Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
By now the concept of peak oil seems almost like an anachronism.
There’s a long succession of predictions that we’d be out by now. There are claims by net zero types that oil companies are in danger of being stuck with stranded assets. Over the last two decades, there’s been a huge expansion of oil and gas from shale fracking in the US.
This expansion has been enthusiastically tracked in a huge number of posts at WUWT by geophysicist David Middleton.
Still there is some concern sometimes expressed on sceptic blogs about the limits of the shale revolution. Fernando Leanme is an engineer and blogger who comments a lot about politics and energy and has expressed concerns about the shale boom. He is a prominent critic of the RCP 8.5 scenario which in itself might be called a peak oil argument. There’s also Rud Istvan who’s very technically savey on energy and has written a couple of e-books that discuss the limits of oil and gas: Gaia’s Limits and Blowing Smoke: Essays on Energy and Climate.
The Decouple podcast just had Leigh Goehring of the commodities firm Goehring and Rozencwajg as a guest to talk about the end of the US shale expansion. He was also a guest on Decouple a year ago with the theme a Shortage of Everything. Both interviews have full transcripts.
His themes sort of harken back to those of a gold bug in the 70s (he even recommends owning some gold), but his scary scenarios are very well argued. I’ll list some points I found interesting in no particular order (there’s transcripts you can search):
He claims all the US shales have peaked except for the Permian which he expects to peak soon. David Middleton appears to be still bullish.
Goehring and Rozencwajg have a neural network model that says increases in US shale productivity have been due more to drilling in top tier sites rather than improved techniques.
As non-OPEC production declines, OPEC will have means to control price.
He says peak world demand is matching peak world supply for the first time in history.
He says shales have to have certain characteristics to be exploitable. Large promising shales in Argentina, Columbia and Russia have political problems.
The price drops in wind, solar and batteries can in large part be attributed to an era of cheap energy and capital which is ending.
He calls the Inflation Reduction Act perhaps the largest malinvestment of capital in history.
He claims EVs will never be competitive with ICE, because one of the key ingredients for EVs is energy.
He is very pro nuclear energy and says the closing of Indian Point is the dumbest thing that could be done.
He claims a large investor in Nebraska was lobbying for Diablo Canyon to be shut down so that he could sell coal fired electricity to California.
He points out that Germany illustrates what happens when gas spikes. People move back to coal and wood.
He says everyone should see the movie Planet of the Humans.
Make what you will of all this. I’ve lately been thinking that this shale gas bounty has been squandered on propping up wind and solar. There’s a couple of pictures I like to use on Twitter to show how California gets half of its electricity from gas and it appears to be slowly increasing:
The science teachers’ bureaucracy is driving climate education into an unquestioning adherence to unscientific methodology. The cost will be measured in students without facility for the more than 400-year-old scientific method and lacking the critical thinking necessary for sustaining civilization and advancing humankind.
Many observers of education have been concerned for some time about the state of science education in America. Teaching, it seems, has drifted from open inquiry to an indoctrination of students into a political agenda. Members of the science-based CO2 Coalition of Arlington, Virginia were concerned enough to launch an education initiative to provide scientific knowledge for elementary and middle school-age students without the climate alarm that permeates the public-school curriculum.
Their concern spiked to alarm with the publication of “The Teaching of Climate Science,” a position paper of the 40,000-member National Science Teaching Association (NSTA). In it, the NSTA advocates that teachers conform to the “consensus” opinion that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide will cause dangerous overheating of Earth. Possibly even worse than the promotion of “consensus” was their endorsement of censorship of any scientific information that deviates from the consensus groupthink.
A critical review of the NSTA Statement was recently completed by a select panel of CO2 Coalition experts and summarized in their publication Challenging the National Science Teaching Association’s Position Statement on Climate Change. The panel was comprised of some of the most esteemed scientists and experts in the field including three members of the National Academy of Sciences.
The review found that the NSTA’s Position Statement on Climate Change promotes the education of students through indoctrination instead of critical thinking skills and the scientific method. Throughout the document, promotion of “consensus” is advanced, while all dissenting scientific facts are censored or derided.
Instead of promoting conformity and indoctrination, the largest science teacher’s organization in America should be promoting an open debate on scientific matters, including climate change. What is correct in science is not determined by consensus but by experiment and observations. Historically, scientific consensuses have often turned out to be wrong. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with consensus. The frequent assertion that there is a consensus behind the idea that there is an impending disaster from climate change is not how the validity of science is determined. To quote the profoundly true observation of Michael Crichton:
“If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it is science, it isn’t consensus.”
Reliable scientific knowledge is determined by the scientific method, where theoretical predictions are validated by observations or rejected by failing to do so. Agreement with observations is the measure of scientific truth. Scientific progress proceeds by the interplay of theory and observation. Observations anchor understanding and weed out theories that do not work. This has been the scientific method for more than 400 years.
The objective of persons of science is to discern the truth. Unfortunately, the NSTA and too many climate scientists have abandoned that mission, and they have done so at great cost to their own institutions and to the reputation of science itself.
Science, as the Islamic mathematician and empiricist al-Haytham (965 to 1040 A.D.) could have told the NSTA, is not done by mere head count:
“The seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus, however venerable or widespread. Instead he questions what he has learned of it, applying to it his hard-won scientific knowledge, and he inspects and inquires and investigates and checks and checks and checks again. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.”
Prof. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, incisively explained the scientific method and provided his thoughts on consensus in science:
“[W]e compare the result of [a theory’s] computation to nature…compare it directly with observations, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”
A primary role for the NSTA should be to develop critical thinking skills for students and to instill in them knowledge and use of the scientific method. Students should be encouraged to review all facts on a subject (in this case climate change) and make up their own minds rather than be indoctrinated into an established political agenda.
Unfortunately, the NSTA has taken a strong position that is antithetical to the scientific method, critical thinking and open scientific debate. Its position is one of censorship of any scientist or science that does not support the NSTA-approved “science.” In short, the NSTA Position Statement on Climate Change fails to delineate between real science and political science.
We respectfully urge the National Science Teaching Association to take to heart our commentary and return science education to the foundations of reason, open debate and tolerance for alternative thinking.
Perhaps Richard Feynman summarized it best, saying:
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
Anyone still banging on about CO2 emissions in the electricity generation sector, ought to be banging on about nothing other than nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the only, stand-alone generation source that can deliver reliable, affordable power without generating CO2 gas, in the process.
Perversely, Australia is the only G20 Country to a place to ban on the use of uranium as a power source. Notwithstanding that it’s the largest uranium exporter, in the World.
The fact that politicians in this Country talk about anything but nuclear power as a solution to Australia’s unfolding energy crisis, speaks volumes.
If CO2 gas really is the existential threat it’s made out to be, then nuclear power is the only solution.
Hackneyed arguments about the cost of nuclear power are readily scotched with reference to nuclear powered France, which gets more than 75% of its power from nuclear plants, and yet the French pay around half of what wind ‘powered’ South Australians pay for power, and that’s when they can get it.
Tim O’Brien picks up the theme below.
The Sum of Ruinous Green Delusions Quadrant Tim O’Brien 7 March 2023
Labor says it will reduce 2005 CO2 emissions of 560 million tonnes by 43 per cent come 2030. That brings it down to 57 per cent of 560 = 320 million tonnes. Emissions for 2021 were about 490 million tonnes so it will be reduced by 490 – 320 = 170 million tonnes.
Where does the 43 per cent come from?
My guess is the person who selected it was a fan of the late Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and through a slip of memory thought the answer was 43. The government has now set this target in legislation.
Court challenges by emissions-reduction activists to coal or gas expansions, to name a couple, will now have in their armoury this legislation to support their case. The halving of global investment in fossil fuels since 2015 has much to do with the current world energy crisis.
The biggest emitter of CO2 is power generation, at 34 per cent, and that amounted to about 170 million tonnes in 2020. Where is Labor going to find its 170 million tonnes? I don’t know, but if it gets 170 million tonnes of it from power generation, let’s look at the consequences of going 100 per cent renewable at some point in the near future.
If only 80 per cent of coal and gas generation were to be replaced and, importantly, appropriately sized battery back-up is built to support the removed generation, then the cost will be 80 per cent of what I have calculated. If a photovoltaic solar farm of 1 megawatt nameplate capacity ( MW- a million watts) is built, and generates a MW for each hour of the day for a year, it would generate 8760 MWh over 12 months.
By monitoring the actual output over a year and adding up all the MWh, to take account of the 4 seasons, it is found for the typical farm that the yearly total is 1750 MWh. This is 20 per cent, or 0.2 times, the 8760 MWh total.
This 0.2 is called the “capacity factor” for the PV solar farms. For the average day, the 1 MW farm produces 1752/365=4.8 MWh. Expressed another way – 24 hours x 0.2 = 4.8 hours it outputs 1 MW. In summer it will beat the average and in a wet winter it will be less than the average.
Now let’s look at the 2880 MW NSW Eraring coal fired power station, which is marked for closures in about three years time. If in a 24-hour day it delivers power as following:
2700MW for the periods 6am to 9am and 5pm to 9 pm ie 7 hours for 18,900MWh.
2200MW from 9am to 5 pm ie 8 hours for 17600 MWh.
1700MW for 9pm to 6am ie 9 hours for 15,300MWh.
This gives 51,800 MWh for the 24-hour period. If this is to be replaced with a solar PV farm, how big does it have to be to produce to match this output in 4.8 hours?
Solar farm output x 4.8 = 51,800 MWh, so farm output = 10,800MW. This is 3.7 times bigger than the 2880 MW plant it is replacing. The 4.8 hours is for an average day. In summer more power will be made than required. In winter there will be brown outs.
In the 9am to 5 pm period the demand is 2200 MW, so 4.8 x 2200 = 10,560 MWh of generated power is consumed. The 51,800 – 10,560 = 41,240 MWh has to be stored in batteries if CO2 emissions from coal and gas turbines are disallowed.
The Eraring announcement, reported in the press, said a 700 MW battery was planned as part of the shift to renewable energy. It did not state for how long this battery could output 700 MW — a typical and annoying failure of reporters to supply the MWh value for batteries. Typically, the Eraring battery could do so for 1.3 hours i.e. 910 MWh versus the 41,240MWh required. This 700MW battery is only good for managing transient variations in supply. Where the 41,240 MWh comes from was not identified. Snowy2.0 perhaps?
Greens leader Adam Bandt clearly does not understand the difference between a firming battery and a transient-response battery because he said “when SA needed to firm it’s supply, it built the worlds biggest battery in under a month”. This Tesla battery was 100MW/130MWh, cost $90 million, and if called upon to firm, the loss of a 1300MW supply, it could do so for six minutes.
If a wind farm were used instead of a solar farm, the typical capacity factor is found to be 0.4 and the calculation becomes wind farm output x 9.6 hour = 51,800MWh. (24 x .4 = 9.6). So the farm output = 5400MW, which is 1.9 times the 2880MW coal power station.
To look at the costs involved, I will use a 50/50 mix of wind and solar farms. They are each going to provide 51,800/2 = 25,900MWh. So the solar farm is 25,900/4.8 = 5400MW and the wind farm is 25,900/9.6 = 2700MW. A total of 8100 MW. The current cost of the solar is $1.7 million/ MW and the land based wind farm is $2 million/MW. So cost comes to $1.7 million x 5400 + $2 million x 2700 equals $14.58 billion.
The battery-storage requirement is complicated because who can know when and at what strength the wind will blow. So I will minimise the storage requirement by saying no wind is blowing when the solar farm is operating. If it did, all the wind output would have to be stored because the solar farm by itself could supply the demand.
So the solar farm outputs 4.8 x 5400 = 25,920 MWh and, as shown above,10,560 MWh is consumed during this time, leaving 15360 MWh to be stored. The wind farm outputs between 6am and 9am and 6pm and 9pm, too good to be true, and 3.6 hours during the night.
During those periods the demand is 6 x 2700 + 3.6 x 1700 = 22,320 MWh requiring 25,900 – 22,320 = 3600 MWh be stored
. The total to be stored is 3600+15,360 = 18,960MWh or 18.96 GWh (G = billion). The battery efficiency is appropriately 90 per cent, so the batteries have to be rated at 18.96/.9 = 21 GWh.
Battery storage costs $500 million per GWh, so the battery cost is $10.5 billion.
Managing the haphazard energy supply from renewables falls upon the power- and process-control engineers. For 21 GWh of storage they may install four assemblies each rated at 3GW/5GWh. When the renewables supply more than the demand, the excess is used to charge a not fully charged assembly and when the renewables is less than demand, an assembly supplies all the demand and all the renewable energy is used for charging. This brings the cost to $25 billion and the expense of the transmission lines to convey the electricity from the remote solar and wind locations to where it can be connected to a major transmission line, has to be added onto this figure.
$25 billion/2880 MW = $8.7 million/MW replaced is a sobering number.
Coincidentally, WA coal and gas generation is very close to the output of the Eraring power station. So WA has to add 5400 MW of solar and 2700 MW of wind plus 21 GWh of batteries costing $25 billion to go 100 per cent renewable. Add to this the cost of additional transmission lines.
Alinta intends to replace Loy Yang B 1000 MW coal station with an offshore wind farm and pumped hydro. As Jeff Dimery, Alinta CEO, told The Financial Review’s Energy and Climate Summit in October 2022, “What cost me $1 billion to acquire is going to cost me $8 billion to replace, so let’s talk about that and explain to me how energy prices still come down. I am missing something”.
I don’t have a price on a transmission line cost/km, but Labor’s Chris Bowen sees an urgent need to spend $20 billion on major transmission lines on the National Energy Grid for the eastern states plus SA. Include $4 billion for Snowy 2.0, and an extra 10,000 km of minor transmission lines required to replace coal and gas generation with renewables and $4 million/km is probably a fair ballpark figure.
The National Energy Grid has approximately 35,000MW of coal plus gas generation capacity.
WA, which is not part of the National Energy Grid, will increase this amount by about 2500 MW, to 37,500MW.
So, for the whole country, we are looking at 37,500/2880 = 13 Erarings. And 13 x $25 billion = $325 billion, plus the cost of transmission lines for 105 GW of wind and solar, 2.8 times the 37.5 GW and 270 GWh of batteries and pumped hydro.
The above calculation indicates 2.8 times more renewables MWs replacing the coal and gas MWs. To suggest that, when renewables are generating more than the grid demands, this is the time to divert that excess to making green hydrogen by electrolysis, doesn’t hold water. If you want to make green hydrogen under my scenario, start adding more GWs to the 105GW total.
As the level of renewables climbs, I expect the unreliability of wind and solar will have become so obvious that the shutting down of gas-fired generation will be suspended. Gas generates 400g of CO2/kWh versus 1000g of CO2/kWh from coal. (I acknowledge my numbers don’t factor in the growth in energy consumption over time). We currently have installed nameplate capacities for wind of 9100 MW, solar farms 7000 MW and hydro 8500 MW. Roof-top solar does not figure in the solar farm number.
Making and storing hydrogen as a way to support the intermittent energy from renewables is not an attractive solution. Elon Musk has dismissed hydrogen as “the most dumb thing I could possibly imagine for energy storage”. Musk also makes the odd dumb statement, but that isn’t one of them. If a GWh of renewable electricity is stored in a battery, it will release only 0.9 GWh when called on. If the GWh was used to make hydrogen by electrolysis it would, at 80 per cent efficiency, make hydrogen with an energy content of 0.8 GWh. This has to be stored somewhere, which also uses energy, until required. If this was used to drive an open circuit gas turbine with 44% conversion efficiency, the electricity generated would amount to 0.8 x 0.44 = 0.35 GWh versus 0.9 GWh from the battery.
Making green hydrogen for ammonia production, industrial heating, hydrogen fuel cell usage and green steel are not to be put in the same basket as electricity production use.
France emits very minor amounts of CO2 when generating its electricity because its power source is 70 per cent nuclear and 19 per cent renewables. They reprocess their spent fuel to produce a mixed oxide fuel (plutonium and uranium) for sending back to the reactor and encapsulate the fission products in glass for long term disposal. This mitigates the issue of spent fuel disposal but it will not satisfy those who are frightened of the nuclear power industry.
The French pay about 2/3 of what the pro-green and anti-nuclear Germans pay per kWh. France has not had a Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima. They are adding to their number of operating plants with a new, larger, more fuel efficient design, although this initial model is proving an enormous headache, with cost and time overruns. Critics of nuclear in Australia, such as Chis Bowen, point to this problem the French are having as a reason not to entertain nuclear power as a solution.
If the French shared Bowen’s attitude they would not have 56 operating reactors. To be consistent, Bowen should be opposed to pumped hydro, given the Snowy 2.0 fiasco he inherited. This mad scheme, championed by Malcolm Turnbull as a $2 billion no-brainer, now looks like costing $6 billion-plus, with $4 billion for the transmission line to take the power from where it is generated to where it is to be used.
Bowen does not mention the United Arab Emirates (UAE) embrace of nuclear power. Starting in 2012, it commissioned 4 x 1400 MW Korean KEPCO pressured-water reactors, The first unit came on line in 2021, the second in 2022, the third is near completion and fourth is 90 per cent complete. And the cost comes out at $A7.3 million/MW ($US4.5 million/MW).
In Australia it is probable a move in parliament to overturn our legislative ban on nuclear power would succeed, this expectation based on surveys of voter sentiment. I am not, however, proposing we go for the big, high-pressure light-water reactors (2200 psi) because they face so many regulatory impositions on the design and construction of the reactor and containment vessels and take large amounts of time and money to build. The reactor containment vessel has to withstand being hit by a jet liner. It is so large because it has to contain the reactor cooling water when converted to steam (at about 80 psi) as a result of reactor-vessel rupture as would likely occur in the event of a core meltdown.
Modular high-pressure light-water reactors have been powering nuclear powered submarines for decades. The Virginia class reactor is rated at 210 MW. This class is one of the options under ARKUS.
I am waiting on the development of hopefully successfully designed, tested and competitively priced low pressure — like liquid sodium or molten salt cooled, small modular reactors (SMRs) – notionally less than 300 MWe. Without light water for moderation they require fuel enriched to between 5 to 20 per cent U235 (HALEU- high assay low enriched uranium). Joe Biden has allocated $700 million to kick start US production of HALEU. Buying it from Russia was the plan before Feb/2022, and the loss of this source has caused TerraPower to announce a minimum two-year delay in their start-up date for their SMR. These SMR — like the Finnish design above — may enter the US market by the end of this decade. It is proposed these SMRs be placed below ground level where a jet liner can’t hit them, so the enormous 1-2 metre thick containment vessel is not built.
Following commissioning of TerraPower’s first sodium-cooled SMR, subsequent units are projected to have an overnight construction cost of between $US 2.8 and 3 million/MW.
The US NuScale modular light water cooled, high pressure reactor, rated at 70MWe, is further advanced than the above low pressure reactors and maybe it will obtains a full Nuclear Regulator Commission (NRC) licence shortly. It is planning to come online in 2029, located at the Idaho National Laboratory. Using light water as a moderator, it is fuelled with 3- to-5 per cent enriched U235. The US DOE has estimated the plant cost will exceed $US6.8 million/MW. NuScale have estimated the electricity will cost $US58/MWh.
Canada’s Ontario Power Generation plans to install a GE Hitachi BWRX-300 MW SMR and bring it online in 2028. It is predicted to reduce capital cost by 60 per cent per MW compared to big conventional nuclear plants.
If Generation 4 Small Modular Reactors were around now we could begin to replace 37,500MW of coal and gas generation from nuclear plants located beside those retired plants, thus allowing the use of existing cooling towers and transmission lines. If the cost of SMRs were reduced by 50 per cent, to $8 million/MW, the 37,500 MW would cost $300 billion i.e. cheaper and longer lasting than Labor’s option. Quadrant
One might wish that a series of recent bank failures might serve as a wakeup call regarding woke Environmental Social Guidance (ESG) investment and spending addiction policies that the rest of us will wind up paying for.
One might wish that a series of recent bank failures might serve as a wakeup call regarding woke Environmental Social Guidance (ESG) investment and spending addiction policies that the rest of us will wind up paying for.
But don’t count on Biden administration bailout responses leading to any favors benefiting your retirement portfolio or children’s college fund.
I’m referring here to predictable consequences of a $19 trillion government bailout in the woke wake of federal financial backstops for California’s struggling Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and New York’s Signature Bank through applications of a “systemic risk exception” law.
SVB and Signature, the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, respectively, have sparked deserved dread that anxious customers will drain customers from small and midsize banks, and government stepping in with “temporary fixes” that end up nationalizing the entire banking system.
Guaranteeing deposits beyond $250,000 per customer limits previously covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) now makes it even more attractive for banks to blow money chasing promised green dreams.
SVB’s implosion, which alone lost roughly $200 billion, billed itself as a go-to bank for those “creating positive environmental change” working with some 1,550 companies in the “climate technology and sustainability sector.”
As law.com quoted a tech entrepreneur describing SVB’s products, “They’re basically subprime business loans.
“You’re talking about companies that have no credit profile, they’re burning cash and are unlikely to raise the same type of capital because of interest rates. . . It was basically social credit.”
A key reason SVB failed was its decision to buy bonds at the top of the inflated government market, then got hit harder after further stretching itself over the past few years by sizably increasing its loans and lines of credit to subprime firms.
Perhaps SVB’s biggest problem was ignoring the “guidance” part of ESG, namely failing to have proper management in place to bring market interest risk assessment discipline to lending practices.
The company has operated without a chief risk officer since April 2022, which as Charles Elson, a retired professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware equated to “like having an airplane without a pilot or a ship without a captain, it will move, but to what direction? That’s the concern.”
As reported in the Wall Street Journal, SVB was beloved for its willingness to offer “banking services to startups that often weren’t profitable, in some cases didn’t have a product, and would otherwise have a hard time getting a line of credit or a loan from a larger bank.”
The SVB bailout occurred a year to the day following a 2008 shotgun marriage rescue of troubled Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial and Washington Mutual through purchases by big private banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp.
This time around, however, FDIC couldn’t find a SVB buyer in time to quell panic and contagion to other — perhaps hundreds — of other banks.
Soon after alarm bells went off over SVB insolvency, Signature Bank — another mid-sized firm — began to see significant outflows of uninsured depositors as well, followed by withdrawal pains from many other midsized banks whose share prices had also been tumbling.
Days later, top FDIC overseers concluded that their only option to avoid broader contagion collapse was to backstop all SVB and Signature depositors, also concluding that doing otherwise would endanger billions in deposits at other regional banks.
This SVB and Signature charity also doesn’t necessarily apply to local banks which provide a preponderance of loans to small businesses.
San Francisco’s First Republic Bank, with assets concentrated in single-family residential mortgage loans and municipal bonds, has since lost 70% of its investment share value with its credit rating downgraded to junk status and about two-thirds of its deposits uninsured.
Most municipal bonds are held by households and mutual funds that can’t rapidly be sold to redeem profits and losses, and the Fed’s emergency lending facility doesn’t accept most muni’s as collateral.
And yes, lots of inflationary woke-ESG-driven congressional spending has also contributed to increasing risks of not being able to bank on bank security.
As Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson observed in a Daily Caller article, “Inflation and rising interest rates killed Silicon Valley Bank slowly by moving their balance sheet out of balance . . . But inflation doesn’t just happen and interest rates didn’t raise themselves.”
“This,” she said, “is all a direct result of the trillions and trillions in extra spending that Congress dumped into the economy” under Joe Biden’s leadership.
Wall Street Journal contributor Kimberly Strassel agrees that liberal ESG policies like Biden’s “Build Back Better” and Congress’s $1.2 trillion 2021 “infrastructure bill” began a clean-tech frenzy that “made available hundreds of billions for new “technologies.”
Add to this, she observes, “last year’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act threw yet more dollars at would-be green innovators, while also extending billions in household tax credits in an attempt to lure Americans to buy these government-fueled concoctions.”
In short, Strassel rightly concludes that the big lesson in all of this is that “no good ever comes from D.C. attempts to micromanage markets. . . SVB and its clients were doing exactly what Washington invited them to do — chase the money.”
“Human Disruptions”? — Like the Covid Pandemic and governmental responses to it. Like the war in the Ukraine. Like governmental efforts to reduce CO2 emissions and restrict the use of fossil fuels. Like “NetZero”.
“Human Disruptions”? — Like the Covid Pandemic and governmental responses to it. Like the war in the Ukraine. Like governmental efforts to reduce CO2 emissions and restrict the use of fossil fuels. Like “NetZero”.
These are not “climate” questions per se, but economic questions that need answering from the knowledge base that is World Economics and Energy Economics.
Lars Schernikau is one of those people with the depth of understanding necessary to address these issues and communicate what it all means to us.
In this 15-minute YouTube lecture, given over a professional slide deck of illustrations and quotes, Schernikau uses data and projections from the IPCC, Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus (Nordhaus 2018), Kahn et al. (2021) and other studies, comparing their projections with comments and exploring the possible and probable economic outcomes of the already-underway “NetZero” transition.
I don’t want to include a spoiler here, as you should really dedicate a quarter hour to this YouTube, I can tell you that Schernikau shows that regardless of future climate scenario, regardless of climate sensitivity, and regardless of climate actions or inactions:
The outcomes, in regards to Global GDP, are better than you think.
Here is the presentation.
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
This presentation is well-worth the 15 minutes it takes to watch it, though you may wish to pause the video often to take a closer look at some of the slides.
We see a lot of details here at WUWT on climate sensitivity and various projections of future temperatures, but seldom see anything on the actual effects on the overall economy – and it is the overall economy that reflects the conditions of human societies. Better economic conditions generally mean better lives, especially at the lower ends of the economic range. The biggest improvements to marginal societies come with the ratcheting up of basic standards of living – which depend on decent paying jobs and education.
The evidence points to a para-governmental fusion of universities,
social media companies,and the federal government,
all working to censor free speech.
Matt Taibbi’s two latest “Twitter Files” drops revealed that Stanford played a direct role in this gross violation of online free speech. Emails revealed that the Stanford Internet Observatory(SIO) actively collaborated with Twitter to suppress information they knew was factually true.
Taibbi’s investigation revealed that Stanford’s Virality Project “recommends that multiple platforms take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”
The project succeeded in getting big tech companies to take down about 35% of the content they flagged. They reviewed content en masse from almost every major social media company:
Twitter, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest were all monitored by SIO. The questionable censorship decisions by the group all seemed to go in one direction—shutting down the now-vindicated Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, while taking direct guidance from Anthony Fauci about the supposed falsehood of the lab leak theory.
In short, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project had countless people—mostly Stanford students—reporting millions of Twitter posts that didn’t comply with their standards. Even posts that were factually true faced censorship if they didn’t conform to the subjective whims of SIO officials.
The evidence points to a para-governmental fusion of universities, social media companies,and the federal government, all working to censor free speech.
We at the Review take Stanford’s actions to suppress speech very seriously. Stanford cannot be allowed to sweep this gross violation of fundamental freedoms under the rug. The University must answer for their actions.
It appears Stanford’s Virality Project took issues with anyone who was an enemy of the state’s, and more explicitly Fauci’s, narrative about the coronavirus and subsequent vaccines.
Any posts that brought up the “lab leak” theory (now the primary COVID origin thesis), were dubbed by SIO as “keen to foment distrust in Fauci’s expert guidance and in American public health officials and institutions.”
People who dared question the Fauci-manufactured ‘status quo’ narrative were censored. SIO even branded “reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway” and “natural immunity,” as troublesome violations of ‘disinformation’ policies.
If this is truly what the term ‘disinformation’ means, perhaps we should no longer define it in terms of what is and isn’t true. Instead when we hear the word we should think of it as anything that isn’t in the federal government’s formal narrative: thought crime.
The Virality Project stated that because the post-vaccine death of a Virginia woman named Drene Keyes inspired “anti-vaccine” comments, it became a “disinformation” event.
They warned against people “asking questions,” alleging it was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.” Doubting, or even just examining, the prevailing narratives on COVID got citizens repressed by a para-governmental entity.
The Stanford Internet Observatory and Project Virality wanted to cover that up—not because it wasn’t true… it was and they knew it. They covered up the truth because they wanted to preserve their narrative. The truth would “exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci,” too much for SIO. When given the choice between truth and Fauci, Stanford chose Fauci.
Projects like SIO’s project Virality are deeply insidious and set a dangerous precedent for the future of online discourse.
Stanford’s hand in them and the extent to which they censored important, relevant and true information is deeply disappointing and troubling. When an extra-governmental institution acts with impunity against the First Amendment rights of Americans and suppresses information that resulted in the deaths of American citizens, one might expect a dark and shady underground alliance of evil to be behind it. In 2023, it seems all roads lead to Palo Alto.
With free speech on campus recently under attack at the law school, the university censoring faculty that wouldn’t go along with the lockdown narrative, and now their role in censorship on social media, it is fair to question if the winds of freedom still blow at Stanford. It is up to the University to take concrete steps to reassert that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle.
Back in 2017, when it was announced that windfarms had agreed Contracts for Difference (CfDs) to sell power to the grid at extraordinarily low prices, the mainstream media and the Green Blob went wild with claims that we were witnessing a revolution in costs.
Wednesday 29th March 2023, By Andrew Montford, Net Zero Watch
Back in 2017, when it was announced that windfarms had agreed Contracts for Difference (CfDs) to sell power to the grid at extraordinarily low prices, the mainstream media and the Green Blob went wild with claims that we were witnessing a revolution in costs.
Only us wicked sceptics said that it was a ridiculous suggestion, pointing out that there was no sign in the financial accounts or market announcements of windfarm operators to support such a claim.
It was therefore no surprise to the ‘denialist’ fringe when, at the start of 2021, major windfarms that had recently become fully operational suddenly decided that they would be delaying the start of their CfD contracts for a year. This enabled them to take advantage of market prices that had soared throughout 2021 and then gone stratospheric towards the end of the year in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For the last twelve months, these windfarms have been making money hand over fist, but they are now facing another decision: activate their CfDs or delay for another year. The equation is not as simple as twelve months ago. While market prices are double the long-term norm, they are less than half the level of a year ago. The operators’ views on pricing over the next few years look to be critical. Just this week, the accountancy firm KPMG suggested that things would not be back to normal in the next couple of years. It’s likely they will soar again this winter. That being the case, my guess is that they will delay once more. The upsides of doing so are potentially very large, and the downsides are limited. In fact, no final decision on activation needs to be made until 2025.
But it is possible that at that point they will finally sign up. There are valuable hidden subsidies available for those who are inside the CfD scheme, such as exemption from increases in soaring grid balancing charges, and exemption from windfall taxes.
When you stand back and look at the CfD scheme, it’s clear that it’s a win-win for the generators, and a lose-lose for consumers. It may be possible for the Government to claw back some of the billions of extra profits through a windfall tax on those generators who haven’t activated their CfDs, but it’s unlikely they would do that, in thrall to the Green Blob as they are. That being the case, all we can do is stand back and see which “win” the windfarms will choose.
I don’t know the people in the video above were climate activists, they might just be locals who are fed up with people using their street as a rat run.
But Oxford is kind of a hotbed for extreme green ideology.
In 2022, Oxfordshire Council infamously implemented a climate lockdown when they embraced “15 minute city” anti-automobile policies.
I’m guessing the chokepoint pictured above is one of those points vehicles are only supposed to pass 100x per year. But people like doctors and trades people were supposed to be able to apply for an exemption, and stopping traffic altogether wasn’t part of the official plan.
Perhaps cleaners like the lady in the video above aren’t considered important enough to qualify for an exemption.
I doubt this will end well for the blue haired activist and his friends, if they keep messing people’s lives up with their roadblocks. Other illegal green roadblocks in Britain have ended in manhandling and violence.
I want to make it clear WUWT does not condone violence. The long term solution is for British people to vote for politicians who care about their problems. Even if the candidate doesn’t win, it sends a message. Even lazy politicians care about what happens on election day.
While Vanuatu claims is it particularly vulnerable to likely impacts of climate change, there are no specific harms it can attribute to human induced climate change.
According to Axios the United Nations (UN) is poised to approve a resolution from the small island nation of Vanuatu to bring a case for climate change related damages before the International Court of Criminal Justice in (ICCJ) the Hague. Such action by the UN would be a purely political move, an effort to force countries to advance climate policies and pay climate reparations, not one based in provable climate harm. There is no evidence showing climate change is causing or enhancing the underlying “harms” Vanuatu is likely to cite in its action, increased cyclone activity and rising seas.
The small Pacific Island country of Vanuatu is poised to gain UN approval to seek an unprecedented legal opinion on what obligation countries have to combat climate change.
Why it matters: Vanuatu’s resolution would give the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague a chance to weigh in on potential consequences for nations that have caused much of global warming to date.
The nonbinding advisory opinion could be cited by U.S. courts, and used in legal proceedings around the world.
The big picture: The push started in a law school classroom in Fiji four years ago, according to Cynthia Houniuhi, president of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change.
She and her international environmental law classmates brainstormed ways to seek action through various legal mechanisms, Houniuhi told reporters on a press call Thursday.
While the UN’s imprimatur or approval of Vanuatu’s claims might carry weight with the ICCJ, allowing a case to be heard, it is unclear any remedies the ICCJ might grant if the case were successful, would to lead to actual policy changes. More immediately, Vanuatu would likely have to provide hard evidence before the ICCJ that its nation is provably being harmed by the actions of developed countries that have emitted the most carbon dioxide emissions historically. While Vanuatu claims is it particularly vulnerable to likely impacts of climate change, there are no specific harms it can attribute to human induced climate change.
The World Bank has published a document: “Climate Risk Country Profile: Vanuatu,” which complicates Vanuatu’s case, because its first two Key Messages state:
Vanuatu is warming and is expected to warm throughout the 21st century. Future rates of warming are clouded by current models’ inability to simulate very localized changes but, warming is expected to be in the range of 0.7°C–2.9°C depending on the 21st century rate of global emissions.
Natural variability between years, even decades, ensure short- and medium-term rainfall changes are difficult to detect and project into the future. Further research is urgently required to develop models better suited to modelling the future climate of Pacific Islands.
In short, the type, extent, and timing of impacts of purported human caused climate change are uncertain. Also, the climate models upon which they are based are unable to accurately account localized climate conditions or the factors which impact them for short and medium term. Indeed, the basis for any case Vanuatu might bring before the ICCJ are climate model outputs, rather than observed changes or trends over the past thirty years of climate change. Yet, as discussed at Climate Realism, here and here, for instance, climate models are seriously compromised. As a result, their projections can’t be trusted and provide no basis for potential public policies.
The World Bank’s report lists a variety of ways climate models project climate change might impact Vanuatu, the big three being: sea level rise; coral bleaching; increased tropical cyclone activity. The World Bank writes specifically with regards to tropical cyclones that because our understanding of large natural global circulation patterns is “weak … likely trends are not well understood.” The same is true for the other projected impacts as well.
As the World Bank notes, in the face of sea level rise Vanuatu has the advantage of having relatively high elevation when compared to many other small island nations. Concerning rising seas, there is little evidence that seas have begun rising globally at accelerated rates during the recent period of warming. In addition, even in the face of rising seas, as discussed at Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, even low lying small island nations are not, in general, suffering net land losses or losses in development or tourism.
Concerns about the impact of climate change on coral reefs is equally misplaced. Although bleaching of corals is not uncommon, the cause of such events is due to factors other than climate change. Experience shows most coral reefs recover from bleaching events, and that corals have evolved and continue to evolve in response to changed climate conditions. There is no reason to believe corals in Vanuatu are exceptions to these trends and facts.
As the World Bank report notes, although Vanuatu is vulnerable to tropical cyclones, climate models provide no support for the claim that tropical cyclones in general, or those occurring in the South Pacific where Vanuatu lies, have increased or are likely to do so. Indeed, concerning hurricanes and cyclones globally, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s AR6 Physical Science report does not indicate climate change has caused hurricanes or tropical cyclones to increase in number or intensity.
“There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multidecadal to centennial) trends in TC [tropical cyclone] frequency- or intensity-based metrics,” concluded the IPCC in AR6.
In addition, multiple recent studies published in various peer reviewed journals, here, here, and here, for example, consistently find that the number of tropical cyclones in the South Pacific and the number of class three or above cyclones (major cyclones) have declined in recent decades even as the earth has modestly warmed.
One of the studies attributes a 13 percent decline in the frequency of tropical cyclones since pre-industrial times to climate change. Also, commenting on their findings, the authors of a second study concerning Pacific cyclone frequency near Japan said referring to a measured decline in cyclones, “[t]his is the opposite of what climate ‘experts’ said would happen.”
To conclude, even if the U.N., for political reasons, approves Vanuatu’s petition to take a case for climate action and damages to the ICCJ in The Hague, the island nation will have a tough row to hoe, proving human actions are causing it identifiable harms, because there is no evidence that is happening. Courts require real evidence, and evidence that human caused climate change is harming Vanuatu is severely lacking. Vanuatu should not waste its peoples’ money on this misguided lawsuit.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
The results of Berlin’s Climate Neutrality By 2030 referendum tell us that FFF and Last Generation are fringe movements, remote of even Berlin’s mainstream.
The results of Berlin’s Climate Neutrality By 2030 referendum tell us that FFF and Last Generation are fringe movements, remote of even Berlin’s mainstream.
It’ll take a longtime for the radical climate activists to recover from this major setback
The movement’s leaders reacted in disbelief and sourly to the defeat, as Twitter account holder Georg tweeted:
Last Sunday’s “Berlin Climate Neutrality By 2030” referendum failed resoundingly despite the more than a million euros spent in a massive run-up campaign that included plastering the city with posters, concerts by famous performers, huge support and propaganda by the media and hefty donations coming from left wing activists from the east and west coasts of USA.
Once the dust of the referendum had settled, it emerged that the “yes” side fell way short of the quorum 608,000 votes needed to pass the measure. Only 442,210 cast a vote in favor, which represents only 18% of Berlin’s eligible voters. The activists expected a far greater turnout. 82% refused to lend any support.
Berlin’s rejection of the climate neutrality by 2030 mandate is a massive body blow to the the radical Fridays for Future and Last Generation movement in Germany, and it will take months for the radicals to recover, it ever, from this setback.
The Berlin initiative to make the city climate neutral by 2030 was led by rich, upper class youths like Luisa “Longhaul” Neubauer. But Berliners, having been harassed for months by activists gluing themselves to the streets and blocking traffic, saw the folly of the initiative and the high costs it would entail politically and financially. They decided resoundingly they’d wanted no part of it.
Lashing out at the majority
The agony of referendum defeat was palpable as some of its leaders reacted by lashing out and insulting those who refused to vote “yes”, In a video, movement co-leader Luisa Neubauer sank into cynical accusations against the majority, even calling the uncooperative Berliners “fossil cynics” and “climate destroyers”.
Neubauer added: “There are forces in this city that are doing everything to get the last spark of climate destruction out.” In Neubauer’s view these forces include the vast 82% of Berliners who refused to vote “yes”. So troublesome democracy can be.
Social Democrat Dario Schramm wept on Twitter at the gloating that would now come from the other side. But he and other supporters of the green ban politics need not be surprised. For years they have been spreading their ideas of good politics for years in a self-righteous, arrogant and sometimes aggressive manner.
They, mostly members of the upper middle class, have declared war on the lower and lower middle class with their destructive climate measures. Outside the Berlin political bubble and the other urban feel-good oases of Germany, the Neubauers of this world never possessed much support. And now the bubble has finally burst. In the Marzahn, Köpenick and Lichtenberg districts, the majority of voters voted against the referendum. The normal working population of Berlin decided against the journalistic and political elite.”
But don’t expect the climate radicals to go away. They’ll be back at it soon enough.
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