By: Ian Cameron                 TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

2023-12-15

 

COP 28 President: There Is "No Science" behind Demands for Phase-out of Fossil Fuels

COP28's President, Sultan Al Jaber, participated in a live She Changes Climate event on November 21 where he responded to questions from Mary Robinson, former Irish President and UN special envoy for climate change. Ms. Robinson asked: "We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone … and it’s because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel. That is the one decision that COP28 can take and in many ways, because you’re head of ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company), you could actually take it with more credibility."

In his response Sultan Al Jaber said: "There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C …  Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves." The rest of the 7:38 video degenerated into ill-tempered accusations.

The Guardian story quoted reaction to Sultan Al Jaber's heresy about promoting use of fossil fuels when "the science is clear …", but a COP28 spokesperson supported him: "The IEA and IPCC 1.5C scenarios clearly state that fossil fuels will have to play a role in the future energy system, albeit a smaller one. The COP president was quoting the science, and leading climate experts."

US climate envoy John Kerry reacted to Sultan Al Jaber's remarks, saying: "Look, he's gotta decide how he wants to phrase it, but the bottom line is this COP needs to be committed to phasing out all unabated fossil fuel … I heard him definitively say in his opening comments to the entire COP that he is committed to 1.5 degrees and that we need to do all the things necessary to implement that."

 

Dutch Election Result Spells Trouble for Europe’s Climate Efforts

The Netherland's November 22 general election gave Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV), whose platform includes exiting the Paris climate accord, dismantling domestic green legislation, and scrapping measures to reduce planet-warming emissions, a surprise victory, with the party winning 37 of 150 parliamentary seats. The PVV will need to form a coalition with one or more other parties to govern with a majority of at least 76 seats.

CLINTEL called the PVV victory a "victory for climate realism" and published what the party's manifesto says about climate change and climate policy. It states that climate always changes and people must adapt to changing circumstances. The current Netherlands climate program of 122 measures will cost €28 billion and result in a reduction in global warming of 0.000036°C and cause the country's entire way of living to change. The PVV promises that the Climate Law, the Climate Agreement and all the other climate measures will go directly to the paper shredder.

One of the big losers in the election, with 25 seats, was the newly formed Labour-Green alliance led by Frans Timmermans, former European Commission vice president and architect of the EU's Green Deal. Mr. Timmermans resigned from his EU position last August to lead the Labour-Green alliance to oppose a growing backlash against climate policy [FoS Extracts 2023-10-23]. Even though Mr. Timmermans has left the EU scene, the effects of his devastating policies will be felt for years to come.

 

Former Federal German Minister Warns that Germany Is Heading Toward a Climate Tyranny

Kristina Schröder, who served as the Federal Family Minister from 2009 to 2013 in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, recently commented that Germany currently finds itself on a dangerous environmentally dogmatic path under the current leadership. She wrote: “The pandemic has provided a blueprint for the climate movement on how to enforce fundamental restrictions on basic rights. Germany is heading in the direction of a radical climate protection dogma that almost completely ignores the costs of the path taken. And once again, the two predominant patterns of argumentation in the pandemic can be observed: A refusal to weigh things up and an ends-justify-the-means mindset."

Other points in Ms. Schröder's comments:

• The threat of regulations affecting how people live, heat, get around, travel and eat.
• A Potsdam Climate Institute proposal that each person have a CO₂ budget of 3 tonnes/year. (Currently each German emits 11 tonnes/year.)
• A blindness to the costs of reducing CO₂.
• For the activists, climate protection is a powerful lever to push back against the hated capitalist system.

 

Car Dealers Want Biden to "Tap the Brakes" as EVs Sit Unsold

Some 3900 car dealers from across the US wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to "tap the brakes" on the "unrealistic government electric vehicle mandate." Last year there was a lot of hope and hype about EVs as early adopters bought them as soon as the dealers had them to sell, but that enthusiasm has stalled. Now dealers have a 103-day supply, compared to 56 days for all cars. The reasons for the sales slowdown are: despite recent price cuts EVs are still too expensive; many apartment renters don't have garages for home charging, public charging networks are spotty; customers are concerned about loss of driving range in cold and hot weather; owners with long daily commutes don't have the extra time to charge the battery.

Finally, Americans don't like to be told what to do or what they must buy.

 

North German Green Hydrogen Project Halted Due to Lack Of Economy… Major Economic Risks

Hydrogen is supposed to become the technology that will solve all the world's energy woes, unlike lithium batteries. In Germany, the Westküste 100 project's aim was to produce "green" hydrogen using a 30 MW electrolyzer powered by wind turbines and photovoltaics. The regional hydrogen economy associated with the project, which began in 2020, would include cement production, waste heat for industrial purposes, methanol and kerosene synthesis, storing hydrogen and injecting it into the gas grid. The project is funded with €36.5 million from the German federal government.

On November 16, three of the Westküste 100 partners – Raffinerie Heide, Ørsted Deutschland and Hynamics Deutschland – announced that the project will not be built, due to increased investment costs and the associated major economic risks. The managing director of Ørsted Deutschland said: “A project must be economically viable, and this was unfortunately not the case in this instance. We therefore arrived at the logical conclusion. For Ørsted, there is no doubt that hydrogen will play an important part in decarbonizing German industry – but the associated costs must be reasonable, and a market needs to be established.”

 

No Amount of Subsidies Will Ever Make a Wind/Solar Electricity System Economically Feasible

The Manhattan Contrarian's Francis Menton examines Germany's experience with wind and solar electricity. In 2021 (the latest year for which the information is available) that country consumed 511.59 TWh of electric energy, which divided by 24 x 365, gives an average power demand of 58.4 GW. Currently Germany has 126.7 GW of wind + solar generation capacity, more than twice as much as needed to meet the average demand (when the sun is shining and the wind blowing). However, during the first three quarters of 2023 Germany got only 52% of its electrical energy from wind and solar. Doubling wind and solar capacity to 250 GW would increase this percentage only marginally, and the excess power generation would have to be given away or discarded. The net result is more expensive electricity.

Renewable energy promoters have come up with the misleading metric called "Levelized Cost of Electricity", which shows that wind and solar are cheaper than the fossil fuel alternatives. But LCOE calculations always ignore the costs of (a) fossil fuel backup, (b) storage and/or (c) massive overbuilding of renewable generating and transmission capacity. As it becomes obvious that the whole LCOE “wind and solar are cheaper” mantra is a transparent lie, all private money will exit the energy transition. This leaves only massive government subsidies.

 

World Leaders Ignore Growing Safety Issues with Green Energy

Most energy sources involve safety risks. For example, gasoline-powered cars can explode and burn after collisions; natural gas pipelines and processing facilities can explode or combust; and nuclear power plants have suffered disasters when their cooling systems fail. Steve Goreham, a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure, investigates the major safety issues associated with batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage, and hydrogen fuels for industry.

Lithium batteries in cars, when they ignite, can burn for hours with a very high heat and are extremely difficult to extinguish. While the number of EV fires per vehicle does not exceed the rate for ICE vehicles, EVs can spontaneously combust, when driving, charging or even when parked. BMW, Ford, GM, Hyundai, and Tesla electric cars have all experienced problems with battery fires. Grid scale batteries, as backup for wind and solar facilities, are being deployed by utilities in Australia, the US, and other nations. These batteries have burst into flame in Arizona, California, New York in the US and in Australia and the UK. E-bike lithium batteries are the leading cause of accidental fires in New York City.

Green hydrogen, produced from electrolysis of water, is also proposed as a new fuel for the energy transition. Hydrogen exists in nature only in compounds (e.g., water). Pure hydrogen is very reactive and takes only a low level of energy in the presence of oxygen to ignite. But green energy advocates now call for a network of hydrogen pipelines, public hydrogen fueling stations for vehicles, and even the use of hydrogen to heat homes. Unlike natural gas, hydrogen leaks are prone to spontaneous combustion and resultant explosions and fires.

 

2023-11-23

 

UN Production Gap Report 2023

On November 8 the UN Environmental Program released its 2023 Production Gap Report, with the title: Phasing down or phasing up? Top fossil fuel producers plan even more extraction despite climate promises. The report assesses governments’ planned and projected production of coal, oil, and gas against global levels consistent with the Paris Agreement's goals of limiting global warming to 1.5°C to 2°C. Despite 151 national governments having pledged to reach net-zero emissions, the report found that combined government plans will lead to a global increase in coal production until 2030, and in global oil & gas production until at least 2050.

Figure ES.1 on p. 3 of the report depicts the difference (gap) between governments' plans and projections, expressed in Gt/year of CO₂, and the levels consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C to 2°C. It projects the gap's magnitude to grow over time, such that by 2050 fossil fuel production will be 350% and 150% above the levels consistent with the respective temperature targets.

Table ES.1 on p.6 lists 20 of the world's largest producer countries, which in 2021 accounted for 82% of production and 73% of consumption of the world’s supply of primary fossil fuels (p.35). The table includes each country's planned change in production (in EJ) of coal, oil and gas for 2030 relative to 2021. Only Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the US will exceed Canada's increase of 3.0 EJ in oil production. Nine counties will exceed Canada's 0.6 EJ increase in gas production.

On p.13 the report says carbon capture and storage is not a "free pass" to carry on with business as usual. Even if all CCS projects planned and under development became operational, only about 0.25 Gt of CO₂ would be captured in 2030, which is less than 1% of 2022 global emissions. Over the past 30 years 80% of CCS pilot projects ended in failure.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the report "… a startling indictment of runaway climate carelessness" and accused governments of "literally doubling down on fossil fuel production."

 

UK Softens Stance on Fossil Fuels ahead of COP28 Summit

The UK's Energy and Climate Minister, Graham Stuart, told MPs on November 8 that he was not fixated on whether countries agree to “phasing down" or "phasing out" fossil fuels so long as the COP agreement “translates into real action.” This marks a significant change in direction for the UK government and came two days after it announced plans to accelerate issuing of oil and gas drilling licenses in the North Sea and a rollback of interim net zero targets.

The distinction between "phasing down” and “phasing out” fossil fuels has become a key bone of contention between countries ahead of the COP28 talks. The EU has said that it will push for "phasing out" in it push for the final negotiated text and is in line with a G7 agreement this year, which pledged to "accelerate the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels."

 

Trudeau's Climate Obsession Runs into Reality

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's climate project is staggering from a trifecta of reality checks: missed emission targets, public blowback against the carbon tax, and at long last, growing realization that nothing Canada does will change global temperatures. Earlier this month the federal environment and sustainability commissioner issued a report to Parliament stating that the government is not on track to meet its 2030 emission reduction target under the new Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act. The 2030 target under the act is for emissions to be 40% below the 2005 level, but in December 2022 the government revised its expected reduction to 34%.

Only twice in the past two decades (during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic) did emissions decline. The silver lining in the failure of the government's signature policy program is that success — achieving the emissions targets — would be more costly than missing them.

Bending to political winds in Atlantic Canada, the prime minister increased rural carbon tax rebates and suspended the tax itself on home heating oil for three years, but not for natural gas and propane. This outraged many non-Atlantic MPs and all environmentalists, while prompting other provinces to demand comparable treatment. It also undermined the rationale for the tax and the government's commitment to it.

Canada's climate policies, even if they achieved the government's net-zero fantasy, would have only a miniscule effect on global temperatures. Yet the prime minister makes up claims that the country's emissions are contributing to extreme weather events like forest fires. Even the IPCC has low confidence in climate change being a cause of such events.

 

Calgary's Climate Emergency

On November 15, 2021, less than a month after the last municipal election, the new council voted to declare a climate emergency, which included the standard target of net-zero emissions by 2050. In May 2022 the city administration unveiled its plan to achieve the target, with an interim 2030 target of emissions 60% below 2005 levels. This will require a total expenditure of $87 billion, or $3.1 billion/year, on measures such as building retrofits, renewable energy and zero-emissions mobility. The following July council approved the plan in a 9-6 vote.

Two years after the emergency declaration the Calgary Herald reported that the city is struggling to make headway on its emission-reduction targets. Based on the city's 2023 mid-year performance report (p.13), emissions of 16.35 Gt of CO₂e were 3.5% above those for 2005. The report blames population and economic growth for the increase, stating: "As Calgary continues to grow in population and we plan for a city of two million (people), it is critical that as a community we accelerate our progress on reducing energy demand."

 

Marc Morano on Rebel News

In this 6:20 video Ezra Levant of Rebel News interviews Climate Depot's Marc Morano. The first question deals with the state of "luxury" policy issues like carbon taxes and green schemes in view of the current dangerous world (wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, inflation, poverty). Mr. Morano replied that, even in the good times of a few years ago, polling showed that climate ranked far down on the list of the general public's priorities.

Currently green energy is in a state of collapse around the world, for example:

• Offshore wind projects in the US northeast going belly up, despite massive subsidies and political support.
• The electric car market is collapsing in Europe and the US.
• China is about to become the world's No. 1 automaker because it controls the mining of rare earth minerals, and makes the cheapest EV cars, built under the lowest environmental and human rights standards.

Mr. Morano expects little out of COP28 except cover up and trying to put a happy face on the collapse of the unworkable green agenda.

 

Europe’s Largest Wind Farm Facing Bankruptcy

The Markbygden Wind Farm is a series of interconnected wind parks in northern Sweden, with the first phase commissioned in 2010 and subsequent phases continuing through 2023, with a total capacity of 2 GW. It is the largest onshore wind project in Europe. In 2017 the Markbygden ETT phase of the project (650 MW) signed a 19-year power purchase agreement with Norsk Hydro, with the project being commissioned in 2018-2019.Since February 6 of this year Markbygden ETT's deal with Norsk Hydro became unprofitable when lower than expected generation and financial troubles prevented it from meeting the required baseload supply of 1.65 TWh/year. Under the terms of the contract Markbygden ETT had to purchase the shortfall on the spot market when prices were high. In other words, the wind farm had to pay the costs of its own intermittency.

 

The Accounting Error that Could Kill Germany’s Coalition

Germany's unconventional alliance of Social Democrats, Greens and conservative Free Democrats was in disarray after the country's highest court (the Constitutional Court) ruled on November 15 that the centerpiece of the alliance’s environmental strategy — a plan to repurpose €60 billion left over from an emergency COVID-19 fund to finance the coalition’s climate agenda — was unconstitutional. The plan to use the COVID money, originally devised by Chancellor Scholz, was essential towards marrying the fiscal demands of the FDP with the environmental priorities of the Greens when the coalition was first formed.

The only ways of compensating for the €60 billion shortfall are tax hikes (which the Free Democrats reject), substantial spending cuts (anathema to the Social Democrats and the Greens) or by repealing the "debt brake" (which requires a two-thirds super majority.) In July the government suffered faced a similar embarrassment when the court suspended a vote in the German parliament, on a landmark household heating law because the coalition hadn’t given the opposition enough time to evaluate it.

The deep discord has fueled speculation that, with the next national election not expected for two years, has fueled speculation that the chancellor might dump the Greens and Free Democrats and seek coalition with the opposition Christian Democrats.

 

2023-11-08

 

FoS 20^th Annual Climate Event 2023 Videos and Video Clips

We want to thank all of you for being our supporting members and for making it possible for us to put on our 20^th Annual Friends of Science Society Climate Science Event on Oct. 17, 2023.  We had a full house and a wonderful time! Both event videos and powerpoints are posted on our event page.

Watch this series of short, conversational interviews with our speakers!

Dr. Ian Clark

Robert Lyman

 

The EV Industry's Bubble Pops

The electric-vehicle industry is facing trouble as revealed by news from various sources:

• Volkswagen announced that, though its EV sales for the first nine months of 2023 increased by 45% over 2022, total EV sales in its largest market, Europe, are 50% lower.
• Ford, managed to sell 20,962 EVs in Q3, but it lost $36,000 on every sale due to slowing demand and a price war initiated by Tesla at the start of the year. For the full year Ford expects its EV unit to lose $4.5 billion. According to another report Ford lost $62,016 on each EV in Q3. The company is pausing a $12 billion EV investment, saying customers will not pay a premium for these vehicles.
• General Motors's biggest bets on the future — EVs, self-driving cars and subscription software — are running into trouble. The company abandoned its target to produce 400,000 EVs through the first half of 2024, citing slowing demand, continued manufacturing bottlenecks and profitability concerns. Nevertheless, GM's CEO said: "Our commitment to an all-EV future is as strong as ever, and we continue to plan to have annual EV capacity of 1 million units in North America as we exit 2025."
• Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, raised the alarm, saying that he was concerned about the impact of high interest rates on car buyers, adding that Tesla was hesitating on its plans for a factory in Mexico as it gauges the economic outlook.
• The CEO of Mercedes-Benz blamed "brutal" EV pricing for the company's profit fall, even as the company's all-electric vehicle sales rose from 6% to 11% in the first nine months of 2023.
• Honda and GM announced that they are scrapping a plan to co-produce affordable EVs, one year after they agreed to work together in an effort to beat Tesla.
• Toyota's chairman and former CEO told reporters at an auto show that waning demand for electric vehicles (EV) is a sign that people are finally waking up to the reality that EVs aren't the silver bullet against the supposed ills of carbon emissions they're often made out to be.
• Fortune reports on automakers' struggles to make EVs affordable for pinched customers, even after government incentives. What they are doing is unsustainably selling the vehicles below cost and delaying EV investments.

The Energy Institute published a report Political Ideology and US Electric Vehicle Adoption that used detailed county-level data on new vehicle registrations from 2012-2022 to measure the degree to which EV adoption is concentrated in the most left-leaning US counties, and how this concentration has changed over time. The results point to a strong correlation between political ideology and EV adoption, with half of the EVs going to the 10% most Democratic counties and 1/3 to the top 5%. There is little evidence that this correlation between political ideology and EV adoption has decreased over time, meaning that will be hard to achieve high levels of EV adoption in the US.

 

The Political Risks of Mandating EVs for Everyone

In this essay, Real Clear Energy author Mark P. Mills goes after the three claims behind the political mandates for electric vehicles:

• They are cheaper and easier to fuel because you can “just plug them in.”
• They will radically reduce global CO₂ emissions.
• They will soon be cheaper than conventional cars because they are inherently simpler.

Starting with the "simpler" claim, while an EV motor has fewer parts than the engines and transmissions of conventional cars, an EV fuel tank is a complex electrochemical system made from hundreds, sometimes thousands of parts including: the cylindrical battery cells (~3,000-4,400 for a Tesla Model 3), a cooling system, sensors, safety systems, and a lot of power electronics. In Tesla's Nevada gigafactory, public data show that 8 people are employed per 1,000 EV drivetrains produced (electric motor + battery). Conventional engine and transmission factories need only 4 employees to produce 1,000 drivetrains.

Steel and iron make up about 85% of the weight of conventional vehicles, with the upstream supply chain requiring 1 person per 1,000 produced. Much of the weight of EVs comes from energy materials, such as lithium, copper, aluminum, nickel, cobalt, manganese and rare-earth metals, with a supply chain employing 30 people for every 1,000 EVs. Getting the materials for a half-tonne EV battery means digging 250 tonnes of earth. With 250 tonnes of gasoline (325,000 litres) extracted from the earth, and assuming consumption of 10 litres/100 km, a gasoline-powered car could go 3.25 million km.

An all-EV future requires on-the-road fast charging superchargers that cost 2-3 times the price of a gasoline pump but can deliver only an 80% charge in 30-40 minutes, compared to 3-4 minutes to fill a gasoline tank. To avoid long lines, these EV fueling stations will need 5-10 times as many charging ports as gasoline pumps. Each EV station will have the electric demand of a steel mill.

Any emissions calculation for producing an EV is a rough estimate or an outright guess based on averages, approximations, assumptions, or aspirations, due to uncertainties in the emissions from energy-intensive mining and the processing of minerals used to make EV batteries. No one knows how much CO₂ emissions will decline as materials production rises to build more EVs.

The eventual discovery that EVs will disappoint (as consumers face escalating ownership costs and inconvenience) and have only a tiny impact on global CO₂ emissions will lead to many unhappy voters. A car is the single most expensive and critical product used by most citizens.

 

The Economist Sees a Global Backlash against Climate Policies

The Economist is concerned about a movement that's gathering pace around the world: a backlash against pro-climate policies. As examples, the newspaper refers to political events in Europe: the weakening of net-zero targets in the UK; kicking down the road stringent green home-heating rules years into the future in Germany; huge protests against high fuel prices in France. Despite some reasons for cautious optimism (massive investment in wind and solar in China, US President Joe Biden's green turn and changes of government in Brazil and Australia), some political undercurrents are less reassuring.

These undercurrents are more general as voters: are realizing that remaking the entire global economy will be disruptive, object to policies that impose costs on ordinary citizens, add hassles to their daily lives, or they don't like change that means fuss today in return for benefits they may not live to see. Even though a poll of 12 rich countries found clear majorities in 11 of them agreeing that climate change is a major threat, only a minority are willing to pay more taxes to prevent it.

Populism appears to be undermining climate policy in several ways: populists are skeptical of "trust the experts" messaging, suspicious of global institutions and foreigners, and encourage people to believe that the elite are plotting against them. In Europe, even when populist parties aren't in government, they can influence it. They are helped when environmentalists in government overreach.

The Economist hopes that innovation will ease the drivers of much of the anti-climate backlash. In a companion story it recommends minimizing the cost and hassle that green policies impose on households. For example, instead of forcing all householders to install individual heat pumps, make utilities install large units serving groups of nearby houses. The newspaper also thinks that giving car firms realistic deadlines to stop selling gasoline-powered vehicles will induce them to produce cheaper and longer-range electric vehicles (unlikely — see above stories.)

 

Real-world Crises Beset COP28

The National Post's Terence Corcoran surveys the problems that will complicate matters at COP28, which begins on November 30. These include the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, national policy meltdowns over carbon taxes, and major issues related to technology, science and economics. The COP's president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber of the UAE, has been trying to get countries to find "common ground" on fossil fuels: whether to phase them out altogether (a divided EU and climate-vulnerable states) or merely phase them down (everyone else).

However, the political climate in four G7 nations — Canada, the US, Germany and the UK — is uncertain and filled with conflict over climate policy:

• On October 26 the Canadian government, for purely political reasons (pressure from vulnerable government MPs in Atlantic Canada), made a sudden pullback on part of its carbon tax, by giving a three-year exemption for oil used for home heating. This led to demands to expand the exemption to cover all heating fuels, while the carbon tax enthusiasts sees this "carve out" as possibly beginning the erosion of carbon pricing, the government’s signature climate policy.
• The UK prime minister is expected to announce a significant pullback in climate policies, including expansion of oil and gas exploration in the North Sea and pro-car policies that will make it difficult for local authorities to introduce low speed limits and low-emission zones.
• The oil industry is booming due rising oil and gas prices, as Exxon and Chevron close on takeover deals worth a total of $110 billion.

Besides the future of fossil fuels, the other big issue at COP28 will be loss and damage. A crucial preparatory meeting on the subject ended in failure on October 21.

 

Vaclav Smil Tells Shell Canada President that Carbon Capture Is ‘the Stupidest Solution’

Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus in the Faculty of the Environment at the University of Manitoba, was the featured speaker at a special dinner on September 25, organized by Resource Works.  Prof. Smil has positioned himself as a climate realist in relation to decarbonization and energy transition efforts and argued that carbon capture and storage is itself unrealistic because of the “big numbers” involved. To capture and sequester even a third of global CO₂ emissions, Smil argued, the CCS industry would need to grow to the size of the current oil and gas industry within two or three decades. He also identified potential problems related to carbon dioxide leaks (which can be deadly) that could come with such a massive effort to sequester CO₂ emissions. 

During his talk Prof. Smil said: "People realize that it would be impossible to produce zero carbon by 2050. So, they say, ‘ah, but we’ll capture it, and we’ll hide it!'. Now I capture it and bury it somewhere. It’s stupid, right? From the smart engineering viewpoint, it’s the stupidest solution." This did not go down well with the event's moderator Susannah Pierce, president and country chair of Shell Canada, who defended her company's Quest CCS project.

Canada's oil majors have been confidently preaching the gospel of CCS in their efforts to secure public licenses and subsidies. According to Table 10-4 of the Alberta Department of Energy’s 2022 report on the Quest project, it has received C$1,183 million in public funding from the governments of Alberta and Canada from 2009 to 2022. According to Table 4-1 of the same report, the average CO₂ injection rate over the last seven years was 1.06 Mt/year. This is close to the project’s design flow rate, which Table 5-1 of the 2011 report set at 1.2 Mt/year.

 

Ørsted Gives Up on New Jersey Wind Projects

Danish green energy company Ørsted is pulling out of its Ocean 1 and Ocean 2 wind projects off the coast of New Jersey, citing escalating financial and supply-chain issues. The two projects would have had a total capacity of 2.248 GW, and Ørsted’s impairments related to their cancellation could amount to $5.58 billion.

NJ Governor Phil Murphy, a big supporter of offshore wind, expressed his disappointment at Ørsted’s cancellation: “Today’s decision by Ørsted to abandon its commitments to New Jersey is outrageous and calls into question the company’s credibility and competence. I have directed my Administration to take all necessary steps to ensure that Ørsted fully honors its obligations.”

However, local officials in Cape May County, NJ, hailed the news, with the director of the Cape May County Board of Commissioners stating: “Ørsted has walked away from Ocean Wind One, but we are not walking away from this fight. We intend to redouble our efforts to ensure that our horizon remains free of massive offshore industrialization.”

 

2023-10-23

 

Judith Curry Interview: Climate Scientist Says World Isn’t Ending

Climate Change Dispatch's John Stossel interviewed Judith Curry on the subject of how climate science got hijacked by alarmists (full 43-minute video here, truncated video here.) According to Dr. Curry the "overwhelming scientific consensus" is a manufactured one, as climate scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk, a situation that once applied to her. In 2008 Dr. Curry was celebrated by the alarmist community for reporting a doubling of the percentage of Category 4 & 5 hurricanes — until other researchers noticed gaps in her research. So, Dr. Curry checked her data, finding that some of it was bad, and natural climate variability had been overlooked. The next year the Climate Gate scandal showed how the mainstream community of climate scientists had corrupted science by conspiring to suppress views that disagreed with their consensus.

When the UN set up the IPCC, it was not supposed to focus on any benefits of warming, but rather look for dangerous human-caused climate change. National funding for climate research now assumes that climate change is causing dangerous impacts.

Dr. Curry agrees that climate change is a problem, but not a crisis.

 

Truth And Science: A Nobel Laureate’s Advice to Students

Dr. John Clauser won the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics, so when he talks about the science of matter and energy people should listen. In an inspirational talk to a group of South Korean students, rather than discussing the specialty that won him the prize (quantum entanglement), Dr. Clauser told the students that their job is to tell the truth and warned them against being used to manufacture an interpretation of truth at variance with reality. This interpretation can be propagandized opportunistically by non-scientific business and political leaders ("techno-cons"). One of the worst sources of dangerous scientific misinformation is the IPCC ("a dangerous corruption of science") as techno-cons feed the IPCC's misinformation to the public.

Dr. Clauser criticized the awarding of the 2021 Nobel Prize for work in the development of computer models for predicting global warming. He said the models are unreliable and don't account for the dramatic temperature-stabilization feedback of clouds, something which is more than 50 times as powerful as the radiative forcing effect of CO₂. He also stated that there is no climate crisis and the increasing CO₂ concentrations will benefit the world.

 

Frans Timmermans Urges European Left to Unite against Right’s Climate Backlash

Frans Timmermans was Executive Vice President of the European Commission, with responsibility for climate matters and the European Green Deal, until he resigned last August to be a candidate in the November 22 general election in the Netherlands. There, Mr. Timmermans is leading the combined GreenLeft and Labour parties, and called for the European left to unite against the right's "astonishing" climate backlash. He believes progressives need to urgently mobilize against the radical right’s attempt to brand environmental reforms “too costly”.

Both Sweden and the UK have recently announced pushbacks on green targets and budgets, and Germany is attacking the EU's plans to enact stricter clean energy rules for buildings. Mr. Timmermans is particularly scathing about UK policies, warning that the radicals seem to be taking over the British Conservative Party after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced pushing back a ban on new gasoline and diesel vehicles.

 

EU Climate Divisions Give Foretaste of Fight Looming at COP28

Diplomats from the 27 EU countries spent weeks negotiating the bloc's position at COP28, cumulating with an agreement by the EU Council on October 16 that emphasizes:

• Increasing global ambition, led by the EU, towards climate neutrality.
• Phasing out fossil fuels and increasing renewable energy.
• Greater efforts towards climate mitigation and adaption.
• Climate finance to address loss and damage.

Nevertheless, as this Reuters story relates, the toughest issue for the negotiators was the phase out of coal, oil and gas, which was resolved only after Poland, the Czech Republic and other nations won a concession that provides certain industrial sectors with the option to keep consuming fossil fuels if technologies are used to abate (capture) the resulting emissions. Even if the EU will support phase out of fossil fuels at COP28, Russia will be opposed, and the positions of blocs, such as the African Group of Negotiators, is uncertain.

 

Europe Launches a Carbon Tax Attack Against the US Economy

On October 1 Europe's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered a trial period. From that date Europe's trading partners will have to report greenhouse gas emissions associated with their exports of iron, steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizer, hydrogen and electricity. Initially, companies will just have to report emissions, with payments to go into effect in 2026. The purpose of the CBAM is to both shield EU countries from unfair competition and to nudge other countries into implementing their own carbon pricing, as non-EU producers can deduct the cost of the CBAM if their countries have their own carbon tax.

Reaction to the CBAM was an explosion of fury from key trading partners and concern that businesses aren't ready for the paperwork requirements. According a report by Carnegie Europe the countries most affected by the CBAM are Russia, China, the United Kingdom, Türkiye, Ukraine, India, South Korea, and the United States. Brazil, South Africa and India, have all accused the EU measure of being “discriminatory." In retaliation, India is planning its own version of the CBAM. The US, which has no carbon tax, is seeking an exemption.

In a Watts Up With That? essay writer Eric Worrall calls the CBAM " an attempt to mitigate the economic devastation caused by Europe’s obsession with unaffordable green energy", which is causing companies to flee Europe as skyrocketing energy prices destroy their ability to compete.

 

Green Energy Subsidy Gets Far More Subsidies than Fossil Fuels in the US

While environmentalists frequently complain about subsidies to the oil and gas industry, they are silent about the subsidies paid out to politically favoured renewable energy programs. On October 2 the Biden White House quietly issued a report from August titled Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy in Fiscal Years 2016–2022. The report considered four types of interventions and subsidies: tax expenditures, direct expenditures, R&D support, and loan guarantees.

During the seven fiscal years studied the federal government gave $183.3 billion covering all four types of subsidies (p.22). Subsidies for fossil fuels (coal, refined coal, natural gas and petroleum liquids) were $24.5 billion, or 13% of the total, while renewables at $83.8 billion were 46% of the total.

 

Voters Give Germany’s Ruling Green Coalition A Beating in State Elections

On October 9 elections in the German states of Hesse and Bavaria showed that the ruling national coalition of the SPD Social Democrats, Alliance Greens and the Free Democratic Party suffered major losses. These results, in two of Germany's most affluent and economically powerful states are seen as a damning verdict on the performance of chancellor Scholz’s coalition government after two years of its four-year term. Decisions such as shutting Germany’s remaining nuclear plants during the energy crisis and introducing a law on banning fossil fuel heating amid skyrocketing energy prices, had been a constant source of disputes among the government parties and made the three-party government prone to attacks from the opposition conservatives.

 

IEA: Grid “Lack of ambition” Endangering the Green Energy Revolution

This month the International Energy Agency issued a special report, Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions, that "offers a global stocktake of the world’s electricity grids as they stand today, taking a detailed look at grid infrastructure, connection queues, the cost of outages, grid congestion, generation curtailment, and timelines for grid development" (Abstract, p.1). The press release accompanying the report was headlined "Lack of ambition and attention risks making electricity grids the weak link in clean energy transitions."

The report (p.8) identifies the grids as becoming the weak link in energy transitions. To reach the various national energy and climate goals means adding or refurbishing a total of 80 million km of grids by 2040, which is equivalent to the entire existing global grid (p.7).

Pages 28 and 29 promote the advantages of interconnected grids for improved stability, energy security and to enable integration of wind and solar. In a Watts Up With That? story on the report Eric Worrall casts doubt on whether interconnectedness would help as much as the IEA makes out. During Northern Hemisphere winters all renewable power sources tend to drop, so a truly interconnected grid would have to be able to transfer lots of energy across the equator. Even if the NH nations had sufficient overcapacity to carry them through the winter, large scale bad weather conditions would still cause power outages. Mr. Worrall suspects that it won't be lack of grid capacity that kills the green energy revolution, but rather reaction in countries where politicians answer to voters.

 

It’s Time to Build the Intermittent Renewable Plus Hydrogen Storage Demonstration Project

The Manhattan Contrarian's Francis Menton, noticed a report by the UK's Royal Society that proposes a net-zero electricity system for Britain consisting entirely of wind and solar generation, with their intermittency largely backed up by hydrogen stored in underground, solution-mined salt caverns. Mr. Menton considers the report's treatment of the prospective costs of the system "perfunctory and thoroughly inadequate", and there is no mention of the electricity prices paid by consumers. Therefore, instead of moving all Great Britain's 65 million people to a fully wind/solar/storage electricity system by 2050, he proposes building a demonstration project to establish the system's feasibility and cost, for example:

• Pick a town or region of 65,000 people (0.1% of the UK’s population).
• Dedicate to the project sufficient wind turbines to generate the entire electricity usage of the 65,000 inhabitants over the course of a year, plus all the losses in hydrogen production and storage, probably 300 MW of capacity. The output from the wind turbines will supply the people's power needs and/or feed electrolyzers to produce hydrogen.
• Create a storage cavern big enough to store enough hydrogen to supply these people for two months in the event of wind drought, together with electrolyzers, pipelines, compressors and water purification.
• Build a modest-sized thermal power plant for burning the hydrogen (when needed) of about 60 MW nameplate capacity.

Once the system is operating, the sizes of its components can be adjusted as necessary, and its costs evaluated. Mr. Menton thinks that it will be too expensive and will cost billions of pounds. However, in the unlikely event that the system can supply electricity at a modest premium compared to the present one, then there can be a debate whether the premium is worth spending for the slight "climate" benefits.

 

2023-10-06

 

Reducing Emissions Will Cost. Governments Need to Admit That

The Canadian government is promoting a suite of policies (a combination of regulation, taxation and subsidies) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But these policies will cost Canadians directly and indirectly. The Royal Bank of Canada has produced this report that estimates the cost at around $2 trillion to reach Net Zero by 2050. This means spending $60 billion/year, or 4 times the current rate, to cut emissions by 75% from current levels, which is the limit achievable with current technologies. The RBC report identifies six pathways to Net Zero: electricity, oil & gas, buildings, transportation, heavy industry and agriculture. The report includes a pair of notable sentences: "The challenge is getting people to change. A low-carbon lifestyle can be more expensive, harder, and less convenient than the status quo.”

According to this article by Charles DeLand of the C.D. Howe Institute in the National Post virtually all governments in Canada and opposition parties twist themselves in knots to avoid saying that fighting climate change will cause economic pain. Mr. DeLand describes a government-funded dashboard that allows the user to select the costs of renewables, hydrogen or capturing carbon; the price of oil; and carbon offsets to calculate various outcomes. The dashboard makes it clear that doing more on climate will reduce economic growth, and Canada's economy is currently underperforming those of OECD peers.

 

Sunak’s Net Zero Climbdown

After a leak about possible softening of his government's net-zero pledge, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak held a hastily-arranged press conference on September 20 (22-minute video here) to announce that:

• (05:55) Britain is far ahead of every other country in the world in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and its citizens are being asked to sacrifice more than others, thereby risking losing consent of the British people.
• (07:10) The current debate is stuck between two extremes of those wanting to abandon net zero altogether because of its costs, and those who argue with an ideological zeal that we must go even faster and further, no matter what the cost or disruptions.
• (08:15) The government's long-standing plans to meet net zero by 2050 "did not meet the test "of being the "fairest credible path" to reach that goal "in a way that brings people with us" and would impose "unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families." These costs may not be necessary to deliver the emissions reductions needed.
• (11:10) For now, consumers, rather than government forcing them to do so, should determine whether to purchase electric vehicles. Therefore, the government will "ease the transition to electric vehicles" by allowing the sale of new gasoline and diesel-powered cars and vans until 2035 (instead of 2030). Buying and selling these vehicles second hand will continue after 2035.
• (13:05) The government will allow "far more time to make the necessary transition of heat pumps" by never forcing anyone to rip out their existing boiler and replace it with a heat pump. However, if the boiler is being replaced anyway it will be with a heat pump after 2035.
• (14:15) Plans to force homeowners to upgrade insulation will be scrapped, though subsidies will continue.

While Mr. Sunak insisted that the net zero target is still on, he was besieged from all sides, with business leaders, his own party's backbenchers and environmental campaigners calling for him to think again. Mr. Sunak was accused of trying to make net zero a wedge issue in next year's general election. The head of the UK's Climate Change Committee said that Mr. Sunak's announcement is likely to take the UK further away from its legal commitments for 2030, 2035 and 2050.

 

When Is a Climate Target "Legally Binding?"

This article in Internationale Politik Quarterly examines the question in the cases of Germany and the UK as these countries have enshrined climate targets into national law. (Climate targets submitted to global bodies, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, are legally binding only in theory, notwithstanding the UNFCCC website, as there is no authority to compel governments to act.

In 2019 Germany enacted its Climate Protection Law that enshrined the country's goal of net zero by 2050, with an interim one for 2030, also setting up an independent council of experts to assess measures to be taken in case of target failure. The country's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court, declared in 2021 that the 2029 law was incompatible with basic rights and ordered the government to strengthen the law, which the government did by setting annual emission budgets for each sector during the 2020s. This year, after public outcry over a proposed law demanding that homeowners replace their heating systems immediately, the coalition government weakened the law by gradually banning the installation of new fossil-fueled heating systems. As Germany's climate policy is embedded in EU law it may have to pay €30 billion to Brussels, but the German government is not going to fine itself for breaking German law, and is considering making ministers only politically, not legally, responsible.

The UK set its legally-binding emissions targets in 2008 in legislation (the Climate Change Act) that included its own expert council, the Climate Change Committee. The CCC announced last June declining confidence in the UK meeting its goals from 2030 onwards. With Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's recently-announced plans to delay bans on combustion-engined cars and gas boilers for heating, the emission targets are becoming out of reach. While the UK judicial system has put extra pressure on the government through a High Court ruling, it was only over a matter of reporting technicalities. It is still untested whether the Climate Change Act can force a reluctant government to accelerate its policy delivery. Also, there is nothing to stop a future Parliament from changing or repealing the Act itself.

As we approach target dates like 2030, it will become harder to make up for shortfalls, and "legally binding" national targets will be missed. Then governments will have to decide whether to ignore the target, change it, or — if their populations let them — impose drastic measures to achieve it.

 

The Elites Directing the Energy Transition Have No Idea What They Are Doing

According to the Manhattan Contrarian's Francis Menton the US federal government, essentially all of the country's colleges and universities, as well as every other elite institution, agree that we're on our way to Net Zero by 2050. The number one elitist organization, the World Economic Forum, is also on board. On September 5, the WEF published a report, How battery energy storage can power us to Net Zero, that caught Mr. Menton's attention because he knows something about energy storage, and he quickly noted some glaring errors.

The report's authors, all from the World Bank, apparently don't understand the distinction between GW (a measure or power, or energy flow) and GWh (a measure of energy), which the authors call "gigawatts per hour", a meaningless concept. GWh means 'gigawatt hour', the energy equal to that delivered at a rate of one gigawatt for one hour, not a gigawatt per hour. The report concludes, without any analysis or backup, that adding only 320 GWh of storage per year (80 GW of 4-hour standard batteries) from now to 2050 (a total of 8,960 GWh) will be enough for the whole world to meet Net Zero.

However, Mr. Menton's own energy storage report of December 2022 quoted from a report by Friends of Science director Ken Gregory that, for the US alone, it would take 233,000 GWh of battery storage to fully back up the electrical grid. If the world electrifies to the US level by 2050, the global total would be 5,825,000 GWh, or 650 times the WEF estimate.

 

DeSmog: Jordan Peterson Generates Millions of YouTube Hits for Climate Crisis Deniers

DeSmog is concerned about data that reveals "a massive visibility boost for public figures who’ve been active in the climate denial movement for years but whose ideas — such as the claim that plants are growing much better due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — are now rarely taken seriously by most legacy media outlets." People, whom DeSmog calls "climate crisis deniers" (Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Richard Lindzen, Alex Epstein and Bjørn Lomborg) were interviewed on Jordan Peterson's YouTube channel and collectively garnered five million views. To DeSmog’s dismay, Dr. Peterson's channel has 7.31 million subscribers, whereas the legacy media outlet New York Times has only 4.33 million.

Also of concern to DeSmog, climate scientists and disinformation experts, is that Dr. Peterson is planting doubt about the severity and urgency of global warming in the minds of younger generations. And he is now "in the process of putting real political power behind the climate crisis denial movement" via the newly founded Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (DeSmog link). Michael Mann considers Dr. Peterson " a central cog in the denial machine."

DeSmog takes YouTube's owner Google to task for not enforcing its policy prohibiting advertisements on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

 

African Climate Summit Pushes for Climate Action and Financing

The inaugural African Climate Summit concluded on September 8 with a declaration that will be the basis of Africa's common position at COP28 next November. While calling for urgent action by developed countries to reduce emissions, the declaration focuses on a new financing mechanism. It calls for a new global carbon tax on fossil fuel trade, maritime transport and aviation. This would be augmented by a global financial transaction tax "to provide dedicated affordable and accessible finance for climate positive investments at scale and ring fencing of these resources and decision making from geopolitical and national interests."

 

COP28 Boss' Appeal to Raise Climate Targets Met with Total Indifference

Last July in Brussels the UAE's Sultan Al Jaber, who will preside over COP28 in Dubai, laid out his plan for the COP to be "brutally honest about the gaps that need to be filled, the root causes and how we got to this place here today. Then we must apply a far-reaching, forward-looking, action-oriented and comprehensive response to address these gaps practically."

Two and a half months later Sultan Al Jaber's appeal has gone totally unanswered, as no country has updated its nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement, and so the gaps remain. Among the major emitters, European Union states last increased their NDCs in December 2020; the US, UK, Canada, Japan and China did so in 2021. The UAE is one of the very few nations to revise its NDC this year, limiting emissions to 182 MtCO2e by 2030, a 14% improvement compared to the previous target.

 

2023-09-07

 

How to Make Money out of Climate Anxiety

The Financial Post's Matthew Lau learned about the existence of something called the Climate Psychology Certificate program offered by the California Institute of Integral Studies. The program is delivered online over five weekends for a cost of $4,000 to $6,000 and aims to provide "psychological training and skills for therapists, healers, and allied professionals to address the growing mental health impacts of the climate emergency." These impacts include "eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and many expressions of climate-invoked dread."

Mr. Lau points out that the program is infused with politics and ideology, encourages activism and relates "climate distress" to racial oppression and gender bias. Rather than provoking more climate dread, he suggests reducing it by sharing statistics about falling deaths from floods, droughts, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures.

 

UN Seeks to Help Children Battling Climate Change in Court

On August 18 a UN body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), updated a key treaty designed to protect children's rights in order to strengthen their hand as plaintiffs in lawsuits seeking more government action on climate change. The document calls environmental degradation, including the climate crisis, "a form of structural violence against children" (s.35). Sections 82-90 (Access to justice and remedies) urge states to enhance children's access to justice in environmental matters including "removing barriers for children to initiate proceedings themselves" (s.83) and shifting the burden of proof from plaintiffs to establish causation (s.87).

In preparing the document the CRC consulted 16,000 children in over 100 countries. Lawyers representing six young Portuguese who are taking 32 countries before the European Court of Human Rights, think the document will strengthen their case. However, others like Greta Thunberg and the deputy director of Out Children's Trust (winners in the recent Held v. Montana decision [FoS Extracts 2023-08-24]) criticized the document for not being sufficiently ambitious.

 

US Offshore Wind Sector Faces Key Test after Weak Gulf Auction

The first ever auction of offshore wind development rights in the Gulf of Mexico attracted little interest, marking a potential setback for US President Joe Biden's green energy agenda. There was only a single bid of $5.6 million for 41,472 ha. Two other offered leases received no bids at all. Compared to the offshore US Northeast the Gulf of Mexico is less attractive as its waters are shallower, more congested, have lower wind speeds and face hurricane risks. Also, market prices for wind power are lower, thanks to state laws in New York and New Jersey that require utilities to buy certain amounts of power from offshore projects.

 

The Offshore Wind Industry’s Ignored Consequences: Whales in Peril

Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never, describes a documentary, Thrown to the Wind, about the increase in whale and other cetacean deaths off the US East Coast since 2016. While the US government officials say that the deaths are not due to the construction of offshore wind turbines, Mr. Shellenberger claims the film shows that the officials have been lying.

There appear to be two types of wind industry activities that are killing the whales. These are boat traffic in areas where there historically hasn't been traffic and high-decibel sonar mapping that can disorient whales, separate mothers from their calves, and send them into harm’s way, either into boat traffic or poorer feeding grounds.

The above link contains a one-minute trailer from the documentary. To see the full film, you must subscribe to Mr. Shellenberger's Twitter feed for a cost of $14/month.

 

Brussels Showdown Brews with Paris and Berlin over Lavish Energy Subsidies

After Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year the European Commission allowed member states to subsidize the energy sector to cushion industry from price spikes. Now the EC is pressing them to confirm that these subsidies will be phased out by December 31 as originally planned. However, neither France nor Germany, fearing loss of industrial competitiveness and departure of leading industries, wants to kill the subsidies. Over 2022 Germany represented 53% of the EU's €672 billion spent on subsidies, while France accounted for 24%. Both countries directly compete with the US Inflation Reduction Act that offers generous green subsidies and tax cuts.

In Germany the question of extending the industrial subsidies is under debate by the three-party governing coalition, while France is giving billions of euros of support to energy intensive industries and wants to enshrine the right to subsidize nuclear power stations. The Commission wants all member countries to respond to a survey on energy subsidies by September 15.

 

Memo to Trudeau: Higher Immigration Means More Greenhouse Gases

Two of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's signature policies are reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing Canada’s immigration levels — and they conflict with each other. Last year the country's population increased by one million, or 2.7%, the highest since 1957, which had 3.3%. The government is now boosting immigration targets: 465,000 this year, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025, arguing that we need more immigrants for economic growth because of our low domestic birth rate and aging population.

But rapid population growth means higher greenhouse gas emissions because of the increased economic activity needed to accommodate new immigrants. The ENGO Canadians for a Sustainable Society's website states "There is a direct link between immigration and sustainability." It notes that the recent addition of 10 million people, their three million housing units and six million cars have driven up CO₂ emissions and paved hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland.

Based on higher immigration levels 2030 greenhouse gas emissions will be 7.5% above what they would have been otherwise. The Trudeau government missed its 2020 emissions target of 17% below 2005 levels and has set a 2030 target of at least 40%, as well as net zero by 2050.

 

Bjørn Lomborg: Fearmongering over Forest Fires and Climate Change Isn't Rooted in Reality

During summer climate alarmism served up more stories of heat domes, fires, floods — all blamed on global warming, often with cherry picked data. But the media coverage fails to mention that temperature-driven deaths are overwhelmingly caused by cold. A Lancet study found that, in the US and Canada, 20,000 people die each year from heat, but 170,000 die from cold. Climate policy, by making energy more expensive, exacerbates the cold death rate.

Since NASA satellites started recording fires globally two decades ago, there's been a strong downward trend, but scarcely reported in the media. While fires this year burned much more in the Americas than over the past decade, it was much less so in Africa and Europe, except for Greece. The Global Wildfire Information System shows that all five regions (Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceana) the world has actually burned less than the average over the last decade. Cutting emissions is an ineffective way to prevent forest fires. Better forest management is cheaper and more effective.

Over the rest of this century global warming will cost only the equivalent of two recessions, so Mr. Lomborg says we should choose a middle pathway to reduce the damages at a reasonable cost.

 

Hot or Not: Steven Koonin Questions Conventional Climate Science and Methodology

On August 15 Steven Koonin, former undersecretary of science at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, gave a wide ranging discussion (video and excerpted transcript) based on his 2021 book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. Dr. Koonin is interviewed by Peter Robinson, a professor at New York University and fellow at the Hoover Institution. Among the topics discussed are:

• Distinguishing the actual science on climate from the alarming statements by political figures, in particular the detailed contents of IPCC reports written by scientists, compared to their Summaries for Policymakers written by governments.
• Media that has an agenda to promote alarm and induce governments to decarbonize.
• How warming of the planet decreases the number of extreme cold events and deaths therefrom.
• Climate models that are too sensitive to CO₂.
• Surging agricultural yields over the past century as the world has warmed.
• The effects of the January eruption of an underwater volcano near Tonga and the more recent El Niño’s effect on current world weather.
• Human adaptation as the world warmed 1.3°C since 1900.
• Building electrical grids supplied entirely by wind and solar.
• The immoral treatment of the developing world and scaring of the younger generation.

 

Three Reasons There’s Something Sinister with the Big Push for Electric Vehicles

US Congressman Thomas Massie, an electrical engineer, discussed with Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, President Biden’s plan to have 50% of cars sold in the US be electric by 2030. Mr. Massie revealed that, if the average US home adopted electric vehicles, the additional electricity consumption per household would be equivalent to 25 refrigerators. The current and future grid in most places will not be able to support such a load.

Journalist Nick Giambruno, referred to Mr. Massie's above discussion in this article in the International Man calling the notion of widespread adoption of EVs a "dangerous fantasy based on political science, not sound engineering." He then describes three reasons why EVs are a giant scam:

• They are not "green" as they do not reduce CO₂ emissions, but simply rearrange them.
• EVs can't compete without government support.
• EVs are about controlling you, as the vehicles collect an unimaginable amount of data (about 25 GB/hour). Governments want to know everything, keep you dependent, and have the ability to control everything, just like how a farmer would with his cattle. They think of you in similar terms.

 

Angry Londoners Damage over 300 “Low Emission” Surveillance Cameras

As Joanne Nova puts it, the war on the poor has become a war on surveillance cameras. The expansion of London’s ultra-low emissions zone will force more drivers to pay a draconian £12.50/day to drive their cars. People who own the cars affected (diesels older than 2015 and gasoline models older than 2006) tend to be the poorest. As many as 850,000 vehicles registered in London are not compliant. A chart of income deprivation and car ownership accompanying Ms. Nova’s story shows that, in Central London, 75% of the rich and poor don’t own a car. But in the outer zones only 20%-40% are carless.

There have been 339 official reports of damaged or missing ULEZ cameras that monitor traffic and detect non-compliant vehicles, but unofficial reports suggest the true number is closer to 500. Groups, apps and interactive maps are springing up to protest and map the locations of the cameras.

 

2023-08-24

 

Pushing Canada toward a Net-Zero Electricity Grid with a Stick instead of a Carrot

On August 10 the Canadian government released its draft Clean Electricity Regulations covering the 16% of Canada's electricity production that currently doesn't come from hydroelectricity, solar, wind, and nuclear. To achieve a net zero emissions economy by 2050 the accompanying press release estimates that electricity supply will have to double by then and that a clean electricity grid "will be the backbone of a prosperous, low-carbon future." Under the draft regulations January 1, 2035 marks the start of prohibited operation of any power plant emitting more than 30 tonnes of CO₂ per GWh of electricity or burns coal. Natural gas-fired generators have prescribed life of 20 years, with no new unabated plants after 2025. There are exemptions for emergency operations and units with carbon capture, utilization and storage.

Writing in the National Post columnist Jamie Sarkonak comments:

• The draft regulations are designed to move Canada toward a net-zero electricity grid with a stick instead of a carrot. That's because the penalties for non-compliance would be enforced under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, with corporate penalties of up to $12 million and three years in jail for individuals associated with the offending corporations.
• The cost of the transition process is $54 billion, and a cost-benefit analysis shows positive returns stating in 2036. However, the benefits assume "new investments in the development and deployment of emerging technologies such as (carbon capture and storage), energy storage and (small modular rectors)."
• The CER would especially affect certain regions of Canada, such as Nunavut (100% fossil fuel generated electricity), Alberta (85%), Nova Scotia (79%) and Saskatchewan (78%). The premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Manitoba declared the new rules unconstitutional (since electricity generation is provincially regulated) and/or the 2035 target impossible to meet.

Another National Post columnist Rahim Mohamed writes that the government should prioritize grid reliability and resilience, rather than virtue signaling with the proposed CER. Joe Oliver, a former federal minister of natural resources and of finance, points out that the two militant ministers responsible (ministers of Environment and Natural Resources) put out a backgrounder stating: "Climate scientists are unequivocally telling us that we must drastically reduce our emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero by 2050 if we are to leave a habitable world to our children." Mr. Oliver then describes prominent scientists that refute the backgrounder statement. In the UK and other Western European countries voters are pressuring governments to abandon green policies or face defeat.

 

Canada's Environment Minister Exposed as China Government Adviser

The Toronto Sun broke the story about Steven Guilbeault having another job in addition to being Canada's environment minister. Mr. Guilbeault is the Executive Vice Chairperson of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), an organization of the Ministry of Environment and Ecology for the Government of China. The chair of the organization is First Vice Premier for the Peoples Republic of China, Ding Xuexiang. In effect, Mr. Guilbeault is both a Canadian cabinet minister and an adviser to China's government. This is the same government that interfered in the last two Canadian federal elections, and kidnapped and imprisoned two Canadians and has a terrible human rights record. The Sun contacted the Canadian Prime Minister's office, but they had no comment.

Mr. Guilbeault will be in Beijing August 26-31 to attend a meeting of the CCICED. In an interview with the National Observer he said: "Maybe some [political opponents] will try and attack me. I am clearly a lightning rod for some of them, but I think Canadians in general will understand how important it is. We can't solve climate change, you can't solve the international biodiversity issue, without working with countries like China."

 

Kids Win Climate Change Lawsuit in Montana

Friends of Science's June 2023 Newsletter described the Held v. Montana lawsuit in which 16 Montana youth, represented by the Children's Trust, assert climate change-based claims against the State of Montana. The state lawyers initially retained Judith Curry as an expert witness to rebut the plaintiffs' scientific evidence, but then chose not to use Dr. Curry and argue only on a point of law. On August 14 the lawyers had cause to regret that choice when the trial judge, according to a Children's Trust press release, accepted the plaintiffs' unchallenged evidence and awarded a "sweeping constitutional win" in their favour. The press release lists ten highlights from the judge's decision that likely will form precedents for similar climate litigation in the future. One interesting finding in the decision is that all Montana's fossil fuel energy use can be technically and economically replaced by wind, water, and sunlight, "the cheapest and most efficient form of energy," as early as 2035 (p.81).

An NBC News report on the court ruling says that it's up to the Montana legislature how to bring policy into compliance as the judge's ruling (pp.101-103 or the decision) strikes down some existing legislation, but contains nothing in the form of prescriptive actions by the state government. A spokeswoman for Montana's attorney general said: "This ruling is absurd, but not surprising from a judge who let the plaintiffs’ attorneys put on a weeklong taxpayer-funded publicity stunt that was supposed to be a trial. Montanans can’t be blamed for changing the climate — even the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses agreed that our state has no impact on the global climate. Their same legal theory has been thrown out of federal court and courts in more than a dozen states. It should have been here as well, but they found an ideological judge who bent over backward to allow the case to move forward and earn herself a spot in their next documentary." The AG's office plans to appeal.

Francis Menton writing in the Manhattan Contrarian has a suggestion for Montana's government on how to proceed: select one of the state's cities (a liberal one) as a guinea pig; build a bunch of wind turbines and solar panels; prohibit access to fossil fuel-powered back-up power (batteries are OK); impose the full cost of the new electricity system on residents; ban internal-combustion vehicles and require conversion of oil and natural gas heat to electric.

 

Canceling Skeptical Scientists Is the Real “Climate Crisis”

Nobel Laureate Dr. John Clauser was scheduled to give a Webex speech titled How Much Can We Trust IPCC Climate Predictions? for the International Monetary Fund's Independent Evaluation Office on July 25. Five days before the event the IEO informed Dr. Clauser that his speech had been "postponed" and is yet to be rescheduled. Gregory Wrightstone, executive director of the CO₂ Coalition, where Dr. Clauser sits on the board of directors, told the Daily Signal: "The postponement of Dr. John Clauser’s presentation to the IMF concerning climate models and their use is troubling, but not surprising. Any scientific information that differs from the ‘consensus’ opinion of man-made catastrophic warming continues to be systematically suppressed."

Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, wrote about the cancellation in a PJ Media article. He notes that Dr. Clauser had previously:

• Criticized awarding the Nobel Prize for the development of climate models that predicted global warming, as these models ignore the significant feedback of clouds on the climate system.
• Stated that the climate change narrative is “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.” 
• Gave a 2023 speech in Seoul where he said: "If you’re doing good science, it may lead you into politically incorrect areas.”

For Mr. Harris, cancelling experts like Dr. Clauser is the real climate crisis, not climate change.

 

Calling Climate Sceptics "Climate Deniers" Is an Admission You’ve Lost the Argument

Robert Lyman explains why the insult "climate denier" is completely misplaced as well as misinformed. People using the insult are generally advocates of government action to eliminate human-caused greenhouse gas emissions because they believe such emissions, unless sharply reduced, will cause catastrophic global warming. To believe this one would have to accept a list of 30 scientific and economic/technology arguments that Mr. Lyman provides in question form.

The "denier" insult boils all these questions down to a single issue of whether one believes that human GHG emissions are harmful and should be reduced, thus grossly over-simplifying the issue. It thus demonstrates the ignorance of the person hurling the insult and appeals to others who share this ignorance. It also attempts to shut down discussion.

 

Maui's Wildfires

After the tragic wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui the state's Governor, Josh Green, stated that climate change is "the ultimate reason that so many people perished." However, the following list of actions and green policy decisions appear to have played a major role:

• For years government agencies were aware that high concentrations of non-native invasive grasses in Western Maui made it particularly susceptible to wildfires.
• According to NBC News: "Wildfire experts in Hawaii warned for years that overgrown grasses put communities like Lahaina at extreme risk for wildfire destruction, but officials struggled to fund projects and introduce policies used elsewhere in the country to reduce danger."
• The Wall Street Journal reported that, after the 2019 wildfire season Hawaiian Electric concluded that it needed to do far more to prevent its power lines from emitting sparks. However, the utility, which relies on petroleum for most of its energy supply was also preoccupied with meeting a legislative mandate to derive 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045.
• Even The Economist admits that local topography, land-use change and invasive plants were more to blame for the fire than climate change.

When President Joe Biden made a belated visit to Maui on August 21 he didn't mention "climate" once in his speech.

 

2023-08-08

 

Global Boiling?

Brendan O'Neill, Spiked's chief political writer, reacts to UN Secretary-General António Guterres' announcement that the "hottest July ever" signals that "the era of global boiling has arrived." Mr. Guterres referred to the UN's Climate Ambition Summit (September 20 in New York) and COP28 (November 30 - December 12 in Dubai) where world leaders "must step up for climate action and climate justice." Media such as The Guardian, the Independent and VOA News obsequiously picked up the "boiling" story and Mr. Guterres' alarmist messages. The Washington Post's story was more nuanced and included quotes from selected scientists, one of whom said that global boiling departs from the underlying scientific evidence.

Mr. O'Neill cites other reasons to be skeptical of the boiling hysteria as historically there have been heatwaves in Europe and cold weather kills more people than hot. The use of "boiling" is another example of ramping up the green politics of fear and emotional manipulation.

 

In the Grip of Climate Change Catastrophism

Joe Oliver was Canada's minister of natural resources (June 2011 - March 2014) and minister of finance (March 2014 - October 2015). In a Financial Post article he argues that the climate change movement is a powerful cultural entity. It is one with a core narrative — that human GHG emissions have created a climate emergency that calls for urgent and extraordinary action, without which the consequences for humanity will be catastrophic. Like a religion the faithful are reassured by groupthink, while "deniers" are vilified, penalized, and ostracized. The movement has its high priests and priestesses: Al Gore, Justin Trudeau, Greta Thunberg, King Charles and Mark Carney, none of whom is a scientist. Mr. Oliver predicts that when people must choose between food and heat, and when the poorest countries cannot afford the energy to raise themselves up, then people's beliefs may eventually change.

In his article Mr. Oliver refers to a new book, The Grip of Culture - The Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism, by Andy A. West from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (book available for purchase on Amazon and as a free pdf download.) The book is about the social psychology associated with climate change. As such, it deals with neither the physical climate system and its future physical state, nor differences in opinion among climate scientists. Mr. West believes that the societal changes brought about by climate catastrophism are not the result of a hoax or conspiracy but are instead a function of normal emotive reactions deep within our subconscious. His best hope for taming the culture is through adversity (p.311), such as when the constraints of Net Zero become increasingly onerous.

 

Judith Curry: How Climate “Science” Got Hijacked by Alarmists

In a 7-minute video interview Dr. Curry describes how she once spread alarm about climate change and was feted by the media and advocacy groups for doing so. When criticized for errors in her data Dr. Curry had another look and changed her conclusions. She explains the origins of climate science corruption, as evidenced by the Climategate email scandal, go back to the 1980s with the inauguration of the anti-oil UN Environmental Program. Then the IPCC was set up to look at the risk of dangerous human-induced climate change. National funding agencies announced offers of funding that were tied to assuming dangerous impacts from burning fossil fuels. Scientific journals refused to publish anything that contradicted the manufactured consensus.

When Dr. Curry concluded that fossil fuels weren’t so terrible, her position as department chair at Georgia Tech became uncomfortable, so she looked for work elsewhere, eventually setting up her private weather forecasting service.

 

UK Byelections Force Politicians to Rethink Climate Policy

On July 20 there were three UK byelections, with the governing Conservative Party suffering two defeats for seats that they previously held and narrowly winning the third one in Uxbridge. The latter was a safe Conservative seat formerly held by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but which Labour was expected to win this time. The byelection result has put pressure on the leaders of both the Conservatives (Prime Minister Rishi Sunak) and opposition Labour Party (Sir Keir Starmer) to reconsider their green agendas.

Expansion of London's ultra-low emission zone was blamed for Labour's loss in Uxbridge, which will be included in the ULEZ’s August expansion. The chief promoter of the ULEZ (where cars and motorcycles that don't meet emissions standards need to pay a £12.50 daily charge to drive within the zone 24/7) is London's Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan. The day after the byelections Sir Keir warned that his party must "learn the lesson" of the Uxbridge defeat and called on the London Mayor to "reflect" on his plans to expand the ULEZ. Despite the warning from his party leader, Mr. Khan is determined to go ahead with the ULEZ expansion.

On the Conservative side, MPs have pointed to their unexpected win in Uxbridge, where they campaigned against the ULEZ expansion, as proof that Mr. Sunak should scale back the government's net zero plans. While Mr. Sunak ducked questions about whether he remains committed to his government's 2030 ban on new gasoline and diesel cars (which is unique to the UK), his office confirmed that it is looking again at the green pledges in light of their unpopularity, thereby raising the prospect that they could be ditched before the next election.

 

Britain Commits to North Sea Oil and Gas Licences

On July 31 British PM Rishi Sunak confirmed plans to issue more than 100 licences for extraction of oil and gas from the North Sea and indicated that hundreds more could come in the future. He also announced support for two carbon capture and storage clusters in Scotland and Northern England, the first such projects in the UK. Even though Britain is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, Mr. Sunak said that the country will still be getting more than a quarter of its energy from oil and gas.

 

Unsold Electric Cars May Be Signaling a Death Spiral for the Auto Industry

The last edition [2023-07-25] of FoS Extracts contained articles about repair of electric vehicles and customer reluctance towards buying them. Here, Ronald Stein of the Heartland Institute wonders whether growing inventories of unsold EVs may be signalling a death spiral for the auto industry as manufacturers go all-in to make only EVs in the coming years. First, he lists 11 buyer concerns regarding EVs, but omitting their more rapid depreciation compared to ICE vehicles. Current EV buyers tend to be highly educated, well-off, in multi-vehicle families and use their EV as a low-mileage second car. However, most car owners buy used vehicles: in 2022 there were 13.8 million new light-vehicle sales in the US, compared to 38.6 million used ones.

Electricity supply is an issue for EVs. In the US California has 40% of the country's total and imports more electricity than any other US state. In the UK home chargers must be "smart" ones connected to the internet with nine hours of downtime each day and the ability of authorities to impose randomized delays of 30 minutes on individual chargers.

 

"Incredible Job": John Kerry Praises China for Using More Slave Labor-Made Green Energy

During a visit to Beijing US Climate Envoy John Kerry heaped praise on the Chinese Communist Party’s green energy initiatives, in particular its solar panel manufacturing. Since June 2022 US customs officers have been enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act that bans imports from the Xinjiang region, due to the alleged forced labor of Uyghur Muslims. The law presumes that all products, including solar panels, from Xinjiang are produced using forced labor; thus, imports are prohibited unless vendors can provide proof to the contrary.

While Mr. Kerry was in Beijing Chinese President Xi Jinping held a two-day "national conference on ecological and environmental protection" without inviting his American guest. Mr. Kerry limped out of Beijing having succeeded "in having long and detailed meetings" without any sort of climate agreement.

 

US States Reconsider: The Folly of Fear-Driven Climate Policies

Governors Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Joe Lombardo of Nevada are prioritizing the well-being of their citizens and the unique needs of their states over ill-founded climate alarmism. In Virginia, Governor Youngkin recently concluded a review of new regulations, bringing the state closer to withdrawing from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative by the end of the year. The RGGI is a 12-state pact that forces electricity producers to buy allowances for CO₂ emissions. Mr. Youngkin refers to the cost of the allowances as a “hidden tax” and seeks to shield Virginians from such unnecessary financial burdens.

In Nevada, Governor Lombardo withdrew his state from the 25-member US Climate Alliance. Mr. Lombardo said: " … the goals of the alliance are “ambitious and well-intentioned” but that they “conflict with Nevada’s energy policy objectives.”

 

Germany - Big and Middle Size Companies Leaving Renewables Paradise

A November 2020 article by Vaclav Smil in the IEEE Spectrum examines a 20-year (2000 - 2019) history of Germany's policy experiment with renewable (wind + solar) energy, called the Energiewende. The experiment's results:

• Renewable share of electricity production increased from 6.6% to 41.1%.
• In 2000 Germany's installed generating capacity of 121 GW produced 577 TWh of energy (54% capacity factor). In 2019 it had 80% more capacity at 218 GW, which produced 607 TWh, only 5% more than in 2019. The country now has two generating systems and needs to keep the old system running as backup for the new one.
• The new system (intermittent wind and solar) accounted for 110 GW of capacity (50% of the total) in 2019 but operated at a capacity factor of 20% (only 10% for solar as Germany is a cloudy country.)
• The average cost of electricity for German households has doubled, to US$0.34/kWh in 2019, compared to US$0.22/kWh in France and US$0.13/kWh in the US.
• In 2000 Germany derived 84% of its primary energy from fossil fuels, and this share fell to 78% in 2019. During the same 20-year period the US reduced fossil-fuels' share for primary energy from 86% to 80%, without the expensive, target-mandated Energiewende.

Joanne Nova considers Germany's experiment to be a lesson for the rest of the world as the former economic powerhouse of Europe loses iconic parts of its industries to the US and Asia. The historic BASF company, the world's largest chemical producer, is spending $10 billion on a new plant in China. The industrial gas giant Linde is now headquartered in Ireland. A recent poll of 128 German auto suppliers found that none planned to increase investment at home, and more than a quarter planned to shift operations abroad.

 

2023-07-25

 

King Charles’ Climate Clock

It did not take long for the new King to get involved in political matters. In late June he and London Mayor Sadiq Khan started a National Climate Clock showing the amount of time left to hold global warming to 1.5°C — 6 years and 24 days. Previously he had issued 10-year, 18-month, 100-month and 35-year tipping points.

In its last financial year the King's crown estate made £443 million in profits, thanks in large part to payments from renewable energy companies for the right to access the seabed. It has just signed leases for six more offshore wind projects. The scale of the estate’s renewable energy windfall has delayed a decision by the prime minister and the chancellor on what proportion of its wealth should be shared with the King.

 

UN Climate Alliance Scraps Emissions Rules for Insurers after Exodus

The Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, a UN-convened climate alliance for insurers and part of Mark Carney's Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, was launched in 2021. By the end of May seven members of the NZIA, including at least five of the eight founding signatories, had left the alliance. The cause of their departures was growing political opposition in the US, where 23 state attorney generals said that the group's targets and requirement appeared to violate both federal and state antitrust laws. They also accused insurers of collaborative action "to advance an activist climate agenda" which was having "serious detrimental effects" on the residents of their states.

In July, the NZIA ditched all requirements for members to set or publish greenhouse gas emission-reduction targets, according to a statement issued by the UN Environmental Program: "Going forward, NZIA member companies have no obligation to set or publish targets: rather, individual member companies will be responsible and publicly accountable for any targets they set, the methodologies used to set them, the timeline on which they decide to publish any targets, and the progress they are making."

 

The Automobile Industry Does Not Know How to Repair EV Batteries

Thatcham Research, funded by the UK Government’s innovation agency, has produced a report titled Impact of BEV Adoption on the Repair and Insurance Sectors. The report highlights differences in the insurance claims processes when repairing a battery-electric vehicle (BEV) versus an internal-combustion engine (ICE) equivalent. Some of the report's findings, which will add to insurance premiums for BEVs:

• BEV incident claims are currently 25.5% more expensive than their ICE equivalents and can take 14% longer to repair.
• In 2022, 9,400 vehicles were potentially involved in collisions resulting in battery inclusion in the repair. By 2035, the number is estimated to reach 260,000 vehicles a year.
• The cost to replace the battery in a BEV varies from £14,200 to £29,500.
• Due to fire risk, government regulations require damaged BEVs awaiting repair to be stored in an outside quarantine area 15 m from other nearby objects. This means that an outside storage space sufficient for 100 ICE vehicles could safely quarantine only two BEVs.
• Much of the insurance industry has yet to adapt to BEV technology, so many BEVs are deemed irreparable, leading to premature write-offs.
• The depreciation curve of battery cost versus average used value shows that the cost of a replacement battery is more than the used price of the vehicle after only one year.

This essay from What's Up With That? features a  video by a YouTube blogger named Geoff Buys Cars reading excerpts from the report with witty comments on "planet-saving" BEVs.

 

“Strong Customer Reluctance” in the Electric Vehicle Sector

While production of its combustion-engine vehicles like the Passat continues unchanged, Volkswagen is scaling back EV manufacturing because demand for electrics is 30% below original plans. Manfred Wulff, head of the works council at VW's Emden plant said: "We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector." The minister of state for Lower Saxony, Olaf Lies, referred to a dip in demand for EVs across all manufacturers and called for more incentives for their purchase, including a reduction in the value-added tax.

A Watts Up With That? posting on the VW story features another video on EVs by Geoff Buys Cars. First, he comments on Volkswagen's EV production cutback and then compares the "shocking" economics of two used VW cars: a gasoline-powered Golf and an electric-powered ID3. Both of them are five-door compact hatchbacks, two years old, with similar resale values in Auto Trader of £18,800 for the Golf and £18,500 for the ID3. Their mileages are also similar: 39,000 miles for the Golf and 37,700 for the ID3. However, the Golf cost £23,300 new, while the ID3's original cost was £37,715. Thus, over two years the Golf depreciated £4,500 (19%), while the ID3 depreciated £19,215 (51%). This massive difference far outweighs the Golf's higher running costs (£540 in road tax and £5,320 in fuel, and assuming that the ID3 pays no road tax and gets free charging.)

Germany is not the only market experiencing EV woes. The US electric vehicle market is growing, but not fast enough to prevent EVs from stacking up (with ~90 days’ worth of inventory) at some automakers' dealerships. This could signal that boosting sales above the current 7% market share will be more costly and difficult than expected, even with federal and state subsidies. More than 90 new EV models are expected to hit the US market through 2026, and many will struggle to reach profitable sales volumes.

An Issues & Insights article on EV manufacturers' difficulties in selling their products (except for Tesla and China's BYD. Co.) wonders if we have reached peak virtue signaling with EVs. I&I calls them "rolling megaphones for the upper-middle class and upper-class white Democrats and progressives" who want to be seen as saving the planet. A Washington Free Beacon story refers to a Manhattan Institute report that driving an electric vehicle instead of a gasoline-powered one could lead to a net increase in emissions.

 

US Refuses Climate Reparations for Developing Nations

Climate envoy John Kerry, in a Congressional hearing, said that the US will not "under any circumstances" pay reparations to developing countries hit by climate-related disasters. At last year's COP27 in Egypt more than 200 countries agreed to create a loss and damage fund, to be financed by developed nations. This agreement was billed as one of the major successes of the summit.

 

The White House Tells the Truth about Climate Change

The White House accidentally let some facts slip through the net ol alarmism. These appeared in a white paper of March 13 by the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget and caught the attention of Steven Koonin, who wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal. The first graph in the white paper (p.4) displays 12 independent peer-reviewed estimates of how US GDP would potentially decline due to rising global temperatures. Based on the current rise in mean global temperature since pre-industrial of 2.2°F (1.2°C), ten of the estimates show a GDP reduction of less than 0.5%. Since 1950 US GDP has grown 800% in real terms.

Even under the IPCC's projected 4.5°F (2.5°C) increase by 2100, the white paper's consensus predicts a GDP reduction of less than 2%. With a modest GDP rise of 1.5%/year meaning over 200% net growth by 2100, any reduction caused by rising temperatures will get lost in the noise. However, the kicker is that the white paper omits America's ability to adapt and even flourish under changing climate conditions, as witnessed by the country's experience since 1900.

 

EU "Climate Pope" Timmermans to Run for Dutch PM in November Elections

The EU's climate change and environmental commissioner, Franz Timmermans, has announced that he will be resigning his post in a bid to lead the newly-merged Dutch Labour and Green parties in the Netherlands' national election next November. Mr. Timmermans was a mastermind of the EU's Green Deal, which seeks to make the bloc climate neutral and earned him the nickname "Climate Pope." Mr. Timmermans was also a major backer of the EU’s Nature Restoration Law, under which 30% of the land in Europe will be designated as environmentally protected and will likely have a massive impact on farmers. This led to the creation of the Farmer Citizen Movement in the Netherlands to counter nitrogen emission legislation and address the concerns of farmers and other citizens.

Reaction to the announcement was mixed. Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini welcomed the news, saying "We will not miss him. This man has done so much damage. We hope that the Dutch voters will treat him as he deserves." Dutch political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek said: "If Timmermans becomes our new prime minister, I sincerely believe it will be the final blow for the Netherlands. The man is the literal personification of globalism and champagne socialism, and he is now clearly aiming to becoming prime minister of the Netherlands; which—ironically—is a country he fundamentally aims to destroy."

 

UK and Scandinavian Governments Fund Campaign to Rewrite Climate Science Entries on Wikipedia

According to a Daily Sceptic story governments from Scandinavia and the UK are funding a major rewriting of Wikipedia pages that are skeptical of the "settled" climate narrative. The operation is under the aegis of the Stockholm Environment Institute in a project titled Improving communication of climate knowledge through Wikipedia. The project, according its website, "selects relevant Wikipedia articles dealing with climate change topics that have significant daily pageviews and at the same time require updating and improvement in content and quality. The project team scores the quality of these Wikipedia articles at the start and at the end of the project using ten quality parameters. We also interact with published experts who advise us on necessary content edits."

The Daily Sceptic article discusses the biases of some of the SEI project's "content experts" and the SEI's connections with the UN and the IPCC.

 

Norway Invests $18B In Fossil Fuels after Trudeau Asked Them to Join His Latest Green Scheme

Just two days after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invited Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr to join Canada's Global Carbon Pricing Challenge, Norway announced an $18 billion investment in oil and natural gas projects. The GCPC is an effort to get countries worldwide to adopt CO₂ pricing to reduce emissions by 2030. In Norway two environmental groups reacted to the announcement by threatening to sue the state for violating the country's human rights commitments and constitution.

 

Record Renewables Growth Fails to Reduce Global Fossil Fuel Share

This month the Energy Institute, with partners KPMG and Kearney, released the 72nd Statistical Review of World Energy (formerly the BP Statistical Review of World Energy). According to a Business Day article on the report, record-high increases in solar and wind installations in 2022 failed to reduce the 82% share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption. Also, emissions rose to a record last year (p.3). The Energy Institute's President, Juliet Davenport said: "Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again. We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement."

 

2023-07-06

 

And the Workers Shall Not Own Cars

In May the Global New Mobility Coalition and the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Visa, issued a 21-page briefing paper, The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility. The forward to the paper states (p.3): "The cities of the future need to move more people with fewer, cleaner vehicles. Investment in electrification, public transport and shared mobility is the solution." By "fewer" vehicles the authors explain (p.4) that they want to reduce vehicles from a potential 2.1 billion in 2050 to 0.5 billion (there are 1.5 billion today), a 75% reduction.

This vehicular reduction caught the attention of Joanne Nova, who predicts that it won't be the WEF billionaires giving up their cars and private jets. And while the Scorecard is not a tool for creating a future that voters want, it will help bully bureaucrats into doing what the WEF wants. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial, The World Economic Forum Is Coming for Your Cars (paywalled but summarized by Climate Change Dispatch) noting that people prefer owning cars because they give unparalleled mobility (compared to public transport) and most are powered by fossil fuels because they offer better performance and value. The WSJ suggests the WEF set an example by banning private jets at its gatherings.

 

Net Zero’s March to Impoverishment: How Is Lower GDP an "Opportunity"?

Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, Johnathon Wilkinson said: "Canada faces a choice: we can either lead in seizing the historic economic opportunities associated with building a global net-zero economy, or we can let them pass us by, with all the attendant consequences of being a late mover. I strongly believe that Canada must lead: we must build a net-zero economy." In the Financial Post writer Matthew Lau asks what are these "historic economic opportunities"? According to the Canadian Energy Regulator's projections out to 2050, net-zero policies would cut the growth of Canada's per-capital GDP by 20-40%. Cumulative consumer price index growth over 2022-50 is projected at 83-87%, compared to 79% in the baseline scenario.

Moreover, the CER's report assumes declining costs for key technologies such as EVs, heat pumps, electrolyzers and direct air capture. If these don't occur, achieving net zero by 2050 "would be more costly and involve lower economic growth than shown here."

Mr. Lau juxtaposes the high costs of net zero with the estimated costs of climate change itself, noting that a 2019 Moody's report estimated that warmer temperatures and climate change would actually increase GDP growth in Canada to 2050. Last year Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that climate change would cut annual GDP growth to 2050 by 0.06 percentage points. Since the government-led campaign for net-zero emissions will materially reduce Canadians’ incomes and standards of living, advertising it as a "historic economic opportunity" is a pack of lies.

 

Aussie, Canada and NZ Climate Ministers: Send Money

Climate change ministers Chris Bowen of Australia, Steven Guilbeault of Canada and James Shaw of New Zealand wrote an article for The Guardian calling on multilateral banks to offer "concessional finance" to vulnerable nations, particularly those in the Pacific and small island states. The authors say the world needs a global financial architecture that "helps address the existential threat of climate change, while supporting countries’ development ambitions, responding to the millions slipping back into poverty and maintaining stability in the global financial system."

As Eric Worrall comments in Watts Up With That?: "If addressing the climate crisis requires a complete redesign of the global financial system and massive subsidies from financial institutions, presumably underwritten by US taxpayers, as Bretton Woods was, then claims green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels are trash."

 

European Aviation Faces a €820 billion Tab to Reach Net Zero

Europe's aviation sector initially supported the EU's ambitious blueprint for sustainable growth, creating its own initiative in 2021, called Destination 2050. The latter would have flights within and departing from EU states, the UK and EFTA countries realize net zero CO₂ emissions by 2050. However, recent EU initiatives, like its Green Deal, the "Fit for 55" package (curbing emissions 55% below 1990 levels by 2030), and mandates for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), are giving the aviation sector cause for concern. SAF is a product that doesn't exist, but there are blending mandates for it, though no EU incentives for its production. There is fear, that while the EU focuses on mandates, the US Inflation Reduction Act's program of incentives will drive production of products like SAF away from Europe to North America.

A study on expenditures needed to reach net zero by 2050 found that the  premiums paid towards new aircraft technologies, air traffic management, SAF and negative emissions would amount to €820 billion over the 32-year period. The European Parliament's transport committee commissioned a report that found implementing the Fit for 55 measures would lead to a 10% drop in demand for flights within the European Economic Area and 1.4% reduction for flights beyond the EEA.

 

Siemens' Wind Turbine Problems

On June 23, the stock price of Siemens Energy plunged 37% following a company warning that quality problems at its Siemens Gamesa wind turbine unit will take years to fix. It will cost more that €1 billion to fix flaws in rotor blades and bearings that could cause damage ranging from small cracks to component failures that would need to be replaced. The creaky components affect 15%-30% of the company's installed onshore fleet, with a total capacity of 132 GW. Siemens expects to have a more accurate estimate of costs in August.

Joanne Nova comments that wind turbines were supposed to keep getting cheaper as they got bigger. Now that issues appear even in new installations, people are wondering if the turbines are getting too big too fast. Watts Up With That's Charles Rotter writes that Siemens' problems show the perils of massive government subsidies being funneled to a new energy technology to address a problem whose magnitude and urgency are debatable.

 

How Eco-Journalists promote the "Weather Is Climate" Scam

Net Zero Watch's David Whitehouse describes how journalists have been confusing weather and climate predictions since 2008, when the New Scientist asked "What's going to happen to the climate over the next ten years or so?" — even though climate change is considered to be a 30-year phenomenon. During the 2010s Michael Mann, Bill McKibben, the UK Met Office, and others made short-term "climate" forecasts that didn't happen. Climate journalists habitually report contradictory numbers, predictions, and statements without ever scrutinising them.

In this, climate journalists are guided by the Covering Climate Now website, which provides helpful articles on best practices in climate reporting, including denying a platform to "deniers" who are essentially anyone who disagree with them. They have over 500 news affiliates, including the Columbia Journalism Review, CBS, NBC, The Guardian, Nature, and Scientific American.

The website approvingly reports how the French national public broadcaster, France Télévisions, produces a nightly "weather-and-climate journal." So that viewers are left in no doubt that global warming is mainly caused by burning fossil fuels, the channel displays the precise amount by which today’s average global temperature exceeds that of the pre-industrial era, calculated to eight decimal places — something that Mr. Whitehouse calls a scientific absurdity.

 

Big Ethanol vs. Electric Vehicles

These days in Washington there is an industrial-policy competition between the climate and ethanol lobbies. In June the Environmental Protection Agency published renewable fuel standards for 2023-25 dictating how much ethanol and other biofuels must be blended into the US fuel supply. If refiners don't meet their quotas, they have to buy credits, which raises the price of gasoline. However, the EPA projected lower than expected gasoline demand and therefore decided not to increase mandated volume of ethanol, which angered corn farmers and ethanol producers.

The reason for the EPA's lowered forecast of gasoline demand: electric vehicle mandates and subsidies that are more generous than those for ethanol. The agency tried to placate the ethanol lobby by shelving a proposal to let EV makers qualify for renewable fuel credit, which infuriated the greens. In fact biofuel subsidies contribute to rising food and fuel prices, while increasing GHG emissions.

 

A Comprehensive Critique of the IEA's Net Zero Fantasies

In May 2021 the International Energy Agency published a report, Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector, advocating "nothing short of a total transformation of the energy systems that underpin our economies" to reach net zero by 2050 and limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5°C. Among the milestones needed to achieve this outcome: no new oil and gas fields, or coal mines, approved for development after 2021 (p.20).

The Manhattan Contrarian's Francis Menton calls the IEA report yet another example of a bureaucracy gone completely nuts, especially since the IEA started out in the 1970s as a consortium of Western nations to counteract the oil price shocks of that decade. In June another group, the Energy Policy Research Foundation, which has been around since 1944, produced its own counter report, A Critical Assessment of the IEA's Net Zero, ESG, and the Cessation of Investment in New Oil and Gas Fields.

The EPRF found that that the fundamental assumption behind the IEA's net zero roadmap is that the plunging cost of wind and solar will destroy demand for oil and gas, without any need for a government-forced energy transition. Without this assumption the IEA's roadmap goes up in smoke. The EPRF report shows that the IEA's own analysis contradicts the assumption on the economic superiority of renewable energy.

 

2023-06-13

 

Cracks Emerging in Europe’s United Front to Battle Climate Change

Since 2019, when Ursula von der Leyen became president of the European Commission, environmental policies such as "climate neutrality" by 2050 have topped the EU agenda. But in recent months cracks in the European united front against climate change have emerged.

• Germany delayed a deal to ban the sale of new car with combustion engines from 2035, after initially failing to get assurances from the bloc’s executive for an exemption on synthetic fuels.
• France's President Emmanuel Macron has been particularly concerned by US legislation that benefits electric vehicles and other products made in North America, to the detriment of European manufacturers. He wants a pause on environmental constraints that would help EU businesses keep producing on home soil, despite competition from countries such as China that have lower environmental standards.
• Belgian Prime minister Alexander De Croo called for a moratorium on the introduction of EU legislation aimed at nature preservation, creating a rift within the governing coalition including green politicians. Mr. De Croo and allies in the European Parliament have asked the European Commission to withdraw the nature restoration law proposal on grounds that it will threaten agriculture and undermine food security in Europe. Frans Timmermans, the EU Commission's top climate official opposed this initiative saying: "You can’t say I support the Green Deal, but not the ambition to restore nature. It’s not ‘à la carte menu.’"
• Italy's nationalist government is leading the revolt against European Union plans to tighten vehicle emissions limits, vowing to defend the automotive industry in a country still attached to the combustion engine.
• France’s Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, brought together her counterparts from member countries of the Nuclear Alliance on 16 May at the Ministry for Energy Transition. Other EU countries slammed France for taking renewables legislation "hostage" unless the EU recognized some role for atomic energy.

 

Climate Protestors Arrested in Netherlands and Germany, Tolerated in UK

When activists from Extinction Rebellion blocked parts of a motorway in The Hague to protest against Dutch fossil fuel subsidies, police used water cannon to disperse them and arrested a total of 1,579 people. The protests marked the seventh organized by Extinction Rebellion in this area of The Hague, but the highest number of people arrested so far.

Germans appear to have had enough climate disruption as police have been cracking down on organized climate protest rings. Investigators launched a nation-wide raid against members of the Last Generation climate group. The Prosecutor General’s Office in Munich said it had initiated a preliminary investigation “due to numerous criminal complaints from the population” against a total of seven defendants aged 22 to 38 years, “on the charge of forming or supporting a criminal organization.”

Britain supposedly has strict laws against illegally blocking roads, but instead of arresting Just Stop Oil protesters who appear to be maintaining an illegal road block, British police arrested a commuter who lost his temper at police inaction.

 

"Heating Hammer" Could Topple Germany’s Heat Pump-Loving Green Party

To reach its climate targets, Germany's three-party coalition government (Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats) has been planning to bring in a new Building Energy Act that would ban the installation of new gas- or oil-fired boilers for home heating from January 1, 2024 onwards. Instead, homeowners would have to rely on electric-powered heat pumps, consuming electricity that is largely generated by fossil fuels and thus achieving no reduction in CO₂ emissions at all. The cost over the next five years would be €45 billion for no benefit.

When the Greens' Energy and Economy Minister Robert Habeck circulated the new draft law, the Free Democrats and leading newspapers sprang into action. "This is how the heating hammer (German: Heizungshammer) hits YOU" titled the best-selling tabloid Bild. Free Democrat leader Christian Lindner told the tabloid: “The draft was well-intentioned in terms of climate policy, but economically and socially the echo is devastating.” Mr. Lindner said the plans would have to be "fundamentally revised" for his party to assent. The construction industry, which is in the hands of the Social Democrats, reportedly agrees. Germany is not the only one: according to the European Heat Pump Association, a lobby group, nine European countries plan to clamp down on fossil-fuel heating systems.

According The Economist, costly climate rules are turning Germans away from the Greens. A Deutsche Welle story reported that 13,000 people took to the streets in the Bavarian town of Erding to protest the heat-pump law.

 

Joe Oliver: Wind and Solar Can Have a Role in Our Electricity System, but Are Not a Panacea

Mr. Oliver recently retired as chair of Ontario's Independent Electricity System Operator. Before leaving IESO he requested an analysis of the cost of wind and solar, considering their intermittency and the resulting need for backup power. The analysis is yet to be published, but in this Financial Post article Mr. Oliver explains some basic principles about relying on wind and solar to replace fossil-fuel power generation:

• If there is sufficient baseload power to ensure a minimum continuously available supply, then low-marginal-cost wind and solar can be viable and cost-competitive (when the wind is blowing and the sun shining) by providing short-term additional capacity while dialing back thermal power generation.
• However, if used at greater volume or for longer periods, the intermittency of wind solar requires substantial backup to cover baseline needs.
• Any even-handed analysis of the cost of renewables should consider the generous tax credits and subsidies they benefit from, as well as the carbon taxes and restrictive regulations imposed on fossil fuels. No such apples-to-apples comparison has been prepared, at least not for the public, perhaps because an objective study risks undermining the green assertion that natural gas use can be rapidly and inexpensively eliminated.
• The IESO’s 2022 report, Pathways to Decarbonization, concluded that “Ontario’s natural gas fleet is capable of providing continuous, flexible energy year round and under all weather conditions, and there is currently no like-for-like replacement.”  As a result, gas will have to be relied on at least until 2050, pending nuclear refurbishments and new builds and possible, but by no means guaranteed, technological breakthroughs in battery storage and hydrogen.

 

The World Will Not Hit Its Climate Targets. Let's Prepare for that Inconvenient Truth 

George Fallis, professor emeritus, economics and social science at York University, writes in the Financial Post that over the past 30 years developed countries have closed coal-fired power plants, levied carbon taxes, established cap-and-trade systems, heavily subsidized alternative sources of electricity and taken many other steps to reduce emissions. While some developed countries have achieved modest emissions reductions, emissions growth from developing countries has overwhelmed these reductions. Since action on climate got underway in 1992 China has become the elephant in the room, emitting more greenhouse gases than the developed countries combined.

The heart of the problem is that technological change cannot cut emissions 50% by 2030 and to net-zero by 2050 if the world economy continues to grow. To meet these targets economic growth would have to stop, and we all would have to produce and consume less — and we don't want to consume less. Even if we do exceed the 2.0°C target, the world won’t burst into fire nor be submerged under seawater, and our planet will still be inhabitable.

 

Shakedown! Climate Governance Initiative (UK)

Robert Bradley Jr. at Master Resource has a politicized ESG alert for corporations about the Corporate Governance Initiative at the University of Cambridge. The CGI's mission is "to mobilize boards around the world to accelerate the net zero transition, guided by the World Economic Forum's Principles for Effective Climate Governance." The CGI sees the next three years as critical in getting the business community to move from pledges to action. To this end it has set up about 30 chapters worldwide, with more emerging. Mr. Bradley concludes that it would take nerve for a business to tell an organization like CGI to stay off its property and not bother the employees.

 

Roger Pielke Jr.: What the Media Won't Tell You about Wildfires

In light of the current publicity over smoke from Canadian wildfires drifting along the eastern seaboard of the US, Dr. Pielke discusses some of the aspects of wildfires that he sees missing from the public discussion. These include:

• The IPCC has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change, even under the extreme RCP8.5 scenario.
• CO₂ emissions from wildfires have decreased globally over recent decades, as well as in many regions — including Canada.
• Wildfire risk and associated impacts can be reduced through ten prevention measures identified by the OECD in a report. It is certainly not, as some have called for, by reducing everything to climate with global energy policy as the only solution.

 

2023-05-25

 

Canada's Climate Policy Conundrum

Robert Lyman is an economist with 35 years’ experience in the Canadian federal government working in the areas of energy, transportation, and environmental policy. Since retiring he has been a prolific contributor to the Friends of Science website here and here. In this report for Net Zero Watch Mr. Lyman explains to British readers Canada's climate policies and their challenge to the country's economic prosperity, as well as the political and social environments that sustain these policies.

The entire Canadian political elite — most national political parties, provincial governments, mainstream media, academia, and industry associations — accept with little question the narrative that: (1) human greenhouse gas emissions are causing catastrophic climate change and extreme weather events; (2) significantly reducing global GHG emissions is possible through collaborative UN diplomacy; (3) "decarbonization" is possible by 2050. Accordingly, Canada's federal and provincial governments have committed to a suite of climate policies that seek to implement a costly and high-risk "transition" to energy sources and technologies that are more expensive and less reliable than the current ones.

Over the past seven years the federal government has spent over $120 billion on loosely defined climate programs, and provincial governments have made large additional, unpublished expenditures. In 2023 the federal government's budget promised at least $121 billion in climate-related subsidies (by tax credits and direct grants) to rent-seeking corporations. Well-funded environmental organizations are using the courts to impose new obligations on governments, businesses and individuals — unchallenged, or even welcomed, by governments. Intolerance for dissent discourages opposition to any of these measures.

For the future, Mr. Lyman speculates that the technological, economic, social and political consequences of current policies may result in them "hitting the wall" when their effects prove intolerable to the public. He also discusses ways to alter the view of the political elite, including:

• Presenting a coherent and positive policy alternative that balances environmental, economic and social considerations.
• Using effective public communications to challenge the logical and factual flaws in current climate science and policy.
• Working together with like-minded organizations in Canada and abroad.
• Targeting political parties and elected officials using the same tactics as the climate campaigners.

 

EPA Proposes Strict Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cuts for Power Plants

On May 11 the US Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft rule to limit emissions from existing coal-fired power plants, as well as new ones fueled by natural gas. Coal plants would have to capture 90% of their CO₂ emissions, while gas plants would have the option to either capture 90% by 2035 or run on hydrogen energy by 2038. The EPA expects some coal plants to shut down rather than comply with the new regulations. Overall, there are 3,393 fossil fuel-fired power plants in the US and they generate more than 60% of the nation's electricity, compared to 4% by wind and solar projects.

West Virginia's two Senators, Joe Manchin (D) and Shelley Moore Capito (R), immediately announced their opposition to the proposed rule. Sen. Manchin, as Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, threatened to withhold confirmation support for any presidential nominees to the EPA. Sen. Capito intends to use the Congressional Review Act to try to overturn what she calls the "Illegal Clean Power Plan."

 

The Great Food Reset: John Kerry Targets Agriculture as Part of the Climate Crusade

On May 10, Special US Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, gave a speech lamenting that agricultural production creates 33% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and arguing that  reducing those emissions must be "front and center" in the quest to defeat global warming. He predicted that emissions from the food system (land-use change, actual agricultural production, packaging and waste management) will cause another half-degree of warming by mid-century.

Mr. Kerry continued: "This sector needs innovation now more than ever. We're facing record malnutrition at a time when agriculture, more than any other sector, is suffering from the impacts of the climate crisis. And I refuse to call it climate change anymore. It's not change. It's a crisis."

A group of 27 House Republicans called on President Biden and his agricultural secretary to disavow Mr. Kerry's remarks. Said Rep. Mark Alford: "Since assuming his post as ‘climate czar’, John Kerry has done nothing but fly his private jets around the world and preach his radical gospel for the climate cult. His latest remarks about America’s agriculture industry paints a widely inaccurate picture."

 

Spare: The Problem with Renewables

Because intermittency is the key problem with wind and solar generation, grids that rely on them will need backup (until scalable storage technologies become scalable and affordable.) If that backup is provided by open-cycle natural gas generation, net zero will never be achieved. Nuclear power is the one technology that can provide cheap and reliable low-emissions electricity. But, if we had 100% nuclear backup for wind and solar, we wouldn't need the renewables.

 

Finally, A Solution to The Problem of Intermittent Power Generation — The “Virtual Power Plant”

The Manhattan Contrarian's Francis Menton recently noticed central planners' latest talking points about a solution to the intermittency problem of wind and solar power generation, one without the problem of grid-scale batteries: the "Virtual Power Plant."  The US Department of Energy defines a VPP as: "a connected aggregation of distributed energy resource (DER) technologies, offer deeper integration of renewables and demand flexibility, which in turn offers more Americans cleaner and more affordable power." A Reuters piece explains how VPPs work: Networks of small energy-producing or storage devices like solar panels and batteries are pooled together to serve the electricity grid. With their participants' approval, their energy can be tapped by utilities during times of high demand or can be reserved for later use. Owners of the devices are compensated for their participation. Tesla has launched a VPP pilot program in California.

The proponents of VPPs use a lot of bureaucratic jargon (e.g., “smart” thermostats, “smart” water heaters, “managed” EV charging) so Mr. Menton explains the concept in layman's terms: "On the coldest days of the winter, when the grid does not have enough power, first we will take the liberty of draining the power out of your EV battery. In the all-EV utopia that we envision, you are now stuck at home. Then, we will remotely turn off your heat and hot water. In this vision, the convenience and comfort, let alone the physical safety, of the people are of no importance."

 

Physics Is Why Renewables Can’t Power Modern Economies

This article from the Heartland Institute doesn’t deal with the economics of renewable energy, but instead considers just the physics of making the US electric power system net zero by 2030, 2035, 2050 or whatever date deemed necessary to prevent a 1.5°C or 2.0°C rise in global mean temperature. The electrical grid, which was built up over 80 years or more, consists of two segments: baseload power and peaking power. Coal, nuclear, hydro, and to a lesser but growing extent, natural gas have satisfied the country’s baseload for the past century, while gas is commonly used for peaking power. Neither wind nor solar, being weather or sunlight dependent, is reliable enough for either baseload or peaking. Hence the need for backup power supply.

Just to meet current electric power demand would require millions of wind turbines and solar panels, together with billons of battery packs in homes (or tens of thousands in centralized battery farms). Wind turbines would cover one-third of the continental US, or solar panels cover 20% of the countryside. In addition, thousands of electrical towers and thousands of miles of transmission lines and thousands of new transformer stations would have to be built.

In September 2019 Roger Pielke Jr. calculated that reaching global net zero by 2050 would require bringing on the equivalent of three big nuclear power plants every two days between October1, 2019 and January 1, 2050. Alternatively, achieving net zero would be 1,500 new wind turbines installed every day. The US contribution would be one nuclear power plant or 1,000 wind turbines every six days. Since Roger Pielke Jr. produced his analysis, no new US power plants have come online, but lots of wind turbines, though far less than the 218,000 required over the 1,308 days between October 1, 2019, and May 1, 2023.

If net zero is to be accomplished, all manufacturing will have to be directed away from whatever products we build now and diverted to the production of millions of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, transmission towers and power lines, rail tracks, cars, battery packs, heat pumps, and associated technologies for the net zero economy. In other words, government conscription of all factories, and by extension their workers, into a warlike net zero crusade against chimeric climate change.

 

Dominating EVs Globally: How China is Crushing the US

Since 2015, when China initiated the National Key Research and Development Program New Energy Vehicle Key Special Implementation Plan, it has been actively working towards dominating the battery industry. The strategy began with battery production, including securing a stronghold on the raw materials, and then progressed to developing a domestic EV manufacturing industry with a flourishing internal market. Foreign automakers, already dependent on China Inc.'s batteries for their EVs, are losing market share. Globally, China accounts for 60% of the EVs sold and is home to half of the electric vehicles on the road.

The US currently has only one operational lithium mine and environmental concerns have limited US production to just 1% of global supply. It also lacks a major player in the battery cell industry. Profitable battery production by US manufacturers is not expected until at least 2030. Companies like GM and Ford cannot build affordable and profitable EVs without relying on Chinese-manufactured batteries. If Tesla is to achieve its ambitious goal of manufacturing 20 million EVs per year by 2030, it will have to rely on Chinese consumers and cost-effective batteries from China.

 

Electric Vehicle Delusions

Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute has published a report Electric Vehicle Illusions and Gautam Kalghatgi for the Global Warming Policy Foundation has written the Battery Car Delusion, which looks at the issue from the UK perspective. Both examine whether electric vehicles really reduce CO₂ emissions. Some findings from the reports:

• To store the energy contained in one pound of oil takes 15 pounds of lithium battery, which in turn requires digging 7,000 pounds of rock to get the minerals needed.
• A single half-tonne vehicle battery requires processing 250 tonnes of materials, and the global mining sector already uses 40% of all industrial energy — dominated by oil, coal, and natural gas.
• Upstream CO₂ emissions from electric vehicle fabrication can double or triple, depending on the companies and regions involved.
• To replace all the light duty vehicles in the UK would require twice the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world pro- duction of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018.
• A life-cycle study of upstream emissions revealed that the bottom-line estimates of EV lifecycle emissions varied by fivefold, for a median battery size of 30 kWh. EVs sold in the US typically have batteries two or three times this size.
• Volkswagen and Volvo published studies showing that an EV powered on Europe's grid creates more CO₂ emissions than a conventional car until at least 50,000 miles of gasoline-free driving. After 120,000 miles the cumulative emissions reductions reaches 15-25%, which is hardly "zero".
• Even the IEA acknowledges that the demand surge for energy minerals will coincide with falling ore grades as more Earth has to be dug up to yield the same amount of metal.
• The hundreds of billions of dollars designated for all-EV mandates will likely become stranded because the quantities of minerals needed won't be available.

 

2023-05-09

 

The Practical Impossibility of Large-Scale Carbon Capture and Storage

The US Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule setting drastic limits on CO₂ emissions from power plants by 2040. Operators would have to capture emissions from their smokestacks (i.e., carbon capture and storage) or switch to other fuels. CCS has been slow to take off due to its cost and the limited market for CO₂ as a product. According to the International Energy Agency, there are 39 CCS facilities around the world today, capturing 45 million tonnes per year, or 0.1% of global emissions. Of these, 24 facilities use the captured CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery. Many of them are not meeting their carbon-capture goals or are over budget.

CCS is very expensive. For example, Wyoming passed a bill requiring state utilities to produce 20% of electricity from coal plants fitted with CCS by 2030. The state's two major power companies calculated that adding CCS to two existing coal plants would cost $980 million, or three times their original cost. The International Energy Agency calls for 9% of the world's CO₂ emissions to be captured and stored by 2050, and estimates that 70-100 major CCS facilities will have to come online every year to achieve this.

 

A Heavy Dose of Reality for Electric-truck Mandates

Andrew Boyle, first vice-chair of the American Trucking Associations, testified before a US Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on the future of clean vehicles. While acknowledging that cars and light-duty trucks are appropriate for electrification, transport trucks are unsuitable for the following reasons:

• Today, a diesel truck takes 15 minutes to refuel anywhere in the country, giving it a range of 1,200 miles before refueling again.
• Long-haul battery-electric trucks require up to 10 hours to recharge, for a range of 150-330 miles. So, to go 1,200 miles, a BEV truck needs to charge 4-8 times — assuming there are charge points where needed.
• Thus, far more trucks would be needed to haul the same amount of freight, with each electric truck costing $300,000 more than a diesel equivalent.
• Converting all the Class 8 trucks in the US would require a $1 trillion investment, which would flow to consumers, and for which the US would have to commandeer the global production of lithium for seven years.
• A battery for a heavy-duty truck weighs 8,000 lb., which means that much less payload since the maximum gross weight of the vehicle is fixed.
• Local electric utilities can't handle the loads required for charging stations.

 

African Official Warns Bill Gates, George Soros to Stop Using Their Continent as a 'Climate' Guinea Pig

Chukwumerije Okereke, a Nigerian climate scientist warned climate activists Bill Gates and George Soros that his "continent is not your giant climate laboratory". In a New York Times essay on solar geoengineering, Dr. Okereke wrote: "As a climate expert, I consider these environmental manipulation techniques extremely risky. And as an African climate expert, I strongly object to the idea that Africa should be turned into a testing ground for their use … Even if solar geoengineering can help deflect heat and improve weather conditions on the ground — a prospect that is unproven on any relevant scale — it's not a long-term solution to climate change. Instead, it sends a message to the world that we can carry on over-consuming and polluting because we will be able to engineer our way out of the problem."

 

Is It Curtains for Mark Carney's Net Zero Alliance, or just Teething Problems?

In the run-up to the Glasgow COP26 in 2021, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney announced the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) as a major breakthrough in engaging the financial sector in the fight against climate change. GFANZ consists of seven alliances, covering asset owners, asset managers, banks, insurers, investment consultants and other financial services providers, and representing $130 trillion in assets. However, starting last year, GFANZ has encountered setbacks:

• Wall Street banks, including JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, had threatened to leave the grouping, citing a potential risk of being sued if they adhered to the alliance’s strict requirements on decarbonizing their portfolios.
• Two pension funds, Australia’s Cbus Super and Bundespensionskasse of Austria, then quit the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance and the Paris Aligned Asset Owners, respectively, saying they did not have the resources to meet their membership requirements.
• Vanguard, which has $7 trillion in assets under management, departed from the asset managers’ alliance just before Christmas, citing concerns about how to communicate climate-related risks to its investors.
• Danish pension fund AkademikerPension told Reuters that it is considering leaving the asset owners’ alliance “because new requirements do not attach enough strings to owning the shares and bonds of publicly listed oil and gas companies."
• Germany’s GLS Bank quit GFANZ’s banking alliance in February, reportedly because other members are still funding new oil and gas projects.
• Most recently, two of the world's biggest insurance firms, Munich Re and Zurich, have withdrawn from the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance.

One problem for financial institutions is that so few of the companies they provide services to have credible decarbonization plans, making it difficult for them to cut their financed emissions, which fall under Scope 3 emissions.

 

For Some, It’s Better Not to Work

The Moray East windfarm in the UK's North Sea is one of the first to deploy 9.5 MW turbines (100 of them) and has just completed its first full year of operation. However, it produced only 2.5 TWh of electricity, or 30% of capacity. At this level of output, its levelized cost is £125-200/MWh, compared to the agreed contract-for-difference price of £57.50/MWh.

As well, Moray East incurred 0.7 TWh of constrained operation, when the grid could not take the power offered and compensated for the "lost" output but allowed the windfarm to sell it anyway if diverted to a battery or flywheel. Thus, the windfarm was being paid twice for the same electricity. For some windfarms, being switched off is more profitable than producing power.

 

COP28 Boss Slams Rich Nations' “Dismal” $100 billion Finance Failure

The UAE's Sultan Al Jaber, president of the COP28 climate talks next November, spoke to attendees of the Petersberg Climate Dialogues in Berlin. There, he blamed rich nations' "dismal" failure to provide $100 billion/year in climate finance to developing nations for "holding up" progress in negotiations.

According to an analysis by the Overseas Development Institute, Australia, Canada and the US contributed 23%, 18% and 5%, respectively, of their "fair share" of the $100 billion pledge by 2020. The respective contributions by France, Japan and Germany were 161%, 135% and 119%. According to an estimate by the COP26 and COP27 hosts, developing countries may need up to $1 trillion/year for climate action.

 

US Solar Industry Admits It Needs Cheap Chinese Goods to Survive

On April 28 the US House of Representatives passed legislation to repeal the Biden administration’s June 2022 proclamation that provided a two-year moratorium for new solar tariffs. Immediately, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association put out a statement stating: "The United States cannot produce enough solar panels and cells to meet demand, and the remaining 14 months of this moratorium gives us time to close the gap. The United States can get there and become a global leader in clean energy manufacturing and development. Overturning the moratorium at this stage puts that future at risk." By “that future” the SEIA means its members’ rent seeking.

China controls more than 80% of the world's solar panel production, despite billions in green energy subsidies by the Biden administration. US solar companies, facing increased demand because of fresh subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, have turned to China to supply their panels. President Biden has said that he will veto the new legislation, which has bipartisan support. To overcome a veto, Congress could include the legislation in a bill that the President does, or has to, support.

 

European Green War on Agriculture: Farmers Banned for Life if They Want Compensation

The farming industry in the Netherlands is one of the most productive in Europe, but on May 2 the European Commission threw its support behind a plan by the Dutch government to buy out thousands of farmers from their lands in order to meet the EU’s Natura 2000 scheme to protect certain environments. The plan, which would offer farmers 120% of the value of their farm, could see some 3,000 so-called “peak” emitters of nitrogen shut down. One of the conditions of the proposed buyout scheme is that the bought out Dutch farmers would be prohibited from moving to other EU countries and starting up farms there.

 

2023-04-21

 

Germany’s Renewable Heating Plan to Cost Many Times More than Expected: €776 Billion

The German federal Ministry of Economics, headed by the Green Party's Robert Habeck, estimated the cost for homeowners to replace oil and gas heating systems with heat pumps by 2045 at €135 billion. This is based on installing 500,000 new heat pumps a year at €40,000 each. However, according to the Haus & Grund property owners' association, the real number would have to be 1.5 million heat pumps a year to reach the stated 2045 target. Also, the Ministry forgot that heat pumps have a lifetime of only 20 years, so by 2045 pumps installed in the 2020s will need replacement. Thus, the real price tag would be €776 billion.

Germany's Blackout News compared the annual maintenance costs for heat pumps (€300) compared to gas furnaces (€130). Moreover, gas heating systems, with a service life of 25-30 years, last longer than heat pumps. There is also talk of requiring mandatory smart meters to be installed along with heat pump systems, which would make it possible for power companies to switch off the heat pumps.

Most Germans used to be enthusiastic supporters of the country’s Energiewende (transition to renewable energies). Now, a Forsa survey on the subject of the transition to green energies found that almost 90% of Germans no longer believe in the transition.

 

Europe’s Growing Revolt over Net Zero Mandates and Electric Vehicle Edicts

A revolt has been brewing ever since Europe got a wakeup call when Russia's invasion of Ukraine upset the Net Zero applecart. For example:

• Last November the EU struck a provisional deal on a new vehicle emissions law. Two months afterward the Italian government, facing job cuts in its auto industry due to the forced transition to electric vehicles, raised objections.
• This opened the door for Germany's finance minister to demand an exception for synthetic e-fuels (produced by electrolysis with added carbon) to power internal combustion engine vehicles.
• Poland's prime minister, who had long objected to the EU ban on gasoline and diesel vehicles, contended that Polish families cannot afford expensive EVs and that a ban on ICE vehicles would harm Polish firms producing car components.
• By abstaining on a final vote on the hard ICE vehicle ban, Germany could have killed the proposed EU legislation. So the EU Commission agreed to draft a compromise allowing sale of ICE capable of running on e-fuels after 2035.
• Environmental groups objected because owners of these e-fuel capable vehicles will cheat and fill up with cheaper gasoline or diesel.
• Another reason that the ban on ICE vehicles may be impractical is the risk that there won't be enough EV charging stations or battery making plants to satisfy demand in a short time frame.
• In January and February of 2023 EV sales in Germany fell by a third as subsidies were lifted, and automakers are still losing money in their quest to build all-EV fleets.
• Not even the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies may be sufficient to turn Americans into passive drivers of vehicles they can't repair.
• China already controls the market for many EV components and its government has thrown billions of dollars in subsidies to its EV industry, which threatens to flood Europe with cheaper models that undercut European automakers.

 

Luxury Beliefs and Energy Policy: The Fatal Conceit

Norman Fenton, Professor Emeritus of Risk at Queen Mary University of London, gave an interview on Fox News in which he spelled out just what a "net zero" economy really means. In the UK context all airports except Heathrow, Belfast, and Glasgow, will close by 2030 and no one will be flying at all by 2050. There will be no new gasoline or diesel cars by 2030 and by 2050 road use will be restricted to 60% of today’s level. Food, heating and energy will also be restricted to 60% of today’s levels by 2050. Beef and lamb will be off the menu by 2050. "15-minute cities" will restrict mobility and social activity.

Prof. Fenton put his observations in a Twitter feed that has attracted 3.3 million views. These observations are not mere conjectures, but are derived from a document, titled Absolute Zero (because the authors conclude that there are no negative emissions options or offsets possible with current technology to reach net zero),  that was issued by UK FIRES, a research program sponsored by the UK government.

This Forbes article explains how a leading economy like Great Britain's came to have governments (both left and right) that promise their people penury and a future without the basic freedoms Westerners have taken for granted for over two centuries. It stems from a combination of good intentions and luxury beliefs. The former is based on the "scientific consensus" of absolute truth that allows no contrarian views. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class, such as the "fight against climate change." The rich can drive clean Teslas while ordinary people can bike or take public transit. Politicians of all stripes find it easy to attach themselves to the moral crusade to save the planet and win office.

 

No More Cheap Flights Is the New Reality for Air Travel

Flying into and out of Europe is becoming more expensive due to changes in the EU's Emissions Trading System and the soaring price of CO₂ allowances. Under the ETS airlines must have enough emissions allowances to cover every tonne of CO₂ released for flights starting or ending in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland. Currently half of these allowances are free, but over the next three years airlines will have to pay for 100%. As well, the cost of the allowances, currently around €100/t, is nearly four times what it was in 2019.

Over the next three decades the aviation industry, currently responsible for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions, must transition itself to net zero. Under Destination 2050, the European sector’s plan to reduce emissions, it’ll do that by investing in future aircraft and infrastructure, making operations more efficient, and using alternative fuels and carbon-removal technologies. A report by research groups SEO Amsterdam Economics and the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre, commissioned by airline industry bodies, has put the cost of reaching net zero by 2050 at a whopping €820 billion.

As a result, ticket prices will have to be higher and demand destruction is inevitable.

 

Biden Administration Unveils Tailpipe Emission Rules to Boost EV Sales

On April 12 the Biden Administration proposed emission limits on new cars that will impact car model years 2027 through 2032. The White House projected that, if the regulations are finalized, two-thirds of new sedan, crossover, SUV, and light truck could be electric by 2032. In addition, up to 50% of bus and garbage trucks, 35% of short-haul freight tractors, and 25% of long-haul freight tractor purchases could be electric by then.

Earlier, on March 31, the administration proposed a series of rules providing clarity on how it will implement the Inflation Reduction Act provisions regarding which electric vehicles are eligible for tax credits of up to $7,500 each. However, the IRA bars EVs assembled with battery components or critical materials sources from a "foreign entity of concern" beginning in 2024 and 2025, respectively, which would disqualify China-sourced components and minerals. Currently China boasts 78% of the world's cell capacity for EV batteries.

A new poll shows that EVs aren't popular with American drivers. Only 19% say its "very" or "extremely" likely they’ll purchase an electric vehicle when they need a new car, according to a new Associated Press poll, while 22% say they’re “somewhat likely” to do so. Besides the higher sticker price of EVs, the US would need to build more than 2 million charging points to support them, as well as make expensive investments in power grids. In California alone, the state's utility operator estimates $9.3 billion to upgrade its grid for the green energy transition.

 

Federal Court Blocks Manchin-backed Pipeline in West Virginia

As described in the FoS Quarterly Newsletter of September 2022, the vote of Senator Joe Manchin was crucial to getting the US Inflation Reduction Act passed. In return for his support of the IRA Sen. Manchin got agreement with his Democrat colleagues for a side deal to pass legislation that fast tracks permitting of gas pipelines, electricity transmission, and other energy projects. The side deal would specifically benefit the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, extending from southern Virginia and through Sen. Manchin’s West Virginia, a project that has faced years of delay due to litigation.

However, on April 3 a US Court of Appeals vacated a permit issued to the MVP by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection under the Clean Water Act. Said Sen. Manchin: "It is infuriating to see the same 4th Circuit Court panel deal yet another setback for the Mountain Valley Pipeline project and once again side with activists who seem hell-bent on killing any fossil energy that will make our country energy independent and secure."

Sen. Manchin could have conditioned his vote for the IRA on Congress first passing the permitting reforms, but once the White House and Democratic leaders got what they wanted, they lost interest in permitting reform. The only hope for the senator is passage of a House energy bill, which limits the discretion of judges and states to block Clean Water Act permits.

 

Court Spikes Berkeley's Gas Ban

In July 2019 Berkeley became the first US municipality to ban the use of gas in new buildings. Since then, ENGOs have spent untold millions of dollars campaigning and lobbying at national and local levels to ban the direct use of natural gas in homes and businesses, with some success. The California Air Resources Board voted to ban the sale of all gas-fired space and water heaters in the state by 2030. New York City and Seattle banned the use of gas in new construction. Similar bans, actual or proposed, appeared in Massachusetts, the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston.

On April 17 a unanimous ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case of California Restaurant Association vs. City of Berkeley found that the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 preempts the city's ordinance. This act expressly preempts State and local regulations concerning the energy use of natural gas appliances, including those used in household and restaurant kitchens. As Robert Bryce states in his blog the decision is a huge win for consumers, businesses, and energy security. It should invalidate the gas bans enacted across the country over the past four years, including plans by federal authorities to prohibit, or restrict, the use of gas stoves, gas furnaces, and other gas-fired appliances.

 

Japan, US and EU Block G7 from Setting Coal Phase-out Date

Environment ministers from the G7 group met in Sapporo Japan and failed to agree on a date to end coal-fired electricity generation according to the group's communiqué. The UK and Canada wanted to “set a 2030 date for completing the goal of an accelerated phase out of domestic unabated coal power generation”. While France accepted this target, Japan, the US and the EU were opposed. Japan, the G7 presidency holder, relies on coal for 30% of its electricity generation and has not set a specific timeline for coal phase out. In the US a 2030 coal phase out date would be used by Republicans to attack Democratic politicians running for re-election to Congress next year. Within the EU, due to opposition from Eastern European countries, there is no consensus on when to end coal-fired generation. 

 

2023-04-04

 

Carbon Capture & Storage: Big Oil's Big Play

After a decade of efforts to economically produce environmentally-friendly fuels from algae, ExxonMobil is quietly walking away from its heavily publicized climate solution. Instead, the company's Low Carbon Solutions division has its sights set on something much more lucrative and certain — carbon capture and storage. For decades CC&S meant using CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery with no government subsidies. The first subsidies for CC&S began with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which created a tax credit of up to $45/t just to store the CO₂ underground forever.

That wasn't enough for ExxonMobil and its fellow rent seekers, so they supported passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which offers a tax credit of $85/t for CC&S. However, on ExxonMobil's web page for CC&S, under the heading "Policy is how industry can scale carbon capture and storage", the company wants the tax credit to initially increase to ~$100/t, assurance of quick government permitting for CC&S projects, and even more subsidies in the form of grants for CC&S infrastructure. A consortium of 11 companies, including ExxonMobil, have announced support for a CC&S project in Houston to capture 50 million t/year by 2030 and 100 million t/year by 2050.

For ExxonMobil CC&S is a "loss leader" allowing it to officially greenwash, while announcing its intention to increase production of oil and gas. For the Biden Administration it's a bribe providing leverage on the biggest US oil major.

Canada's version of the Houston project, promoted by a consortium of six oil sands producers called the Pathways Alliance, is a foundational CCS project. This would entail building a 400 km CO₂ pipeline to gather emissions from more than 20 oil sands facilities and transport the CO₂ to a proposed storage hub in the Cold Lake area of Alberta. To be viable the project will require government co-investing and a "supportive fiscal/regulatory system." It is a sad commentary on our times for some of the producers' executives — compelled by circumstances — to appear in a video and profess their adherence to the new religion of Net Zero.

 

Think Tank Claims that Canada's Big Oil & Gas Companies Are Undermining Climate Policy

Influence Map is an "independent think tank producing data-driven analysis on how business and finance are impacting the climate crisis." In February 2023 it issued a report analyzing "the climate-related policy messaging and engagement of the Canadian oil and gas industry" and found what appears to be a case of "net-zero greenwashing." The report examined the six largest oil and gas companies headquartered in Canada (Cenovus Energy, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Enbridge, Imperial Oil, Suncor Energy, and TC Energy), as well as the sector's primary industry group, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

Of the six companies, Enbridge and Suncor "appear to engage positively on some areas of the energy transition while opposing others." The other four "demonstrate negative climate policy engagement," while CAPP is deemed to be "the most active an oppositional to climate policy progress." According to Table 1 of the report all six companies and CAPP support net zero as a government policy target, and the companies have made a net-zero by 2050 internal policy commitments as well. But this is not enough. In Tables 2 to 5 Influence Map rates the seven organizations for various aspects of climate policy engagement, with supporting details in the appendices. Table 2 rates the organizations between E and D+. All seven advocate in favour of the oil and gas sector, two want subsidies and three advocate for "clean" fossil gas (Table 3). In Table 4 five of the organizations oppose an oil & gas emissions cap (Enbridge and Suncor are N/A).

 

Pushing the Worst-case Climate Scenario

The Biden Administration has abandoned the implausible extreme climate scenario called Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5). This is one of five climate scenarios considered by the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the only one with CO₂ emissions projections outside the 1st to 99th percentile range. Nevertheless, according to Financial Post columnist Matthew Lau, RCP8.5 is the favored scenario of alarmists at the Canadian Climate Institute, which is financed by a five-year funding agreement with the federal government.

The CCI has published a five-part series of reports on the cost of climate change. These reports, according to Mr. Lau, use two climate scenarios: a low-emissions one that the CCI admits is more realistic and a high-emissions one corresponding to RCP8.5. Mr. Lau did a word search of the federal government's 2019 national assessment on climate change and found 122 mentions of RCP8.5, compared to 80 for the low-emissions scenario 2.6. In the media, it’s the alarming forecasts thatat get reported by the media.

 

January EV Sales Collapse without Subsidies

The American Journal of Transportation reports that the global electric vehicle market is facing a collapse. In January only 672,000 EVs sold, which is half the December number and only 3% more than January 2022. EV subsides in many European countries and China were cut in January. One ray of hope is the US market, with the rolling out of tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act just beginning. China, Germany, and Norway experienced the largest drop in EV sales.

 

Two-thirds of European EV Battery Production at Risk

About 68% of lithium-ion battery production planned for Europe is at risk of being delayed, scaled down or cancelled according to a new analysis by Transport & Environment, which bills itself as "Europe's leading clean transport campaign group." Battery production equivalent to 18 million electric cars, or 1.2 TWh, is at high or medium risk of being disrupted or lost. T&E used publicly available information to assess the 50 gigafactories announced in Europe based on their finance and permits, whether they had secured a location, and the companies’ links to the US. China's dominance of the EV supply chains and ~$150 billion of subsidies under the US Inflation Reduction Act for US-manufactured components and batteries are changing the game for European manufacturers.

Germany, Hungary and Spain have the largest battery cell capacities at risk. T&E calls for leveraging on Europe's strong climate regulations to create certainty for investors, a green simplification agenda to allow for fast approval of projects and prioritization on battery value chains. It estimates that Europe can extract half of its lithium demand and about 10% of nickel and cobalt demand by 2030.

 

Italy and Germany Oppose EU Ban on ICE Cars by 2035

In a bid to speed up the bloc's transition to electric vehicles, the European Parliament passed legislation banning the sale of gasoline- and diesel-fueled cars in Europe by 2035. But two countries are pushing back against this change. Italy is home to brands like Fiat, Alfa Romeo, and Ferrari, heavily dependent on internal combustion engines. The country's automotive industry is responsible for around 270,000 direct and indirect jobs. The Italian Minister for Transport called new law "economic suicide" and said that it was ideological fundamentalism” that would benefit China and harm the European car industry.

Germany, home to the Volkswagen Group and BMW, wants the European Commission to allow cars with combustion engines that use climate neutral  e-fuels. These are based on producing hydrogen by electrolysis, which is then combined with CO₂ (extracted from the air) with the aid of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. However, the process is horribly energy inefficient, with the e-fuel containing as little as 7% of the energy used to produce it.

Germany is teaming up with Italy and France to slow the pace of laws cutting vehicle emissions. However, EU Vice President Frans Timmermans is worried about competition from China, which is bringing 80 new models of EVs in 2022-23. According to Net Zero Watch on March 26 the EU agreed to not ban the sale of ICE cars after 2035.

 

Policing Information from the Misinformation Police

Ross McKitrick has written an article in the Financial Post about state-sponsored "experts" on "misinformation", who call for new laws to shut up debate on issues important to the ruling class, such as climate change. Dr. McKitrick points to the Institute for Strategic Dialog, which boasts a Climate Disinformation Team that "identifies, monitors, and analyses online information operations targeting the climate policy agenda." The team consists of five staff members, all trained in arts or political sciences (none in economics or physical sciences), who put out reports titled Deny, Deceive, Delay for COP 26 (Vol. 1, 115 pages) and COP 27 (Vol. 2, 43 pages). The reports feature screenshots of social media posts critiquing alarmist climate claims (including many attacking the hypocrisy of the elites attending the COPs via private jets) and the cost of climate policy.

In Canada there is an organization called the Council of Canadian Academies that "convenes the best experts in their respective fields to assess the evidence on complex scientific topics of public interest to inform decision-making in Canada." The CAC recently put out a report on the "socioeconomic impacts of science and health misinformation," prepared by a 13-member Expert Panel (pp. viii & ix), mostly from health-related disciplines and none with a science or economic background. The report concentrates on misinformation related to Covid and vaccination with less emphasis on misinformation related to climate change.

Dr. McKitrick recommends dropping the fixation on misinformation, "which is just the latest iteration of the same old desire of governments to censor their opponents" and instead allow the public freedom to hear arguments by advocates from all sides.

 

UN Climate Panic is More Politics than Science

In March the IPCC released its AR6 Synthesis Report, which combines (synthesizes) the AR6 reports released earlier (three working group and three special reports). Judith Curry has published the complete text of an op-ed from The Australian that begins with fanfare from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres: "The climate time-bomb is ticking but the latest IPCC report shows that we have the knowledge & resources to tackle the climate crisis.  We need to act now to ensure a livable planet in the future."

The most important finding is that the Synthesis Report refers to the extreme emissions scenarios RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 as "business as usual" scenarios, which is now widely considered as implausible, while burying the truth in a footnote. These extreme scenarios give alarming projections of 4-5°C of warming by 2100, whereas the most recent COP27 climate conference worked from a medium emissions scenario projecting 2.5°C. Rather than acknowledging that the "climate crisis" isn't what it used to be, the IPCC and UN officials are doubling down on the "alarm" regarding the urgency of eliminating fossil fuels. In particular, the IPCC has deviated from its former "policy-neutral" never "policy-prescriptive" stance to one of explicit political advocacy. Thus, their reports have become "bumper sticker" climate science.

Even Bill McKibbin of 350.org accepts that the SR "landed in the world with a gentle plop, not the resounding thud that's required." He attributes this to a disconnect between the dire words of the report and the actions most people feel they can effectively take.

Some media outlets regurgitated the IPCC's "final warning" on climate change, without realizing that we've already passed 1.5°C. Others admitted that hysterical climate coverage is counterproductive.

 

"Climate Homicide": Could Big Oil Be Sued for Disaster Deaths?

Civil climate lawsuits against oil companies are common, but a new academic paper says that petroleum producers can be held criminally responsible for climate-related deaths for allegedly deceiving the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. The paper, Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths, published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, advances a novel legal theory — known as "climate homicide" and is stirring interest from prosecutors.

 

Green Energy: Greatest Wealth Transfer to the Rich in History

Steve Goreham, an author, speaker and environmental researcher, contends in this MasterResource post that government subsidized wind systems, solar arrays, and electric vehicles overwhelmingly benefit wealthy individuals and nations. Since 2000 the world has spent more than $5 trillion on green energy. Currently the spending is $1 trillion/year, including $200 billion in government subsidies. In many ways this spending favours the rich members of society over the poor:

• Wind systems receive production tax credits, property tax exemptions, and sometimes receive payments even when not generating electricity.
• Landowners receive annual payments as much as $8,000 per wind turbine.
• In England, ordinary taxpayers pay for the subsidies funneled to wind companies and wealthy landowners.
• Net metering laws in 39 US states give owners of rooftop solar systems preferential rates for power fed back into the grid, which is subsidized by apartment residents and homeowners unable to afford rooftop solar.
• US federal subsidies of up to $7,500 for each EV directly benefit the buyers. At an average price of $66,000, an EV is out of reach for most drivers. Most US EVs are second vehicles for the rich.
• EV vehicle owners don't pay the road tax embedded in gasoline prices, even though EVs tend to be 50% heavier than gasoline powered cars.
• Most special metals are mined in developing countries, where people struggle with the serious air and water pollution resulting from the mining operations.

 

2023-02-23

 

Carbon Capture too Expensive, Takes too Long to Build

A report released on February 9 by the International Institute for Sustainable Development — an ”award-winning independent think-tank working to create a world where people and the planet thrive” — concludes that carbon capture and storage technology costs too much and takes too long to build to have any hope of helping industry meet Canada's 2030 emissions reductions target. It also does not address emissions from downstream uses of the fuels. There are seven carbon capture and storage projects currently operating in Canada, capturing 0.5% of national emissions. However, at a cost of $200/tonne of CO₂, CCS is expensive. As well, it is energy intensive, slow to implement, and unproven at scale, making it a poor strategy for decarbonizing oil and gas production, as evidenced by the track record of the technology in Canada and globally.

 

The Climate Cultists Are Coming for Electric Cars, Too

A new report from the University of California, Davis and a "network of academics and policy experts" called the Climate and Community Project have released a report titled Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining. According to a Climate Change Dispatch article the report "offers an honest look at the vast personal, environmental, and economic sacrifices needed to meet the left’s net-zero climate goals."

In the US the transportation sector accounts for 28% of emissions and is the only sector in which they are still rising (p.9). There are two ways to reduce the sector’s emissions: (1) Replace internal-combustion-engine vehicles with electric vehicles; or (2) Reduce the total volume of vehicles on the road. The report recommends doing both. Focusing on the lithium needed for EV batteries, and the environmental and social effects associated with its extraction, the report considers four "decarbonized mobility scenarios" (p.13). These scenarios range from (No. 1) preserving the status quo of US car dependency and spatial sprawl, but replacing all ICE vehicles with EVs, to (No. 4) also reducing the percentage of trips taken in passenger cars while reducing overall personal vehicle ownership; increasing the trips taken via mass transit, cycling, and walking; and having densified metro areas better able to support more public and active transit for more trips.

Scenario 4 is the only one modeled where US demand for lithium would not exceed current global production of the mineral. The report deplores the "current trend of large private EVs like SUVs and trucks with long ranges," such as the 2022 GMC Hummer EV pickup weighing 9,000 pounds, of which 3,000 pounds is for the battery pack (p.18). It blames Tesla for the increasing size of battery packs (p.19).

 

Firms Starting to Wake Up to the Lunacy of Net-Zero

Ralph Schoellhammer, assistant professor of economics and political science at Webster University, Vienna, argues that, after investing billions of dollars into the green-energy transition, many of the major players are now shifting priorities. For example, last year there was not a single investment in a major European wind farm. Other examples:

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission has suggested softening the requirements for companies to estimate and disclose their climate impacts.
• Major fossil-fuel giants, such as BP, are quietly moving back to plain old petroleum.
• Even US President Joe Biden, who in 2019 promised to "end fossil fuels", noted in his 2023 State of the Union address that the world will need oil for at least another decade.
• In Germany, as government subsidies for electric vehicles are reduced, consumers' willingness to buy them has declined.
• Even wind pioneer Denmark is re-evaluating renewable-energy projects in favour of nuclear power, while Poland has decided to go all-in for nuclear.
• The year 2022 marked a decisive shift as energy security replaced climate change as the world’s top priority.

 

BP and Other Oil Giants Slow Green Goals

On February 7 BP reported a record profit of $28 billion for 2022 (despite a $25 billion write-down on its Russian assets) and hiked its dividend. But it infuriated climate activists when its CEO, Bernard Looney, announced plans to cut back on its high-profile push into renewable energy. Mr. Looney expressed disappointment with returns from some of these renewable investments and wants to maximize profits in areas where BP has a competitive advantage, such as its legacy oil-and-gas operations. He also intends to put less emphasis on ESG goals. Mr. Looney and other BP executives have suggested that the company play down investments in wind and solar in favour of hydrogen, biogas, electric-vehicle partnerships and charging networks.

Two of BP's European competitors, Shell and TotalEnergies, like BP, used to try and convince investors about the merits of net-zero and renewables. Shell has said that it will pause the growth in spending on renewables and expand gas output, while TotalEnergies is opening new liquefied natural gas terminals in Europe. European majors are responding to competition from American companies that have delivered better returns by focusing on oil and gas. Following passage of the US climate bill last year (the Inflation Reduction Act), companies like Exxon and Chevron are pursuing biofuels and carbon capture, where the processes are a natural fit to their expertise in running complex engineering projects dealing with volatile liquids and gases.

 

Climate Aristocrat Bill Gates Invokes the Special Person Defense for Private Jet Use

Broadcaster Amol Rajan from the BBC asked Mr. Gates in an interview that aired February 3 how he responds to criticism he uses private planes (his collection of private jets is estimated to be worth $194 million) generating outsized carbon emissions while urging political and business leaders to act aggressively against “climate change.” Mr. Gates replied that he more than offsets his own emissions by paying for removal of atmospheric CO₂. Here, he refers to his funding of Climeworks that uses "direct air capture" to remove the CO₂. Mr. Gates asked rhetorically: "I spend billions of dollars … on climate innovation. So, you know, should I stay home and not come to Kenya and learn about farming and malaria?" In a 2020 blog post, the billionaire philanthropist identified climate change as a crisis.

 

Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council v. EPA

In this case a band of electricity consumers (CHECC) is challenging the science behind the US Environmental Protection Agency's 2009 finding that CO₂ and other greenhouse gases constitute a danger to human health and welfare. The case is pending in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. The author of this article, Francis Menton, is one of CHECC's attorneys and he describes its final Reply Brief filed on February 8. He states that the EPA and the government-backed scientific establishment lack any real scientific basis for the EPA's claim of great danger.

The Reply Brief has two main arguments:

1. The EPA relies on surface temperature data, derived from ground-based thermometers, going back to the 1880s. The people responsible for compiling and maintaining the data manipulate and in-fill information for various purposes, resulting a corrupt overall record. The Southern Hemisphere Oceans, comprising 40% of the Earth's surface, had no reported data before the year 2000.
2. Real world data fails to validate the climate models on which the EPA relies. In particular, there is the embarrassing absence of the predicted tropical "hot spot", which is fundamental to the EPA's claimed understanding of the mechanisms of world climate that formed one of the bases of its Endangerment Finding.

 

EU Won't Be Joining the Green Subsidy Race

European Union officials have been embroiled in discussions about how to make the EU competitive in the wake of the US Inflation Reduction Act, with its $369 billion in subsidies for climate and energy projects [see FoS Extracts 2023-02-08]. On February 14 hopes for joint EU borrowing to support Europe's green industry ended when a group of northern countries, led by Germany, opposed any form of new common debt. This proposal had the support of France and European Council President Charles Michel. However, on February 15 at a meeting in Helsinki, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said: "I don't see a need for new financial instruments, or, more precisely, any need for new common debt at the European level … We need better-quality public-sector spending instead of more quantity … An excessive expansion of EU subsidies is not the right response."

 

Most Globally Stupid Green Engineering Project

The Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro storage scheme is the largest renewable energy project in Australia. It involves linking two reservoirs at different elevations through 27 km of tunnels and building a new underground pumping and power station at the low end. When there is surplus renewable electricity, it can pump water to the upper reservoir. When released to flow back to the lower reservoir, the water can generate electricity as needed. The project is supposed to provide 2,000 MW of dispatchable, on-demand generating capacity and 350,000 MWh of energy storage, with operation to start in 2025.

However, as Jo Nova reports, Snowy 2.0 is setting all the worst kinds of records, in terms of delay, cost, environmental damage, lack of any public benefit, and incompetence. It was supposed to take four years to build but will need 12 at least. The estimated cost has gone from A$2 billion to A$20 billion when all the extra transmission lines are included. It was supposed to save the environment, but thanks to exemptions from environmental legislation, has cleared construction sites across 30 km of a national park, constructed/widened hundreds of km of roads and tracks, and in operation will transfer noxious pests between the two reservoirs. The project was supposed to pay for itself by making electricity cheaper, but the Snowy 2.0 team now admit that electricity prices will rise because of the project.

Finally, one of the three tunnel boring machines, named "Florence", hit soft ground in December and is stuck in a cave-in. Last March Florence was commissioned to drill about 15 km through the mountains, travelling 30-50 m/day. When it became stuck, Florence had progressed only about 150 m. Retrieving the 2,400-tonne machine will be difficult: as Florence bored, concrete reinforcements were inserted behind it, meaning it can't be pulled out the way it went into the tunnel.

 

Rash of Whale Deaths off US East Coast Sparks Debate over Offshore Wind

Nine whales have been found dead off the coasts of four East Coast states in less than two months. Five to them were beached in New Jersey, prompting a rally by hundreds of NJ locals over concern that offshore wind construction played a role in their deaths. The Biden administration wants to grow US offshore wind generation from less that 1 GW currently to 30 GW by 2030 ("30 by 30 target").

As CFACT's David Wojick reports, the Vinyard Wind project (62  turbines) in Massachusetts will create "whale hell." Each of the 13 MW turbines (the current biggest is 9.5 MW) will be erected on a 30-foot diameter monopile driven hundreds of feet into the seabed. The noise of the pile drivers can deafen, injure or even kill marine mammals, but Vinyard Wind has an "incidental take" authorization from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for any harm caused by the pile driving.

 

2023-02-08

 

Canada’s New Oil and Gas Strategy: Green Promises at Home and More Exports Abroad

DeSmog has uncovered more corporate green hypocrisy, this time from Canada's oil and gas industry. During the 20th Annual BC Natural Resources Forum on January 17-19, 2023, industry leaders reiterated the message that if Canadian oil and gas companies cut their emissions domestically, then they will be able to market their products globally as better for the climate than other dirtier sources of fossil fuels.

One of the ways to reduce domestic emissions is by carbon capture and storage, and six oilsands companies making up the Pathways Alliance consortium are looking to spend $24 billion by 2030 on emissions cutting, two thirds of which will be on CCS. However, paying for the CCS is problematic, with the industry wanting the Canadian government to match funding being offered by the US government. Ottawa is resisting, with Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault saying that the companies are making record profits and should put more of those profits into climate initiatives.

 

Green Subsidy Race between the EU and the US

Washington's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 includes $369 billion in subsidies and tax breaks for energy security and climate change programs. EU officials and leaders have warned that the IRA amounts to unfair subsidization, particularly for US-made electric vehicles, that could see EU businesses disadvantaged or encouraged to relocate to the US. Therefore, on February 1, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a "Green Industrial Plan" that focuses on streamlined regulation, relaxed rules on state aid, worker skills, and using trade agreements to ensure critical raw material supply.

According to Politico, the EU has embarked on a subsidy race it can't win. Its Green Deal Industrial Plan for the Net-Zero Age says that it "sets in stone our green transition ambitions, including our climate targets towards net-zero by 2050." However, the plan faces major criticism for two reasons: It's based on existing, not new, funding lines; and there's fear that Germany and France will benefit from the bulk of the subsidies to the determent of the smaller EU members. According to one EU diplomat: "We will never be able to compete on level terms with the United States when it comes to financing. The whole state aid debate is a double-edged sword. If we relax subsidy restrictions too much, then we compromise the integrity of the single market."

Climate Discussion Nexus provides a Canadian perspective on this subsidy war: “As soon as the Americans passed the ludicrously named Inflation Reduction Act, the shameless begging in Canada for the Liberals to bring in their own plan would make the most seasoned con artists wince. Everyone has their hand out, demanding their cut. Carmakers, universities, unions, oil and gas companies, renewable energy companies and anyone who believes lobbying Liberals is preferable to satisfying customers has dollar signs in their eyes.”

 

Joe Biden's Opposition to Natural Gas Hits Home

With slowing of natural gas leasing on federal lands, new taxes on methane leaks and impeding pipeline approvals, the Biden Administration has been supporting the climate activists' war on the gas industry. Now it is reaching further downstream by going after natural gas appliances in homes. According to the US Department of Energy gas costs less than 1/3 that of electricity ($12.09/million BTU, compared to $41.79/million BTU). Nevertheless, the DOE in proposing a stringent new efficiency standard for gas furnaces that would boost installation costs and eliminate the most affordable models.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is floating the idea of restrictions on gas stoves, ostensibly because indoor combustion of natural gas creates unhealthy air for the occupants. Following a public backlash to a possible ban, the White House backed off, but the CPSC is moving ahead with a fact finding that could lead to restrictions.

A number of environmental groups have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to completely ban new gas heating systems under the Clean Air Act, and few would be surprised if the agency obliged.

 

As Costs Rise, Orders for New Wind Farms in Europe Are Down by 47%

Last year orders for new wind turbines in Europe were down 47% compared to 2021 — due to inflation and costs rising more than prospective revenues. In 2022 there were only 9 GW of new turbine orders, whereas the EU needs to build 30 GW/year to meet its new energy and climate security targets. This is a worrisome situation for WindEurope, which complains: "Unhelpful interventions in electricity markets by different national governments have compounded the inflation challenge." To support families and businesses, governments have deviated from the EU's emergency €180/MWh revenue cap and set different caps for different technologies. This has created confusion and uncertainty for the wind industry.

 

Enormous Wind Turbines Toppling Like Dominos

The push to install wind turbine capacity has resulted in machines with bigger blades and taller towers that put great stress on the materials used to construct them. This has caused a rash of recent turbine malfunctions in the US and Europe, ranging from failures of components to full collapses. Green energy-friendly Bloomberg Business Week posted a story Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over. The structural problems have added hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the three largest Western turbine makers: GE, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa, and could result in more expensive insurance. These manufacturers have also been squeezed by rising material costs and supply-chain woes. According to the head of wind research at BloombergNEF: "There’s a hesitancy among insurers and lenders about these big models that haven’t been tested yet. The technology alarm bells are ringing."

Watts Up With That? has posted a video of some turbine fails.

 

Zurich Considers Insurance Premium Discounts to Reward Climate Action

Former regulator Geoff Summerhayes, who is taking over as chairman of Swiss insurance giant Zurich's Australian operations wants to offer incentives for climate action in the form of reduced premiums to Zurich's clients. As Eric Worral argues, adding solar panels to a roof or building wind turbines don't reduce the risk of a customer making a claim, but increases it. For example, solar panels catch fire and wind turbines can fall and damage property.

 

The Billionaires Behind the Gas Bans

Blogger Robert Bryce reports on the Climate Imperative Foundation, "the newest and richest anti-hydrocarbon, anti-natural gas group you’ve never heard of." According to Guidestar the foundation had gross receipts of $221 million and has $130 million in assets. Mr. Bryce's report has a table comparing the gross receipts of the top five non-profit energy associations (American Petroleum Institute, Nuclear Energy Institute, American Gas Association, Western States Petroleum Association, and Society of Petroleum Engineers) with those of the CIF and four other anti-hydrocarbon NGOs (Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Environmental Defense Fund.) The NGOs had total receipts of $1,480 million, compared to $529 million for the energy associations.

Regarding the source of CIF's money, Mr. Bryce notes that two of its directors are venture capitalist John Doerr (net worth $12.7 billion) and Laurene Powell Jobs (net worth $17.7 billion.) Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, through his foundation, gave the Rocky Mountain Institute $10 million in 2020, as well as $100 million to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has pledged $500 million to the Beyond Carbon initiative, of which the Sierra Club has been the primary beneficiary.

The goal of the NGOs and their billionaire backers is 100% clean economy (i.e., electrify everything) by, among other things, banning natural gas, the cost of which will be borne by lower- and middle-income Americans. The billionaires themselves consume staggering amounts of hydrocarbons for their houses, private jets, and yachts.

 

Woke Climate Indoctrination Taken Down at Oxford Union

Russian-British satirist, podcaster, author, and political commentator Konstantin Kisin spoke at the Oxford Union for the motion "This House Believes Wokeness Has Gone Too Far." In this amusing 8;54 video of Mr. Kisin's speech he addresses those in the audience who are woke and open to rational argument. Assuming that we are living through a climate emergency, whatever Britain does will make no difference because the future will be decided in Asia and Latin America — by poor people who don't care about saving the planet. Instead, they want prosperity and economic growth. The only way to stop climate change is through scientific and technological breakthroughs to create clean and cheap energy. All wokeness has to offer is to brainwash bright young minds that they're victims without agency and who feel that, to improve the world, they must complain, protest, and throw soup on paintings.

 

Andrew Bolt on Davos

In this 9:26 video, Sky News Australia's Andrew Bolt skewers the World Economic Forum's "deranged, hypocritical and elitist farce" in Davos, which he hopes will be the beginning of the end of the "dangerous religion" of global warming. Mr. Bolt pays particular attention to Al Gore ("a hysterical global warming huckster", shouting about boiling oceans, rain bombs, and a billion climate refugees), Greta Thunberg ("fading young guru"), and John Kerry ("clueless and totally not self-aware"). The private jets and VIP helicopter rides of the elite attendees come in for special mention. Mr. Bolt sums up: "What's hurting people now is not global warming, but the plans of the elite to supposedly stop it."

 

Jordan Peterson Interviews Stephen Koonin

In a 1:38:07 podcast, Jordan Peterson interviews Steven Koonin, who has served as the US Department of Energy’s Under Secretary for Science, Chief Scientist for BP, and as professor and Provost at Caltech. The podcast’s description (click on the “Show more” button) contains links to each of its 35 chapters. Some excerpts from the podcast:

20:30 - If you do the energy transition too rapidly it's tremendously disruptive, because energy touches every part of our lives. There's no climate crisis and therefore time to introduce new energy technologies gracefully.

23:00 - We would like the electrical grid to have three qualities: reliable, affordable and clean (but having all three is impossible, so pick any two).

33:00 - Germany is an example of where people ignored the techno-economic realities of climate and energy. The politicians will not let the public be informed about the related trade-offs.

37:00 - Since 1900 the globe has warmed about 1.3°C, during which we have seen the greatest improvement in human betterment ever. The IPCC projects another 1.3°C over the next century, but it's nonsense to assert that the additional 1.3°C will derail this progress.

42:00 - Humans are wonderfully adaptive, which is why the Malthusian predictions of catastrophe by 2000 never occurred.

44:00 - The IPCC reports contain little about trends in storms and other weather events.

67:00 - There's a positive relation between GDP and environmental awareness as people are pulled out of poverty.

69:00 - The purpose of practical politics is to keep the electorate alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety. However, an alarming issue like climate change can't be maintained forever and eventually fades when people realize how hard it is to solve (i.e., net-zero is just not going to happen.)

82:00 - If you speak out against the prevailing catastrophe narrative you get shouted down. But there are techno-economic realities that will eventually cause the political system to do the right thing.

88:00 - The two immoral effects of the climate scare are the attempt to deny the developing world the benefits of reliable and affordable energy and, particularly in the West, is depressing the younger generation.

91:00 - Dr. Koonin describes the four debates he recently won (links to the debates provided.)

 

2023-01-24

 

Canada's "Just Transition" for Oil and Gas Workers

Justin Trudeau's "Just Transition" aims to socially engineer the transition of the Alberta workforce out of high-paying skilled jobs in oil and gas production into low-paid and largely imaginary jobs in the "clean economy". Natural Resources Minister Johnathon Wilkinson, who will table a Just Transition bill this year, cautions: "I do not believe that the challenge we are going to face is that there are workers who are displaced that will not find other good-paying jobs. I am actually quite worried that there are so many opportunities … we will not have enough workers to fill the jobs." It that were true the government wouldn't have to force the transition, as the market would bring it about anyway.

A briefing note prepared for Mr. Wilkinson indicates that there will be massive implications for at least 13.5% of the workforce, which is an underestimate, because the transition's impact on the four sectors identified (agriculture, manufacturing, building and transportation), will have knock-on effects on others. The note includes the callous line: "Some green jobs will not require workers with green skills to perform their jobs, i.e., janitor or driver working for a solar energy company”

 

Netherlands to Close up to 3,000 Farms to Comply with EU Rules

The Dutch government plans to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to comply with EU nature preservation rules. Farmers will be offered a deal “well over” the worth of the farm, according to the government plan that is targeting the closure of 2,000 to 3,000 farms or other major polluting businesses. “There is no better offer coming,” Christianne van der Wal, nitrogen minister, told MPs on Friday. She said compulsory purchases would be made with “pain in the heart”, if necessary.

The CO₂ Coalition has published a report Nitrous Oxide and the Climate: Why Restricting N₂O Emissions is Unnecessary and Dangerous that finds:

• At current rates, a doubling of N₂O would occur in more than 400 years.
• Atmospheric warming by N₂O is estimated to be 0.064°C per century.
• Increasing crop production requires continued application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to feed a growing population.

 

Big Solar Goes Big Bust

Sun Cable was to be a $A35 billion project to construct a 17-20 GW solar farm, together with 36-42 GWh of battery storage, occupying 120 km² of land in Australia's Northern Territory, and send the electricity to Darwin and Singapore via 800 km of land cable and 4,200 km of undersea cable. However, the amount of dispatchable power (with the batteries supplying power when solar is unavailable) would be only 3.2 GW. Spending $A35 billion for $3.2 GW of reliable power works out to $A11 million/MW. The project aimed to start supplying 800 MW of electricity to Darwin in 2027 and Singapore by 2029.

On January 10 Sun Cable went into voluntary administration. The company’s two major billionaire investors provided a vague statement about why it collapsed: "The appointment [of an administrator] followed the absence of alignment with the objectives of all shareholders. Whilst funding proposals were provided, consensus on the future direction and funding structure of the company could not be achieved." According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the two investors had disagreements about the funding and direction of the company. These included the significant amounts of cash that Sun Cable was spending, and its failure to achieve certain milestones — as required by its venture capital funding agreement.

Joanne Nova points out that, while the media may portray the project's collapse as the fault of big egos, the venture was a stupid idea as its numbers never made sense.

 

Big Wind Turbines Wearing Out Faster

The supposed advantage of big wind turbines is that they will perform better than smaller ones, because wind speeds are greater further above the ground. Data on UK windfarms during their first few years of operation compiled by Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch shows that the larger turbines appear to be delivering higher capacity factors than small ones, at least initially. However, when Mr. Montford examined how capacity factors change over time, he found that they deteriorated more quickly for the larger turbines. Thus, installing large turbines, such as the 850-foot ones planned for Scotland may provide little benefit.

 

UAE Names Oil Chief to Lead COP28 Climate Talks

On January 12 the United Arab Emirates, host of the COP28 climate conference (November 30 - December 12, 2023) announced the appointment of Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber as President-Designate of the COP. Dr. Al Jaber is currently CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology for the UAE. ADNOC is the world's 12th biggest oil company.

COP28 is already mired in controversy since the hosts are one of the world's biggest oil and gas producers. The appointment of a figure in the energy industry as president of the COP will likely increase concern about fossil-fuel interests influencing the climate talks, especially in view of the bitter late-night debates over phasing out of fossil fuel at COP27. According to DeSmog, climate campaigners reacted with outrage to Dr. Al Jaber's appointment.

 

German Electricity to Be Rationed — To Protect EV Chargers and Heat Pumps

In Germany electric cars, heat pumps and private solar systems are booming — which is pushing power grids to their limits. Thus, the country’s Federal Network Agency is planning to ration power supply to heat pumps and EV charging stations to protect distribution grids from collapse. A year ago, the network agency confirmed a “network development plan” in which up to seven million heat pumps in households are expected for 2035. So far there have been around one million heat pump systems installed.

Local power grids threaten to become the bottleneck for the energy transition. In order to arm the distribution grids, between 100 and 135 billion euros would have to be invested in Germany in the next decade and a half.

 

John Kerry Says Climate Threat Calls for Wartime Urgency

Speaking at the 2023 World Economic Forum at Davos, US climate envoy John Kerry called himself and his fellow attendees a "select group" with an "almost extraterrestrial" plan to save the planet. Prominent Twitter users found Mr. Kerry’s statements perplexing and arrogant. During his talk Mr. Kerry told the WEF that the fight against climate change will only succeed if people around the world take on a wartime footing and accelerate action to curb carbon emissions. Regarding the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C he said: "We can’t hit 1.5. We’re not on track to do it now, and it’s not clear, absolutely clear that we will get on track."

According to Mr. Kerry the key to fighting climate change is "money, money, money, money, money, money, money" (i.e., other people's money) and that governments can go only so much, and that it’s time to lean on private companies to fund the green revolution. When asked by a reporter about China's emissions, Mr. Kerry had nothing to say.

 

Fed Chief: "We Are Not Climate Policymakers"

Speaking to an audience of central bankers in Stockholm, US Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell said: "… we should ‘stick to our knitting’ and not wander off into policy areas," and "We are not, and will not be a ‘climate policymaker’." Mr. Powell's remarks clearly distinguish the Fed's approach from that of other central banks, such as the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank, which have taken a more activist role in promoting green goals. The ECB's president has made climate change a priority for the institution.

 

Climate Activists Alarmed by Dissenting Views on Global Warming Appearing on Twitter, et al

On January 19 Climate Action Against Disinformation, which is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and bills itself as a global coalition of "climate and anti-disinformation organizations", released a report titled Deny, Deceive, Delay (Vol. 2) Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27. The report accuses Twitter of boosting the hashtag #ClimateScam for users searching the word "climate". The hashtag started spiking in July 2022 (see chart on p.19 of the report.) By December it had accrued over 362,000 mentions from 91,000 users (p.5). CAAD notes that it could find no comparable trend or uptick in #ClimateScam on other platforms.

CAAD monitored five key narratives surrounding climate in the run-up to, duration and aftermath of COP27: Cost of Living Crisis; Culture Wars and Conspiracism [sic]; Loss and Damage; Anti- Green Technology; and Necessity of Fossil Fuels. Findings suggest that "anti-woke" messaging and conspiracy theories about climate eclipse the popularity and reach of any other narrative.

CAAD conducted an analysis of 850 advertisers on Facebook and Instagram between September 1 and November 23, finding that activity peaked in the weeks preceding and during COP27 (p.10). Some fossil fuel interests used a new technique called "nature rinsing" (formally termed "executional greenwashing" — the systematic use of nature-evoking imagery to enhance the ‘greenness’ of their brand image on social media.)

On p.31 of the report CAAD lists the "most prolific actors promoting contrarian, delayist [sic] or denialist talking points in our dataset around COP27," based on keyword-based monitoring.

 

2023-01-11

 

The Parliamentary Budget Officer Debunks Climate Alarmism

In November Canada's Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report on the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on Canadian GDP growth over the next 80 years. Ross McKitrick writes that the report's overall conclusions agree with mainstream economic thinking on the link (or lack of) between global warming and economic growth. The PBO's report considers two scenarios: (1) emission-reduction policies stall at today’s levels and nobody complies with their Paris Agreement commitments; and (2) countries comply with all their Paris commitments in full and on time. The PBO was advised by Environment and Climate Change Canada to assume that Canada will warm 2.5°C by 2100 (which Dr. McKitrick considers an overestimate.)

Under Scenario 1 Canada's GDP in 2100 will be 6.6% smaller than it would otherwise be, due to the negative impacts of global warming. Assuming a modest 2%/year growth in Canada's economy, Dr. McKitrick calculates that GDP will grow 388% over the next 80 years. But, according to the PBO if we do nothing it will grow only 381%, a small difference compared to other drivers of the economy. In fact, the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report also concluded that the economic impact of climate change is small relative to other drivers.

In Scenario 2, with everyone meeting their Paris targets the above 6.6% difference becomes 5.8%, a miniscule difference of 0.8 percentage points. Incurring the enormous costs of complying with the Paris Agreement will mean that Canada's economy will grow not by the assumed 2.0%/year average, but by 1.986%/year. The compliance costs will take an order of magnitude more off our growth rate.

Dr. McKitrick notes that one of the justifications cited for climate action is the "cost of inaction," i.e., something that is too large. But here, according to the PBO, it's tiny.

 

Canada Moves to Mandate Electric Vehicle Sales Starting in 2026

On December 21 Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault announced that 20% of new cars, SUVs and trucks sold in Canada in 2026 will need to be electric. In 2030, the targets will be 60%, then 100% in 2035. The minister's parliamentary secretary said the targets are: "about making sure that Canadians have access to the vehicles they want." Manufacturers and importers that don't meet the sales targets could face penalties.

In the first six months of 2022 fully electric and plug-in vehicles made up just 7.2% of new car registrations. In all of 2021 the figure was 5.2%.

 

2022: The Year ESG Fell to Earth

In 2022 environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing fell to Earth with a thump. BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, while the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%. By restricting investment in production of oil and gas by Western producers, ESG increases the market power of non-Western producers, thereby enabling Putin’s weaponization of energy supplies.

Alex Edmans, coauthor of the latest edition of the standard textbook on the principles of corporate finance and professor of finance at the London Business School, published a paper titled The End of ESG. Prof. Edmans criticizes what has become the primary justification for ESG: the claim that business can generate higher returns for investors by tackling climate change. Instead, democratically elected governments are best placed to address externalities. “If ESG is pursued for its externalities, companies and investors should be very clear that it may be at the expense of value," according to Prof. Edmans.

 

Although marketed as a climate risk analysis tool, ESG is no such thing. It’s about investors and debt providers driving the decarbonization of Western companies and sunsetting its oil and gas companies. Although the disintegration of ESG as an investment strategy became unmistakable in 2022, its existence as a political doctrine will continue until it is challenged and defeated politically — as is happening in Red states such as Florida, Texas, West Virginia and Utah.

 

The Faux Urgency of the Climate Crisis

On her website Judith Curry has posted the text of an op-ed she wrote for SkyNews. After two centuries of human progress due to fossil fuels, the 21st century is seeing a rapid transition away from them under an international imperative for mitigating climate change. However, this has slowed the provision of grid electricity to developing countries, increased electricity costs and reduced grid reliability. There are allegations of human rights abuses associated with production of solar panels. Sourcing the materials needed for solar and wind energy, as well as battery storage, are leading to logistical problems, supply shortages and rising costs. The large land requirements for wind and solar farms plus transmission lines is causing local land-use conflicts. Dr. Curry questions whether the claimed urgency of reducing CO₂ emissions trumps the foregoing considerations.

With the dropping of the extreme RCP8.5 emissions scenario at COP27, limiting global warming to 2°C now seems to be within reach, and so the goal posts have been moved to 1.5°C. Also, the climate "crisis" rhetoric is now linked to extreme weather events. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that emissions reductions will have any noticeable effect on weather and climate extremes in the 21st century. The reason is that it's difficult to untangle the roles of natural weather and climate variability and land use changes from slow global warming. Thinking that we can minimize severe weather through using atmospheric carbon dioxide as a control knob is a fairy tale.  

Once we relax the faux urgency for eliminating CO₂ emissions and the stringent timetables, we have time and space to envision new energy systems that can meet the diverse, growing needs of the 21st century.

 

Don't Believe the Hype about Climate Disasters

Roger Pielke Jr. has spent almost 30 years trying to understand trends in disasters and the role played by (a) societal vulnerability and exposure and (b) climate variability and change. He's observed a concerted and successful effort by climate advocates to create and spread disinformation about disasters, knowing full well that virtually all journalists and scientists will stay silent and allow the false information to spread unchecked — and sometimes they will even help to amplify it.

As an example, he cites last September's claim by UN Secretary-General António Guterres that the number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years. This was in connection with the release of a UN report titled United in Science,  Dr. Pielke calls this claim "pure misinformation", adding " You will never find a more obviously and egregious wrong claim in public discussions from a more important institution."

Dr. Pielke agrees that preliminary information for 2022 did show some notable disasters:

• Flooding in Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria, India the US and Brazil;
• Drought in Europe, Eastern Africa and China, and
• Hurricane Ian in Florida.

As many as 11,000 people died from such disasters last year, which is about the average of the previous decade, for an overall death rate of 1.4 people per million. This is one of the 5 lowest annual death rates since data is available (dating to more than a century ago). Thirty years ago in 1992 the rate was 29.0/million, more than 20x as large. Dr. Pielke provides plots of disaster count from 2000 and losses since 1990 that show declining trends. He notes that societies have improved their ability to prepare for and recover from extreme events.

Unfortunately, nowadays, every weather and climate disaster becomes enlisted as a sort of “poster child” for climate advocacy.

 

Power Grids Being Ruined by Preferential Treatment of Unreliable Electricity

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, argues that America has the potential to have the best grid in the world, but it is instead becoming a national embarrassment — due to rising costs and reliability problems. The root cause of this is the extreme preferences for unreliable wind and solar electricity, namely:

1. No price penalty for being unreliable.
2. Huge subsidies for unreliables.
3. Mandates for unreliables.

Regarding preference 1, the policy solution is to require all generators to meet technology-neutral reliability standards. Wind and solar suppliers should be responsible for combining their product with reliable generation and/or storage.

However, the subsidies (preference 2) are getting worse. The Inflation Reduction Act has extended the formerly temporary investment and production tax credits for wind and solar indefinitely. The IRA also subsidizes wind and solar industries by giving them $3/kg (twice the market price) for "green" hydrogen. Prof. Epstein's recommendation: end the subsidies and require wind and solar generators to pay for the extra infrastructure they need instead of forcing others to foot the bill.

The mandates require jurisdictions to use wind and solar while shutting down reliable thermal generation, regardless of the impact on cost and reliability. The solution: end all mandates for unreliable wind and solar

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