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.
Despite strong EV sales growth, the ratio of U.S. car shoppers uninterested in buying an EV is increasing, according to a new J.D. Power survey.
“Top-line metrics on overall EV market share, availability and affordability have been on a long-term upward trend,” J.D. Power said in a statement, “but beneath those headline numbers we are starting to see some consumer behaviors that suggest a possible bifurcation of the automotive marketplace.”
J.D. Power’s data show the number of shoppers “very unlikely” to consider an EV purchase in the next 12 months reached 21% in March. That’s up 2% from the month before and the highest “very unlikely” response J.D. Power had ever seen.
EV purchase consideration trends – J.D. Power
Price and charging were the biggest reasons survey respondents rejected EVs. Of those “very unlikely” and “somewhat unlikely” to consider an EV, 49% cited both “lack of charging station availability” and “purchase price” as reasons for their disinterest in EVs. “Limited driving distance per charge” and “time required to charge” were also frequently cited, with 43% and 41% of respondents, respectively, listing them as factors in avoiding an EV purchase.
2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6
On pricing, J.D. Power pointed to the continued confusion over the federal EV tax credit and its tighter requirements, which the firm argues impacts affordability but reduces the number of qualifying EVs. EV prices themselves are also quite volatile at the moment, which could also be dissuading consumers.
On charging, J.D. Power has found in previous studies that customers are much more satisfied with the Tesla Supercharger network, although they’ve soured a bit with home charging due to surging home electricity prices, mainly in the Northeast.
7-Eleven 7Charge EV fast-charging station
However, it’s worth remembering that these findings come in the context of strong EV sales growth. EVs represented 7.3% of all U.S. new-car sales in March, according to J.D. Power. That’s down from 8.5% in February, but still a big increase from EVs’ 2.6% market share in February 2020.
And while this survey indicates EV holdouts may be digging in their heels, the general attitude toward EVs and EV policy appears remarkably positive. Although the policy itself might be political, polls have repeatedly found that the ideas behind the policy—and EV adoption itself—isn’t so partisan.
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up?
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.
HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through April 2023. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.
Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. In 2021 the summer NH summer spike was joined by warming in the Tropics but offset by a drop in SH SSTs, which raised the Global anomaly slightly over the mean.
Then in 2022, another strong NH summer spike peaked in August, but this time both the Tropic and SH were countervailing, resulting in only slight Global warming, later receding to the mean. Oct./Nov. temps dropped in NH and the Tropics took the Global anomaly below the average for this period. After an uptick in December, temps in January 2023 dropped everywhere, strongest in NH, with the Global anomaly further below the mean since 2015.
Now comes El Nino as shown by the upward spike in the Tropics since January, the anomaly nearly doubling from 0.45C to 0.83C. SH stayed the same as March, but NH also increased 0.13, resulting in a Global anomaly of 0.85C. That’s above the average for this period by 0.17C, while Global January was slightly below the mean for this period.
A longer view of SSTs
The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July.1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.
The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.
SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.
Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.
The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.
Now in 2023 the Tropics flip from below to above average, and NH starts building up for a summer peak comparable to previous years.
What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.
Contemporary AMO Observations
Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future. So I find only the Hadsst AMO dataset has Feb. and March data. It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic. “Hadsst AMO follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.” So the values represent differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.
The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed. As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its varibility, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin. Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. An annual chart below is informative:
Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years. 2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September. 1998 and 2007 were mildly warm. 2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average. 2023 is starting out slightly warm.
Summary
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up?
Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4
HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.
HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.
In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.
Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
There’s too much of a coincidence here to ignore, and we continue to rapidly push forward. This activity off our coast is only going to dramatically increase as they begin pile-driving and installing these wind turbines. So if this is having an effect on our marine mammals now, it could be catastrophic when that work begins.
The Washington Post (WP) ran a story discussing the possibility of counting whales as carbon sinks or offsets, concluding that any carbon stored in whales would be insufficient to offset more than a fraction of human carbon dioxide emissions. This is true, and especially so as there is mounting evidence to suggest that efforts to fight climate change by building large industrial offshore wind projects are contributing to a growing rate of excess whale deaths.
A few years ago, a group of economists proposed that whale populations be treated as counterweights to pollution, much in the same way that supporting tree-planting allows individuals and businesses to “cancel out” their carbon emissions.
Here’s the basic idea: Whales store a lot of carbon in their massive bodies. They also poop prodigiously, creating a food source for phytoplankton, which themselves collectively hold even vaster amounts of carbon. And when whales die, their bodies sink to the ocean floor, trapping carbon in deep water for hundreds of years.
Although Gongloff supports the goal of enhancing whale populations, he notes a number of problems with efforts to treat whales as carbon sinks for the purpose of fighting climate change, among them, “is that nobody really knows how much carbon whales actually trap, or for how long,” and any carbon they store is miniscule compared to daily emissions from human activities.
Whales are worth protecting regardless of their ability to store carbon dioxide. Strictly as carbon sinks, however, the fact is, whales can’t serve that purpose if they are dying as a result of efforts to build and operate massive offshore wind projects.
As part of President Biden’s stated goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, the Biden administration has initiated efforts build 30,000 megawatts of traditional offshore wind facilities (with structures attached to the ocean floor) in federal waters by 2030, and an additional 15,000 megawatts of floating industrial offshore wind by 2035. To hit those targets, the Biden administration is soliciting leases in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico and Gulf of Maine and off the coasts of New England, the Mid-Atlantic States, North Carolina, South Carolina, California, and Oregon.
These lease areas are in the middle of or at the edges of numerous protected whale species core habitat and migration routes.
Gongloff and the WP dismiss the threat offshore wind projects pose to whales with a single paragraph:
You might be thinking: So what? If we can dangle carbon offsets as a lure to companies to not only stop killing whales with their ships (likely the primary cause of a recent spate of whale fatalities; not wind farms, as you might have heard) but also pay money to protect them, then isn’t that a good thing?
Yet, whale deaths and strandings have spiked since 2016 as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management first began and sanctioning the sound testing for and initial construction of large offshore wind farms (see the figure below).
Although the sonic pulses may not be directly causing whale deaths, each wind project is being issued level 2 harassment permits to “disturb a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by causing disruption of behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering …,” from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). One would have to be willfully ignorant to believe sonar testing is not harming whales when the NMFS says it likely is or will.
In a letter sent to Department of Interior officials on May 13, 2022, Sean Hayes, chief of the protected species branch at NOAA’s National Northeast Fisheries Science Center wrote:
Additional noise, vessel traffic and habitat modifications due to offshore wind development will likely cause added stress that could result in additional population consequences to a species that is already experiencing rapid decline. Wind turbines may disrupt the dense concentration of zooplankton that the whales depend on for sustenance, potentially forcing them to spend more energy and take more risks searching elsewhere for food.
Adding weight to the concerns raised by Hayes is the fact that 10 whale and sea life conservation organizations sent an official letter to Bureau of Ocean Energy Management specifically objecting to the Biden administration moving forward with offshore wind plans and approvals without a comprehensive environmental impact statement demonstrating that such projects would have no deleterious impacts to whale populations.
Ship strikes are the single largest cause of excess whale deaths and shipping traffic has increased along the Atlantic coast. The ships associated with offshore wind sonar activities, cable laying and construction, have contributed a bit to this increase.
While undertaking acoustic surveys multiple ships traverse areas whales use as calving and feeding grounds, migration corridors, and where some whales reside year around. Even if the sound does not directly harm the whales, it is virtually guaranteed to force them out of their normal habitats into one of the busiest shipping corridors in the world. Indeed, since the pandemic, the Port of New York and New Jersey has become the busiest in the nation.
Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace and its ex-president in Canada, told the New York Post (NYP) that offshore wind development is creating “death zones” for whales.
“The effect of the high-intensity acoustic pulses is unknown, and the excavations are muddying waters for what will be years on end,” Moore said. “It is not reasonable to say there is no possibility of a causal relationship.”
New Jersey state Sen. Anthony Bucco (R-Boonton) agrees with Moore’s assessment of the impact of offshore wind development on whale populations, telling the NYP:
There’s too much of a coincidence here to ignore, and we continue to rapidly push forward. This activity off our coast is only going to dramatically increase as they begin pile-driving and installing these wind turbines. So if this is having an effect on our marine mammals now, it could be catastrophic when that work begins.
Even if offsetting carbon dioxide emissions were a worthwhile goal, which Climate Realism disputes, the WP and Gongloff are right, using whales as carbon dioxide offsets won’t work, especially since offshore wind development to fight climate change is increasing whale deaths.
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.
All the arguments here have been expressed elsewhere – usually by climate sceptics – many times, but now the national press is more willing to let the cat out of the bag. The basic problem for renewables is energy storage, or lack of it and as the Telegraph article says, ‘The necessary miracle doesn’t exist’.
All the arguments here have been expressed elsewhere – usually by climate sceptics – many times, but now the national press is more willing to let the cat out of the bag. The basic problem for renewables is energy storage, or lack of it and as the Telegraph article says, ‘The necessary miracle doesn’t exist’. – – – Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future, says The Telegraph.
The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this.
This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.
These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.
In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days.
“Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online.
The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun.
This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down.
In fact it’s already common to see efficient combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of wind and solar farms. But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas as combined cycle gas turbines.
Switching to high-emissions machinery as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness! . . . Wind and solar need to be backed up, close to 100 per cent, by some other means of power generation. If that backup is provided by open-cycle gas or worse, coal, net zero will never be achieved: nor anything very close to it.
There is one technology that can provide a cheap and reliable supply of low-emissions electricity: nuclear power. Interest in nuclear power is increasing as more and more people realise that it is safe and reliable.
If regulators and the public could be persuaded that modern stations are inherently safe and that low levels of nuclear radiation are not dangerous, nuclear power could provide all the low cost, low emissions electricity the world needs for hundreds or thousands of years.
But if we had 100 per cent nuclear backup for solar and wind, we wouldn’t need the wind and solar plants at all.
Wind and solar are, in fact, completely pointless.
The only reason I have brought up this debunking video now is because it indirectly relates to the recent evaluation of IPCC’s AR6 published by the Clintel group.
What do you know about Bjorn Lomborg? More than me I’m guessing. I know he wrote a book that is very popular with climate sceptics and is universally derided by those who are not. I know that debunking Lomborg is now big business, with a turnover likely in excess of the GDP of most South American countries. And I know he is famous for pushing the following graph depicting the fall in climate-related deaths since 1920:
The graph has been referenced more than once here on Cliscep, so it should be of considerable interest and concern to learn that there is also a ‘fact-checking’ video doing the rounds that, according to those who have no time for Lomborg, does a pretty good job of debunking him. As I say, I am no student of Lomborg and so I am in no position to offer a sweeping judgment regarding his position within the climate change debate; I’ll leave that sort of grandstanding to the likes of Wikipedia and DeSmog. But, given the importance and notoriety of his analysis on climate-related deaths, I thought I would at least take the time to view the debunking video and report on just how good a job it does in adding to the legend of the debunked ‘denier’. In so doing I think I learned a thing or two about just how easy it seems for self-satisfaction to overcome the average fact-checker and, more to the point, just how breathtakingly hypocritical they can be.
If you take a stand then you have to stick to it
The first theme of the debunking is based upon the old chestnut of cherry-picking. The problem is that Lomborg conveniently chooses to start his graph at 1920, which happens to be the high point of the EM-DAT dataset upon which the graph is based. Had he commenced from the start of that dataset the graph would have shown a lower climate-related death rate leading up to the 1920 maximum. Indeed, the earliest version of the Lomborg graph did just that. Whilst it still conveyed the message of a significant drop in climate-related deaths up to the present day, it also invited people to ask the rather awkward question, ‘but what is that at the start?’ It seems a bit sly of Lomborg to subsequently drop this inconvenient section of the data, but does pointing this out debunk Lomborg? Certainly not in my book. With or without the pre-1920 data, there is nothing in the graph to suggest an increase in climate-related deaths in recent years. The opposite is still clearly the case, and that has to remain the point. At worst this is an awkward detail for Lomborg and at best it is an irrelevance.
But he’s cherry-picking, the video screams, and that’s exactly the sort of dirty trick that deniers are supposed to pull. Besides which, the video continues, had you not noticed that the fall in deaths only shows up when one looks at global data? If one focusses in on the USA the data definitely shows an increase. So take that Lomborg! In fact, all you have to do is ignore the data from China and the Indian subcontinent and you get a completely different graph showing a marked recent increase.
It turns out that the real sleight of hand pulled by Lomborg wasn’t to cherry-pick from post 1920 data but to then fail to cherry-pick his countries. Sneakily, he insisted on using global statistics to analyse a global phenomenon. He somehow felt that including the most populace and traditionally most vulnerable countries of the world was perfectly okay. The swine!
I just wonder whether the maker of this debunking video has the slightest understanding that you can’t accuse someone of cherry-picking only then to make cherry-picking a central pillar of one’s own debunking argument. It just beggars belief. Can the hypocrisy get any worse? Well let’s look at the second theme of the debunking to see if it can.
And if you take another stand then you have to stick to it also
As if using global statistics to analyse a global issue wasn’t bad enough, Lomborg also chose to define deaths caused by floods, droughts, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures as climate-related. But, according to the debunking video, this was highly misleading since the events that were driving the data were not purely climate events. The video goes through them all and, in every case, is able to point to other factors (usually caused by human conflict or failed policy) that contributed to the death toll. Maybe it would have been more appropriate for Lomborg to point out that deaths resulting from conflict had dropped dramatically since 1920.
As with the accusation of cherry-picking, this is actually a valid point, but it is again overplayed and is groaning with hypocrisy. The reality is that very few supposedly natural disasters can be placed purely in such a category since there are nearly always human-related causations that have to be taken into account. Even the non-climate related disasters that Lomborg references will have been affected in that way. For example, just how many deaths have been caused by an earthquake will be a function of both its strength and just how earthquake-resistant the buildings will have been. And yet we still refer to the deaths as earthquake-related rather than construction-related. And we don’t whine when someone does so but fails to point out the human negligence involved. So saying that Lomborg is misleading his audience is a bit rich, particularly when you take into account that no matter how many human-related causations were behind the death tolls of recent climate events, all the deaths were counted as climate-related. The rule seems to be that when the statistics are dropping it is due to trends in the human-related causations, but when they are rising, it is entirely due to the trends in climate.
So it is fine to pick up Lomborg on this point, but if you do so then you are going to have to stop objecting to those who point out the major role of deforestation in Pakistani flooding, or the role that an epidemic of arson has had on Australian wildfires. Either you take a sophisticated view regarding causation or you don’t. You can’t just switch sophistication on and off just to suit your ‘debunking’ arguments.
And try not to get desperate
The only other supposedly debunking argument I can discern in the video is one taking issue with Lomborg’s claim that the drop in climate-related deaths is entirely positive. Yes, asserts the video, but at what cost? All these protections that have come with greater economic wealth have also resulted in greater financial loss when disaster strikes – just ask the insurance companies. And we all know that money is fungible – every pound spent on sea defences or to rebuild houses is a pound less for cancer research.
‘Specious’ is the word that comes to mind here. ‘Naïve’ is another. You just can’t do that. You can’t play the cancer card unless you can directly relate the two revenue streams and provide statistics that unequivocally show that death rates due to cancer are a lot higher because of the redirection of funding. Sure, cancer deaths are on the increase, but this trend is easily explained in terms of a growing and aging population that is not dying as much from other things that would have traditionally got you before cancer had the chance. The attempt to allude in this way to a hidden climate-related death toll is just downright desperate. The less said about this one, the better.
A call to arms
The only reason I have brought up this debunking video now is because it indirectly relates to the recent evaluation of IPCC’s AR6 published by the Clintel group. In fact, I had not even heard of this video until Dr Ken Rice referenced it in the latest post on his ATTP blog. The article dismisses the Clintel report as a litany of the same old heavily debunked arguments offered by climate ‘deniers’ and, in passing, Dr Rice adds a comment citing the Lomborg graph as another example of the sort of stuff that has already been thoroughly debunked (he actually says of the debunking video, ‘I thought this was a pretty good debunking of Lomborg’s graph’). I know that there are differences of opinion here on Cliscep regarding whether there is still much to be gained by arguing against the science used to justify Net Zero. I say that there is, and I will continue to say this whilst there are still people such as Dr Ken Rice who feel that the video I have just reviewed does a pretty good job of anything.
As heat pumps become the latest trend, so is their theft. And because they are installed outdoors, insurance companies refuse to cover the losses.
Swiss site Tichy’s Einblick here reports on how police and consumer advocates are warning homeowners heat pumps are being stolen and that often aren’t insured because they are not not secured indoors.
As opposed to fossil fuel furnaces, which are housed securely in basements, heat pumps are usually installed outdoors, thus making them easy targets for criminals.
“Criminals have apparently now discovered the theft of heat pumps as a new business field for themselves,” reports Tichy’s Einblick, citing the Nordkurier. “Throughout Germany, the police are receiving more and more reports of heat pumps being dismantled and stolen.”
Because heat pumps are usually not installed indoors, they end up not being covered by standard household insurance policies if stolen or damaged. This misfortune was experienced by one woman in Germany, when here 15,000 euro pump was stolen and her insurance company refused to cover the damage.
“The insurance company now does not want to pay. The problem: the heat pump was not covered by the building insurance. Since the heat pump is not in the house but in front of it, she is stuck with the costs,” reports Tichy’s Einblick. Criminals are reported stealing units from homes under construction as well.
Securing heat pumps against theft of course will only add to their already hefty costs of their installation. Germany aims to pass a law forcing all German households off gas and oil heating systems beginning next year.
You almost can’t help but think of Monty Python’s famous sketch with John Cleese as the main actor when you look at the events in the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. Instead of silly gaits in the United Kingdom, this is about crazy behavior in the German Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The State Secretary for the Energy Transition Patrick Graichen (left) and his Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck (both Greens)
You almost can’t help but think of Monty Python’s famous sketch with John Cleese as the main actor when you look at the events in the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. Instead of silly gaits in the United Kingdom, this is about crazy behavior in the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. Almost every day, new absurd facts pop up from the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
As is well known, State Secretary Graichen wanted to appoint his trusted witness Schäfer to the position of head of the German Energy Agency dena. Graichen emphasized that his best man was the best applicant. Of course, this is a feast for the press and they found out that Schäfer has an apprenticeship as a copywriter, after which he was a Green MP in the Berlin House of Representatives and moved to Nabu and finally to Agora Energiewende. He has no scientific training, nor has he ever managed a company or agency with 500 employees. If this was already the best candidate, as Graichen emphasized, then it would be better not to imagine the qualifications of the other applicants. Die Welt has taken a closer look at the shepherd, who has since been taken out of the race, in a paid article.
“It is questionable whether Dena would have retained its “critical-constructive” role under the leadership of Michael Schäfer, the former head of environmental policy at the nature conservation association Nabu: Schäfer has so far hardly made a name for himself with energy policy expertise. On Twitter, Schäfer had supported the citizens’ initiative to make Berlin climate-neutral as early as 2030, a goal that scientists and even the Green Party’s top candidate Bettina Jarasch had considered unrealistic.”
The article concludes that Graichen apparently wanted to create facts and install a dena boss who was devoted to him and, above all, uncritical. We recall the great Peter Ustinov:
“Everyone makes mistakes. The trick is to do it when no one is watching.”
Not only did someone watch Graichen, but another state secretary in the Ministry of Economics is now making a name for himself. If you like, these are self-fulfilling prophecies from Habeck’s state secretary Philipp. Sitting in regulation exactly where you invest privately sounds great, but it has little to do with compliance. Setting up subsidy programmes that have a chance that they will affect some investments is already a strong piece. The Focus:
“After the felt allegations against his state secretary Patrick Graichen, Robert Habeck’s second state secretary Udo Philipp is now also putting the Minister of Economics in need of explanation because of conflicts of interest. Philipp is responsible for digital policy and the German startup scene, is responsible, among other things, for the German government’s startup strategy and billion-dollar funding programs, but is also active as a business angel for startups, according to research by Business Insider. Philipp supports companies through silent participations, loans and open participations, as he admits on request, according to the report. He is silent about which companies are involved. In addition, Philipp has money in a number of funds. Individual funds that can be assigned to the State Secretary are in industries of the future. This includes electromobility, for which Philipp is responsible in the ministry.”
The alarmist forecast of 12 billion is only a projection of current trends, ignoring factors that make it unlikely or impossible. Fertility is crashing almost everywhere, even societies where experts confidently predicted it wouldn’t (eg, Iran).https://t.co/hNsxup80V1
— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) April 19, 2023
In this BBC report which I covered the other day, there was this statement:
The government and private investors have spent £198bn on renewable power infrastructure since 2010
I assume this includes the costs incurred by the National Grid in upgrading the network, on top of the cost of wind farms etc. Nevertheless I suspect the figure is understated, as a lot of what the National Grid spends goes under the radar.
Even so, this is an extraordinary amount, nearly £20 billion a year, and most has come in the last ten years, when renewable capacity really began to take off. Add on interest costs and profit margins, and you are looking at triple that number, all of which we will have to pay for in years to come, whether via taxation or higher energy bills.
And all for what? Most of this renewable capacity has to be backed up by existing dispatchable capacity.
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