Day: February 18, 2023

From Watts Up With That?

Guest, “Why do they think ‘the climate story’ only has two sides?” by David Middleton

Both-sidesing the climate story
JANUARY 13, 2023
By KYLE POPE

The recent storms in California have been tragic, killing at least nineteen people and soaking nearly the entire state, including cities, such as Palm Springs, that are more used to drought. But is climate change driving it?

It is maddening that, this far into the climate crisis, news outlets continue to dither as to whether a single weather event is related to the now-undeniable, violent changes in Earth’s weather. Did the warming of the planet produce the water that pulled a five-year-old boy from his mother’s arms as he was on his way to school in San Luis Obispo County on Monday? It no doubt had a role. Is the cause and effect immediately and directly provable, on a chart or in a document? Of course not.

[…]

Journalists no longer need to both-sides the climate question. Many outlets don’t; this week, for example, Scientific American clearly conveyed that the California weather is the new normal. That would seem to be the story worth telling.

Scientists are doing their part to end the mystery; attribution science, which helps link local weather events to broader shifts, is gaining in sophistication and understanding. Help is also coming from local TV weathercasters who have emerged as unexpected heroes in efforts to more effectively tell the climate story. TV meteorologists are often the most trusted media figures in their markets, and the closest thing to a scientist many viewers see. The fact that they spend all day staring at the weather gives them unusual credibility in calling out changes on the ground.

[…]Columbia Journalism Review

OK… The Columbia Journalism Review calls for an end to “both-sidesing the climate story” because this was obviously due to climate change:

It is maddening that, this far into the climate crisis, news outlets continue to dither as to whether a single weather event is related to the now-undeniable, violent changes in Earth’s weather. Did the warming of the planet produce the water that pulled a five-year-old boy from his mother’s arms as he was on his way to school in San Luis Obispo County on Monday? It no doubt had a role.Columbia Journalism Review

Maybe the Columbia Journalism Review should have consulted the Columbia Climate School. They published this the day before CJR’s pathetic appeal to emotion…

CLIMATE, NATURAL DISASTERS

Flooding in California: What Went Wrong, and What Comes Next

BY SARAH FECHT | JANUARY 12, 2023

Battered by storm after storm, California is facing intense flooding, with at least 19 lives lost so far and nearly 100,000 people evacuated from their homes. And there’s no sign that the storms will be letting up soon.

Below, experts from across the Columbia Climate School help to explain this devastating weather and what it means in the broader conversation of climate change and disaster response.

Unusual, but not unheard of

“The floods are due to recurrent waves of atmospheric rivers that typically lead to very high rainfall. These are not unusual for California,” said Upmanu Lall, an engineering professor and director of the Columbia Water Center. Atmospheric rivers are air currents that carry large amounts of water vapor through the sky.

Modeling by the U.S. Geological Survey predicted a devastating scenario like we’re seeing now, Lall said. The projections were based on the storms that caused disastrous floods in California in 1861-62.

“There is sedimentary evidence from a UC Santa Barbara study that such a phenomenon recurs in California about every 250 years,” Lall added.

[…]

Climate change’s role

What role did climate change play in this seemingly endless parade of storms marching across California?

“Extreme precipitation is getting more frequent with warmer climate in many regions globally,” said Kornhuber. “A recent study suggests that climate change is increasing the frequency and magnitude of such storm sequences that impact California.”

However, he said, with atmospheric rivers in general, “it’s a bit difficult to say to what degree climate change is altering their frequency,” in part because it’s not clear how atmospheric circulation will change as the climate continues to warm.

[…]Columbia Climate School

The fairly well-balanced Columbia Climate School article cites many factors:

• The “recurrent waves of atmospheric rivers” that caused this flood “are not unusual for California”
• “Sedimentary evidence from a UC Santa Barbara study that such a phenomenon recurs in California about every 250 years” 
• “El Niño and La Niña effects”
• Failure to heed warnings like these: Starting in December 2022, “US government agencies started issuing forecasts that indicated the imminent possibility of something like this happening in the immediate term”
• “Communication breakdown”
• The drought made flooding more likely
• Regarding climate change…

“Extreme precipitation is getting more frequent with warmer climate in many regions globally,” said Kornhuber. “A recent study suggests that climate change is increasing the frequency and magnitude of such storm sequences that impact California.”

However, he said, with atmospheric rivers in general, “it’s a bit difficult to say to what degree climate change is altering their frequency,” in part because it’s not clear how atmospheric circulation will change as the climate continues to warm.Columbia Climate School

While it’s possible that climate change played some role in this flooding event, Du et al., 2018 found that the the average frequency of these sorts of floods is 236 years, ranging from 144 to 372 years.

Modeling by the U.S. Geological Survey predicted a devastating scenario like we’re seeing now, Lall said. The projections were based on the storms that caused disastrous floods in California in 1861-62.Columbia Climate School

• 2023-1861 = 162 years

This flood did not deviate from the historical frequency of the past 9,000 years.

It seems to me that “both-sidesing the climate story” doesn’t have enough sides.

Here’s a plot of annual precipitation in California since 1895:

NOAA

The most anomalous features are the heavy precipitation in 1984 and the 2011-2014 mega-mega-drought, which wasn’t caused by climate change.

Causes and Predictability of the 2011 to 2014 California Drought, NOAA

It is tragic when lives are lost due to flooding and other weather-related disasters. It would be even more tragic if the death toll from flooding in these United States was increasing. However, it is not increasing; it is decreasing.

Our World in Data

The declining death toll is even more obvious on a per capita basis.

Our World in Data

Our World in Data

The real other side of “the climate story”

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that Earth is warming, that man-made causes are to blame…Columbia Journalism Review

The folks are Columbia Journalism Review think that the media should only cover one side of “the climate story.” That side asserts the “man-made causes” of climate change are greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel consumption and that this has lead to a climate crisis that must be solved quickly and at any cost. This illogical premise would lead to the conclusion that the only way to prevent children of the future from being swept from their mothers’ arms by flood waters, would be to get rid of fossil fuels.

This entirely ignores the massive benefits that modern civilization has derived from fossil fuels.

Life Expectancy: Our World in Data
Energy Consumption: Bjorn Lomborg, LinkedIn

From 1800 to 1900, per capita energy consumption, primarily from biomass, remained relatively flat; as did the average life expectancy. From 1900 to 1978, per capita energy consumption roughly tripled with the rapid growth in fossil fuel production (coal, oil & gas). This was accompanied by a doubling of average life expectancy. While I can’t say that fossil fuels caused the increase in life expectancy, I can unequivocally state that everything that enabled the increase in life expectancy wouldn’t have existed or happened without fossil fuels, particularly petroleum.

The logical side of “the climate story” is that greenhouse gas emissions have probably contributed to warming over the past 50 years.

Left: Modeled human climate forcing compared to three instrumental records (see Terando for specifics).
Right: Science News March 1, 1975

The warming has clearly been beneficial.

The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.

[…]

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.

[…]

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
—PETER GWYNNE with bureau reportsNewsweek, April 28, 1975 Full text.

If not for the warming over the past 50 years, it would still be just about this cold:

Science News March 1, 1975

The logical side of “the climate story” would:

• recognize the massive benefits they have derived from fossil fuels
• continue to reap the benefits of fossil fuels
• promote economically viable efforts to reduce all emissions
• place the policy focus on adapting to changes in weather patterns
• recognize that weather-related disasters cannot be prevented, but they can be prepared for

The Columbia Journalism Review side of “the climate story” would:

• hype every weather-related disaster as proof of the mythical climate crisis
• ignore and/or censor the logical side
• remain blissfully (or bitterly) ignorant of the realities of energy economics
• continue to reap the benefits of fossil fuels, because they don’t have the slightest fracking clue about How the World Really Works

References

Du, Xiaojing, Ingrid Hendy, Arndt Schimmelmann. A 9000-year flood history for Southern California: A revised stratigraphy of varved sediments in Santa Barbara Basin. Marine Geology. Volume 397. 2018. Pages 29-42. ISSN 0025-3227 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.margeo.2017.11.014.

Terando, A., Reidmiller, D., Hostetler, S.W., Littell, J.S., Beard, T.D., Jr., Weiskopf, S.R., Belnap, J., and Plumlee, G.S., 2020, Using information from global climate models to inform policymaking—The role of the U.S. Geological Survey: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2020–1058, 25 p.,
https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20201058.

From NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin on 12. February 2023

“Mobility on the road to become elitist, luxury good!”

In November, 2022, the EU Commission presented its Euro 7 vehicle emissions standard proposal. The new directive would mandate new vehicles to become cleaner and apply to all newly registered vehicles as of July 2025.

“We cannot accept a society where exposure to air pollution is responsible for more than 300,000 premature deaths a year in the EU-27 alone,” said Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, responsible for competition policy, at the launch of the proposal. The new rules will help us breathe cleaner air and make the sector greener and more resilient. We must stick to the goal of the European Green Deal and set global standards.”

But critics warn Euro 7 will make cars far more expensive, turning them into a luxury good affordable only to the rich. The EU Commission is in fact striving to restrict general individual mass mobility under the guise of clean air and climate protection.

“In short, driving a car must become so expensive that some of the customers with smaller wallets will forego buying their own car. And they do so voluntarily,” explains Tichys Einblick.

Why will Euro 7 make cars more expensive?

Tichys Einblick reports that the Euro 7 standard “contains new exhaust gas requirements for future internal combustion engines that cannot be met using the current state of the art – or only with such high technical effort and costs that it only pays off for large high-priced vehicles, not for smaller cars for average earners.”

In other words, the EU Commission will make the standard so tough that it will price vehicles out of the market for many citizens.

According to engine expert Professor Thomas Koch of KIT Karlsruhe, “additional production costs of at least €500 and probably as much as €1000 can be expected, depending on the initial vehicle.”

“This means in the last consequence: Mobility on the road becomes elitist! Becomes a luxury good!” warns Tichys Einblick. Electric cars are not an alternative because they are even more expensive.

Previously, European car manufacturers went along with the EU’s demands for cleaner cars, but that cozy cooperation is now running thin as manufacturers no longer see benefits.

“For the first time, fierce opposition has been stirring in the European auto industry against the ideologically trimmed emissions plans of EU Commissioner Frans Timmermans,” writes Ticky Einblick. “The trade journal Automobilwoche speaks of an ‘uprising against the Euro 7 emissions standard’.”

The Euro 7 directive is still a draft, and opposition to it remains fierce, not only from the industry but from a number of parties and ministries as well. Whether or not it goes into affect in its current version remains questionable.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Dave Ward

 

California’s electric grid faces years of potential blackouts and failure as state leaders continue pushing aggressive measures to transition to renewable energy sources, policy experts tell Fox News Digital.

The state’s grid, which is still mainly powered by fossil fuels, is undergoing a major shift from natural gas and coal power to renewable power like wind and solar. Simultaneously, state officials are pushing an electrification of the economy, particularly in the transportation sector through electric vehicle mandates, which is expected to increase pressure on the grid.

“California is drastically cutting our dependence on fossil fuels and cleaning our air,” Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a November announcement unveiling the “world’s first detailed pathway to carbon neutrality.”

The state’s plan involves goals to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 85%, cut oil usage by 94% and deploy more solar and wind capacity over the next two decades. The aggressive plan to overhaul the state’s energy system came three months after a top California environmental agency moved forward with a rule requiring all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2035.

In 2021, the most recent year with data, wind and solar accounted for about 25% of total electricity generated in California while natural gas accounted for more than 50% of in-state electricity generation. And 19% of new car sales in California were zero-emission vehicles, state data showed.

Experts told Fox News Digital environmental mandates implemented by Newsom and his administration have already created instability in the grid, an issue they argued would only get worse as existing fossil fuel power generation capacity was taken offline and replaced by intermittent sources.

“They’re going to have to build an outrageous amount of wind and solar in a very short time if they want to accomplish their objectives of electrifying — our whole transportation sector and our whole home heating and cooling and residential sector,” Edward Ring, a senior fellow with and co-founder of the California Policy Center, told Fox News Digital in an interview.

“There’s a burden to the consumer that’s going to get very heavy,” he continued. “Even if they can pull it off without blackouts, the burden to the consumer is going to be ridiculous.” 

The full article is well worth reading here.

The scale of the transition is evident from the current energy mix in California:

https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA

According to the California Energy Commission:

“To reach the 2045 target while electrifying other sectors to meet the state’s economywide climate goals, California will need to roughly triple its current electricity grid capacity.”

.

My calculations suggest this is underestimated. Current grid capacity is 81 GW, including about 40 GW of renewables, including hydro. The CAC figures imply about 240 GW in total by 2045. Given that there are no plans to build new nuclear, and hydro is pretty much limited to current capacities, most of this extra capacity will have to be solar.

Wind power, by the way, is as unreliable as it is in this country, as the latest data shows. It would be suicidal for California to rely heavily on wind power:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/balancing_authority/CISO

Electricity only accounts for about 30% of total energy usage in California. But the 2045 decarbonisation targets imply that this ratio will have to rise to maybe 90%, with the electrification of cars, heating, industry and so on.

In other words, electricity generation may need to triple, which maybe is what the CAC mean. But because wind and solar power have such low utilisation rates, the capacity will have to rise much more than three times.

Below is my back of the Players Weights packet, assuming hydro, bio and geo stay the same as now, and wind power doubles. Under this scenario, solar power generation would need to rise to 540 TWh from its current level of 33 TWh:

Solar capacity would need to increase from 14 GW to 229 GW, with total grid capacity rising to 260 GW. But these figures assume that solar panel productivity is the same all year round, currently around 25%.

During winter months this is much less; on Feb 12th, for instance, utilisation fell to 18%. Allowing for system reserves and contingencies, you would probably have to plan on a figure of about 15%, which would mean you would need solar capacity of 410 GW, rather than 229 GW. Inevitably much of this would be redundant for much of the year. (The alternative would be to provide battery storage for seasonal peaks in demand and troughs in generation, but I suspect this would be prohibitively expensive).

You may also have to add more capacity to cope with demand during heatwaves, which can add 30 GW to average usage.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/balancing_authority/CISO

Two other things to consider:

• California gets about a third of its power from other states, 84 TWh in 2021. At least half of this is fossil fuel/nuclear/hydro, which will either not be available in twenty years time, or in the case of hydro cannot be increased. Given the likely shortage of power in other states, it would extremely foolish to rely on these imports going forward.
• Gavin Newsom is also relying heavily on energy efficiency, but any savings are likely to be offset by increased demand. Having said that, he is doing such a good job of running the state that Californians are migrating in droves to states like Texas, Tennessee and Florida, along with chunks of the industrial base, so that should help!

Which brings us to the $64 billion (or is it trillion?) question – storage.

I have assumed for this exercise that storage is only needed for 24 hour cycles, and that seasonal peaks are covered by installing extra generation capacity.

Battery storage needs would need to be planned around winter, when generation is at its lowest. My calculations suggest that storage would need to be about 70% of daily consumption in mid-winter. Based on 540 TWh a year, and allowing for extra demand for heating in winter. daily consumption of solar power would be about 1.6 TWh, giving a storage of 1.12 TWh. (Current battery storage by comparison is 4316 MWh – in other words California would need more than a million times as much storage as it has now!).

But as the CAC conveniently point out, battery capacity quickly declines:

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac

There would probably need to be a constant, rolling 10-year replacement programme for batteries. Over that life span, average capacity may be no more than 50% in effective terms, given that you cannot run batteries dry. So that 1.12 TWh needs to be doubled to 2.24 TWh. (The idea, by the way, that you would want to run your grid on second hand car batteries shows just how ramshackle this whole programme is! It would be self defeating, in any case, because those car batteries would soon be useless).

Currently battery prices are around $200/KWh. Laughingly the CAC expect these to fall by two thirds, on the back of rising demand for EVs. The dolts have not worked out that increased demand will send prices of the raw materials needed much higher!

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac

So, working with the current $200, that 2.24 TWh would cost $448 billion. With a ten year life, that’s $44.8 billion every year. And that is only the cost of the battery; there vis also the cost of infrastructure, switchgear, transmission networks and labour to consider. I doubt you would get much change out of $100 billion. And this is every year hereafter.

It is usually claimed that renewable energy reduces dependence on petro-state dictators. It is always a silly argument, because you can buy fossil fuels from around the world, and the US could be self sufficient if it wanted to.

But this suicidal lurch to solar power brings with it a much greater geopolitical risk. A grid that is wholly dependent on batteries would put California at the mercy of China’s monopoly of batteries and the raw materials that go into them.

And once California has gone down that path, there would be no way back.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

This Disney clip is pure critical race theory, including the insane conspiracy theory that Lincoln did not free the slaves.pic.twitter.com/kLqPUU34Mn

— Christopher Rufo (@christopherrufo) February 5, 2023

Brandon Morse writes at Red State No, Slaves Didn’t Build This Country.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Not long ago, Disney ripped off any pretense of being a family company and dove head-first into the social justice muck with an episode of “The Proud Family” that featured a slam poetry segment that echoed the fringe critical race theory claim that “slaves built this country.”

As RedState reported, it soon surfaced that the writer of the show is a very loud and proud social justice radical named Latoya Raveneau, who has a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and wants to introduce “queerness” to the shows your kids watch whenever she gets the chance. She also bragged that no one at Disney is trying to stop her.

First things first, we need to torpedo this idea that slaves built this country. While it’d be unrealistic to say they weren’t a part of the nation’s development, putting them as the prime constructors of an entire nation is like saying the guy who crafted the axle at the car factory built your vehicle. He was definitely a part of it, but he hardly gets to take full credit.

So many kinds of people came to the new world and worked their own land, built their own towns, and established their own societies without the help of slaves. For one thing, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade transported well over 12 million slaves, but only a little over 300,000 made their way into the United States. This didn’t happen all at once.

Slavery did officially begin in 1619, but it began with just over 20 slaves.

To think that over the course of time that singular group of people built an entire nation — even a burgeoning one — by themselves is the height of fantasy. Especially as you continue to plug in the numbers.

The slave population would later balloon to around four million by the time the emancipation proclamation was signed in 1863, and while that number is tragically large, it doesn’t mean that there was a slave for every family. The vast majority of slaves were held in the agrarian south and even then, only around 25 percent of the south was wealthy enough to own slaves.

Meanwhile, the slave-free north continued to outpace the south by leaps and bounds, including agriculturally according to Warfare in the Western World:

“But in a longer struggle the North’s advantages were substantial. With a population of 20 million, the Northern states obviously possessed a much larger military manpower base, but their industrial capacity was far greater as well. In 1860 the North had over 110,000 manufacturing establishments, the South just 18,000. The North produced 94 percent of the country’s iron, 97 percent of is coal and – not incidentally – 97 percent of its firearms. It contained 22,000 miles of railroad to the South’s 8,500. The North outperformed the South agriculturally as well. Northerners held 75 percent of the country’s farm acreage, produced 60 percent of its livestock, 67 percent of its corn, and 81 percent of its wheat. All in all, they held 75 percent of the nation’s total wealth.”

These stats immediately wreck the idea that “slaves built this country.” Not only did the north succeed greatly without them, but the majority of the south also didn’t have them.

The idea that white people were sitting in rocking chairs sipping tea while black people did all the work from 1619 to 1863 is, frankly, stupid. It dismisses the blood, sweat, and tears of many different kinds of people, including Mexicans, Germans, Irish, Chinese, and more. It purposely shoves aside the industriousness of an entire country looking to build a new world and make something for itself.

Yes, slavery did play a part, but not nearly enough of one to claim all the credit.
This leads me to the idea that reparations are owed to the black population
of the United States by the taxpayers of this country.

No. No one owes anything to anyone for the atrocity that is slavery. For one, no one alive today was around to commit that sin or have that sin be committed upon them. Whatever guilt there was for it has long since died off. Outside of the church, the idea of original sin is ludicrous. White people alive today are not guilty of what a percentage of white people did long ago. Moreover, the nation that declared slavery illegal and went to war with emancipation being a goal leading to an astounding loss of life is not responsible for reparations either.

This nation’s story is, in part, a struggle against slavery beginning at its very foundations. White supremacy was never the intended goal of those most loyal to the American dream and spirit, despite the claims of race hustlers. Nothing is owed because there is no one around to whom anything would be owed.

Social sin is non-transferable.

Raveneau is, like most radical leftists, incredibly bitter and bigoted herself. Her racism against white people is clearly on display, as is her disdain for a country that sacrificed much to shed itself of the slavery she’s using as a tool to exert social control over innocent people. 

That Disney is allowing this to happen shows just how lost it is and how it too wishes to damage this great nation’s reputation and cast its people as villains for simply existing in a place where once there was slavery.

The bitter truth that race hustlers need to face is that white people today aren’t guilty of slavery. White supremacy is not the foremost wish of the vast majority of white people in this nation today, and anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something that would be detrimental to everyone for having bought it.

Slavery is evil and it should be left in the past. No one living today should try to bring it back,
not in practice or as a social tool to use as a method of social dictatorship.

From Climate Change Dispatch

By ROBERT BRYCE

Last Tuesday during his State of The Union speech, President Joe Biden repeated a claim he has made many times over the past few years about renewable energy.

Biden declared that the Inflation Reduction Act is “the most significant investment ever in climate change, ever. Lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, leading the world to a clean energy future.” [emphasis, links added]

In 2020, while campaigning for the White House, Biden released an energy plan that promised to “spur the installation of millions of solar panels, including utility-scale, rooftop, and community solar systems.”

In 2021, Biden’s White House released a plan that claimed the U.S. could be getting nearly half of its electricity from solar by 2050.

The plan was released a few days after Biden declared we need to overhaul our energy and power systems because climate change poses “an existential threat to our lives.”

Last July, the Biden administration touted its Community Solar Subscription Platform, which aims to “connect families to solar energy and lower electricity bills through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and other low-income assistance programs.”

The effort was designed to “jump-start solar energy careers in underserved communities. Today’s announcements support President Biden’s goal to reach a carbon-free electricity sector by 2035 while creating good-paying jobs across the country.”

But those breezy claims about solar, jobs and a carbon-free grid keep crashing into the hard realities of land use and local politics.

On Wednesday, roughly 24 hours after Biden gave his State of the Union speech, the Zoning Hearing Board in Scranton Joe’s hometown, vetoed a proposed 4.3-megawatt solar project.

Here’s how Jim Lockwood of Scranton’s Times-Tribune reported on the hearing:

• The zoning board on Wednesday rejected a proposal for a solar farm on West Mountain after some neighbors expressed opposition to the plan. Massachusetts-based ECA Solar sought zoning approval to build a large-scale solar array with 12,000 panels on a 73-acre tract on West Mountain in the rear 800 block of North Keyser Avenue off Graham Street. The board voted 4-1…to reject a special exception that ECA needed to advance the plan. The ECA project, called Electric City Solar Initiative, would be the first commercial solar venture in the city. It would cost nearly $9 million to construct and produce 4.35 megawatts of electricity.
• The array would contain three sections of panels situated on 36 acres of the 73-acre tract and within buffered areas…the tract formerly hosted coal mining many years ago and ECA Solar bought the land in 2021 because it’s near PPL electrical facilities.

The site of the proposed solar project is about four miles west of the house on North Washington Avenue that Biden lived in as a child. Lockwood explained that Scranton residents raised “various issues and concerns about the solar project.”

His article continued:

• Keyser Valley Citizens Association Vice President Bridget Chomko, who said she represented Fawnwood and Keyser Valley residents, spoke about the potential negative impacts of stormwater runoff and said the neighborhood’s quality of life would forever be altered by a solar farm. Residents now have woods and wildlife next door, but if the solar farm is allowed, such an “idyllic view” of Fawnwood “would transform to an eyesore of the metal and the glass of the solar panels,” Chomko said.
• Resident Brian Gallagher also believes the solar farm would only benefit ECA and there would not be any upside for the neighborhood and city. “I think the biggest concern is there is no benefit” to the neighborhood or city, Gallagher said. “Nobody wants to look at them.“

The rejection of the solar project in Scranton provides yet more proof that land-use conflicts are slowing or stopping the growth of renewable energy projects all across America.

As can be seen in the newly updated Renewable Rejection Database­ (which is now searchable by keyword, year, and state), the rejection of ECA’s project is the sixth solar rejection of 2023.

It also marks the 114th rejection of solar in the U.S. since 2017.

Solar energy is politically popular, but local communities across the country are rejecting projects. For more details, see the Renewable Rejection Database

One other point must be noted about Wednesday’s rejection: it shows that struggling towns like Scranton and high-income communities alike are rejecting renewable-energy projects.

Much is made by NGOs, alt-energy promoters, and activists about “climate justice” and their desire to put solar facilities in lower-income and “underserved communities.”

According to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate in Scranton is about 20%. That’s nearly double the nationwide poverty rate of 11.6%.

In addition, the median household income in Scranton is about $44,000 per year. That’s substantially below the U.S. median household income, which was about $71,000 in 2021.

Despite these facts, residents of Scranton’s Keyser Valley made it clear to the Zoning Hearing Board that they didn’t want a big solar project in their community.

I’ve been reporting on land-use conflicts and renewables for more than a decade. Over those years, I’ve interviewed dozens of rural landowners and local residents who are fighting renewable energy projects.

The common refrain I’ve heard in Iowa, Maine, Missouri, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, and numerous other places about big wind and solar projects was the same message that was delivered last Wednesday to Scranton’s Zoning Hearing Board by Brian Gallagher: “Nobody wants to look at them.”

Read more at Substack

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

AEP sees the light!

 

The climate Left has picked the wrong target in vilifying BP. It is a futile mistake to tar every oil and gas company with the same brush.

Bernard Looney’s BP is doing its part to decarbonise the world in a way that does not trigger energy mayhem in the process, and does not provoke a paralysing political backlash. So are all of the European “majors” to varying degrees.

Contrary to media headlines and feverish censure from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Liberal Democrats – who ought to know better – BP is not retreating from renewables or clean energy. The company is tapping its booming oil and gas profits to make green hydrogen a commercial reality in this country instead of a pious dream.

In parallel, it is investing an extra £1bn annually in oil and gas, concentrated on “short-cycle fast-payback” wells to exploit soaring prices and meet the looming supply crunch in the mid-2020s.

Yes, it is also paying down debt and providing a dividend to pension funds and retirees struggling to cope with fuel bills. It is taking necessary steps to remain a viable commercial company, able to fend off takeovers by powerful rivals with a very different climate ideology.

Green realists should recognise the tactical wisdom of BP’s plan to slow its exit from fossils this decade. Its upstream spending will focus on spur pipelines from existing drilling platforms able to produce within one to three years. They include “tie-back” mini-projects such as Seagull and Merlach in North Sea for crude; or Cypre and Mento in Trinidad for gas.

This is nothing like BP’s retreat from renewables after Lord Browne’s tenure, when the company went green slightly too early and lost money becoming (briefly) the world leader in solar power.

BP’s Energy Outlook this month is in many ways an extraordinary document. It concluded that global demand for oil and fossil fuels peaked in 2019, with even China close to rolling over. It has rung the bell that tolls for Big Oil.

The $190 trillion (£155 trillion) global economy runs on a legacy infrastructure of fossil fuels. Three quarters of British homes are heated exclusively by gas. The fleet of 1.5 billion vehicles on the roads today will depend on petrol and diesel for a long time. Ditto for aviation and maritime fleets. Steel, cement, chemical, and fertiliser plants can be decarbonised but for now they run on fossils.

That does not mean it is impossible to switch this vast and complex system to net zero emissions by 2050. The International Monetary Fund and the International Energy Agency say alternative technology is already so cheap that decarbonisation can be done at a negative net cost – ie, an economic gain.

But it cannot be done by shutting down supply or by Puritan incantations of “degrowth”. People will not willingly submit to economic depression and food rationing.

Vladimir Putin’s energy war has shown us how quickly societies will turn against climate targets if the transition becomes disorderly and threatening. We have lost just 120 billion cubic metres (BCM) of Russian gas supply out of a global market of 4,100 BCM. That has been enough for our democracies to wobble.

There was always going to be an energy crisis this decade – regardless of Ukraine – because the world faces a structural supply deficit. Rystad Energy says upstream investment in oil and gas was running at over $800bn a year at the top of the commodity supercycle in 2014. It has been running at closer to $400bn over recent years.

Daniel Yergin, S&P Global’s energy guru, calls it “pre-emptive underinvestment”. The cycle has played its part, but so has net zero signalling, with fears of stranded assets and long-tail risk from climate litigation.

Old fields are depleting. Few new projects coming on stream. Shale drillers have tapped the best seams in the Permian. The “expected ultimate recovery” of wells has dropped this year for the first time since the fracking boom began.

Investment in nuclear, renewables, and electrification has not compensated. It needs to rise by a factor 2.4 this decade to plug the gap.

“The world is underinvesting in all forms of energy,” said Columbia University’s Jason Bordoff.

The danger of a botched transition should by now be obvious, and so should the danger of a premature and misplaced campaign to disinvest from well-run western oil majors, which have much lower methane emissions than the bad actors, and which bolster the energy security of our democracies.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/02/14/climate-activists-would-applaud-bp-had-political-sense/

Of course it was not long ago that AEP was demonising the fossil fuel industry, insisting that its days were over and warning of stranded assets:

And it this naive assumption that renewables would simply replace fossil fuels overnight that has led to the massive underinvestment in fossil fuel projects.

As the IEA projections above make clear, we may still be needing almost as much oil as we do now in 2050.

It’s a pity AEP did not wake up to the real world a few years ago.

From The DAILY SCEPTIC

By CHRIS MORRISON

Two independent groups of scientists have destroyed the always improbable claim that vertebrates across the planet have declined by 69% since 1970.

The averaged claim is made by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). It is a bedrock climate and ecological scare story repeated endlessly in the mainstream media and broadcast everywhere from UN platforms to school classrooms.

A group of Canadian biologists have shown that the figure is a statistical freak. They reveal that the estimate is driven by 2.4% of wildlife  populations, adding, “If these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.”

The 69% scare is contained in the Living Planet Index (LPI) compiled by the WWF and the ZSL. The latest bi-annual report was released late last year to coincide with the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Montreal, and claimed the decline was “an average fall in species population numbers between 1970 and 2018”. 

Commenting on its report, the ZSL said one million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. The joint report is said to have looked at 32,000 populations of animals from over 5,000 species.

The report is highly political, arguing for a complete transformation of society. The planet is said to be in the midst of a biodiversity and climate crisis, and we have a last chance to act. “A nature-positive future needs transformative – game changing – shifts in how we produce, how we consume, how we govern, and what we finance.

We hope it inspires you to be part of that change,” say the authors. Less inspiring might have been the message that 2.4% of vertebrate populations are currently doing badly – it’s nature, it happens – but the rest on average are just dandy.

This latest debunking of a cherished green scare is further bad news for publicity-seeking climate catastrophists. Introducing the LPI report, the ZSL also noted that a 0.3°C warming would result in a loss of up to 90% of warm water coral, a scare that has a very ‘last decade’ look about it, given that corals on the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere have rarely been in better shape. Slowly recovering Arctic ice, including the Greenland ice shelf, plateauing global surface temperature, and more polar bears hunting more seals, have all added to the recent misery.

The essence of the debunking scientists’ argument is that trying to distill disparate population trends into a single global index distorts the full picture. Calculating the straight line average across populations is strongly influenced by outliers, or extremes. For example, the biologists put forward a hypothetical scenario in which one animal population declining by 99%, while a second population increases 50 fold, or 393 populations increase by 1%. In this scenario, the geometric average – the metric used by the WWF and the ZSL – would show a catastrophic decline of 50%.

This work was done by the Canadian biologists before the last 2022 LPI report. The dotted line above indicates overall population stability. The red line shows a 50% decline averaged across all populations, but the removal of just 2.4% of separate populations produces a positive trend.

The scientists observe that such clusters of decline require different conservation measures compared to widespread falls across the planet. But such a subtle understanding of focused conservation measures is entirely missing from the unhinged view spread throughout politics and the media that the planet and climate is under mortal threat, and urgent, collectivist Net Zero measures must be immediately implemented.

Accounting for extreme clusters “fundamentally alters the interpretation of global vertebrate trend”, say the scientists. The sensitivity of global average trends to outliers “suggests that more informative indices are needed”, they add.

Last month, a group of Finnish biologists joined the scientific fray over the Index and noted that statistical calculations prevented any straightforward interpretation in the change of animal abundance. The LPI measure is biased downwards because proportions are measured, not actual abundance. In fact, the more populations vary in their rate of increase or decrease, “the more downwardly biased the LPI will be as a measure of abundance”.

Even worse, the scientists go on to show, the downward past bias is baked into future calculations, since previous index values are multiplied with the current one. Overall, the Finnish scientists take on board the outlier problems identified by the Canadians, but observe the trouble with the LPI methodology “is deeper than that and cannot be resolved by removing extreme population trends from the analysis”.

The LPI garners massive publicity and it is also used as an indicator for international negotiations within the UN Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD). “We urge scientists that have used the LPI methodology to scrutinise the conclusions of their work, and those negotiating future indicators for the UN CBD to critically review the interpretation of the LPI,” they conclude.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.