By: Ian Cameron TABLE OF CONTENTS
2018-12-19
Best Places in Canada to Install Solar Panels
According to a National Energy Board study, installing solar panels makes most sense for homeowners in Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island and most places in Ontario. The NEB included 20,000 communities in its study and looked at capacity (hours of sunlight), the competing cost of grid power and the cost of installing solar panels. It considered four types of solar installations: residential, commercial, community and utility. The study 's Executive Summary shows interactive maps for various scenarios showing the breakeven percentage for each province or territory.
In provinces where grid power is cheap (Quebec and Manitoba) the study found that solar costs twice as much. In places where electricity costs are high solar is more economical. The BC coast and the eastern edge of Newfoundland are among the worst places to generate solar power because they don't get a lot of sunshine. The territories north of 60 ° have high costs for solar installation but the high cost of power, often generated by diesel, still makes solar competitive.
The NEB 's chief economist noted: The country cannot run solely on solar panels in the future.
Ontario Scales Back Climate-change Goals
Ontario will scale back its climate-change targets and focus on regulating industrial greenhouse gas emitters, the province said on November 29 as the government unveiled its environmental plan. Instead of CO2 taxes or cap-and-trade the province will create regulations for industrial emitters, support business investment in innovation and clean technology, and increase the ethanol content for gasoline from 10% to 15% by 2025. The province aims to reduce emissions 30% below 2005 levels, which is the same target that the federal government set for the country as a whole. However, it is far less ambitious than the goal set by the previous government. The federal government was counting on more ambitious efforts by Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia to make up for slower progress by provinces more heavily reliant on oil and gas production and coal-fired electricity.
Using the Courts to Fight Climate Change
Lawyer Edward Waitzer points to recent climate-change lawsuits on behalf of young people in Quebec [FoS Extracts - 2018-11-29], the US and the Netherlands. While politicians can legislate solutions to climate change, such legislation is vulnerable to being unravelled over time, especially because it imposes costs in the short term for realization of benefits decades and sometimes centuries in the future.
Mr. Waitzer thinks that courts are better able to address the issue. He expects that concerns over activism by unelected judges can be lessened if they rely on international standards such as the Paris Agreement and the UN 's Sustainable Development Goals, as these have been adopted by 193 countries. Since courts have historically stepped in to protect minority rights, Mr. Waitzer thinks should be able to protect societal rights as well.
<https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-how-the-courts-can-help-in-the-climate-change-fight/>
Margaret Wente: Canada, Climate Hypocrite
One of the doom-laden messages coming out of the latest UN climate summit is that nations of the world have only 12 years to save the Earth from catastrophic global warming. Yet, most nations, including Canada, have no feasible plan to meet their climate targets (emissions 30% below 2005 levels by 2030 in Canada 's case.) According to Climate Action Tracker 's six-point scale, Canada 's performance is highly insufficient, just above the worst rating of critically insufficient .
The federal government 's CO2 tax starting at $20/t and rising to $50/t by 2022 will be ineffective and at best a nuisance. While the government promises that the tax will be revenue neutral, the stream of revenue is to tempting to ignore, as has been the case in British Columbia. Ms. Wente 's advice: invest in new technologies and measures to offset the worst effects of climate change, and be skeptical of people who warn that the seas will boil and the tides will sweep us all away.
Divisive Carbon Prices
Mark Jaccard, who describes himself as a climate-energy economist, argues that CO2 taxes are not essential to stop burning coal and gasolineï¼despite the frequent assertion that economists prefer such taxes. One disadvantage to CO2 taxes is that politicians who advocate them tend to lose elections. Instead, Prof. Jaccard wants flexible regulations ( flex-regs ). For example, government can mandate the phase-out of coal plants while allowing competing electricity generators to determine the cheapest mix of alternatives. Similarly government can order the phase-out of gasoline vehicles while allowing manufacturers and consumers to determine the cheapest mix of electric, biofuel and hydrogen vehicles.
Prof. Jaccard says that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau 's CO2 tax will contribute only 15% to his planned emissions reduction and suggests replacing the tax with a flex-reg clean fuel standard.
<https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-divisive-carbon-prices-are-much-ado-about-nothing/>
Why People Hate Energy Taxes (and Why Politicians Prefer Trading Schemes)
USC professor Matthew Kahn, a leading microeconomist (meaning he studies behaviour of buyers and sellers in market economies) recently posted an essay on the recent French uprising over fuel taxes. Prof. Kahn does not question that fossil fuels cause global warming. His essay, The Substitution and Income Effects Induced by Introducing Carbon Taxes, notes that economists celebrate the substitutions effects induced by CO2 taxesï¼they tend to make people who drive either drive less or demand more fuel-efficient cars and incentivize manufacturers of zero-emission vehicles.
However, votersï¼as the gilets jaunes in France have shownï¼are smart and don 't want their disposable income to decline as a result of CO2 taxes. Thus, economists propose offsetting the income effect through tax and dividend policies, as well as trying to convince the public that raising CO2 prices is in their personal interests. Politicians, however, tend to favour emission-trading schemes, as these force companies to pay more for energy, which they then pass on to their customers. This spreads the cost by increasing prices on everything, not just fuel purchases, and the politicians still get the money coming into green funds which they can distribute in the form of grants and subsidies.
Why the Climate-change Problem Is Starting to Look Too Big to Solve
As COP24 began in Poland the Washington Post ran a downbeat opinion piece on the chances of getting an effective climate policy. Economists like new Nobel laureate William Nordhaus advocate that a whopping $250/t CO2 tax in 2020, rising rapidly thereafter, is needed to hit the 2 °C target. He says: This assumes that all major countries are onboard and that economies can handle a large fiscal and trade shock in which energy expenditures rise by about $2 trillion in a few years, and blames lack of climate policy progress on free-riding ï¼because international organizations lack the authority to enforce rules on backward nations.
Every day the world burns 100 million barrels of oil, most of which goes into road transportation. Even though there are 1 million electric vehicles in the US, there were 12 million more cars with internal combustion engines on the road in the US in 2016, compared to 2008. Global coal consumption runs at 5 billion tonnes annually. Asian coal plants are 11 years old on average, and so will be burning coal for decades. In 2014 the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell noted that wind and solar provide 1% of the world 's energy and won 't provide the required 90% of an energy system that will be twice as large by the middle of the century.
The Road from Paris: China 's Climate U-Turn
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has published a report by Probe International 's Patricia Adams. She finds that the Chinese Communist Party 's highest priority is to stay and power. It is sensitive to domestic pressure that threatens its existence and is much less concerned about international pressure. After basking in the role of climate saviour at the 2015 Paris conference, China 's energy policy is now focussed on energy to fuel the country 's economy (as well as its Belt-and-Road initiative) and reducing smog that undermines public confidence in the party. Clumsy central-planning policies have made a mess of initiatives to invest in renewables and natural gas to deal with the pollution crisis. The country 's emissions rose 1.7% in 2017 and are expected to grow 4.7% in 2018.
The lure of the promised $100 billion/year Green Climate Fund was a lure that made climate change interesting to China and other developing countries. The GCF 's present unfunded state gives China another reason reason to abandon its former climate leadership role.
In a Globe and Mail column Gary Mason is particularly depressed at China 's Great Leap Backward and acknowledges that the global warming deniers are winning now. He predicts that Canadian politicians who refuse to address the climate problem now will be long forgotten when future generations have to deal with the fallout.
The Social Benefit of Carbon
Willis Eschenbach has posted an interesting essay to counter the often-used social cost of carbon or SCC. The latter is defined as: the dollar value of total damages from emitting one tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere. Typically, the SCC is calculated to be about $40/t. Mr. Eschenbach uses a series of seven figures showing global primary energy consumption (with renewables on 2.5% of the total), US taxpayer subsidies of energy sources (far greater for renewables than others), global GDP vs energy use (wealth is almost directly proportional to energy use), change over time and amounts of goods and services gotten from energy use (we 're getting more from each unit of energy), energy usage vs CO2 emitted, global GDP vs energy use & CO2 emissions (each tonne of CO2 provides $4,380 in additional goods and services), and plant growth under differing levels of CO2 (more CO2 means more growth.)
Mr. Eschenbach 's conclusion is that the reason alarmists talk about only SCC is that SCC is a possible future cost and is measured in tens of dollars per tonne of CO2. The actual benefits are in thousands of dollars per tonne.
2018-11-29
Climate Change: What 's In a Name?
Rebranding global warming as climate change helps activists re-arrange the debate and counter the emergence of inconvenient facts. For example, cold, hot, moist or dryï¼as well as any headline-making weather eventï¼can be stuffed under climate change. In fact, the opposite to climate change is climate fixityï¼a climate that never varies, never alters, and something that is unknown in nature.
The Trudeau administration has declared war with one the the constituents of the Earth 's atmosphere by putting a tax on it. Calling the tax by its proper name, a carbon-dioxide tex, would never do, so they call it a carbon tax or a tax on pollution because these sound darker, like soot and smog.
Quebec Group Sues Federal Government over Climate Change
A Quebec group is taking the groundbreaking step of bringing climate action into the courts by launching a legal battle against Ottawa for violating the rights of young people by failing to tackle climate change. The environmental group Environnement Jeunesse is initiating a class-action lawsuit on behalf of nearly 3.5 million Quebeckers at or below the age of 35 the cohort that, it argues, faces the most dire consequences of global warming. The group seeks $100 a person in damages, but says its main goal is to obtain a court ruling that would hold the federal government accountable for any future course of action on climate change.
Climate Change Alarmists Harm Canada 's Economy
Former minister of finance Joe Oliver points out that Canada 's economy is losing over $45 billion/year due to blocking of oil pipelines to tidewater by environmental activists predicting dire consequences from the use of fossil fuels. He gives examples of past predictions of climate doom that failed to materialize. Despite the activists ' claims of extreme weather events, the IPCC itself has found little or no evidence of global warming as a cause. To put the climate in perspective, over the past 600 million years global temperatures from 12 °C to 22 °C, and it is currently 14.5 °C.
UN 's 2018 Emissions Gap Report
This year 's report, the ninth edition in a series, delivers familiar bad newsï¼the problem is getting worse, not better. In particular, following three years of stabilization greenhouse gases increased in 2017 and need to be 25% and 55% below that year 's figure (53.5 GtCO2e) by 2030 to put the world on a least-cost pathway to limit global warming to 2.0 °C and 1.5 °C, respectively (Executive Summary, p.6). The meet the 1.5 °C goal, pledges under the Paris Agreement have to be ramped up fivefold (p.4).
On p.48 of the full report (Section 6.3.3ï¼Political and behavioural factors) the authors state: there is a tendency for citizens to question problems if policy solutions challenge their world views, e.g. on the State 's role in the economy ( solution aversion ) . In other words, the authors single out political ideology as obstructing actions advocated by the UN. To overcome such aversion they suggest using words like fee or contribution rather than tax.
With the sudden departure of the chief of the UN Environment Program (see next story) it fell to the UNEP 's Acting Executive Director to write the forward (p.xiii) to this report.
Jet-Setting UN Environment Chief Resigns
A UN audit report found that the organization 's environment chief Erik Solheim, a former Norwegian environment minister, incurred costs of $488,518 while travelling for 529 out of 668 days. Mr. Solheim 's travel was approved by a member of his office, in contravention of UN rules. Across UN Environment around $58 million was spent on travel in the two years up to 2018. As a BBC report puts it: At a time when awareness of climate change has never been greater, the sight of the man dedicated to fighting global warming endlessly jet-setting around the world risked reputational damage to the UN.
Countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden were so incensed at Mr. Solheim 's attitude that they were withholding tens of millions of dollars in funding to the UNEP, threatening a financial crisis.
Power-hungry Asia Drives Coal Demand
In 2017 global coal demand rose for the first time in two years according to the International Energy Agency in its World Energy Outlook 2018 report. China consumes over 50% of the world 's coal and India uses 12%. The US consumes 9% and Europe 8%. Governments in still developing countries see lower cost energy like coal as especially crucial since citizens have a much smaller capacity to absorb higher prices. As the Forbes story states: In fact, coal is the cornerstone of urbanization, increasingly important since the world 's cities are expanding by 75 million humans every year. Forbes also points out that the great switch to renewables will mean more coal. Each onshore windmill requires 150 t of metallurgical coal for the steel used in its construction.
Anti Carbon-Tax Revolt Threatens to Paralyze France
The Contribution Climat ‰nergie a French version of the carbon tax, has steadily increased fuel prices in recent years. Drivers across the country are balking at the rising price of diesel as it disproportionately affects workers who depend on their vehicles to get to and from their jobs. Two-thirds of French people expect a social explosion in the coming months. The rise of a group called gilets jaunes because of their high-visibility safety vests has organized at least 630 protests nation wide.
Irish Facing 15-fold Increase in CO2 Tax
According to the Ireland 's Economic and Social Research Institute, CO2 taxes will have to rise from the present ‚ 20/t to at least ‚ 300/t by 2030 in order to allow the State to meet stringent EU fines. The country has to reduce emissions by 20% over 2005 levels by 2020 and is not expected to reach this target; hence the fines. By 2030 the target is 30%.
If agriculture reduced emissions at the same rate as the rest of the economy, the carbon tax will have to increase from ‚ 20/t at present to just under ‚ 50/t by 2020 and ‚ 300/t by 2030. If agriculture did not play a role, the tax would need to increase to around ‚ 150 by 2020 and ‚ 470 by 2030 if the State was to hit its targets.
Catholic Ireland reports that one in four households are living in energy poverty in Ireland.
Dutch State Will Appeal Climate-change Verdict
In October a Netherlands appeal court upheld a 2015 lower court ruling that mandated reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 [FoS Extracts - 2018-10-27]. The Dutch state has decided to ask the country 's Supreme Court to overturn the appellate court ruling. On current prognosis the Netherlands is on course to reduce CO2 emissions by only 23% of 1990 levels.
2018-11-13
The US Midterms: Climate Initiatives Lose
Voters rejected Initiative 1631, a ballot measure backed by a coalition of liberal groups, which would have imposed a carbon tax on Washington state. Had the measure passed, Washington would have become the first state to tax CO2 emissions. In Arizona, despite millions of dollars from activist Tom Steyer, renewable energy initiative, Proposition 127, was defeated.
In a gloomy summary of the outcomes of these and two other ballot initiatives, the Washington Post concludes: The failure of the most ambitious ballot measures underscores the difficulty of tackling a global problem like climate change policy at the state and local level Or, as the president of the American Energy Alliance puts it: voters reject policies that would make energy more expensive and less reliable. DeSmogBlog blames the poor results on energy and fossil-fuel companies spending to defeat the initiatives.
Too Many Polar Bears
There are too many polar bears in parts of Nunavut and climate change hasn 't yet affected any of them, says a draft management plan from the territorial government that contradicts much of conventional scientific thinking. The proposed plan which is to go to public hearings in Iqaluit on November 13 says that growing bear numbers are increasingly jeopardizing public safety and that it 's time Inuit knowledge drove management policy. Scientists say only one population of bears is growing; Inuit say there are nine. Environment Canada says four populations are shrinking; Inuit say none are.
Bolsonaro In, Merkel Out: The Paris Climate Gang Is Breaking Up
The alliance of rich, emerging and poor economies that sealed the Paris climate deal is falling apart. In 2015, the world 's top two emitters, the US and China, joined with Brazil, some small island countries and the European Union, led by Germany, France and the UK, to land the agreement. But climate change politics have shifted significantly since then, with two more big tilts recently. Brazil elected a staunch and radical anti-environmentalist president, while Germany 's Angela Merkel confirmed her exit plans, further weakening an already fading image as the climate chancellor and Europe 's go-to leader in the field.
Only 17 Countries Are Aiming To Reach Their Paris Targets
According to a policy brief published by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, as of October there were only 17 countries with national targets, policies and laws that are compatible with their nationally-determined contributions under the Paris Agreement: Algeria, Canada, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, FYR Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Montenegro, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Samoa, Singapore and Tonga. (On page 5 of the report, see Note (a) for Figure 2.)
Moving the Goalposts: IPCC Secretly Redefines Climate
The definition of climate adopted by the World Meteorological Organization is the average of a particular weather parameter (e.g., global temperature) over 30 years. For its recent 1.5 °C report [FoS Extracts - 2018-10-09] the IPCC changed the definition of climate to what has been loosely called the climate we are in. It still uses 30 years for its estimate of global warming and hence climate but now the IPCC uses 30 years centred on the present. That means the actual temperatures for the past 15 years and assumed temperatures for the next 15. In other words the IPCC is defining climate on speculation.
Jordan Peterson: The World Won 't Unite to Solve Climate Change
In a 6:30 video Prof. Peterson responds to a question from his Cambridge Union audience on whether climate change is an issue that will unite us all. After responding no to applause and laughter, he explains that the issue a catastrophic, nightmarish mess where it 's difficult to separate the science from the politics. Projecting climate change 50 years out accumulates ever wider error bars such that it 's impossible to know the effect of anything we do right now, such that it 's impossible to measure the consequences of one 's actions.
Wind and solar aren 't the solution, as Germany found out. Instead Prof. Peterson recommends Bj ¸rn Lomborg 's solution of getting people out of poverty so that they care about, and clean up the environment.
Biggest Renewable Power Source Is an Environmental Disaster
Hydropower is the source of 71% of renewable energy throughout the world and has played a major role in the development of many countries. However, a paper Sustainable hydropower in the 21st century appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that a recent trend of new large hydropower dams being built in developing countries is causing socio-economic and environmental damages in river systems.
The Rotors of Sickness
A report on infrasound (low frequency sound below 20 Hz) by German public television ZDF further reveals how infrasound from wind turbines causes widespread health issues, despite claims by experts that these illnesses are in peoples ' heads and not really real. Particularly troublesome, ZDF reports, are the new, larger turbines which replace older, smaller turbines in what is called repowering . But when confronted with the health risk from infrasound, Germany 's Ministry of Environment (using totally irrelevant measurements) denied that there was a serious problem of any type for residents nearby.
ZDF consulted its own experts, finding that it is possible to measure a clear exposure to very strong vibrations of infrasound. The Ministry of Environment ignores the health-damaging infrasound by smoothing them out and taking the position that it doesn 't really exist.
100% Renewablesï¼Poor Policy for Ratepayers
In the US two states and more than 80 cities and counties have now announced a goal of receiving 100% of their electricity from renewable sources. Wind, solar, and biofuels are proposed to replace electricity from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. On September 10, Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 100, committing California to 100% renewable electricity by 2045.
Because of the intermittency problem, in order to achieve the desired deep decarbonization states will need to keep 90% of traditional power plants and add increasing amounts of wind and solar to existing systems. Total system capacity must first double and then triple as 100% renewable output is approached. This, of course means enormous electricity cost. In California power rates increased 25% between 2008 and 2017, compared to the US national average of 7%. In their 100% renewable efforts, cities and states will will learn the hard lesson of skyrocketing electricity prices.
How Wind-turbine Plantations Are Ruining Germany 's Natural Heritage
A 4-minute video shows how Germany has transformed a large part of its once idyllic landscape into an industrial wasteland littered by wind turbines all in the name of environmentalism. And it warns that if wind energy movement continues in Germany, the entire country will look like the images shown in the video.
Cold Weather Kills; Moderate Warming May Save Millions
A new paper published in JAMA Cardiology confirms that cold weather triggers more heart attacks. The life-threatening condition is more likely to occur on chilly, windy days when there is little sunshine, the study found. And sub-zero temperatures increase a person 's risk of suffering the most serious type of heart attack by nearly 10%. According to the lead author, icy weather is thought to cause blood vessels to narrow, restricting the heart 's oxygen supply, and colds and flu are also more common during the winter months, which have been shown to increase vulnerable people 's risk of a heart attack.
2018-10-27
Trudeau 's Carbon Tax
Residents of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswickï¼provinces with carbon pricing plans that the federal government considers inadequateï¼will receive pre-emptive rebates from Ottawa when they begin paying the federal carbon tax in April 2019. The federal government says that 90% of the tax revenue will be returned to households through the annual rebate, with the remaining 10% used to support small businesses, universities, hospitals, schools, non-profits, municipalities, etc., that cannot pass on the cost to consumers. Nevertheless, the government estimates that average households in the four provinces will get back more than they pay through the federal carbon tax.
As Kevin Libin notes in the Financial Post, the Trudeau government is layering its carbon tax atop an existing web work of myriad green initiatives and regulations, both federal and provincial, that vary wildly from coast to coast. The rebated money will use a rough formula applied to personal tax returns, based on the number of people per household and where they liveï¼not how much they emit. In effect, it 's an unwieldy wealth-distribution scheme that takes money from businesses and high-income families and reallocates it to others. It will raise business costs and give imports an advantage.
The government 's message is that taxing carbon emissions as they call them is a price on pollution. Rex Murphy says they are instead putting a tax on all energy fuels and that CO2 is not a pollutant; it 's a nature-produced life-giving and life-enhancing part of the planet 's atmosphere.
Carbon Tax Lovers Celebrate a Trade Warmonger
With the award of a Nobel prize in economics to William Nordhaus, it didn 't take long for Canada 's Environment and Climate Change Minister, Catherine McKenna, to tweet out the news implying that the Nobel Committee supported the Government of Canada 's carbon-price scheme. Dr. Nordhaus has been promoting CO2 pricing for more than four decades.
To be effective, a carbon tax has to be global, which the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement haven 't achieved. So, Dr. Nordhaus proposes that sympathetic nations form coalitions to use trade sanctions and tariffs to punish non-members who don 't cooperate with the climate targets. To force compliance Dr. Nordhaus describes a basic tariff on all goods from non-compliant nations. Better still would be a tariff based on the amount of CO2 in the imported products.
The Climate-Change Panel that Cried Wolf Too Often
As Rex Murphy argues, the IPCC enjoys a delightfully recurrent state of despair over the world 's imminent collapse, which happily coincides with the release of each annual report. In its latest, doomsday has been moved to 2030 and we 've lost half a degree, but even the most sanctimonious aren 't living up to their commitments. The IPCC estimates that governments will have to impose taxes of $135 to $5,500 per tonne of CO2 by 2030, far more than greener-than-thou Canada 's eventual tax of $50/t.
Mr. Murphy 's conclusion: The trouble with apocalypses is that they can 't be plural. You only get one by definition. Neither can you set multiple deadlines for Doomsday. It 's a kind of one-off by nature. Do it too often and people cease to take notice or even care.
The IPCC 's Cynical Ploy
According to its mandate the IPCC is supposed to be policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral and never policy-prescriptive. However, on October 8 the IPCC released its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15) [FoS Extracts - 2018-10-09] together with a press release which included the statements, Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C would require rapid and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society and that such limiting could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society. As Donna Laframboise notes, If an equitable society is part of your argument, you 're having a political discussion not a scientific one.
The journalists who reported on AR15 didn 't spend much time explaining that the report is an artificial comparison of two hypothetical scenarios, nor the dismal track record associated with such apocalyptic projections. Reporters, predictably, hyped the need to follow the IPCC 's advice and the quotes of IPCC officials, one of whom said that it 's important to put pressure on policymakers.
Even Al Gore, in a TV interview, admitted that SR15 was torqued up to promote political action.
IPCC Redefining Global Warming at 11th Hour
The 34-page Summary for Policymakers for the IPCC 's SR15 was released after a week of sentence-by-sentence editing in a closed-door meeting by lawyers and diplomats representing UN nations. When the SPM was complete the IPCC announced that the underlying, 1200-page Scientific-Technical Assessment required 16 pages of changes to ensure consistency with the approved Summary for Policymakers.
Among the changes is a re-definition of the term global warming, as Donna Laframboise describes in her article. In other words the non-expert lawyers and diplomats got to overrule the scientists.
Richard Lindzen: Warming of Any Significance Ceased 20 Years Ago
Prof. Lindzen said that the IPCC 's SR15 had reduced the alleged tipping point from 2 °C to 1.5 °C because there had been no significant warming for 20 years: Warming of any significance ceased about 20 years ago, and 2 °C warming was looking increasingly unlikely.
Law Enforcement for Rent
A recent report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute is the result of 2- ½ years of open records requests and, in some cases, subsequent litigation. It details an extensive campaign by an informal coalition of US attorneys general to use the legal system in pursuit of a purely political objective (litigation against opponents of their progressive climate policy agenda.) Members of the coalition held fundraisers and secret meetings for their project, using NGOs to pass through the off-the-books money collected. In other words, private interests were commandeering the state 's police powers to target opponents and hijack the justice system as a way to overturn the democratic process 's rejection of a political agenda.
How Bloomberg Embeds Green Warriors in Blue-State Governments
Nine states and Washington, D.C., including New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, are participating in the multimillion-dollar program funded by media magnate and ex-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to place lawyers in the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and paying them to prosecute energy companies and challenge Trump administration policies on energy and the environment.
The 14 current fellows in the program report to the attorneys general, but they are paid by NYU 's Bloomberg-funded State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. State AG offices hire these trained lawyers not students but seasoned professionals with years of experience as special assistant attorneys general. Under terms of the arrangement, the fellows work solely to advance progressive environmental policy at a time when Democratic state attorneys general have investigated and sued ExxonMobil and other energy companies over alleged damages due to climate change.
Dutch Court Upholds Climate Change Ruling
In a 2015 ruling a Dutch court ordered the state to reduce emissions by 25% within five years to protect its citizens from climate change. The government appealed, but the appellate court has upheld the lower court ruling that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 measured against 1990 levels higher than the 17% drop planned by the government.
The Dutch government has not decided whether to appeal the court 's decision yet, but opposition politicians are steeling themselves for the prospect.
US Supreme Court Orders Pause in Landmark Climate Case
The Juliana v. U.S. case has been trudging through the legal system since 2015, when 21 young plaintiffs brought a suit claiming that US government policies have contributed to climate change, thereby denying them their fundamental right to a healthy environment. It was supposed to go to trial on October 29 in the US District Court in Oregon. Then, on October 19 Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court ordered an extremely rare, if not unprecedented stay in the suit.
Both the Obama and Trump administrations have tried to put a stop to the lawsuit, arguing that the court is not the right place to deal with this matter. A main source of contention is whether or not a safe climate should be considered a civil right. What happens next remains to be seen.
2018-10-09
IPCC Releases Report on Impacts of 1.5 °C of Warming
On October 8 the IPCC released its report (short title: SR15) on the impacts of 1.5 °C of warming above pre -industrial levels, together with related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. Here, pre-industrial levels means global mean surface temperatures for 1850-1900. SR15 consists of: Summary for Policy Makers (33 pp, the result of line-by-line editing by government representatives at a meeting in Korea, October 1-6); Headline Statements (3 pp.); Ch. 1ï¼Framing and context (22 pp.); Ch. 2ï¼Mitigation pathways compatible with 1.5 °C (113 pp.); Ch. 3ï¼Impacts of 1.5 °C of warming (246 pp.); Ch. 4ï¼Strengthening and implementing global response to the threat of climate change (198 pp.); Ch. 5ï¼Sustainable development, poverty eradication and reducing inequalities (77 pp.); Glossary (55 pp.), and FAQs (21 pp.). Page counts do not include Annexes.
SR15 builds on the IPCC 's last major report of 2013 (AR5). Its main conclusions: Human activities have caused 1.0 °C ( ±0.2 °C) of warming up to 2017, and the warming is likely to reach 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052 at its current rate (SPM-4); Emissions from pre-industrial times to the present are unlikely to cause warming to exceed 1.5 °C (SPM-4); Limiting warming to 1.5 °C rather than 2.0 °C will have several less bad effects (SPM-8 to SPM-15); To keep within 1.5 °C anthropogenic CO2 emissions must decline 45% below 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050 (SPM-15); Limiting warming to 1.5 °C will require carbon dioxide removal (CDR) of 100 to 1000 Gt over the 21st century (SPM-23); The pledges under the Paris Agreement would lead to an emissions reduction of only 52-58 Gt/year, which is not enough to meet 1.5 °C (SPM-24).
Watts Up With That? has a more detailed summary of SR15, including quotes from some of the authors. Judith Curry comments about 1.5 °C, including the fact that the IPCC models ignore the bottom third of the likely climate sensitivity values of 1.5 to 4.5 °C of warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration, and current temperatures are more benign than those of the 18th and 19th centuries. A translated Die Welt article in the GWPF calls the 1.5 °C target utopian and notes that energy-saving measures of up to $1 trillion/year are needed, about 4-5 times the current level. Also, an area the size of the USA would need to be reserved for new forests.
It 's All Over: Ontario Government Moves to Scrap Green Energy Act
Months after cancelling 758 contracts for renewable energy projects still in development, the Ontario Government introduced legislation on September 20 to repeal the province 's Green Energy Act. The GEA was passed in 2009 to promote Ontario 's use of renewable energy such as wind power, solar power, biofuels, and small-scale hydropower. Its centrepiece was a schedule of subsidized electricity purchase contracts called Feed-in-Tariffs that provide long-term guarantees of above-market rates for power generated by those renewablesï¼whether the power is needed or not. The GEA had disastrous impacts on Ontario 's electricity rates, putting the province at or near the top in North America, with little environmental benefit.
In its press release the government called the GEA the largest transfer of money from the poor and middle class to the rich in Ontario's history and stated: "Well-connected energy insiders made fortunes putting up wind-farms and solar panels that gouge hydro consumers in order to generate electricity that Ontario doesn't need.
Federal Environment and Climate Change Minister, Catherine McKenna reacted by stating that Ontario was "taking action to move away from the biggest economic opportunity of the century. Other environmental commentators called the GEA 's repeal symbolic as it will not have much effect on electricity rates. A Fraser Institute report, Electricity Reform in Ontario: Getting Power Prices Down, supports the commentators ' conclusion (p.12). Instead, it recommends that the Ontario government enact legislation to cancel the legacy renewable-energy contracts made under the GEA, thereby reducing the 2017 electricity price by 4.3 ¢/kWh, or 27% of the total of 15.8 ¢/kWh (pp. 13 & 15).
Trudeau Stands Alone as the World Abandons Green Energy
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau 's climate agenda is going against a world-wide trend of rejecting renewable energy and climate change alarmism, while embracing coal and other fossil fuels. China was once the poster boy for the renewable energy industry, but is now cutting subsidies to renewables. It is the world 'd biggest importer of coal and oil, and in 2018 will become the largest importer of natural gas. Another former poster boy, Germany, is cutting subsidies to wind developers, while increasing gas imports and mining of local coal. Japan plans to remove its modest renewables subsidies and will add 40 coal-fired stations to its existing 100.
The decline of government funding for renewables follows years of public opinion polls that consistently show the public isn 't much fussed about climate change. Governments finally got the message that the green lobby wasn 't all-powerful. The most timid, least principled players in society the corporate sector may be next in showing some spine on the climate change file. According to an internal memo leaked earlier this month, BusinessEurope, the EU 's largest employer association, intends to counter EU plans to tighten carbon-dioxide emissions at their expense.
Trudeau Still Wants to Talk Climate Change and Trade with US
Even though the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that replaces NAFTA doesn 't mention climate change or global warming and contains no binding rules on pollution, Prime Minister Trudeau insists that Canada is still committed to addressing climate change in its trade relations with the US. An environmental chapter summary on the USMCA put out by the Canadian government states: Climate change remains a priority for Canada, and we remain committed to addressing this issue through ongoing negotiations of a parallel environmental cooperation agreement.
Environmental and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna said the Trudeau government absolutely did" try to get climate change written into the new trade deal, but doesn 't consider absence of the term from the USMCA to be a big loss for the Canadian side.
Renewable Economy Stimulates Green Entrepreneurs to Fly More
According to Guardian Columnist George Monbiot the renewable energy economy is putting so much money into the pockets of greens, that money is being blown on high carbon activities like long distance holiday flights. Mr. Monbiot asks why, with the transition to an electric future, oil production is about to hit 100 million barrels/day and keep climbing to the 2030s. The answer is economic growth and what he calls an increase in pointless consumption.
It turns out that, when a low-carbon industry expands within a growing economy, the money generated stimulates high-carbon industry as environmental entrepreneurs, eco-consultants and green business managers who use their earnings to pay for holidays in distant parts of the world and the flights required to get there.
The Myth that Carbon Taxes Will Make Families Richer
Canadians for Clean Prosperity published a report estimating that a carbon tax will make Canadians better off ( the vast majority of households ) if the money is rebated to every person as equal per capita grants. In a Financial Post article Jack Mintz examined the report 's three scenarios (households receive what they pay; households get all the tax proceeds except those from large final emitters; and all proceeds are rebated back to households). Mr. Mintz notes that report does not account for the indirect cost to households of carbon taxes levied on exported production.
Also, a carbon-tax regime requires significant administrative and compliance costs. If the tax makes households produce less CO2 the carbon taxes collected are reduced and so is the amount rebated. In Ontario, for example, the carbon tax would cost $124 more per household, and all households with incomes over $40,000 would come out losers. In the Globe and Mail Peter Shawn Taylor from Canadians for Affordable Energy argues that, after exemptions for big business and rebates to consumers, small and medium businesses would shoulder the entire burden of carbon-tax giveaway plans.
EU Business Lobby to Champion Climate Status Quo
A leaked document from one of Europe 's most influential business lobbies is trying to push the EU towards climate action standstill, calling the bloc 's existing 40% emissions reduction target already ambitious. The BusinessEurope document, dated 3 October, shows that references to an 80%, 95% or carbon neutral climate target have been deleted, while the term trajectories has been replaced by scenarios. It does not define action to be taken against climate warming in order to limit it to the 2 °C or 1.5 °C pathways referred to in the Paris Agreement.
First Ever Audit of Hadley Temperature Data
The UK Met Office 's Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia publish the HadCrut4 global temperature data. The Hadley data is one of the most cited, most important databases for climate modelling, and thus for policies involving billions of dollars. For his PhD thesis Dr. John McLean audited this data and found that it contains more than 70 different kinds of problems. Some of them are absurd: For two years the entire Southern Hemisphere temperature was estimated from one sole land-based site in Indonesia and some ship data; Some temperatures are in °F instead of °C; Mistakes in longitude and latitude; Tropical islands recording temperature of 0 °C; a spot in Romania with a whole month averaging -45 °C; A site in Columbia recording three months of over 80 °C.
The Downside to Wind Power
Two papers published by Harvard University researchers find that the transition to wind or solar power in the US would require five to 20 times as much land as previously thought, and if such large-scale wind farms were built, would warm average surface temperatures over the continental U.S. by 0.24 °C. Based on modelling and observations of already-installed wind turbines and government databases, the researchers were able to quantify the power density of 411 wind farms and 1,150 solar photovoltaic plants operating in the US during 2016.
From this they determined that wind farms will require more land to meet proposed renewable energy targets and would have an impact on the climate system. In their models they covered one-third of the continental US with with enough wind turbines to meet current electricity demand, finding that this would warm surface temperatures by up to 0.24 °C. Nevertheless the researchers insisted that their work not be seen as a fundamental critique of windpower.
2018-09-17
Hurricane Florence: The Blame Begins
Tim Ball describes the media distortions surrounding this hurricane, as well as what happens as it reaches landfall and moves north. Among the distortions is the Washington Post holding Donald Trump complicit for extreme weather events (and by implication, Florence.) The really complicit parties are the insurance companies, such as Swiss Re, which has committed itself to actively raising awareness of climate change issues. Swiss Re also sponsored a documentary, The Great Warming, that pushes all the propaganda buttons.
Auto Industry Pushes Back Against Tougher EU Emissions Targets
Claiming that the EU 's climate targets and push toward more e-cars will cost jobs, European carmakers have openly questioned the bloc 's 2021 car emission goals. The European Automobile Manufacturers' Association admitted on September 4 that Europe's car industry would find it hard to meet the EU's 2021 target of 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre (57.4 miles per gallon) for average fleet emissions, and flatly rejected an EU proposal for steeper cuts beyond 2030. Currently, carmakers ' most modern fleets emit about 118.5 g/km of CO2.
California Passes 100% Renewable Bill To Fight Climate Change
Citing the existential threat of climate change, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation on September 10 making California the first state to set a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045, despite concerns about increased electricity costs. The legislation, Senate Bill 100, speeds up the state 's renewable-energy benchmarks, setting goals of 50% electrical-power generation from energy sources such as wind and solar by 2025, and 60% by 2030.
Critics have argued that the bill is unrealistic and will compound the state 's problems with rolling brownouts and high energy prices. Natural-gas plants are used to make up for gaps when the sun fails to shine and the wind doesn 't blow. At the same time, California has grappled with an oversupply of renewable energy, especially at noon when the sun is at its highest, leading the state to offload solar energy to other states.
Even before SB 100 passed, California 's leaders were already facing a legal backlash from minority leaders over the high costs of the state 's climate policies. The Two Hundred, a coalition of civil-rights leaders, filed a lawsuit in state court against the California Air Resources Board, seeking an injunction against some of the state 's carbon dioxide reduction rules.
<https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/10/jerry-brown-signs-100-renewables-bill-fight-existe/>
Europe 's Renewable Energy Strategy: Destroy Forests and Emit More CO2
In January 2018 the EU Parliament voted to double Europe 's 2015 renewable energy level by 2030. It also decided that one of the ways of achieving this is to allow countries, power plants and factories to claim that cutting down trees just to burn them for energy fully qualifies as low-carbon, renewable energy. However, in a paper published in Nature Communications, argues that the new renewable energy directive could consume quantities of wood equal to all Europe 's wood harvests, greatly increase CO2 in the air for decades, and set a dangerous global example for other countries, such as Brazil and Indonesia, which are planning to do the same.
Typically, about one-third of the wood in a harvested tree is contained in the small branches and roots, which are left in the forest. Burning the other two-thirds emits about 1.5 x the CO2 of coal and 3 x that of natural gas because of wood 's carbon bonds, water content and lower burning temperature. While regrowing the cut-down forests absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, it takes many years.
Big Green Inc.: The US Foundations Funding Green Activists
Big Green, Inc. is a first-of-its-kind research tool that provides a detailed accounting of the billions of dollars that flow into and throughout the green movement. The website tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016. The tool found, for example, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave out $2 billion in grants to environmental causes, including climate activism, between 2008 and 2016. The Energy Foundation handed out $444 million in grants and the Sea Change Foundation doled out $373 million. The Energy Foundation got funding from liberal billionaire Tom Steyer 's charitable trust from 2009 to 2013.
Big Green Inc. is a project of the Institute for Energy Research that demonstrates money 's influence on energy policy in the US. Its website features a map highlighting a group of foundations that spend billions of dollars supporting aggressive climate litigation, the promotion of uneconomic renewable energies and overburdening regulations. The interactive map displays grant information bubbles for each state, and these can be expanded to provide more detail.
Industrial Wind Energy Deceptions
Wind energy was abandoned for most commercial and industrial applications over a century ago, but thanks to the AGW scare and subsidies, it 's making a comeback. This essay describes deceptions that have evolved with the merchandizing of industrial wind energy. Among the greatest is the myth that wind power reduces CO2 emissions.
Unaffordable Green Energy: Charity Begs for More Volunteer Knitters, to Help Poor People Survive Winter
Victoria, Australia 's deep green government is determined to end the age of dispatchable power, whatever the cost. This has resulted in soaring power prices that have been leaving people cold. As a result volunteer knitters are busy trying to meet the demand for winter woolies.
2018-09-01
Canada 'a Climate Plan In Free-fall
On August 30, the same day the Federal Court of Appeal overturned approval of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion, Alberta 's Premier Rachel Notley withdrew her government 's support for Canada 's national climate change strategy. The move means Alberta will now not move ahead to raise the province 's current carbon tax of $30/t to $40/t by 2021, or to $50/t in 2022, as per the federal climate change plan schedule.
Prime Minister Trudeau 's government had staked much of its legacy on forging a grand bargain on resources: It sought to get social license for projects like Trans Mountain in exchange for its climate plan involving both the federal government and the provinces.
Climate Change Off The Agenda For New Australian Government
On August 24, after the governing coalition refused to support global warming-related legislation pushed by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, the latter was facing a vote of no confidence and stepped down. Mr. Turnbull 's replacement, Scott Morrison, signalled that his government will focus on reducing electricity rates and abandon all efforts to lower CO2 emissions. Mr. Morrison said that he 's .. not sceptical about climate science, but I am and have been for many years sceptical about the economics of so many of the emissions-reduction schemes dreamed up by vested interests, technocrats and politicians around the world.
Even though the new prime minister won 't walk away from the Paris Agreement, the EU is concerned that his predecessor lost his job over proposed legislation to cement Australia 's Paris pledge to cut emissions 26% below 2005 levels by 2030. The European Commission wants current trade negotiations between the EU and Australia and New Zealand to include a reference to the Paris Agreement, which may now be unacceptable to Australia.
Trump Issues Rollback Of Obama 's Biggest Climate Rule
On August 21 the Trump administration, through the Environmental Protection Agency, rolled out its proposal for gutting former President Barack Obama 's most sweeping climate change regulation a move that could also block any future Democratic president from trying to put it back together. The EPA 's proposal would replace the Obama regulation which required states to cut emissions from power plants, by giving states far more leeway to meet more modest climate goals or even to opt of the program entirely.
The new rule will inevitably bring lawsuits from environmental groups and Democratic-leaning states. If they lose, the result could be a court decision enshrining the Trump administration 's approach to climate regulation. It would also slam the door on any later attempts to recreate President Obama 's handiwork.
Merkel Rejects EU Proposal For More Emissions Cuts
On August 26 German Chancellor Angela Markel rejected a proposal, floated by the European Commission last month, of setting new, stricter emissions cuts targets, saying that EU countries should focus on meeting the targets they have already set themselves. The Commission 's energy chief, Miguel Arias Ca ±ete, was considering increasing from 40% to 45% the size of CO2 emissions cuts by 2030 for all EU countries. Mr. Arias Ca ±ete wants to see the EU target increased before the climate summit in Katowice, Poland next December.
Six German states where 65,000 jobs depend on coal and lignite mining and coal-powered generation, have been pressuring the chancellor to keep the coal-fire plants open for as long as 30 years.
UN-Appointed Climate Science Team Demands End To Capitalism
A team of scientists appointed by the United Nations has reported that a free market system cannot provide the economic transition required to defeat climate change. The report, Governance of Economic Transition, was released in August. Its introductory paragraph states: Because economies are for the first time in human history shifting to energy sources that are less energy efficient, production of usable energy (exergy) will require more, not less, effort on the part of societies to power both basic and non-basic human activities. . Sink costs are also rising; economies have used up the capacity of planetary ecosystems to handle the waste generated by energy and material use. Climate change is the most pronounced sink cost.
The report notes that renewable forms of energy have a lower Energy Return on Investment (EROI) than conventional forms and therefore meeting growing energy needs with low-carbon sources will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. The report rejects carbon pricing in favour of new geopolitical order based on a collective Keynesian world with planetary boundaries : unique, autonomous economies and societies engaging in regulated international trade for specific reasons, such as food security, rather than for the sake of free trade as a principle. In its final paragraph the report calls for a group of progressive states to take the lead."
Wildfires: Not The New Normal, But The Old One
News media, politicians and environmental groups have claimed that the smoke hitting western North America during the past two summers is a new normal ï¼the result of global warming. However, wildfires are an essential part of the ecology of our region, particularly east of the Cascade crest. When European settler reached the region in the 1800s they found an area that was frequently smoky in summers, with major fires. And the reason that current inhabitants of the region think smoke is an outlier is because of nearly a century of fire suppression in the West.
The Real Story Behind The Starving Polar-Bear Video
Susan Crockford reveals new facts about the filmmakers behind the cruel and deliberate exploitation of a dying polar bear in quest to advance their climate change agenda [FoS Extracts - 2018-08-01]. The filmmakers allowed the bear to continue suffering so that they could produce and disseminate their tragedy porn video, rather than calling a conservation officer, who would have euthanized the bear and arranged for a necropsy to determine the cause of the bear 's poor condition. A necropsy result would have hamstrung the filmmakers ' plan to use the starving-bear video to spur action on climate change.
Sierra Club: Democrats Are Losing Interest In Climate Change
The Sierra Club worries that the Democratic Party appears to be moving backward on climate change. For example, the Senate Minority Leader gripes about the unavailability of cheap fossil fuel for internal combustion enginesï¼something out of touch for a party that has positioned itself to be the leading voice on climate action. The Democratic National Committee reversed its position on a previously adopted resolution that prohibited donations from fossil-fuel-aligned corporate political action committees. The official Democratic rebuttal to President Trump 's State of the Union Address this year omitted any mention of climate change.
In addition the Democratic Party has mostly failed to embrace climate change as a social justice or economic equity issue, preferring to cling to the status quo of all-of-the-above energy platform. and a conception of climate action that seems to begin and end with market-based solutions like a carbon tax. The Sierra Club hopes that things could change this year with the election of politicians proposing a New Green Deal into a national conversation on climate action.
<https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/08/22/sierra-club-democrats-are-losing-interest-in-climate-change/>
Electric Cars: Will Any Auto Company Make Money?
Steve Graham points out that it took Toyota ten years of production to start making money on its Prius hybrid (gas-electric with no plug-in). No plug-in hybrids nor any pure electrics from any manufacturer are profitable yet. For example General Motors loses $7,000 on each of its new Bolt battery-electrics, and the battery itself costs $10,000ï¼$12,000, or one-third of the car 's price.
The demand for electrics comes not from market need or new technology, but as a result of government incentives. More than 20 countries offer tax credits, deductions, and subsidies to consumers and businesses, but electric car growth has been disappointing. With subsidies largely ineffective, governments in Europe now plan to ban internal combustion engine car sales in the name of saving the environment. Look for big losses by auto companies on their electric vehicles and a growing resale market for traditional gasoline and diesel vehicles.
2018-08-16
Trudeau 's Carbon Tax Climbdown
Following intense political backlash from conservatives and businesses over new US tariffs on steel and aluminum and fears that a new federal carbon tax would only make them less competitive, the Trudeau government will scale back plans to tax CO2 emissions from industrial operations. Those industries will only pay the carbon tax for emissions over their sector 's average. The federal government will now raise those thresholds from 70% to 80% for some industries and 90% for others, with the tax being levied on emissions over the thresholds.
The new Ontario government wasted no time gloating about what they've dubbed a "climbdown" from Mr. Trudeau on carbon pricing.
Catherine McKenna Claims That Sewage Leaks Will Increase Due To Climate Change
Following a report that 1 trillion litres of raw sewage leaked into Canadian waterways between 2013 and 2017, the country 's Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said that climate change is expected to bring about more frequent storms, like the recent flash flood rainfall in Toronto that left the harbourfront waters covered in debris from the toilets of millions of Toronto residents. It turns out that Toronto 's old plumbing system carries household waste and whatever gets swept through storm drains in the same pipes pipes that overflowed.
What Went Wrong with Carbon Taxes?
Jack Mintz, President 's Fellow, School of Public Policy, University of Calgary writes in the Financial Post to explain why carbon taxes are so unpopular. The latest World Bank report on carbon pricing finds that 23 jurisdictions have carbon taxes, another 12 have emission trading systems. Three (Australia, Washington State and Ontario) have recently cut carbon tax/emission trading proposals. In contrast, 176 countries have targets for renewable energy and/or energy efficiency and 110 jurisdictions have feed-in tariffs.
Despite the appeal of carbon taxes (providing price certainty, can be widely applied, popular with economists and policy elites), they don 't pass the smell test with voters. A a new paper published in WIREs Climate Change (Overcoming public resistance to carbon taxes) asks why and finds five reasons: (1) the levies are regressive, hitting lower income households most, (2) voters are worried about competitiveness and employment effects, (3) voters view the personal costs as too high, (4) carbon taxes are believed to be ineffective in reducing emissions, and (5) governments can 't be trusted. Regarding the last one, when British Columbia and Alberta brought in their carbon taxes they promised that the revenues would not be used for the general budget, and then backtracked.
New Doomsday Paper Forecasts Hothouse Earth
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published a paper called Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene postulating self-reinforcing feedbacks that could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a Hothouse Earth ' pathway even as human emissions are reduced. The authors ' prescriptions for avoiding this calamity include, among others: (1) decarbonization of the global economy; (2) behavioural changes; (3) new governance arrangements; and (4) transformed social values. One of the authors, Hans Joachim Schnellhuber, has long dreamed of a world government and geocybernetic control.
In the Global Policy Warming Forum, David Whitehouse points out that the PNAS paper: (1) is not a research paper and contains no new science; (2) is a future scenario pieced together by quoting selected (cherry-picked) references; (3) moves into what he regards as extreme scientific speculation since there is no evidence in the literature suggesting that a global temperature rise of 2 °C over pre-industrial levels will be a tipping point. Judith Curry summarizes media reaction to the paper, noting that she has frequently written on the need to articulate a worse case scenario and that the paper 's purpose is to spur action on changing the world to prevent a hypothetical consequence 1000 years in the future. She thinks a more useful time horizon is 30 years (~2050) to 2100.
Green Climate Fund Facing Massive Challenges
Following the resignation of its executive director last month [FoS Extracts - 2018-07-20] the head of the Global Green Growth Institute gave a frank assessment of the GCF 's massive challenges. The most pressing of these is to convince governments to put in more cash. While they promised $10.3 billion in startup capital, Donald Trump has refused $2 billion of the US pledge, and the pot lost another $1 billion in currency fluctuations. The GCF 's board has committed $3.5 billion to 74 projects, leaving $2.8 billion to play with. Last year only $145 million was disbursed, and the target for 2018 was $900 million.
Besides the cash crunch the fund 's unique governance structure gives developed and developing countries an equal say at board meetings. National board representatives are typically drawn from the ranks of climate negotiators, so a lot of political discussions from the UN climate talks spill over into board meetings. Decisions are made by consensus, which gives every member veto power.
<http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/08/09/crucial-global-climate-fund-facing-massive-challenges/>
Washington Judge Throws Out Children 's Climate Change Lawsuit
On August 14 a judge in Washington state dismissed a climate change lawsuit filed against the state by a group of child activists represented by Our Children 's Trust. King County Superior Court Judge Michael Scott ruled in favour of the State of Washington 's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Aji P. v. State of Washington. The 13 young activists in the suit argue that the state is violating their constitutional rights through actions that cause climate change. Judge Scott ruled that issues brought up in the case are political questions that cannot be resolved by a court, and must be addressed by Congress and the president.
German Wind Industry Could Implode
Due to a dramatic price fall for wind energy as subsidies are withdrawn, thousands of workers risk losing their jobs. Investors are running from wind, and some 600 citizens initiatives organized across Germany have sent a loud and clear message: We don 't want the ugly, impractical industrial eyesores around. Germany is stuck between a rock and a hard place. If it does nothing, tens of thousands of jobs will join the those that got fried in solar Death Valley, and Germany can kiss any hopes of reaching its Paris targets. But if the government does reactivate subsidies to bring life back into the German wind industry, the power grid infrastructure for more wind parks is just not there and there 's no place to send the power.
By 2020 many of Germany 's older wind parks will see their useful lifetime expire, and so up to a quarter of the Germany wind capacity (14 GW) risks being taken offline. This will make reaching the Paris targets all the more difficult.
Elon Musk Ends War On Big Oil To Court Saudi Billions
Elon Musk has long hated the fossil-fuel industry. His stated mission for Tesla Inc. is to hasten its demise, and more than once he's blamed the "unrelenting and enormous" power of oil interests for sabotaging his efforts. In a blog post on August 13, Mr. Musk revealed that he has been in secret talks with Saudi Arabia for the past two years, in an attempt to buy out Tesla 's publicly traded shares and take the company private. In fact, it 's clear that he knew that the world 's biggest pool of oil money was interested in financing, not destroying, his company.
YouTube to Scribble Green Propaganda over Climate Skeptic Videos
YouTube will now place Wikipedia entries about global warming below videos refuting evidence of rising temperatures. YouTube hopes this will reduce misinformation and conspiracy theories on the site. Only US viewers can see the feature for now, but YouTube plans to roll-out the feature worldwide at a later date.
How Do You Tell If The Earth 's System Is Warming ?
A precise answer to this question depends on who gets to pick the start date for the analysis. For example: (1) if the start date is June 2018 it 's warming ; (2) if the start date is January 2016 it 's cooling ; (3) if the start date is January 1998 it 's cooling ; (4) if the start date is 1880 it 's warming ; (5) if the start date is the year 1000 it 's cooling ; if the start date is in the Dark Ages it 's warming ; (6) if the start date is in Roman times it 's cooling.
Refreshing Candour from an Aussie Minister
At a town hall meeting Australian Minister of Agriculture David Littleproud was asked whether the country 's emissions targets are too low. In Mr. Littleproud 's response he said: "The reality is, I don 't really give a rat 's whether it 's [climate change is] man-made or not you shouldn 't feel afraid to turn on a heater or light at night. The WUWT link includes a video of the exchange.
2018-08-01
Carbon Tax May Bring Down Justin Trudeau
Mr. Trudeau has a problem of his own creation: the only way his government can keep a promise is to make millions of voters angry just as the next federal election rolls around. The promise (threat?) was to impose a federal carbon tax next year on any province that did not develop a version of its own that met federally dictated benchmarks.
The PM now faces a much different political environment than he apparently took for granted. A year ago nine out of ten provinces were on board. Today Saskatchewan, the original renegade, has been joined by Ontario and Prince Edward Island, with Newfoundland and New Brunswick signalling they too might bail. Next year they could be joined by Alberta if there 's a change in government.
Goldman Sachs: Global Solar Power Installations Will Crash 24% in 2018
Research by analysts at Goldman Sachs show that the pace of global solar installations will contract by 24% this year. That 's far more dire than the 3% decline forecast by Bloomberg NEF in the bleakest of three scenarios outlined in a report earlier this month. Credit Suisse Group AG is forecasting a 17% contraction.
Government subsidies have done a good job to date of shielding solar enthusiasts from business reality, but the election of President Trump, and waning political enthusiasm across the world appear to have combined to create a severe contraction in demand for this useless form of electricity generation.
Gallup Poll: No One Believes Climate Change is America 's Biggest Problem
Americans came up with 36 answers to a Gallup poll asking the biggest problem currently facing the country, and no one answered climate change, with only 2% even mentioning the environment at all, Gallup revealed in late July. In a random poll of 1033 US adults, immigration topped the list as the greatest problem faced by the United States at this moment, with 22 percent offering that response. While 17% responded that dissatisfaction with government was the biggest issue, others proposed race relations, national disunity, healthcare, and family decline. Missing from Gallup 's list of causes garnering at least 3% of responses was the vague category of Environment/Pollution, which drew only 2%.
EU Relaxes Climate Stance in Trade Sop to Trump
The European Commission abandoned its customary climate hard talk on July 25 in a bid to defuse trade tensions with the US. In a joint statement issued in Washington, commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Trump agreed to launch a close dialogue on standards in order to ease trade, reduce bureaucratic obstacles, and slash costs. There was no mention of upholding the Paris climate deal or environmental protections. Instead, it called for more trade in liquefied natural gas from the US to the EU.
That 's a break from recent EU rhetoric. Trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstr ¶m tweeted in February that reference to Paris was essential to any EU trade deal and the pact finalized with Japan last week duly included a Paris clause.
Climate Alarmists Burned By Studies Showing Destructive Wildfires In Decline
Scenes of Californians fleeing their homes and Greeks swimming out to sea have fuelled alarm about climate change fuelling deadly wildfires, but recent studies show that such destructive blazes are on the decline worldwide. A September 2017 report in the journal Science found that global burned area dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years. Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.
Even though temperatures across Greece have increased in recent decades, wildfires in Greece, and Mediterranean Europe as a whole, have declined since 1980.
Michael Mann: Extreme Global Weather Is the face of climate change
In a Guardian article Dr. Mann says that extreme heatwaves and wildfires wreaking havoc around the globe are the face of climate change. He added: As a scientist that is reassuring, but as a citizen of planet Earth, it is very distressing to see that as it means we have not taken the necessary action. As Eric Worrall comments in Whats Up With That: How can you scientifically state we would not have seen these extremes in the absence of climate change? '
Oh Dear: Climate News Is A Ratings Killer ', US Journalist Confirms
MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes ' admission that climate change is a ratings killer has infuriated environmentalists who accused the liberal network of being more concerned about its bottom line than with fighting global warming. Asked about his network 's lack of climate-change coverage, Mr. Hayes tweeted on July 24 that almost without exception. every single time we 've covered it 's been a palpable ratings killer. so incentives are not great.
New York Times Thinks We have lost the Earth
The New York Times Magazine has published an entire issue devoted to a single investigative piece on climate change, called Losing Earth, which observes that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, everybody knew it was happening. The conclusion is a major blow to climate activists who have been blaming oil companies such as Exxon and Shell. It is also a direct threat to the multi-million-dollar campaign they have waged in recent years, anti-energy activists intensely criticized the report before it was even released.
National Geographic Admits Error About Notorious Starving Polar Bear
The National Geographic photographer who took the viral photo of a polar bear starving, reportedly thanks to climate change thought that she had found a way to help people imaging what the future of climate change might look like. After some experts suggested a number of reason besides climate change that could have led to the animal 's condition, including age, the photographer now admits that she couldn 't say that this bear was starving because of climate change.
Why Weather-Dependent Electricity Fails Civilization
In recent years, many politicians and promoters have claimed that wind and solar generated electricity are the obvious choices for the future. Here, in a 2:35 video and a series of supporting articles the Capital Research Center punctures the myth that alternative energy sources (wind and solar) will be able to replace traditional electricity generation.
2018-07-20
Canadian Voters Rebelling Against Carbon Taxes
What 's Up With That s Eric Worrall noticed a recent Economist article that, with the recent change of government in Ontario, worries that Canadians are electing provincial politicians opposed to the Trudeau government 's climate policies. Mr. Worrall has no doubt that Canadians would love to move to a green energy future. But all they 've seen is higher costs, job losses and precious little green progress. As Google engineers discovered in 2014, there is just no viable route to affordable green energy with today 's technology.
It 's Roll-back Timeï¼Ontario Scraps $2 Billion Carbon Tax and Axes Green Subsidies
On July 3 Ontario Premier Doug Ford cancelled what amounts to a $2 billion a year tax on Ontarians by scrapping all of the government subsidy programs funded by the former Liberal government 's cap-and-trade scheme. Every cent from the cap-and-trade slush fund is money that has been taken out of the pockets of Ontario families and businesses, Mr. Ford said in a written statement, adding he was fulfilling his election promise to scrap the Liberals ' cash grab designed to fund big government programs that do nothing for the environment.
Mr. Ford cited a 2016 report by Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk which concluded that despite its $8-billion price tag from 2017 to 2020, the former cap-and-trade scheme would not significantly lower Ontario 's greenhouse gas emissions.
According to a CBC news report, the federal government is interpreting Ontario's cancellation of its cap-and-trade program as equivalent to withdrawing from Ottawa's national climate change framework. Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says that $420 million earmarked for Ontario under the Low Carbon Economy Leadership Fund is under review, since funding is contingent on agreeing to the framework, which includes imposing a carbon price.
German Company Seeks Damages after Ontario Cancels Wind Project
One of the companies hit by Ontario 's scrapping of green subsidies is German-owned wpd Canada Corp., which had received approval, just before the election, to construct the 18.5 MW White Pines wind turbine project in Prince Edward County. Many residents of the countyï¼a rural tourist meccaï¼were jubilant over the news. However, wpd Canada 's president said that the company will seek up to $100 million in damages. A spokesman for the Ontario government said that it would introduce legislation that not only cancels the contract but prevents the government from being sued in domestic courts.
Ottawa 's Subsidies Aren 't Enough
New data show that Canadian investment in clean technology has cooled off over the past three years, despite myriad programs introduced by Ottawa to boost spending on green infrastructure and shift the country towards a lower carbon economy. Canadian private sector investment in clean technologies have fallen by half since 2014, dropping to a combined US$9.4 billion over the past three years, compared with US$19.5 billion between 2012-2014, according to data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The slower pace of growth mirrors a global trend, in which new investment in clean tech has eased.
The Hypocrisy of Faith-based Environmentalismï¼Its Preachers Have Failed to Deliver
Environmentalists long ago turned to faith as a recruitment tool. It was far easier and more effective than trying to explain the science, which was neither simple nor straightforward, and is troubled by inconsistencies and challenged by dissidents in any case. But reliance on faith comes with a caveat. It rests heavily on the integrity of its clergy. It 's hard to keep the flock under control if the high priests can 't be trusted.
In Canada, the climate clergy hasn 't been delivering for quite some time now. The federal Liberals did themselves absolutely no good whatsoever by loudly and regularly declaiming the firmness of their devotion to the UN 's climate agenda, and then publicly straying time and again. Provinces, such as British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec are equally hypocriticalï¼using carbon taxes to fund general government spending and/or implementing green policies while quietly tolerating other actions that increase emissions.
The preachers have failed miserably to deliver. When a priesthood is discredited, the religion itself suffers.
<https://nationalpost.com/opinion/kelly-mcparland-justin-trudeau-carbon-tax-doug-ford#comments-area>
Green Climate Fund Chief Quits After 'Disappointing' Meeting
The UN 's Green Climate Fund, which is meant to channel billions of dollars to poor nations, had a very difficult and disappointing meeting ending on July 4, in a new setback after US President Donald Trump pulled out US support last year. Australian climate finance expert Howard Bamsey announced he was stepping down as executive director of the GCF at the end of the four-day meeting in Songdo, South Korea.
The GCF, whose South Korean headquarters opened in 2013 with backing from almost 200 nations, aims to help poor nations cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt their economies to heatwaves, storms and rising seas. But it has been bogged down by disputes between rich and poor nations about how and where to invest.
A Watts Up With That post by Willis Eschenbach explains the basics of the GCF, pointing out that the countries emitting almost two-thirds of the total CO2 aren 't contributing to the money that the GCF is currently wasting.
Scott Pruitt Leaves EPA after Scandals
Mr. Pruitt resigned from the Environmental Protection Agency on July 5 after watchdogs launched more than a dozen investigations into his conduct on the job, including his decision to spend $43,000 on a soundproof phone booth for his office and his requests to EPA staff to help his family obtain jobs. As EPA chief Mr. Pruitt worked to reverse dozens of Obama-era regulations, such as reining in the EPA 's expanded reach over American waterways and rolling back the Clean Power Plan that sought to impose greenhouse gas caps through executive action. He also defended major cuts to EPA staffing and overhauled the standards for how the agency used science to back up its decision-making.
Andrew Wheeler, the EPA 's deputy administrator, took over as acting administrator. He is a long-time Washington lobbyist and government official, who is expected to run a more conventional and inclusive policy process, even though the end results are policies similar to those of Mr. Pruitt.
Climate Lawfare Suffers Another Defeat
On July 19 a US District Judge threw out New York City 's lawsuit against five major energy companies alleging damages relating to climate change. Judge John Keenan wrote in his opinion that, Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government, not the judiciary. This major blow marks the third climate case to be thrown out litigation in San Francisco and Oakland was dismissed by a federal judge last month on similar grounds. Both of these cases were dismissed by US District Court judges after the suits were ordered to be heard in federal court rather than state court, where they were initially filed.
Green Campaigners Fight Tesla 's Solar Farm in UK
Tesla proposes to build an 890-acre solar farm to feed the world 's biggest (350 MWh) battery. The site lies near Faversham in Kent, along the edge of the Swale estuary, an officially designated Biodiversity Operational Area. This is home to rare nesting birds and surrounded by protected zones for wildlife. Because it is also a flood plain, the project 's 989,000 solar panels will be mounted on frames 12 feet tall.
Green groups, including the local Green Party, the Kent branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Kent Wildlife Trust, while in favour of renewable energy, oppose the scale of the project and the trashing of the countryside.
Whatever Happened to Agenda 21?
An essay by Tim Ball recalls Maurice Strong 's Agenda 21 in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that started the policy of using anthropogenic global warming as a false front to implement global governance. Agenda 21 was the overall environmental plan of the United Nations Environmental Program and spawned the UNFCCC, the IPCC, the Kyoto Protocol, the Green Climate Fund, the World Bank 's Climate Action Plan and numerous similar initiatives. Dr. Ball warns that bureaucrats from the global to the local level and in control and ends with a quote by Mary McCarthy: Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism .
Save the Oceansï¼Stop Recycling Plastic
A report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals that efforts to recycle plastic are a major cause of marine litter. For example, European countries ship huge quantities of plastic waste into Asian waste management streams, ostensibly for recycling. But as much as 20% ends up in the oceans and will continue to do so. Thus EU recycling is therefore a major contributor to marine waste and increasing recycling will therefore simply increase marine litter.
The report 's author, Mikko Paunio recommends incineration, rather than recycling , but the EU is trying to close down incinerators, mistakingly believing that this will reduce CO2 emissions.
What Scientific Consensus?
In just the first six months of 2018, 254 scientific papers have been published that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate 's fundamental control knob or that otherwise serve to question the efficacy of climate models or the related consensus positions commonly endorsed by policymakers and mainstream media sources.
Specifically, these papers support four main skeptical positions: (1) natural mechanisms play a greater role in the climate system than claimed by the IPCC; (2) modern era warming, sea levels, sea ice retreat, storms and droughts fall within the range of natural variability; (3) computer climate models are neither reliable or consistently accurate; (4) current emission-reduction policies are often ineffective and even harmful to the environment.
2018-06-30
Your Carbon Bill Has Finally Arrived
Jennifer Winter, economics professor at the University of Calgary, has found out what the bill will be for Justin Trudeau 's carbon tax. Using energy consumption data from Statistics Canada and imputing prices from average transportation fuels and provincial gasoline prices, she calculated the impact of the carbon tax on a typical Canadian household in different provinces. The $50/tonne tax that Ottawa has mandated for 2022 will have the following annual impacts: Nova Scotia ($1,120), Alberta ($1,111), Saskatchewan ($1,032), New Brunswick ($963), Newfoundland ($859), Prince Edward Island ($788), Ontario ($707), Manitoba ($683), Quebec ($662) and British Columbia ($603).
Experts say that, to effectively lower emissions, the carbon price must continue to increase sharply. At $100/tonne households in Alberta would pay $2,223, while in Saskatchewan they would pay ($2,065), and $2,240 in Nova Scotia. Already across Canada, particularly in the Maritimes, a significant number of households fit the definition of energy poverty (where 10% or more of household income goes to procure the energy needed to live).
According to the HuffPost, newly-elected Ontario Premier Doug Ford 's first priority will be to end the province 's cap-and-trade carbon tax.
US Judge Tosses Out Climate Change Lawsuits Against Big Oil
BP Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp. escaped blame for the public costs of global warming when a US judge ruled that lawsuits brought by San Francisco and Oakland against oil companies aren 't the answer to climate change.
In his ruling US District Judge William Alsup wrote: The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case. The judge acknowledged that CO2 released from fossil fuels has contributed to global warming, but on the other hand, development of our modern world has literally been fuelled by oil and coal. He added: All of us have benefited Having reaped the benefit of that historic progress, would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded?
The first four pages of Judge Alsup 's order (second link below) contain a summary of the science of global warming as agreed by the parties to the case (i.e., fossil fuels lead to global warming and ocean level rise.) Therefore the issue (p. 6) is a legal one: whether fossil fuel producers should pay for the harm resulting from the sea level rise.
US House Votes Down Social Cost of Carbon (SCC)
The Obama administration implemented the social cost of carbon to allow agencies to incorporate the social benefits of reducing CO2 emissions into cost-benefit analyses of regulatory actions that impact cumulative global emissions. The SCC is an estimate of the monetized damages associated with an incremental increase in carbon emissions in a given year. It is intended to include (but not limited to) changes in net agricultural productivity, human health, property damages from increased flood risk, and the value of ecosystem services due to climate change.
On June 8 the US House voted 212-201, along party lines, to include a rider blocking the use of SCC to an energy and water spending bill. The amendment in question defunds any regulation or guidance from the federal government concerning the social costs of carbon.
David Kreutzer, a senior research fellow in energy economics and climate change at Heritage and a member of Donald Trump 's EPA transition team, laid out one of the primary arguments against the SCC. Believe it or not, these models look out to the year 2300. That 's like effectively asking, If you turn your light switch on today, how much damage will that do in 2300? ' That 's way beyond when any macroeconomic model can be trusted.
Not a Single EU State Is Meeting Its Climate Targets
It 's been 2- ½ years since countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement. According to an analysis by the NGO CAN Europe, all EU countries are missing their targets contained in that agreement. The aim of the CAN Europe report was to examine which EU Member States are willing to increase their climate action and tackle the gap between the goals of the Paris Agreement and current greenhouse gas emission reduction efforts in the EU.
According to CAN Europe 's findings: The ranking shows that all EU countries are off target: they are failing to increase their climate action in line with the Paris Agreement goal. No single EU country is performing sufficiently in both ambition and progress in reducing carbon emissions. Germany is a particularly bad actor; it has not reduced its emissions in nine years and there is no sign that this trend will change any time soon.
EU Slashes Renewable Funding Ahead of Brexit
While European leaders noisily parade their commitment to green issues on the world stage, behind the scenes the EU has quietly slashed funding for renewables, to make up the deficit which will occur when Britain leaves the EU. Climate-related projects received ‚ 18 billion or 28% of all EU budget funding last year, with energy efficiency the largest single beneficiary, taking just over a third of the total. The cutbacks would help to plug the roughly ‚ 12 billion-sized funding hole that Brexit is expected to create and to fund a similar amount pledged for increases to defence and migration spending.
Germany Pours Cold Water on EU 's Clean Energy Ambitions
Voters across Europe have lost faith in politics partly because of unachievable targets on renewable energy, said German Energy Minister Peter Altmaier, who rejected calls from a group of other EU countries to boost the share of renewables to 33-35% of the bloc 's energy mix by 2030. Mr. Altmaier made the comments during an on-the-record exchange between the 28 EU energy ministers, who are gathered in Luxembourg on June 11 for a meeting of the Energy Council.
Germany supports responsible but achievable targets, Mr. Altmaier said from the outset, underlining Berlin 's efforts to raise the share of renewables to 15% of the country 's overall energy mix.But he said those efforts also carried a cost for the German taxpayer, which he put at ‚ 25 billion per year. And if we are setting targets that are definitely above 30%, that means that within a decade, our share has to be more than doubled clearly more than doubled,
<https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-pours-cold-water-on-eus-clean-energy-ambitions/>
UK Tidal Lagoon Plan Scrapped by Government
On June 25 the UK 's Business and Energy Secretary, Greg Clark, announced that the government is abandoning plans for a £1.3 billion tidal lagoon project promoted by the green lobby. The government estimated that the project would add £700/year to household energy bills. Securing our energy needs into the future has to be done seriously and, when much cheaper alternatives exist, Clark told MPs, no individual project, and no particular technology, can proceed at any price.
Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Hold Up?
On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James E. Hansen testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where he expressed his high degree of confidence in a cause-and-effect relationship between the claimed CO2 induced greenhouse effect and observed warming. Climatologist Dr Patrick Michaels and meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue compared Dr. Hansen 's predictions to actual reality over the past 30 years. Instead of the gloom and doom heard in 1988, the Earth is only moderately warmer. They state: The list of what didn 't happen is long and tedious. On the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen 's galvanizing testimony, it 's time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn 't happening.
A Look Inside the ClimateWorks Foundation
A cache of emails from John Pedestal (campaign manager for Hilary Clinton) was leaked by Wikileaks. The cache included a 208-page document describing a March 2018 meeting of the board of directors of The ClimateWorks Foundation (third link below.) In this document we see a list of billionaire foundations driving this NGO, who seem to be acting as if they are oblivious to the rule of law or domestic governments, working to create a global cap and trade system and funding a flurry of other environmental NGOs to change local policy.
As reported on page 80, they were helped by McKinsey and Company, the most influential management consulting firm in the world, which got a $42.4 million contract to help make this happen. On page 170, the total 2016 budget for ClimateWorks Foundations was $66.6 million. They planned to use all that money to influence local and state governments to enact climate laws, carbon trading, and put their tendrils even deeper into the deep state.
Anthony Watts, the author of the WUWT article concludes with the observation: Just think what we 'd be seeing if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency.
2018-06-06
Canadian PM Compares Climate Denial to Supporting Female Genital Mutilation
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a speech to New York University graduates about the need to respect and listen to others and bring everyone together. In the speech he mentioned advocates of female genital mutilation in the same breath as deniers of climate change stating that people who hold such viewpoints that will never be valid, no matter how long they have been expressing those views or how loudly they do so.
Eastern States Promote Offshore Wind Systems, but Offshore Systems Are Expensive and High Risk
The governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia have signed executive orders or passed laws to procure offshore wind systems valued at billions of dollars. These will all produce power at a cost above the current market rate of 5 ¢/kWh, thus requiring some form of subsidy. Moreover, experience with offshore wind systems in Denmark and the UK shows that offshore turbines require major repairs after five years of operation. Wind turbines sited off the eastern US coast must survive more brutal weather than offshore turbines in Europe.
Why Proposed Wind and Solar Power Projects Should Be Rejected Nationwide
Former Sierra Club activist and senior analyst at the US Environmental Protection Agency, Alan Carlin, turned skeptic and has published his testimony to the Virginia State Corporation Commission in opposition to a proposed solar development. Dr. Carlin 's testimony is based on both scientific and energy-economic arguments. For the former he lists and rebuts each of the ten most common climate alarmist claims. Regarding energy economics, Dr. Carlin shows how electricity prices go up with increasing supply by renewables.
Germany 's Economics Minister: Green Energy is Efficient Only If Everyone Else is Inefficient
For ten years Germany boasted about being the global leader in green energies with its Energiewende (energy transition). Recently the country 's powerful economics minister Peter Altmaier was speaking a conference of green business leaders where he admitted that the Energiewende will survive only if it is global and that it is no solution for single countries. In a nutshell, Mr. Altmaier admitted that Energiewende is a failure because it is already known that many other countries, like the US and China are not going to adopt it and so they will always have access to cheap, reliable energy and Germany will thus have no chance to compete internationally should it opt to stay on the green course.
By stating that for the Energiewende to be efficient in a country, all other countries must adopt it and become energetically inefficient. Only when all countries become inefficient can Germany 's Energiewende be efficient .
Developing Nations Can 't Afford to Go Cold Turkey on Coal
While the UK recently made headlines by going three days without using coal, most of the power used during that period came from natural gas, followed by wind, nuclear, biomass and solar. But 600 million Africans lack access to electricity, and at current rates of growth all of them won 't get it until 2080. Nevertheless there is political and financial pressure on developing nations to deploy renewable energy they can 't afford. In fact, many African countries, including Mozambique, Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, are known to have vast reserves of coal.
Closing the gap with renewables is unrealistic in the medium term. Developing countries are gaining international support for their right to fully exploit their natural resources, particularly from the United States. In March, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced the creation of a global fossil fuel alliance, which would see the US and other partners export clean coal technology to developing nations, allowing them to quickly expand electricity access while keeping emissions relatively low.
Elon Musk 's Big Oil Conspiracy Theory
Donald Trump isn 't the only one complaining about fake news in the MSM. Elon Musk is unhappy with media coverage about Tesla 's Model 3 production and cash woes. On May 23, a day after Consumer Reports reported flaws with the Model 3, he tweeted, Problem is journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation, as Tesla doesn 't advertise, but fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies are among world 's biggest advertisers.
Mr. Musk also tweeted, Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda
Climate Change Has Run Its Course
In an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal, author Steven F. Hayward describes the four stages of political movements like climate change. The first stage involves groups of experts and activists calling attention to a public problem, which leads quickly to the second stage, wherein the alarmed media and political class discover the issue. Then comes the third stageï¼a gradually-spreading realization that the cost of solving the problem is very high. In the final stage the issue moves into a prolonged limbo.
According to Mr. Hayward, climate change by descending into social-justice identity politics has entered the final stage. For example, early in the non-binding text of the Paris Agreement is the declaration that that climate action must include concern for gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity as well as the importance for some of the concept of climate justice. To Mr. Hayward this represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality.
Shell Shareholders Reject Emissions Target Proposal
In a setback to climate activists who are increasing pressure on global oil companies, 94% of Shell shareholders who voted rejected a proposal by an environmental group calling for the oil company to set and publish annual targets to reduce CO2 emissions. Mark van Baal, founder of the Follow This activist group, which put forward the resolution, said the group would target other oil companies such as BP as soon as funding was available.
2018-05-18
How to End Ontario 's Suffering from Expensive Electricityï¼Instantly
If Doug Ford, whose party is leading in the polls, becomes Ontario 's premier after the June 7 election and really wants to slash the province 's skyrocketing power prices, he could repeal the Green Energy Act and cancel the resulting renewable-energy contracts. Trying to sidetrack such an outcome, the province 's current energy minister said: We 're troubled by the fact that Doug Ford would recklessly tear up a contract, where an agreement had already been signed a harmful signal to businesses looking to invest in Ontario.
However, governments in Canada have a long history of tearing up ill-advised contracts they 've entered into, most prominently in the electricity sector. A century ago developers who built power plants and transmission lines on the basis of what they thought were iron-clad contracts saw them later nullified, even when a contract was backed by Ontario legislation, as a new government amended the legislation in response to public outrage over sweetheart deals. To cut off any argument a developer might want to make in court, the province even passed a law denying companies legal redress, and it survived a legal challenge.
Even Environmentalists Pan Trudeau 's Ethanol Plan
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau 's plan to replace fossil fuels with ethanol and other low-carbon fuels through a clean fuel standard expected to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 30 million tonnes a year by 2030 faces mounting opposition, especially from a powerful lobby south of the border. The opposition comes from a US environmental lobby, which has awakened to one of the most colossal environmental mistakes in its history: the ethanol mandate, part of America 's Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which effectively mandates that 10% of gasoline at the pump consists of ethanol.
According to Henry Waxman the US congressman credited with the RFS legislation in 2007: Not only has the RFS failed to spur significant development of truly advanced fuels, but conventional biofuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are destroying wildlife habitat at home and abroad, polluting waterways, and increasing global warming pollution. Reform legislation in the US by environmental-leaning Democrats is now gathering support in both houses of Congress, aided by an environmental lobby determined to end subsidies to ethanol as well as its mandated use.
In Canada a collection of environmental groups made a submission to Environment and Climate Change Canada questioning whether the benefits from biofuels will be all they 're cracked up to be, noting that ECCC 's methodology ignores the greenhouse gas emissions indirectly created by converting fields and forests to croplands. Rather than expose the shell game of the Trudeau government 's climate change agenda, ECCC dismissed the environmental groups with a statement that it may make updates to the emissions calculations to reflect indirect greenhouse gas emissions at a future time.
BC Government Drops Greenhouse Gas Target in New 2030 Goal
Blaming the previous administration for failing to do enough, British Columbia 's government has announced a new target. Instead of reducing GHG emissions 33% below 2007 levels by 2020, the goal is now to achieve a 40% reduction by 2030. Environmental activists pointed out that the new Climate Change Accountability Act leaves the government unaccountable for hitting GHG targets more than a decade away.
UN Attempting to Create a Legally Binding Climate Change Pact
On May 10 the UN voted to take the first step in creating a legally-binding agreement on climate change. The body voted 143-6, with 7 abstentions, to have Secretary General Antonio Guterres produce a report that identifies gaps in international environmental laws and related legal instruments to enforce such laws. The six no voters were the US, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Syria and the Philippines. The resolution 's title is Towards a Global Pact for the Environment. An ad-hoc, open-ended working group (including non-governmental organizations) is to prepare a report to be submitted in time for the UN 's 73rd Assembly next September.
The US ambassador to the UN issued a statement: When international bodies attempt to force America into vague environmental commitments, it 's a sure sign that American citizens and businesses will get stuck paying a large bill without getting large benefits The proposed global compact is not in our interests, and we oppose it.
Besides the Secretary General, the catalyst for this attempt to create a new climate agreement with UN enforcement power is French President Emmanuel Macron, who in his address to the US Congress said: By polluting the oceans, not mitigating CO2 emissions and destroying our biodiversity, we are killing our planet. During debate on the resolution, the French ambassador to the UN identified planetary warming as one of the reasons for the proposed global pact.
Green Energy Insanity
In April a campus of State University of New York proudly celebrated the completion of a new solar energy system. Costing $1.4 million, the system includes battery storage and will generate 217 kW of power. But the campus will save only $26,000/year on its electricity bill. $1.4 million divided by $26,000 means that it will take 53 years and 10 months to pay back the cost of the system. And that 's before considering maintenance, repairs, declining output from the solar panels and the cost of money. In other words, the system will never pay back its costs.
California 's Rooftop Solar Mandate
The California Energy Commission has adopted a standard requiring all new homes in the state to include rooftop solar, or share solar power in a group system, starting January 1, 2020. This will add $8,000 to $12,000 to the cost of a home. An article in MIT Technology Review calls this feel-good change to the building code a questionable public policy for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is cost: electricity from rooftop solar panels costs 12.9-16.7 ¢/kWh, more than twice that of utility-scale solar systems. While the Energy Commission claims that homeowners will save on their electricity bills, any savings will be subsidized by other ratepayers without panels.
Windfarms: Managing the Death Spiral
In the absence of new subsidies, we could be looking at the beginning of the end for the wind industry in Europe. New academic research on whether to re-power or extend the lifetime of an obsolescent wind farm in Europe reveals that without new subsidies for re-powered sites, low cost lifetime extensions focused on maximizing return before decommissioning are more probable, with a potential to affect about half the wind turbine fleet in Germany, Spain and Denmark. In the absence of new subsidies, we could be looking at the beginning of the end for the wind industry in Europe.
By 2020, 41% of the currently installed capacity in Germany will be over 15 years old, as well as 44% in Spain and 57% in Denmark.
<http://joannenova.com.au/2018/05/is-this-the-start-of-the-death-spiral-for-old-windfarms-in-europe/>
New Report: Green Policies Threaten Poor Nations
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has released a report Kicking Away the Energy Ladderï¼How Environmentalism Destroys Hope for the Poorest. The report, by eminent epidemiologist Mikko Paunio, says that international bodies and NGOs are trying to prevent poor countries from expanding their use of conventional fuels and have abandoned the so-called energy ladder ï¼the gradual shift to cleaner types of fuel that underpinned the clean up of air quality in industrialized nations.
The greens inside and outside the development community are blaming air pollution on power stations, industry and cars, as a way to prevent any shift to industrial power production. As Dr Paunio makes clear, most air pollution in poor countries is in fact caused by burning low-quality biofuels and coal in domestic stoves. In fact, domestic combustion of solid (bio)fuels is by far the number one global pollution problem. 4.3 million deaths annually are directly attributable to indoor air pollution according to the World Health Organization.
Don 't Tell Anyone, But We 've Just Had Two Years of Global Cooling
According to NASA data, from February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available), global average temperatures dropped 0.56 °C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47 °C also during the global warming era. This story has been, of course, ignored by the mainstream media, which readily jumped on a story of one starving polar bear as proof of global warming.
Google 's Massive Carbon Footprint
Despite the notion that the internet is a cloud, it actually relies on millions of physical servers in data centres around the world, which are connected with miles of undersea cables, switches, and routers, all requiring a lot of energy to run. Much of that energy comes from power sources that emit carbon dioxide into the air as they burn fossil fuels; one study from 2015 suggests internet activity results in as much CO2 emissions as the global aviation industry.
Every Google search comes at a cost to the planet. In processing 3.5 billion searches a day, the world 's most popular website accounts for about 40% of the internet 's carbon footprint.
2018-05-03
Friends of Science May Event
There are only four days left to purchase tickets to our Annual Event in Calgary on May 15: Extreme Climate Uncertainty.
Also, we are having film screenings in Calgary (Globe Cinema, May 14 at 7 pm) and Edmonton (Metro Cinema, May 17 at 7 pm) of the award-winning documentary The Uncertainty Has Settled. After each screening there will be a Q&A with the film maker Marijn Poels. Tickets are $10, available at the door, or online:
Edmonton - <http://www.metrocinema.org/production/the-uncertainty-has-settled/?ID=2018-05-17T19:00:00&testvar=3850>
What Global Warming? How About Global Cooling
Madhav Khandekar, who will be speaking at the above Friends of Science event on May 15, says that levying a carbon tax will just cool the Earth 's climate more than it already is. He points to the cold winter just experienced across North America and in Europe and Siberia. Also, five of the last six winters in Canada have been significantly colder than average. Dr. Khandekar thinks it 's time for Canadians to to take a closer look at the changing climate in Canada, instead of simply clamouring for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Government 's Electricity Plans Will Shock Albertans
Todd Beasley, one of the organizers of a group called Albertans for Affordable Electricity, has been speaking to audiences across the province, warning them that the government is sending them down the road to energy poverty, like what has happened in Ontario. Mr. Beasley expects that, under the province 's Climate Leadership Act, Albertans can expect to see at best a three-fold increase, or at worst, a seven-to-ten times increase in their monthly electricity bills.
The government is proudly subsidizing electricity for consumers at 6.8 ¢/kWh until 2021, using borrowed money. It will also be paying $2 billion to break long-term contracts for the 18 coal-fired plants being closed, billions more for the replacement gas plants, and even more in subsidies for wind and solar.
Alberta 's Copying Ontario 's Disastrous Electricity Policyï¼What Could Go Wrong?
A report released on April 29 by the University of Calgary 's School of Public Policy examines the effects of the Alberta government 's planned changes to the supply of electricity to the current grid over the next 15 years and compares Alberta 's proposed grid with Ontario 's current one. Alberta plans to phase out all of its cheap coal-fired plants by 2030 and force onto the grid large amounts of unreliable and expensive wind and solar power. In effect this will amount to rebuilding 75% of the province 's current grid in less than 15 years.
However, learning from Ontario 's mistake, the Alberta government is ensuring that the cost of the uneconomic power won 't show up on consumers ' power bills. Instead, it is capping retail electricity rates at 6.8 ¢/kWh and using carbon tax revenues to pay the difference when rates go above that amount. In either case it 's the people who pay.
What Canada Can Learn from Germany: The Truth about Cheap Solar and Wind Power
After the German government decided to reduce subsidies to the solar industry in 2012, virtually every major German solar producer has gone under. Some 80,000 workers 70 per cent of the solar workforce lost their jobs. Solar power 's market share is shrinking and solar panels, having outlived their usefulness, are being retired without being replaced.
Wind power faces a similar fate. Germany has some 29,000 wind turbines, almost all of which have been benefitting from a 20-year subsidy program that began in 2000. Starting in 2020, when subsidies run out for some 5,700 wind turbines, thousands of them each year will lose government support, making the continued operation of most of them uneconomic based on current market prices.
The Political Activities of Canadian Charities
In her Fair Questions blog Vivian Krause has been studying the political activities of registered charities like Tides Canada. This charity has an annual revenue of $31 million (some coming from its US affiliate) and a staff of 225. Tides has been funding the Dogwood Initiative, one of the most politically active organizations in the country.
Between 2008 and 2012 Gerald Butts was CEO of WWF Canada, which works closely with Tides Canada. When Mr. Butts left to run Justin Trudeau 's leadership and election campaigns, and subsequently become his principle secretary, WWF Canada paid him $US 361,000 in severance. Ms. Krause has asked Mr. Butts whether this is tantamount to a paid sabbatical, but received no reply.
Since 2010 more than 50 charities have had their charitable status revoked, but Tides Canada, WWF and the Dogwood Initiative continue to operate with impunity. In May of 2017, the National Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier announced that the federal government has asked the Canada Revenue Agency to suspend all action in relation to the political activity audits of charities.
Why is a Green Car Company Pivoting Back to SUVs?
Two years ago, the Ford Motor Company boasted about having been named Interbrand 's Best Global Green Brand and said it was committed to working to meet stricter fuel economy standards. Last week, after lobbying with the rest of the industry to strike down those standards, Ford announced that it would largely abandon the American passenger car market in favour of building more trucks, crossovers and SUVs.
The reasons for the change: the return of cheap gas, customer preference, and SUVs are more profitable than cars. By 2020 Ford expects that almost 90% of its North American portfolio will be trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles.
EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Moves to End Reliance on Secret Science '
US Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt is proposing to ensure that the science standing behind the agency 's actions is made public so that it can be independently verified. The new rule will prevent agency officials from using undisclosed scientific data as the foundation for regulations that cost affected individuals and businesses tens of billions of dollars. Democrats and environmentalists oppose Pruitt 's data transparency rule, arguing it would restrict the scientific studies EPA could rely on for rule making and violate privacy rights of patients participating in health studies.
Four Questions on Climate Change
On her blog Judith Curry has posted an essay by Garth Paltridge that poses and answers four questions: (1) Is the science of climate change settled '? (2) What is the effect on climate science of public advocacy for the message of disastrous anthropogenic global warming? (3) What are the barriers to public dissemination of results casting doubt on the theory of disastrous anthropogenic global warming? (4) What are the implications for climate science of public acceptance of the idea that there is a consensus among scientists ' on anthropogenic global warming?
2018-04-16
Voters Don 't Like Climate Crusading
Lawrence Solomon notes that Democrat members of Congress helped push through a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that contained funding for programs dear to them. But nowhere in the bill 's 2,232 pages do the words climate change or global warming appear. That 's because polls show that Americans consistently are unwilling to support climate policies if there 's a cost attached. Britain 's largest independent social research agency, Netcen, surveyed 35,000 people in 18 European countries and found that fewer than one-quarter were either extremely worried or very worried about global warming.
The press once cared about climate change; politicians did, tooï¼whenever it appeared to further their political careers. But the public may never have truly cared. If election results, rather than public opinion polls, are the measure. Canada was a pioneer in proving how little the public cared, when in 2008, Liberal leader St phane Dion vowed to introduce a carbon tax if elected prime minister, thereby earning the Liberals ' worst defeat since Confederation. There won 't be any downplaying in Justin Trudeau 's next election, though in 2019, when his carbon taxes will be front and centre.
In a separate piece Ross McKitrick forecasts that a Doug Ford victory in Ontario 's June election will change national climate policy in a big way. The reason is Mr. Ford 's willingness to declare the climate change issue as secondary to basic economic priorities. That view may inspire others to join him and is supported by the IPCC 's report in the impact of climate change on economic activity, welfare and development.
Canadian Auditors-General Report on Adapting to Climate Change
Auditors-general from the federal government and nine provinces (Quebec sensibly opting out of this one) issued a report Perspectives on Climate Change Action in Canadaï¼A Collaborative Report from Auditors Generalï¼March 2018. The report begins with the usual mantra about the severe impacts of a warming climate and extreme weather events. It then notes that Canada missed two emission-reduction targets (1992 Rio, 2005 Kyoto), will likely miss the 2009 Copenhagen target and will also likely miss the 2030 Paris target by 20%. More than half of the governments had no overall emissions targets, and of those that did, only two were on track to meet them.
In an interview of federal environment and climate change minister Catherine McKenna, the interviewer points out that the UN says that under the current plan, Canada will fail to meet its 2030 target. The minister promises additional measures, such as investments in public transit, clean technologies, carbon sinks will enable Canada to meet its goal. Three times in the interview she mentions her basic talking point about increasing forest fires and floods as justification for emissions reductions. In a YouTube video the minister is pressed to respond to a simple question on the emissions-reduction effect of the government 's $50/t carbon tax, but is unable to answer.
Will a Federal Carbon Tax Survive the Supreme Court?
Facing the prospect of opposition to Ottawa 's proposed national carbon tax by three provinces, Catherine McKenna bluntly stated, without producing any constitutional basis, that they would lose in court. A Toronto Sun story argues that section 92 of the Constitution give provinces the exclusive exclusive jurisdiction to regulate the activities of the companies and businesses in their provinces. Also, the provinces may be able to successfully argue that the actual effects of the proposed carbon tax legislation is the imposition of taxes which will have no effect on positively affecting climate change and regulating the environment.
In a CTV News piece Minister McKenna, in effect, promises the voters of Ontario and Alberta that if they throw out their present governments, the feds will impose a carbon tax and rebate the revenue directly to taxpayers.
Rolling Back Fuel Economy Standards Could Mean Bigger Cars
The LA Times has noticed that gas prices have been so low in recent years that more Americans are choosing to buy bigger vehicles, meaning less progress in the fight against climate change. The only thing reining in consumer appetite for trucks and SUVs has been tough fuel economy standards adopted several years ago by California and the Obama administration. Now that the Trump administration has declared that these standards are too onerous for the auto industry and should be weakened.
The feds and California are currently negotiating about a compromise regarding the rules that require automakers to meet fleet-wide averages of more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025 (35 mpg in real-world driving conditions.) If they can 't agree the US auto market would face two different standards, with California and 12 other states operating differently than the rest of the country, not to mention years of court battles.
Polar Bears and the New York Times
The NY Times published a piece titled Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back, that targets Susan Crockford for departing from the polar bear party line. The author of the screed, Erica Goode, is a former environmental editor of the Times, who knows that the experts concerned about the long-term prospects of polar bears are correct and that any dissenting voices who think the bears are doing well are wrong.
<https://www.thegwpf.com/polar-bear-specialist-mitch-taylor-on-accountability-in-polar-bear-science/>
HuffPost Notices Academic Climate Hypocrisy
Recently two academics at the University of Washington were appalled to hear professional colleagues bragging about their frequent flyer statusï¼the result of jetting around the world to attend conferences, participate in workshops and give lectures. In a Huffington Post article the authors write that in 2014 U. of Washington academics submitted claims for 136 million miles of professional travel enough for a return trip to Mars, and thereby creating 23,811 tonnes of CO2. They deplore the noticeable disconnect between what universities preach and what their star professors do.
<https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-dolsak-prakash-carbon-tax_us_5abe746ae4b055e50acd5c80>
Court Case to Force Shell to Reinvest More in Renewables
Shell 's long term policy of cultivating green friends seems to have come unstuck. A Friends of the Earth lawsuit insists that Shell 's re-investing 5% of its profits in renewables simply isn 't good enough. Friends of the Earth Netherlands on April 4 demanded the Anglo-Dutch company revise plans to invest only 5% in sustainable energy and 95% in greenhouse-gas emitting oil and gas. In the Netherlands in 2015, greens won a shock court victory Dutch courts ruled that the government had to do more to cut CO2 emissions. The Dutch government was forced to live up to its green rhetoric. The lawyer who won that case is now coming after Shell.
A New Coal War Emerges in SE Asia
A joint report by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and CoalSwarm indicates that Southeast Asia will be the new epicentre of coal power production. The region accounts for 85% of new coal power development in the world 's top 20 coal producing countries, with China the leader of the pack. However, Beijing 's foremost strategic competitor in Asia, Japan, is being forced to step up efforts to combat its shrinking influence in the region. The booming energy sector of Southeast Asia, especially coal, is proving to be the new front line in the geopolitical rivalry between Asia 's two industrial giants.
India Slashes Plans for New Nuclear Reactors by Two-thirds
The Indian government had set an ambitious goal of 63 GW of nuclear power additions by 2031-32, but has cut it to 22 GW, or about one-third. While the Department of Atomic Energy did not specify the reasons for the change, it is likely that India has come face-to-face with the same reality as other developing nations seeking rapid construction of nuclear powerï¼challenges due to lack of funding, a reliable supply chain to handle the huge increase in orders, and a trained workforce to build and operate the new plants. Currently two-thirds of India 's electricity comes from coal, and with the cut in planned nuclear power the country will rely even more heavily on coal.
Battery Wastage
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has issued a paper explaining why battery storage for rooftop solar doesn 't pay, at least in the UK. First, batteries are expensive but are warranted only for a certain number of duty cycles, meaning that the stored energy cost exceeds present electricity prices. (The paper used a warranty of 3,000 - 4,000 cycles over five years for a 4-kWh lithium-ion battery.) A rooftop solar array without any battery storage can reduce grid power by about 40%. Consumers can easily shift their load peaks to coincide with solar production peaks. Finally, in winter solar generation is so low that there is little possibility that a realistic battery store can affect grid energy import.
2018-03-24
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe Tries to Scare Canadians with Threats of Warmer Temperatures
As the IPCC Cities Conference progressed in Edmonton, March 5-8, 2018, Canada 's energy center was not going to be left out. The Calgary Climate Change Symposium featured Climate George George Marshall, activist and author of the UK, and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe of the Political Sciences department at Texas Tech University. Dr. Hayhoe charmed the audience with her folksy presentation telling us how her mother 's tulips were coming up in March instead of April and how this had never happened in all the time she was growing up in Ontario. This would normally be termed an anecdotal commentary, not scientific evidence, but this is the path the Alberta Narrative has taken.
Dr. Hayhoe tends to defer to social scientists. They 've found that more education doesn 't change people 's perceptions that in fact, the people with the highest degree of science literacy aren 't the ones who are most concerned, but rather, the most polarized. Because those people can muster evidence to explain why they 're right, too.
The Coming Carbon Tax Showdown
In December 2016 the Canadian federal and nearly all the provincial leaders signed the pan-Canadian framework to meet the country 's 2030 emissions targets. It rested on the bargain that Canada would build a pipeline or two, and the citizens would do penance in the form of carbon taxes that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Today, that bargain is looking shaky. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley imposed a carbon tax, and the feds approved the TransMountain pipeline expansion, which is resolutely opposed by the British Columbia government and activists. Ms. will probably lose her job next year because she has delivered carbon taxes but no pipeline. Her replacement is planning to abolish the carbon tax as soon as he beats her. In Ontario, the anti-carbon-tax crusader Doug Ford could well become premier in next June 's election.
Within a couple years it is possible that five provinces (Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia) will have governments opposed to a carbon tax. Manitoba 's current Conservative regime is a lukewarm supporter, at best. This sets the stage for a carbon tax war between the feds and provinces representing more than half the country 's population.
A Billion-dollar Plan No One Should Follow
In its March 19 Speech from the Throne, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne 's government asserted, you cannot be serious about lowering emissions and fighting climate change without a price on carbon pollution. Nowhere did the speech specify what this supposed pollution actually is. That 's probably because, if it did, millions of Canadians would realize that the Wynne government is wasting billions of dollars trying to control a non-pollutant in the forlorn hope that reducing the province 's minimal contribution to worldwide emissions of this non-pollutant will have a beneficial effect on Earth 's complex and ever-changing climate.
Premier Wynne 's carbon pollution ' mistake is dangerous because it dumbs down a vitally important science debate, inappropriately sways millions of people, and ultimately drives terrible government policies.
Canadian Government: Consider the gendered impacts of climate change
Canada 's Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna, is urging environmental activists to address the gendered impacts of climate change, especially its effects on women and girls. In a recent post on Twitter, the minister called on followers to consider the gendered impacts of climate change on women, girls and children while praising Canada 's leadership in training women negotiators in the fight against manmade global warming.
US Federal Court Holds First-ever Hearing on Climate-change Science
On March 7 US District Court judge William Alsup ordered a proceeding for March 21 featuring lawyers for Exxon, BP, Chevron and other oil companies pitted against those for San Francisco and Oakland that have accused fossil fuel interests of covering up their role in contributing to global warming. For this hearing the judge posed a list of eight questions on climate science, and these are posted on RealClimate 's website. After a five-hour tutorial on global warming, Judge Alsup dismissed a core section that plaintiffs brought in the case that oil companies conspired to cover up global warming science.
In a Watts Up With That? article Joseph Bast provides a postmortem of the case, pending the transcript from the court. Lawyers for Chevron submitted a PowerPoint (adopted by all the other defendants), which Mr. Bast critiques. Much of the PowerPoint relies on IPCC reports.
Growing German Opposition to Wind Farms
Fritz Vahrenholt, Hamburg 's former environmental senator, was one of the pioneers of Germany 's Energiewende. Today, he finds its implementation miserable and believes that the new federal government urgently needs to change course in response to growing public resistance against more and more wind turbines. Mr. Vahrenholt 's main criticism of Energiewende: With our move towards intermittent wind and solar energy we have reached a dead end. Correcting the undesirable developments by imposing ever-increasing costs on households and drivers, that smells like a planned economy. He notes the the falling cost of wind turbines is no longer relevant. Rather it 's the exorbitant cost of storing intermittent wind and solar power.
Global Warming: Real or Groupthink?
A report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation examines groupthink, the tendency for members of groups of like-minded people to bolster their collective view and ignore or rubbish alternative views. The three rules of groupthink are: (1) A group of people come to share a particular view or belief without a proper appraisal of the evidence; (2) This leads them to insist that their belief is shared by a consensus ' of all right-minded opinion; (3) Because their belief is ultimately only subjective, resting on shaky foundations, they then defend it only by displaying an irrational, dismissive hostility towards anyone daring to question it.
According to the report 's author: Future generations may look back on the late-20th and early 21st-century panic over man-made warming as one of the strangest episodes in the history of either science or politics. But they will only be able to understand how such an extraordinary flight from reality could have taken place by reference to the peculiarities of collective human psychology, and in particular to the rules defining the nature of groupthink.
MIT Report: It Will Take up to 400 Years to Transform to Clean Energy
The MIT Technology Review has published a report on the real reasons we 're not building clean energy near fast enough. Fifteen years ago a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution calculated that the world needed to add about a nuclear power plant 's worth of CO2-free energy capacity (1,100 MW) every day from 2000 to 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change (i.e., keep the global temperature rise to less than 2 °C.) Instead, the capacity being added is only 151 MW/day. At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries.
The reason for the holdup: Beyond the vexing combination of economic, political, and technical challenges is the basic problem of overwhelming scale. There is a massive amount that needs to be built, which will suck up an immense quantity of manpower, money, and materials. To achieve the required scale would require World War II-type government intervention in the economy, when the US government nationalized parts of the steel, coal and railroad industries and forced automakers to produce aircraft, tanks and jeeps, instead of cars. But how do you inspire a war mentality in peacetime, when the enemy is invisible and moving in slow motion?
2018-02-23
Tim Ball 's Free-Speech Victory over Andrew Weaver
In 2011, Andrew Weaver, then a climate modeller at the University of Victoria and now leader of the Green Party in the British Columbia legislature, sued Dr. Ball over an article published in the Canada Free Press. Among other things the article said Dr. Weaver was was lacking a basic understanding of climate science, Arguments on the case were heard in the fall of 2017, and on February 13 the judge dismissed all charges in the lawsuit.
In a Watts Up With That article, Dr. Ball describes the history of the Weaver lawsuit, as well as one still outstanding brought by Micheal Mann.
Polar Bear Battle in Toronto: Good Science vs Climate Do-gooders
Two events on February 27 in Toronto will juxtapose conflicting conclusions on the current health and future for polar bears. In the city 's swanky Yorkville district, it 's the 2018 Polar Bear Showdown, an international display of conflicting views on the state of polar-bear science. Are the great, charismatic creatures, all white, cuddly-looking and dangerous, caught in the death grip of climate change? At another corner, exactly one block away, in the Founders ' Room at the down-market Toronto Reference Library, the Global Warming Policy Foundation of London, England will launch a new report on the state of polar bears by Susan Crockford, adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. There will be no entertainment, and no food, but the science will be far superior.
Chevron and Exxon Fight Back against Climate Suits
Chevron, which together with BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Shell, is facing climate lawsuits from San Francisco and Oakland, and is now suing Oslo-based Statoil, calling it one of many oil producers that should help foot the bill if the industry is found liable. Adding foreign companies to the litigation is a tactical maneuver to keep the dispute out of state court, where the cities have more favourable prospects, and force it into federal court. A federal judge in San Francisco is scheduled to decide whether the cases should stay there or proceed in the superior courts of Alameda and San Francisco counties.
Exxon Mobil has targeted at least 30 people and organizations, including the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, hitting them with suits, threats of suits or demands for sworn depositions. The company claims the lawyers, public officials and environmental activists are conspiring against it in a coordinated legal and public relations campaign.
NYU Law Professor: Cross-examination is going to be brutal
Richard Epstein, director of New York University 's Classical Liberal Institute, was interviewed about the California counties and municipal litigation against energy companies and predicts that the plaintiffs are going to lose. California is both a big producer and consumer of the same fossil fuels the litigation claims are sowing the seeds of imminent climate change disaster. The cities and counties omitted any mention of their dire climate change predictions in their bond offerings. Prof. Epstein says that the cities and counties are now in a tough position because if officials admit their litigation claims were flawed, they kill their own lawsuits. But if they admit they lied to or withheld information from investors, they open themselves up to potential fraud liability,
Electricity Prices Fell for 40 Years in Australia, then Renewables Came
Joanne Nova 's blog has a graph of real electricity prices in Australia for 1955-2018, indexed and adjusted for inflation. During the coal boom, prices declined decade after decade. As renewals and energy bureaucracies grew, so did the price of electricity. Today, all the hard-won efficiency gains of the fifties, sixties and seventies have effectively been reversed in full.
George Soros Makes $160 Million Investments in Oil, Gas & Coal Companies
In 2017 the billionaire underwrote the Peoples ' Climate March to mark the 100th day of the Trump Administration, having donated $36 million to the march 's organizations between 2000 and 2014. He also agreed to give Al Gore 's Alliance for Climate Protection $10 million over a three-year period. Mr. Soros founded and operates his own climate change advocacy group called the Climate Policy Initiative. He pledged to give at least $100 million in 2009 to the initiative over ten years and in 2015 he gave $26.5 million to the group.
Nevertheless Mr. Soros is hedging his bets by making $160 million in investments in for-profit fossil fuel over the last quarter of 2017. These include; $87 million in Alerian, MLP, a fund that solely invests in energy infrastructure consisting of pipelines, storage tanks and processing plants for crude oil and natural gas; $30 million in Halliburton, one of the world 's largest oil exploration and drilling companies; $4.7 million into Peabody Energy Corporation, the largest pure play coal company in the US.
According to the president of the free-market Energy and Environment Legal Institute: These global elitists try to wrap themselves in this sky-is-falling, fossil fuels are bad, climate change is real mantra, ' but the fact of the matter is they are doing that to manipulate markets.
Environmentalists Push Global Wealth Distribution
The environmental movement wants to make the rich West much poorer so that the destitute can become richer. In an article for Nature Sustainability, the four authors apply a top-down approach (i.e., international technocratic tyranny) to distribute shares in planetary resources among nations on a per-capita basis. The authors use the term democratic quality nine times, but they don 't mean it. They prescribe an international technocratic tyranny that would take from the successful to give to those in need to prevent their increased use of natural resources. As the authors put it: If all people are to lead a good life within planetary boundaries, then our results suggest that provisioning systems must be fundamentally restructured to enable basic needs to be met at a much lower level of resource use.
Sinking Pacific Nation Is Getting Bigger
The Pacific nation of Tuvaluï¼long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levelsï¼is actually growing in size, new research shows. A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu's nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery. It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9%, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.
Warnings of an Unusually Inactive Sun: Will We Face a Little Ice Age?
Studies by the University of California San Diego and Northumbria University claim that in the 2021-2050 period, the Sun is expected to become cool as it undergoes a grand minimum , similar to the Maunder Minimum of 1646-1715. In a 5-minute video researcher Valentina Zharkova from Northumbria explains her discovery of two solar magnetic waves, or dynamos, which will offset each other during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. During Cycle 26 between 2030 and 2040, the waves will become out of sync, causing reduction in solar activity by as much as 60%.
Dr. Zharkova said that climate scientists approached the Royal Astronomical Society in an effort to suppress a news release about her findings. The RAS refused to do so, telling the climate scientists to collaborate with Dr. Zharkova and her team.
2018-02-09
Cyclists Are Collateral Damage in the Climate Change Wars
Believing that climate change looms large as a threat to the planet, many city politicians and planners are combatting the automobile by aggressively promoting the bicycle as an alternative, despite immense infrastructure costs. However, as the European Transport Safety Council, in a report in aid of developing a cycling strategy for the EU, stated: an increase in cycling might, at least at first, lead to an increase in the number of cyclists killed or seriously injured. ' The Netherlands ' Institute for Road Safety Research, which assessed what would happen if just 10% of car trips shorter than 7.5 km were replaced by bike trips. It found that cyclists in the Netherlands would suffer some 500 serious road injuries requiring hospitalization, untold numbers of lesser injuries and four to eight deaths.
The West 's aging populations add another serious safety risk. As the Dutch study found, the only demographic group that stood to be safer by switching from the auto to the bike was 18- and 19-year-old males, who tend to be reckless behind the wheel of a car. With all other demographics, and especially with those older than 35, a shift from the car to the bike elevates risk.
In the war against climate change, cyclists are becoming cannon fodder. The more cities succeed in their quest to save the planet, the more they will fail to protect their own people.
The US State of the Union: Both Parties Omit Climate Change
The Huffington Post is not surprised that President Trump neglected to mention the climate crisis in his State of the Union address on January 20, but is upset that the Democratic rebuttal by Rep. Joe Kennedy omitted global warming, sea-level rise and the rise in global CO2 emissions. The Huff Post claimed that 2017 was the world 's second-hottest year on record, that the US racked up $306 billion in climate-related damages and fossil fuel emissions reached an all-time high.
Germany to Pay for Renewables and Missing EU Emissions Targets
Germany will have to purchase greenhouse gas emissions allowances for the years 2019 and 2020 from other European Union members. The extent of the shortfall in these two years will only be known two years after this period, and the permits will then be purchased bilaterally from an EU-country at a yet to be determined price at the expense of German taxpayers. The country was supposed to cut CO2 emissions by 14% below 2005 levels by 2020.
IPCC Communications Handbook
The IPCC is worried that the general public does not sufficiently appreciate the alarmist messages in its reports. As the Forward to the Principles for effective communication and public engagement on climate change: A Handbook for IPCC Authors puts it: As several decades of awareness-raising and initiatives to engage the public have shown, climate change doesn 't communicate itself . The handbook goes on to explain how its authors at Climate Outreach turned to social science to enable IPCC scientists to feel confident in going about public engagement in the best possible way, based on the best possible evidence.
On page 6 it alludes to Stephen Schneider 's double ethical bind ï¼scientists may have to make a personal choice between being effective, and telling the truth. The handbook recommends six principles for public engagement: (1) Be a confident communicator; (2) Talk about the real world, not abstract ideas; (3) Connect with what matters to your audience (obviously, not affordable and reliable energy); (4) Tell a human story; (5) Lead with what you know (i.e., downplay uncertainty); (6) Use the most effective visual communications.
Exxon Concludes that Climate Policies Will Have Little Impact on It
In response to shareholder pressure regarding business risks of stricter climate-change policies, Exxon Mobil released a report on how it would fare in a low-carbon world. It concluded that even aggressive climate policies pose little risk to its investments. The company stressed that it expected healthy demand for its products for decades to come, regardless of how strongly countries move to cut emissions.
Scott Pruitt: Global Warming Has Been Good for Humanity
Mr. Pruitt, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, was asked in an interview if the climate is changing, whether humans are affecting the climate and should we be alarmed. He agreed with the first two questions, but said that humans have flourished most during warming trends. No one has defined what the climate should be in 2018 or 2100. Mr. Pruitt called for an open debate so that the American people can be informed.
Global Investment in Renewable Energy Has Stalled
Global investment in renewables has stalled in the US, in Europe, and in many markets across the world. From 2004 to 2011, global renewable energy investment grew at a 26.7% compounded annual rate. By the end of 2012, more than 200,000 wind turbines were operating worldwide. But, from 2011 to 2017, global green energy investment grew at only 0.7% per year essentially flat. The reason for the faltering investment is that, after electricity prices in various European countries climbed to three or four times the US price, subsidies and mandates are being cut.
The Inconvenient Truth about EVs in Cold Weather
A Tesla Model 3 recently drove from Los Angeles to New York City in 50 hours and 16 minutes, of which about 10 hours were spent recharging the car 's battery at Supercharger stations along the way. The occupants had to wear multiple layers of clothing as they drove through the worst winter weather the US has seen in decades without the comfort of cabin heat. The website fleetcarma.com studied the effect of cold weather on the range of various EVs (Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV and Ford Connect EV). All three vehicles lost 50% of their advertised range when the temperature hit -10 °C, due to both cabin heating (which is essentially free with the waste heat of gasoline vehicles) and lower component efficiency (battery and drive mechanism).
William Happer: Climate Models Don 't Work
In a 5-minute video Princeton University physicist William Happer talks about climate models that attempt to predict the future temperature of the planet. A number of factors influence climate: the Sun, Earth 's orbital properties, oceans, clouds, and human industries. Climate essentially involves the interaction between the atmosphere (which holds large amounts of water) and the oceans. Water, in all its phases, has huge effects on atmospheric heating and cooling, while CO2 is a minor contributor. Predicting what the two fluids will do on a planetary scale over decades is close to impossible. Dr. Happer points to example of Hurricane Irma last summer: even with massive amounts of real-time data, the models could not predict the hurricane 's path two days in advance.
Peter Ridd Hits Back
Around the world, much has been said about the impending extinction of the Great Barrier Reef as a result of climate change. When Prof. Ridd, who has been studying the reef for the past 30 years and authored over 100 scientific papers, called into question the published science and wrote that scientific institutions can no longer be trusted, his employer, James Cook University, served Prof. Ridd with a gag order. He went to court in November, and the university back away from firing him, but issued a Final Censure in his employment file, telling him to be silent about the allegations against him and not to repeat comments about the unreliability of institutional research. Rather than comply, Prof. Ridd is pursuing the matter in court.
2018-01-23
Alberta Government Cool to FoS Speaker at Agricultural Conference
Friends of Science Communications Manager, Michelle Stirling, was invited to appear as one of the speakers at the 2018 Agricultural Service Board Conference in Grande Prairie on January 17. The topic of Ms. Stirling 's talk was Climate Plan and Coal Phase Out. This did not sit well with the Alberta government, which was surprised to hear that that the ASB, as a recipient of government grants, would book a speaker on a controversial topic so contrary to government policy.
There 's a link to the YouTube video of the presentation. Radio station CHQR 's Danielle Smith, noticing the controversy, did a radio interview with Ms. Stirling.
Alberta Won 't Hit Emissions Target
According to the latest progress report on Alberta 's Climate Leadership Plan, quietly released in December, the province is likely to fall well short of meeting its share of Canada 's emissions target for 2030. This target would require Alberta to reach a level of 163 Mt by then, However, even with the CLP initiatives the province 's 2030 emissions will be 254 Mt, which is only 20 Mt less than the reported level for 2015. Environment Minister Shannon Phillips downplayed the significance of the report, saying: We are putting in policies that get results. We are less interested in theoretical targets; we are more interested in actual action.
Pentagon: Global Warming No Longer a National Security Threat
The Pentagon released a National Defense Strategy that, for the first time in more than a decade, does not mention man-made global warming as a security threat. An 11-page summary of the new National Defense Strategy makes no mention of global warming or climate change, according to a keyword search by the Huffington Post. The document reflects the Trump administration 's focus on energy dominance over climate.
Fossil-fuel Divestment Crusade Hurts Poor and Middle Class Most
Responding to demands that big institutional investors dump there holdings of oil and gas stocks, Mark Milke, a contributing writer to Canadians for Affordable Energy, argues that the notion that building subsidized wind turbines and solar panels can replace the jobs, exports and tax revenues of a long-profitable energy sector is folly. From Newfoundland to northern British Columbia, there are 300,000 people directly employed in the oil and gas business with 650,000 spinoff jobs. Oil and gas products represent $136 billion in exports to the US and $22 billion in annual tax revenues to governments. Between 2006 and 2014 Ontario spent $35 billion on above-market subsidies to wind solar and other alternatives.
Study: Europe 's Green Energy Burning Killing 40,000 People/Year
Linde Zuidema, a bioenergy campaigner at the forests and rights NGO Fern, argues that the EU 's dependence on burning solid biomassï¼mostly woodï¼to meet its renewable energy targets makes no sense environmentally. It harms the climate, and damages forests and biodiversity. She points to research by Dr. Mike Holland, a leading independent air pollution expert, whose research indicates that tens of thousands of EU citizens are dying prematurely every year as a result of exposure to air pollution from burning solid biomass.
The Hockey Stick Goes to Court
On January 9 the City of New York filed suit against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell, claiming that the defendants produced, marketed, and sold massive quantities of fossil fuels knowing that these fuels produced greenhouse gas pollution. The City wants a money judgement for costs of climate change impacts already incurred, costs for actions currently undertaken by the City, and an injunction to abate the public nuisance and trespass that would become effective if Defendants fail to pay the court-determined damages for the past and permanent injuries inflicted.
It 's sill early days for this lawsuit, but already Ross McKitrick has taken issue with statements contained in paragraph 86 of the complaint that attack his supposed refutation of Michael Mann 's hockey stick graph, and implying that Exxon paid money to the Fraser Institute for the refutation 's publication.
<http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/16/de-blasios-global-warming-lawsuit-is-riddled-with-factual-errors/>
Four Other Climate Change Lawsuits to Watch in 2018
The first is Citizens vs. Government of the Netherlands, which resulted in a Dutch court ordering the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions nationwide by at least 25% below 1990 levels by the year 2020. The first hearing on the appeal is scheduled for March 2018. In 2015, 21 plaintiffs between 10 and 21 years old filed the Juliana vs. US. This case goes to trial in February 2018.
A Peruvian farmer and mountain guide is suing German energy firm RWE claiming that the company's contribution to climate change is threatening his home, and is asking RWE to take on financial responsibility for the damage. A German court decided that the plaintiff 's allegations have merit, and evidence will be heard in the case during 2018. Finally, ExxonMobil is s being sued over failing to safeguard Massachusetts communities against pollution relating to climate change impacts, and lying to the public about the risks of climate change. ExxonMobil has denied the claims, and said in a statement it would fight the lawsuit in court. A verdict is expected in 2018.
US Federal Court Punishes Enviros for Using Ridiculous Legal Theory to Ban Fracking
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund sued to overturn Pennsylvania General Energy 's permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to store wastewater as part of its fracking operations. The CELDF used a right of nature argument, which Magistrate Judge Susan Paradise Baxter called an implausible legal theory. Her decision stated: An attorney 's zealous advocacy for the protection of a client 's interests is certainly appropriate; however, the legitimate pursuit of justice imposes important obligations on counsel to ensure that the Court is not a mechanism of harassment or unbridled obstruction. She ruled that the CELDF 's executive director and attorney must pay $50.000 to cover part of PGE 's legal costs.
Why Is Liberal California the Poverty Capital of America?
Nearly one in five California residents is poor, the highest of any state in the country. Despite massive anti-poverty spending by Sacramento and municipalities, they have resisted pro-work reforms, and a large stare of the aid is in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. Land-use restrictions have driven up housing costs. Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing CO2 emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor.
2018-01-11
Eco-Colonialism : Rift Grows Between Indigenous Leaders and Green Activists
Martin Louie, hereditary chief of the Nadleh Whut 'en First Nation in north-central British Columbia, was a high-profile leader in the fight against the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. The $7-billion pipeline was eventually cancelled last year, but Mr. Louie didn 't want to sink the project. Rather, he really just wanted to win more money for his impoverished community than the ridiculous $70,000 a year being offered by the company. Mr. Louie and other First Nation leaders became the focal point of major green campaigns funded by US interests to thwart oil and gas exports.
Now, with the pipeline dead, First Nation leaders are describing the efforts by the green activists as eco-colonialism. Ken Brown, a former chief of the Klahoose First Nation in southwestern BC, said: You are seeing a very pervasive awakening among these First Nations leaders about what is going on in the environmental community.
Carbon Bounty (not taxes) Could Save Us from the Next Little Ice Age
While carbon taxes are intended to encourage lower emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere and thereby prevent global warming, some scientists, such as Valentian Zharkova and Habibullo Abdussamatov foresee the coming of a new Little Ice Age. In that case there should be bounties in the form of subsidies to to oil sands industries, pipelines and fracking, while eliminating subsidies to wind and solar power, as well as Tesla vehicles.
Too Frigid for Global Warming? This is Why They Rebranded it Climate Change
Rex Murphy takes a poke at the alarmists and their political allies who take any unusual weather eventï¼hot, cold, droughts, floods, etc.ï¼as justification for keeping the grants flowing and the contradictions unexamined.
<https://www.thegwpf.com/too-frigid-for-global-warming-this-is-why-they-rebranded-it-climate-change/>
Exxon Launches Counterattack against California-based Conspiracy Lawsuits
Acknowledging the risks of climate change, supporting the Paris Agreement and backing revenue-neutral carbon taxes weren 't enough to prevent ExxonMobil from been targeted by state and local governments. On January 8 the company filed suit against seven cities in California that want state courts to force the oil company to pay for infrastructure improvements to help them adapt to climate change. ExxonMobil argues that it and other Texas-based energy firms have become the target of a conspiracy among liberal state attorneys general and other officials seeking to blame it for driving up emissions that are supposedly causing the earth 's temperature to rise.
The oil company is asking a Texas district court to order officials from the seven cities to disclose documents and provide depositions that Exxon argues will show how they failed to provide evidence of the true risks of climate change. ExxonMobil wants the court to order a number of California local government officials to answer questions under oath that it claims will expose the basis of the argument the cities are attempting to make as erroneous and moot.
It 's All Over: German Parties Agree to Scrap 2020 Climate Target
In a potential embarrassment to Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany 's would-be coalition partners agreed to drop an ambitious plan to lower CO2 emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Instead the target would be deferred to the early 2020s, while still sticking to achieving a 55% cut in emissions by 2030. At the 2017 G20 meeting in Hamburg, Chancellor Merkel was highly critical of President Donald Trump 'a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
Germany Sends Electricity to Neighboursï¼And Pays for It
Germany is increasingly selling electricity at negative prices. According to a report by Handelsblatt several thousand megawatt hours flowed over the borders on New Year 's Day. And not even free of charge: whoever accepted Germany 's electricity gift was paid to take it. Transmission system operators have to purchase electricity from renewable sources, even if there is no demand. In these situations, electricity prices go negative. The costs for this are transferred by the operators to the consumers.
Germany 's Energiewende
The World Nuclear Association has prepared an extensive report on Germany 's policy of increasing the share of renewables and phasing out nuclear power. Thanks to being given grid priority and subsidies, wind power capacity increased from 12 GW in 2002 to 45 GW in 2015 (10.4% of the world total). Solar power capacity in the same period jumped to 40 GW in 2015. With the cost of the subsidies mostly paid by small and medium-sized customers, Germany has some of the lowest wholesale electricity prices in Europe and some of the highest retail prices.
Combined with shutdowns of nuclear plants (to be completed by 2022), coal-fired generation now meets half of the country 's load, and is not expected to diminish significantly by 2030. That is, large-scale deployment of renewable capacity does not translate into a substantial displacement of thermal capacity. In fact, German utilities have commissioned advanced lignite-fired stations capable of ramping up or down on 15-minutes notice to offset the intermittency of wind and solar.
In short, Germany 's Energiewende is a classic example of what happens when policymakers underestimate the cost of renewable subsidies and the strain they have on the grid and national economies.
Al Gore: Bitter Cold is What We Should Expect from the Climate Crisis
On January 4 Mr. Gore tweeted: It 's bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that 's exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis. http://ow.ly/Gdm230hAFv4." His Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth did not warn of record cold and increasing snowfalls as a consequence of man-made global warming. And as recently as 2009, Mr. Gore was hyping the lack of snow as evidence for man-made global warming.
The Population Bombers Keep On Bombing
Half a century after publication of The Population Bomb, the world is healthier, better fed, less poor, better entertained and generally living fuller lives. In this year 2018, the end is not near. The only people in need of downsizing are the predictors of doom and other purveyors of science fiction.
In a paper published in Bioscience, a group of scientists led by veteran Oregon State University bioactivist William Ripple call for a new global economic model to save us from hell on earth. By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere. The statement, released in November under the headline World Scientists ' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, has allegedly been signed by more than 15,000 scientists, although a large number of the signatures list student as a credential.
Death of a Climate Icon
In a blog post and a five-minute video Susan Crockford responds to accusations from the consensus experts that she and other denier bloggers are using topics such as polar bears as proxies for AGW as part of a deliberate plan to undermine the public 's confidence in global warming. She points out that the climate science community, in collaboration with Arctic researchers and the media, set the polar bear up as an icon for catastrophic global warming.
Five Questions from Students about Climate Change
In late 2017 Ross McKitrick was contacted by a group of high school students in Europe asking some questions about climate change for a project they were working on. The questions were: (1) What is behind global warming? (2) What can we do the prevent global warming? (3) If we don 't do anything about it, how does it affect us and our descendants? (4) What will happen in the future, and what are the alternatives for us, if the Earth becomes unliveable? (5) How can we save Earth if it isn't too late?.
Dr. Mckitrick provided common-sense and non-alarmist answers to each question.
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