issue with the vehicle.'

Police said that Mr Key received a fixed penalty notice for a driving offence following the incident at Bournemouth railway station.

A spokesman for Dorset Police said: 'At 5.28pm on October 18, 2023, Dorset Police received a report of a four-vehicle road traffic collision at Bournemouth railway station.

'Officers attended the scene.

'No injuries were reported and following enquiries by officers, no arrests were made. A 60-year-old man from Bournemouth received a fixed penalty notice for a driving offence.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13234863/electric-Jaguar-rogue-reverses-Porsche-smashing-Tesla-Mercedes-crash.html

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Incredible moment Senator John Kennedy destroys Olympic skier Gus Schumacher after Democrats invited him to testify as 'expert witness' on climate change

Senate Democrats were left red-faced at a hearing on climate change as their 'expert witness' proved to be anything but when faced by veteran senator John Kennedy.

Budget Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse invited Olympic skier Gus Schumacher to give his perspective as the committee considered the impact of climate change on the recreation industry.

But it was all downhill for the 23-year-old as he struggled to answer basic questions and could not remember his tweets claiming the war on drugs was designed to jail black people, and calling for the police to be abolished.

The excruciating exchange continued with Schumacher insisting carbon dioxide is a 'huge part of our atmosphere', before Kennedy pointed out that it accounts for 0.04 percent.

'Well, okay. But, yeah. I don't know,' the skier admitted.

Introducing the hearing, Senator Whitehouse praised the quality of the 'highly credible witnesses' the committee had heard from.

'We have heard warnings from economists, scientists, medical professionals, insurance and investment executives, even a former Republican Senate Majority Leader. They warn of danger ahead.'

But there was danger ahead for Schumacher as he tried to fend off Kennedy's interrogation which began with a question about what carbon dioxide is.

'I went to high school, but carbon dioxide is a gas,' the skier told him. 'I'm not a professional to talk about carbon dioxide so much.

But Kennedy demanded an explanation about the gas's role in climate change.

'Carbon dioxide is, what I see it as, you know, a gas that exists in our atmosphere,' Schumacher explained.

'Is it a major part of our atmosphere?' Kennedy asked innocently.

'It's a huge part of our atmosphere,' the skier insisted.

'It's a very small part of our atmosphere,' the Senator pointed out.

'Well, okay. But, yeah. I don't know. What are you asking specifically?' Schumacher replied.

'You said we need to reduce carbon emissions,' Kennedy reminded him, 'I'd like to know first if you know what it is.'

Schumacher, who competed in the 2022 Winter Olympics, insisted he had seen 'climate change dramatically alter the conditions for winter sports,' during his decade or so on the slopes.

And Kennedy was keen to test his expertise on other issues he had weighed in on including a 2020 retweet claiming the 'war on drugs was intentionally created to incarcerate black people en masse'.

'Who intentionally created the 'war on drugs' to put black people in jail?' Kennedy demanded.

Schumacher said he did not remember the tweet, adding: 'I'm here as an athlete giving you my story of what I've seen in my field.'

The senator then asked about a tweet calling for the police to 'abolished' and replaced with a new service.

'You think we ought to abolish the police?' Kennedy asked. 'Should we do that before or after we get rid of fossil fuels?'

'I'm not going to address that,' the skier replied.

Footage of the head-clutching exchange left viewers baffled as to why he had been invited with some suggesting he should stick to what he knows.

'I just like play in the snow and I like noticed the snow wasn't so snowy anymore,' tweeted one.

'It's sad this fella went to the Senate to speak about Carbon dioxide and it's effect on the environment and he has no clue,' added another.

'He thought it would be fun to go advise the Senate on an important issue. That fun ended at Senator John Kennedy,' wrote a third.

Schumacher deleted the X account from which the senator quoted at Wednesday's hearing.

And though some compared him to the gormless surfer Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemount High, the young Alaskan did not seem fazed by his mauling at the hands of the Republican Senator, insisting it had been a 'huge honor'.

'I don't pretend to be an expert, but I'm using my platform to elevate the issue!' he wrote on Facebook.

'I hope that my testimony has made an impact on public officials making policy decisions.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13234019/Incredible-moment-Senator-John-Kennedy-destroys-Olympic-skier-Gus-Schumacher-Democrats-invited-testify-expert-witness-climate-change-reads-damning-old-tweets.html

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Humans Are Not Primary Drivers Of CO2 Increases

“From modern instrumental carbon isotopic data of the last 40 years, no signs of human (fossil fuel) CO2 emissions can be discerned.” –Koutsoyiannis, 2024

It is routinely claimed that a telltale sign human emissions (fossil fuels) have irrevocably altered the atmospheric CO2 concentration is a declining trend in carbon isotope 13 (δ13C), considered an interruption of natural carbon cycle processes.

But new research examining isotopic data from four observation sites (South Pole, Mauna Loa, Barrow, La Jolla – regarded as “global” in their coverage) indicates there is no isotopic pattern consistent with a human fingerprint.

“The standard metric δ13C is consistent with an input isotopic signature that is stable over the entire period of observations (>40 years), i.e., not affected by increases in human CO2 emissions.”

In fact, not only has the input isotopic CO2 signature not been declining as proposed by those who believe humans are fully responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, but, according to multiple detection techniques using both modern data and paleo-data extending to the Little Ice Age (16th to mid-19th century), δ13C [input] has been increasing.

This directionality is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen if fossil fuels were driving atmospheric CO2 increases.

“…for the longer subperiod lengths, 20 and 30 years, the tendencies are clearly increasing, opposite to the hypothesis that they are caused by fossil fuel emissions”
“…the trends are small and always positive, again contradicting the fossil fuel origin of the phenomenon”

“…from period B to C [1899-1976 to 1977-1997], we note an increase in δ13C [input, from -13.9 to -12.9 percent], contradicting the fossil fuel origin of the phenomenon”

https://principia-scientific.com/humans-are-not-primary-drivers-of-co2-increases/

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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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A Re-Evaluation Of Earth’s CO2 History

The reliability of ice cores was of course also heavily questioned by the late Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, who pointed to compression effects in their gases

Dr. Matthew Wielicki

The ongoing debate and investigation into the causes and impacts of global warming bring to the forefront the significance of understanding Earth’s climatic past to forecast its future

Central to this discourse is the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which posits that human activities, primarily through the emission of ‘greenhouse gases’ such as carbon dioxide, have significantly altered the Earth’s atmospheric composition, leading to global warming and ‘climate change’.

Let’s explore the essential crux of the anthropogenic global warming theory, examine the reliability of ice cores in recording atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and explore alternative methods such as plant stomata analysis to gain insights into historical CO2 levels.

The anthropogenic global warming theory is underpinned by the analysis of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over geological timescales. Scientific evidence suggests that for the past 800,000 years, atmospheric CO2 levels fluctuated between approximately 180 to 300 parts per million (ppm).

This range is considered to reflect natural variability, driven by Earth’s orbital cycles, volcanic activity, and interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere.

However, the stark increase in CO2 levels to the current concentration of around 420 ppm is attributed to anthropogenic emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes.

It is claimed that this significant departure from the historical range is a key indicator of human influence on the climate system.

Understanding the historical context of atmospheric CO2 levels is crucial, and ice cores have been an invaluable resource in this endeavor. Ice cores are cylindrical samples extracted from ice sheets and glaciers.

They contain trapped air bubbles that have been sealed off from the atmosphere, or at least that is the assumption, as the ice forms, preserving a record of past atmospheric conditions. By analyzing the gases within these bubbles, scientists can reconstruct atmospheric compositions, including CO2 concentrations, over hundreds of thousands of years.

However, the formation of glacial ice is a prolonged process that occurs over centuries to millennia. This slow encapsulation process means that ice cores may not effectively capture short-term fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 levels, which could last only a few years to decades.

The question then arises: How accurately do ice cores reflect short-term variations in CO2 concentrations?

This is where alternative methods, such as the analysis of plant stomata, come into play. Stomata are microscopic pores found on the surfaces of leaves and needles, facilitating gas exchange between the plant and the atmosphere.

The density of stomata on plant leaves is influenced by atmospheric CO2 levels; higher concentrations lead to fewer stomata, and vice versa. By examining fossilized leaves and comparing stomatal density across different periods, scientists can infer past CO2 levels with a higher resolution than ice cores, potentially capturing more significant, short-term changes.

The evidence from plant stomata analysis suggests that there have been many more large, short-term fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 levels than those recorded by ice cores. In fact, some studies suggest levels approaching 400 ppm in the 14th and 16th centuries, challenging the notion of stable CO2 prior to human emissions.

Furthermore, other studies have shown short-term increases of CO2 of about 200 ppm in two centuries, naturally, which are not observed in the ice cores.

These discrepancies raise important questions about our understanding of natural CO2 variability and the baseline levels of atmospheric CO2 in the absence of human activities.

In conclusion, while ice cores provide a critical long-term perspective on Earth’s atmospheric history, their limitations in capturing short-term fluctuations underscore the need for complementary methods like plant stomata analysis.

Together, these tools offer a more nuanced understanding of natural versus anthropogenic influences on the Earth’s climate.

As we continue to unravel the complex interplay between natural variability and human impact, it becomes increasingly clear that the rise in CO2 levels can not merely be assigned to anthropogenic means.

https://principia-scientific.com/a-re-evaluation-of-earths-co2-history/

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Bugs on the Menu? Biden’s Climate and ESG Policies Threaten Food Supply, Think-Tank Warns

A new report from the right-leaning think-tank The Buckeye Institute sounded the alarm on the Biden administration’s net-zero climate-control policies and that agenda items threaten U.S. food production.

The report, released on Feb.7, found that the climate policies and mandates guided by the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda that is being pushed by the Biden administration carries a hefty price tag for American farmers and consumers.

“To better appreciate the true costs that American farms and households will likely pay for the Biden administration’s net-zero policies and objectives, The Buckeye Institute’s Economic Research Center developed a model corn farm that must play by the government’s new carbon emission rules,” wrote report authors Trevor W. Lewis and M. Ankith Reddy, who are both economic research analysts at the think-tank.

“The farm’s operational costs, as expected, all rose significantly,” they added.

Crunching the numbers, the researchers found that U.S. farmers will see their operational costs rise by an estimated 34 percent as a result of the Biden administration’s net-zero emissions policies.

Not only did the model predict that the government’s carbon pricing policies would raise farm operating costs, consumers also face a hit to their wallets.

The government’s net-zero policies that the Buckeye report took into account in its analysis include the implications of rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, which targets greenhouse gas emissions.

In order to achieve the climate pact’s objectives, the Biden administration committed to cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50–52 percent by 2030 and to reach economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050.

“Achieving the administration’s desired decarbonized economy will require aggressive climate-emission reduction policies that drain and replace fossil fuels from every sector of the U.S. economy,” the report’s authors wrote.

The Biden administration has already started implementing stringent regulatory policies meant to cut carbon emissions from America’s energy industry, while a looming final rule on ESG reporting, due to enter into force in April 2024, threatens to push carbon compliance onto other industries.

Many of these policies have been tested in Europe, with the researchers concluding that the results there have been an “unmitigated failure.”

“Despite these resounding warnings from European counterparts, U.S. policymakers have recommitted American industry to the same net-zero emissions standards and have imposed the same kinds of costly mandates on farms and businesses that will ultimately reduce food and energy supplies without achieving their intended benefits,” they argued.

“The results of Buckeye’s modeling were predictable and unsurprising, but many U.S. policymakers seem unwilling to address or even acknowledge them. That has to change, or the United States will face dire economic consequences,” concludes the report’s executive summary.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the report’s findings.

Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, commented on the report in a post on X.

“Farmers and ranchers lay out huge sums for everything from fertilizer, seeds, and feed to heavy machinery and pesticides to produce the food we eat. Yet, the climate cult and ESG elites are causing these costs to skyrocket,” he wrote.

“That puts a heavier financial burden on agricultural producers and imposes higher food costs on hardworking Americans,” he continued.

“America’s farmers and ranchers’ livelihoods shouldn’t be at risk because of inflated operating costs or loss of access to capital from woke banks. Nor should the American people be victim to a crushing tax put on their groceries by climate extremists.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/bugs-on-the-menu-bidens-climate-and-esg-policies-threaten-food-supply-think-tank-warns-5582745

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SEC faces avalanche of lawsuits from states, companies, and nonprofits over climate rule

More than half the states in the U.S. filed lawsuits this month against the Securities and Exchange Commission over the climate disclosure rules it finalized last week.

On top of state lawsuits, the SEC is facing legal challenges from companies, nonprofits and business advocacy groups.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday temporarily paused the new rules.

The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request from Liberty Energy Inc. and Nomad Proppant Services LLC to put the rules on hold while it considers the oilfield companies' lawsuit challenging them.

The final rule didn’t include the stringent Scope 3 reporting requirements, which would have required companies registered with the SEC to disclose all emissions along the entire supply chain through the end use of products.

If it had been included, the average per-firm costs of producing climate disclosures would have been $864,864 across 7,400 companies, according to the National Review.

The final rules still require large and mid-sized companies to report Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and a deluge of lawsuits have raised a number of objections to what did end up in the final rule.

The day after the SEC voted 3 to 2 to adopt the final rules, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey announced his state and Georgia were leading a coalition of 10 states in filing a petition to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Today, the Biden administration has once again got on the attack against America's energy industry. It actually may be one of the most egregious attempts yet,” Morrisey said in a press conference.

Morrisey said the SEC is exceeding the authority Congress granted it to be a financial regulator. The climate disclosure rules, he said, were an attempt by the SEC to be an environmental regulator.

“Congress only wanted the SEC to focus on the financial regulation. And that's all the SEC has the power to do. Certainly, the SEC has nothing to do with climate change or energy,” Morrisey said.

Materiality

The new rule, Morrisey said, twists the definition of materiality, which has been the basis for what information companies need to supply to investors. The SEC considers a matter "material" if there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable person would consider it important.

Commissioner Hester Peirce had also raised this objection in explaining her dissenting vote on the final rule.

“While the commission has decorated the final rule with materiality ribbons, the rule embraces materiality in name only,” Peirce said.

Morrisey said the reporting requirements under the new rule will be onerous, and that it will make it virtually impossible for companies to calculate how their environmental impact is material.

“How is the company supposed to know if greenhouse gas emission will affect its finances? How many trucks are going to be too many? How much coal do you use versus natural gas or other forms of energy?” Morrisey said.

He also said there are First Amendment issues with the final rule as it may fall under compelled speech.

Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow with the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute and publisher of JunkScience.com, told Just The News that the strongest legal argument against the rules is that the agency is exceeding its authority.

“Congress never authorized the SEC to participate in climate regulation — number one of two. The SEC can only require disclosure of material facts, and it cannot be shown that climate is in any way material to any investor decisions. So it fails on those two counts,” Milloy said.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/sec-faces-avalanche-lawsuits-ttates-companies-and-nonprofits-over-climate

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History of weather extremes reveals little has changed, new report shows

A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation challenges the popular but mistaken belief that weather extremes - such as flooding, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires - are more common and more intense today because of climate change.

Drawing on newspaper archives and long-term observational data, the report, written by Dr Ralph Alexander, documents multiple examples of past extremes that matched or exceeded anything experienced in the present-day world.

Dr Ralph Alexander said:

“That so many people are unaware of past extremes shows that collective memories of extreme weather are short-lived.”

“The perception that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity is primarily a consequence of new information technology – the Internet and smart phones – which have revolutionised communication and made us much more aware of such disasters in all corners of the world than we were 50 or 100 years ago.”

https://mailchi.mp/5a980d299f74/history-of-weather-extremes-reveals-little-has-changed-new-report-shows-201480?e=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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Greens are always warning that the Earth's overcrowded... In fact, the West's plunging birthrate will usher in a dystopia

I think the scenario pictured below is a tad alarmist but lower birthrates will undoubtedly cause adjustment problems. Overlooked is that birthrates may recover for various reasons. Straight-line projections are usually simplistic. After non-maternal women have weeded themseves out of the gene pool, The remaining more maternal women might produce a quite high birthrate

Picture the cities of the future. Do you imagine glittering skyscrapers, bullet trains whizzing past green parklands, flying taxis and limitless clean energy?

I’m afraid you may be disappointed. A century from now, swathes of the world’s cities are more likely to be abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to decaying houses set on empty, weed-strewn streets – like modern-day Detroit.

According to a new report from the Lancet medical journal, by the year 2100, just six countries could be having children at ‘replacement rate’ – that is, with enough births to keep their populations stable, let alone growing.

All six nations will be in sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe and across the West and Asia, the birth rate will have collapsed – and the total global population will be plummeting.

Eco-activists have long decried humans as a curse on the planet, greedily gobbling up resources and despoiling the natural world.

The reliably hysterical BBC presenter Chris Packham has claimed that ‘human population growth’ is ‘our greatest worry… There are just too many of us. Because if you run out of resources, it doesn’t matter how well you’re coping: if you’re starving and thirsty, you’ll die.’

Greens like Packham seem to think that if we could only reduce the overall population, the surviving rump of humanity could somehow live in closer harmony with nature. On the contrary, population collapse will presage a terrifying dystopia.

Fewer babies mean older populations – which in turn means fewer young people paying taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly. And that means that everyone has to work ever longer into old age, and in an atmosphere of declining public services and deteriorating quality of life.

So if you worry that it’s hard now to find carers to look after elderly relatives, this will be nothing compared to what your children or grandchildren will face when they are old.

In modern industrialised societies, it is generally accepted that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the average number of children born to each woman during her lifetime – must be at least 2.1 to ensure a stable population. By 2021, the TFR had fallen below 2.1 in more than half the world’s countries.

In Britain, it now stands at 1.49. In Spain and Japan it is 1.26, in Italy 1.21 and in South Korea a desperate 0.82.

Even in India – which recently overtook China as the world’s most populous nation – the TFR is down to 1.91.

There are now just 94 countries in which the rate exceeds 2.1 – and 44 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers far higher rates of infant mortality.

The dramatic fall in Britain’s birthrate has been disguised until now because we are importing hundreds of thousands of migrants per year to do badly paid jobs that the native population increasingly spurns.

In 2022, net migration here reached more than 700,000. The Office of National Statistics expects the UK population to reach 70million by 2026, almost 74 million by 2036 and almost 77 million by 2046 – largely fed by mass migration.

Unless migration remains high, the UK population is likely to start shrinking soon after that point – especially as the last ‘baby boomer’ (born between 1946 and 1964) reaches their 80th birthday in 2044. This mass importation of migrants to counteract a falling domestic birthrate spells huge consequences for our social fabric.

In years to come, Britain is set to face a pitiless battle with other advanced economies – many of them already much richer than we are – to import millions of overseas workers to staff our hospitals, care homes, factories and everything else.

And once the global population starts to fall in the final decades of this century, it will become ever harder to source such workers from abroad. At that point, we may find hospitals having to cut their services or even close.

So, though medical advancements will likely mean that people will be living even longer, we face a grim future in which elderly people will increasingly die of neglect, or be looked after by robots – an idea that has been trialled in Japan already.

How has this crisis crept up on us so stealthily? It wasn’t so long ago that the United Nations and others were voicing concern at overpopulation.

For decades, self-proclaimed experts have warned – in the manner of early 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus – that global supplies of food and water, as well as natural resources, would run out.

Graphs confidently showed the world’s population accelerating exponentially, with many claiming that humankind had no choice but to launch interplanetary civilisations as we inevitably outgrew our world.

They could not have been more wrong.

Amid all the Packham-esque hysteria about a ‘population explosion’, many failed to notice that birth rates had actually already started to collapse: first in a few developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, and then elsewhere.

As societies grow wealthier and the middle classes boom, women start to put off childbearing. This means that they end up having fewer children overall. In Britain especially, there are the added costs of childcare and the often permanent loss of income that results from leaving the workforce, even temporarily.

The striking result of all this is that the number of babies being born around the world has, in fact, already peaked.

The year 2016 is likely to go down in history as the one in which more babies were born than any other: 142million of them. By 2021, the figure was 129million – a fall of more than 9 per cent in just five years.

To be clear, the global population is for the moment still rising because people are living longer thanks to better medical care. We are not dying as quickly as babies are being born.

According to the UN, the global population reached 8billion on November 15, 2022. It should carry on growing before peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s – although the world will be feeling the effects of the declining birth rate long before that.

On current trends, the world’s population will start to fall by the 2090s – the first time this will have happened since the Black Death swept Eurasia in the 14th century.

So what, if anything, can we do to stop ourselves hurtling towards this calamity?

For one thing, governments must work tirelessly to encourage people to have families. Generous tax incentives for marriage, lavish child benefit payments and better and cheaper childcare are all a must, so that mothers don’t have to stop their careers in order to start families.

Britain could, if it chose to, lead the way on this.

But that seems highly unlikely with the imminent prospect of a Labour government: the statist Left habitually loathes any measures that could be seen to benefit the nuclear family or that incentivise people to have more children.

Yet in truth, the scale of this problem is so vast – and the issue so widespread – that effectively counteracting it may be next to impossible.

Absent some extraordinary shift, the gradual impoverishment of an ageing and shrinking population seems the planet’s destiny. It is not an attractive thought.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13224245/Earth-overcrowded-West-plunging-birthrate-dystopia-ROSS-CLARK.html

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Even lefties now admit closing the Indian Point nuclear plant actually HARMED the planet

Daniel Turner

Those on the environmental left cheering the Biden administration’s electric-vehicle mandates or Gov. Hochul’s offshore wind farms would be wise to heed a painful and embarrassing lesson New York is learning from its not-so-distant past.

Not only do so-called “green” policies drive up consumer prices, decrease reliability and upend everyday life (say goodbye to wood-fired pizza ovens and gas-powered stoves), they often end up harming the environment they’re supposed to be saving.

Talk about a lose-lose.

Consider disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s forcing the Indian Point nuclear plant to close in 2021.

Heralded by a who’s who of leftist extremists — socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had labeled Indian Point a “catastrophe waiting to happen” while Hamas sympathizer Mark Ruffalo praised the move as a “BIG deal” — there were immediate and obvious problems.

For starters, Indian Point provided nearly one-quarter of New York City’s power.

Unilaterally and arbitrarily taking it off the grid meant other forms of energy would take on a new importance.

It wasn’t as if Big Apple residents were suddenly going to cut their power consumption 25% overnight.

Cuomo was already setting New York on an ill-advised path of becoming 70% reliant on “renewable” energy like wind and solar by 2030.

Still basking in the media’s COVID-era adoration, Cuomo was seen as a man with White House ambitions.

His wandering hands and all-around creepiness that led to 11 claims of sexual harassment and a swift resignation ahead of an expected impeachment were still to come.

To compete nationally in today’s Democratic Party, one must be a full-fledged disciple of the green cult.

It’s the reason candidate Joe Biden pledged to “end fossil fuel” in 2020.

Cuomo saw the writing on the wall, and Indian Point was a small price to pay for his political ambitions.

To fill the sudden void created, New York did not turn to wind or solar.

It was fossil fuels to the rescue, just as it is every time the weather turns severe and citizens’ safety depends on the lights and heat staying on.

In the month after the plant’s closure, New York’s natural-gas generation increased from 35% to 39%.

Nearly four years after the Indian Point fiasco, New York emits more carbon per megawatt-hour than Texas — the nation’s leading oil producer — and outpaces America as a whole.

Another twist in this saga: The power Indian Point produced was carbon free.

In fact, nuclear is such a clean form of energy that France derives 70% of its electricity from it.

Naturally, the 1,000 jobs Indian Point provided also went away and never came back.

When even the fairly left-of-center British outlet The Guardian admits Indian Point’s closure turned out to be a bad decision, the eco-left is running out of friends and advocates.

As an unabashed and unapologetic advocate of fossil fuels, I’m not terribly interested in the debate over “carbon emissions.”

They’re an ever-shifting goalpost metric eco-lefties created, and I do not play the game by their rules.

No emissions number satiates them, so the fossil-fuel industry and individual fossil-fuel companies should stop trying to appease them.

America became the envy of the world because of — not in spite of — our abundant, affordable domestic energy.

John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and the other titans who built our country didn’t do so with windmills or solar panels.

If fact, you can’t even build windmills and solar panels with windmills and solar panels.

They are all manufactured with fossil fuels in plants that run on fossil fuels.

Yes, the same eco-left playing the “net zero” shell game will tell you it’s bad to use fossil fuels to make electricity — but China polluting air, land and water to manufacture wind and solar that Biden buys with our tax dollars and are shipped across the ocean, burning millions of gallons of diesel, and installed on our beautiful landscapes, turning purple mountain majesty into wildlife killing fields while making the grid unstable and costing ratepayers more money is “green.”

What a racket.

The New York City I grew up in knows a con job when it sees one.

There’s a valuable lesson in Indian Point: Our energy situation is getting worse.

Like Cuomo before him, Biden has called for nationwide “net-zero emissions” by 2050.

Should that initiative come to pass, say goodbye to the reliable and affordable 60% of our electricity that came from fossil fuels in 2023.

The fate of the additional nearly 20% from nuclear is anyone’s guess.

So when you see Team Biden touting its “tailpipe emissions” rule to force us into electric cars or Gov. Hochul celebrating the completion of the South Fork Wind farm in Long Island Sound, remember they’re doubling down on proven failure.

163
What do you think? Post a comment.
If Indian Point’s past is prologue, not only will life become more expensive, but the planet will likely get dirtier.

Yet they’ll still call it “green.”

https://nypost.com/2024/03/21/opinion/even-lefties-now-admit-closing-the-indian-point-nuclear-plant-actually-harmed-the-planet/

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BBC Meteorologist Falsely Claims South Sudan is Experiencing “Extreme Heat” for March

South Sudan is experiencing “extreme heatwaves” and is shutting schools and cutting power, reports BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor. “It is exceptionally early for South Sudan to experience such heat – temperatures often exceed 43°C but only in the summer months, according to the World Bank’s Climate Change portal,” he states.

Hot days in the capital Juba – five degrees north of the equator – are for some a big ‘climate change’ story, but it is difficult to read into the World Bank data the interpretation that Taylor wants to publicise. In fact it is impossible, since the data clearly show that average South Sudan temperatures peak in March and then fall away through the wet monsoon ‘summer’ months.

Quite how Taylor can draw the conclusion from the above World Bank graph that it is “exceptionally early” for South Sudan to experience such heat, in a place where temperatures often exceed 45°C “but only in the summer months”, is not clear. Anybody else looking at the graph would draw the opposite conclusion. Perhaps Taylor is unclear on the difference between rainfall totals (the blue bars, which do peak in the “summer months”) and average temperatures. He also seems to be unaware that South Sudan is equatorial so does not have a “summer” and certainly not in June through August.

In fact the “heatwaves” in South Sudan drew headlines in other climate-crazed mainstream media. The New York Times reported on March 20th that: “Climate change already worsened floods and droughts in the young nation. Now soaring temperatures are forecast for two weeks.” Both the BBC and NYT write about temperatures soaring well past 40°C, but, as is often the case, we must count the spoons and consult the original sources when dealing with such unreliable propagandists.

According to the Time and Data website, in the five days up to March 21st the temperature in Juba only once went over 40°C at midday. Since a 42°C high last Sunday, the temperature has dropped up to 6°C. Hot, it would seem, but not exceptional at the equator.

But the BBC was in full disaster mode with Taylor reporting that South Sudan is the latest in a “long-line” of countries to experience blistering and, in many cases, record-breaking heat. “This heat is very serious, and it’s really affecting our work,” says Wadcom Saviour Lazarus, who is said to run an NGO. “Because of this heat we are not able to move from one place to another,” he adds. Juba resident Ayaa Winnie Eric is said to take “lots of water to keep me hydrated”. Light clothes are worn and walking in the hot sun is avoided.

How did people cope in the past living right next to the equator? Of course they didn’t have ‘climate change’ alarmism to cope with as another World Bank graph below demonstrates.

The graph plots the temperatures for South Sudan going back to 1901. On a five year smoothing average, the temperature in 2022 at 27.64°C was only 0.41°C higher than 121 years ago. Interestingly, since 2007 the average temperature has actually dropped a full degree centigrade from 28.64°C to 27.64°C. Looking at the cyclical nature of the graph, it is difficult to see a correlation with trace atmospheric carbon dioxide which has of course risen throughout the period.

The Taylor story is another crass example of the constant fearmongering undertaken in the mainstream media to nudge populations to accept the collectivist Net Zero project. In this case it can only be assumed that readers will take the hint over devasting human-caused climate change and not look at the underlying data.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/22/bbc-meteorologist-falsely-claims-south-sudan-is-experiencing-extreme-heat-for-march/

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The grim cost of firming up solar and wind

Alan Moran

The ‘transition’ of the electricity supply industry has been forced by government subsidies to renewable energy generators with increased impositions on coal and gas with higher royalty charges and bans playing a secondary role. The first subsidies were introduced by John Howard in 2001 as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target. He later described this as his worst political decision. It required electricity retailers gradually to include wind or solar to comprise 2 per cent of their additional energy. This was quantified as 9,500 megawatt hours.

These measures pandered to concerns about the global warming. They also responded to lobbyists, who wheeled out experts claiming that renewable energy technology would follow a variation of Moore’s Law, where computer chip performance doubles every two years. The application of this to electricity supply, it was argued, just needed a short-term leg-up.

Time has demonstrated this to have been spurious. The need wind and solar facilities have for subsidies, far from withering away, have escalated.

The initial measure provided a subsidy to renewables (and cost to consumers) growing to about $380 million per year. To his credit, John Howard resisted pressures to increase this but the Rudd/Gillard governments and state governments vastly expanded the support with new schemes for rooftop facilities and budgetary expenditures. The Turnbull and Morrison governments further expanded the subsidies, which at the outset of the present government’s tenure amounted to $9 billion per annum.

The Albanese government has introduced a number of additional measures. These include the Safeguard Mechanism, which requires the major carbon-emitting firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030 or buy the equivalents in carbon credits. The cost is conservatively estimated at $906 million per annum.

The government is also set to introduce the Capacity Investment Scheme involving power purchasing agreements designed to attract $68 billion of spending on additional wind, solar, and batteries. The best estimate of the cost to the taxpayer is $5,775 million per annum. In addition, the government is expediting the transmission roll-out.

Present subsidy levels are estimated at $15.6 billion per annum. The effects of subsidies have come in three phases.

The first was in the decade after 2003 when renewables progressively increased their market share as required by regulations. By 2014/15, wind and solar had grown to about 7 per cent of the electricity market. The subsidised supplies placed downward pressure on the market price as well as taking market share from coal. That outcome was intensified by new Queensland gas supplies coming on stream. Without access to export ports, that gas was redirected to domestic electricity generation and the share of gas supplies in the National Electricity Market increased from 8 per cent to 12 per cent. Gas now has more lucrative markets overseas and governments are exerting pressure on the producers to allocate more than is commercially sensible to the domestic market.

This first phase came to an abrupt end when low prices and higher supplies forced major coal generators, Northern Power in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria, out of the market.

Those market exits led to a second phase, whereby reduced coal capacity brought a trebling of wholesale market prices from their 2015 level of $40 per megawatt hour (MWh). Covid caused a temporary downward blip but the wholesale price is averaging $119 per megawatt hour in the March quarter, 2024.

These higher prices reflect the higher cost of wind and solar and will continue to prevail and, in fact, increase. Price increases may be concealed by governments entering into power purchasing agreements but this means subsidies financed by taxpayers rather than electricity users.

The subsidies to wind and solar have now resulted in their market share growing from zero 20 years ago to over 30 per cent. This is ushering in the third phase of the ‘transition’, which involves desperately seeking ways to firm up the intermittent and largely unpredictable electricity supply from wind and solar.

Gas, coal, and nuclear can operate pretty much continuously and without special storage facilities, but weather and nightfall limit solar to generating only 20 per cent of the time and wind to about 30 per cent. And electricity supply from wind and solar generators is highly variable.

With wind and solar at their current market share, coal and gas can fill their troughs in supply, albeit unprofitably. But the policy in all Australian government jurisdictions is to force coal and most gas out of the market. Moreover, coal (and, for that matter, nuclear) is technically ill-suited and costly to be used as a back-stop to variable wind and solar supplies. ‘Social licences’ aside, new coal or nuclear plants could not be commercially built except as near continuous baseload.

Other means of ‘firming’ wind and solar supplies are therefore increasingly required. One such is the conversion of Snowy Hydro into a pumped storage facility. Pumped hydro generates by releasing water when alternative supplies are short and uses electricity when it is in excess supply (and therefore cheap), to pump the water back uphill. Batteries supply and replenish on a similar basis.

Snowy 2 is planned to provide 376 megawatt hours of storage. The Capacity Investment Scheme is an attempt to augment this, though, notwithstanding its name, it earmarks 70 per cent of its intended power purchasing agreements simply for more wind and solar. These add nothing to replacing the dispatchable (controllable) power being lost from the forced retirement of coal plants. The Capacity Investment Scheme will add just 36 gigawatt hours of storage from the 9 GW of facilities planned to be contracted.

The Australian Market Operator’s (AEMO) Integrated Systems Plan for 2050 envisages a total storage capacity of 642 gigawatt hours for a system double the size of the present one and overwhelmingly powered by wind and solar. This is utterly inadequate for backing up intermittent power.

Francis Menton has assembled a wealth of evidence of how much storage a renewables system would require. He authored a major report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation as well as many other papers like this. Basically, his work shows that a wind and solar system, if it is to provide a secure and reliable electricity supply, requires some 26 days of storage. For Australia, this means 13,000 gigawatt hours of storage, which is 25 times what the AEMO Integrated Systems Plan envisages.

The highly regarded GlobalRoam consultancy estimated that the National Electricity Market (which excludes Western Australia), with perfect planning and no losses in storage or transmission, would require at least 9,000 gigawatt hours of storage. The costs of this, at $US 350 per kWh, would be three times Australia’s GDP for batteries that would need to be replaced every 12 years.

It might be argued that Germany, with little storage back-up, already has wind and solar providing 45 per cent of its electricity and, although it has some of the world’s highest prices, its supply is reliable. But Germany also has access to supplies from Polish coal and French nuclear power to firm up its wind and solar. Australia has a stand-alone system.

Our politicians are plunging us into a perilous future. Policies have already given us an electricity supply system with costs that cannot support energy-intensive industries. Those policies are now poised to bring about lower reliability than is compatible with a first-world economy.

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comm

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/the-grim-cost-of-firming-up-solar-and-wind/

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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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Bill Gates-founded energy company set to construct $3 billion nuclear power plant in Wyoming that could be operational by 2030

I don't want to be too negative about this but trying to pump around safely a mass of just about the most reactive substance known is very optmistic. The slightest leak could trigger a totally destructive explosion. It is apparently going to be built in a remote area in Wyoming so maybe the Greenies will let it pass

A power company co-founded by Microsoft's Bill Gates has announced plans to begin building a new type of nuclear power plant in the US this summer.

TerraPower revealed it plans to apply for the necessary permits this month to start construction on a next-generation nuclear reactor at the start of June in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

The Washington-based firm has received an estimated $1 billion in funding from private investors, which will be combined with a promised $2 billion from the US government.

The reactor is unique in the world of nuclear power, as it is cooled with liquid sodium rather than water - an efficient strategy, but one that has proven dangerous in some cases because of sodium's explosive reaction if it touches water.

TerraPower's announcement puts it in a nuclear energy race against Russia and China.

The two superpowers are working to develop and export cheaper reactors, and the Natrium one represents TerraPower's attempt to enter that market, the Financial Times reported.

In December, the company inked an agreement with Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation.

That deal will see TerraPower exploring the use of its Natrium reactors to not only generate electricity in the United Arab Emirates, but also produce hydrogen - a notoriously energy-hungry process.

TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque told FT that they plan to apply this month for the necessary permits to begin construction in June, but whether or not the company has received approval yet, they will begin building then.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in charge of approving construction of new nuclear powerplants.

The next-generation reactor, called 'Natrium,' can be built for half the cost of water-cooled ones, the standard nuclear power technology for decades, Levesque said.

Because of the design of the Natrium reactor, most of the initial phase of construction will not involve any reactor parts per se, but will rather focus on support structures.

According to the company's website: 'TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries that decided the private sector needed to take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and lift billions out of poverty.'

Nuclear power does not have the same issues with carbon emissions that other powerplants do, especially coal.

But it does present new problems, as spent nuclear waste is dangerously radioactive for thousands of years.

There has not been a sodium-cooled reactor in the US since several experimental reactors were attempted in the 1960s and 1970s.

After several failures, including a partial meltdown of the Fermi 1 in Michigan in 1966, all of these reactors were decommissioned, and most were replaced with conventional boiling water reactors.

In 1995 the Monju Nuclear Powerplant in Japan suffered a fire as a result of a sodium leak in its cooling system.

The ensuing coverup, involving falsified reports and edited video footage of the accident, was so disgraceful that government investigator Shigeo Nishimura took his own life after uncovering it.

'When you use liquid sodium as a coolant instead of water it's a game-changer,' Levesque told FT, noting that since it boils at almost 900C it can be operated much more cheaply than water-cooled reactors.

'Natrium plants will cost half of what light water reactor plants cost . . . and we are moving our project along pretty aggressively,' he said.

The reactor in Wyoming will be a demonstration project, but upon completion it will become a commercial power provider, TerraPower claimed.

The plant is scheduled to be operational by 2030.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13219021/Bill-Gates-company-nuclear-power-Wyoming.html

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SNP retreat is ‘high water’ for Net Zero

Campaign group Net Zero Watch has welcomed the announcement by the Scottish Government that they are considering legislating to water down their Net Zero targets.[1] Net Zero Secretary Mairi McAllan told the Holyrood Parliament that, having set themselves a legally binding target of cutting carbon emissions by 75% by 2030, she and her officials were now considering a variety of options to address the impossibility of actually delivering, including legislation.

Welcoming the move, Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:

Politicians across the world have set ruinous, utopian targets that are impossible to deliver. Ms McAllan is the first to publicly face up to reality, but she won’t be the last. We have reached the high water mark for Net Zero.

Under the Climate Change Act, governments can amend the decarbonisation target and the timetable for achieving it by regulation, as happened in 2020 [2]. It is also open to them to legislate.

Mr Montford said:

This is a purely political decision. Whatever course they take, the Scottish Government will face opposition from environmentalists, the Climate Change Committee and their Green coalition partners. But they have no option. You can’t negotiate with reality.

https://www.netzerowatch.com/campaigns/view-email/QgkSvHy_8jTqDjEXTe3ZMR-aVCQTkpWtzjva3_7sdESIjpKbg0O-WhodYEDpcZk-kf_U6pO4lUSFOgTyguLmzMQPwGMgWk8KNMKx9SOuKU18B4QrZSbLrgrGuprmbz_qqeRvw7HKyHpuDcNcac_2_QkmUwaoA4iXXNelNw==

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World’s largest solar company cuts thousands of jobs

China’s Longi Green Energy Technology Co., the world’s largest solar manufacturer, is cutting almost one-third of its staff to slash costs in an industry struggling with overcapacity and fierce competition.

Longi plans to trim as much as 30% of its workforce, which last year totaled about 80,000 at its peak, according to several people familiar with the matter, including some briefed by senior management. The people asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.

The move signals an acceleration of job cuts that Longi began in November, when it started laying off thousands of people who were mostly management trainees and factory hires — a reversal after years of breakneck expansion across the global solar industry. It isn’t clear how many employees had been dismissed before this latest decision.

Longi rejected as false the suggestion that it would cut 30% of staff and said reductions would involve about 5% of total employees.

The solar sector is facing an “increasingly competitive environment,” the company said in a statement. “In order to adapt to market changes and improve organizational efficiency, Longi is optimizing our workforce.”

Xi’an-based Longi isn’t alone: China’s solar industry dominates global manufacturing but has suffered from layoffs and suspended investment plans in recent months. Manufacturers have been forced to sell at or below production costs after prices for solar panels fell to record lows last year. The result is that an industry seen as crucial to the global energy transition is struggling with excessive capacity, consolidation and the possibility of bankruptcies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-18/world-s-top-solar-firm-longi-plans-thousands-of-job-cuts-on-glut

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Financial adviser's frightening warning about the latest tech-enabled cars

Yipes! This is pretty appalling. My car is an 18 year old Toyota Echo that never talks to me and has never let me down in any way in all those years. It sounds like I am lucky to have it. Someone who knows Toyotas has offered me "above market" money for it

Scott Pape, who wrote the best-selling financial advice book The Barefoot Investor in 2016, argued that new 'internet-enabled cars' in the US often share data about a driver's speeding, braking and swerving with insurance companies.

This data can then lead to an increase in their insurance premiums.

Mr Pape recently wrote about his joyless experience driving a 'Chinese-built Haval Jolion SUV' on his blog.

'It is hands down the worst car I’ve ever driven (and in my twenties I drove a Mitsubishi Magna that leaked more oil than Saddam Hussein),' Mr Pape wrote.

'The Haval makes me feel like I’m 17 years old, back on my L-plates, with my hyper-anxious mother in the passenger seat "guiding" me.'

Mr Pape said the car would 'ding' repeatedly to keep him in check, including when he did not wear his seatbelt, tried to overtake or even if he looked away from the windscreen.

He suggested something more 'sinister' might be at work.

'You see, in the US, internet-enabled cars are recording all those dings, swerves and sharp stops, and selling the data for millions to the insurance industry,' he wrote.

'The result? People are often pinged with higher insurance premiums.'

While he acknowledged that this is only a reality in the US for now, he warned that it could soon be widespread in Australia.

'The most powerful car companies on Earth have teams of lawyers who craft 12,000-word privacy terms and conditions that they know no one ever reads,' Mr Pape wrote.

'This then allows the companies to track and sell our every move, and the buyers of that data feed it into algorithms and use it against us.'

In October, Katherine Kemp, Associate Professor at the UNSW's Faculty of Law & Justice, warned that 'Australia's privacy laws need urgent reform'.

'Australia’s privacy laws aren’t up to the task of protecting the vast amount of personal information collected and shared by car companies,' Ms Kemp wrote.

'And since our privacy laws don’t demand the specific disclosures required by some US states, we have much less information about what car companies are doing with our data.'

Ms Kemp cited a US study by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which found that cars with internet-connected features were 'the official worst category of products for privacy' they had ever reviewed, dubbing them a 'privacy nightmare on wheels'.

They tested all major car brands – Toyota, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Tesla, Hyundai – and found they all failed to meet minimum privacy standards.

Almost 85 per cent share or sell your data to third parties, while Nissan and Kia reportedly even allow the collection of data on a driver's sex life.

'They come right out and say they can collect and share your sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information and other sensitive personal information for targeted marketing purposes,' the report by the Mozilla Foundation states.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13220797/Barefoot-Investor-new-car-warning.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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Climate change is 'off the charts': Damning report reveals how records were smashed for greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures and sea level rise in 2023



Here we go again. The temperature changes they are talking about are tiny and their link to human activities is just a wobbly theory. There is no proof that human activities had any impact at all.

And note the chart. It is calibrated in TENTHS of one degree and has to go back to 1850 to show anything like a smooth rise. A more detailed chart would show long periods of stasis and falls, unlike CO emissions, which have been rising fairly steadily as industrial civilization has progressed. It is all just asssertion and even they admit that recent rises could be due to El Nino rather than CO2 emissions

And note that they show NO details of the CO2 changes which they allege to be at fault

Climate change is 'off the charts' and presents a 'defining challenge' to humanity, a damning new report warns today.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says several climate records were broken and in some cases 'smashed' last year.

Greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rises, and Antarctic ice loss all escalating in 2023 due to fossil fuel emissions.

'Sirens are blaring across all major indicators,' said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. 'Some records aren't just chart-topping, they're chart-busting – and changes are speeding-up.'

The WMO's State of the Global Climate report, published today, confirms that the year 2023 broke 'every single climate indicator'.

WMO confirmd that 2023 was the warmest year on record, as already announced by the UN's Copernicus climate change programme in January.

The global average near-surface air temperature for the year was at 2.61°F (1.45°C) above the pre-industrial average (1850 to 1900).

Before 2023, the two previous warmest years were 2016 (2.32°F/1.29°C above the 1850–1900 average) and 2020 (2.28°F/1.27°F above the 1850–1900 average).

What's more, the past nine years – between 2015 and 2023 – were the nine warmest years on record.

But the experts admit that the shift to 'El Niño' conditions in the middle of 2023 contributed to a rapid rise in temperature from 2022 to 2023.

El Niño is natural climate phenomenon where there's warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator.

Why are temperatures compared to 'pre-industrial' levels?
Pre-industrial levels act as a benchmark for how much the Earth's climate has changed.

The pre-industrial period is typically defined as the time before human activities - such as burning coal for heat - began to have a significant impact on the Earth's climate.

By comparing current temperatures to pre-industrial temperatures, experts can isolate the effects of human activity from natural climate variability.

Temperatures are largely fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, and these continued to climb in 2023.

WMO says data for concentrations of the three main greenhouse gases in the air (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) are not yet available for the whole of 2023, but in 2022 they reached 'new highs'.

Globally averaged concentrations were 417.9 parts per million (ppm) for carbon dioxide (CO2), 1,923 parts per billion (ppb) for methane (CH4), and 335.8 ppb for nitrous oxide (N2O).

Respectively, this marks an alarming rise of 150 per cent, 264 per cent and 124 per cent compared with greenhouse gas concentrations levels in the year 1750.

'For more than 250 years, the burning of oil, gas and coal has filled the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses,' said Dr Friederike Otto, climate lecturer at Imperial College London, who wasn't involved in the report.

'The result is the dire situation we are in today – a rapidly heating climate with dangerous weather, suffering ecosystems and rising sea-levels, as outlined by the WMO report.

'To stop things from getting worse, humans need to stop burning fossil fuels. It really is that simple.

'If we do not stop burning fossil fuels, the climate will continue to warm, making life more dangerous, more unpredictable, and more expensive for billions of people on earth.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13213507/Climate-change-charts-report-records-smashed.html

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The DOE Transformer Steel Rule and its Consequences

Last January, the Department of Energy (DOE) proposed a rule that would change the efficiency standards for the steel used in the cores of distribution transformers. The rule is now a final rule pending review at the Office of Management and Budget, with lawmakers looking to push back on the standards it would impose.

The new efficiency standards would effectively require the switch from grain oriented electrical steel (GOES) to amorphous steel in the cores of transformers on the electrical grid. The change would be required to be implemented within three years from the publication of the rule.

This is concerning because the new standards could jeopardize the transformer supply chain, with terrible consequences for the electrical grid and the provision of power to Americans.

Transformers are one of the many parts of the electrical grid that most people think of seldomly. They hum away in the background, and their importance is something that most of us rarely consider.

But, transformers serve an absolutely essential function on the grid. Transformers are necessary to change the voltage of electricity as it goes from long distance transmission, to local transmission, and then to residential and industrial consumption. Without these voltage changes, it’s impossible to move power between these stages.

Currently, GOES is the steel used in the cores of 95 percent of the transformers in the country. It’s produced by one firm in the US, Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. at two facilities in Butler, Pennsylvania and Zanesville, Ohio.

Amorphous steel for transformer applications is only manufactured by one firm, Metglas Inc, at just one facility, in Conway, South Carolina. This type of steel is used in the cores of the remaining five percent of transformers.

A major overhaul in the type of steel used in transformer cores will have significant implications for the supply chain of transformers.

Under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), the statute that DOE points to as authorizing these transformer steel standards “any new or amended energy conservation standard must be designed to achieve the maximum improvement in energy efficiency that DOE determines is technologically feasible and economically justified.”

DOE’s argument for putting forth these new standards hinges on the cost savings associated with the efficiency gains that the new rule would elicit, but it ignores the costs imposed on manufacturers throughout the supply chain, especially the steel producers and transformer manufacturers. It also ignores the burden that a major disruption to transformer manufacturing would create for the electrical grid, and the very real risks to reliability that such a disruption would pose.

Let’s take a look at it from the perspective of the amorphous metal supply.

During the comment period for the rule, Michael Howard, CEO of Howard Industries, one of the country’s largest transformer manufacturers which currently relies on GOES for their cores, discussed at a hearing the difficulty of meeting current transformer demand for core materials using amorphous steel:

There is not enough amorphous capacity in the world to handle the market today. I estimate the market in the distribution transformer business to be 450-million pounds. The total market for amorphous in the world, from my understanding, is around 400-million pounds, and that’s if you get 100-percent of all the steel supplying just the United States transformer market.

Just getting to the level of necessary amorphous steel production would be an incredibly heavy lift due to the limitations of the current manufacturing capacity.

Howard goes on to explain what this would mean for the companies that manufacture the transformers:

And then you’re talking about us — the transformer manufacturers — if we had to convert to amorphous or if we do some kind of hybrid of multiple, multiple lines and one-to-two-hundred-million-dollars, just for Howard Industries, I would estimate 500 to 800 million for the industry.

Multiple new production lines don’t come cheaply or quickly, and with three years to comply with the new standards, it would be incredibly difficult for transformer manufacturers to make the necessary changes to comply with the rule.

Legislators have also expressed major concerns over the DOE rule.

There is currently a bill, the Distribution Transformer Efficiency and Supply Chain Reliability Act of 2024, that would prevent the rule from going into effect and would prohibit any standards from being set that would remove GOES from the market.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/03/19/transformer-steel-rule/

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The cheap renewable thrill of climate protests

On March 13, 2024, Greta Thunberg was dragged away from blocking the Swedish Parliament entrance for a second day. She was among 40 or so people protesting the ‘political inaction’ over climate change. (If only that were true, I sigh…) She’s been at it since even before her embarrassingly hammy How dare you! speech at the United Nations in 2019. Climate change is the magic pudding of protests.

In 2005, the Global Day of Action (aka Kyoto Climate March) established the magic pudding recipe for annual protests, intended to force all governments to take action to ‘combat climate change’. Yep, almost 20 years ago.

According to Treehugger.com:

‘One of the first globally recognised protests took place in Copenhagen in 2009. Halfway through the UN’s environmental summit on December 12, tens of thousands of climate activists lined the streets to demand effective environmental policy. This was part of the Campaign for Climate Action’s annual Global Day of Action, and it ended up being the largest of the events to take place – estimates range from 25,000 to 100,000 people. What captured significant media attention was the violence incited by a few at the protest, and the arrests that followed.’

So much pushy passion, so little intelligence…

Much of the signage at these protests reflects faux moral posturing. In the 2014 People’s Climate March (more about ‘People’ later), one large blue sign carried the panic prophesy, all in caps:

WHEN THE LAST TREE IS CUT DOWN THE LAST [fish image] EATEN AND THE LAST STREAM POISONED YOU WILL REALISE YOU CANNOT EAT MONEY

This sort of presumptive argument by assertion is par for the alarmist cause. You can also run images of bushfires and storms with the assertion that they are caused by climate change and nobody challenges you. That is why it is done over and over again. As for ‘People’s Climate March’, it’s worth noting that ‘people’ in this context is usually a political sleight of hand, as in The People’s Democratic Republic of (North) Korea, etc.

The ever-recurring protests against climate change (a nonsensical statement but you know what I mean) enjoy the benefits of the never-ending, ‘renewable’ source of angst for the alarmist cohort. Like climate change ministers, the protesters will not be around long enough to be embarrassed by their alarmism in 50 years. But perhaps this ever-renewable protest will still manifest. Greta will be over 70 – and no doubt still thundering, still protesting, still accusing the world of stealing her childhood dreams. (Of what?)

Global concern for climate change began in 1972 when multiple scientists at the UN Conference on Human Development in Stockholm presented on the development of the climate over the century. By 1979, climate conferences were held and led to the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by the United Nations in 1988. The IPCC is now one of the leading organisations that provide countries with scientific data to create informed policies.

This was reported by Sharmon Lebby for her June 2021 article in treehugger.com. Sharmon is, as the website states, a ‘writer and sustainable fashion expert. She has written and spoken on panels about the ties between environmentalism, social justice, inclusivity, and fashion. She is the founder of Blessed Designs, an ethical fashion brand, and the President of the Ethical Network of San Antonio’. She cites her expertise as ‘Sustainable Fashion, Clean Beauty’. Good for her.

I am quoting from her treehugger.com article to stifle any knee-jerk criticism that I have selectively plucked material from a ‘denier’ source…

In September of 2014, around 400,000 demonstrators would gather in New York City for an event that would dramatically overtake Copenhagen’s protest numbers. This event was significant because even though the environmental movement gained real ground with the inception of Earth Day, polls would show that the United States ranked second to last in public knowledge about climate change. The Climate March would be known for its diverse attendees, all of whom gathered under the slogan “To Change Everything, It Takes Everyone”.

In other words, groupthink climate gullibility.

There have been many more climate change protests or climate strikes… The latter is a fun outing for school students prodded into action by the thought of saving the planet. All you needed to do was wag school.

In conclusion, Lebby wrote:

The number of climate change organisations appears to be growing. From government organisations to nonprofits, more and more leaders are beginning to see the urgency in working to heal the planet at its source. Many organisations such as Extinction Rebellion, Campaign Against Climate Action, and Fridays For Future were created for the sole purpose of using civil disobedience and peaceful marches to push for climate action. How effective these will be remains to be seen, but it does seem that these methods increase public support.

I’m not convinced about that, but my point is that the topic of climate change is a reliable source of renewable protesting, never running short of panic, angst and finger pointing at governments who ‘must do something’.

The terrible addiction of this topic is that no matter how much governments do something to satisfy their own alarmist craze (including our very own climate tsar Chris Bowen), there is nothing positive to show for it. Some people seem to expect instant and localised results but what would that look like? Even if you were to accept that fossil fuels cause warming, those economy-weakening policies would not have any effect for a long time. You can protest every day for 50 years! The signs and the paraphernalia are reusable – and universal.

Many governments have ‘done something’ (too much) already, eg Net Zero, chasing the elusive dream of renewable energy replacing coal and gas all while luxuriating in the financial contributions to the nation’s well-being by the same coal and gas. Sure, you can’t eat money, but you sure can’t eat without money, either.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/the-cheap-renewable-thrill-of-climate-protests/

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Getting to net zero without nuclear power condemns us to poverty

Our energy debate, here and globally, is one of the most consequential discussions in human history. That it is distorted by politicking, virtue signalling and delusion can be explained only by widespread ignorance about what is at stake.

It is pointless to contest the proposition that we need to transition away from a heavy reliance on fossil fuels. They are a finite resource and if our civilisation is to continue in anything approximating its current form this transition is unavoidable sometime.

The point of contestability is the urgency – probably overstated by many players. Still, let us put that argument aside and look at the overwhelming scale of the task. If we understand how energy has underpinned the development of our economies and societies, and how we rely on it, we could never be blase about transitioning from fossil fuels. We are talking about the reversal of the whole trajectory and achievement of our development across just a few decades.

We are being urged to up-end the relentless intensification of energy in favour of energy devolution or diffusion. This flips all we know about the core driver of our civilisation and, if it must be done, it needs to be done carefully with all possible technologies on the table.

Our journey from forager to influencer is all about the availability of increasingly intense sources of energy. The hunter-gather relied only on the energy of the human form, fuelled by the vegetable and animal matter of other organisms.

By controlling fire, domesticating animals and harnessing wind and water, we greatly leveraged our energy options. But none of this was enough to sustain cities or deliver widespread wealth.

Fossil fuels changed everything, driving transport and generating electricity. For thousands of years the global population grew very slowly and lived mostly in poverty. Across the past 250 years the population has increased tenfold, we have developed unfathomable wealth and technology, all the while more than doubling life expectancy and reducing poverty.

Energy was the driving force, and the consequences extend way beyond the economic.

In a new short film for Net Zero Watch, John Constable explains the impact: “That exponential increase in wealth from high-quality fuels led to a society that could withstand external shocks that would have been catastrophic for earlier populations. It was the beginnings of modernity.”

Constable is seen as a controversial figure in the climate debate, the sort derided as a denier by alarmists and renewables zealots. But his historical perspective is uncontrovertible.

Apart from transport, heating and cooling, industrialisation, appliances, entertainment and communications devices, consider what energy has done for humanity. In How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil details how even in the early part of the 20th century most of the world faced poverty and food shortages. Rising food production – fuelled largely by fossil fuels and techniques dependent on them – led to a decline in global malnutrition from two in three people in 1950 to less than one in 10 now. And because this occur­red while the global population more than tripled from 2.5 billion in 1950 to eight billion in the 2020s, it means we are feeding eight times as many people as we did 70 years ago.

We mess with this formula at our own peril. What has been fuelled by dense forms of energy can continue only if replacement energy is available, otherwise much more will have to change, and likely for the worse.

Constable talks about other knock-on effects, describing how Britain’s population became larger and richer and therefore more secure and innovative: “Wealth creates freedom, which creates more wealth, which creates yet more freedom and more wealth.”

He fails to offer a long-term solu­tion, preferring to warn of potentially dire and chaotic conseq­uences if we shun reliable and affordable energy: “Everything that humans value is in jeopardy.”

Labor, the Greens and their barrackers in public debate have their hands over their eyes, ears and mouths. For them, the world’s only reliable, baseload, zero-emissions fuel source is an evil whose role they refuse to see, hear or consider.

This is confounding when green-left politicians in Europe have long embraced nuclear and 22 leading economies at the COP28 conference in Dubai last December pledged to triple their nuclear energy output.

The green left in Australia shuns modernity for sham reasons; it cites only cost but this cannot be genuine given its lack of interest in the costs of renewables and clear evidence that many nations are reaping price benefits from nuclear. The costs of not developing a domestic nuclear industry need to be confronted. We would consign ourselves to a more sparse and vulnerable electricity grid that dam­ages environments and land­scapes. It also would face permanently high transmission and energy storage costs.

We would turn our backs on a hi-tech industry that plays a role in all modern economies and we would do this while attempting to run (and build) nuclear-propelled submarines. Madness. We also would surrender energy security, undermining economic fundamentals. Australia’s strategic rivals would encourage us to eschew nuclear and persist with our renewables plus storage experiment (especially if they buy our coal, gas and iron ore while selling us wind turbines and solar panels).

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull posted on X about the nuclear debate, asserting that nuclear could not “firm” renewable energy such as wind and solar. “To firm them we need flexible, dis­patchable sources of zero emission energy such as pumped hydro, batteries or green hydrogen,” Turnbull said. “Nuclear reactors cannot turn on and off, ramp up and down like hydro or batteries can. Nuclear reactors generate continuously.”

And he said that like it is a bad thing. Nuclear would stabilise our grid with constant power and at times of low demand there might be little need for renewables. Perhaps that is why renewable investors, including in green hydrogen, are so antagonistic to nuclear. Excess power from a nuclear plant at times of low demand might be used to generate hydrogen or desalinate seawater. Next Turnbull will criticise drip irrigation because it invariably leads to moist soil.

Another film from Britain caught my attention this week. It was an old newsreel-style update on the 1956 commissioning of Britain’s (and the world’s) first commercial nuclear reactor at Calder Hall in Cumbria. Over wonderful black-and-white footage of workers toiling away on gargantuan cement and steel installations, there is a voice-over in well-modulated King’s English that has a hint of derring-do in the delivery.

“Far below, work started on the intricate task of creating the heart of the reactor furnace, to draw heat from the new fuel of the atomic age,” we are told. Yep, they were proud. Here was a damaged and straitened post-war nation justifiably taking pride in its industry and innovation – it built the reactor in less than three years. Compare that to our negativity and self-doubt.

The green left here argues all this technology is beyond us and that we should build wind farms and power lines across the country while we leave the rest of the world to modernise, and just hope for the best. It is a scientific cringe.

In an extraordinary interview on Tuesday Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s 730 harangued opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien for daring to suggest this nation could deliver a nuclear plant inside 12 years and do it in a costly manner. Apparently, this can happen only overseas.

Yet the same host spoke with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen last November and when he claimed to be turning Australia into a “renewable energy superpower” they both managed to keep straight faces.

Facts and science have lost relevance in favour of ideology and sanctimony.

Science tells us, as the International Energy Agency concludes, that current technologies cannot deliver net zero by 2050. Neither can net zero be delivered without nuclear energy. Yet the government’s pretence continues, and the Greens and the media cheer. Just this week Anthony Albanese hailed a company investing $44m in electric trucks – but taxpayers tipped in almost half ($20m) and no one mentioned none of this would be possible without coal-generated power.

Turnbull and Bowen complain about timelines and costs for nuclear while somewhere underneath the Snowy Mountains lies a bedevilled tunnelling machine called Florence that Turnbull set to work on what was supposed to be a $2bn, five-year project but that will cost $20bn across at least 10 years and will provide only some energy storage if we are lucky.

Around the country communities are objecting to renewable projects and the transmission lines to connect them – legal and political battles are enjoined. Little wonder renewable energy investment, despite being favoured by laws, subsidies and market rules, is starting to drop off.

Bowen is set to trump a long list of failed energy ministers. One of the key considerations on election timing will be energy – can Labor risk an election early next year if there is a threat of blackouts from December through to March?

We know what a zero-emissions environment looks like – South Australia lived it for a day during the 2016 statewide blackout that occurred only because of how vulnerable the renewables push had made them. We saw what a low-emissions world looks like too, during the pandemic – people staying home, empty shopping centres, empty CBDs, empty airports, empty streets and empty skies.

The challenge for the world is keeping businesses open and skies busy while getting emissions to zero. It is unclear whether this is even possible. But it is certainly not possible without nuclear energy.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/getting-to-net-zero-without-nuclear-power-condemns-us-to-poverty/news-story/d623c988c4e05408191f7354c796ff0b

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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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EU takes the ax to green farming rules

The European Commission is finalizing a series of legislative proposals that would severely weaken environmental requirements for farmers — flying in the face of advice by its top scientists that agriculture must become more sustainable or it will be decimated by climate change.

The proposals, seen by POLITICO, would end a requirement to set aside land to promote biodiversity, making it and other measures — such as minimizing tillage to prevent soil erosion — voluntary. Taken together, they would enable farmers to get EU subsidies even if they don't meet the most basic environmental standards, known as conditionality.

The dramatic policy reversal by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission comes at the urging of national governments desperate to quell protests by farmers who have taken to the streets around Europe, and in Brussels, to vent their fury at the environmental red tape they say is destroying their livelihoods.

But it also ignores a stark warning by the EU’s own scientists, in a first-of-its-kind report this week by the European Environment Agency, which singles out agriculture as a sector where urgent action is needed if the Continent is to avoid catastrophic floods, years-long droughts and scorching heatwaves.

Civil society groups and green lawmakers warn that the push would undo what little environmental reform has been added in recent years to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU farm subsidy program that eats up a third of the bloc’s budget, locking taxpayers' money into subsidizing farmers to maintain the status quo for years to come.

“Wiping out decades of incremental progress towards sustainable farming for short-term electoral concerns is a huge mistake, and all of society will pay a high price,” said Marco Contiero, Greenpeace EU's agriculture campaigner.

The policy reversal by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission comes at the urging of national governments desperate to quell protests by farmers | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images
“Farmers are experiencing serious hardship, but these proposals do little to address that and just strip away some of the last shreds of environmental protection in the EU’s farm policy.”

Conditionality

The CAP includes a set of “good agricultural and environmental conditions” — or GAECs — that farmers must meet to receive subsidies.

The EU executive will propose to remove obligations for four of them, and instead provide financial compensation to farmers who voluntarily implement them.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-takes-the-ax-to-green-farming-rules/

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UK: Net Zero is dead. Only the fanatics haven’t realised it

If building new gas plants is inconsistent with Net Zero, then Net Zero is inconsistent with a functioning power grid

Rishi Sunak has made the case for building new gas-fired power plants on the grounds that reliable sources of electricity generation are needed to back up the intermittency of wind and solar generation. This simple statement of reality has prompted hostile comments from the usual suspects, claiming that this is inconsistent with Net Zero commitments.

…

The response to Mr Sunak’s article illustrates that many advocates of Net Zero live in a fantasy world and are, apparently, content to sacrifice the future welfare of the UK’s population on the altar of arbitrary and artificial goals. In our world there is a simple choice to ensure reliable electricity supplies in 2035. Either we build a lot of new gas-fired generation capacity, or we extend the life of older inefficient plants. In neither case is a fully decarbonised electricity system possible, but the option of doing little or nothing is clearly worse than making the commitment to building new plants.

There are too many artificial deadlines in the climate change field, but this one is real. It takes between 3 and 5 years to build a new gas-fired power plant at an existing site under the UK’s current planning system. Another 1-2 years is required for contracts and project finance. These are minimum periods as 30 GW of plant capacity can’t be built at one time. A program of this scale must start in 2025 or 2026 to have any chance of meeting the UK’s needs in 2035. Unless we start now, we face blackouts within a decade.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/12/rishi-sunak-gas-power-station-net-zero-blackouts/

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Flawed Polling Study Claims That Climate Change Influences Elections

In a recent post by The Conversation, “Climate change matters to more and more people – and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election,” one of the authors of a recent study looking at polling and Americans’ attitudes towards climate change claims that despite being low on most people’s list of concerns, it actually plays a potentially deciding role in elections. This is unsubstantiated, and not only can the results can be manipulated based on what polling you select, but the researchers appear to have -at best- some major blind spots when it comes to interpreting their data.

Matt Burgess, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote the Conversation piece, and is also one of the authors on the study being referred to. Right away, he admits that American voters’ top priorities are economics, inflation, crime, health care, education, and immigration. This is consistently shown to be true, as Climate Realism has pointed out numerous times. Not only do Americans rank other issues higher than climate change, but it is actually ranked last or tied for last for the majority of people when compared to other issues, even other environmental issues.

Still, Burgess insists that actually climate change has influenced presidential elections, writing “[d]espite this, research that I conducted with my colleages suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections.”

The authors used 2016 and 2020 survey data from “Voter Study Group,” a subsidiary of “Democracy Fund” which is described as nonpartisan, although they seem to lean decidedly left. The study analyzed “relationships between thousands of voters’ presidential picks in the past two elections with their demographics and their opinions on 22 different issues, including climate change.”

The survey data they used was one where they asked voters to rate climate change as “unimportant,” “not very important,” “somewhat important” or “very important.” Unsurprisingly, they found that 67% of those polled rated climate change as “somewhat” or “very” important, which was an increase from previous polling from 2016. They also report that 77% of those rating climate change as important expressed support for Biden in 2020, and 69% of them supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. Burgess says this suggests “that climate change opinion has been providing the Democrats with a growing electoral advantage,” but this is obviously ignoring another fundamental criterion, which is candidate likeability.

Even among Democrats, Clinton was unpopular. Remembering, for example, that many Bernie Sanders supporters were miffed when Clinton was given the nomination, polling data from the time showed that 12% of Sanders supporters ended up voting for Trump in the general election.

This is a pretty egregious oversight on the part of Burgess, and in the Conversation article, he admits that “[o]ur analysis could not answer” the question of how climate change opinion may have “tipped” the 2020 presidential election, but he offers “educated guesses.”

First, that because recent elections have been very close, “climate change opinion would not need to have a very large effect on voting to change election outcomes.” Number two was that “candidates who deny that climate change is real or a problem might turn off some moderate swing voters,” and third was that “some voters may be starting to see the connections between climate change and the kitchen-table issues that they consider to be higher priorities than climate change.”

None of this is evidenced by the data, and outside research calls it into question. The Pew Research Center tried the same thing in 2020, as covered by Climate Realism at the time, claiming that “a majority of registered voters in the United States say climate change will be a very (42 percent) or somewhat (26 percent) important issue in making their decision about whom to vote for in the presidential election[.]” However, once again, the same poll found that out of 12 policy issues, it was at the bottom of the ranking. The question “How important, if at all, are each of the following issues in making your decision about who to vote for in the 2020 presidential election?” was asked of surveyed voters, and even in that line of questioning, the economy, health care, supreme court appointments, corona virus, economic inequality, foreign policy, gun policy, immigration, racial and ethnic inequality, and violent crime all ranked higher.

Burgess admits towards the end of the article that Democrats “risk losing voters when their policies impose economic costs, or when they are framed as anti-capitalist, racial, or overly pessimistic.” This is a death blow to the idea that climate change gives Democrats a significant benefit in elections, because climate policy is consistently economically costly, especially when discussing banning fossil fuels, and polls show that voters are unwilling to spend very much money at all on climate issues. Additionally, the climate narrative is completely pessimistic with constant alarmist claims of impending doom.

In the end, the article about Burgess’ study reads more like wishful thinking than science. It is transparently an effort to use polling in order to influence people into believing that the climate issue is more important in their peers’ minds, so that social pressure will make it a priority for them too. If past polling and the reporting on it are anything to go by, this attempt will likely not succeed either, especially as energy costs rise amid the application of climate policy.

https://climaterealism.com/2024/03/the-conversation-leans-on-flawed-polling-study-to-claim-that-climate-change-influences-elections/

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Collapsing El Niño spells end to year-long bout of climate hysteria

Lawks-a-mercy, the oceans have stopped boiling. Cancel the slots on cable news for rising media stars and noted climate hysterics Jim Dale and Donnachadh McCarthy, and loosen the protective clothing for the unhinged UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres. To be serious, the current strong and natural El Niño event is starting to dramatically collapse with critical ocean temperatures in the central tropical Pacific ocean falling from 2.1°C above normal in late November to 1.3°C. The collapse in temperatures is even more dramatic at the sub-surface 300 metre level. In the western tropical Pacific, the temperature has plummeted by nearly 1.5°C, and the water is now cooler than normal.

Apart from damaging a few budding media careers, what does this mean? El Niño is a natural transfer of heat between the oceans and the atmosphere that starts in the Pacific regions. The effects of an El Niño are far from completely understood but they are essentially large heat transfers from the tropics to the northern hemisphere. We have experienced three strong El Niños in the last 25 years – 1998, 2016 and 2023 – and in each case they have disrupted weather patterns around the world. This leads to sudden spikes in ocean temperatures and unusual weather events. Over the last year, these events have been ruthlessly catastrophised by activist scientists, politicians and journalists seeking to nudge citizens to accept the collectivist Net Zero agenda.

One of the main indicators of the progress of El Niño, and its related La Niña oscillation, is the temperature of the water at the surface and near surface. The graph below shows the very rapid recent drop in the sub-surface temperatures for the western tropical Pacific down to much cooler levels.

Atmospheric scientist Professor Cliff Mass of Washington University observes that the entire character of the northern winter has been characterised by a strong El Niño. He notes that in America the impacts have included low snowpack over Washington State, huge snowpack and heavy rain over California and warm temperatures over the Upper Plains States. Of course, similar unusual weather patterns have been recorded over many parts of the planet, along with the ubiquitous pseudoscientific claim that the climate is collapsing and it is all the fault of humans and their wicked ways.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/13/collapsing-el-nino-spells-end-to-year-long-bout-of-climate-hysteria/

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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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