Glyphosate (Roundup) to the rescue

The weedkiller that Greenies hate is the only one that can control black grass

The UK's food security is being put at risk by herbicide-resistant black-grass, ZSL [Zoological Society of London] has revealed, as it calls for a ban on overuse of weed killer.

The grass out-competes wheat for soil nutrients and reduces the number of wheat plants where it grows - and it is likely to spread further across the UK.

This would increase the prices of bread and biscuits, and there would be less animal feed available so could also affect how much meat costs.

Black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides) is a native annual weed which although natural, large infestations in farmers’ fields can force them to abandon their winter wheat – the UK’s main cereal crop.

Farmers have been using herbicides to try and tackle the black-grass problem – but ZSL has found that in many areas of England the agricultural weed is now resistant to these herbicides.

According to new research from the scientists at Rothampsted Research in Hertfordshire as well ZSL and the University of Sheffield, the cost of black-grass , is setting back the UK economy £400 million and 800,000 tonnes of lost wheat yield each year, with potential implications for national food security.

A spokesperson for ZSL said: "We must reduce herbicide use. We need government policy to address this at a national level and drive behaviour change, e.g. through a national action plan.

"Farmers must adopt more truly integrated past management practices, using all the tools available to them rather than relying mainly on chemical herbicides. This will include much more diverse crop rotations, cultural control methods, direct sowing, strict field hygiene measures and regular monitoring and delayed drilling to allow stale seedbeds."

The report, published in Nature Sustainability today, found the UK is losing 0.82 million tonnes in wheat yield each year (equivalent to roughly 5 per cent of the UK’s domestic wheat consumption) due to herbicide resistant black-grass.

The worst-case scenario – where all fields contained large amounts of resistant black-grass – is estimated to result in an annual cost of £1 billion, with a wheat yield loss of 3.4 million tonnes per year.

Lead author and postdoctoral researcher at ZSL’s Institute of Zoology, Dr Alexa Varah said: “This study represents the first national-scale estimate of the economic costs and yield losses due to herbicide resistance, and the figure is shockingly higher than I think most would imagine.

“We need to reduce pesticide use nationwide, which might mean introducing statutory limits on pesticide use, or support to farmers to encourage reduced use and adoption of alternative management strategies. Allocating public money for independent farm advisory services and research and development could help too.”

Over-use of herbicides also leads to poor water quality and biodiversity loss, meaning a reduction in numbers of insects and rare farmland birds.

 Glyphosate is now one of the few herbicides that black-grass has not evolved resistance to, with farmers now reliant on repeated applications to control the weed. However, evidence from a recent study shows that resistance to glyphosate is now evolving in the field too.

Dr Varah added: “Understanding the economic and potential food security issues is a vital step, before looking at biodiversity, carbon emissions and water quality impacts in greater detail. We hope to use this method to aid the development of future models to help us understand how British farmers battling black-grass could do it in a way that is more beneficial to biodiversity like insects, mammals, wild plants and threatened farmland bird species like skylarks, lapwing and tree sparrows – unearthing how their numbers are linked to changes in farming practices.”

SOURCE 




World Faces Trash Glut After China Ban

Recyclers search for alternatives to exports, while some towns drop programs

For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products.

That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard. Since then, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia—other popular markets for the West’s trash—have implemented their own restrictions.

The moves have caused a seismic shift in how the world deals with its waste. Long used to shipping off trash to poorer countries to sort and process, nations are now faced with the question of what recycling is worth to them. They are undertaking new investments in domestic processing, ramping up alternative strategies such as incineration and rolling out education campaigns to teach homeowners to sort trash. Others are dropping programs altogether.

Recycling is “something that’s ingrained in you, and one day it suddenly all goes away,” said Kyle O’Brien, the town manager of Broadway, Va. The town had offered curbside recycling for two decades but canceled the service last year after Beijing started turning away the world’s recyclables. The company that processed the materials, van der Linde Recycling, closed its household waste processing facility, blaming the severe drop in prices.

For years, the world’s bottles and boxes made their way to China on ships that offered deep discounts to avoid returning empty after dropping off cargo in the U.S. and other countries. Since 1992, China has imported 45% of the world’s plastic waste, according to data published last year in the journal Science Advances.

“It was a great relationship, where we bought their goods and sent them back the empty boxes,” says Brent Bell, vice president of recycling for Houston- based Waste Management, the largest waste management company in the U.S.

Last year, China instituted a ban on 24 categories of waste— including, for example, plastic clamshell containers, soda and shampoo bottles, and junk mail. It said foreign garbage was “provoking a public outcry.”

As of October, U.S. scrap exports of plastic to mainland China were down 89% since early 2017, when China began to make clear it would ban many categories, while mixed paper exports were down 96%, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.

Total U.S. plastic scrap exports to all countries were down 64% in that period, while mixed paper exports were down 42% according to ISRI.

Scramble for buyers

Cities and towns have been scrambling to find new buyers for their waste ever since. One big problem is that many locations outside cities such as New York are used to putting recycling in a single bin. Different materials must be painstakingly separated before they can be processed. Much paper is too damp and plastic too soiled with food or grease to be recycled at all.


China accepted dirty and mixed recyclables because it had low-wage workers to sort out unwanted material, often by hand. That gave American contractors little incentive to weed out food scraps, plastic bags and nonrecyclable junk stateside.

After China rejected imports, a flood of trash was rerouted to countries such as India, Indonesia and Malaysia. Many of those places now say they are overwhelmed and have imposed their own restrictions on paper or plastic imports. The countries also want to focus on developing their own waste collection industries.

Malaysia in May began sending back 60 containers of imported trash to the U.S. and other countries, complaining it had become a dumping ground for rich countries. The containers were meant to contain plastic scrap but were contaminated with other items such as cables and electronic waste. A government spokeswoman said more containers will be returned as Malaysia ramps up inspections.

Japan, which historically sent most of its plastic exports to China, had been redirecting trash to Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam after China’s ban. But when those countries began turning dirty recycling away, Japanese collectors started stockpiling, in hopes a new market would arise. Over the past year, Japan has amassed 500,000 tons of plastic waste, according to Hiroaki Kaneko, deputy director of recycling at the environment ministry.

Japan, the second-biggest exporter of plastic waste behind the U.S., is trying to stimulate domestic processing by earmarking billions of yen to subsidize plastic recycling machinery for private companies.

Daiei Kankyo Holdings, a recycling company based in Kobe, recently applied for the government subsidies, which are estimated to cover up to half the cost of recycling equipment for a new plant slated to open next year in Osaka. The plant will double the company’s current capacity to around 30,000 tons a year.

Asei Co., a Japanese plastic waste exporter, moved the production of plastic pellets, which are created during the recycling process and used to produce new products, home from its factory in Shanghai. It spent 500 million yen, or close to $5 million, on two new facilities northeast of Tokyo.

The U.K. is burning more of its trash, including dirty or low-value recycling. Attitudes toward incineration vary greatly by country. In the U.S., where space is plentiful, it has long been cheaper to send materials to landfills, and incineration has remained unpopular. Across much of Europe, by contrast, trash burned for energy has been popular for years.

Incineration and recycling rates in England are now on par at roughly 42%, according to government data. Waste collected by local authorities sent for incineration climbed to 10.8 million metric tons last year from 10.2 million tons a year earlier, while recycling dropped to 10.9 million tons from 11.3 million tons.

“We are fast moving into a crisis where we don’t have market capacity for the materials collected, and already prices have plummeted,” said Simon Ellin, CEO of the Recycling Association, a U.K. trade body.

London-based waste contractor Paper Round has begun asking customers to stop putting plastic film, which isn’t easily recyclable, into recycling bins dotted around the office buildings, hotels and restaurants it collects from, because buyers don’t want it.

It is holding breakfast seminars for office workers and sending educational emails to staff at the buildings it serves explaining what can and can’t be recycled. It has also warned customers that unless prices for cardboard rise it will start charging for some collections.

“The China ban has highlighted that we can no longer export our problem,” said managing director Bill Swan. Paper Round’s buyers have much higher standards now, he said, such as checking moisture levels, which can decrease the quality of paper.

In Memphis, Tenn., Republic Services Inc., one of America’s largest waste haulers, last year stopped accepting mixed recycling put in a single bin from some businesses, saying it was too contaminated.

“When you’re in a buyer’s market—and we are certainly in a buyer’s market—you can demand higher quality,” said Pete Keller, head of recycling at Phoenix-based Republic.

The move in Memphis prompted the city’s airport to send bottles, cans and paper to landfills. For months it left in place recycling bins in case the service returned but recently gave up and removed them.

To improve the quality of what it does still collect, Republic has hired more staff to sort materials and acquired new optical scanners to distinguish between metals, colored paper and different types of plastic. It opened a new facility in Texas earlier this year that uses a variety of technologies to sort material in milliseconds.

Other waste collectors have also made investments, which have driven up costs for customers. Philadelphia is paying $92 a ton for its recyclables to be collected, up from $44 a ton before the China ban. Higher costs initially prompted the city to start burning half its recyclables before backtracking after public criticism.

The city is now spending $500,000 on an advertising campaign it hopes will reduce contamination rates—down to 10% from the current 25%—to secure it a discount on collection costs. “Often the material people put in bins, they don’t know whether it’s recyclable,” said Department of Streets Commissioner Carlton Williams, who counts bowling balls, garden hoses and old toys among examples of contaminants he has seen.

This summer, Philadelphia put ads on bus shelters and the radio telling people to “take a minute before you bin it” and “if in doubt throw it out.” The campaign asks residents to stop putting plastic bags in recycling bins and to rinse food containers. It has also sent staff doorto- door to tell residents what should go in the recycling bin, and has put lids on bins to protect paper from the rain.

SOURCE 





Now Alcohol and Sugar Are Even Worse for the Planet Than Eating Meat

Scientists want us to eat bugs. Eating actual meat, from delicious cows and chickens and pigs and whatnot, is supposedly killing the planet. Instead, we should be eating wormburgers and maggot-dogs and cricket tacos. That's literally what the eggheads want. They say it's the only way we'll keep everybody from dying of global warming. Every other day there's another "news" story encouraging us all to eat filthy insects, like the mud-caked peasants they think we are.

So let's say you do what your moral, ethical, and intellectual betters tell you to do. You stop eating meat. Maybe you don't choke down cockroach casserole like they keep telling you, but you stop eating dead animals. You make that sacrifice for the common good. Now you're off the hook, aren't you? Now they'll leave you alone, right?

Wrong!

Daily Mail:

Families that often dine out and consume large quantities of sweets and alcohol are likely to have a higher carbon footprint than meat eaters, a study claims.

Researchers came to this conclusion after studying the food habits and carbon footprints of around 60,000 households across Japan.

They found that meat consumption typically only accounts for only 10 per cent of the different in environmental impact between low and high carbon households.

In contrast, households with high carbon footprints typically consumed around two to three times more sweets and alcohol than those with low footprints.

Well, it's Japan, so I really feel like Godzilla screws up the average. He's got a huge footprint, in every sense. But even so, obviously this means everybody should stop eating sugar and drinking alcohol. Otherwise, Greta Thunberg won't grow up to scold us some more.

You know what? Why stop there? Everybody should just stop eating, period. Let's all starve ourselves to death. Our only carbon footprint will be whatever is released as our corpses decompose. And then, that'll be it. Just let mankind die off to save the world. (Everybody except Arnold Schwarzenegger and Leonardo DiCaprio, of course. As always, they're exempt from the rules they want to impose on the rest of us.)

Environmentalists hate humanity and feel guilty for being part of it. If you derive any pleasure out of life, you must be stopped. Or as raconteur Jesse Kelly puts it: "The entire climate change platform is, 'If you're evil enough to be alive, at least have the decency to be miserable.'"

The holidays are depressing enough as it is. Go ahead, have some eggnog. Eat some cookies shaped like snowmen and Christmas trees. Flip off a scientist. Whatever makes these next few weeks bearable. Tell those Scrooges to go scold themselves.

SOURCE 




Australia building gas-fired generators

A NEW power station to help keep the lights on in Queensland and NSW will "be announced today, the first of a series of new electricity generators to be given the tick. The gas-fired power plant at Gatton will be underwritten by the Morrison Government and is one of 12 generators short-listed just prior to the election.

No decision has yet been made on a coal-fired power station at Collinsville, championed by some LNP MPs, which was also short-listed.

At 132 megawatts, the Gatton gas plant is a smaller generator but can be used to firm up renewable power and can switch on with little notice during peak periods. It is also hoped it will put downward pressure on power prices should it be given final approval by the company behind it, Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners.

Quinbrook, which specialises in renewable and low-carbon projects, has previously warned the project would not go ahead without government support. Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the decision to underwrite the project was made after consideration of the project's financial viability, benefit to consumers and potential environmental impacts: "The Government will now enter detailed underwriting and contractual negotiations with the project proponent ahead of its financial investment decisions," he said.

Construction will begin once private sector funding is secured. The Federal Government is not funding the project, but instead underwriting its debt, so taxpayers will not have to fork out for the construction and any financial exposure is expected to be minimal.

Mr Taylor said it would increase competition, helping to keep energy prices down. Any excess gas from the project will be put on the Queensland gas market, which would increase competition for AGL and Origin.

An interconnector linking the Queensland and NSW power grids means the project could boost the southern state's energy supply if needed.

In relation to Collinsville, Mr Taylor said a first study was due this week, but further feasibility studies would be needed early in the new year.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail' of 23 December, 2019

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

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

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Dave Lowe found measurable proof of climate change 50 years ago. He's watched in horror ever since (?)

Below is the preface to a very long-winded story that ignores the elephant in the room.  Dr Lowe did NOT find "measurable proof of climate change" 50 years ago or at any other time.  All he found was that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were rising fairly steadily.  Nobody argues with that. It's a fact.  What they do argue about is how much (if any) effect that has on global temperatures.  And that is not at all obvious at first sight or any other sight.

It becomes obvious when you look at how well global temperature tracks CO2 levels.  It is supposed to but it doesn't.  The theoretical case that CO2 should influence temperature is clear enough but the big question is:  "By how much"?  Scientists measure things so that is the burning question.  And the answer appears to be: "By less than the error of measurement."  So the effect is so small as to be virtually undetectable. CO2 is a minute fraction of the atmosphere so that its effects are minute is very much what one would on theory expect, an expectation that is borne out by the data 

Greenies say the effect is large but that is little more than an expression of opinion.  So what are the facts?  There is much in the temperature record that one could point to but my favorite is the "Grand Hiatus". That datum is a real lulu. The central assertion of the whole Greenie case is that post-WWII the world industrialized vigorously and the many new factories and industries concerned belched out vast amounts of CO2, thus warming the planet.

But did it?  The first half of the story is spot-on.  Atmospheric CO2 levels did soar from that point on.  But what about the temperature?  It flatlined.  For 30 years between 1945 and 1975, CO2 levels leapt but global temperatures remained flat, which completely contradicts the theory. See here.  At the very moment that the Global Warming theory was first bruited, it was demonstrably false.  At the very time Warmists point to as the start of global warming, it was not warming.

Greenies say that "special factors" explain the discrepancy but what special factor could exactly cancel out the effect of CO2 for 30 years? It's an absurdity. CO2 is irrelevant.

Dr Lowe would appear to be a man of faith, true to his Greenie religion at all costs

There's a certificate on the wall of Dave Lowe's small cottage in Petone, Wellington, New Zealand.

It could easily be missed by a passing guest. But if they cared to take a second glance, three words would immediately jump out: Nobel Peace Prize.  It's the 2007 Prize, awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lowe was a lead author on their largest-ever report.

It was by far the greatest honor of his career. He resigned almost immediately afterward, walking away on top of the scientific world.

The Prize is a testament to all that he has achieved in his career, but at the same time, to him, it's a haunting reminder of all the things he didn't, or couldn't, change.

"I've lived this horror for 50 years," he says. "There's so little time left and we've just been so bloody stupid."

Dave Lowe was one of the first people on Earth to find measurable proof that human activities were changing the atmosphere and warming the planet.

For the past 50 years, he has watched on, helpless and frustrated, as the situation around him has gotten worse, and worse, and worse.

More HERE

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

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

*****************************************

  Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all who come by here

May this Holy time bring you all its blessings

I will be posting over the Christmas New Year period but not as much as usual



These activists really are crackers! Now the Greenies want to ban your Christmas bonbon – and the reason why is all too familiar

Environmental activists are calling for the traditional Christmas cracker to be banned as they contribute to plastic waste.

Environmentalist and founder of eco-friendly online store Biome, Tracey Bailey, says the Christmas tradition is responsible for a large contribution of plastic waste to landfill every year.

Ms Bailey told the Courier Mail that the disposable plastic toys inside the crackers should be considered just as harmful as other single use plastic items including straws, cutlery, beverage stirrers and cotton buds.

She believed that the plastic trinkets should be included in worldwide government bans on single use plastics and explained: 'They are just as likely to end up washing down drains and in to our oceans.'

Ms Bailey said that families could help reduce the large amount of rubbish over Christmastime by abstaining from purchasing crackers with the plastic toys. 

She told how the yule tradition led to excess waste and said: 'Once the festivities are over, the toys are usually forgotten and discarded with the rubbish from Christmas lunch or dinner.'

A spokesperson from the environmental organisation Planet Ark said that avoiding bonbons would be a good way to reduce the impact of Christmas waste.

He said: 'It is possible to make your own low waste bonbons by using recycled paper and treats you've made yourself.'

Ms Bailey explained that making your own plastic free Christmas crackers would be a good eco friendly alternative. 

She said that you can use cardboard toilet roll inserts, recycled paper and twine to create the outside shell and replace the plastic toy with a random act of kindness card for the recipient to complete.

SOURCE 





Trump Administration Finalizes Rule That Will Roll Back Light Bulb Ban

The Energy Department announced that it had finalized its decision to roll back the 2007 rule that banned incandescent light bulbs in favor of energy-efficient CFLs.

DOE said that although the CFLs increase efficiency in light bulbs, it costs the consumers 300 percent more to light their homes. But the real benefit to repealing the ban is that it will once again, give consumers a choice.

Reuters:

The move is part of the administration’s push to ease regulations by requiring agencies to ditch two old regulations for each one they propose. The administration has also rolled back Obama-era regulations on pollution and emissions as it seeks to maximize oil, gas and coal production.

The roll back on light bulbs has been challenged in court by 15 states and Washington, D.C. who say it would harm state efforts to fight emissions blamed for climate change.

Environmental groups decried the decision. The Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit, said it would cost consumers $14 billion in energy bills annually and create the need to generate the amount of electricity provided by an additional 30 500-megawatt power plants.

I call BS on those claims. They don't factor in savings from buying incandescent rather than CFL bulbs and many people realize the savings and will keep using CFLs. What the greens object to is giving people a choice. You see, they don't think you're smart enough to act in your own interest.

The NRDC said old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, which give off more of their energy in heat rather than light, comprise nearly half of today’s bulb sales.

“The Trump administration just thumbed its nose at Congress, America’s families and businesses, and the environment,” said Noah Horowitz, an energy efficiency specialist at the NRDC.

This American family thanks the president for giving us the choice. It's called "freedom" for that reason and the green hysterics can't stand it.

Some people may want to continue using the CFLs. There is an argument that they lower electric bills by using less energy. But many other consumers balk at the expense and complain about the reduced illumination. A 105-watt-equivalent bulb can cost between $25 and $50.

Most CFLs are fine for general illumination, but I like a nice, bright, soft, 100-watt incandescent bulb to read by. It may be energy inefficient, so sue me. That's my choice and I'm glad I still have it.

SOURCE 






Trump to Make Dishwashers Great Again!

The president’s war on environmental regulations is one of his signature fights. Here’s where dishwashers come into it.

As Congress voted to impeach President Trump in Washington, D.C., he appeared at a spirited rally in Battle Creek, Michigan.

During a long speech, he turned his attention to another issue on his mind: dishwashers.

The president said he'd heard complaints about environmental regulations making the kitchen appliances inefficient.

"Remember the dishwasher?" he said. "You'd press it, boom! There’d be like an explosion. Five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out.”

"Now you press it 12 times. Women tell me ..." the president said. "You know, they give you four drops of water."

The statement quickly went viral, but this is not the first time dishwashers have made recent news. The New York Times reported a lobbying group FreedomWorks –an offshoot of a group founded by Charles and the late David Koch– to ‘Make Dishwashers Great Again’ through more lax environmental regulations.

A signature feature of Trump’s presidency has been the effort to end or roll back Obama-era environmental policies to generate economic growth that many believe is hindered by green regulations.

The president described his plan as based on rolling back federal regulations and incorporating “better machinery” into the market.

Environmental advocates argue that changes to water regulations for dishwashers, if placed into effect, would have negative impacts. Modern dishwashers have improved greatly and now only use half of the water and energy of older models. Eliminating these regulations would use more water and more energy, advocates say, and cost the average household more money.

SOURCE 




The snark of carbon capture and storage (CCS)

The original use envisaged for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology was to take CO 2 out of the chimneys of coal-fired power plants and pump it deep underground; do it right and the power station will be close to carbon-neutral. Apply the same technology to a biomass-burning plant and the CO 2 you pump into the depths is not from ancient fossils, but from recently living plants—and, before them, the atmosphere. Hey presto: negative emissions. And BECCS does not just get rid of CO 2: it produces power, too. The solar energy that photosynthesis stored away in the plants’ leaves and wood gets turned into electricity when that biomass is burned. It is almost as if nature were paying to get rid of the stuff.

There are, as you might expect, some difficulties. Even if you regularly take some away for burning, growing biomass on the requisite scale still takes a lot of land. Also, the bog-standard CCS of which BECCS is meant to be a clever variant has never really made its mark. It has been talked about for decades; the IPCC produced a report about it in 2005. Some hoped that it might become a mainstay of carbon-free energy production. But for various reasons, technical, economic and ideological, it has not.

The world has about 2,500 coal-fired power stations, and thousands more gasfired stations, steel plants, cement works and other installations that produce industrial amounts of CO 2. Just 19 of them offer some level of ccs, according to the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI), a CCS advocacy group. All told, roughly 40m tonnes of CO 2 are being captured from industrial sources every year— around 0.1% of emissions.

Why so little? There are no fundamental technological hurdles; but the heavy industrial kit needed to do CCS at scale costs a lot. If CO 2 emitters had to pay for the privilege of emitting to the tune, say, of $100 a tonne, there would be a lot more interest in the technology, which would bring down its cost. In the absence of such a price, there are very few incentives or penalties to encourage such investment. The greens who lobby for action on the climate do not, for the most part, want to support ccs. They see it as a way for fossil-fuel companies to seem to be part of the solution while staying in business, a prospect they hate. Electricity generators have seen the remarkable drop in the price of wind and solar and invested accordingly.

In some circumstances, you do not need a subsidy, a carbon price or any other intervention to make capturing CO 2 pay.

Selling it will suffice. The commercial use of CO 2 is nothing new. Not long after the great British chemist Joseph Priestley first made what he called “fixed air” in the 1760s, an ingenious businessman called Johann Jacob Schweppe was selling soda water in Geneva. CO 2, mostly from natural sources, is still used to make drinks fizzy and for other things. Many greenhouses make use of it to stimulate the growth of plants.

The use case

The problem with most of these markets from a negative-emissions point of view is that the CO 2 gets back into the atmosphere in not much more time than it takes a drinker to belch. But there is one notable exception. For half a century oil companies have been squirting CO 2 down some of their wells in order to chase recalcitrant oil out of the nooks and crannies in the rock—a process known as enhanced oil recovery, or EOR. And though the oil comes out, a lot of the CO 2 stays underground.

The oil industry goes to some inconvenience to capture the 28m tonnes of CO 2 a year it uses for EOR from natural sources (some gas wells have a lot of CO 2 mixed in with the good stuff). That effort is rewarded, according to the International Energy Agency, with some 500,000 barrels of oil a day, or 0.6% of global production. That seems like a market that CCS could grow into—though the irony of using CO 2 produced by burning fossil fuels to chase yet more fossil fuels out of the ground is not lost on anyone. The fact that oilfields in Texas regularly use EOR has made the state a popular site for companies trying out new approaches to carbon capture. A startup called Net Power has built a new sort of gas-fired power plant on the outskirts of Houston. Most such plants burn natural gas in air to heat water to make steam to drive a turbine. The Net Power plant burns natural gas in pure oxygen to create a stream of hot CO 2 which drives the turbine directly—and which, being pure, needs no further filtering in order to be used for EOR.

Also in Texas, Occidental Petroleum is developing a plant with Carbon Engineering, a Canadian firm which seeks to pull CO 2 straight out of the air, a process called direct air capture. Because CO 2 is present in air only at a very low concentration (0.04%) DAC is a very demanding business. But oil recovered through EOR that uses atmospheric CO 2 can earn handsome credits under California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standards cap and trade programme. The scheme aims to be pumping 500,000 tonnes of CO 2 captured from the air into Occidental’s nearly depleted wells by 2022.

Not all the CO 2 pumped into the ground by oil companies is used for EOR. Equinor, formerly Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, has long pumped CO 2 into a spent field in the North Sea, both to prove the technology and to avoid the stiff carbon tax which Norway levies on emissions from the hydrocarbon industry. As a condition on its lease to develop the Gorgon natural-gas field off the coast of Australia, Chevron was required to strip the CO 2 out of the gas and store it. The resultant project is, at 4m tonnes a year, bigger than any other not used for EOR, and the world’s only CCS facility that could handle emissions on the scale of those from Drax.

In Europe, the idea has caught on that the costs of operating big CO 2 reservoirs like Gorgon’s will need to be shared between many carbon sources. This is prompting a trend towards clusters that could share the storage infrastructure. Equinor, Shell and Total, two more oil companies, are proposing to turn CCS into a service industry in Norway. For a fee they will collect CO 2 from its producers and ship it to Bergen before pushing it out through a pipeline to offshore injection points. In September, Equinor announced that it had seven potential customers, including Air Liquide, an industrial gas provider, and Acelor Mittal, a steelmaker.

Return to sender

Similar projects for filling up the emptied gasfields of the North Sea are seeking government support in the Netherlands, where Rotterdam’s port authority is championing the idea, and in Britain, where the main movers are heavy industries in the north, including Drax.

This is part of what the GCCSI says is a steady increase in projects to capture and store, or use, CO 2. But the trend needs to be treated with caution. First and foremost, global carbon capture is still measured in the tens of millions of tonnes, not the billions of tonnes that matter to the climate. What the Gorgon project stores in a year, the world emits in an hour.

Second, the public support the sector has received in the past has often proved fickle or poorly designed. In 2012, the British government promised £1bn in funding for ccs, only to pull the plug in 2015. Two projects which had been competing for the money, a Scottish one that would have trapped CO 2 at an existing gas plant and one in Yorkshire which planned to build a new coal-fired power station with ccs, were both scrapped. This history makes the £800m for CCS that Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has promised as part of the current election campaign even less convincing than most such pledges.

Tax breaks, experimental capture plants, new fangled ways of producing electricity and talk of infrastructure hubs amount to an encouraging buzz, but not yet much more. A CCS industry capable of producing lots of BECCS plants remains a long way off, as does the infrastructure for gathering sustainably sourced biomass for use in them. Carbon Engineering and its rival DAC companies, such as Climeworks and Skytree, remain very expensive ways of getting pure CO 2. If they can find new markets and push their costs down both by learning better tricks and through economies of scale, they may yet be part of the solution.

But for now, it looks like most of the CO 2 being pumped into the atmosphere will stay there for a very long time.

SOURCE 






Australia: Investment in solar, wind farms drying up

A sharp slump in new investment in wind and solar farms will continue unless a price is put on carbon or the Renewable Energy Target is extended beyond next year, the Clean Energy Council warns.

CEC chief executive Kane Thornton said investment in renewable energy had dropped by 60 per cent in the past year and declines would continue without government intervention. He said this would put pressure on power prices and reliability as coal generators aged.

The comments ignited a debate about whether renewable energy was the cheapest form of power, as advocates including Anthony Albanese and Malcolm Turnbull claim. Energy Minister Angus Taylor said large-scale renewables projects would not receive any further government support. "The clean energy industry has assured us that the cost of renewables is now competitive with alternatives so we would expect investment to continue in the absence of subsidies," he said. "An industry that is now competitive shouldn't require additional subsidies, Mr Taylor said.

Nearly 70 per cent of Australia's electricity was generated from coal-fired power this year compared with 22.6 per cent from renewables. The RET will result in 33,000GWh of power being derived from renewable power generation next year and the subsidies will continue until 2030 but only for plants constructed by 2020.

The scheme operates by allowing large renewable power stations, such as wind farms, to create renewable energy certificates for every megawatt hour of power they generate. The certificates are bought by electricity retailers who sell the electricity to householders and businesses.

Mr Thornton said the industry was not asking for subsidies, despite his call for an extension of the RET. "The RET could actually be extended in a way that provides that certainty," he said "The market will decide whether there is in fact a subsidy delivered or not "(In one project), the renewable energy certificates that were delivered were worth zero. So that project was essentially getting no subsidy but was getting certainty from the target."

The fall in investment from renewables, also shown in a report released this month by the Clean Energy Regulator, comes amid continuing tight supply in parts of the electricity market during periods of high demand.

The Australian Energy Regu-lator launched an investigation on Friday after South Australia's wholesale spot electricity price hit the market price cap of $14,700 a megawatt hour twice on Thursday night, amid a severe heatwave.

With the Morrison government moving to fund a feasibility study into a coal-fired power station in central Queensland, the Opposition Leader this week declared a new coal plant was not needed because "renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels".

"Markets will determine what the economics are of projects," he said. "And the economics of projects are showing that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels and that change has occurred over a period of time. And one would expect that would continue."

According to a draft report on the energy market released by the CSIRO this month, electricity generated from new renewables projects will be cheaper than from coal projects that include carbon-capture storage.

It predicts a new wind project with six hours' storage would generate electricity at between $88-$112/MWh in 2030, dropping to between $82-$108/ MWh in 2030 and $71-$102/1"h in 2050. A new solar project with six hours storage will generate power at between $75-$11.8/MWh falling to $52-$95 by 2050:

A new thermal coal-fired power station that stored its carbon emisions would produce electricity at between $148-$200 MWh in 2020 and $137-$202/ MWh in 2050.

However, the projections show that new gas and coal projects without carbon-capture storage will be  cost competitive with renewables. A new coal-fired power station is expected to produce electricity for between $83-$l12 in 2020, with the price reducing slightly by 2050.  Electricity from a new gas power plant would produce power at between $67-$117.

Grattan Institute director Tony Wood said new coal-fired power stations without carbon capture storage would have trouble receiving finance because of concerns they would be forced to close if emissions targets became more ambitious.

He said the RET had helped renewable energy become competitive and he doubted major clean energy projects would come online under the Morrison government's policy settings.

From The Weekend Australian of 21 December, 2019


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

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

*****************************************

COP 25: Paris Accord destroyed

“Action Now!” radicalism has destroyed the slow moving, consensus based Paris Agreement. It is not just COP 25 that failed; the UN climate change machinery has collapsed. This is good news, even though the reason is bad news.

I have been writing about the climate alarmism movement tearing itself apart for months now. For example here.

The new radicalism is at war with the establishment moderates. This great gulf between radicals and moderates hit the COP 25 summit in Madrid with a vengeance. These annual summits are normally protracted exercises in compromise among the almost 200 nations represented. Not this time.

In Madrid the Action Now! radicals would not even consider compromise. Their extremism then caused the moderates to take hard line positions as well, so the COP stalled out and failed to act on any significant issue. That what the radicals demand is impossible did not help. The negotiating machinery ground to a noisy halt.

So now we have two very different versions of the alarmist rhetoric and a lot of people on each side. I call them the “Action Now!” hysterics (Greta, XR, etc.) and the moderates. The Paris Accord reflects the slow moving moderate view. It turns out that a lot of national delegations now take the hysterical view, especially the small island states and the Africans (both of which stand to make the most money).

You could see the breakdown coming on, as Madrid was hyped as the “action COP” when it was nothing of the sort. Even the COP leaders took part in this foolish rhetoric. Yet the sorts of radical national actions being called for were simply not on the agenda. I doubt the moderate negotiators on the ground in Madrid had the authority to even consider the radical’s hysterical demands for immediate drastic action.

Nor is such radical action on upcoming COP agendas. It is not part of the Paris Accord process and therein lies the problem for the Action Now! radicals. They demand what cannot happen.

The hysterics are calling for radical action at next year’s Glasgow COP at the latest. This is highly unlikely, to say the least.

In fact the harassed moderates in Madrid pointed out that most countries, including all of the major emitters, do not have to file new emission reduction plans until 2030. China and India, the first and fourth biggest emitters, have already said that is their intent. Additionally, their plans allow for unlimited emission increases until 2030, which is intolerable for the Action Now! hysterics.

America, the number two emitter, is certainly not going to file a radical action plan. U.S. membership in the Paris fiasco officially ends the day before the 2020 Glasgow COP begins in November.

If the Action Now! radicals continue their intransigence then the Paris Accord is essentially dead. This is almost certain to happen. Ironically the Paris Agreement has been killed by the irrational fear of climate change that spawned it in the first place. Is that cool or what?

The death of the silly Paris Accord is fine by me. My only real concern is that the hysterics might somehow do real damage. So far this seems unlikely, given that what they are demanding is impossible.

This is why I cherish the hysterics. They are wrecking the climate scare political movement. It is like I am fighting an enemy force and suddenly it is having an endless civil war. I am all for that.

SOURCE 




A California economy built on wind and solar is a mirage

In its never-ending war to demonstrate political correctness in the era of “climate change,” California lawmakers are demonstrating their ignorance of economics and resource allocation and angering voters across the nation in the process.

Just last year, the California legislature enacted a law that requires the state to obtain all of its electricity from “clean” sources – wind, solar, hydro – by 2045, with shorter term goal of 60 percent renewable by 2030. One has to wonder how the state is going to meet what promises to be a massive increase in energy demand just 25 years from now.

The California Energy Commission estimated that the state will consume 301,525 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity in 2020 – and that’s the lowball estimate! Just four years ago, the Golden State was importing a third of its electricity, and 44 percent of its electrical energy generation was from oil, coal, and natural gas.

California, however, is still the nation’s third largest producer of oil and natural gas. One wonders if and when the state will stop issuing operating permits for these facilities, which generate significant revenues and provide thousands of jobs for Californians.

Also in 2018, Assemblyman Phil Ting (D, San Francisco) introduced a bill that would have banned the sale and registration of new passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks powered by internal combustion engines beginning in 2040. Though that bill died, the 2020 state budget empowers the California Energy Commission to conduct a study of how to move the state toward 100 percent electric vehicles by 2040.

Currently, only about 3 percent of the 26 million passenger vehicles in California are personal electric vehicles. How is California going to generate enough electricity within 20 years to power 23 million more personal vehicles? The California Energy Commission notes that 15.1 billion gallons of gasoline and 4.2 billion gallons of diesel fuel were sold in the state in 2015. That’s a boatload of energy that will have to be replaced with wind and solar electricity.

Moreover, while some believe these bans will result in Californians driving existing internal combustion engines as long as they can be operated, one wonders at what point in time California will ban the SALE of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Earlier this year, progressive Berkeley banned the construction of natural gas lines to single-family homes, town homes, and small apartment buildings starting in January 2020; the ban will be extended to commercial buildings and larger residential structures once the state developes, develop regulations. Several other California cities have followed suit, and the trend is likely to continue.

Jacques Leslie, who was a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times during the Vietnam war, stated flatly in a LA Times op ed that, “California has set a climate mandate of 100% clean, renewable energy by 2045. It won’t reach that goal unless it eliminates natural gas from buildings.” Leslie went on to assert that, “Now that regulations aimed at the 2045 mandate are in place for cars, trucks, and coal-fired power, natural gas has to be next. The popular image of gas cooking and heating — clean, cheap and reliable, a “bridge fuel” from coal to renewables — requires drastic revision. Natural gas is in fact the new coal.”

According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, about 12 million California homes have gas stoves and/or furnaces. Natural gas consumption in the state in 2018 totaled 2,136,907 million cubic feet (Mcf), of which 614,722 Mcf went for electric power generation, 766,415 Mcf to industrial users, 423,915 Mcf to residential users, and 248,012 to commercial users. That is a whopping amount of energy that will have to be replaced with wind and solar electricity.

To jumpstart the state’s intoxicating goals for zero emissions, California in November announced it would no longer buy sedans powered solely by internal combustion engines and will purchase only plug-in electric or hybrid vehicles. SUV’s, trucks, and certain public safety vehicles are exempt – for now. The state further announced it would only purchase vehicles from automakers that recognize the California Air Resources Board’s authority to set tough greenhouse gas standards for vehicles – Ford, Volkswagen, BMW, and Honda.

This decision is a declaration of war against General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, and other automakers that are seeking to become a party to a legal battle between the Trump Administration and California over whether the state can set auto emission rules for itself.

Curiously, one week after this announcement, California motorists reported they had to wait in a half-mile-long line for hours to recharge their ZEV Teslas at the Kettleman City recharging station halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on Interstate 5, even though the station has 40 individual charging points. A day earlier a video entitled ‘Tesla Energy Crisis’ revealed a sizable line of 15 Teslas waiting for their turn at a supercharger station in San Luis Obispo on Thanksgiving Day.

But if you think waiting in line for hours just to get home from a weekend outing is tough, imagine trying to recharge your electric vehicle during one of Pacific Gas & Electric’s intentional rolling blackouts, one of which reportedly affected 700,000 California households – and which PG&E promises may be needed for years to come as part of their fire prevention plan?

California’s commitment to 100 percent renewable electricity – no natural gas, no coal, no oil, and no nuclear power (the state’s lone nuclear power plant will sunset in 2021) — violates the maxim popularized in 1605 by Miguel Cervantes, “It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.”

SOURCE 




Giant African wetland boosts global methane emissions

For over a decade, scientists have been scratching their heads trying to figure out what is behind rising methane emissions around the world. Is it soaring production of natural gas, led by the fracking boom in the U.S.? Or is it agriculture, with all those flatulating cattle?

Now, the real culprit appears to have been found: It’s a giant wetland in East Africa. Coming in at 22,000 square miles, the Sudd wetlands in South Sudan is about the size of the state of West Virginia. Water entering the wetlands is fueling plant growth and soil microbiol activity, producing gobs of methane. It is now one of the largest freshwater ecosystems in the world, and growing. The influx of water appears to be the result of upriver dam releases on the Nile River and its tributaries.

Everything Became Greener

Satellite images “showed the Sudd wetlands expanded in size, you can even see it in aerial imagery – everything became greener,” Paul Palmer, and atmospheric scientist at the University of Edinburgh who co-authored the research, told BBC News. “There’s not much ground-monitoring in this region that can prove or disprove our results, but the data fit together beautifully.” The scientists published their findings in early December in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

“The level of the East African lakes, which feed down the Nile to the Sudd, increased considerably over the period we were studying,” Mark Lunt, a geoscientist at the University of Edinburgh who headed the research, told Yale Environment 360. “It coincided with the increase in methane we saw, and would imply that we were getting this increased flow down the river into the wetlands.”

As the East African wetlands expand, vegetation, including trees, will proliferate. Scientists are now focusing more attention on trees in tropical wetlands as a source of methane. The greener the earth gets, the more methane we’re going to get. It comes with the territory.

A Greener Planet

Proponents of human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming/climate change often describe methane as a “potent greenhouse gas,” far more powerful than the villainous carbon dioxide. But just as almost all CO2 occurs without human input, methane, too, is part of the natural world. For years satellite images have shown a greening planet, most notably in Africa. Contrary to the dire predictions of climate alarmists, deserts are shrinking, and plant life is taking hold where it has been absent for thousands of years.

All of this is good for biodiversity and food production and attests to the benefits of rising CO2 levels.

SOURCE 




Greenhorns of the climate crusade

Everyone loves children. They’re the best part of a better world to come. Unfortunately, kids are clueless about both the world as it is and the means to improve it. That’s why they’re sent to school to learn rather than teach. However, climate-change activists have managed to short-circuit the educational process and fashion millions of “green” greenhorns raring to fight for a decarbonized global economy. Sensible adults should step forward and gently disabuse misguided minors of the notion that the world is about to go up in smoke. It’s not.

Teenage “climate leader” Greta Thunberg led a children’s crusade into the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid last week, intent on hectoring world leaders over their failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions claimed to be crucial to prevent climate cataclysm. For the bold activism that brought her from picketing Parliament in her native Sweden to become the world’s most famous environmentalist virtually overnight, Time magazine named her “Person of the Year.”

The 16-year-old high school dropout topped with a girlish braid pleaded with thousands of policymakers and fellow climate activists to settle for nothing short of solid commitments to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide in order to keep its blanketing effect from raising global temperatures above the U.N. ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“Why is it so important to stay below 1.5 degrees?” she queried rhetorically of the conferees before answering her own question: “Because with even one degree, people are dying from the climate crisis. Because that is what the united science calls for to avoid destabilizing the climate.”

It was quite a grown-up performance, and one emboldening other young ideologues to take their own stand against the supposed depredations of modern civilization. At one point, dozens of exultant young activists stormed the Madrid conference stage, chanting, “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.” Seamless self-assurance is a gift of adolescence, when individuals feel like they’re the smartest in the room. Over the course of time, most learn otherwise.

Still, children shouldn’t be faulted for gathering from their brief life experience that their destiny is to save the world from some sort of mortal threat. During the 13th century, legions of credulous French and German youth, believing themselves anointed to convert the Muslims, marched on the Holy Land. Their Children’s Crusade proved an impossible dream as many died on the long journey and others were sold into slavery. The lucky ones eventually straggled home.

The 20th century saw two generations of westerners come of age in the midst of existential threats to civilization from malevolent powers. Millions of patriotic youth volunteered to fight and, if necessary, die to save the world. Many shed their blood to uphold their military oath and they did, in fact, save the world from heartless aggressors.

The generation born in the 21st century has been reared in relative safety, but weaned on ubiquitous tales of an impending global warming doomsday. With free access to the social media cyberworld, young Americans have undoubtedly heard the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making the breathless claim that “We’re like the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

That’s a frightening forecast for those who haven’t heard similar declarations in the past. Former Vice President-turned climate activist Al Gore predicted in 2008 that the Arctic polar cap would completely melt in five years. Kids residing in the lower 48 may not have noticed, but it hasn’t. In 2014, France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, appeared with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington, where he predicted Earth had 500 days to avoid “climate chaos.” The planet easily glided past that dreaded milestone around 2,300 days ago, none the worse for wear.

In fact, scientific consensus that carbon dioxide is the controlling factor in temperature variation is still a work in progress, despite the U.N.’s efforts to paper it over. And while atmospheric carbon dioxide has climbed to 400 parts per million during the era of human industrialization, global temperatures have not risen clearly in concert, as the carbon dioxide-temperature correlation theory demands.

“Green” greenhorns like Greta Thunberg need reassurance that despite what they have learned from cagey activists, a world afire is not their future. In time, they may learn what preceding generations have come to understand: The worst fear is fear itself.

SOURCE 





Australian PM rules out changes to government’s climate change policies amid bushfire crisis

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made clear that there will be no change to current climate change policies, as he addressed the ongoing bushfires crisis after returning from holiday.

Speaking to the media at the NSW Rural Fire Service headquarters in Sydney, Mr Morrison said a range of measures in place were adequate and contributing to a reduction in emissions.

Yesterday, while still in his capacity as Acting PM, Nationals leader Michael McCormack conceded that Australia “absolutely” must do more to tackle climate change.

“I agree entirely,” Mr McCormack. “Yes I do. We will have those discussions.”

But today, just hours after jetting in from Hawaii in the wake of ongoing criticism over his absence while large parts of the country burn, Mr Morrison ruled out any immediate changes.

“What we will not do is act in a kneejerk or crisis or panicked mode. A panic approach and response to anything does not help,” he said. “It puts people at risk.”

Mr Morrison defended the government’s climate policy and reaffirmed his commitment to “meet and beat” Australia’s emissions targets under the Paris agreement.

“There is no argument, in my view and the government’s view, and any government in the country, about the links between broader issues of global climate change and weather events around the world,” he said.

“But I’m sure people would equally acknowledge the direct connection to any single fire event is not a credible suggestion to make that link. We must take action on climate change and we are taking action on climate change.”

However, climate change experts have criticised the government’s use of a so-called “loophole” that allows it to use carry-over credits from the Kyoto agreement to meet Paris targets.

Mr Morrison deflected a direct question about the loophole today, instead reiterating his view that current policies represented a “balanced” approach.

“Emissions are lower than at any time they were under the previous government. “We have had record investment in renewables in Australia and now, thankfully, as a result of policies the Government has put in place we are also getting electricity prices down, some $65 a year.

“And on top of that we’ve been doing it without embracing the reckless job destroying and economy crunching targets that others are seeking to force upon us.”

Later, when asked about Mr McCormack’s remarks, the PM denied it was an indication that new targets are needed.

“The Kyoto targets that were set by the previous Labor government, when we came to government there was the projections were that we would miss those by some 700 million tons,” Mr Morrison said. “Now we’re going to beat them by 411 million tons.”

SOURCE 

***************************************

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

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

*****************************************

Ruthless Joe Biden Admits He'll Sacrifice Hundreds of Thousands of Blue-Collar Workers for His Green Dream

You've got to give it to Democrats: they freely admit they do not care one bit about blue-collar workers. They don't. They're the party by and for leftist academics, illegal immigrants, and SJW whackjobs. Although this has been the case for at least a few decades, they've always pretended to care about John Doe. Not any longer. All pretenses are dropped.

Case in point: Joe Biden admitting during Thursday's Democratic presidential debate that he's more than willing to hang out blue-collar workers to dry in order to pursue a costly and largely useless green dream:

"Would you be willing to sacrifice some of that growth, even knowing potentially that it could displace thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers in the interest of transitioning to that greener economy," the moderator asked Biden.

Instead of beating around the bush, Biden simply admitted that "the answer is yes."

Yes, he's quite willing to destroy those people. Hundreds of thousands of them -- and their families.

This is downright shocking. Of course Democrats like Biden also pretend that they're going to "re-train" or "re-educate" those same workers, but everybody with an IQ of 60 or over (indeed, that almost includes chimpanzees) knows that this isn't going to happen. You can't just send those folks back to school. Instead, they'll end up unemployed, sitting at home, feeling useless because they're no longer able to take care of themselves, let alone provide for their families.

It's sickening. This is how little Democrats care about blue-collar workers -- the very people who form the backbone of American society and the nation's economy.

The good news? Team Trump only has to use this video and air it all year long in the Rust Belt states. They don't even have to add anything to it. Just this clip and end it with "I am Donald Trump and I approve this message." That's enough.

SOURCE 





UK: After Brexit, let’s embrace gene editing

EU rules are killing vital innovation in biotech.

Virus-resistant tomato, disease-resistant rice, stem-cell treatment for paralysis, for heart disease, for spinal-chord injury and even for cornea repair — these are just some of the many innovations made possible through gene editing.

Canada has created permissive rules for these technologies, as has Japan, where scientists are working night and day to find therapeutic treatments that root out cancer and the Zika virus.

In Europe, however, the prospects are bleak. Bureaucrats and politicians are stifling the speed with which scientists can make breakthroughs available to consumers and patients. Granted, wealthy elites will always be able to fly to Tokyo or the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to get treatments. But for Brits who cannot afford this, we need laws and regulations that will allow for the research and development of innovative treatments.

Gene editing is effectively banned throughout the EU. The slightest word in favour of innovative technologies such as CRISPR (a prominent genome-editing technology) gets you yelled at by politicians and EU-funded NGOs alike. With Brexit on the horizon, the UK has a unique opportunity to embrace innovation.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel on the continent. At the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) in Berlin next month, approximately 70 ministers of agriculture from around the world intend to adopt a communiqué about the global direction of agriculture. The hope is that these delegates will recognise the value in technologies like gene editing.

In Germany, some green activists like the Youth Greens seem to be waking up to the problem. Several activists have warned that strict regulation makes the application of gene technologies more expensive, meaning only big corporates can afford it.

However, we cannot rely on what happens internationally. Britain has an obligation to its citizens to allow scientists to develop new cures and new foods for the 21st century. Brexit offers a unique opportunity to rethink biotech regulations as we break away from the EU’s anti-science dogma. We cannot let Britain lag behind in global innovation.

SOURCE 





Obesity is bad for the planet

Journal article below.  The war on fat continues

The Environmental Foodprint of Obesity

Faidon Magkos  et al.

Abstract

Emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) are linked to global warming and adverse climate changes. Meeting the needs of the increasing number of people on the planet presents a challenge for reducing total GHG burden. A further challenge may be the size of the average person on the planet and the increasing number of people with excess body weight. We used data on GHG emissions from various sources and estimated that obesity is associated with ~20% greater GHG emissions compared with the normal‐weight state. On a global scale, obesity contributes to an extra GHG emissions of ~49 megatons per year of CO2 equivalent (CO2eq) from oxidative metabolism due to greater metabolic demands, ~361 megatons per year of CO2eq from food production processes due to increased food intake, and ~290 megatons per year of CO2eq from automobile and air transportation due to greater body weight. Therefore, the total impact of obesity may be extra emissions of ~700 megatons per year of CO2eq, which is about 1.6% of worldwide GHG emissions. Inasmuch as obesity is an important contributor to global GHG burden, strategies to reduce its prevalence should prioritize efforts to reduce GHG emissions. Accordingly, reducing obesity may have considerable benefits for both public health and the environment.

SOURCE 



Could sidewalks and buildings combat air pollution?

Is it possible to create sidewalks, buildings and other city structures that help lower air pollution and further clean our cities?

Well believe it or not, the answer could be “yes” – at least according to researchers at a company called Graphene Flagship partners.

Working with experts from a number of prestigious universities including the Israeli Institute of Technology, University of Bologna, and University of Cambridge, among others, the firm has developed a graphene-titania photocatalyst that degrades up to 70 percent more atmospheric NOx than standard nanoparticles in tests on real air pollution.

In laymen’s terms, that means this compound, when spread on buildings and sidewalks, absorbs pollution out of the air over time.

Although the level of air pollution in the U.S. has dropped dramatically in recent decades, it nevertheless remains a top priority of environmental and health officials. Thus, researchers are continually seeking new and improved ways to reduce harmful pollutants like NOx and volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere. Using photocatalysts such as titania might be a great way to accomplish this, according to the researchers.

How did the researchers develop their process? As reported in Science Daily, they did so in the following manner:

By performing liquid-phase exfoliation of graphite — a process that creates graphene — in the presence of titania nanoparticles, using only water and atmospheric pressure, they created a new graphene-titania nanocomposite that can be coated on the surface of materials to passively remove pollutants from the air. If the coating is applied to concrete on the street or on the walls of buildings, the harmless photodegradation products could be washed away by rain or wind, or manually cleaned off.

As for how they could apply this technology, Xinliang Feng, Graphene Flagship Work Package Leader for Functional Foams and Coatings, explains:

“Photocatalysis in a cementitious matrix, applied to buildings, could have a large effect to decrease air pollution by reducing NOx and enabling self-cleaning of the surfaces — the so-called “smog-eating” effect. Graphene could help to improve the photocatalytic behaviour of catalysts like titania and enhance the mechanical properties of cement.

In this publication, Graphene Flagship partners have prepared a graphene-titania composite via a one-step procedure to widen and improve the ground-breaking invention of “smog-eating” cement. The prepared composite showed enhanced photocatalytic activity, degrading up to 40% more pollutants than pristine titania in the model study, and up to 70% more NOx with a similar procedure.

SOURCE 




Australian bushfire crisis: fire chief’s city slicker claims not relevant, says Campbell Newman

Former premier Campbell Newman has blasted a prominent former fire chief for blaming intense bushfires on climate change, saying Lee Johnson never raised the issue when he headed emergency services in Queensland.

“He had a solid two years where he could have come to me and ­expressed, one on one, these views that he’s now espousing. I have no recollection of him doing so,” Mr Newman said.

Mr Johnson, commissioner of Queensland Fire and Emergency Services when Mr Newman led the state, was one of the six former fire chiefs who accused Scott Morrison this week of abandoning bushfires raging across the country and offering “no moral leadership” on climate change.

As part of the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action group funded by Tim Flannery’s Climate Council and spearheaded by former NSW fire chief Greg Mullins, Mr Johnson said firefighters were seeing the effects of climate change “first-hand”.

He called for a national strategy to tackle extreme weather linked to climate change, saying the Brisbane River flooding he ­witnessed as fire chief in 2011 ­amounted to an “inland tsunami”.

“I can feel the tsunami of public opinion rolling on to Canberra,” Mr Johnson said.

Mr Newman, Queensland LNP premier from 2012-15, challenged Mr Johnson’s expertise on bushfires and climate change, saying he found it curious all his group “seem to be urban guys”.

“Mr Johnson’s career was particularly about urban firefighting,” Mr Newman said. “There is a world of difference between urban and rural firefighting. Urban firefighters are about spraying lots of water and chemical foams and stopping fires, whereas rural firefighters know they have to use fire as a tool, in terms of hazard-reduction burns and backburning.”

Mr Newman said he never recalled Mr Johnson saying, as fire commissioner, that the state was not doing enough hazard-­reduction burning or other land management. As premier, Mr Newman said, he was also very concerned about tensions between urban, unionised firefighters under Mr Johnson’s leadership and rural fire services.

“Behind the scenes, city-based firefighters were trying to exert control operationally, in a quite profound way, over the rural and volunteer fire services. They pushed back,” he said. “So here we have this schism between urban and rural firefighters, and Lee Johnson suddenly jumps into this area on bushfires … I would prefer to hear the views of experienced volunteer rural firefighters.”

He accused Mr Johnson of “hysterical nonsense” in calling Brisbane floods an inland tsunami when records showed much worse events. “When Lee Johnson starts talking about weather, he needs to do his homework,” he said.

Mr Newman said he felt compelled to “cry foul” because bushfires had resulted from poor land management, not climate change.

“I am sick and tired of people like Mr Johnson telling people from their positions of trust and respect in the community that things are unprecedented when they are not,” he said.

Emergency Leaders, which has grown to 29 former fire chiefs since its formation in April, says it will convene a national summit early next year to devise a bushfire strategy with strong emphasis on ­climate change. The former fire chiefs, almost all with distinguished careers involving urban brigades, want an immediate end to burning fossil fuels.

Mr Johnson left his Queensland fire chief’s position in December 2014 following a report on the “hostile” work environment for women in the service.

Report author Margaret Allison found evidence of sexual harassment and bullying, and “systematic problems” in dealing with them.

SOURCE 

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

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

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Climate Change Shakedown Ends in Failure

Boris Johnson’s historic victory in the United Kingdom’s latest election is indicative of many things, but first and foremost is the “quaint” idea that a substantial majority of people favor the nation state more than the democracy-crushing globalist alternative.

Nonetheless at the United Nations, transnational governance remains the order of the day. Last Wednesday, that collection of feckless bureaucrats warned the Trump administration that America must compensate poorer nations for climate change, despite President Donald Trump honoring his 2016 campaign promise to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate.

The impetus for their demands stems from the 1992 climate treaty, formally titled the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). A timeline since then reveals that the initial idea of developed countries lowering their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000 was the first pipe dream that ended in failure. Five years later, President Bill Clinton committed our nation to the Kyoto Protocol, which was so “popular,” the Senate unanimously rejected it 95-0.

In 2001, President George W. Bush withdrew America’s signature, but President Barack Obama subsequently announced his allegiance to the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, which was a non-biding deal negotiated outside the auspices of the UN. The following year, America set an emissions-reduction target of 17% from 2005 levels by 2020. Yet even when the Paris Agreement was being negotiated in 2015, the Obama administration was fighting what were UN-designated “loss and damage” payouts, which it rightly viewed as unlimited liability arising from adverse weather.

The Paris Agreement itself? The latest edition of the world’s “moveable goal posts” approach to emissions reductions remains just that: The overwhelming majority of signatories to the agreement are still “far off track,” as The New York Times reported in December 2018.

In the last year, nothing has changed. At the (Conference of Parties) COP25 negotiations in Madrid that drew to a close on Sunday, the 197 parties present produced no concrete commitments. “These talks reflect how disconnected country leaders are from the urgency of the science and the demands of their citizens in the streets,” said Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute think tank.

Citizens in the streets? Despite Boris Johnson’s overwhelming victory, London was rocked by “citizen in the street” protests, suggesting that those who make the loudest noise are wholly disconnected from majority opinion. Perhaps nothing indicates the equally puerile nature of the climate protests better than the reality that their leader is media darling and Time Magazine Person of the Year Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old girl with mental-health problems whose most recent contribution to the cause consisted of an apology for telling her followers that politicians should be put “against the wall.”

Perhaps the real reason these talks failed is because attendees were being told by green groups that the funds necessary to compensate nations victimized by climate change will ultimately exceed $300 billion annually by 2030.

Unsurprisingly, the United States was expected to be invoiced for the lion’s share of those costs, financed by taxing wealthy nations’ financial transactions, international air travel, and fossil fuels.

The latest negotiations revolved around a mechanism established in 2013, known as the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (WIM). It was supposed to look at ways to deal with compensation, but as the International Business Times describes it, that mechanism did not produce an agreement “on where the money might come from or even if it should be paid.”

American negotiators circulated a document whereby a key provision under the 2015 Paris Agreement stating that that accord “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation,” would applied to the wider COP25 process. Developing nations saw this liability waiver as “unimaginable” and vowed to block it. “The Trump administration is now making a cynical and paranoid play to further distance itself from responsibility for the harmful impacts of climate change and to further protect itself and other polluters from liability for the crisis,” complained Harjeet Singh, global climate lead at ActionAid.

What to do? What bureaucrats always do: set up another committee of “experts” to discover new sources of finance. Moreover, according to Singh, a “Santiago Network on Addressing Loss and Damage” may be established as well.

In 2017, when Trump announced he would withdraw American from the Paris Agreement, he made it quite clear his administration had little use for international shakedown artists, stating that the “well being” of Americans was the motivating factor behind his decision.

At the time, Trump also cited a National Economic Research Associates study noting that the compliance goals pursued by the Obama administration would have cost this nation 2.7 million jobs by 2025. By 2040, Trump insisted, the cost to the economy would have been realized in losses of nearly $3 trillion of GDP, 6.5 million industrial jobs, and American household enduring $7,000 losses in annual income. “In many cases,” he added, it would be “much worse than that.”

By contrast, The Washington Post reports that the latest global study, courtesy of researchers from the University of Cambridge, the International Monetary Fund, the University of Southern California and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan asserts that if the U.S. doesn’t adhere to the Paris Agreement goals, the nation will endure a 10.5% cut in GDP — by 2100. “The hardest hit countries will be poorer, tropical nations, but in contrast to previous studies, the new paper finds that no country will be spared and none will see a net benefit economically from global warming,” the Post adds.

No country will see a net benefit from global warming, not even countries with colder climates that might see an increase in arable land, e.g.?

Unfortunately for the activists and their supporters, an “inconvenient truth” has emerged: The sun is on the verge of breaking the 2008 record of no solar activity for 268 days, according to a panel of experts from NASA and NOAA. Even when the next solar cycle upswing takes place between 2023 and 2026, the panel predicts the number of sunspots produced will be well below average.

Such slowdowns often cause cooling in Earth’s atmosphere.

Whatever one is to make of climate change, it seems there is never enough alarmism to go around. Moreover the notion that countries with developed modern economies are not only less “virtuous” than those without but should be held accountable while less-developed countries remain beholden to different standards is absurd. The non-binding Paris Agreement made the distinction, insisting developed nations should pursue “economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets,” while developing countries could “move over time towards economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets in the light of different national circumstances.”

In other words, some pollution is “more equal” than other pollution.

So what’s this really all about? Nine years ago, Ottmar Edenhofer, a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stated the real goal: “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Last week, columnist Rupert Darwall echoed that reality. “Saving the planet takes money, and lots of it,” he explained, adding that “a vast river of cash flows through the UN climate process.”

No doubt.

SOURCE 






End of the apple sticker, as major British supermarkets say they will ditch the labels as part of plastic pledge



For some they are a collector's item, and for others they are just an annoyance when trying to eat an apple on the go, but now the time of the fruit and vegetable sticker is at an end as supermarkets vow to ditch them in a new plastics pledge.

All of Britain's major supermarkets, including Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury's, Morrissons and Asda have signed up to waste charity Wrap's "Plastic Pledge", and are among 85 companies promising to get rid of a billion single-use plastic items by the end of 2020.

Retailers will no longer be using pointless plastic items including stickers on fruit and vegetables, and will be providing recycling plants for crisp packets, frozen food wrappers and bread bags.

These materials are incredibly difficult for consumers to recycle usually and account for 25 per cent of consumer plastic packaging, but only four per cent is recycled.

Plastic stickers on fruit and vegetables were there to let cashiers know what the product is and how much it costs. They also let consumers know whether the product is organic.

A spokesperson for Wrap said some supermarkets have already made the switch away from fruit stickers, adding; "Some have provided additional training to staff and introduced visual cue cards at the till.

"Others have moved to compostable stickers. I’ve also seen previously that M&S were looking at lasering dates on to their avocados! So there is a range of alternatives being explored."

Members of the pact have also signed up to ensure that 100 per cent of plastic packaging will be reusable, recyclable or compostable.

To achieve this by the end of 2020 all members are aiming to remove 21,000 tonnes of unrecyclable PVC and polystyrene from their packaging.

Data from the organisation shows that when the group first began in 2018, just 65 per cent of their packaging could be recycled.

Since then, supermarkets have removed 19,000 tonnes of non-recyclable black plastic, as well as 3,400 tonnes of plastic packaging from fresh produce.

Morrisons have rolled out loose fresh produce areas to 60 stores with more to follow next year, where customers can choose from up to 127 varieties of loose fruit and vegetables, avoiding plastic waste.

There has also been an increase in reusable packaging, such as the Waitrose ‘Unpacked’ trial stores providing refill stations for dry goods, wine, beer, and detergent refillables.

Several items such as straws and cotton buds have already been eliminated by the majority of members.

Marcus Gover, Wrap CEO, said: “Our Pact members have shown that they’re committed to this challenge and our new report demonstrates the breadth of action so far on tackling plastic waste. These aren’t token gestures – changes like these require a huge amount of investment and innovation. It shows that our members are working collaboratively towards the same goal.   

“Moving forward we face significant challenges, particularly around films and flexible packaging, increasing recycling, and development of re-use and refill models. These will be our top priorities as we work urgently towards a world where plastic is valued and doesn’t pollute the environment."

SOURCE 





Why climate demonstrations have become so persistent

Mother Jones knows:

IN NOVEMBER 2018, I was enjoying a post-midterms vacation when I saw the news: Six days after Democrats had taken back the House, a scrappy group of 150 young people staged a sit-in at Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office because they weren’t convinced by her pledge to push forward on climate change legislation. The hourslong protest might have been a forgotten blip in the news cycle—if progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t stopped by. Her cameo set offa chain of events that meant, by the time I returned to DC, there were teenage and twentysomething activists everywhere in black T-shirts emblazoned with a symbol of a rising sun. They called themselves the Sunrise Movement, and they were calling for an ambitious bundle of climate legislation known as the Green New Deal.

At first, I was skeptical that these young people deserved the hype. They tended to slip into a dizzying patois of activism theory—during one phone call, I heard one Sunrise member cheerfully cite Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, and civil rights academic Charles Payne in one breath. But over the course of the past year, I’ve noticed a sea change in the climate movement. The older white men who still lead the national environmental groups have started to give way to a much younger, more diverse, more in-your-face set of activists with their own set of leaders, like the teenage Swedish climate crusader Greta Thunberg.

This revitalized climate movement isn’t a fluke. Sunrise leaders say their secret sauce is a relatively new organizing strategy called Momentum, which teaches activists how to keep a movement growing instead of fizzling out after a few splashy protests. The Momentum approach has also influenced the Black Lives Matter movement and the immigration rights group Cosecha, as well as new climate groups like Extinction Rebellion, and some older ones like 350.org. For Sunrise, which claims 15,000 members in 200 hubs across the country, the strategy seems to be particularly effective.

Varshini Prakash, the 26-year-old executive director of Sunrise, thinks the Capitol Hill sit-in would have unfolded very differently without Momentum’s forward-thinking strategy. “When these big moments happen, like you sit in Nancy Pelosi’s office and there are 5,000 articles written about climate change in the next two days, what do you do with that moment?” she said. “Do you say, ‘Wow, that was awesome—let’s pack up and go home,’ or do you say, ‘How do we use this moment to drive thousands and thousands of people toward our organization and create a leadership pathway?’”

Momentum theory grew largely with the help of two brothers from Iowa, Mark and Paul Engler. A writer and a community organizer, respectively, the Englers were frustrated with social movements’ lack of staying power. In 2013, they began developing an approach based on the modern history of civil resistance, from Dr. King to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. “Many of the founders of Momentum, including me, have had the experience of living through a cycle of mass protest, with its exhilarating peaks, and then experiencing its failure or collapse,” Paul Engler told me. That inspired “a long process of trying to figure out what happened and analyzing how to do it better.”

The Englers came up with a set of principles for organizers: Devise a clear narrative for what you want to accomplish from the start, then think about your work in a cycle of “escalation” —attracting a wider base largely through rallies and mass protest—and “absorption” —in-person trainings and call-in sessions, where eager new members can become more effective soldiers in the fight.

Many of the Sunrise Movement’s founders, including Prakash, attended the first Momentum trainings in New York in 2014 and 2015. They came up with the idea for Sunrise and spent nearly a year planning before officially launching it in 2017. They decided to focus on motivating youth: Young people have a good track record of challenging the status quo. But more importantly, the threat of climate change feels particularly acute to young people—without immediate action, the environment will profoundly change in their lifetimes. Sunrise’s leaders also decided to focus on pushing Democrats on climate policy; trying to convince Republican lawmakers to accept the science seemed like a poor use of precious time and resources.

Since those early days, the group has pulled offa handful of successful escalations—protests, school strikes, and confrontations with top Democrats whose climate policies they deem too timid. After each of these actions, Sunrise leaders have swooped in to set up recruitment drives and more trainings for new members. That last bit, according to Momentum principles, is key: Other movements often consider a successful protest the last step. For Momentum, it’s just the beginning.

In September, I went to Philly to see Sunrise in action at a gathering of Green New Deal supporters. After seven hours of climate speeches, the crowd of college students and other young adults, along with veteran organizers, all cooped up in an auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania, was restless. Even the most committed were ready to call it a day—until Prakash took the mic.

The daughter of South Indian immigrants, Prakash wore her long hair loose and moved confidently around the stage in jeans and a green canvas jacket. She described Sunrise’s vision for a radically different climate movement. The world desperately needs “a militant force of young people,” she said, to prevent the type of dystopian future that feels imminent to her generation. “I spent my college years imagining what kind of bunker we would all need to create to shield ourselves from a militarized band of bandits that were out because the government just collapsed and all of society was in ruin,” she said.

After the conference, Prakash reflected on Sunrise’s rapid growth over the past year. “Every time we would do something really big, we would have a mass call where thousands of people would join, understand what Sunrise is, what the next action is,” she said. After Sunrise’s Kentucky hub targeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell with protests recently, 1,000 people joined one of its organizing calls, and 700 of them agreed to do a congressional office visit in their hometown. One of those visits was to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which resulted in a viral video of the California Democrat haughtily dismissing the Green New Deal, saying, “There’s no way to pay for it.” Yet by February, 11 senators and 67 House representatives, including every senator running for president, had endorsed a symbolic resolution in support of the bill. (By early November, that number had grown to 109 total.)

So far, Sunrise hasn’t figured out how to channel its energy into actually passing climate legislation. The group “put it on the agenda, they’re driving a ton of alignment, and all that is impressive,” said one activist, who didn’t want to be named while criticizing the organization. But, he continued, “The scale we need to win it is going to transcend Sunrise.”

There’s not a lot of time. When Sunrise members say there’s only a decade to act, they’re not exactly right—climate change doesn’t work like an on/offswitch. Rather, the impacts escalate the longer we delay. But they are correct that the next 10 years is a critical window for action. Sunrise leaders have made big plans: In 2020, they aim to sweep a Democrat into the White House who will tackle global warming, spurred on by what Sunrise hopes will be the largest youth strikes in US history in 2021.

Onstage in Philadelphia, Prakash was aware of how impossibly idealistic all this may sound. “We’re working on it,” she quipped with a self-deprecating laugh. She invited everyone to stand and join her in a singalong of “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen. “There is a crack in everything,” the crowd sang. “That’s how the light gets in.”

SOURCE 





Science and economics trump government mandates with climate change

By Richard W. Rahn

Many in the political and media classes, showing their ignorance, try to ignore the laws of physics and economics, particularly when it comes to climate change. Various candidates make grand declarations that if elected they will stop all carbon emissions by “x” year. They usually propose to do this by requiring all cars to be electric by some arbitrary year, and that the country move totally to renewable energy sources — most often wind and solar.

It is true that most cars will probably be electric in the next couple of decades — but no faster than battery technology improves — and that is dependent not on legislative mandate but on scientific advancement. Batteries still require massive subsidies to compete with gasoline on a cost basis.

The electricity that will power the cars of the future and everything else will be provided by nuclear fission, hydro, fossil fuels and renewables. There is a limit to the quantity of renewables that an electric power grid can use because of the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

The Germans found out that solar turned out to be much more expensive than forecast and that wind had health side effects for those living nearby and was a massive killer of birds, etc. German electric rates are on average about triple those in the United States, making much of their industry non-competitive and causing a consumer political revolt. As a result, the Germans are returning to more traditional sources of power generation.

The United States has actually been reducing carbon emissions, not because of government mandates, but as a result of the huge increase in natural gas usage for power plants due to the fracking revolution (created by private-sector engineers and entrepreneurs). The irony is that the United States met the Paris agreement target reductions in carbon, while Europe, despite all of their big green programs, has not. Again, physics and economics trump government mandates.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a function of all global, natural and man-made emissions. The Chinese now have 148 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity under active construction, which is almost equivalent to the 150 gigawatts of existing coal capacity in the EU.

There are also another 105 gigawatts of coal plants under construction in the rest of the world. The bottom line is no matter what the United States (and the EU) do to curb emissions, it will have virtually no effect on the Earth’s temperatures, because the increases in CO2 in the rest of the world are swamping U.S. actions. 

The middle-income and developing nations argue that the United States and Europe became rich in part because of cheap energy, and the rich nations have no moral right to mandate energy restrictions and costs on the developing countries.

Furthermore, taxpayers and consumers, as the citizens of Europe have already shown, are not going to stand for government schemes to increase the cost of energy and more taxes. People can see what these big green programs are really about — a further power grab by the Washington politicians — having little to do with a greener world.

This does not mean that we ought to do nothing. To date, the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere has been a net benefit. Plants inhale CO2 and exhale oxygen. More CO2 has increased plant growth — including food plants — bringing down the price of food. Greenhouse operators pump CO2 into their greenhouses to increase yields. At the moment, the world is far below the CO2 level to optimize plant growth — but at some time in the future, the optimum will be exceeded.

There are lower-cost ways to delay the negative effects of CO2 growth than massive tax- and welfare-redistribution schemes, and freedom-destroying mandates as to how we travel and live our lives. For at least 2,000 years, men have been re-engineering shore-lines — to cope with higher sea levels which have steadily risen from the end of the last ice age (the rate of increase in sea levels has not increased in recent decades, despite many forecasts that it would).

Recent studies have shown there is a low-cost way to stop the increase in CO2 for the next century or so — that is, plant a trillion trees (the Earth already has approximately 3 trillion trees). (Yes, there are doomsayers who claim we have only a few years left – it varies from speaker to speaker – if we don’t take massive government action. But they have been saying such things for decades, and nothing happened.)

Ecologist Thomas Crowther and his colleagues at ETH University in Zurich (the MIT of Switzerland) have determined there is enough suitable and underused or abandoned land to grow an additional 1.2 trillion trees. The trees would have enough storage capacity to cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions.

Appropriate trees would need to be planted for different climates. And the new forests need to be well-managed so that the forest floor is kept clean to reduce the chances of forest fires. Trees also have the benefit of holding ground water, which reduces flooding, providing attractive screening against urban blight and other eyesores, supplying many useful products. In sum, as the poet Joyce Kilmer wrote: “I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.”

SOURCE 





Why electric cars cannot compete against combustion engines

Electric cars will not be able to compete in the same price range as fuel-driven vehicles while they rely on lithium-ion batteries.

This is according to a report from the MIT Energy Initiative, which argues that the price of electric vehicles batteries will not be sufficiently reduced for more mainstream adoption in the coming years.

Although the price of lithium-ion batteries, which makes up about a third of the cost of an electric vehicle, is steadily declining, the reductions will soon reach a limit.

The Executive Director of the Mobility of the Future group at MIT, Randall Field, explained the problem related to the cost of materials.

“If you follow some of these other projections, you basically end up with the cost of batteries being less than the ingredients required to make it,” Field said.

According to Technology Review, the current average price of a lithium-ion battery pack ranges between $175 and $300 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

Informed projections have estimated that the price of lithium-ion batteries will be reduced to $100 per kWh by 2025. This number is punted as the ideal figure where electric car prices will be on par with fuel-based models.

To reach this level would require that the prices of the metals and materials needed for the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries remain flat, notwithstanding the fact that the demand for these would rise as more electric vehicles enter the market.

MIT’s research therefore indicated that the price per kWh would likely only be at $124 by 2025.

This would be enough to drive the cost-of-ownership down to around the same price as that of conventional cars, but the initial purchase prices for electric cars would still be significantly higher.

Other battery technologies needed

The study further stated that from 2030 onwards, other battery technologies would need to be developed to drive prices down, as the material costs will make up an increased part of the total cost.

These include battery types such as lithium-sulfur, lithium-metal, and solid-state.

SOURCE 

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

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

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