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.
“It was raining intensely. Around 4am I heard a deafening crash. Just behind the house, the entire hill collapsed and unleashed a torrent of water and mud that destroyed everything. I survived, but my daughter, wife and my mother died in their sleep,” Prakash said.
…
“Due to global warming, the monsoon winds now carry more moisture from the sea along with dust and pollution from the plains. Himachal’s bowl-like topography captures those moisture-laden clouds. This leads to excess monsoon rainfall in less periods. The result is flooding,” Shukla explained.
…
Stopping the flow of rivers by dams in Himachal Pradesh has led to severe riverine disturbances, said Manshi Asher, co-founder of the environmental group Himdhara.
“When the water increases beyond the holding capacity of the dam, they open the floodgates without warning. The impact is visible in the form of landslides and floods,” she said.
The lack of comprehensive data on the environment in the region has also made the situation more dangerous.
I wonder what the original draft of that Al Jazeera story looked like?
In my opinion, someone involved in the chain of publication of that Al Jazeera story appears to have tried to tell the real story – uncontrolled building of dams, poor management of said dams, including abrupt releases of water without warning, and a lack of environmental data, have dramatically worsened the risk of landslides and floods.
But Al Jazeera decided to lead with climate change claims, which given the “lack of comprehensive data”, do not seem to be backed by solid evidence.
Even if CO2 is increasing rainfall, would reducing emissions fix the “landslides and floods” caused by poor water management? Or would focussing on water management issues be more likely to lead to an improved near term outcome?
If Al Jazeera had led with the dam management issue, I would have praised their handling of the story, even if it contained alarmist climate content. But instead of telling the story, in my opinion Al Jazeera have done a grave disservice to Om Prakash and others in his situation, by using Prakash’s tragedy as a prop to push their political climate agenda. You have to read the full article to read about the real root cause of local landslide and flood tragedies.
I take no joy in being perceptive when writing the post below in March 2021. Because the process becoming evident back then has only gone from bad to worse. So much more has happened in the dismantling of my birthplace USA, more extreme and unrelenting destruction of the republic. If anything, I underestimated the virulence of people carrying out the agenda of this regime.
I take no joy in being perceptive when writing the post below in March 2021. Because the process becoming evident back then has only gone from bad to worse. So much more has happened in the dismantling of my birthplace USA, more extreme and unrelenting destruction of the republic. If anything, I underestimated the virulence of people carrying out the agenda of this regime. They have revealed themselves as:
♦ Incompetent, hired for group identity and sexual preference, not knowledge or skill; ♦ Corrupt, driven by greed from the top of the house on down; and ♦ Malicious, eagerly destroying civility and causing pain and suffering for the joy of it.
Will Americans Rally to their heritage or succumb to this craven cabal?
They Swallowed It: Hook, Line and Sinker
Many will recognize the expression for taking on an idea or proposition so deeply in your gut that, like a fish on the line, there is no escape no matter how hard you try. Jacques Parizeau, one time separatist Premier of Quebec coined a similar idiom regarding voters resisting the referendum on Quebec independence from Canada. Meeting privately with foreign diplomats, he said that in the event of a Yes vote, the result would be like a “lobster pot.” That refers to the traditional wooden traps that have a one-way gate allowing a lobster to get in, but not out.
These expressions come to mind concerning the plight of US citizens following the installing of Biden-Harris in the White House. The intention of this administration is clearly to fundamentally transform America: From “The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave,” to “The Land of the Victims, Home of the Afraid.” The movement in this direction has been a long time in the works, and was only recently triggered by the election of Trump and the leftist need to cancel the alternate ideology of “Make America Great Again.” Time will tell if those now in power are reaching too far, too fast, going for broke before the majority were caught in the pot.
No doubt the program to undermine American global dominance has been operating for several generations. Those not familiar with the Marxist revolutionary four-stage process can read my synopsis article Four Steps to Take Down a Free Society
Pioneered by the Soviets and exported into many countries before their empire collapsed, the method is now employed by the Chinese Communist Party updated with cyber tools, along with traditional espionage tactics of honey traps and buyouts. The first stage of demoralizing involves teachers indoctrinating students to disparage their national heritage and destroy commitment to traditional social values and customs. Tom Wolfe wrote with his satirical wit and historical knowledge about the demise of liberal US academia into leftist dogma in his essay In the Land of the Rococo Marxists. My synopsis is Warmists and Rococo Marxists.
Of course the present manifestation flies under a different banner: Social Justice. And the reverent refer to George Floyd rather than Karl Marx. But Critical Race Theory is so obviously intended to divide and conquer a free and democratic society, you would have to be in a trance (claiming to be “woke”) to be taken in by it. Yet, indoctrinated children, now adults abound in the ranks of corporate management, others churning out copy for mass media or organizing activists in the streets and in cyberspace.
The protests in city streets of developed countries are coordinated and led by Social Justice Warriors indoctrinated in Western academies of higher education, after elementary school slanted teaching. If neo-Marxist progressive post-moderns take pride in this as accomplishing their agenda, consider what happened in China’s cultural revolution in the 1960s and is repeating itself in 2020. The useful dupes, like teachers, become outcasts and themselves targets for cancellation once power and control is seized. See article Teachers Beware Your Cultural Revolution Turning on You.
Have the scales yet tipped in favor of the slide into a socialist autocracy? Will Americans mount a resistance to this revolution? Depends on who and how many are on the line or trapped in lobster pots.
Amusingly, Mr Johnson seems to want to blame MPs for the failure of the Net Zero plan. There was, he says, ‘an easy consensus’ and a ‘lack of serious parliamentary scrutiny’. You have to admit that the chutzpah is impressive. Mr Johnson was, after all, a member of the Climate Change Committee when it produced the Net Zero plan.
A prominent former member of the Climate Change Committee blames MPs for failure of Net Zero plans.
Back in 2020, the economist Paul Johnson, a member of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said that the overall cost of getting to Net Zero should be ‘more than manageable’, and indeed, with a fair technological wind, might be ‘remarkably low’.[1] Tens of billions of pounds a year would be all that was required, he claimed, in line with the CCC’s 2019 Net Zero report, which suggested a figure of £50 billion per year, and thus perhaps £1.5 trillion in total.
This easy transformation was going to be enabled by technology, explained Mr Johnson:
It looks likely that electric cars will turn out to be cheaper overall to buy and run than petrol cars. The cost of wind and solar power has been plummeting at an extraordinary rate.
Wind forward just three years, and Mr Johnson’s optimism about the bill to be paid looks slightly ridiculous. His belief in plummeting renewables costs – credulous even at the time – has been refuted every year, before and since, by the information in windfarm financial accounts,[2] and now by the recent failure of the renewables auction too. EVs remains thousands of pounds more expensive than petrol and diesel equivalents,[3] and they are dearer to insure to boot.[4] Very few seem to want them, and even fewer seem interested in heat pumps either, perhaps unsurprisingly since they seem to deliver only higher energy bills.[5]
Perhaps sensing a change in the wind, Mr Johnson seems recently to have changed his tune. In an article in the Times on Monday,[6] he declared that we have ‘targets without strategies and without coherent policies’ for reaching Net Zero. And indeed, there is a ‘fog of uncertainty over how we are actually expecting to decarbonise household heating, further massively increase zero-carbon electricity production and distribution, revolutionise agriculture and all the rest’.
Net Zero not so ‘manageable’ after all, then?
And now it seems that, rather than being ‘rather low’, Net Zero is actually going to be ‘costly’. Indeed, we are warned, the investment required is ‘not in the billions, but in the trillions’ – ‘vast amounts of money’, he warns. This dramatic upgrading of the costs does rather suggest that his earlier estimate, just three years old, was wrong by several trillion pounds. Still, as Niels Bohr once observed, ‘prediction is hard, particularly of the future’.
Amusingly, Mr Johnson seems to want to blame MPs for the failure of the Net Zero plan. There was, he says, ‘an easy consensus’ and a ‘lack of serious parliamentary scrutiny’. You have to admit that the chutzpah is impressive. Mr Johnson was, after all, a member of the Climate Change Committee when it produced the Net Zero plan. He told us it was ‘manageable’, remember? So while few would argue that Parliamentary oversight of the Net Zero process has been non-existent – shamefully so – for members of the CCC to try to shift the blame in this way does seem a bit like pointing the finger at the teacher for your poor homework.
Despite all these problems, Mr Johnson’s enthusiasm for the Net Zero project seems undiminished. It is still vital that we go ahead, he says, because we face ‘an existential threat’, rather contradicting a prominent former CCC colleague, Professor Jim Skea, who is now the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and who seems much less apocalyptic about it all.[7]
So although ‘deliverable plans’ are ‘thin on the ground’, he seems to think that if we just gird our loins, and come up with a new one, all will be well. All it will take is…
…the kind of careful, long-term, honest planning, decision-making and delivery that has not exactly been the hallmark of British governments
Last week, President Biden dusted off his plan to create an American Climate Corps, this time through an executive order after Congress refused to approve it as part of last year’s climate law grotesquely mislabeled the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, President Biden dusted off his plan to create an American Climate Corps, this time through an executive order after Congress refused to approve it as part of last year’s climate law grotesquely mislabeled the Inflation Reduction Act.
The president’s action revealed much familiar about his administration, including, but not limited to: (1) the president’s obsession to be the 21st reincarnation of President Franklin Roosevelt who created the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression; (2) the anti-democratic nature of his administration with another end-around of Congress (even as the president incessantly describes his political opponents as “threat(s) to democracy;” and (3) perpetuating the ongoing fraud that “climate change” can be thwarted, in this example by 20,000 twenty-somethings reliving summer youth camp by doing make-work outdoor projects.
Six weeks into President Biden’s term, he met with several partisans who pose as “historians” so he could learn how to become a president in the mold of FDR. In some ways, Biden is mimicking his White House predecessor, including by massively increasing federal spending and debt, now approaching $33 trillion, proposing to “pack” the U.S. Supreme Court by adding more justices to rubber-stamp his actions, and ignoring growing global security threats to the U.S.
Unlike FDR, President Biden is not fighting a Great Depression with 25 percent unemployment. Rather, he inherited a growing economy, $2.40 per gallon gasoline, and the worst of the Covid pandemic in the rearview.
President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps was one of many New Deal policies to put unemployed Americans to work to mitigate the effects of the Depression. By contrast, the unemployment rate today remains below four percent, and millions of available jobs are going unfilled. As with past proposals for climate troops, the notion that we need another jobs program on top of the colossal federal bureaucracy is preposterous and wastrel.
President Biden’s executive order to create the Corps is another act of defiance of the democratic process and the U.S. Constitution, which often defines the administration’s climate agenda. The federal government already spends approximately $5 billion just for the National Park Service, with fewer than 20,000 employees. With a stroke of a pen, President Biden thinks he can double that number and cost billions more dollars with no congressional action.
As the Washington Timesreported, “there are many details left to be answered by administration officials, including specifics about the types of jobs, how much the program will pay, its overall funding cost, and the source of funding.” One end-around is that much of the order directs existing federal programs and agencies to refocus apprenticeships and job training.
The Climate Corps proposal also is an example of the ongoing ruse about climate change itself, expressed perfectly by the head of the Sunrise Movement, Varshini Prakash, a huge supporter of the program. “After years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rally cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis,” she said (emphasis mine).
This is both laughable and delusional.
One-hundred-degree heat in Arizona in July and a hurricane in Florida in September are not climate crises. It’s the historical norm. If the global thermometer does somehow go off whack, there is nothing—zero—anyone can do about it, not by banning gasoline vehicles, not by illegally blocking oil leases, and certainly not with 20,000 idealists planting trees and solar panels. Instead, China will continue building coal plants, the developing world will demand more oil and gas to build their economies, and carbon emissions will go on naturally with no cause-and-effect on climate, as data shows.
Yet, socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, speaking for many politicians, is undaunted, still preaching the gospel of climate Armageddon: “there will not be a future for this planet unless we come together and make a radical transition from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy, and that is what the Climate Corps project is all about.” If this man ever uttered a scientific fact or provided evidence, I missed it.
There is the possibility that the joke is on Sen. Sanders, Ms. Prakash, and so many other climate fanatics cheerleading the president’s Climate Corps proposal. To wit, the grandiose vision of a new climate-change army cannot exist without authorization by Congress because it needs money that only Congress can appropriate, regardless of how many soundbites and orders are issued as the presidential election heats up.
With President Biden’s terrible poll numbers, he must shore up his base of support of which the climate change industry is paramount to furnish campaign money and volunteers. So, he throws them a bone, a long-sought item in the climate agenda. Sure, the president wants to continue expanding the size and power of government, per FDR, but is this proposal worth the paper upon which it’s written? More accurately, this mostly unfunded, hollow proposal is more pretentious than real.
He has researched and advocated for a variety of policy issues, including education reform and fiscal policy, both in the non-profit sector and in government in the administration of former New York Governor George Pataki.
He previously wrote and edited The Chalkboard weblog for the NY Charter Schools Association, and has been published in numerous media outlets, including The Hill, New York Post, Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. Twitter: @PeterMurphy26 Website: https://www.petermurphylgs.com/
Kasha Patel, a writer for The Washington Post (WaPo) created a story that is likely in the top 10 most false and egregious climate scare stories ever published. Titled, “Scientists found the most intense heat wave ever recorded — in Antarctica,” the story isn’t just false, it is doubly so because the research paper it is based on is also seriously flawed. In this case, peer review at Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) failed to catch and correct the most basic abuse of the definition of a “heat wave.”
On September 24th, 2023, Kasha Patel, a writer for The Washington Post (WaPo) created a story that is likely in the top 10 most false and egregious climate scare stories ever published. Titled, “Scientists found the most intense heat wave ever recorded — in Antarctica,” the story isn’t just false, it is doubly so because the research paper it is based on is also seriously flawed. In this case, peer review at Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) failed to catch and correct the most basic abuse of the definition of a “heat wave.”
The leading paragraph of the WaPo story said:
In March 2022, temperatures near the eastern coast of Antarctica spiked 70 degrees Fahrenheit (39 degrees Celsius) above normal — making it the most intense recorded heat wave to occur anywhere on Earth, according to a recent study. At the time, researchers on-site were wearing shorts and some even removed their shirts to bask in the (relative) warmth. Scientists elsewhere said such a high in that region of the world was unthinkable.
WaPo also provided a normal temperature, for reference with some “unbelievability” from the lead author of the paper.
Temperatures in March, marking a change into autumn on the continent, are typically around minus -54 degrees Celsius on the east coast near the Dome C. On March 18, 2022, temperatures peaked to minus -10 degrees Celsius. That’s warmer than even the hottest temperature recorded during the summer months in that region — “that in itself is pretty unbelievable,” said Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington.
First, it is important to point out that the so-called “heat wave” really wasn’t warm at all; the shorts and shirt removal was completely for show, rather than science. Since most people in the United States use the Fahrenheit temperature scale, which isn’t mentioned at all in the WaPo article citing the actual high temperature recorded, it was easy for reporter Kasha Patel to sneak by the idea that it was actually warm at the time.
-10 Celsius is actually 14 degrees Fahrenheit – which isn’t warm, much less a “heat wave” by any definition. Patel can’t be forgiven for not mentioning this in the article because anyone can get the conversion simply by typing it into Google, like this example.
But that isn’t the worst journalistic violation Patel makes. She mentions “70 degrees Fahrenheit (39 degrees Celsius) above normal” in the first paragraph, but neglects to offer the same reference when it comes to the actual temperature “minus -10 degrees Celsius,” clearly to hide the fact that at 14°F, it is still well below freezing (32°F) and not warm at all.
By several meteorological definitions, the Antarctic temperature event doesn’t qualify as a heat wave at all. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in their website “SciJinks” for kids defines it as:
A heat wave is a period of unusually hot weather that typically lasts two or more days. To be considered a heat wave, the temperatures have to be outside the historical averages for a given area.
At -10 Celsius/14 degrees Fahrenheit in Antarctica, “hot” is not even close. Even kids will understand this.
On an academic level, a peer reviewed paper “On the Definition of a Heat Wave” published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, clearly defines what a heat wave actually is, in table 7:
As you can see, at 14°F, Antarctica’s March weather event wasn’t even close.
And finally, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) defines a heat wave as:
“…a period during which the daily maximum temperature exceeds for more than five consecutive days the maximum normal temperature by 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).”
In the case of the March Antarctic temperature event, according to the GRL paper abstract, it only lasted 4 days, and so failed that test too. Clearly, despite GRL and WaPo wanting to call it a “heat wave,” by three different definitions, it was not, and the paper author and the WaPo reporter abused the definition.
Finally, there’s this in the GRL paper: “We find that the heatwave was made 2°C warmer by climate change, and future end of century heatwaves to be 5–6°C warmer, suggesting the possibility of near-melting temperatures over the East Antarctic ice cap during extreme heatwaves.”
But the WaPo reporter, who failed to catch that this wasn’t a heat wave at all, reported properly:
The complete role of climate change is still under investigation, although the new study asserts that the warmer atmosphere didn’t play a large role boosting temperatures. The team ran a suite of computer models running scenarios that included increased greenhouse gas emissions vs. a world that did not. They found climate change only increased the heat wave by 2 degrees Celsius.
At -8°C (17.6°F) versus -10°C (14°F), there’s still no significant effect. Antarctic ice didn’t melt, and there was no “shirtless” weather even though it was hyped in the article. It was all for show, roping in low-information readers who wouldn’t question “science” and the journalistic skills of WaPo.
Of course, the damage is in the headline, which most people read without reading such explanations further down in the article, much less in the scientific literature itself. Readers come away with the false impression that Antarctica has a heat wave like what they might experience in the summer where they live, and that’s the biggest lie of all.
Shame on WaPo’s Kasha Patel for not catching and correcting this, and double shame on the editors of GRL for not catching and correcting the false claim of a heat wave in the paper before they published it. We deserve better than this sort of half-baked science and reporting.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.
Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.
He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.
He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
ROGER PIELKE JR.: A new paper has just been published by Zhang and colleagues — Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States — which updates and extends our 2013 analysis. They find: “[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.” Their analysis confirms our earlier work: “[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards.” … Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.
In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising:
[A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.
The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.
Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom:
The analysis presented in this paper indicates that normalized tornado damage in the US from 1950 to 2011 declined in all three normalization methods applied (two are statistically significant one is not). The degree to which this decrease is the result of an actual decrease in the incidence of strong tornadoes is difficult to assess due to inconsistencies in reporting practices over time. However, an examination of trends within sub-periods of the dataset is suggestive that some part of the long-term decrease in losses may have a component related to actual changes in tornado behaviour. Further research is clearly needed to assess this suggestion.
You can see that we were exceedingly cautious in how we framed the possibility that things were not actually getting worse. even so, our work was ignored by the Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment, which instead claimed the opposite, contrary to the evidence and peer-reviewed research:
[T]here is reason to expect increased tornado frequency and intensity in a warming climate
[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.
Their analysis confirms our earlier work:
[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards
You can see the results of their normalization for 1954 to 2018 in the figure below.
Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1954-2018. Source: Zhang et al. 2023
Compare their results with ours in the figure below, which I have just updated through 2022.
Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1950-2022. Source: Updated from Simmons et al. 2013.
Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.
In the 11 full years following our analysis, 9 of 11 have seen overall below average tornado incidence in the United States — 2023 will wind up slightly above average. There is simply no evidence to support claims that tornadoes are getting worse or causing more damage. In fact, the evidence indicates the opposite and peer-reviewed research is strongly in agreement.
Why has the downward trend occurred? Might climate change play a role? You rarely see such questions asked or explored in the scientific literature.
Misinformation on extreme weather and disasters sits out in plain sight, and is easily refuted — yet there seems to be exceedingly strong social norms and political pressures to simply not call things straight. It is really remarkable.
#
Key Points:
ROGER PIELKE JR.: A new paper has just been published by Zhang and colleagues — Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States — which updates and extends our 2013 analysis. They find: “[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.”
Their analysis confirms our earlier work: “[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards.” …
Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.
As wind and solar capacity increases, Germany’s once thriving economy shrinks. And it’s the sudden and dramatic collapse in German industrial output that’s allowed the wind and sun cult to cry ‘victory’ with a claim – based on a statistical fudge – that Germany obtained 50% of its power from ‘renewable’ sources.
As wind and solar capacity increases, Germany’s once thriving economy shrinks. And it’s the sudden and dramatic collapse in German industrial output that’s allowed the wind and sun cult to cry ‘victory’ with a claim – based on a statistical fudge – that Germany obtained 50% of its power from ‘renewable’ sources. Sitting behind the hyperbole is the fact that the bulk of what was generated by so-called ‘renewables’ came from ‘biomass’ ie wood stripped from Germany’s shrinking woods.
The other reason for Germany breaking 50% ‘renewable’ energy barrier, is down to the fact that its declining economy means less demand for electricity, overall.
Already suffering Europe’s highest power prices – with worse to come – German households and businesses are unlikely to increase their power use, anytime soon. Plenty of German businesses like BASF, Wacker and Siltronic – have fled in search of cheap energy, pitching up in places like Singapore and the USA, a process that began over a decade ago.
Francis Menton takes a look at the truth behind the numbers.
Congratulations To Germany On Achieving More Than 50% Of Its Electricity Production From “Renewables”! Manhattan Contrarian Francis Menton 29 August 2023
On the march to Net Zero carbon emissions from usage of energy, the key first step is to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity, replacing them with the magical “renewables.” Or so we are told. Once electricity generation is fossil fuel-free, then all energy use can be switched to electricity, without any of the evil emissions. Voilà — Net Zero!
But somehow, in the places that have tried to go this route with wind turbines and solar panels, the push to get more electricity generation from “renewables” has seemed to stall out at around 40 – 45%. (Some small countries with lots of hydropower get higher percentages by counting the hydropower as “renewable.”). Countries may build more and more solar panels and wind turbines, but somewhere in the 40s the percentage that those things contribute to electricity generation just doesn’t seem to budge very much any more.
And that’s why it’s so exciting that in the first half of 2023 Germany finally crashed through the 50% barrier, becoming the first significant country with little hydropower to achieve more than half of its electricity generation from “renewables.” With a simple internet search, you can find large numbers of news sources relaying the great news.
So this is surely Germany continuing to lead the way to the green energy transition. Certainly, Germany has only accelerated its pursuit of the idea that the route to Net Zero is the building of more and yet more solar panels and wind turbines. A site called Renewable-Energy-Industry.com compiles data on additions to Germany’s wind and solar generation capacity just in the first half of 2023: “Record Additions in Germany: 8,000 MW of New Wind And Solar Capacity in The First Half of 2023.”:
[S]olar energy in particular is booming in Germany. From January to June 2023 alone, around 465,000 new solar plants with 6,500 MW capacity . . . went into operation and produce electricity, more than ever before in a six-month period. . . . In the first six months of 2023, just under 350 new wind turbines with a capacity of around 1,750 MW went into operation. . . .
So are these large additions to capacity what has succeeded in pushing Germany over the 50% threshold? Unfortunately, if you read deep into the Reuters piece linked above, you will start to get a very different understanding. It turns out that Germany’s percentage of electricity from renewables increased not because the production of electricity from renewables increased, but rather because Germany’s economy is shrinking. After decades of effort and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and greatly increased consumer electricity prices, the contribution of wind and solar energy in Germany’s economy remains almost insignificant.
Despite all its new solar and wind facilities, Germany’s production of electricity from those sources has lately been going down rather than up. Here is the story for the first half of 2023) (from the Reuters piece linked above:
Renewables, at 137.5 TWh, represented 51.7% of total output, up from 46.4% in first half 2022, even as green power production volumes decreased by 0.6%.
The 137.5 TWh of electricity that Germany’s “renewable” facilities produced in the first half of 2023 is a pitiful percentage of their supposed theoretical capacity. A chart at Clean Energy Wire here gives Germany’s generation capacity of solar, plus onshore and offshore wind as 130.8 GW as of 2022. (In a country with only about 85 GW of peak usage!). Add the new 8 GW of capacity added in the first half of 2023, and you would have 138.8 GW of wind and solar capacity, or 602.9 TWh hours of capacity (138.8 x 24 x 181) for the 181 days in January to June 2023. That would mean that the wind and solar facilities combined produced at a rate of only 22.8% of capacity over that period.
So if production of electricity from “renewables” actually decreased, how could the percentage of electricity production from the “renewables” have increased from 46.4% to 51.7% of the total? Easy — the production from all other sources (fossil fuels and nuclear) went down dramatically:
Conventional energy sources – nuclear, coal, natural gas and oil – provided 128.4 TWh of output, down from 160.0 TWh a year earlier.
They ran the conventional generators less because the demand for electricity was not there:
The fall in conventional production reflected the phase-out of nuclear energy by mid-April and operators cutting output to match weak demand.
The change from 160.0 TWh to 128.4 TWh from conventional sources would be a 19.75% decline. That’s rather enormous in one year. Now, how could it be that Germany is experiencing that kind of a huge decline in the demand for electricity? You might check out the big front page article from today’s Wall Street Journal, “Germany’s Shrinking Economy Sparks a Struggle for Solutions.” (different headline online). The world leader in the supposed “green energy transition” turns out also to be in the unique position of having an economy that is shrinking, and not by a little:
Germany will be the world’s only major economy to contract in 2023, with even sanctioned Russia experiencing growth, according to the International Monetary Fund.
The WSJ piece goes into a variety of factors that may be contributing to the shrinking economy. But self-inflicted high energy prices turn up again and again:
Energy costs are posing an existential challenge to sectors such as chemicals. . . . Energy prices in Europe have declined from last year’s peak as EU countries scrambled to replace Russian gas, but German industry still faces higher costs than competitors in the U.S. and Asia.
And meanwhile, with Germany’s massive investments in wind and solar electricity generation, are those sources actually making any major inroads in the overall market for primary energy in the country? Here is an extremely revealing chart, again from Clean Energy Wire, with data from 2022:
In the “renewables” category for all primary energy (not just electricity), we learn that they include “biomass” as a “renewable.” Probably, that’s mostly wood, used for heating homes, and hardly a zero carbon source. The amount of energy produced from the “biomass,” at 1,040 PJ and 8.8% of primary energy, far exceeds the combined total from wind and solar (713 PJ and 6.0% of primary energy).
The whole “more than 50% from renewables” mantra turns out only to apply to electricity (far less than half of primary energy usage). And rather than representing the advance of the mythical wind and solar, the whole thing is just an artifact of a shrinking economy, largely itself caused by the destructive build-out of the wind and solar facilities. They are destroying their economy, and have almost nothing to show for two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the useless wind and solar farms. Manhattan Contrarian
Last week there was a television programme that I especially wanted to see; a programme that, if the past was any indication, most commentators at this site would have deliberately dodged. The programme was Chris Packham, is it time to break the law? You will have missed something good and worthwhile. It gave a chance to evaluate a potential major opponent.
Last week there was a television programme that I especially wanted to see; a programme that, if the past was any indication, most commentators at this site would have deliberately dodged. The programme was Chris Packham, is it time to break the law? You will have missed something good and worthwhile. It gave a chance to evaluate a potential major opponent.
I was also interested in the programme because I had watched and, via Open Mic had strongly recommended watching, Chis Packham’s series Earth. This clearly established his ability to step into Attenborough’s shoes as a leading television personality with a mission to support wildlife and climate change. Also a potential major adversary of anything vaguely critical of catastrophic climate advocacy.
The programme fully lived up to my expectations. Packham came across as a dedicated advocate, someone very genuine (if misguided). His thesis was that for his entire life he had supported wildlife and warned about climate change. He was now discouraged because of a lack of any real response and was pondering engaging with groups (like Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion) that conducted quasi-legal (like slow walking and holding up traffic) or even illegal acts. Packham agonised over this conundrum, seeking advice here, there, and everywhere. He got all sorts of advice ranging from don’t break the law (from Lord Deben) to sabotaging oil pipelines. He tried to interview relevant Tory Ministers but to no avail. In the end Packham stated that he had come to believe that those who broke the law were engaged in laudable actions and that, after much reflection, he personally could break the law in support of climate change protests.
A fascinating and I believe very honest treatment of most of the entire subject. Personally I don’t believe he covered the rights of the general public to be free of public nuisance with sufficient detail. Also there was the nagging doubt as to whether Packham and the programme makers were engaged in incitement. It was noticeable that when the list of credits at the end of the programme rolled it was headed by their legal advisor.
So why am I suggesting you might benefit from seeking out the programme and viewing it? Well, I believe there has been a tendency to view those supporting climate catastrophe as not deserving our full efforts. They are treated as lacking in reason or knowledge. Packham stands as an example of those we so dismiss at our peril. He comes across as entirely honest, committed and knowledgeable, someone who cannot easily be dismissed and also one who will gather support. His only fault in the programme IMHO was to summarily dismiss Peter Lilley’s arguments regarding forest fires, waving his hands as he maintained that so much evidence (never given) supported the view that climate change was causing them to increase this year.
I found the programme fascinating and well worth spending the hour spent watching it. It also generated much discussion afterwards with “she who must be listened to”. We failed to agree upon a fundamental question: if you were convinced that climate change was a realistic threat, is it legitimate to break the law to support action to counteract it? I was jail-bait, my wife would promise to visit me.
Alaska’s economy runs on oil and gas. Additionally, oil revenues have accounted for up to 90% of our General Fund revenue. Amid its resource abundance, however, Alaska has a big and growing governmental problem—mostly in Washington, D.C., and increasingly, in local governments trying to appease their federal masters.
“The actions of Alaska policy makers, led by the governor, are eradicating the free-market principles in our state. A media blackout on the problem has left only citizen-led initiatives driving the train to truth. We the People Alaska publishes an eye-opening substack on many of these topics.”
Alaska’s economy runs on oil and gas. Additionally, oil revenues have accounted for up to 90% of our General Fund revenue. Amid its resource abundance, however, Alaska has a big and growing governmental problem—mostly in Washington, D.C., and increasingly, in local governments trying to appease their federal masters.
Alaska has been in a production decline trend since 1988 when the state accounted for 25 percent of U.S. domestic production. Presently, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) is running at a quarter of its capacity (485K barrels per day).
The decline is not for lack of resource, as indicated in part from the proposed Willow Project, which would add 180K/d in 2028 to increase overall TAPS deliveries by 13 percent. Santos Pikka Phase I is expected to add 80k/d in 2026, according to the Alaska Department of Revenue – Tax Division.
Willow Project
Recently, the Conoco Phillips Willow Project has been sanctioned in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The largest oil development project in Alaska in decades was met with fierce opposition from outside environmental groups. The project was pulled back for insertion of language from President Biden’s Executive Order 13990, establishing the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (SC-GHG).
Biden’s compromise was an alternative that promises to leave 53 million barrels in the ground. The option to not develop our resources is in violation of Article VIII—Natural Resources of the Alaska Constitution: “It is the policy of the State to encourage the settlement of its land and the development of its resources by making them available for maximum use consistent with the public interest.”
The “public interest” is hardly about Alaska and climate change. A bit of extra warmth from any cause is welcomed year-round in this state, particularly since the “greenhouse signal” is oriented toward winter nights. Moreover, Alaska emits around one hundredth of one percent of global GHG emissions, calculated by multiplying the state’s 0.8 percent of U.S. emissions times the U.S. share of global emissions of 12 percent.
Willow has now moved the yard marker and will be an example for every other resource development project on federal lands, while simultaneously creating a fictitious value to SC-GHG.
Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, has been the ringleader in all of this. Her nomination as secretary was advanced out of committee by Alaska United States Senator Lisa Murkowski, and she was confirmed by both Alaska US Senators Murkowski and Dan Sullivan. Most Alaska oil and gas executives endorsed Lisa for reelection in 2022, a story of pragmatism gone wrong.
Natural Gas for Alaska
Alaska’s (governmental) oil problem is also a natural gas problem. In Anchorage, the majority of power and heat comes from gas. In the last couple of years, the state has been fed a narrative of a looming natural gas shortage in the Cook Inlet basin with ideas floating around recently to import gas.
In 2011, USGS estimated that Cook Inlet Region contained 20 trillion cubic feet of gas (TCF) with a 95% probability of 5 TCF being proved (economic). That is a lot of gas, with proved reserves representing a half-century of usage in the state (primarily Anchorage) at present consumption rates.
Regional gas is supplied to ENSTAR, which was bought out in 2022 by TriSummit Utilities, owned by two Canadian public investment managers, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP) being one of them. According to TriSummit’s 2022 ESG report,
While our net-zero commitment excludes subsequently acquired assets, such as our pending acquisition of ENSTAR Natural Gas Company and Cook Inlet Natural Gas Storage Alaska, we will strive to bring our emissions reducing mindset to bear as we grow….
Chugach Corporation, the Anchorage area electric utility, uses one fourth of the gas produced from the Cook Inlet. Sentiments from Chugach executives are that natural gas is a “transitional fuel” that can be phased out. As if we desire to sell our souls to the wildly unreliable and expensive renewables.
Since losing two seats to the NGO-led green movement in the Chugach board elections last spring, the renewable energy propaganda in the newsletter is being ramped up as Alaska risks becoming cold and dark. It happened in Texas, and it can happen here.
Governor Dunleavy Problem
Instead of pushing for responsible development of natural gas in the Cook Inlet basin, Governor Mike Dunleavy has plans to turn it into a CO2 carbon capture & storage dumping ground. The Cook Inlet is one of the largest geological sequestration locations on the US west coast. Carbon management legislation, the top priority for the Dunleavy Administration in the 2023-2024 session, was fast tracked and passed 58-2 in a majority Republican legislature.
The scheme was sold as a major revenue source for Alaska, but the fiscal notes were blank. When representatives faced backlash from their constituents, they went as far as to pen opinion pieces claiming that carbon management was “Not ESG.”
Surprisingly, in the 2021-2022 session, Governor Dunleavy introduced a bill for Renewable Portfolio Standards for utilities. This bill would require certain regulated utilities to “derive increasing percentages of the utility’s net electricity sales from clean energy resources in order to minimize costs to consumers and minimize the state’s carbon emissions.” This bill didn’t progress; still, on September 30, 2022, Governor Dunleavy established the Office of Energy Innovation.
On February 23, 2023, Governor Dunleavy established the Alaska Energy Security Task Force. Then on May 25, at the second annual Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference, he signed a bill permanently extending the state’s renewable energy grant fund.
At the same time, Governor Dunleavy unveiled The Alaska Standard Inaugural Sustainability Report wherein it is said: “Alaska stands ready to lead the energy transition.” This report proudly pledged allegiance in a disturbing attempt to explain how Alaska is aligned with the United Nations SDGs.
Alaska Sovereignty at Risk
In a state where oil revenues account for up to 90% of tax revenues, we are obliterating any chance Alaska has at sovereignty. Then again, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled the legislature can raid the largest Sovereign Wealth Fund in the nation, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, which is owned by the citizens, to fund the Jabba the Hut-sized government.
Alaska policy makers, led by the governor, are eradicating the free-market principles in our state. A media blackout on the problem has left only citizen-led initiatives driving the train to truth. We the People Alaska publishes an eye-opening substack on many of these topics.
We need to restore the power of the grand jury; this constitutional right as of one year ago has been halted. Why else would the court rule in violation of Alaska’s constitution if not rife with corruption – the very corruption the grand jury sought to investigate?
It is time for policy reform at all levels of Alaskan government. Overall, we need a critical mass of folks asking the tough questions. Voter apathy is a real issue in this state – turnout for the Chugach electric utility board was only 16%, for example.
I don’t recall anyone asking for any of this to be done to us, however who you choose to represent you and your involvement at the lowest level will mean deciding between food and electricity.
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Kassie Andrews is a long time Alaska resident with a particular interest in natural resources and energy policy. This is her first blog at MasterResource.
Letter to the Editor published in the Aberdeen Press and Journal on 22 Sep 2023 as:
Public need to be able to scrutinise the true costs on net-zero energy policy
Sir, – Reading your letters pages in recent months, there seems to be significant anger within local populations at the implementation of Scottish and UK energy policies, and justifiably so. Here, I try to cast some light on the origins of that anger. In the recent past, sound electrical engineering design dictated that electricity generation centres were located close to the population centres where the electricity was to be consumed. This was because transmitting electricity through high voltage alternating current (AC) lines results in losses that had to be paid for by the consumer, and the lines themselves were expensive to build and scarred the landscape. In the recent past the driving motives of politicians, planners and industry was to optimise the service provided to constituents and consumers.
During the early days of “the transition” renewables initiatives were sold to the public based on the proposed benefits of distributed as opposed to centralised generation (coal, gas and nuclear) where members of the public were encouraged, via generous subsidies, to install roof top solar to generate their own electricity at home. If you were lucky enough to own a farm, then you could generate your own power using a small wind turbine. Honourable goals perhaps, where wealthy property owners could harvest subsidies that were paid for by the whole population, who on average were much less well-off.
What we now have instead are vast centralised wind and solar power stations distributed outside of population centres, and quite distant to the eventual market for the third-rate power that is being produced. This is the exact opposite of the original proposals for distributed power located within population centres. In January 2022, The Crown Estate Scotland alone, licensed 17 vast offshore wind projects amounting to 25GW peak power capacity that may deliver next to nothing when the wind does not blow. Some individual projects are rated at 3 GW. These individually represent the equivalent of 3 nuclear power stations located in the middle of the North Sea, fifty miles from shore and several hundred miles from the eventual market for this power that is likely to lie somewhere in the Midlands of England. What politicians, and members of the public need to understand, is that these giant power stations will need 25GW of dedicated power lines to connect them to their market – where are these power lines going to go and who is going to pay for them? The protest banners that now line the A90 are a mere shadow of what is planned for the future.
So, what about exports to Europe? The fantasy of local politicians is that Scotland will become some kind of renewable power house, exporting electricity to England and beyond. In 2010, the UK had 2.5 GW interconnector capacity with the rest of Europe. By 2021, this had grown to 7.5 GW. In that period, electricity exports to Europe were effectively flat. On the other hand, net electricity imports in 2010 were 2.7 TWh. By 2021 these had grown to 24.6 TWh (UK government statistics). A 3-fold increase in interconnector capacity has led to a 9-fold increase in net imports. The explanation is quite simple. The UK has closed down significant amounts of dispatchable coal and nuclear generating capacity creating supply vulnerability when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Conversely, there is a high degree of correlation in wind supply between the UK and Europe and this means that when the UK generates a surplus, Europe has a surplus too. The UK surplus has no market resulting in high constraint payments paid for by already hard-pressed consumers.
Yet another frailty of the current strategy is the need to maintain significant amounts of dispatchable generating capacity to cover supply when renewables fail. In effect, 20 GW of combined cycle gas turbines will have to be maintained to back up the 25 GW of proposed offshore wind. In addition, gas import facilities (pipelines and liquefied natural gas) will need to be maintained for occasional use. The high cost of maintaining backup supplies is normally ignored when the levelized cost of wind and solar power is reported. The proponents of the net zero strategy seem content to pile these costs on to hard pressed consumers while politicians seem content to blame the high cost of energy on Vladimir Putin.
I urge politicians in Holyrood and Westminster to suspend all new large-scale wind and solar developments and grid expansions until a comprehensive analysis and report on the real environmental and economic costs of current net-zero energy policy is presented to the public for scrutiny. This report must be based on sound thermodynamic and economic principles and not upon wishful thinking and net zero dogma that appears to underpin much of current energy policy.
Dr Euan Mearns
Aberdeen
Dr. Eaun Mearns is a member of the CO2 Coalition and has a BSc (hons) in geology and a Ph.D. in isotope geochemistry both from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
This commentary was first published in the Aberdeen Press and Journal on September 22, 2023.
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