By: Ian Cameron                 TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

2024-11-28

 

Shell Wins Appeal in Landmark Dutch Climate Case

On November 12 the Court of Appeal in The Hague issued its judgement in a case dealing with the question whether Shell Plc has an obligation to reduce its CO₂ emissions by 45% below 2019 levels. The case began in 2019 when Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) and others filed a case in The Hague District Court alleging that Shell’s contributions to climate change violate its duty of care under Dutch law and human rights obligations. The case builds on the landmark Urgenda decision of 2019 in which the Supreme Court of The Netherlands found that the Dutch government’s inadequate action on climate change violated a duty of care to its citizens.

In May 2021 the Hague District Court ordered Shell to reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030, relative to 2019, across all activities including both its own emissions and end-use emissions (i.e., Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions). Shell appealed this decision in July 2022. In its judgement the Court of Appeal accepted the District Court’s finding that Shell has a legal duty of care under Dutch tort law, in light of international human rights law, as well as international and EU climate law, to curb dangerous climate change. However, the court concluded (para 7.111 of the judgement) that Shell cannot be bound to reduce its Scope 3 (downstream) emissions by 45% or any percentage, on the narrow legal grounds that this percentage does not apply to every country and business sector individually.

Clintel published an analysis of the Court of Appeal decision stating that it still does not eliminate the threat of activist NGOs launching climate cases to effect “system change” (i.e., set aside democracy, subordinate citizens and destroy the economy). For example, the Court arrived at the alarmist conclusion that “the climate problem is the biggest problem of our time” and that the danger of climate change is great and even “life-threatening.” Further, it found that protection against climate change is a human right superseding other rights or interests such as reliable and affordable energy. Clintel considers that the Court of Appeal decision is an important first step towards restoring rationality and balance in judicial decision-making in climate cases.

Canadian law firm Fasken issued its analysis of the case (on July 28, 2024, before the Court of Appeal decision), stating that The Hague District Court found that Shell owed a duty of care to Dutch citizens to prevent injury resulting from the carbon emissions associated with its operations and its products. It summarized five current climate change litigations in Canada against governments that have, so far, not proved very successful. Since Canadian courts have been reluctant to examine whether the conduct of provincial and federal governments fails to meet international standards, it would be a stretch for them to hold individual companies to those standards.

 

Canada Promises Climate Reparations at COP29 While Courting Big Oil at Home

At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Canada's Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault announced the launch of GAIA, a US$1.48 billion finance platform “that aims to increase the availability of climate finance for high impact climate action projects in up to 25 emerging markets and developing economies.” GAIA is co-funded by FinDev Canada in partnership with the Mitsubishi Financial Group with an anchor investment from the UN’s Green Climate Fund. FinDev Canada is a subsidiary of the Canadian government’s Export Development Canada and promotes “sustainable and inclusive growth” through climate and nature action, gender equality and market development.

In a related story DeSmog welcomed Minister Guilbeault’s announcement on acceleration of climate finance (which it noted is sometimes referred to as climate reparations) while sourly remarking that, behind the scenes, oil-patch lobbyists are hard at work seeking subsidies from the Canadian taxpayer. As an example it points to the Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage project. Pathways is apparently counting on government to cover 60% of the project’s capital cost while getting carbon pricing guarantees. 

 

The Dunkelflaute Disaster: What Happens When Wind Power Goes Silent

The German word Dunkelflaute means “dark doldrum”, a period when little or no energy can be generated from wind or solar sources due to lack of wind or sunlight. Earlier this month a Dunkelflaute period of weather sent wind power generation tumbling in the UK, German and other parts of Northern Europe. On November 5 wind farms were able to meet 3-4% of the UK’s power demand during morning and evening peaks with gas-powered plants supplying 60% of demand. In Germany low wind speeds left wind farms operating at about 7% of nameplate capacity, and grid operators used coal-fired plants to meet 30% of the morning’s demand, with another 18% coming from gas and 12% from solar.

The UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) published a report on November 5, Advice on achieving clean power by 2030, setting out “pathways” to achieve the UK government’s target of reaching clean power by 2030. NESO identified (p.8) two primary pathways, which “push the limits of what is feasibly deliverable.” They include 43-50 GW of new offshore wind capacity, a four-to-fivefold increase in demand flexibility and backup from nuclear power, battery storage and gas plants.

As Charles Rotter writes in a Watts Up with That? article, “flexibility” means expecting the public to adjust their energy use based on availability. He notes that gas will continue to do the heavy lifting during Dunkelflauten. Thus we will have to face reality and embrace a balanced, reliable mix of energy sources.

 

Energy Realism and Climate Pragmatism at the US Department of Energy

Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Energy, has been nominated to serve as Secretary of Energy in Donald Trump’s cabinet. Some of the angry reactions to his nomination:

• Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL): “Chris Wright is a climate denier who prioritizes the wants of energy producers over the needs of American consumers.”
• Sierra Club: “Chris Wright is a climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.”
• The Washington Post: “Climate crisis skeptic is Trump’s top energy pick”
• DeSmog commented that Mr. Wright's thinking about climate change has been shaped by the “influential climate crisis denier” Bjørn Lomborg and worries that Mr. Lomborg’s influence could extend to the highest levels of the US government.

In fact, Mr. Wright has expressed his views on energy and climate in detail, views that are largely consistent with the findings of the IPCC. For example, in the recent publication Bettering Human Lives, Mr. Wright acknowledges that the recent expansion of fossil fuel energy has improved the human condition while bringing risk of climate change through increased atmospheric CO₂, resulting in 1.3°C of warming over the past 150 years. Mr. Wright notes that the IPCC findings of extreme weather contradict claims by climate activists. He supports pragmatic policies to reduce emissions and considers climate change as one of many problems facing humanity, but not a crisis or existential threat.

The Department of Energy is a $51 billion/year entity focused on the science, technology, and policy dimensions of energy, and Mr. Wright wants it to deliver “massive improvements in energy technologies that can deliver low-carbon energy that is also low cost, reliable and secure.”

 

Automakers to Trump: Please Require Us to Sell Electric Vehicles

According to The New York Times three of the largest US automakers – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis – are strategizing with other car manufacturers to ask incoming President Donald Trump to rescind his promise to scrap the federal mandates compelling the industry to sell EVs. Mr. Trump sees the mandates as preventing Americans from buying the gasoline-powered vehicles of their choice, and he holds grievances against automakers from his first term when they supported Obama-era auto emission rules. Also, in 2019 four automakers – Ford, VW, Honda and BMW – blindsided and enraged Mr. Trump by striking a secret deal with California to adopt that state’s more stringent tailpipe emissions limits.

The automakers, having invested at least $164 billion in the EV transition, still sell them at a loss and fear that they would be undercut by manufacturers selling cheaper, gas-powered cars. Thus they want the Biden-era rules to remain intact.

Elon Musk’s Tesla makes only electric vehicles and has earned billions of dollars selling emissions credits to other automakers. Mr. Musk, who is poised to lead the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency,

is more focused on getting government approval for his self-driving cars [see the FoS September newsletter for an essay on the dangers of Tesla’s autonomous vehicles]. Moreover, Mr. Musk will not oppose removal of the $7,500 tax credit for buyers of EVs as that would be more damaging for Tesla’s competitors than for Tesla itself.

 

2024-11-05

 

Ontario's Top Court Orders New Hearing in Youth Climate Case

On October 17 the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in favour of a youth-led lawsuit against the Ontario government, which was assisted by Ecojustice. The case, known as Mathur v. Ontario, includes seven young plaintiffs and is the first Charter challenge in Ontario against a government actor for actions taken related to climate change to reach a full hearing on its merits in any Canadian court.

Background: In 2018 the Ontario government enacted the Cap and Trade Cancellation Act (CTCA) that repealed the Climate Change and Low-carbon Economy Act, thereby reducing a 2030 emissions reduction target from 37% to 30% below the 2005 level. The plaintiffs in Mathur v. Ontario allege that the revised target inadequately addresses the dangers posed by climate change, thereby infringing on the rights of Ontario youth and future generations under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The infringements include the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right to equality because the revised target discriminates against younger persons by imposing a heavier burden on them. The plaintiffs seek a declaration that the revised target is unconstitutional.

In April 2023 Justice Vermette of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that, while the Charter issues in the case are, for the first time in Ontario, “justiciable” (subject to trial in a court of law), the plaintiffs’ Charter rights are not infringed by the CTCA. The plaintiffs then took the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal, where a three-judge panel unanimously ruled that Justice Vermette erred in certain parts of her decision and should rehear the case in light of the appellate court’s findings.

The appeal court (para 5) stated that, by enacting the CTCA, Ontario “voluntarily assumed a positive statutory obligation to combat climate change and to produce the Plan and the Target for that purpose.” It also found that Justice Vermette “did not address whether Ontario failed to produce a plan and a target that was Charter compliant in accordance with its statutory mandate.” In other words, the Charter alone doesn’t require provincial governments to set climate plans that satisfy court standards, but if they create climate plans, those plans become subject to the Charter.

 

UN Emissions Gap Report: No more hot air … please!

On October 24, just in time for COP29, which starts on November 11, the UN Environment Program issued its Emissions Gap 2024 Report, with a warning from UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen that “Climate crunch time is here … We need global mobilization on a scale and pace never seen before, starting right now before the next round of climate pledges.” She warned that the 1.5°C goal to cap rising temperatures set in the Paris Agreement “will soon be dead, and well below two degrees Celsius will take its place in the intensive care unit.”

The reason for the UNEP's alarm is that in 2023 global emissions increased 1.3% setting a new record equivalent to 57.1 Gt of CO₂. Some highlights from the 100-page full report:

• The 2023 increase (over 2022) in emissions is above the average 0.8%/year experienced during 2010-2019 [p. XII].
• The countries with the biggest change in total emissions 2022-2023 were China (+5.2%), USA (-1.4%), India (+6.1%), EU (-7.5%), Russia (+2%) and Brazil (+0.1%). However, under current policies global emissions for 2030 are projected to be 57 GtCO₂eq with a likely range of 53 to 59 GtCO₂eq [p. XIII].
• Unless 2030 global emissions are brought below levels resulting from current policies and from the full implementation of current pledges under the Paris Agreement, it will be impossible to get to a pathway that limits warming to 1.5°C [p. XV].
• The G20 group of countries has a key responsibility in closing the emissions gap, and it is fair that they reduce emissions faster than the global average [p. XVIII].

 

“Green” Energy: It’s Just a Bribe      

In this essay, Robert L. Bradley, founder and chief executive officer to the Institute for Energy Research, states: “Government does not create wealth; it redistributes it (after a large cut). Who wins and loses? The winners are government, the lobbyists, and the rent-seekers, with concentrated benefits to them and diffused costs for the rest of us.” Prominent among the rent-seekers cashing in on the billions of dollars in clean energy incentives coming from the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act are Republican officials in rural communities.

These Republicans haven’t come to fear “climate change” and welcome “green” energy as cheaper and better. Rather, they were financially captured and are enjoying a wealth transfer from taxpayers (via Biden) to their pockets.

A quote from a Wall Street Journal article: “The IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] is the heart of Bidenomics, which is about creating a new political-subsidy economy. Perhaps all of this will effloresce into a brilliant green future. More likely hundreds of billions in misallocated investment will reduce future productivity gains and translate into slower economic and income growth. Let’s hope President Biden’s subsidies don’t boomerang like pandemic transfer payments, leaving all Americans poorer.”

Mr. Bradley calls on the next US president to issue an emergency declaration that the country is out of money and cease all subsidies in the IRA in order to pause wind, solar and battery subsidies.

 

Future of UN Climate Dialogue Threatened by Budget Shortfall

The UN Framework on Climate Change is facing a budget gap of at least €57 million, which is about half the funding needed for the UNFCCC’s secretariat to run the annual climate negotiations for its nearly 200 member countries. The budget includes a core fund into which these countries are obligated to contribute, a supplementary fund drawing voluntary donations, and another voluntary fund to help diplomats from poorer countries attend UN climate negotiations.

While some countries like Japan and Germany have exceeded their payment obligations, the US and China – the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases and with the biggest unpaid dues – have not met theirs. Though officials from both countries have promised to make their payments this year (normally due on January 1), they have not said when.

The budget shortfall has forced the UNFCCC to curtail some activities, such as reducing conference operating hours at its Bonn headquarters, extending employment contracts for only a few months at a time and hampering ability to fund travel of poor country representatives to climate talks.

 

World Bank Bureaucrats Lost Track of $24-$41 billion “Fighting Climate Change”

Joanne Nova discusses an Oxfam press release stating that its audit of the World Bank’s 2017-2023 climate finance portfolio found that between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate finance went unaccounted for between the time projects were approved and when they closed. Table A.2. (p. 27) of the full report lists the annual high and low deviations for a total of 1816 projects with a claimed finance amount totalling $105 billion. The auditors note: “Thus, these low- and high-end estimates are the theoretical scale of the deviation in climate finance across the Bank’s entire portfolio. In other words, this deviation is the amount of potential climate finance for which we have no idea of the impact, as we do not know what it is being spent on.”

This finding is embarrassing, because the issue of climate finance will take center stage at this year’s COP in Azerbaijan, where countries are set to negotiate a new global climate finance goal. As Ms. Nova comments: “The supranational unaccountable entities like the World Bank, the UN, are surely the great attractor of global freeloaders. Like a super magnet for people who like spending other people’s money.”

 

How EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms Expose False Claims of Cheap Green Energy

Watts Up With That? author Eric Worral poses the question: If Renewables are the cheapest form of energy, why does the EU need a carbon border tax to protect EU based industries? He refers to a CarbonBrief article containing a detailed examination of the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which  is the bloc’s “tool to put a fair price on the carbon emitted during the production of carbon intensive goods that are entering the EU, and to encourage cleaner industrial production in non-EU countries.”

The CBAM is being rolled out gradually, by requiring any company importing CBAM-covered goods (currently cement, iron, steel, aluminum, fertilizers, hydrogen and electricity) into the EU between October 2023 and December 2025 to declare them in quarterly reports. From January 2026 onward companies bringing these goods into the EU will have to purchase enough CBAM certificates to cover their associated emissions (with credit for carbon pricing paid in the country of origin). The cost of these certificates will be the same as the EU’s Emissions Trading System’s market price.

While CarbonBrief found evidence that the CBAM has driven other governments to launch their own carbon-pricing policies and helped shift climate and trade up in the international climate agenda, the new levy has proved controversial at a time of increasing protectionism. Moreover, an analysis by the Asian Development Bank found that the CBAM will have an impact on global emissions of only 0.2% relative to an emissions trading scheme with a carbon price of €100/tonne.

 Mr. Worral notes that China dominates global manufacturing because being a largely coal powered economy gives it a competitive edge. If the EU’s renewables were truly delivering cheap energy, the bloc would not need a CBAM to prevent cheap imports from undercutting EU based manufacturing. Instead, “cheap energy, renewable powered manufacturing hubs would be springing up across the EU, flooding the world with low-cost energy intensive goods which even China would be unable to undercut.”

 

Climate Colonialism’s Stranglehold on Africa’s Energy Starved

In 2024 over 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, only 28% of healthcare centers have reliable power. This is the result of a highly political climate-industrial complex that, by replacing the European colonialism of the last century with climate colonialism, stifles Africa's economic development. This artificially-induced energy gap is a pernicious intervention in energy markets that shortens life spans, snuffs out newborns’ cries, and erects barriers to progress.

 

Greens Detest “Little Guys” Who Get in Their Way

Environmentalists insist they love “little guys” – until the latter raise inconvenient questions about, or try to block, “renewable energy” projects intended to “save the planet” from “manmade climate cataclysms.” This happens when the little folks who discover that the environmentalists are really working with (and for) Big Wind, Big Solar, Big Utilities, Big Finance, powerful politicians and crony bureaucrats – the Climate Industrial Complex. 

Energy analyst and journalist Robert Bryce reports that these little guys have rejected or restricted 747 US wind and solar projects since 2015, including 70 solar and 38 wind proposals so far this year. 

 

2024-10-08

 

Rebranded Tides Canada Keeps Scooping Up Taxpayer Dollars

Tides Foundation is a US-based organization, which was founded in 1976 as a left-leaning, donor-advised fund to distribute money from anonymous donors to other entities. It established Tides Canada in 2000, which makes its own grants and has a charity that supports environmental and social justice projects. Last June, following a “smear campaign”, Tides Canada distanced itself from its US parent by rebranding itself as MakeWay Foundation.

Former banker Parker Gallant, who spends his retirement researching the energy sector, has prepared a five-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5) describing how MakeWay sucks up taxpayer dollars and is influential in pushing against fossil fuel use, all with the blessing of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), as it continues working to destroy Canada’s well-being. In Part 1 Mr. Gallant summarizes MakeWay’s history based on an Influence Watch report and Vivian Krause’s investigation of 2010. Part 2 describes findings from CRA filings that reveal government grants of $47 million over five years to Tides Canada/MakeWay. Since Steven Guilbeault, a prior recipient of Tides Foundation money, became Canada's environment minister in 2021 the federal government has become generous in handing out grants to MakeWay.

In Part 3 Mr. Gallant notes Minister Guilbeault’s history with Greenpeace, where the current CEO of MakeWay, Joanna Kerr, previously worked for five years as executive director. Sarah Goodman, a former senior VP of MakeWay, spent five years in the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada, including the position of Senior Advisor, Climate Action and Sustainable Economy. MakeWay's federal lobbying efforts, principally related to “climate” and  “environment” with various government entities, were rewarded with over $6.8 million in funding during the last financial year.

Part 4 describes some of MakeWay’s notable lobbying efforts, including getting pension funds to exit fossil-fuel investments for which it created Shift. Shift produces reports focused on federal and provincial government pension plans and managers of their funds. MakeWay’s latest annual report lists 32 government partners, including municipal, indigenous, provincial and federal entities.

In Part 5, using data from the Charities Directorate, Mr. Gallant found that MakeWay Foundation and MakeWay Charitable Society had a combined revenue in 2022 of $68.1 million. MakeWay’s CRA filings for 2023 reveal that it received $32 million from sources outside Canada. There were 128 “not for profits” without charitable status that were able to donate to MakeWay and receive a charitable receipt. One of these was the Equiterre Fund, which Mr. Guilbeault co-founded before running for parliament. Toting up the numerous charities and not for profits involved with MakeWay distorts what “charitable” activities really are.

 

Some Ontario Plants Hit the Brakes on EVs

Since October 2020, 13 companies have announced a combined investment of $46.1 billion in EV-related projects in Canada, with federal and governments pledging to provide $52.5 billion worth of support via construction and production subsidies, and tax credits, according to an estimate by Canada’s parliamentary budget officer. One of the projects is a battery materials production plant in Loyalist Township, Ontario being built by Umicore Battery Materials Canada, part of Belgium-based Umicore Group. Umicore announced the $1.5 billion project in July 2022 after signing a memorandum of understanding with the Government of Canada. Construction was to begin in 2023 with the facility coming online in 2025.

In July 2024 Umicore told CBC News that, due to “significant worsening of the EV market context and the impacts this has on the entire supply chain,” it was delaying construction on the plant. Umicore said that it’s conducting a “thorough review” of its battery materials business, the results of which it expects to be announced during the first quarter of 2025.

Ford Motors Co. has opted to delay production of electric SUVs at its Oakville, Ontario plant, from 2025 to 2027. Tied to this production was a $1.8 billion investment, including some $590 million in government subsidies. Meanwhile, Ford will keep the Oakville plant busy producing 100,000 gas and diesel-powered Super Duty trucks. The company insists that it is still committed to EVs.

 

Unloved EVs In Europe

The European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) reported that sales of new battery-powered EVs in Germany plunged by nearly 70% to 27,024 in August 2024. In France, the EU’s second largest EV market, sales were down 33% to 13,143. The ACEA, concerned that the “continued downward trajectory” of EV sales will mean that manufacturers will be at risk of multi-billion-euro fines, urged the EU to delay vehicle emissions targets, something that Volkswagen, BNW and Renault have already suggested.

In response to the European slowdown in EV sales, Sweden's Northvolt has suspended expansion of its Ett gigafactory in Skellefteå with the loss of 1600 jobs.

In the UK a slowdown in consumer demand for used EVs is forcing leasing operators to swallow unexpected losses because the typical “residual value” at the end of a car’s lease has plunged from 60% to 35%. The news is also disastrous for anyone buying a new EV privately. Not only will they have to pay an extra £10,000 to buy it, but they will get much less when the trade it in. Campaigners blame the slump in value on the UK government for pushing back the ban on sale of new gas and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, along with lack of cash incentives to buy used vehicles. Some argue that poorer ­battery performance on older ­vehicles was putting the brakes on the ­second-hand market. Meanwhile, UK automobile manufacturers, facing fines of £15,000 per car over quota for not selling enough EVs, are now restricting sales of gas and diesel models.

Also in the UK, an inquiry by insurer QBE found that fire services attended 46% more fires linked to lithium-ion batteries in bikes, scooters, cars, trucks and buses in 2023 compared to 2022.

 

Grid-scale Batteries and Fire Risk

John Fannon, writing for NetZero Watch, examines some of the impacts of grid-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) close to concentrations of housing, particularly in southern England. He begins with a discussion about battery science, thermal runaway in lithium-ion cells, preventing same, and standards and regulations. Despite the standards and regulations there have been 30 BESS fires in South Korea since 2017. Also, battery fires have occurred in large-scale BESS in Belgium (2017), Arizona (2019) and urban Liverpool (2020). Mr. Fannon refers to a working paper by a group of eminent physicists describing these fires, as well as concerns over new “mega” BESS (existing and planned) in Australia and the UK. The paper concludes with a chapter about fire safety planning for BESS fires, including making realistic, physics-based calculations of the water quantities required to be available for every cabin in the BESS.

In September 2021 a 3,000 MWh capacity BESS at Moss Landing, California underwent an emergency shutdown, when some of its battery packs overheated and threatened to burst into flames. A year later in September 2022 some of the facility’s battery packs overheated and did catch fire, and police cordoned off an area of about 3 km in radius for at least 13 hours. Mr. Fannon applied information learned from the Moss Landing incident to a proposed 2,400 MWh BESS in Chickerell, UK. The Chickerell facility, when fully charged, would have an explosive potential equivalent to over 3,000 tonnes of TNT. A fire at the Chickerell BESS most likely would result in a toxic smoke plume over suburbs of the adjacent city of Weymouth (pop. 60,000).

Mr. Fannon recommends that all BESS proposals present a formal Safety Case and provide evidence that hazards have been fully addressed and residual risks reduced to “as low as reasonably practicable.”

 

Why There Will Never Be a Zero Emissions Electricity System Powered Mainly by Wind and Sun

Every virtuous state or country has adopted Net Zero for its energy system as an official goal, with the “net” recognizing that some parts of the system (e.g., air travel or steelmaking) may never be fully decarbonized and therefore will need some kind of offsets to achieve the goal. In the purely electrical parts of the system, the official line is that zero emissions is easy and cheap because power can be provided by the wind and sun. The official line is wrong because the required back-up will be underused and/or idle most of the time and therefore an uneconomical type of asset that no one wants to develop or deploy.

In New York State regulators have devised the acronym DEFR (dispatchable emissions-free resource) for the back-up, which eliminates natural gas, leaving only nuclear, hydrogen and/or batteries. Since none of these exist today at the required scale, somebody is going to have to make huge investments, something that regulators tend to bury in lengthy documents. However, Roger Caiazza, the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, has done some digging and has created a Dispatchable Emissions Free Resources Page, that examined the 800-page state administration’s strategy and discovered the following figure.

This figure shows what could happen to the state’s electricity supply/demand during a week of persistently low wind and solar generation in the winter of 2050. The grey section (the DEFR supply) exceeds 20 GW at certain times, and at others is zero. For comparison, New York State's current electricity usage is well below 20 GW – meaning the construction of new fleets of nuclear, hydrogen or battery storage facilities, which will be kept idle most of the time. In that case, why not dispense with the wind and solar and use DEFR all the time?

 

2024-09-13

 

Greenpeace USA May Be Wiped Out by $300 million Lawsuit

In 2016 Greenpeace USA, some native American tribal groups and activists conducted protests in North Dakota to stop the Dakota Access crude oil pipeline, which completed construction and began operating in May 2017. In August 2017 Energy Transfer Partners, which owns 36.4% of Dakota Access, sued in a Federal District Court in North Dakota, accusing Greenpeace, Bank Track and Earth First! of violating federal and state racketeering statutes in connection with the protests. In February 2019 the court dismissed the lawsuit.

In 2019 Energy Transfer Partners filed a lawsuit in a District Court in North Dakota accusing Greenpeace of criminal behaviour, including trespassing, vandalism, arson as well as harassment and assault of construction workers. This case, in which Energy Transfer Partners is seeking $300 million, goes to trial in February 2015. In a 1:51 video Greenpeace says a $300 million judgement against it “would shut down Greenpeace USA.”

Patrick Moore, one of the original founders of Greenpeace, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Greenpeace USA “would certainly deserve” to lose the lawsuit."

 

The Terrifying Scale of the Green Revolution

The Global Warming Policy Forum’s John Constable provides some examples to illustrate the physical character of wind and solar generation. While wind contains substantial energy, the energy’s thermodynamic quality is low, which is why no organisms derive their metabolic energy from wind. Solar radiation, while of high quality in space, at the planet’s surface it is hindered by clouds, dust and the Earth’s rotation. Thus, energy collection requires large devices – enormous wind turbines and vast arrays of solar panels.

For example, the Sophia Offshore Wind Farm, currently under construction in the UK sector of the North Sea, will cover an area for 593 km² with 100 14-MW turbines. These machines have three 108 m-long blades, each weighing 65 tonnes, with an overall height of 252 m, and a total weight (blades, nacelle, tower and foundation) approaching 3,000 tonnes. The project will require a gathering network of cables and substations feeding a 220 km-long underwater transmission line to landfall. The project’s total capital cost is in the region of £3 billion, which is a lot for an asset exposed to the North Sea and likely to have a short economic life. Sophia will produce about 6 TWh of energy annually, or about 2% of the UK’s annual electricity demand. Its energy density is low – about 0.01 TWh/km².

Solar isn’t much better. A planned 500 MW photovoltaic installation on 10 km² of UK farmland, comprising one million solar panels, will produce only 0.25 TWh/year, for an energy density of 0.025 TWh/km².

By comparison, the UK’s Sizewell B nuclear power station produces 10 TWh/year, has been in operation since 1995, with a planned closing in 2035, unless extended. This station occupies an area of 0.5 km², for an energy density of 20 TWh/km², making it 2,000 times as productive as the Sophia wind farm. This is typical for conventional (thermal and hydro) power stations – they are small and highly productive compared to wind and solar.

 

California's Trillion-dollar Floating Wind Fantasy

California has adopted a target of 25 GW of offshore wind generating capacity. There is no mention of cost, so David Wojick has prepared a rough estimate. He uses the 2.6 GW Dominion Energy (DOM) fixed wind project currently under construction off Virginia as the start. DOM will cost $10 billion to build, which is $4 billion/GW. The “revenue requirement” that customers will pay over the facility's lifetime is estimated to be twice the construction cost, or $20 billion.

Industry-wide costs have increased 65% since DOM locked in its construction contracts, so this pushes the construction and costs for fixed-bottom wind projects to $6.6 billion/GW (construction) and $13.2 billion/GW (revenue requirement). Floating wind facilities – required for offshore California, where the water is ~1/2 mile deep – is estimated to be three times that for fixed bottom, pushing the costs up to $20 billion/GW (construction) and $40 billion/GW (revenue requirement.)

Thus the 25 GW of floating capacity off California would cost $500 billion (construction) and $1 trillion (revenue requirement). $1 trillion paid over 20 years is $50 billion/year. Assuming a 40% capacity factor for the wind turbines, this amount works out to 57 ¢/kWh, which is 11 times the average wholesale price in California of 5 ¢/kWh.

Meanwhile the US Department of Energy’s Grid Development Office has sent a request for information, with responses due by October 3, for individuals and organizations to submit information for its West Coast Offshore Wind Transmission project. Mr. Wojick estimates that, if this project is to be as big as DOE’s plan for the US Atlantic region (85 GW), the cost could be $3.5 trillion. He invites people to send in comments on this “monstrous floating wind development effort.”

 

Why Is Cheap Wind Power So Expensive?

In March 2021 the newly-inaugurated Biden Administration established a target of “employing tens of thousands of workers” to deploy 30 GW of offshore wind power by 2030. Willis Eschenbach is skeptical about achieving the target and did some calculations. He determined that meeting the target requires adding 465 MW/month of offshore wind generation between now and 2030. Currently the biggest US offshore wind farm (the new South Fork Wind, costing $637 million) has 132 MW capacity. So, to meet the 2030 goal, the US would have commission three Soth Fork-sized facilities each month – not remotely possible.

Mr. Eschenbach researched the time required to get an offshore wind farm online. It takes 6 to 10 years to complete all three stages (planning, permitting and construction – which means that any project not underway now won’t be online by 2030. As well, the wind-powered electricity will be four times as much as the current cost of power in New York, even when the developer gets two-thirds of its cost paid by the taxpayer, and this doesn’t include the cost of backup power.

 

Degrowth: The Final Solution

Robert Bradley Jr. discusses the latest thinking and pitch from the degrowth movement, such as Marcus Feldthus’ website, which advertises an online course: Aligning Business with Planetary Boundaries. This course is based on four precepts:

• Why green growth fails to deliver results fast enough and sufficiently.
• How the inequality and ecological crises are connected.
• Cases of companies that get sustainability right and wrong.
• How to start implementing post growth thinking in a business.

Mr. Feldthus quotes a group of academics and activists who question possibility of endless growth on a finite planet, by advocating for a bold solution: degrowth.

Mr. Bradley considers degrowth as an anti-human philosophy of stagnation and decline, based on the belief that there are too many people. It is about government authoritarianism overriding the natural human impulse to improve.

 

Big Corporations Are Quietly Abandoning Climate Commitments

After their emissions went up 29% and 50% respectively over the last 4-5 years, tech giants like Microsoft and Google are no longer bragging about their carbon neutrality. Of over 500 companies that pledged to reach net zero by 2040, 96% are failing to stay on track. Some are blaming artificial intelligence, because it uses a lot of electricity. For the CEOs that were the saviors of Mother Earth not long ago, there’s now a race to capture the AI market.

As Joanne Nova explains, if Earth really were in danger, the CEOs and billionaires would be “pushing nuclear power like their children's lives depended on it. Instead, it was all an intellectual fashion contest and a quick subsidy buck …”

 

2024-08-29

 

Economic Impact and GHG Effects of the Federal Government's Emissions Reduction Plan through 2030

The Canadian government’s Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) outlines a sector-by-sector path for Canada to reach its 2030 emissions reduction target of 40% below 2005 levels, and net zero by 2050. In this report for the Fraser Institute Ross McKitrick discusses the ERP’s policy framework and presents an empirical analysis of the likely costs of reaching the 2030 target. Using a peer-reviewed macroeconomic model he includes a critical review of the climate plan and an economic analysis of its likely effects on the economy. Some of Prof. McKitrick’s conclusions:

• It is estimated that the ERP will reduce Canada's emissions by about 26.5% between 2019 and 2030, thereby reaching 57% of the government’s target and leaving a substantial gap.
• Implementation of the ERP will dampen economic growth, with a projected 6.2% reduction in Canada’s economy by 2030.
• Income per worker, adjusted for inflation, is forecasted to stagnate during the 2020s and decrease 1.5% by 2030, compared to 2022.
• While the ERP will contribute to emissions reduction, it will fall short of targets and is costlier than it needs to be.

 

Are Canadians Willing to Help the Transition to a Greener, Cleaner World?

Between April 28 and May 1 Nanos Research conducted a hybrid telephone and online random survey of 1,086 Canadians. The study was commissioned by the University of Ottawa’s Positive Energy Program. For energy-transition enthusiasts, the good news is that 68% are interested in moving away from gasoline for cars and from natural gas for furnaces, while 32% are not interested in doing so (44% in Prairie provinces, 18% in Quebec.) The bad news is that the overall appetite to transition has weakened since 2023, as Canadians feel crushed by the rising costs of housing, groceries and energy.

Another Nanos study, this time for Schneider Electric and conducted between March 21 and April 1 with a sample size of 1,069, found that only 2% of Canadians were confident that Canada will reach its net-zero policy goal by 2050, and 13% were somewhat confident. Also, 57% were not aware that $400 billion would be needed to replace aging facilities and expand electric generating capacity to achieve net zero. While 85% of Canadians are open or somewhat open to installing solar panels or heat pumps at home, the No. 1 barrier to doing so is the view that there would be no return on investment.

To achieve any sort of greener economy will require sacrifices.

 

Zero-Emissions Grid: Is a Demonstration Project Really Necessary?

The Manhattan Contrarian’s Francis Menton has made repeated calls for a Demonstration Project (DP) of a zero-emissions electrical grid. While most responders back his position, some say a DP is not necessary and would be a waste of effort. A typical argument against a DP is that a proper engineering plan for a real local utility would reveal that the cost of the backup battery capacity needed would be far too expensive.

Mr. Menton looks at what’s happening in large states and countries that are trying to achieve a zero-emissions grid without ever having a working DP. An example is Germany, a country of 80 million with the world’s fourth largest GDP, that is forging ahead in the blind hope that building enough wind turbines and solar panels will someday result in zero-emissions electricity. After 30 years of “progress” Germany has reached just over 50% of its electricity from “renewables.”

The Siemens-affiliated company Fluence excitedly announced that electricity storage capacity will grow 40-fold to reach 57 GWh by 2030. With Germany’s average demand of 50 GW, this will supply just over one hour’s worth. A more competent calculation of backup energy storage reveals that 500 to 1,000 hours’ worth are needed to back up the grid.

 

A Test Case for Zero-Emissions in Australia

In 2016 Australia’s Northern Territory got a new Labor government that decreed that the territory’s electricity will be 50% renewable by 2030, claiming that doing so would drive down power prices. In 2019 Eni Australia started work on 25-MW solar farm near Katherine to feed power into the Darwin-Katherine grid. However, two years after its 2020 completion, the Katherine solar farm, two other 10 MW Eni-owned solar farms at Batchelor and Manton, as well as another 10 MW facility at Batchelor had not been connected to the grid, due to “some technical issue.”

Today the four facilities are still not connected, and Joanne Nova explains the technical issue behind this. In October 2019 an afternoon cloud caused a drop in output from a solar farm connected to the smaller Alice Springs power system, which triggered a cascade of system failures and an outage affecting 12,000 customers for up to 10 hours. This was that system’s third blackout in four years, and the NT government responded by firing the CEOs of the Power and Water Corporation and Territory Generation for their “unacceptable” response to the blackout.

As a result of the Alice Springs experience, in February 2020 the Territory government rewrote the rules by insisting that solar generators will have to predict what they can supply 30 minutes ahead on a rolling 5-minute basis. For this the solar generators will need to provide battery backup equivalent to 80% of capacity, lasting 30 minutes.

Eni protested that the new NT Generator Performance Standards will make their project unviable. The four solar farms are still idle, and it looks like the NT government will try to purchase the facilities in a bid to bring them online. The government has also commissioned construction of a “big battery,” which will give time for gas generators to kick into action when cloud cover decreases the output of solar farms.

 

The Solar Panel Cyber Threat

Joanne Nova warns about what could happen if a hostile force shut down a nation’s web-connected network of solar panels. An attack on the solar generators could spark a “black start” event, bringing down the entire power grid. This summer an “ethical hacker” from the Netherlands got access to four million solar power systems in 150 countries, exposing a major flaw in the inverters that convert solar panels’ direct current to alternating, before feeding into the grid.

In Australia, sometimes half the national grid’s power comes from solar panels, and 58% of the solar inverters connected to the internet come from companies based in China. Ms. Nova recommends possibly replacing the inverters and fixing the software.

 

The Earth after Net Zero 50: What Happens when the Lights Go Out?

John Whitmore Jenkins was prompted to write this 30-page short book about America's energy transformation plans for five reasons:

• The US government has committed to converting the nation’s land, sea and air transportation systems to only battery-powered devices in 25 years, replacing en masse the principal elements that built the prosperity upon which our civilization operates.
• Net Zero is not “made in America”, but a “made in the United Nations” concept.
• Net Zero has attracted grifters from governments, businesses, finance, academia, and the media – a toxic cocktail of special interests.
• The mandated Net Zero plan would create an unstable power and transportation infrastructure increasing the likelihood of long periods of power outages.
• Net Zero was conceived on the basis of global warming hysteria.

The book consists of six chapters:

• Net Zero 50 – a short history of how it came to be and what its full implementation would entail.
• The Role of the United Nations – establishment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the IPCC, including findings from IPCC reports.
• A Toxic Green Cocktail – the media’s role with the UN, along with other vested interests, in corrupting any search for truths about climate change.
• What Happens When the Lights Go Out? – how solar storms can destroy solar panels and bring down the electrical grid.
• The Historical View – Earth’s recurring ice ages, human prosperity during warm periods and the current warming period cooler than the three previous ones.
• The Science – atmospheric composition and greenhouse gases, relationship of modern warming to CO₂ emissions, benefits of CO₂ for plant growth and modern temperatures compared to historical norms.

In an appendix the book contains a link to Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth that “exposes the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science.”

 

2024-08-14

 

Just Stop Oil Co-founder and Four Activists Jailed for Conspiracy

Roger Hallam is a co-founder of Just Stop Oil, which has been pursuing a disruption campaign in the UK to support its demand for a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning coal, oil and gas by 2030. In November 2022 Mr. Hallam and other activists participated in a Zoom call planning a protest to block the M25 motorway later that month. A journalist from the Sun newspaper participated in the call and sent recordings to the police. The resulting protests “compromised” the M25 for more than 120 hours, causing 50,000 hours of vehicle delay and affecting more than 700,000 vehicles.

On July 18 Mr. Hallam and four colleagues were convicted by a jury of conspiracy intentionally to cause a public nuisance. Mr. Hallam received a sentence of four years imprisonment, while his colleagues got four years each. The judge said that the Zoom call showed “how intricately planned the disruption was and the sophistication involved” and was “compelling evidence” of the existence of a conspiracy. In a press release on the Just Stop Oil website the five called the convictions and sentences “an obscene perversion of justice.”

In an essay posted on Watts Up With That?, Eric Worrall comments on the dilemma caused by the sentences for the new British Labour administration. If the government releases the protesters, they would take it as a license to cause more disruptions, and the government would face public fury. If the government doesn’t release them, Labour activists and donors will stir up trouble and disunity, possibly leading to the party’s defeat in the next election.

 

Global Greening Becomes So Obvious That Climate Alarmists Start Arguing We Need to “Save the Deserts”

Two years ago The Guardian published a story Desertification is turning the Earth barren, for which it blamed climate change, as well as soil degradation. However, this Daily Sceptic article by its environment editor Chris Morrison – based on a paper titled With CO₂ Levels Rising, World’s Drylands Are Turning Green published in Yale Environment 360 – shows that, rather than shrinking and drying, vegetation is growing faster and deserts are retreating. According to the Yale article, the increased CO₂ is “fast-tracking” photosynthesis in plants and allowing them to use water more efficiently.

Yale Environment 360 receives financial support from activist groups and foundations. Accordingly, the Yale article includes some climate doom and tries to temper the good news story with a warning that arid environments matter and are important habitats for species uniquely adapted to scarce water.

 

Lomborg: From Polar Bears to Coral Reefs, Climate Disinformation Refuses to Die

Bjørn Lomborg discusses how, over the past 20 years, climate activists have elevated various stories about climate catastrophe, then quietly dropped them in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. In 2004 the Washington Post warned that polar bears could face extinction, and Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth depicted a sad cartoon polar bear floating away to its death. During the 2010s as evidence mounted about increasing polar bear population campaigners stopped talking about them.

Another favorite icon was Australia's Great Barrier Reef, supposedly being killed off by rising sea temperatures. In 2012 and 2014 the reef’s demise was the subject of stories in the Sydney Morning Herald (“Great reef catastrophe”) and The Guardian (“The Great Barrier Reef: an obituary”). However, for the past three years the reef has had more coral cover since 1986, when records began.

Small Pacific islands threatened with sinking are another meme. UN Secretary-General António Guterres flew to Tuvalu for a Time magazine “Sinking Planet” cover shot as he stood, wearing a business suit, in water up to his thighs. The New York Times recently shared what it called “a surprising climate find”: by comparing mid-20th century aerial photos of Pacific islands with recent satellite images, the authors found that many haven’t shrunk, most are stable and some have even grown. A study in Nature Communications revealed that, over the past four decades for the 101 islands of the Tuvalu atoll, 74% of them have increased in size.

Today, the new climate story is killer heat waves, with US President Joe Biden claiming extreme heat as the No. 1 weather-related killer in the US. However, while heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans annually, cold kills 152,000. Much of climate policy makes affordable energy harder to obtain. Activists refuse to acknowledge facts that challenge their worldview.

 

IPCC’s Input into Key UN Climate Review at Risk as Countries Clash over Timeline

The first global stocktake under the Paris Agreement took place in 2023 at COP28 in Dubai, confirming that the world is not on track to keep global warming to 1.5°C. The next stocktake is due five years later, in 2028. Before then the next IPCC assessment report (AR7) should be available, but there is concern from some developing countries that AR7 won’t meet the deadline, and an accelerated timeline is needed.

This concern proved correct at the IPCC’s 61st session, which took place in Sofia, July 27 – August 2. Here, the IPCC Bureau presented a schedule that would see the assessment process completed between May and August of 2028.  While most countries supported this schedule, a dozen developing countries, led by India, Saudi Arabia and China, opposed it, citing concerns that it would be harder to include scientists from the Global South, where the IPCC has long struggled to get adequate representation of experts. Unable to reach agreement, delegates postponed a decision on the timeline to the next IPCC session in February 2025.

 

Biden Administration Launches Great Leap Forward into Green Energy

On July 22 the Biden Administration launched a significant new climate initiative the “Community-Driven Solutions to Cut Climate Pollution Across America.” According to the administration’s press release there will be $4.3 billion in grants for 25 projects by states, Tribes, local governments and coalitions of these entities that will reduce emissions by 971 Mt/y of CO₂ by 2050. In a Manhattan Contrarian article Francis Menton sees resemblances to China’s “Great Leap Forward” of 1958 where communes of about 5500 households became the main economic units, taking direction from above. The businesses to be pursued were based on an ideological vision of utopia, such as backyard steel furnaces, which ultimately led to starvation as resources got diverted from food production.

According to the Biden Administration’s “climate czar” John Podesta: “President Biden’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants put local governments in the driver’s seat to develop climate solutions that work for their communities.” Projects include EV charging stations, funds to help local governments expedite green energy siting and programs to enhance heat pump adoption. However, these projects are uneconomic and would never be undertaken by people with their own money – only through coercion through federal funding and local government mandates.

The good news is that the Biden program’s cost is only $4.3 billion, a rounding error in the federal budget, while the Inflation Reduction Act as a whole has a published price tag of $1.5 trillion. Devoting that kind of money to uneconomic and wealth-destroying projects can have disastrous consequences.

 

Electric Car Fiasco “On the Brink of “Collapse”

According to Jo Nova, “It’s hard to keep up with the great EV unravelling,” where the best news is that Ford is now losing only $50,000 a car, instead of the $132,000 loss/vehicle last quarter. While Tesla’s sales rose 2% in the last quarter, profits plunged 45%. Nearly every manufacturer is delaying new EV models as they respond to cooling sales growth, high vehicle prices and uncertain political outcomes. At the 2021 COP26 in Glasgow six major auto manufacturers and 30 national governments pledged to halt the sale of ICE vehicles by 2035. Now a group of automakers (GM, Ford, Volvo, Volkswagen, Honda, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Renault, Jaguar Land Rover and Bentley) are revising their plans so as to balance between EVs, hybrids and ICE vehicles.

Politicians tried to ignore economics by playing God in the car market, wasting vast amounts of taxpayer money. They can’t force consumers to buy an unwanted product.

 

Jordan Peterson and Bjørn Lomborg Explain What Climate Activists Get Wrong

In this 9:28 video Mr. Lomborg wonders why, when over the past 25 years, 138,000 people/day were lifted out of poverty, this never got mentioned by the media. Two hundred years ago nearly everybody was extremely poor; now that’s less than 10%. Dr. Peterson explains that we are structured psychologically to be more impacted by the negative than the positive, especially when the former gets blown up to apocalyptic proportions.

The environmental radical left have been good at capitalizing on the natural psychological transformation that typically occurs between the ages of 16 and 21 by offering young people a shortcut to messianic virtue. They can become protectors of the planet, but it’s an invitation to a very one-sided story with a destructive anti-human element. Mr. Lomborg agrees that “the world is terrible and here’s how we can help by cutting CO₂” is an easy message to fall into. However, if we believe that it’s the end of the world and this is the only thing that matters, we tend to make poor decisions. In reality, climate change is a problem that we can predict and can make sure that people become safer from its effects by adaptation.

The idea of Net Zero by 2050 would be enormously costly and fatal, especially for poor countries. Right now half the world’s population survives on nitrogen-based fertilizers that come from natural gas, leaving no way of feeding those people if we went to Net Zero (as evidenced by the example of Sri Lanka.)

 

Air New Zealand Scraps 2030 Emissions Target

In a 2022 announcement, Air New Zealand declared itself the second carrier in the world to have its plans validated by the UN’s Science Based Targets Initiative aviation framework, by pledging a 28.9% reduction in emissions from a 2019 baseline by 2030. It was due to begin progress reports this financial year. On July 31 the airline scrapped the 2030 target, citing lags in producing new planes, a lack of alternative fuel and “challenging” regulatory and policy settings.

Said James Higham, a sustainable tourism expert at Griffith University in Australia: “If even Air New Zealand can’t do it, it kind of cements the reality that reducing emissions from aviation is an impossible task under the current technical regime.” In Australia most companies are far behind Air New Zealand, with 30% of them having “no intention” of meeting climate targets.

 

2024-07-25

 

Joe Oliver: Scientific Method Counters Climate Alarmism

Mr. Oliver, a former Canadian minister of natural resources, in a National Post article, comments on an expert opinion submitted pro bono to the Hague Court of Appeals by three eminent American scientists. These scientists are Richard Lindzen, emeritus professor of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT; William Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton; and Steven Koonin, professor at NYU and author of Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn't and why it matters.

Their conclusions contradict alarmists’ sacred beliefs, including that anthropogenic carbon dioxide will cause dangerous climate change, thus obviating the need for wasting $275 trillion by 2050 in useless expenditures. The foundation for the scientists’ opinion is the scientific method (science must be based on observations consistent with predictions, rather than consensus, peer reviews, or opinions of government-controlled bodies like the IPCC.)

However, realities like the scientific method won’t sway alarmists who have a financial, political, ideological or professional stake in perpetuating the global warming scare. Groupthink dies hard.

 

Ross McKitrick: EV Mandates Don't Make Economic Sense

In this National Post article, Dr. McKitrick examines the economic consequences of a national EV mandate in Canada. Referring to his new paper in the Canadian Journal of Economics, in which he ran a detailed inter-provincial model of the Canadian economy, Dr. McKitrick describes his findings. During the phase-in period the EV sector will raise the price of ICE vehicles and manufacturers will earn above-market rents on them, but these won’t cover the losses on the EV side, so the industry will incur overall losses by the late-2020s. The losses will be permanent unless and until EV production costs fall enough that a mandate is unnecessary. If it takes a mandate to force consumers to choose EVs over ICE vehicles, the mandate will destroy the Canadian auto industry.

Suppose EV technology improves so quickly that by 2035 consumers are absolutely indifferent between an EV and an ICE vehicle. Getting to that point would still impose Canadian auto industry losses that total $140 billion compared to the no-policy base case. Greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 3% relative to the base case, but the abatement costs reach about $2,800/t as of 2030. According to the model the auto sector would lose $1.3 trillion relative to the base case between 2025 and 2050, though in reality it would just shut down.

While people are willing to pay for computers, cars and lots of other things because they perceive that they generate greater consumption value than the cost to buy, this is not the case for EVs, so an EV mandate must make people worse off. The test: if the government concludes, based on trends in vehicle sales data, that a mandate is necessary to force consumers to switch, the answer is yes.

 

Climate Fatigue Strikes in Ireland

The Government of Ireland is legally committed to achieving Net Zero (“climate neutrality”) by 2050 with a 51% reduction in emissions by 2030, but it worries about getting the necessary public engagement to achieve these goals. So, the Department of Environment spent a full year conducting its 2023 National Dialog on Climate Action (NDCA). This consisted of an online public consultation with 4,000 members of the public, 12 workshops across the country with a diverse range of individuals, and 18 in-depth interviews with individuals across a range of agencies and sectors. The result was a 106-page report, titled Climate Conversation 2023, from Individual Action to Collective Engagement (CC23) that the NDCA released in June.

The NDCA program has four pillars (p.7 of CC23):

• Awareness – understanding climate change and its impacts
• Engagement – active participation in climate action
• Climate Literacy – understanding the climate system and being able to make choices regarding one’s own actions that affect the climate
• Behaviour Change – making changes in daily activities and lifestyle to help mitigate the impacts of climate change

Behaviour Change is the big one, and for this the NDCA adopted a systems approach to shaping behaviour as illustrated in the following figure, which is copied from p.23 of CC23

Headlines of stories about CC23 from the Irish Times (Climate change: People do not want to take actions amid belief Ireland not being harmed, survey finds) and Ireland’s public service media Raidió Teilifís Éireann or RTÉ (‘High’ awareness but lack of urgency around climate change – report) indicate that much of the Irish public doesn’t share its government’s climate ambition and is not behaving accordingly. For example:

• Many of those questioned have “no intention” of cutting their meat consumption, while others see foreign trips as “part of their identity” and feel “it would be hard to fly less.”
• Many people are reluctant to live car-free and are skeptical about the value of fitting heat pumps in their homes.
• Climate-focused activities are often perceived as “Dublin-centric” and can alienate people in more regional and rural areas, while older people who prefer using traditional forms of heating struggle to grasp the concept of having a warmer home without an open fire.
• Respondents noted a “degree of fatigue” about green messaging, and some struggled with a lot of climate change vocabulary.
• Just over half of respondents said they did not believe climate change is currently harming people in Ireland.
• Older homeowners, particularly those in rural locations, often believe their way of life is “under threat” as a result of climate initiatives.
•  While the intentions indicate a readiness for larger climate actions, people are worried about the cost and range of electric cars, the payback on solar, and do not know where to start on their retrofitting journey.
• Across the generations, young people identify with the freedom to take flights and struggle with the idea of flying less, in part because they live on an island.
• Irish people, mistakenly, do not recognize that driving an electric vehicle is one of the best ways to reduce impact on the environment.

 

Electricity Canada Warns of “Flawed” Design and “Severe Affordability Impacts” of Ottawa’s Clean Electricity Regulations

According to a column by Chris Varcoe in the Calgary Herald, Electricity Canada, a national organization representing the country’s electricity sector, sent a letter to federal Environmental Minister Steven Guilbeault expressing profound concerns over the government’s engagement process with industry about Ottawa’s proposed Clean Electricity Regulations.

The letter accuses Mr. Guilbeault’s department of repeatedly delaying sharing information about the department’s assumptions underpinning the proposed regulations. For example: “We remain deeply concerned that what has been shared with us during this engagement still reveals what is, in our expert opinion, an unequivocally flawed regulatory design that risks significant impairments to the reliability of the electricity system and severe affordability impacts in many parts of the country. This is especially true in provinces that are currently most reliant on fossil-fueled power plants, which is precisely where a realistic path to compliance is most essential.”

The group’s letter states that to maintain electricity affordability and system reliability — keeping the lights on — regulations must be flexible so companies can meet the federal standards using technology that’s deployable and commercially available today.

 

Huge Percentage of EV Owners Want to Go Back to Normal Cars, Study Finds

According to a new study from McKinsey and Co., approximately 46% of Americans who own an EV want to go back to a standard vehicle for their next purchase. Moreover, 58% of Americans are very likely to keep their current cars for longer, and 44% are likely to postpone a possible switch to an EV. The Biden Administration’s goal is to have EVs make up 50% of all new car sales by 2030, and the Environmental Protection Agency issued new regulations in March that force manufacturers to ensure that up to 56% of light-duty vehicles are EVs by 2032.

 

Study: World Would Need 55% More Copper Mines to meet EV Transition Goals

The International Energy Forum has published a paper, Copper Mining and Vehicle Electrification, that projects copper supply and demand from 2018 to 2050, placing both in the historical context of copper mine output. Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now. To electrify the global vehicle fleet requires bringing into production 55% more new mines than would otherwise be needed.

This paper underscores that copper production cannot keep pace with the increasing global demand for EVs, which require about 83 kg of the metal per car, according to the International Copper Association, an ICE vehicle requires 23 kg of copper, but a battery EV needs 83 kg.

 

2024-07-08

 

Corporate Canada Betrayed Capitalism. Now It Has Been Betrayed

Bruce Pardy is professor of law at Queen's University, currently on leave to serve as the Executive Director of Rights Probe. In this National Post essay he describes how Canada’s business leaders, having spent years colluding with climate hysteria, embracing ESG and betraying capitalism –  while availing themselves of opportunities for profitable rent-seeking – now feel betrayed upon discovering that the activists and the federal government they were trying to appease are targeting capitalism itself.

This became suddenly apparent on June 20 when Bill C-59 received Royal Assent. This is an “omnibus” bill implementing various provisions of last fall’s economic statement and the spring 2023 budget. Buried in the bill are two sections that prohibit “greenwashing.” Specifically, section 236 (1) of the bill, dealing with amendments to the Competition Act, states:

(b.1) makes a representation to the public in the form of a statement, warranty or guarantee of a product’s benefits for protecting or restoring the environment or mitigating the environmental, social and ecological causes or effects of climate change that is not based on an adequate and proper test, the proof of which lies on the person making the representation;

(b.2) makes a representation to the public with respect to the benefits of a business or business activity for protecting or restoring the environment or mitigating the environmental and ecological causes or effects of climate change that is not based on adequate and proper substantiation in accordance with internationally recognized methodology, the proof of which lies on the person making the representation;

These amendments make climate and other environmental claims subject to the same regulatory regime as false advertising, thus exposing any such claims to activist lawsuits – and the burden of proof is on the defendant, not the plaintiff. Immediately, companies and industry associations took down climate pledges and environmental commitments from their websites and social media. For example, Pathways Alliance, a group of oil and gas companies promoting a $15 billion carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) project in northern Alberta, replaced all the pages of its website with this notice. Ironically, Bill C-59 included (see the 190 occurrences of “CCUS” in the text of the bill) the tax credits that Pathways Alliance members had been seeking to make their project financially viable.

Deborah Yedlin, president and CEO of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, wrote that Bill C-59 will derail investment in emissions reductions, because companies won’t “make investment decisions without knowing the standards against which they will be measured.”

As Prof. Pardy puts it: “Progressive statism has never been about the climate, or transgenderism, or whatever the cause du jour. The target has always been Western values and principles. Free enterprise is anathema to its aspirations, and as it turns out, so is prosperity itself. Canadian companies have betrayed the economic principles of their own society. How does government change one side of a bargain? When there is no other side.”

 

It's Time to Abandon Reckless EV Mandates

Dan McTeague, President of Canadians for Affordable Energy, recently wrote to every member of Parliament saying that Canada is not yet ready for the wholesale adoption of EVs. He urged them to drop the “Electric Vehicle Availability Standard” mandate requiring all new vehicles sold in Canada to be electric by 2035. Some of his reasons:

• Billions of tax dollars have already been handed out to companies that have no accountability to the Canadian taxpayer – an experiment in societal re-engineering will disproportionately harm Canadian workers and families, especially those who live in rural communities.
• EVs, with current technology, are not a reliable source of transportation in Canada’s winter climate.
• EVs cost more and rely heavily on government subsidies, which can’t last forever. Replacing an EV battery can cost up to $20,000.
• The electrical grid is not ready for the increased demand associated with widespread EV adoption and the federal government’s goal of fully decarbonizing the grid by 2035 puts us on a collision course with the reality of unreliable power.
• Canada will need between 442,000 and 469,000 public charging ports by 2035. Currently there are about 28,000.
• If there is enough demand for a product, supply soon follows. In the case of EVs, however, the federal government is operating under the assumption that if you somehow create a supply, that will inspire a demand.

 

COP 29: Bonn Blame Game

The 2024 Bonn Climate Conference (officially known as the 60th sessions of the Subsidiary Bodies or SB60) took place on June 3-13, for the purpose of making progress across a range of issues before COP29 next November in Baku. The concluding UN press release reported that the 7200 participants “took modest steps forward” but “too many items are still on the table … We’ve left ourselves with a very steep mountain to climb to achieve ambitious outcomes in Baku.” There was some progress on climate finance, adaptation indicators, an international carbon market and transparency.

Climate Home News’ story about the conference outcome focussed on the disappointment and frustration expressed by many countries over the lack of any outcome on the Mitigation Ambition and Implementation Work Program (MWP). The purpose of the MWP, which was established at COP26, is to “urgently scale up mitigation ambition and implementation in this critical decade in a manner that complements the global stocktake.” As explained in the Climate Home News story, progress on the MWP stalled because some developed countries, together with a group led by Saudi Arabia and China, and some African countries, refused to engage constructively in the discussions. Or, as an earlier Climate Home News article put it, discussions on what to do about fossil fuels has largely disappeared from the agenda.

The talks also failed to make much progress on options to negotiate a new post-2025 climate finance goal.

 

COP29 Climate Hosts Say They'll Keep Expanding Fossil Fuels

Mukhtar Babayev, the incoming president of COP29 in Azerbaijan, told AFP that his country will keep increasing fossil fuel production (mainly natural gas) “in parallel” with investments in cleaner alternatives. He recently described his country's gas reserves as a “gift of the gods” and pledged to defend other fossil-fuel economies wanting to extract more oil and gas.

 

German Hydrogen Rollout Fails to Take Off

Germany wants a national electrolysis capacity of 10 GW by 2030 and last month approved the Hydrogen Acceleration Law to give associated infrastructure an “overriding public interest status,” allowing authorities to prioritize its approval status. However, final investment decisions have been made on only 300 MW of projects. German industry executives and policymakers are pleading for patience. At a conference organized by the Handelsblatt business newspaper they said the regulatory support for new value chains would bring about a large-scale switch to renewably derived hydrogen energy early next decade.

 

Numbers Don’t Lie

On June 20 the Energy Institute released its 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy (SRWE) covering production and use of all types of energy, prices, emissions and key minerals through 2023. Last year the world consumed 620 EJ of energy, of which coal, oil and natural gas supplied 504 EJ, or 81.3% of the total. Robert Bryce, in his Substack blog, used some of the SRWE statistics to expose the myth of the energy transition and show that hydrocarbons (coal, oil and natural gas) are growing faster than “alt-energy” (nuclear, hydro and renewables).

Mr. Bryce prepared nine charts from the SRWE data. Chart 1 shows that, despite spending $4.7 trillion on wind and solar from 2004 to 2023, this expenditure produced a 37 EJ increase in primary energy from W+S, while hydrocarbons produced a 120 EJ increase, or 3.2 times as much. Between 2022 and 2023 (Chart 2) hydrocarbons grew by 7.4 EJ, compared to 4.9 EJ for W+S. For the six largest economies, emissions growth in China and India far surpassed the modest declines for the US, Germany, the UK and Japan (Charts 3 to 5). Global oil use averaged more than 100 million bbl/d in 2023 for the first time and coal use set a new record (Charts 6 & 7). Last year US gas-fired generation grew five times that of W+S (Chart 8). In India and China coal-fired generation increased more than solar (Chart 9).

 

Bloomberg: Europe Must Double Down on Net Zero

In a Watts Up With That? essay Eric Worrall comments on a Bloomberg editorial urging Europe’s centrists to react to the recent European Parliament elections in which populist groups opposing EU environmental policies won more than a quarter of the seats. Bloomberg wants Europe and the world to do more on climate, not less. This means increasing efforts to reach Net Zero while being more forthright about the costs and distributing them as fairly as possible.

According to Mr. Worrall European voters rejected Net Zero because the EU’s energy policy is failing as energy bills strip wealth from workers and the lower middle class and factories close. He proposes that governments stop hiding their Net Zero ambitions by, in a glorious act of political seppuku, closing all the gas and coal plants to give their supporters a taste of the green energy-powered future.

 

New Report Reveals Massive Scale of Green Billionaire Funding of “Climate Emergency” Reporting in Mainstream Media

Chris Morrison, the Daily Sceptic's Environment Editor, describes a massive global grooming program aimed at promoting climate catastrophism and Net Zero in the mainstream media. A recently-published report from the green billionaire-funded Earth Journalism Network (EJN) titled Cooling the Planet: Assessing the State of Climate and Environmental Journalism Globally, gives an insight into the corruption of independent, investigative journalism. The report observes “a concerning trend among journalists in some countries still seeking to ‘balance’ their climate change reporting.”

Any journalists can apply to be members of the EJN and avail themselves of access to grant funding for stories and “training opportunities.” Over 25,000 in 200 countries have done so.

The list of EJN funders includes the European Climate Foundation -- supported by Michael Bloomberg, Extinction Rebellion paymaster Sir Christopher Hohn, Tides,  Gulbenkian, Oak, Packard, Climate Justice Resilience, MacArthur and Rockefeller.

As 1984 author George Orwell once wrote: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; anything else is public relations.”

 

Overstating the Financial Risks of Climate Change

This essay by University of North Carolina Professor Jessica Weinkle examines the use of extreme scenarios in the burgeoning field of climate risk analysis. Since there’s big money in climate change, participants’ financial interest may distort related research and scientific assessments, such as those of the IPCC and the National Climate Assessments.

For example, in recent years there has been an ongoing debate over extreme emissions scenarios. These scenarios, even if judged implausible, are hard to ditch because of the $2.2 billion/year climate analysis consulting business, which depends on them and is a link between scientists and the business community. The fanciful RCP 8.5 scenario is used not just often, but almost universally.

Use of outdated science, such as extreme scenarios, shines a light on the symbiotic relationships that hold together the belief system. Dr. Weinkle outlines the relationships and conflict of interests between two entities founded by Mark Carney, a 2021 executive order signed by President Joe Biden, philanthropies, establishment environmental groups, researchers, central banks and other financial interests.

Dr. Weinkle concludes: “I can think of no better illustration of environmentalism as a special interest: extreme emissions scenarios bring together an eager coalition of scientists, environmental groups, and the financial industry in hot pursuit of regulations that build business sectors to employ climate quants.”

 

2024-06-12

 

President of European Central Bank Says the Entire Economy and Financial System Requires Overhauling due to Climate Change

Christine Lagarde, former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and currently President of the European Central Bank, warns us in a 1:01 video: “Floods, droughts and wildfires last year were just a preview of what is to come. A hotter climate and nature loss are changing our economy and our financial system.” With its new climate and nature plan the ECB will focus on three things, all of which result in impoverishment:

• The green transition.
• The growing physical impact of climate change.
• The risks from nature loss and degradation.

The ECB will also work to reduce its own carbon footprint in everything it does, from banknotes to how it supervises banks. Reducing the carbon footprint of banknotes would mean replacing them with a central bank digital currency (CBDC). As this video (Why are CBDCs so dangerous) explains, while a CBDC allows central banks to create and destroy money as they can now, implementing a CBDC cuts out retail banks between customers and central banks by requiring every individual and business in a country to have an account with the central bank. In effect this results in nationalization of a country’s entire banking system and gives central banks to power to monitor and control every single purchase and transfer of money — a recipe for tyranny. For example, accounts could be blocked to restrict gasoline purchases. People attending protests that the government doesn’t approve of, could find their accounts frozen, which is what happened in February 2022 when Justin Trudeau’s government declared an emergency and shut down the accounts of thousands from truckers and protesters opposing Canada’s lockdowns.

 

Environmentalism in America Is Dead

Robert Bryce has been reporting on the energy sector for over 30 years and his credo is that energy realism is energy humanism. In this essay Mr. Bryce argues that, in America, environmentalism has been replaced by climatism and renewable energy fetishism. The environmental movement spawned by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s and Earth Day in the 1970s has morphed into an NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex. Rather than preserving wildlands and wildlife, today's “green” NGOs “… have devolved into a sprawling network of nonprofit and for-profit groups aligned with big corporations, big banks, and big law firms.” The NGOs want to cover America’s countryside with oceans of solar panels and forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines, as well as industrializing the oceans with hundreds of offshore wind turbines.

Mr. Bryce’s essay provides a list of the top 25 climate-focused NGOs, whose total receipts now total $4.7 billion/year. The NGOs are uniformly opposed to both nuclear energy and hydrocarbons and have budgets that dwarf those such as the Nuclear Energy Institute and the American Petroleum Institute.

As an example of the activists’ environmental betrayal, Mr. Bryce includes a four-minute video showing him using an interactive map of the US eastern seaboard to depict plans to install hundreds of wind turbines on top of the habitat for endangered North Atlantic right whales. Supporting the offshore wind industry are the Center for American Progress (founded by John Podesta, now serving as President Biden’s advisor on clean energy and implementation), Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Climate Imperative, ClimateWorks and the Sierra Club.

Mr. Bryce calls for a new generation of activists, who want to spare nature, wildlife and marine mammals by using high-density, low emission energy sources such as natural gas and nuclear energy. He says that America needs true conservationists, ones who will include a positive view of humans’ place on the planet, seeking to conserve natural places, not pave them.

 

Dutch Farmers Triumph Over Ideological Climate Policies: A Victory for Practicality and Reason

On May 15, Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom (PVV) won the most seats in the November 2023 Netherlands general election, announced that he had reached a provisional agreement with three other Dutch party leaders from the: People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the New Social Contract Party and the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) party. The question of who will be the next prime minister remains undecided after Mr. Wilders withdrew his bid on March 13.

Thanks to the efforts of the BBB, the new government will repeal the following policies of the previous government, which had EU support:

• The mandatory heat-pump rule, which would have forced homeowners to switch to hybrid heat pumps, which are costly and ineffective in many Dutch homes.
• Replacing the compulsory buyout of farms to reduce nitrogen emissions with a voluntary scheme.
• Rejecting an EU demand to reduce livestock numbers to cut pollution.
• Ending subsidies for electric cars in 2025.

While the Dutch branch of Greenpeace labeled the new coalition agreement as “an attack on nature,” the success of the Dutch farmers and the new coalition government reflects a broader trend of pushback against impractical climate policies in both the Netherlands and across Europe.

 

Swiss Parliament Rejects European Climate Ruling

On May 21 a Swiss parliamentary committee rejected an April landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights declaring that Swiss authorities were responsible for not implementing sufficient climate policies and thereby violating the right to life for a group of elderly women in Switzerland. The ruling got widespread criticism in the country. Then, on June 5 the upper house (Senate) of the Swiss parliament voted 31 to 11 backing a motion stating that Switzerland has “no reason to take further action” on the court’s ruling. The Senate found that Switzerland’s past and present climate efforts meet the human rights requirements set out in the judgement.

 

“Hydrogen Town” Plan Cancelled after Protests over Forced Switch from Natural Gas

The UK energy secretary scrapped plans for a pilot “hydrogen town” after a wave of protests. The scheme would have forced thousands of homes and businesses to replace their natural gas supplies with hydrogen by 2030. Aberdeen, Scunthorpe and two Welsh towns were among those being considered for a wholescale conversion to hydrogen heating. However, two smaller communities, Redcar in Yorkshire and Whitby near Ellesmere Port, had been earmarked as testbed “hydrogen villages”, resulting in protests from local residents.

To produce and compress 1 tonne of hydrogen by electrolysis of water requires 52.5 MWh of electricity. Burning that 1 tonne of hydrogen yields only 15 MWh of heat, so the energy invested is 3.5 times the energy returned.

 

Bjørn Lomborg: “The Science” Doesn’t Tell Us What Fighting Climate Change Costs

In these articles published in The Financial Post and the New York Post, Mr. Lomborg says the mantra that, climate change is real and therefore we must “follow the science” and end fossil fuel use, confounds climate science with climate policy. That is, while climate science may tell us about some of the benefits of cutting emissions, it tells us nothing about the costs.  Despite claims by activist politicians and climate campaigners that ending fossil-fuel use will avert a hellscape, the negative impacts of climate change are exaggerated, and even the IPCC cannot document evidence of extreme weather disasters. As Mr. Lomborg shows, climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods and fires have declined more that 97% over the past century — from 500,000 to 15,000.

Currently the world gets about 80% of its energy from fossil fuels and if we quickly ended their use billions of people would die. For example, half the world's population (~four billion) depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. Without that there would be no way to feed those people. Adding the billions who depend on fossil fuels for heating, steel, cement, plastics and transport, abruptly ending fossil fuels could lead to up to six billion dying in less than a year.

While phasing out fossil fuels by 2050, as many politicians favour, would reduce the short-term death toll, the downsides are still immense. According to Mr. Lomborg peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows that reaching net-zero by 2050 would cost $27 trillion/year, or one-quarter of the world’s current GDP. Instead, we should focus on short-term adaption to build resilience while investing for the long term in innovation for reliable, low-emission sources of energy.

 

UN Chief Calls for Governments to Censor Fossil Fuel Advertisements

In a speech marking World Environment Day on June 5, UN Secretary-General António Guterres accused many in the fossil-fuel industry of shameless greenwashing and seeking to delay climate action with lobbying, legal threats and ad campaigns. To counter this he urged “every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies,” similarly to the way many governments ban or restrict tobacco advertising.

Joanne Nova responded to Mr. Guterres by writing that the UN needs an enemy to blame for everything, but it hasn’t been able to end the power of fossil fuel giants by persuading people not to buy oil, gas and coal.

 

Net Zero Cargo Ships? International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea Demands Climate Action

In response to a request from the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) has found greenhouse gases constitute marine pollution. This was an “advisory opinion” confirming that all 168 members of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea must address climate change and ocean acidification in order to comply with their obligations under the law.

In a Watts Up With That? commentary on the ITLOS ruling Eric Worral writes that its impact likely will be minimal as stopping operation of cargo ships would be an economic and social disaster for the island nations that brought the case. Since Pacific Islanders have long experience in receiving money by playing off great powers against each other, this case is just the continuation of an ongoing shakedown.

 

2024-05-28

 

Companies are Baulking at the High Cost of Running Electric Trucks

Watts Up With That? reports on a story in The Wall Street Journal about an analysis of the economic and operational challenges of adopting electric trucks. It turns out that the “The economics just don't work for most companies.” For example, converting a fleet in California (25 vehicles, including ten heavy-duty trucks, from diesel to battery) would increase operating costs by 56%. In Georgia, the same transition would mean a 67% increase. The main reason is that purchase prices of electric trucks is about three times that of diesels.

Despite this, the US Environmental Protection Agency has mandated that manufacturers sell more battery-electric trucks by the end of the decade.

 

Concerns Mount over Exploding Electric Vehicles

EV battery explosions can occur very quickly, triggering the release of toxic gases. When on fire, they create high temperature blazes that are difficult to extinguish, often taking hours to control, and they can re-ignite days after they were thought to have been put out. Explosions can occur after almost any collision or due to a manufacturing fault.

The Wakefield, Massachusetts Fire Department put out a press release describing what happened when they responded to the crash of a Tesla EV that got wedged into the guardrail on Interstate 95 (no initial fire). When the vehicle was being prepped for removal, the guardrail pierced the undercarriage causing the lithium-ion batteries to go into thermal runaway and catch fire. It took the efforts of Wakefield FD and multiple surrounding mutual aid communities to support firefighting operations. Extinguishing the blaze required 2-1/2 hours and 20,000 gallons of water.

In the UK, the company CE Safety conducted a survey of EV fires to determine the number of conflagrations by region and vehicle type for the 2022-23 fiscal year. There were 390 fires, of which 219 occurred in the Greater London area. Bikes were the most common type of vehicle, with 160, followed by car/hybrid (118), scooter (53), bus/coach (14), motorcycle (6). During the 2017-2022 period there were a total of 507 fires, which indicates an alarming increase.

Concern is also rising over transportation of EVs on ferries. Havila Kystruten, which operates a coastal passenger service in Norway, conducted a risk assessment and decided to ban electric, hybrid and hydrogen vehicles due to fire risk. The assessment found that a fire in a fossil fuel vehicle could be handled by the systems and crew aboard their vessels, but fires of electric, hybrid and hydrogen vehicles would require external rescue efforts, and this could put people on board and the ships at risk if outside help was not readily available.

Insurer Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty issued a safety bulletin in 2022 warning that that the number of fires on board large vessels has increased in recent years, in particular three fires in 2020-2022 (e.g., Felicity Ace) caused by the presence of lithium-ion batteries. The bulletin identified substandard manufacturing of battery cells/devices, over-charging of battery cells, over-temperature by short-circuiting and damaged battery cells or devices as the most common causes.

Last January Transport Canada issued Ship Safety Bulletin 04/2024 for transportation of EVs on ferries that states: “While EVs are not more prone to fires than vehicles with an internal combustion engine, EV fires require special procedures as the fires can burn hotter, last longer, and are more likely to re-ignite once extinguished.”

 

The Inconvenient Truth About Copper: Implications for Electrification Goals

The International Energy Forum, an internation organization of energy ministers from 73 countries, has published a report, Copper Mining and Vehicle Electrification, that examines the issue of whether there will be enough copper to meet the demands of the energy transition, in particular EVs. An EV requires substantially more copper (60 kg) than an ICE vehicle (24 kg), and with policies mandating 100% EV production by 2035 there will be a strain on copper supply resources.

Just to meet business-as-usual trends (no energy transition), 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now. Electrifying the global vehicle fleet would require 55% more new mines, which carries significant environmental and social costs. The reality presented in the IEF report highlights the error of poor planning and idealistic climate policy.

 

Wind Turbines Could Steal Power as Much as 38% of Downwind Turbines

As Joanne Nova puts it: “The more wind turbines we have the more useless they are.” This is because new research shows that turbines off the US East Coast could steal as much as a third of the energy from other turbines downstream, with the turbulent wake extending as much as 55 km. The research was published March 14 in the journal Wind Energy Science.

The researchers evaluated wake variability and annual energy production in a year-long modeling assessment of a domain in the mid-Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf. In the model they deployed 12-MW turbines across the domain over a range of densities from zero (no wind plants) to 3.14 MW/km², which is close to the planned density of 3 MW/km² when all the lease areas are built out. They found that the strongest wakes, propagating 55 km occurred during summer when New England’s grid demand peaks. Overall, the simulated wake impacts reduce power output by 38.2% to 34.1%.

 

The Importance of Distinguishing Climate Science from Climate Activism

Ulf Büntgen is professor of environmental systems analysis at the University of Cambridge. In this Nature paper he expresses concern about climate scientists becoming climate activists, as well as activists who pretend to be scientists. He sees a conflict when “scholars use information selectively or over-attribute problems to anthropogenic warming, and thus politicize climate and environmental change.” Considering the role of recent global warming, Prof. Büntgen identifies some troubling issues:

• The IPCC's latest report overstates the scientific understanding of our recent anthropogenic warming relative to past natural variability over 2,000 or even 125,000 years, given the quality and quantity of proxy temperature records.
• The IPCC should include economic research, and its reports should inform, not prescribe climate policy.
• The ongoing pseudo-scientific chase for record-breaking weather extremes is a distraction from “scientifically guided international achievements of important long-term goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate global warming.”
• The unprecedented temperature rise in 2023, amplified by an ongoing El Niño event, could trigger a “zeitgeist of resignation and disregard.”

As a way forward Prof. Büntgen proposes:

• A neutral science that remains unbiased while avoiding any form of selection, over-attribution or simplification that reflects activism.
• Policymakers should seek and consider nuanced information, as well as advice from a diversity of researchers and institutions beyond the IPCC and similar organizations.
• Reliable reporting of detailed and trustworthy certainties and uncertainties, without scientism or exaggeration.

 

Even Stupider than the Stupidest Litigation in the Country

Francis Menton has made several posts on stupid litigation where climate hysterics, claiming a constitutional right to a “clean and healthy environment,” have sued oil and gas companies, the US federal government or both. An example is Juliana v. United States, which is in its ninth year of litigation. On May 1 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed Juliana, ruling that courts should not “step into the shoes of the political branches” to provide the relief sought by the Juliana plaintiffs.

Now a political branch, the State of Vermont’s legislature, has approved the Climate Superfund Act, (“so stupid that even California hasn’t tried it”) mandating that big oil companies and others with high emissions pay for the damages within the state caused by global warming. The amounts owed would be determined based on the degree to which climate change has contributed to extreme weather in Vermont and how much those weather disasters have cost the state. Companies' share would depend on the amount of CO₂ released from 1995 to 2024.

Mr. Menton describes some of the possible issues raised by the Climate Superfund Act:

• Every citizen of Vermont and the state itself is a user of fossil fuels.
• Producers could raise their prices to Vermont distributers to recoup whatever costs Vermont imposes on them.
• Most fossil-fuel production occurs outside the US.

Even within the US Vermont does not have the ability to force producers to respond to its claims, unless the companies are incorporated or headquartered in Vermont, or Vermont wants to pursue its claims in the oil-friendly states where the companies are domiciled.

 

 

2024-05-08

 

Plug Pulled on Carbon Capture and Storage Project in Edmonton

Edmonton, Alberta-based Capital Power Corp. announced on May 1 that it is no longer pursuing a proposed $2.4-billion carbon capture and storage project at its Genesee natural gas-fired power plant. The company had concluded that the project is technically viable, but not economically feasible.

The next day in a story on the federal government’s release of its latest Greenhouse Gas Emissions report, the Alberta government blamed the demise of the Genesee CCS project on the failure of Ottawa to provide the necessary financial incentives to make it economically viable.

 

Major Offshore wind Projects in New York Canceled in Latest Blow to Industry

On April 19 the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced that it has “concluded” three offshore wind projects that were provisionally awarded on October 24, 2023, subject to successful conclusion of contract negotiations. These projects comprised: Attentive Energy One, 1,404 MW (developed by TotalEnergies, Rise Light & Power, and Corio Generation); Community Offshore Wind, 1,314 MW (developed by RWE Offshore Renewables and National Grid Ventures), and Excelsior Wind, 1,315 MW (developed by Vineyard Offshore). In connection with these projects NYSERDA had provisionally awarded $300 million of grant funding to GE Vernova and LM Wind power for nacelle and blade manufacturing in New York’s Capital Region.

NYSERDA’s announcement tied the cancellations to GE Vernova’s decision to scrap developing a proposed 18 MW wind turbine model in favour of its 15.5 MW “workhorse” product. As explained in a WorkBoat story project costs would go up with more, smaller machines. While Renewable Energy World calls the cancellations a “tremendous blow” to the offshore wind industry, they were a good-news surprise to East Coast scallop fishermen.

The cancellation of the New York State projects continues what has been a brutal year for offshore wind, the result of inflation, higher borrowing costs, logistical and supply-chain problems. Since the start of 2023, approximately 60% of all contracts signed by American offshore wind developers have been cancelled.

 

EVs and Bad Press

Clean Energy Canada has noticed that “EVs can scarcely stay out of the news and off social media these days, and while that much exposure for a key climate solution is positive in one respect, in another, it is — more often than not — increasingly negative.” Such stories include Teslas piling up at public chargers, EVs and cold weather, EVs bursting into flames, high initial costs of EVs and waning interest in purchasing them. Clean Energy Canada calls this a shift from the old-fashioned climate denial to a new denial that discredits climate solutions — like EVs.

To combat this spate of new denial stories, Clean Energy Canada sponsored a one-hour webinar titled The rise of EV misinformation, and how to tackle it. The first 6:45 minutes explains the recent EV publicity issue before introducing a panel consisting of Clean Energy Canada’s communications director, Trevor Melanson, director of public affairs, Joanna Kyriazis, and manager of reports and outreach, Keri McNamara, joined by Globe and Mail car critic Matt Bubbers and Electric Mobility Canada’s Daniel Breton.

The panel answered questions submitted by webinar viewers and included topics such as: (07:40) too much media focus on negative EV stories; (10:50) the impact of the bad news coverage; (12:49) whether the overly negative media makes it harder for governments to implement EV policies; (15:35) ways to  break through the misinformation circulating on social media and mainstream media; (21:44) the difference between a headline and the content of an article; (24:16) we should be moving away from all cars, including EVs; (31:08) countering arguments over Chinese-made EVs vs Western-made internal combustion vehicles; (39:10) carbon footprint and environmental impacts of mining related to EVs; (47:59) the role of plug-in hybrids vs EVs; (56:32) what consumer concerns regarding EVs are legitimate and what ones are overblown by the media, and how can EV proponents communicate for their adoption factually.

The Economist also wants to dispel the gloom surrounding recent EV news, such as about falling EV sales and announcements by manufacturers about cutting back on EV investments. It optimistically sees the slowdown as cyclical; predicts that the EV price premium will narrow; urges manufacturers to build more mass-market EVs and wishes governments would lift barriers that keep Chinese EVs off their roads.

 

EV Hell Continues

In an EV obituary column, Joanne Nova chronicles the continuing collapse of the government-made EV bubble:

• Two months after Tesla chargers became the industry standard, Elon Musk fired his EV charging team.
• Hertz realized that dumping 20,000 electric cars in January was not enough and now plans to offload another 10,000.
• In the Australian state of New South Wales, fire and rescue experts are warning that they may have to do a “tactical disengagement” from car accident victims, leaving them to die in an EV fire if the battery looks likely to explode.
• Used EVs could become impossible to sell because the battery guarantees won't last.

In another article Ms. Nova reports that Ford’s EV unit booked first quarter losses of $1.3 billion, or $132,000 on each of the 10,000 vehicles sold in that quarter. This is 20% fewer than the number of EVs sold a year ago. Ford is expecting EV losses in the order of $5 billion for the full year. Its best hope is to, one day, sell EVs for enough to cover the costs of making them, let alone recover the development costs.

 

Juliana v. United States: A Fatal Blow?

Juliana v. United States, brought by 21 children against the US and alleging that the government has failed to adequately respond to climate change, has ping-ponged through the federal court system since 2015. On May 1 the Ninth Circuit appellate court dismissed the case for the second time. The ruling stated that courts could not “step into the shoes of the political branches to provide the relief” sought by the Juliana plaintiffs. The National Law Review opines that, while this dismissal likely means the final word on Juliana, climate change litigation will continue under various legal theories for the foreseeable future.

Our Children’s Trust, which supported Juliana since its inception, wrote: “The court’s opinion that declaring dangerous and discriminatory government systems unconstitutional doesn’t matter, is simply false. The youth plaintiffs are now considering their options to move forward – they are not giving up!” A similar Canadian case, La Rose v. His Majesty the King, is still ongoing following a favourable December 2023 ruling from the Federal Court of Appeals.

 

How Many Billions of People Would Die under Net Zero?

Chris Morrison, environment editor at the Daily Sceptic, comments on statements by Chris Packham, Patrick Moore, and Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen concerning what would happen to world population under Net Zero and a ban on fossil fuels. Mr. Packham has claimed that mass extinctions of life on Earth will occur unless humans stop burning hydrocarbons. Dr. Moore, in an interview, said: “If we ban fossil fuels, agricultural production would collapse. People will begin to starve, and half the population will die in a very short period of time.” Professors Happer and Lindzen, in a submission to the US Environmental Protection Agency, noted that “eliminating fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides will create worldwide starvation.”

Mr. Morrison sees the current Net Zero obsession as a middle-class luxury based on a seeming hatred of human progress. It is also based on climate activists’ ignorance about how food arrives on their plates, complete disregard for the central role played by hydrocarbons in their lives. Leaving fossil fuels in the ground would mean disappearance of medicines, cosmetics, plastics, synthetic rubber, cleaning products, and asphalt. He agrees with Alec Epstein, who calls Net Zero policies by 2050 “apocalyptically destructive.” Mr. Epstein believes that if Net Zero is followed, “virtually all the world’s eight billion people will plunge into poverty and premature death”.

 

A Shockingly Inept Report from the IEA on Battery Storage

The Manhattan Contrarian's Francis Menton writes: “… in a field rife with bad, worse, still worse, and even dangerously incompetent work, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything as shockingly inept as the Report just out from the International Energy Agency with the title Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions.” The IEA is not part of the UN, but a consortium of some 40 countries that was founded in the oil-shocked 1970s with the goal of promoting energy security. Today, as seen from its website the IEA is almost entirely focused on energy transition.

Mr. Menton says that, while the IEA report claims that batteries, along with renewables are a “competitive, secure and sustainable alternative to electricity generation from fossil fuels,” it omits answering three important questions:

• Quantitatively, how much energy storage, in watt-hours (or gigawatt-hours) will be necessary to provide full back-up to a national electricity grid once all fossil fuel back-up has been banished and the storage is all that is available when the instantaneous generators are not supplying the full demand?
• How much will that amount of storage cost?
• What is the maximum length of time that energy must be held in storage before it is called upon, and is the proposed storage technology capable of the task of storing energy for that period of time?

Instead, there is endless happy talk about the wonders of lithium-ion battery technology, how its costs are falling rapidly, how deployments are soaring.  Mr. Menton provides five choice quotes from pages 11 & 12 of the IEA report, noting on the fifth one that the authors discuss energy storage capacity in GW (a measure of energy flow), rather than GWh (a measure of energy quantity.)

Regarding the question of the length of time that energy must be stored to back up a wind/solar grid, Mr. Menton refers to his September 2023 coverage of an energy storage report by Britain’s Royal Society, which used 37 years of data. The Royal Society report found that, because wind supply can vary over time scales of decades, tens of TWh of very long duration storage would be needed for the UK, and far more than “could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.”

The IEA report conceded (p.47) that lithium-ion batteries are suitable for storage durations up to eight hours and are therefore not fit for long duration storage, such as seasonal storage. For long-term storage, pumped storage hydro and hydrogen storage must be deployed.

 

“Net Zero” Has Become an Unhelpful Slogan

Chris Stark is the outgoing chief executive of the UK's Climate Change Committee, an independent non-governmental body created to advise the UK government on tackling and preparing for climate change. In an interview with The Guardian he said: “Net zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it.” He noted that politicians on all sides are wary of associating themselves with the term, which is inhibiting progress.

Mr. Stark attempts to point out that fighting climate change will not involve massive change: “The world that we’ll have in 2050 is extremely similar to the one we have now. We will still be flying, we’ll still be eating meat, we will still be warming our homes, just heating them differently.” He also slams the climate activists, who are alarming people and creating “quite a serious barrier to large parts of the political spectrum to support climate action” by forceful protests and presenting environmental policies as radical.

In a commentary, Watt's Up With That? author Charles Rotter writes that Mr. Stark’s statements expose the façade that the grandiose plans for a “green” economy are both impractical and laden with sacrifices for the ordinary citizen.

 

2024-04-22

 

There Is No Human Right to a Safe or Stable Climate

On April 9, 2024, in a verdict that could have worldwide repercussions, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decided that Swiss authorities are responsible for not implementing efficient climate change policies and thereby violating the right to life of a group of elderly women in Switzerland. This is the first time that the ECHR has condemned a state for failing to act against climate change, linking the protection of human rights to compliance with environmental obligations.

The case began in 2016 when the Senior Women for Climate Protection, asserting that older people are more vulnerable to heatwaves, accused the Swiss authorities of pursuing a climate policy with insufficient targets and measures, in violation of their right to life. After losing at the Federal Administrative Court and later the Federal Supreme Court in Switzerland, the plaintiffs turned to the ECHR to denounce the violation of several rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, including the right to life (Article 2) and the right to respect for private and family life (Article 8).

While the ECHR (which is unrelated to the European Union) rejected on procedural grounds two other, similar cases that sought to force governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Swiss case sets a legal precedent in the Council of Europe’s 46 member states against which future lawsuits will be judged.

The only dissenting opinion in the 17-judge panel, was from UK judge Tim Eicke, who has previously said that the ECHR is not designed for environmental cases. A professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in environmental and natural resources law cautioned: “The European Court of Human Rights stopped short of ordering the Swiss government to take any specific action, underscoring that relief from the Swiss government ‘necessarily depends on democratic decision-making’ to enact the laws necessary to impose such a remedy.” (In a 2021 referendum 51.6% of the voters rejected a proposed CO₂ law that was part of Switzerland’s strategy to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement.)

NetZero Watch has posted this comment on the ECHR ruling, noting that it is binding on all signatory countries, including the UK. Its impact is that climate policies must be put in place, regardless of the costs and benefits, and is, by definition, irrational. Or, as the Manhattan Contrarian puts it: “How the court gets its ruling implemented is therefore a mystery to me. Maybe they don’t care … After all, they are saving the planet.”

Judith Curry, writing about the ECHR decision, says that there is no human right to a safe or stable climate. Trying to impose such a right raises so many contradictions that it is meaningless. Even if Net Zero were achieved by 2050, the climate would continue to change from natural weather and climate variability: volcanic eruptions, solar effects, large-scale oscillations of ocean circulations, and other geologic processes. Further, given the inertia in the climate system (particularly oceans and ice sheets), it would be many decades before there was any noticeable change in extreme weather/climate events and sea level rise after Net Zero was achieved.

Regarding the right to life, Dr. Curry points to declining global mortality rates from extreme weather and climate events, part of which is due to increasing wealth, driven by fossil-fuel energy. She asks whether deaths count only if they are alleged to be the result of human-caused global warming and not by restricting access to safe cooking fuels or are associated with natural weather and climate variability. Efforts to reduce fossil fuel use cause their own environmental degradation.

 

Canadian Wildfires Due to Decades of Fire Suppression, Not Climate Change

Last year’s wildfires in Canada were inevitably blamed on climate change. However, decades of fire suppression created a conflagration that was waiting to happen. A 2016 article in the Edmonton Journal described a 2012 report stating how Alberta’s forests went from more than 50% “young” in 1971 to less than 10% by 2011, noting: “Wildfire is a natural part of the life cycle of the boreal forest; many of the vegetation species, including trees, are well adapted to large, intense wildfires.”

According to Natural Resources Canada, fire’s role in Canadian forests varies in its role and importance. In the moist forests of the west coast, wildfires are relatively infrequent and generally play a minor ecological role. In boreal forests, the opposite is true: fires are frequent and their ecological influence at all levels — species, stand and landscape — drives boreal forest vegetation dynamics. The NRCan report concludes: “Fire is a vital ecological component of Canadian forests and will always be present. The ongoing challenge for fire management agencies is therefore how to manage fire to protect human values while still allowing fire to play its important ecological role in maintaining healthy forests.”

Backing up the Canadian experience, a March 2024 paper in Nature Communications used simulations to examine the effect of “suppression bias” (removing less-extreme wildfires ensures that the remaining ones burn under more extreme conditions) on a global basis. The authors concluded: “Over a human lifespan, the modeled impacts of the suppression bias exceed those from fuel accumulation or climate change alone, suggesting that suppression may exert a significant and underappreciated influence on patterns of fire globally. Managing wildfires to safely burn under low and moderate conditions is thus a critical tool to address the growing wildfire crisis.”

 

Canada Launches New Offensive in EV Manufacturing Subsidy War

In its proposed 2024 budget the Canadian government is including a new tax credit offering manufacturers a 10% subsidy on the capital cost of buildings used in “key segments” of EV production. This builds on an existing tax credit passed in 2023 to subsidize 30% of EV makers’ equipment costs. Unlike the 2023 tax credit, the 2024 one is narrowly targeted to auto manufacturers that have committed to building an EV supply chain in the country. It requires qualifying manufacturers to have existing investments in three key areas: cathode active material manufacturing, battery cell production, and EV assembly.

These credits are part of the government’s response to the US Inflation Reduction Act, which ties subsidies for EVs and batteries to domestic sourcing requirements. While the IRA has been effective in attracting new investments in US battery facilities, it has been less so in terms of making the cars themselves. With the 2023 30% equipment tax credit plus the 2024 10% tax credit, Canada would have a competitive advantage over the US when it comes to making EVs.

The EV subsidies could disappear if there’s a change in government. During parliamentary debate on the 2024 budget, the leader of Canada’s Official Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, responded to a Green Party MP’s question about handouts to the oil and gas industry by saying: “I’ll end corporate handouts to all industries. I don’t believe in corporate handouts. We are the only party that stands against corporate welfare. We believe businesses should make money, not take money …”

 

BBC Reporter Put in His Place by Guyana Leader

In this 2:20 video from X, the President of Guyana, Mohamed Irfaan Ali, is interviewed by a BBC reporter, Stephen Sackur, who begins with the forecast of $150 billion of oil and gas to be extracted off the coast of Guyana over the next decade. The reporter then says that this means “two billion tonnes of carbon emissions” released into the atmosphere. At this point Mr. Irfaan Ali interrupts to point out that Guyana maintains a forest the size of England and Scotland combined, which stores 19.5 Gt of carbon. He then questions Mr. Sackur’s right to lecture Guyanese on climate change when, even with the oil production, their country will still be Net Zero.

The full 23-minute interview is available in audio form from BBC's HARDtalk. After 14:20 minutes spent discussing a threat from Venezuela, Guyana's political instability and poverty, and the exploitive deal signed with Exxon by the previous government, Mr. Sackur gets into the matter covered by the video. During most of the last eight minutes of the audio Mr. Sackur continues his aggressive questioning and frequent interruptions of Mr. Irfaan Ali's responses but ends the interview on a civil note.

 

UN Climate Chief Says Two Years to Save the Planet

Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said the next two years are “essential in saving our planet. We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble, with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans, now.” Mr. Stiell was speaking at an event at the Chatham House think tank in London.

Referring to the 84,000 attendees as last year's COP28 climate summit in Dubai, Mr. Stiell said he would like to see future COP meetings reduced in size. He is in talks with the hosts of COPs 29 & 30 (Azerbaijan and Brazil) about this. With voters going to the polls in many elections around the world this year, Mr. Stiell warned too often climate action was “slipping down cabinet agendas.”

 

The Guardian Pushes ‘New’ Legal Theory of Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Deaths

A recent Guardian article Fossil fuel firms could be tried in US for homicide over climate-related deaths, experts say, reports on a new legal theory proposing that fossil fuel companies be tried for homicide for climate-related deaths. Said Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel with the advocacy non-profit Public Citizen’s climate program: “We’ve been really excited to see the curiosity, interest and support these ideas have garnered from members of the legal community, including from both former and current federal, state and local prosecutors.” Public Citizen researchers are currently holding events at top law schools including Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, University of Chicago and New York University to promote the idea.

However, as Climate Change Dispatch points out, the facts don’t support the proposed legal theory that Big Oil is the leading contributor to “planet-heating pollution.” Instead, deaths from extreme weather events and temperatures have declined dramatically even as the Earth has slightly warmed. The vast majority of temperature-related deaths come from cold temperatures, not hot. In fact, the warming of the past decades has led to a decrease in the net-total number of temperature-related deaths because more cold deaths are prevented.

Other climate or weather-related deaths, such as those from floods, wildfires, and other storms, have declined dramatically over the same time period that global warming has occurred (since 1920). The new discipline of attribution science presupposes that warming has had an effect on a weather event and then tries to calculate the probability of the event occurring had climate change not been a factor. Climate Realism has debunked attribution science repeatedly over the misuse of modeling in previous posts here, here, and here, to name a few.

 

EV Sales Fall 30% in Germany and Minister Threatens to Ban Cars on Weekends

Helped by the abolition of the electric bonus at the end of 2023, German EV car sales are down by 30% compared to a year ago and their market share is actually shrinking, to just 11.9%. This is bad news for the German government, which wants to increase the current number of EVs on the road from 1.4 million to15 million by 2030. Germany’s federal minister of transportation, Dr. Volker Wissing, is threatening to ban driving on weekends by motorists in order “to meet climate goals set forth by the Climate Protection Act.” Said the minister: “A reduction in traffic to help meet the climate goals would only be possible through measures that are difficult to communicate to the public, such as comprehensive and indefinite driving bans on Saturdays and Sundays.”

 

2024-03-28

 

 

Wind Power Rip-off Ontario — 2024 Update

Retired banker Parker Gallant uses data from February 9, 2024 to explain how subsidies for industrial wind turbines (IWTs) work in Ontario. On that day IWTs throughout the province generated an impressive 94,605 MWh. In contrast, during all of February 3 and the first seven hours of February 4 they generated only 2,673 MWh, which was 1.8% of their capacity during these 31 hours. The green area in the following chart illustrates the "yo-yo" tendencies of IWTs and the dark blue is natural gas generation, which can ramp up and down to keep the grid from failing.

Mr. Gallant then asks the question: Was the power delivered by the IWTs on February 9 needed in Ontario? It turns out that 65.8%, or 62,259 MWh, was not as it went through interties to neighbouring jurisdictions Quebec, New York and Michigan at an average sale price of $19.42/MWh (1.9 ¢/kWh), well below what Ontario ratepayers/taxpayers paid to the IWT owners. Mr. Gallant assumes that a more realistic price of $135/MWh was paid to contracted parties, which means that total cost of the power sold on February 9 to Ontario's neighbours was $8,404,965, for which they paid only $1,227,774.

Mr. Gallant wonders why the Ontario Minister of Energy is instructing Ontario's Independent Electric System Operator to extend the IWT contracts when their 20-year terms expire.

 

Energy and the Poverty of Nations

Doing work to create wealth requires energy. In this 13-minute video, Dr. John Constable compares energy sources that vary enormously in quality and thus their ability to create wealth. Humans initially developed the ability to do work with energy from organic sources other than food – mostly wood (an energy source of medium thermodynamic quality) – which allowed development of moderately complex agricultural societies. But these were generally poor and vulnerable to external shocks. Any excess wealth generated usually flowed to land-owning aristocrats, who enjoyed huge socio-economic power, while everyone else worked as low-income laborers with little social mobility.

In the late Medieval period in NW Europe the fuel supply began to diversify, initially using peat. Then Britain adopted coal, which is solar energy in the form of complex organic molecules, compressed by gravitational force and chemically transformed by the resulting temperatures to produce a concentrated fuel of exceptional thermodynamic quality. When burned it produces high temperatures and a tremendous capacity to do work. As a result Britain, and then the rest of the world, enjoyed an exponential increase in wealth from high quality fuels. The surplus energy enabled manufacturing and commerce to dwarf the power of the landowners, resulting in a more tolerant and trusting civil society, and a healthier place to raise families. High quality fuels such as coal, oil, gas, and more recently uranium, have delivered an increase in human welfare unprecedented in previous history.

The last 20 years has seen an attempt to switch to wind and solar power, which are diffuse and of low thermodynamic quality. They can’t do as much work or create as much wealth as the high-quality, concentrated fuels. Investment in wind and solar is vast, reducing investment elsewhere and increasing consumer energy costs. As a result, since 2005 the UK’s total energy consumption has dropped 28% and electricity 25% as the cost of renewables rose. The high cost of collecting, converting and delivering diffuse and low-quality wind and solar energy threatens a return of poverty and constriction of opportunity. The living standards for all but the very rich are falling. The young are reluctant to raise families since they can’t afford houses. Power is shifting back to those who own land and to the energy sector.

However, Dr. Constable says that it’s not too late to put the UK on a thermodynamically-sound energy footing. He sees gas and nuclear as the best choices in the medium term for electricity and industrial heat. Oil will continue to be essential for transport for the foreseeable future.

 

Saudi Aramco CEO: World Should Abandon “Fantasy” of Phasing Out Oil

Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said that the energy transition is failing, and policymakers should abandon the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. During a panel interview at the CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference in Houston, Texas, Mr. Nasser said that alternative energy sources have been unable to displace hydrocarbons at scale, despite the world investing more than $9.5 trillion over the past two decades. Wind and solar currently supply less than 4% of the world’s energy.

Over the past 15 years, efficiency improvements have reduced global energy demand by the equivalent of almost 90 million barrels per day, while wind and solar have substituted only 15 million barrels per day over the same period.

 

John Kerry: Demagogues Imperiling Global Fight against Climate Breakdown

John Kerry, who is stepping down from his role as US climate chief this spring, warned that the populist backlash against net zero around the world is imperiling the fight against climate breakdown. “People are not being told the truth about what the impacts are from making this transition [to net zero greenhouse gas emissions],” he said. “They’re being scared, purposely frightened by the demagoguery that is oblivious to the facts or distorting the facts. And in some cases outright lying is going on.”

“We have politics now entering into this – fighting for delay and fighting for progress. They’re procrastinating and they’re part of the disinformation crowd that are willing to put the whole world at risk for whatever political motivations may be behind their choices here,” Mr. Kerry told the Guardian in an interview in London.

Mr. Kerry warned that the backlash against climate action was having a substantial impact. “We have our work cut out for us because they’re scaring certain companies. You’ll see people retrenching on some things, which is exactly the wrong thing to have happening right now. We ought to be speeding up,” he said.

 

The “Energy Trilemma” and the Cost of Electricity

Dr. Lars Schernikau explains in this article why it is wrong to use the “levelized cost of electricity” (LCOE) when evaluating the cost of power to a country. LCOE is popular because it makes renewables look cheaper than coal, gas and nuclear. However, LCOE omits costs, such as:

• Backup or long-duration storage for the intermittency of wind and solar.
• Costs of network integration.
• Efficiency losses due to less asset utilization.
• “Room” costs due to the lower energy density of wind and solar.
• Recycling costs associated with the shorter lifetimes of wind and solar installations.
• Environmental costs in the form of damage to plant and animal life and negative effects on climate systems.
• Raw material and net energy inefficiency.

Instead, Dr. Schernikau proposes using the full cost of electricity (FCOE) as explained in this paper he co-authored. The paper explains why wind and solar become more expensive the higher their penetration into the energy system, a conclusion that even the IEA agrees with (“the system value of variable renewables such as wind and solar decreases as their share in the power supply increases.”) This, in part, accounts for the high cost of the “green” energy transition. Rather than favoring certain energy systems, the paper recommends supporting “all energy systems in a manner which avoids energy shortage and energy poverty.”

 

Cambridge U. Climate Scientist Dr. Mike Hulme Denounces “Climate Emergency”

Dr. Mike Hulme is a Professor at the University of Cambridge and founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and has a new book Climate Change isn't Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism that reveals how climatism has taken hold in recent years, becoming so pervasive and embedded in public life that it is increasingly hard to resist it without being written off as a climate denier. While climate activists dismiss Dr. Hulme as a denier he agrees the planet is warming due to human activities and specifically says we should prepare for more heat waves.

 

UNFCCC Faces “Severe Financial Challenges”

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is facing severe financial challenges that put at risk its ability of fulfill an expanding workload. The body’s director, Simon Steill, said: “Our organization, the UNFCCC, now faces severe financial challenges. We are attempting to meet an ever-growing mandate. Our job is to make your job easier. To carry out the tasks you have all agreed we should do, but we can only do this if we have the funding support.”

The UNFCCC estimated that it needs €152 million for 2024-25 to carry out the ever-growing number of activities asked by member countries, but at a meeting last year they agreed to a core budget of only €74 million, leaving a deficit of €78 million that would need to be filled with voluntary donations from governments and private entities.

 

2024-02-23

 

Can the Government Create a Green Hydrogen Fuel Industry?

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, predicts that the answer to the above question will be "No". In this essay he starts by pointing out that, even though 95 million tonnes/year of H₂ are produced globally from natural gas and coal to use as a feedstock for industrial purposes, a hydrogen fuel industry does not exist today.

Hydrogen fuel advocates propose to use wind and solar electricity to produce “green” H₂ by electrolysis of water, which costs ~$5/kg, compared to ~$1/kg for hydrogen feedstock from coal or natural gas. The Biden administration has awarded $7 billion in grants for seven regional green hydrogen hubs, which are to produce 3 million tonnes/year. According to Bloomberg/NEF, announced green hydrogen subsidies worldwide total more than $280 billion, with the US contributing $137 billion of that amount.

Mr. Goreham provides a number of reasons why he believes government efforts to create a new green hydrogen fuel industry through market intervention, mandates and massive subsidies will fail:

• The amount of electricity needed to produce green hydrogen for just the steel industry is larger than the existing output of renewable electricity.
• There are only 70,000 hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles operated across the world, compared to 30 million electric vehicles and 1.5 billion powered by gasoline or diesel.
• California is the only US state with a network of hydrogen fueling stations, 65 of them built with millions of dollars in subsidies, to support 12,000 vehicles that drive on California roads.
• Hydrogen pipeline networks don't exist, and transporting the gas by ship is expensive.
• For the world to use hydrogen fuel, the new infrastructure needed to produce and transport it is unlikely to happen in most people's lifetimes.
• Use of hydrogen for home heating would be dangerous, as H₂ is nature's smallest molecule, is prone to leaking and ignites with low levels of energy, like static electricity.

 

BP Lost $1 Billion in Wind Power and Flipped from Cutting Oil by 40% to Increasing It

Twenty-three years ago BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum” and in 2020 pledged to spend $5 billion/year to boost its renewable power generation to 50 GW, while shrinking oil and gas production 40% below 2019 levels. Now BP is writing off a billion dollars in offshore wind investment and its new CEO, Murray Auchincloss, is calling for “pragmatism.” BP is “going to invest in today’s energy system, to help make sure that prices don’t get out of control,” Mr. Auchincloss said. “So that’s investing into oil and gas,” he added, while also putting money into alternative energy sources like biofuels and hydrogen.

The promises to cut oil and gas by 40% have gone with the wind as production of these two fuels rose 2.6% last year. Mr. Auchincloss said that oil output will increase 2-3%/year through 2027 because of production increases in Abu Dhabi, Angola, the US and elsewhere. Last year BP wrote down the value of its US offshore wind business by $1.1 billion.

Last October BP shareholder Bluebell Capital called on BP to scrap its commitment to scale back its oil and gas business and halt investment in renewable energy schemes.

 

Ford's EV Profitability Crisis

On February 6, during Ford’s Q4 2023 earnings call, the company’s CFO John Lawler said: “We delayed our second joint venture battery plant in Kentucky. We reduced the size of our new lithium iron phosphate plant in Michigan, and we did not proceed with our JV battery plant in Turkey. We are further adjusting installed capacity to match demand, reassessing vertical integration in new battery chemistries, adjusting Gen 2 products and potentially their launch timing to ensure they meet our criteria for profitability.”

For 2023 Ford reported that the operating loss (known as EBIT — earnings before interest and taxes) incurred on its EV business amounted to $4.7 billion, compared to an overall net income of $4.3 billion. Based on the 72,608 EVs sold last year, this means a loss of $64,731 on each EV sold. In 2023 Ford sold 750,789 F-Series trucks, more than 10 times the number of EVs.

 

European Farmers in Revolt: Welcome to the Age of Greenlash

On February 6 the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, surrendered to angry farmers by withdrawing a bill to halve the use of chemical pesticides by 2030. The proposed measure was a key plank in the commission’s European Green Deal and its Farm to Fork strategy, intended to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050, make agriculture more environmentally friendly and preserve biodiversity.

Ms. von der Leyen’s sudden U-turn was more than an attempt to defuse a spreading continent-wide rural revolt over input costs and environmental regulations, but a sign of panic among mainstream EU parties over next June's elections to the European Parliament. Farmers have traditionally voted for mainstream conservative and Christian Democratic parties, but now are more likely to vote for the right-wing and far-right parties. Also, recent polling suggests that the Greens are set to lose one-third of their 72 seats in the 720-member legislature.

 

Canada’s New Democratic Party’s Pitch to Criminalize Climate Dissent

Charlie Angus, a Member of Parliament for the New Democratic Party, recently introduced a private member’s bill, C-372, the Fossil Fuel Advertising Act, that criminalizes fossil fuel promotion. The purpose of Bill C-372 is (s.4) to protect the health of Canadians and the environment from the burning of fossil fuels, and more importantly, prevent “the public from being deceived or misled with respect to the environmental and health hazards of using fossil fuels,” and “to enhance public awareness of those hazards.” As this National Post commentary points out, much or most of the misleading information regarding fossil fuels comes from groups opposing fossil fuels. The NP commentary speculates that, as a private member's bill, C-372 will likely “die the death it deserves.”

Under s.7 of Bill C-372 promotion of fossil fuels “that is likely to create an erroneous impression about the characteristics, health or environmental effects or health or environmental hazards” of them is deemed “false promotion.” And s.8 of Bill C-372 prohibits promotion of a fossil fuel that states or suggests that it is less harmful than other fossil fuels. Thus, one could not advocate for natural gas as being better than coal.

Under “offences and punishment,” producers can face fines of $500,000 to $1.5 million and imprisonment for up to two years. Under s.19 there is the “general offence” stating that “every person” who contravenes s.8 is liable to a fine of up to $500,000 and imprisonment of up to two years, less a day.

 

The Billionaire Class Is Fueling the War against Abundant American Energy

It is an open secret that big foundations funded by billionaire families have played big roles in various climate alarmist campaigns against fossil fuels. Less well known is the role these foundations play in convincing government entities to go after Big Oil. An example is the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), which put pressure on the New York Attorney General's office in 2015 to target ExxonMobil with a subpoena for records about the company’s research into global warming. The RFF then funded media coverage attacking the company with the “Exxon knew” meme.

Earlier this month the RFF was in the news when the Wall Street Journal reported that it and other billionaire interests, including Michael Bloomberg, were instrumental in pressuring the Biden White House to implement its January “pause” on the permitting of proposed new export facilities for liquefied natural gas. The efforts by the RFF and their billionaire collaborators result in increasing the cost of energy, reducing US energy security and making the country more reliant on China.

 

The Next Big Climate Scare: Counting Climate Change Deaths

Climate control advocates now propose that we begin counting deaths from climate change as the next big climate scare. For example, last December, former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton spoke at COP28: “We are seeing and beginning to pay attention and to count and record the deaths that are related to climate. And by far the biggest killer is extreme heat.” Ms. Clinton claimed that Europe had 61,000 extreme heat deaths in 2023, with 500,000 across the world.

In this article Steve Goreham notes that global temperatures have been gently rising for 300 years, and most cases of influenza and Covid occur during the cold months, which is also when most temperature-related deaths happen. Moreover, the number of deaths from natural disasters has been falling during the warming of the past century.

 

Activists Block ‘Every Single’ Climate Spy Camera in London Borough

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan's expansion of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone charges motorists a base fee of £12.50 for driving anywhere in the city, which disproportionately impacts working-class commuters. In the borough of Sutton activists opposed to the ULEZ placed signs to block the license plate cameras used to enforce the tax. Throughout the city citizens began “ULEZ fishing” by using fishing poles to plaster stickers on the camera lenses. In response to the civil disobedience, including at least 600 attacks on the cameras, the mayor's office deployed surveillance vans to enforce the ULEZ.

Mr. Khan's chief rival in the upcoming mayoral election, Susan Hall, said: “It is shameful that Sadiq Khan has consistently misled Londoners about his ULEZ expansion. It is nothing but a tax grab that only has a negligible effect on air quality. We know his staff leant on scientists to change their findings and he is taking hundreds of millions from the poorest Londoners. I will scrap the ULEZ expansion on day one of my Mayoralty, no ifs no buts.”

 

2024-02-08

 

European Commission Sets 2040 Climate Target

On February 6 the European Commission (the EU’s executive) announced its recommendation for the 2040 emissions reductions target — 40% below the 1990 level. But it will be up to the next Commission, which will be appointed after next June’s elections for the European Parliament, to propose legislation to implement this target. The legislation will then require approval by the Parliament and the member states of the EU under the European Climate Law of July 2021. This law sets a legal objective of net zero (“climate neutrality”) by 2050, with a target of 55% for 2030 and a process for setting the 2040 target.

The starting point for achieving the 2040 target is reaching 2030’s target of 55%. As the Commission’s December 18 assessment of EU members’ draft National Energy and Climate Plans, current measures are not on track and will lead to a 2030 reduction of only 51%.

Achieving the 2040 and 2050 targets will require both emissions reductions and “carbon removals.” For these removals the Commission proposes to establish a single European market for CO₂, with at least 40 Mt/year storage capacity by 2030, 280 Mt/year by 2040 and 450 Mt/year by 2050, which requires creating a trans-European CO₂ transport network.

A Euractiv story on the Commission’s recommendations reports that making the climate goal will mean close to €660 billon/year in energy investments over 2031-2050, equivalent to 3.2% of the EU’s GDP. For transport the estimated spending needed is €870 billion/year, or 4.2% of GDP. The Guardian reports that, in bowing to famers’ protests, the Commission scrapped at the last minute proposals to cut agricultural emissions of methane and nitrogen, and limit use of pesticides.

 

Biggest Party in EU Wants to Drop Ban on ICE Cars

Last February the EU declared that sales of new gasoline and diesel cars will be banned from 2035. But now the largest party in the EU, the European Peoples’ Party, is drafting a policy to ditch this ban. The EPP is leading in polls for the European parliamentary elections next June. A Euractiv story describes the EPP’s election manifesto as “economy first, environment last.”

An article by Ralph Schoellhammer in The Post argues that the surging in the polls of right-wing parties like the EPP is the result of climate policies that are seen as too ambitious. Once it becomes clear that reducing emissions comes at a significant cost, support for corresponding policies falls dramatically. Ironically, the EPP is the party of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has been a champion of the EU's green policies, including the phaseout of ICE-powered cars and nature restoration laws that limit the use of land for agriculture. Unlike the appointed Ms. von der Leyen, Manfred Weber the EPPs parliamentary leader depends on the electorate.

 

Thousands of Farmers in Brussels to Protest EU Climate Agenda

Farmers’ protests have taken place across Europe (France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Germany), exposing tensions over the impact on farming of the EU’s climate policies, as well as imports of Ukrainian farm produce. Their frustrations came to a head in Brussels on February 1 when farmers threw eggs and stones at the European Parliament, started fires and set off fireworks as they demanded EU leaders at a summit nearby do more to help them. The head of the European Commission and the president of the EU’s Council of Ministers were set to meet with the farmers’ lobby.

 

Germany’s Dream of Building a Fleet of Hydrogen-fired Power plants Is Faltering

By 2035 Germany plans to produce 100% of its electricity in a climate-neutral way, from wind and solar backed up by a fleet of hydrogen-fired power plants. The latter would comprise 8.8 GW of new dedicated hydrogen installations alongside 15 GW of existing natural gas plants converted to burn hydrogen fuel by 2035. Because these plants would produce power only during sustained low wind/sun production, they would require state support to be economically viable. However, an annual €7 billion earmarked for this purpose evaporated when Germany’s constitutional court ruled against using credit lines approved during the Covid crisis.

Given the budgetary constraints, two industry associations are urging the government to ditch plans for hydrogen-fired power plants. Existing power plants can’t burn pure hydrogen because the burners would melt, so they would have to be retrofitted with costly ceramics. Since Germany has shut down its last nuclear station, this leaves natural gas.

 

Canada’s EV Subsidies Scheme Equates to $4 Million per Job

During her appearance at the World Economic Forum on January 18, Canada's Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, touted her government’s $15 billion fund run by professional investors and $120 billion of investment tax credits (24:18 - 25:26 of this video.) In a National Post commentary Jack Mintz wonders if the only way Canada can attract capital is to offer billions to foreign multinationals. Some of his criticisms of this policy:

• Subsidies are often paid to companies that would do the investments anyway.
• Subsidies are wasted as countries bid to attract the same investment. Better to import the subsidized product and use the tax dollars so that Canada can gain a real comparative advantage.
• Subsidies don’t create jobs, since companies that hire more workers draw them from more profitable enterprises elsewhere.
• Subsidies are paid to politically chosen companies that may fail.
• Fearing that EV battery production would go south, Canada has thrown $35 billion at three companies (Volkswagen, Stellantis and Northvolt) to create ~8,500 jobs, or $4 million for each worker.

Rather than throwing around tens of billions in subsidies, Mr. Mintz calls for policies to make it easier for the private sector to create jobs. Governments should get rid of burdensome regulations, build infrastructure, and improve incentives to work, save and invest.

 

Governments Fail to Agree Timeline for Climate Science Reports in Fraught IPCC Talks

During the IPCC’s 60th Session (IPCC-60), in Istanbul January 16-20, delegates from 120 governments and 26 observer organizations met to set the work plan for the IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle (AR7). What might have been a straightforward agenda-setting exercise evolved into “fraught deliberations” that ran overnight on January 19-20. The most contentious item, according to Climate Home News, was opposition from Saudi Arabia, India and China to producing AR7 in time (2028) for the next global stocktake under the Paris Agreement, five years after the first stocktake at COP28 last year.

Sticking to a 2028 deadline would mean shortening the IPCC’s cycle from the normal seven years to five, an option favoured by small island nations, least developed countries and some rich ones. Negotiators reached a last minute compromise by putting the IPCC’s bureau in charge of proposing a timeline for the assessment reports for decision at IPCC-61 next summer.

 

Associated Press Takes More Money to Promote Climate Alarm

The Washington Free Beacon reports that in December 2022 the Associated Press accepted $300,000 from the Danish environmental group KR Foundation, whose purpose “is to address the climate crisis by pushing for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels at a global level.” Though AP claims that it is committed to the “highest practicable degree of transparency” regarding its backers, the news outlet added the KR Foundation to its list of philanthropic supporters only last month.

Last February, the AP admitted that it has taken at least $8 million from climate activists when it announced that it had created a new team to focus on climate-change issues. While AP claims that it maintains strict editorial independence, despite the enormous funding from climate-advocacy groups, a quick check of its recent headlines on climate change cast doubt on that claim. Examples:

• “Climate change threatens Bolivian ‘cholitas’ livelihood”.
• “Climate change hits women’s health harder. Activists want leaders to address it at COP28”.
• “Endangered species list grows by 2,000. Climate change is part of the problem”.
• “How did humans get to the brink of crashing climate?”.

 

Exxon Mobil Files Lawsuit against Investors' Climate Proposal

On January 21 Exxon Mobil filed a complaint in a Texas court against investors, which it says are “driven by an extreme agenda.” These investors are led by US activist investment firm Arjuna Capital and shareholder activist group Follow This, who are asking Exxon Mobil and other oil majors to adopt tighter climate targets, in particular for Scope-3 emissions. Exxon Mobil is the only of the five Western oil majors which does not have such targets.

In 2022 and 2023 similar proposals received 28% and 22%, respectively, approval from Exxon Mobil's shareholders. The company is seeking a ruling by March 19. Its proxy statement needs to be filed by April 11, in time for its annual shareholder meeting in May.

 

World Cereal Production Set to Hit Record High in 2023

The story fed to us by the media is that extreme weather and droughts are supposedly impacting food supply. However, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization's forecast of world cereal production for 2023 has this month been revised upward by 13.2 million tonnes, or 0.5% and reached an all-time high of 1,523 million tonnes. Countries responsible for the upward revision include Canada, China, Türkiye, the US, Russia, Nepal, Mali and Guinea. The FAO’s latest forecast of world cereal stocks stands at 895 million tonnes, with a stocks-to-use ratio in 2023-24 forecast at a comfortable level of 31.1%, exceeding the 2022-23 ratio of 30.9%.

 

New Jersey Doubles Down on Offshore Wind after 2023’s Massive Failure

Last October, Denmark-based wind firm Ørsted cancelled its Ocean Wind 1 and 2 projects off the coast of New Jersey, leaving the state’s taxpayers potentially on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars. This followed weeks of mounting financial problems for the company as well as the broader offshore wind industry. Nevertheless, the state is not giving up as the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities announced on January 24 that it has awarded a combined 3,742 MW of offshore wind capacity to Invenergy and energyRE’s Leading Light Wind Project and Attentive Energy LLC’s Attentive Energy Two Project. The NJBPU stated that these approvals will advance the state’s progress toward a 100% clean energy economy by 2035.

The new contracts are designed to insulate against the risks for future cancellations, as they include provisions that account for inflationary pressures, while also requiring Attentive to put up a $67 million security and mandating that Leading Light put up its own security of $120 million. The projects are expected to increase residential electricity rates by $6.84/month, commercial rates by $58.73/month and industrial by $513.22/month.  One of the two terminated Ørsted contracts would have been about half as expensive for residential ratepayers.

 

2024-01-19

 

A Cautionary Tale from Prince Edward Island

In 2012, the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island signed a contract with a Spanish company, Acciona Windpower, to install and operate the Hermanville-Clearspring windfarm, consisting of 10 turbines with a total generating capacity of 30 MW. At the time the turbines were the largest in North America, and the province’s energy minister promised that that the project would bring down energy prices for PEI customers. In 2014 the project began operation, and to mark the occasion and ease local residents' concerns, the PEI government hosted an open house.

However, by 2022 there were operational problems with some of the turbines, and a consultant, DNV Canada Ltd., was hired by Prince Edward Island Energy Corporation to assess the related issues. DNV’s 208-page report, dated June 30,  2022, is attached to a January 2024 CBC News story. The DNV report cited turbine blades with a “severe degree of damage or defect such that there is a high risk of imminent failure.”  A second, 8-page report, dated February 28, 2023, by Frontier Power Systems discussed repowering options for the project and is also attached to the CBC story. Frontier’s report describes problems with the blades, blade bearings and low speed shafts have affected as many as 1,000 wind turbines around the world. However, total repowering of the windfarm would not be financially attractive, as this would take several years.

The CBC story also reported that in December high winds ripped two 56-metre blades from one of the turbines, and electricity generation had fallen to 10% of design capacity by July. Last August PEI's energy minister said the province would pay for $10 million in repairs and try to recoup the costs from Nordex, the company contracted to maintain the turbines.

 

How Did Alberta Wind Up Facing Blackouts in the Extreme Cold?

During the evening of Saturday, January 13, the Alberta Electric System Operator sent an unprecedented alert to Albertans’ mobile phones warning them to conserve power, lest the operator resort to rolling blackouts. On Sunday morning the Edmonton Journal interviewed an AESO spokesperson, who explained what happened:

• On Thursday night demand set an all-time record of 12,384 MW, but there were strong winds providing about 1,200 MW of power during the 4-7 pm peak period (though no solar because it was dark).
• By Saturday the wind had dropped off dramatically and there were problems with two natural gas plants, one offline and another at reduced capacity. Despite imports from neighbouring provinces, coal and gas plants were running close to full capacity, while wind contributed just 2.6%, and with zero reserves the AESO issued its grid alert at 6:36 pm. Within minutes 200 MW of demand fell off the system, and AESO ended the alert at 9 pm.

Alberta operates an energy only market for wholesale electricity, whereby generators get paid only for the energy they produce. Producers submit offers in price-quantity pairs, and AESO dispatches the lowest-priced offers first, moving up towards the higher-priced ones until all electricity required to meet demand has been dispatched.

The AESO alert spawned a lot of misleading comments on social media, like power deliberately being held back to spike prices. So, Friends of Science’s Michelle Stirling used insights from people who keep the Alberta grid powered in a Western Standard article to correct such misconceptions. Some of her findings:

• While the energy only market can result in economic withholding (i.e., offering to supply electricity only at a given price), there is no physical withholding (producers refusing to supply power when requested and capable of doing so face huge fines.)
• When the wind is blowing and/or sun shining, renewable generators have an advantage since their marginal costs are close to zero, whereas thermal generators need to at least cover the fuel cost in their offers.
• As more wind and solar generation comes online, it takes away revenue that used to be available to thermal generators.
• Wind and solar benefit from preferential government treatment, such as investment tax credits, whereas thermal generators are carbon-taxed and regulated to death.
• Alberta has allowed ~4,500 MW of wind and solar to be built without building any dispatchable thermal plants as backup.
• When wind and solar disappear, as regularly happens during cold snaps, coal and gas generation is all that's left, and that was the situation on January 13.

 

EU Net Zero Target in Doubt as Governments Struggle to Meet Climate Commitments

The European Climate Law commits the EU to a 55% emissions cut by 2030 with full carbon neutrality by 2050, and requires the European Commission (the EU’s executive branch) to propose an intermediate target for 2040 in the coming months. The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, a body created by the same legislation, concluded last summer that reaching net-zero will be impossible unless a reduction of 90-95% is achieved by 2040.

Last summer, 21 of the EU members submitted draft national energy and climate plans (NECPs), and in December the Commission published a damning assessment of these NECPs, finding that current plans would lead to an emissions reduction of only 51% by 2030. Other targets for land use and forestry, renewable energy, and energy efficiency would also fall short. All member states have to submit their final updated NECPs by the end of next June, taking into account the Commission's recommendations and individual assessments. The Commission highlighted the importance of phasing out fossil fuels in energy generation and the persistence of fossil fuel subsidies in all member states.

An article in Spiked explains why EU member states are reluctant to take the action needed to meet the Commission's targets — there is growing public anger towards Net Zero, that has started to shake a complacent political elite. Populist opposition to greenism has brought people out into the street, with farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, Ireland and Germany. In November’s Dutch election, hard-right firebrand and climate sceptic Geert Wilders trounced his nearest rival, Frans Timmermans, the architect and face of the EU’s climate policies.

In Germany a row over mandating expensive heat pumps exposed cracks in the ruling coalition government, and the country's green energy sector is “facing the abyss.” France has quietly dropped its renewables target in favour of nuclear energy and is planning to build six to 14 new nuclear plants by 2050.

 

Death of the 1.5 Degree Climate Target

In this Foreign Policy article the two authors argue that the imminent missing of the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C target doesn't mean that we’re all going to boil, bake and die. They point out that deaths due to floods, droughts, storms and wildfires had declined as countries became richer and more resilient. In fact, sticking to an unrealistic temperature target has severe economic and geopolitical effects such as a radical push to phase out the fossil fuels that make up 80% of the world's primary energy supply. The goal of freezing emissions, or even targeting negative emissions to compensate for any temperature overshoot turns global economic activity into a zero-sum game. Relaxing the 1.5°C target in 2024 could reduce tensions between rich and poor countries.

For the first time COP28 officially recognized that transition fuels (fossil fuels that prevent economic collapse and allow development if abundant green energy is not available) can have a role. These are crucial for the development in poor countries and for their adaptation to climate change. Natural gas, of which Africa has plenty, is the best and cheapest feedstock for ammonia-based fertilizers, while gas-fired power plants provide electricity for homes, schools, hospitals and cold storage systems to preserve food. COP28 also made history by treating nuclear power as equal to other renewable energy sources. More than 20 countries declared their intention to triple nuclear energy by 2050.

Governments and civil society should therefore abandon today’s ritualized, performative, and highly politicized discourse and instead concentrate on using the full spectrum of technologies to reduce emissions while helping poor countries develop and become more resilient to climate change.

 

The Cost of the Climate Cabal

In this article the Issues & Insights editorial board reminds us of the last meeting of the World Economic Forum where US climate functionary John Kerry said that climate programs to meet the net zero goal need “money, money, money, money, money, money, money” (see here and at 07:42 in this video). According to the World Energy Transitions Outlook for 2023, putting a figure on the money required is $150 trillion, or $5 trillion/year.

As Issues & Insights argues, in return for spending $5 trillion/year will mean economic struggles, energy shortages — and zero impact on the climate. University of Sussex economist Richard S.J. Tol has calculated that the benefits of reaching 1.5°C target in 2050 are about 0.5% of GDP, while the costs are almost 5%. When the 1.5°C target is missed, perhaps later this decade, and 2°C becomes infeasible, the environmental movement will have to come to terms with a foretold catastrophe that did not materialize. But the true believers will not easily surrender their convictions.

 

What Happened to EVs?

Just over two years ago US President Joe Biden touted his plan to make half of all new cars sold be electric by 2030 by executive order. In 2022 Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which created incentives for drivers to buy EVs and for automakers to produce them. Sales of EVs kept going up, but in late 2023 the pace of adoption markedly slowed, and the country no longer is on track to meet the government's sales targets. Auto executives are coming clean: EVs aren't working.

Reasons for the slowdown include insufficient charging infrastructure and lack of affordable EV options. However, one miscalculation was the size of the new EVs being put on the road as drivers saw vehicles around them getting bigger and wanted bigger cars to make themselves feel safer. So automakers cut production of small models and made existing vehicles bigger, but massive EVs with large batteries don’t make environmental or economic sense. Even though EV prices have come down, they are still 28% higher than gasoline vehicles on average.

Norway, the model for EV incentives, started them in the 1990s, and by last September 87% of new vehicles sales in that country were electric. However, the total share of EVs on Norwegian roads in 2022 was only about 20%, since the incentives encouraged people to buy more cars, often second vehicles. Norway isn’t on track to meet its 2030 emissions target as EV reductions are offset by increased emissions from trucks. Norway shows that if US policymakers stick with the current model of EV transition, it's going to be a difficult road.

In the UK, EV sales have slumped to just a quarter of new purchases last year. Motorists are defying the combined urging of green lobbyists and government diktat.

 

Was The ‘Preindustrial Period’ of 1850-1900 an Era of Perfect Climate?

In this essay Roger Pielke Jr. remarks how global climate policy has evolved from emphasis on reducing the risks associated with altering the climate to emphasis on global average temperature as an indicator of quality of life. As example he uses the “burning ember” diagrams that appeared in the IPCC's AR6 report and purport to show successively greater risks and impacts as functions of global temperature rise above the baseline for the Paris Agreement's targets of 1.5°C and 2.0°C.

This baseline refers to the preindustrial 1850-1900 period that has come to represent a “time before climate change.” The reason that this period serves as a useful starting point is that people know little what the climate looked like back then and even less of the climate impacts experienced, because modern climate records only began in the 20th century. Dr. Pielke researched the 1850-1900 era, in particular Mike Davis' book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. This work examines a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the resulting famines around the globe in the last third of the 19th century. These, and the imperialist policies of the ruling elites, led to the underdevelopment of what later became known as the Third World.

Besides the El Niño famines, Dr. Pielke notes other extreme events of the era, such as the US Midwest fires of 1871, the 1872 Baltic Sea flood, a 1875 US locust swarm, the1874 China typhoon, and the six major landfalling US hurricanes in the 1870s, compared to just three in the 2010s. During the 1870s, about 50 million people died due to extreme weather and climate, about 4% of global population. Today, that figure would be 320 million.

 

2024-01-04

 

Youth Climate Lawsuit against Canadian Government Can Go to Trial

The ongoing case of La Rose v. His Majesty the King, wherein 15 youth plaintiffs claim that the federal government of Canada is contributing to dangerous climate change, began in 2019. La Rose is the Canadian version of a landmark American case, Juliana v. the United States, in which 21 youth plaintiffs allege that the US government has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources. On October 27, 2020, Justice Michael Manson of the Federal Court of Canada issued a decision in the La Rose case, finding that the plaintiffs’ claims are not “justiciable” as they are so political as to be not suitable for judicial determination under the Canadian constitution and other legal precedents (paras 26-54). The judge noted that even if he is wrong on the question of justiciability, the plaintiffs’ statement of claim has no reasonable cause of action (paras 59 and 96-100).

The plaintiffs appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal which, on December 13, released the decision of a three-judge panel overturning Justice Manson's ruling. In paras 31 & 32 the panel disagrees that the plaintiffs’ claims are not justiciable simply because the question of climate change is so complex and that addressing it is a political choice. In paras 53-62 the panel supports Justice Manson’s ruling on the public trust doctrine (i.e., it is judiciable.) In para 135 the panel allowed the case to go to trial after amending the complaint to address its lack of focus on challenging particular laws or government actions (paras 126-134). The Our Children's Trust legal team representing the plaintiffs plans to file an amended complaint in 2024, with trial expected to start in 2025.

 

New ZEV Mandate for Canada

On December 19 Environment and Climate Change Canada released an Electric Vehicle Availability Standard that applies to new light duty vehicles that now account for about half of Canada's transportation sector emissions. Under the standard manufacturers and importers must meet zero emission vehicle (ZEV) targets, beginning at 20% of total sales in 2026, 60% in 2030 and 100% in 2035. ZEVs include battery electrics, plug-in hybrid electrics (with battery ranges of at least 80 km) and fuel-cell vehicles. Enforcement of the targets uses a credit system, whereby manufacturers that exceed targets generate credits that they can bank or trade. Manufacturers that miss their targets generate deficits, which must be discharged in three model years.

The claimed benefits of the standard include ensuring that the supply of ZEVs keeps up with consumer demand, enhancing consumer choice (as long as the only choice is ZEV) and reducing wait times. Despite having heard concerns from people living in rural and northern communities, the government is counting on technology improvements, with plug-in hybrids helping to bridge the charging infrastructure gap. Another claimed benefit is preventing a cumulative 362 Mt of greenhouse gas emissions (worth $96 billion).

However, a BNN Bloomberg story casts doubt on the need for more ZEV supply, noting that EV inventories have been growing exponentially and that the new standard puts Canada out of step with US vehicle regulations. A Driving.ca article lists a number of things that have to go right for Canada to achieve 100% ZEV sales by 2035: no Conservative governments; decrease in battery prices; solid-state batteries; more charging stations; battery recycling becoming a reality; the prairie provinces "getting religion"; re-introduction of ZEV subsidies by Ontario, and maintenance of federal subsidies for longer than originally proposed.

The Toronto Star, which usually supports the current Liberal government and climate action, published an opinion piece explaining why North American EV mandates are destined to fail. It’s mainly because the mandates overlook two realities — consumer preferences are not easily swayed by top-down government directives, and the timeline for obtaining the minerals crucial for electric vehicles is unrealistic. The authors, two analysts from the Fraser Institute, note that 2022 ZEV sales in Canada were only 6.5% (98,589) of the 1.5 million new vehicles sold. Assuming the same total vehicle sales for 2030, the ZEV portion would have to be 900,000, a nine-fold amount. The International Energy Agency has determined that, to meet international EV mandates by 2030, the world would need 388 new mines. For context, in 2021 there were only 340 metal mines operating in Canada and the US, and it takes from 6 to 18 years to develop new mining and refining facilities.

The Star story, together with other "destined to fail" pieces about the ZEV regulations in the Globe and Mail and the National Post, prompted an alarmed DeSmog to publish a rebuttal, replete with ad hominem attacks on the authors and any person or organization affiliated with them.

 

US Federal Judge Orders Massive Wind Farm Torn Down In Year-End Defeat For Big Wind

The Osage Wind Farm in Oklahoma, consisting of 84 turbines with a total capacity of 150 MW, has been operating since 2015, and is also the subject of a legal battle between the Osage Nation and the developer, Rome-based Enel, going back to 2011. The Osage Nation claims that the wind farm trespasses on its subsurface mineral rights. On December 20 the Osage Nation won a massive ruling when Judge Jennifer Choe-Graves of the US Court of International Trade ordered Enel to remove the 84 turbines, which will cost about $300 million.

Osage Nation’s victory is not only costly for Enel, but it’s an embarrassing loss for Big Wind and its allies and provides more proof of the increasing opposition to wind energy from rural residents all over the world. In France a windfarm was ordered to close due to noise complaints and its effect on birds. The managing company of the site, Énergie Renouvelable du Languedoc, has 15 months to dismantle its turbines and return the land to its original state. Robert Bryce’s Renewable Rejection Database quantifies the number of restrictions or rejections of solar and wind projects in the US over the past decade or so. The December 20 court ruling brings the total rejections of wind energy in 2023 to 51.

 

Junk Science Alert: UK Met Office Set to Ditch Actual Temperature Data in Favour of Model Predictions

A group of scientists in the UK Met Office has proposed replacing the current method of calculating temperature trends from 30 years of actual measurements — set almost 100 years ago by the International Meteorological Organization. Instead, Met Office scientists want to use 10 years of actual data combined with a 10-year model projection. In a Nature paper they point out that the Paris Agreement contains no formally agreed way of defining the present level of global warming, and without an agreed metric there can be no consensus on when the agreement's 1.5°C target has been exceeded. Even reducing the averaging period to 20 years of observed data means that a breach of the 1.5°C limit around 2030 wouldn't be recognized until around 2040, an unwelcome delay of 10 years.

To get around this delay the scientists propose a new indicator — a 20-year average temperature rise centered around the current year by blending observations for the past 10 years with model projections for the next 10 years and then averaging the two periods. They claim this method would provide an "instantaneous" indicator of current warming.

Chris Morrison, the Daily Sceptic's environment editor, notes that the Nature paper's authors used a computer model pathway of RCP4.5 that allows for a possible rise in temperatures of up to 3.2°C within 80 years. (Over the past 25 years observed warming has been about 0.2°C). He notes the poor record of climate models in producing accurate temperature forecasts and lack of confidence in global surface temperature records.

 

The Oxford Climate Journalism Network

The Oxford Climate Journalism Network "supports a global community of reporters and editors across beats and platforms to improve the quality, understanding and impact of climate coverage around the world." It is run by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and supported by grants from green billionaire funds like the European Climate Foundation and the Laudes Foundation. As the Daily Sceptic's Chris Morrison puts it, the aim of the OCJN is to "insert constant fearmongering messages into media stories, as global elites press ahead with a collectivist Net Zero political agenda."

For example, he cites a recently published essay by two OCJN organizers, who provide 14 ideas on how to rethink and push forward climate journalism and to “move beyond their siloed past” into a strategic position within newsrooms “combining expertise with collaboration”. A focus of the OCJN is the new science of weather attribution, led by Dr Friederike Otto and the World Weather Attribution team. Instead of waiting months or years after a hurricane or drought to link the event to climate change, the WWA team can do so in days. The WWA has published a guide for journalists on reporting extreme weather and climate change. Weather attribution uses a three-step process (p.8) — simulate the modern warmed climate thousands of times and count the number of times an extreme event occurs; simulate the climate without any human-generated greenhouse gases and aerosols, again counting the number of occurrences of the event; compare the two numbers of occurrences and calculate the probability that human-caused climate change made the event more likely.

Mr. Morrison points out that the OCJN is not the “only billionaire foundation-funded operation trying to spread climate alarm and hysteria throughout the general population.” Others are Climate Central (“Helping journalists bring climate science into reporting”) and Covering Climate Now, an off shoot of the Columbia Journalism Review. CCNow is partnered with Reuters, which is connected to the OCJN through the Reuters Institute.

 

America's Judiciary Is Quietly Receiving Climate “Training”

The Washington, DC – based Environmental Law Institute created the Climate Judiciary Project to provide “judges and the judiciary with reliable, authoritative, and trustworthy education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law.” The course consists of 13 modules broken into two parts — the scientific foundations of climate change, and science in "climate cases." Module 1 of Part 1, How Climate Science Works, begins by dismissing the long-established Scientific Method, because climate science is a multidisciplinary field that explains interconnected systems covering the whole planet, and the process of science is more complex than simple observations and analysis. Instead, scientific consensus, when “virtually the entire scientific community has come to accept the validity of a fact” is touted as the gold standard for scientific findings. The ELI points to the IPCC processes as an example of such a consensus. In module 11, Climate Change — the Virtually Unanimous View, is this statement: "The scientific community has near to unanimously embraced the only explanation that stands up to the evidence — that heat-trapping gases from human activities are heating the planet."

In an American Thinker article about the CJP, Olivia Murray writes: “When judicial minds receive ‘quiet training’ in pseudo-science to ensure ‘climate justice’ and ‘equity’ are taken into consideration, the threat of prejudiced decisions increases, and unconstitutional laws, and bureaucratic rules and mandates become ‘legal’ despite any fact, reason, or authority to support their implementation.” She then speculates that, in future, a “trained” judiciary will allow a tyrannical government to impose “carbon emissions” limits on Americans, a federal bureaucracy to take away home heating and cooling elements, and legislators dictate what grocery chains can sell.

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