Day: October 14, 2023

Blinded by Antarctica Reports 2023

Even if Antarctica lost 200 Gt/yr. for the next 1000 years, it would only approach 1% of the ice sheet.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Special snow goggles for protection in polar landscapes.

Climate Crisis Central apparently triggered Antarctica for this week’s media alarm blitz.

Antarctic Ice Shelves Suffer Staggering Losses | Weather.com

‘Shrinking with no sign of recovery’: Scientists issue warning on Antarctic ice shelves
YAHOO!News

Scientists count huge melts in many protective Antarctic ice shelves. Trillions of tons of ice lost.
Associated Press

Antarctica’s Shrinking Sea Ice Hits a Record Low, Alarming Scientists Bloomberg

Melting Antarctic Ice Shelves Have Dumped More Than 7 Trillion Metric Tons of Water Into the Ocean  The Messenger

Etc., Etc. Etc.

Looks like it’s time yet again to play Climate Whack-A-Mole.  That means stepping back to get some perspective on the reports and the interpretations applied by those invested in alarmism.

Antarctic Basics

The Antarctic Ice Sheet extends almost 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), roughly the area of the contiguous United States and Mexico combined. The Antarctic Ice Sheet contains 30 million cubic kilometers (7.2 million cubic miles) of ice. (Source: NSIDC: Quick Facts Ice Sheets)

Highly active volcano Mt. Erebus, Ross Island, Antarctica

The Antarctic Ice Sheet covers an area larger than the U.S. and Mexico combined. This photo shows Mt. Erebus rising above the ice-covered continent. Credit: Ted Scambos & Rob Bauer, NSIDC

The study of ice sheet mass balance underwent two major advances, one during the early 1990s, and again early in the 2000s. At the beginning of the 1990s, scientists were unsure of the sign (positive or negative) of the mass balance of Greenland or Antarctica, and knew only that it could not be changing rapidly relative to the size of the ice sheet.

Advances in glacier ice flow mapping using repeat satellite images, and later using interferometric synthetic aperture radar SAR methods, facilitated the mass budget approach, although this still requires an estimate of snow input and a cross-section of the glacier as it flows out from the continent and becomes floating ice. Satellite radar altimetry mapping and change detection, developed in the early to mid-1990s allowed the research community to finally extract reliable quantitative information regarding the overall growth or reduction of the volume of the ice sheets.

By 2002, publications were able to report that both large ice sheets were losing mass (Rignot and Thomas 2002). Then in 2003 the launch of two new satellites, ICESat and GRACE, led to vast improvements in one of the methods for mass balance determination, volume change, and introduced the ability to conduct gravimetric measurements of ice sheet mass over time. The gravimetric method helped to resolve remaining questions about how and where the ice sheets were losing mass. With this third method, and with continued evolution of mass budget and geodetic methods it was shown that the ice sheets were in fact losing mass at an accelerating rate by the end of the 2000s (Veliconga 2009, Rignot et al. 2011b).

Fig. 1. Antarctic Ice Sheet Regions and Drainage Systems (DS). East Antarctica (EA) is divided into EA1 (DS2 to DS11) and EA2 (DS12 to DS17). The Antarctic Peninsula (AP) includes DS24 – 27. West Antarctica (WA) is divided into WA1 (Pine Island Glacier DS22, Thwaites and Smith Glaciers DS21, and the coastal DS20) and WA2 (inland DS1, DS18, and DS19 and coastal DS23). Includes grounded ice within ice shelves and contiguous islands.

Contradictory Findings

A 2021 paper by H. J. Zwally describes the waxing and waning of the Antarctic ice sheet NASA Study: Excess of Mass Gains of the Antarctic Ice Sheet over Mass Losses during 1992 to 2008 Eliminated by Increasing Dynamic Losses to 2016.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

A new NASA study [Antarctic Mass Balance] confirms that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation [Siegert, 2003] that began 10,000 years ago in East Antarctica (EA) [Fig. 1] was adding enough ice to the continent during 1992 to 2008 to outweigh increased losses from its increasing glacier discharge into the ocean from West Antarctica (WA) as previously reported [2015 JOG paper]. Since most other studies reported that the Antarctic ice sheet was losing mass, those 2015 results on gaining mass were controversial. The new study derives consistent rates of mass changes over 24 years (1992 to 2016) using radar-altimetry data from ESA’s Envisat (2003-10) and gravimetry data from NASA’s GRACE (2003-16), in addition to the prior use of radar-altimetry data from ERS1/2 (1992-2001) of the European Space Agency (ESA) and laser-altimetry from NASA’s ICESat (2003-08).

However, the new study shows that beginning in 2009, the dynamic losses from the outlet glaciers in the WA1 part of WA strongly increased by 119 Gt a-1 (from 95 to 214 Gt a-1), which was further enhanced by an accumulation mass decrease of 39 Gt a-1 in the inland WA2 part of WA. Nevertheless, that total decrease of 158 Gt a-1 was not enough to bring the whole ice sheet into balance (input equals output), because there was a concurrent accumulation mass increase of 107 Gt a-1 in EA for three years (2009-11). While that temporary EA accumulation increase diminished, the loss from WA reduced by 71 Gt a-1 and the total ice sheet came into balance at -12 ± 46 Gt a-1 during 2012-16, thereby eliminating its effect on sea level rise.

Fig. 2. M(t) mass time series for West Antarctica (WA), East Antarctica (EA), Antarctica Peninsula (AP), and the total Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) from ICESat (blue) and GRACE (red) using the derived equalizing corrections (dBcor and GIAcor) for sub-glacial changes in volume and mass of the Earth’s fluid mantle.

Fig. 3. ICESat map of dM/dt total rate of mass change for 2003-2008 with adjusted correction for bedrock motion.

“We now have an accurate record of how the mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet has changed over 24 years and the causes of those changes. Short-term changes for 3 to 8 years have been caused by fluctuations in snowfall and accumulation, but there is no significant trend during 1992 to 2016. Mass losses have increased from the dynamic thinning and faster ice discharge of outlet glaciers in West Antarctic, and the large long-term mass gain in East Antarctica has continued”, said lead author Jay Zwally. “However, our findings and those of others [e.g. Barletta and others, 2018] also include some good signs about the future stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet, about which there has been much concern and predictions of increasing mass loss”.

NASA aerial images record West Antarctica melting ice (2016)

Keeping Things in Perspective
Source: NASA

Such reports often include scary graphs like this one and the reader is usually provided no frame of reference or context to interpret the image. First, the chart is showing cumulative loss of mass arising from an average rate of 100 Gt lost per year since 2002. Many years had gains, including 2002, and the cumulative loss went below zero only in 2006.  Also, various methods of measuring and analyzing give different results, as indicated by the earlier section.

Most important is understanding the fluxes in proportion to the Antarctic Ice Sheet.  Let’s do the math.  Above it was stated Antarctica contains ~30 million cubic kilometers of ice volume.  One km3 of water is 1 billion cubic meters and weighs 1 billion tonnes, or 1 gigatonne.  So Antarctica has about 30,000,000 gigatonnes of ice.  Since ice is slightly less dense than water, the total should be adjusted by 0.92 for an estimate of 27.6 M Gts of ice comprising the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

So in the recent decade, an average year went from 27,600,100 Gt to 27,600,000, according to one analysis.  Other studies range from losing 200 Gt/yr to gaining 100 Gt/yr.

Even if Antarctica lost 200 Gt/yr. for the next 1000 years,
it would only approach 1% of the ice sheet.

If like Al Gore you are concerned about sea level rise, that calculation starts with the ocean area estimated to be 3.618 x 10^8 km2 (361,800,000 km2). To raise that area 1 mm requires 3.618×10^2 km3 or 361.8 km3 water (1 km3 water=1 Gt.) So 200 Gt./yr is about 0.55mm/yr or 6 mm a decade, or 6 cm/century.

By all means let’s pay attention to things changing in our world, but let’s also notice the scale of the reality and not make mountains out of molehills.

Let’s also respect the scientists who study glaciers and their subtle movements over time (“glacial pace”).  Below is an amazing video showing the challenges and the beauty of working on Greenland Glacier.

Michael Kelly: The green energy Net Zero plan will require a command economy

The People have to know the realities of net zero.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Imagine the USA in 2050 has a net-zero emissions economy, as President Joe Biden has pledged that it will (the UK is also committed to this).

Three very large, interrelated, and multidisciplinary engineering projects will need to have been completed. Transport will have been electrified. Industrial and domestic heat will have been electrified. The electricity sector – generation, transmission and distribution – will have been greatly expanded in order to cope with the first two projects, and will have ceased to use fossil fuels.
I have had a long career in industrial and academic engineering, and recently retired as Professor of Technology in electrical engineering at Cambridge University. I’ve spent some time looking into the feasibility of these ideas, and these are the facts.

At the moment the USA uses on average 7,768 trillion British Thermal Units of energy every month, most of which is supplied by burning fossil fuel either directly for heat or transport, or indirectly to generate electricity.
Because an internal combustion engine converts the energy stored in its fuel into transport motion with an efficiency of about 30 per cent, while electric motors are more than 90 per cent efficient at using energy stored in a battery, we will need to increase the US electricity supply by about 25 per cent to maintain transport in the USA at today’s level. Let’s assume that replacing today’s fossil-powered vehicles and trains with electric ones will cost no more than we would have spent replacing them anyway: it’s not really true but the difference is small compared to the rest of this. I should note however that a small part of today’s transport energy is used for aviation and shipping, which are much harder to electrify than ground transport, but we’ll ignore that for now.

Next we need to electrify all the heat. If this heat was provided by ordinary electric heaters, we would need an extra electrical sector equal to the size of today’s. But if we mostly use air-source and ground-source heat pumps, and assume a coefficient of performance of 3:1 – optimistic, but not wildly unreasonable – then we only need new grid capacity equivalent to 35 per cent of the size of the present grid for the heat task.

So far, the grid in 2050 will need to be more than 60 per cent bigger than its present size. We also need to work on the buildings. US building stock is made up of nearly 150 million housing units, commercial and industrial buildings, with an estimated floor space of 367 billion square feet. Some of this is well insulated, much of it is not. All of it would need to be, for our heat pumps to work at the efficiencies we need them to. Based on a UK pilot retrofit programme the national scale cost for this is $1 trillion per 15 million population. The figure in the USA could therefore be about $20 trillion. It might be as high as $35 trillion.

We should note here that as with transport, some specialist types of heating cannot at the moment be done electrically, for instance in primary steel production. These will involve extra costs if net zero is to be reached, but we’ll ignore that for now, even though we’re going to need an awful lot of steel.
Now let’s get the power grid decarbonised and make it 60 per cent bigger and more powerful. Taken together, the US electrical grid has been called the largest machine in the world: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution ones. We will need to add a further 120,000 miles of transmission line. This will cost on the order of $0.6 trillion, based on US cost data.

The 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines will have to be upgraded to carry much higher currents. Most houses in the USA have a main circuit-breaker panel that allows between 100 and 200 amps (A) current into the house, although some new ones are rated at 300A. The 100A standard was set nearly a century ago, when the electric kettle was the largest single appliance. In a modern all-electric home, some of the new appliances draw rather higher currents: ground-source heat pumps may draw 85A on start-up, radiant hobs when starting up draw 37A, fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 46A, and even slow ones may draw 17A, while electric showers draw 46A. The local wiring in streets and local transformers were all sized to the 100-A limit. Most homes will need an upgraded circuit breaker panel and at least some rewiring, and much local wiring and many local substations will need upsizing. The UK costs have been estimated in detail at £1 trillion, which would scale to the order of $6 trillion on a per-capita basis.

As 60 per cent of the current electrical generation is fossil fuelled, we need to close all the fossil stations down and increase the remaining, non-fossil generation capacity four times over. There isn’t much scope for new hydropower, and so far carbon capture doesn’t exist outside fossil fuel production. Using a mixture of wind (onshore $1600/kW, offshore $6500/kW), solar ($1000/kW at the utility level) and nuclear ($6000/kW), the capital cost of this task alone is around $5 trillion, and we have not dealt with the enormous problem of wind and solar being intermittent.
So far we’re up to $32 trillion as the cost of providing the insulated buildings and the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in a net-zero world. Although not all borne by households, this figure is of the order of $260,000 per US household.

Now let’s think about intermittency. Sometimes there is no wind and no sunshine, and our largely renewables-driven grid will have no power. Current hydropower storage would run a net-zero grid in the USA for a few hours; current battery capacity could do so for a few minutes. Net-zero advocates often suggest simply building huge amounts of battery storage, but the costs of this are colossal: 80 times as much as the power plants, hundreds of trillions of dollars. And indeed this is simply fantasy as the necessary minerals are not available in anything like the required amounts. If prices climbed, more reserves would become economic – but the prices are already impossibly high.

Straight away, we can see that a net-zero grid with a large proportion of renewables simply cannot be built. But for now let’s just ignore the storage problem and look at some more numbers.
The UK engineering firm Atkins estimates that a $1-billion project in the electrical sector over 30 years needs 24 or more professional, graduate engineers and 100 or more skilled tradespeople for the whole period. Scaling up these figures for the $12 trillion of electricity sector projects just described, we will need 300,000 professional electrical engineers and 1.2 million skilled tradespeople, full time, for the 30 years to 2050 on just this part of the net-zero project. Based on the budget, we might expect the buildings retrofit sector to need a similar workforce of roughly three million people. This is a combined workforce roughly the size of the entire existing construction sector.

Now let’s think about materials. A 600-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) needs 300 tonnes of high-performance steels. We would need 360 5-MW wind turbines, each running at an optimistic average 33 per cent efficiency (and a major energy storage facility alongside which we are just ignoring as it would be impossibly expensive) to achieve the same continuous 600-MW supply. In fact, since the life of wind turbines at 25 years is less than half that of CCGT turbines, we would actually need more than 720 of them.
The mass of the nacelle (the turbine at the top of the tower) for a 5-MW wind turbine is comparable to that of a CCGT. Furthermore, the mass of concrete in the plinth of a single CCGT is comparable to the mass of concrete for the foundations of each individual onshore wind turbine, and much smaller than the concrete and ballast for each offshore one. We are going to need enormous amounts of high-energy materials such as steel and concrete: something like a thousand times as much as we need to build CCGT or nuclear powerplants, and renewed more frequently. This vast requirement is probably going to affect prices, both of materials and energy – and not in a good way – but for now we’ll just assume costs remain at something like current levels.

So we can see that the infrastructure parts of the net-zero project which are theoretically possible would cost comfortably in excess of $35 trillion and would require a dedicated and highly skilled workforce comparable to that of the construction sector as well as enormous amounts of materials. Net zero would also require several things which today are completely impossible: scalable non-fossil energy storage, very high temperature electrical industrial processes, serious electrical aviation and shipping. There would also be the matter of decarbonising agriculture. These things, if they can even be achieved, would multiply the cost at least several times over, to more than $100 trillion.

So the real cost of net-zero, or more likely of trying and failing to achieve it, would be similar to – or even more than – total projected US government spending out to 2050. There is no likelihood of that amount of money being diverted from other purposes under anything resembling normal market economics and standards of living.
The idea that net zero can be achieved on the current timelines by any means short of a command economy combined with a drastic decline in standards of living – and several unlikely technological miracles – is a blatant falsehood. The silence of the National Academies and the professional science and engineering bodies about these big picture engineering realities is despicable.
People need to know the realities of net zero.

Michael Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Royal Society of New Zealand, of the Institute of Physics and of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, as well as Senior Member of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in the USA. He is a trustees of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Earthquakes Blamed on Humans in New Climate Alarm Letter from Pope Francis

Pope Francis is the religious leader of the climate church.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

In matters of Catholic dogma the Holy Father in Rome is deemed infallible, but when it comes to more earthly matters surrounding climate change, Pope Francis is mostly talking through his Pontifical Posterior. At one point, Francis suggests humans emitting carbon dioxide are causing “seaquakes”, while his inner Guardian soul is on clear display with his claim that the world is “collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point”.

Pope Francis’s latest comments on climate change are contained in an ‘Apostolic Exhortation’ titled Laudate Deum. It is a follow up to an earlier doom-ridden encyclical letter in 2015 when he referred to CO2 – a gas the Supreme Pontiff emits with every breath – as highly polluting. The latest letter is full of emotional errors, unsubstantiated scientific opinions and a cold condescension for the growing number of scientists who dispute the political narrative of a climate emergency. At one point these scientists are said to bring up “allegedly solid scientific facts”.

Francis is on very shaky ground with his contention that humans somehow cause submarine earthquakes. Even more nonsensical is his suggestion that the human-caused seaquakes are leading to communities being swept away. As the Daily Sceptic recently noted, the Holy Grail of climate alarmism is to link earthquakes to humans driving their cars. Sadly to date the suggestion is only to be found at the whacky end of climate fearmongering. A recent article in the Conversation noted “evidence” that the loss of surface ice in Scandinavia triggered numerous earthquake events around 7,000-11,000 years ago. Alas, further inquiry showed that the only tectonic plate action was to be found in the circuit boards of a researcher’s computer. Seaquakes would appear to be a new field of climate alarm, suggesting Francis is well ahead of the game on this one.

The Pope is also leading the pack with his contention that melting of the continental ice sheets at the poles will not be reversed for hundreds of years. What melting of the ice sheet in Antarctica Francis is referring to is not immediately clear. Alarmists usually find Antarctica a difficult neighbourhood to run the Thermogeddon narrative. According to Singh and Polvani, warming has been “almost non-existent” for at least 70 years. NASA reports the ice loss is 0.0005% a year. In 2021, the South Pole recorded its coldest winter since records began in 1957. Meanwhile in the Arctic, a small, little publicised, cyclical recovery in sea ice has been underway for over a decade.

At one point in his letter, Francis makes the claim that it is “verifiable that specific climate changes provoked by humanity are notably heightening the probability of extreme phenomena that are increasingly frequent and intense”. Quite how it is possible to verify something that is only probable is not immediately clear, but it seems Francis is referring to the computer model-driven pseudoscience of weather attribution that has grown up in recent years. In fact its popularity is partly in response to the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently holding back from directly linking individual weather events to longer term changes in the climate.

Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativise the issue, continues Francis, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident. No one can ignore recent extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and unusual heat, he continues. It is not possible to conceal the correlation of these global climate phenomena and the accelerated increase in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly since the mid-20th century, he argues. As regular readers will know, plenty of scientists do just that, as does the IPCC. According to its latest report, the IPCC states there is “low confidence” that humans influence droughts in most regions, while confidence is generally low in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence.

All Francis is doing is joining up the dots of recent weather anomalies and claiming a causal link to long-term climate trends. With global warming having run out of steam over the last 25 years, this practice is in common use in alarmist circles. It is used to promote the collectivist Net Zero narrative, and is profoundly unscientific.

“I feel obliged to make these clarifications, which may appear obvious, because of certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church,” states Francis. In fact the Pope shows no sign, as was his attitude in 2015, of listening to any alternative view – the “allegedly solid scientific data” he seems to find so distasteful. He merely repeats the collapsing and tipping point fearmongering of the green activist lobby. In doing so he does a disservice to a tradition of Church support and patronage to the scientific process through monasteries, funded hospitals, schools and universities. The Catholic Church teaches that faith in God and science are complementary, with the Catechism noting that “methodical research in all branches of knowledge, providing it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God”.

Of course it would take a longer article than this to identify many of the inevitable past conflicts between the Church authorities and some of the findings of science (don’t mention Galileo). So far as the climate story is concerned, scientists are just starting to comprehend the complexities of the non-linear atmosphere. However, it is perhaps not surprising that the Vatican has hitched its influential wagon to current unproven scientific narratives that serve a largely political purpose. In a 2020 encyclical letter, Francis spoke of the possibility of a world authority “equipped with the power to provide for the global common good”. The world Government should be given “real authority in such a way as to provide for the attainment of certain goals”. In this way , there could come about a multilateralism that is not dependent on changing political conditions or the interest of a certain few, and possesses a stable efficacy, he concluded.

Possibly this is papal speak for no more Trump, Farage, Brexit and all those other annoying inconveniences of national democracy.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Climate Soothsayers: Why your hay fever is a “sign” you should vote for a carbon tax

More climate change junk science and climate propaganda for keeping believers in mass hypnosis.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Image by Ulrich B. from Pixabay

Just more junk science to spook those who want to be spooked

Did you sneeze today? It must be “Climate change”. Go forth and buy some solar panels…

Like a continuous propaganda machine, the government pays academics money to find a crisis, so they do, and then the media rephrase the story like a Pavlovian prompt. It’s a form of mass hypnosis. Everything is climate change and only the government can save you:

Is your hay fever getting worse? It could be climate change

by Laura Chung, The Sydney Morning Herald

Did your hay fever start earlier this spring? The coughing, the sneezing, those terrible itching eyes? You are not alone, and it might get worse in coming years as climate change extends the season, experts say.

About 15 per cent of Australians have hay fever, with those between 25 and 44 years old most likely to suffer during spring. Hay fever is an allergic response when substances including pollen from grasses and trees, dust mites or mould come into contact with the nose and eyes.

The only time a climate scientist remembers that CO2 helps plants grow is when it’s bad:

Plants rely on carbon dioxide to fuel photosynthesis, so they may grow larger and produce more pollen with increased gases in the atmosphere.

Summers are going to keep getting longer — (especially because temperatures in 1910 keep getting colder every time we revise the dataset):

Data from the Australian Institute published in 2020 found that summer was, on average, one month longer than it was 100 years ago, while winter was more than three weeks shorter. For example, in Port Macquarie in New South Wales, summers have increased by 48 days.

And if summers stop growing, we’ll just change the instruments, build another runway and add another radar.

Remember girls and boys — your hay fever is not because of the highly allergenic shrubs your neighbors planted, or the westerly wind that blows over the hay plains. It’s got nothing to do with your wayward gut flora, antibiotics, diet, mineral deficiencies or any other possible thing.

Sneeze and think about all those evil people causing your terrible itching eyes because they’re driving a Ford Ranger XLT and loving it.

UPDATE: All around the world the past keeps getting adjusted, not just in Australia.  John McLean audited the UK Hadley global dataset and found they were cooling the past one hundred years later. Then there’s the US adjustments of GISS where the 1970’s kept warming for decades.

Regulatory Rebuff Blow to Offshore Wind Projects

The state denial could force some developers whose contracts may not cover project costs to scrap plans to sell power to customers in New York, cancel or delay projects, as happened with a couple of offshore wind projects in Massachusetts. 

From Watts Up With That?

When the breezy dreams of offshore wind giants met the rocky shores of regulation.

In a move that left offshore wind giants like Orsted, Equinor, and BP staggering, New York’s utility regulator has blown away pleas for contract relief.

“Nearly all of New York’s pacesetting 4.3GW of contracted offshore wind capacity is now in limbo following rejection of developers’ pleas for inflation relief by the state’s utility regulator.”

https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/blow-to-orsted-equinor-and-bp-as-new-york-rejects-pleas-for-offshore-wind-contract-relief-leaving-4gw-in-limbo/2-1-1534223

Developers’ Substantial Requests Denied

The developers, caught in the turbulent winds of cost overruns, sought increases to offtake contracts by a staggering 55%. However, the PSC was not swayed by their arguments.

“New York Public Service Commission (PSC) denied petitions by the state’s two offshore wind developers, joint ventures (JVs) of Equinor-BP and Orsted-Eversource, for increases to offtake contracts as high as 55%, which one PSC member reportedly described as ‘breathtaking’.”

Ratepayer Impact: A Central Concern

The PSC stood its ground, prioritizing the interests of ratepayers over the inflation woes of developers. The commission emphasized that the proposed contract increases were not in line with its policy objectives.

“Regulator said cost hikes of up to 55% would have substantial ratepayer impacts and were ‘fundamentally inconsistent’ with commission policy.”

The Uncertain Path Ahead

The decision leaves a significant portion of New York’s offshore wind capacity in a state of uncertainty. The ambitious plans of these offshore developers now seem to be at the mercy of regulatory scrutiny and economic practicality. The future trajectory of these projects remains unclear amidst this regulatory challenge.

Conclusion: Navigating the Regulatory Landscape

The PSC’s decision underscores an interplay of economic considerations and, (finally!) some regulatory prudence in the renewable energy sector. Developers now, perhaps for the first time, face the task of advancing their projects amidst economic fluctuations, having to with regulatory expectations and safeguarding ratepayer interests. We’ll see how many walk away.

Source force this article: https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/blow-to-orsted-equinor-and-bp-as-new-york-rejects-pleas-for-offshore-wind-contract-relief-leaving-4gw-in-limbo/2-1-1534223

HT/david d for sending me official decision below.

pr23105Herunterladen

Extraordinary Costs Of Green Energy Creeping Slowly Into Public Awareness

Skyrocketing electricity bills and power prices are the result of green energy policies.

From The MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

A key claim of the green energy movement has long been that the intermittent “renewables” — wind and solar — provide the cheapest form of energy. Therefore, the advocates say, just build enough wind turbines and solar panels, convert all use of energy to electricity, and sit back and enjoy a future of affordable energy without adverse environmental consequences.

Meanwhile a key theme at this blog has been exposing the incompetence and chicanery of the claims of low cost for electricity from wind and sun. Although it may often seem as if nobody is listening, I reassure myself that when the full costs of wind and solar electricity eventually get exposed, the people will catch on and not allow themselves to be impoverished.

Over in Europe, it looks like enough of the costs have now gotten exposed to cause the beginning of a public awakening. In August I had a post on how the costs of “green” energy were starting to change the “net zero” debate in the UK. Now, add to that report the results of the elections this past weekend in Germany and Luxembourg. In both countries, parties now standing at least somewhat against the green transition scored gains, while Greens lost ground. The process of ultimate political transformation looks to be long and slow; but I have faith that reality will eventually win out.

First, a short refresher on the claims of green energy advocates that the wind and sun provide the cheapest power. If you only read this blog, or other climate skeptic sources, you may find it incredible that anyone could believe such assertions. But you must remember that the self-designated climate advocates repeat these claims to themselves endlessly in an echo chamber where no one ever pushes back. Eventually, it appears, they come to believe that the claims are true.

And thus, here is my blog post from August 16, 2022, reporting on a Soho Forum debate on the energy future, between Steven Koonin and Andrew Dessler. Dessler, arguing for a future of wind and solar power, had as his main contention that those are cheaper than the fossil fuel alternatives, and therefore they will inevitably sweep the fossil fuel infrastructure away. Although he is some kind of leader in the climate alarm movement, Dessler appeared to have no clue that there was any counter-information to his contentions about the costs of wind and solar power. In support of his position, Dessler used as his main metric the “Levelized Cost of Energy” (LCOE) as published by investment bank Lazard. The LCOE metric is ridiculously flawed, and should not fool anybody, but seems to have fooled not just Dessler but also the entire green energy movement (and for that matter the entire Democratic Party and the President of the United States).

And nothing about LCOE and fraudulent advocacy based on it is going away. Long after the Soho Forum debate last August, Lazard went right ahead and came out with a new and updated Report in April titled “2023 Levelized Cost of Energy+.” Here is the key chart from that Report:

You can see right there that the cost (measured by LCOE) of solar PV is $24-96/MWh, onshore wind is even less at $24-75/MWh, and the cheapest fossil fuel alternative is combined cycle natural gas at $39-101/MWh. So wind and solar are cheaper — QED! But, as I wrote in my August 16, 2022 post:

[A]n LCOE calculation completely omits the dominant costs of generating reliable electricity using mostly or entirely wind and solar generators. These dominant costs are the costs of energy storage and/or backup, the costs of overbuilding, and the costs of additional transmission.

Meanwhile over in Europe, I doubt that many people are abandoning the green movement based on complex spreadsheet calculations of the costs involved. Rather, most of them are starting to face up to reality because of some combination of skyrocketing electricity bills and plans to ban gas heat and internal combustion cars.

The BBC reports here on the results of yesterday’s regional elections in the German states of Bavaria and Hesse. The swings in voter preferences were not huge, but still enough to be meaningful on the climate issue. For example, in Bavaria the BBC reports that the long-dominant CSU got 36.7% of the vote, and a second conservative party, the Free Voters (Freie Währen) expanded to 15%, while the Greens “slipped slightly” to 15% and the SPD (party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz) got only a “catastrophic” 8%. The BBC has this to say about the issues in the Bavarian election:

In an unusually ferocious campaign in Bavaria, conservatives and right-wingers railed against Berlin’s plans to phase out fossil fuel boilers and high levels of migration.

While this was not a one-issue referendum on green energy, still it is clear from the results that opposing green energy in at least some respects was definitely a positive rather than a negative among the electorate.

In Luxembourg, the swings were also mostly small, but included a gain for the conservatives matched with a dramatic loss for the Greens. Bloomberg reports on October 8 that the long-time ruling coalition of Democrats, Socialists and Greens got “toppled.” In a parliament of 60, the Conservatives upped their total to 21 seats, while the Greens went from 9 seats to just 4. The result is likely to be a governing coalition of the conservatives with other parties, but excluding the Greens, which could mean a significant shift in green energy policies.

Back here in the U.S., the Biden administration continues with its wrecking ball approach to destroying our energy economy. But as Europe is showing us, small changes voter preferences can change that quickly after the next election.

David Whitehouse: Climate “out of control”? A reality check

Just another fear mongering story of climate change.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Why are many parts of the world so warm right now? Over the past four months we have seen record-breaking temperatures. September, globally-averaged, was 0.5°C above the previous record. 2023 is bound to be the warmest year of the instrumental record period. This is quite extraordinary, but what is behind this sudden spike in temperature?

Speaking on Channel 4, Piers Forster of the Climate Change Committee, said the sudden uptick in temperatures was 500 times bigger than climate scientists expected. He says the temperature record covered the whole world. Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Spaceflight Center said 20% of the globe was setting new records. Others said it was just 12%. The Guardian’s front page said simply “Out of Control.”

It’s a state of affairs that has caused much confusion among climate scientists and commentators (often the same thing) many of whom attribute the sudden spike to climate change – but in doing so end up being rather muddled and contradictory. But is there anything really ‘out of control’? Is this abrupt climate change? Perhaps a transition, the crossing of a threshold?

There are some who look towards climate computer models for an explanation, saying that what we have seen over the past few months is in line with expected warming but at the upper end of the scale. This is highly unlikely because the events of a few months, especially during a strong El Niño year when there is so much variability going on, are not a climate change event, even though Zeke Hausfather has said that 2023 has been unusual for the climate. Actually if you view what has happened in terms of climate models it is a clear failure because none predicted the spike – once again showing their inadequacy.

In short, it’s not climate change because – as reputable climate scientists rightly emphasise – a sudden temperature spike or drop in a single year (or even in a number years) can and does happen quite frequently, although this year is a particularly unusual spike. Nevertheless, this sudden rise in temperature is on a far too short period to be driven by global warming which is a long-term trend.
Abrupt climate change is possible without human forcing and is not unusual in the climate record, even recently. Between 1976 and 1977, the Tropical Pacific underwent a rapid warming that had global impacts, including over North America, which was wetter than usual for the following two decades. Even today the cause of the 1976/77 climate shift is still debated.

The explanation for the recent event has not one cause but multiple.A major reason why parts of the world are so hot is the El Niño which warms the surface of much of the tropical Pacific. This typically raises the global average temperatures by about 0.1°C to 0.2°C, but it can be higher due to variability of the phenomenon. Having recently emerged from a triple La Nina, which cools the planet, it is perhaps understandable why this current El Niño is so intense.

Then there is also the new regulations regarding sulphur in ship fuels that has dramatically reduced the sulphur aerosol emission that has cleared the air over many oceans, especially the North Atlantic. Indeed sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic are very high this summer after a period of rapid warming in the spring. Globally, the North Atlantic is far in excess of anything we’ve seen in that region.
Another contributing factor could be the Hunga Tonga eruption in the South Pacific last year. It injected large amounts of water vapour into the upper atmosphere probably increasing the greenhouse effect. Initial estimates are quite modest, but they could be revised as further work is done.

The Sun might also be playing a role, particularly since this current cycle has surprised astronomers by being more intense than expected. In addition to these we have seen persistent high-pressure systems over many land regions such as Australia and Western Europe.

Climate change means that these changes are acting on an increased global temperature baseline. However, it should be noted that climate change doesn’t explain why September 2023 is so much warmer than September 2022. The main difference is due to a combination of other factors.

The best time to judge what has happened over the past few months is to wait until the year after the current El Niño subsides. There is a significant chance that global temperatures will drop, just as they dropped after the last big El Niño spike in 2015/16.

Pope Francis makes serious errors in recent climate encyclical

The doomsday interpretation of climate change is a political doctrine, not a scientific finding.

From  CFACT

By H. Sterling Burnett

Bucharest, Romania – May 31, 2019: Pope Francis waves to the crowd in his popemobile vehicle during a visit in Bucharest, Romania.

In late December 2014, the Vatican announced the Pope would be issuing an encyclical in 2015 concerning the need to battle climate change. In late April 2015, Francis hosted a one-day conference, “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development.” Despite being described as a workshop to come to understanding and agreement about a common path forward on climate change, the Vatican’s official closing statement was written in advance by British economist Sir Partha Dasgupta, Ph.D., then chairman of Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Dasgupta’s predetermined conclusion was that human greed was causing planet-destroying climate change and that a radical fundamental global economic transformation was necessary to reverse it. The statement, titled “Climate Change and the Common Good: A Statement of the Problem and the Demand for Transformative Solutions,” was less a discussion of the state of climate science or an open-minded consideration of how best to serve people and the planet, and more a lecture to the world on the evils of capitalism and the “fact” fossil fuel use causes increasing poverty and inequality and is destroying the planet.

The Pope followed this up on June 18, with the official release of his much anticipated encyclical, Laudato Si (Praise be to you), which was nothing more nor less than an extended harangue against Western consumerism, purported irresponsible development, which it claimed led to environmental degradation and global warming. The Pope ended his statement with a call for the world’s people to take “swift and unified global action.”

In statements in the U.S., and at various international fora since then, Pope Francis has continued to get the science wrong, and, as a result, has continued to push policies and actions that would be worse for the people and the planet he is supposedly concerned about saving from destruction, than a changing climate itself.

Most recently, on October 4, Francis issued a new statement concerning climate change, Laudate Deum (‘Praise God’). Francis has consistently been wrong about climate change since 2014, and he is still in error. Because I have responded to the Pope’s misguided claims about the climate science and the dangers of fossil fuels repeatedly in the past (as seen at the links above), I decided it would be a good time to have a fresh voice respond to the Pontiff, this time. Below is a guest essay from Robinson Center Research Fellow, Linnea Lueken, responding to Francis’ latest missive on climate change and the evils of capitalism.

Pope Francis Makes Serious Errors in His Recent Climate Encyclical

A recent teaching document issued by Pope Francis, Laudate Deum (‘Praise God’), has been aggressively promoted by the mainstream media for its focus on climate change, especially Francis’ criticism of the Western world’s heavier energy use and alleged contributions to warming. Pope Francis says extreme weather is worsening, that current rates of warming are accelerated beyond what has occurred in the past, and that fluctuations between weather extremes are a symptom of man-caused climate change. These assertions are mistaken.

Additionally, the solutions Francis proposes to solve the “climate crisis,” namely a rapid energy transition, global de-prioritization of economic growth, and the implied need to sacrifice the Western standard of living, will not only fail to stop climate change but will lead to further human and ecological suffering.

Laudate Deum is the second environment-focused encyclical issued by Pope Francis, and compared to the first, Laudato Si, has its primary focus on the issue of climate change. It also was written in much stronger language, highlighting what Francis views as a lack of “progress” on advancing the goals of the numerous U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conferences.

Many mainstream media outlets, like CNN and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), and trade or specialty journals, like Inside Climate News, among numerous others, promoted the encyclical, particularly the parts that point the finger at Western countries for high fossil fuel use and government policies that prioritize economic growth over environmental issues.

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident,” Francis writes in Laudate Deum. “No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest on the part of the earth that are only a few palpable expressions of a silent disease that affects everyone.”

He lists a bevy of other alleged problems caused by climate change, which posts at Climate Realism have debunked previously, such as assertions that polar ice and glaciers are melting due to human greenhouse gas emissions, that oceans are acidifying, and that climate change is shifting ocean currents, to cite but a few.

Focusing on the overall claim that extreme weather is getting worse over time, there is simply no data to support this claim. Trends of various extreme weather events do not show that they are occurring either more frequently or that such events are more severe when they do occur than they have been historically. The appearance of more frequent weather disasters around the globe is actually likely an artifact of new technology allowing 24-hour-a-day global online and broadcast media coverage, with the media hyping every bad weather event and tying it to climate change.

The IPCC itself agrees with a study that came to the conclusion that “on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet,” as discussed in the Climate Realism post “Wrong, Mainstream Media, ‘Extreme Weather’ is Fairly Common, Not Rare.” The IPCC says there is low scientific confidence in the existence of any visible “global warming” effects in the form of most of the weather extremes that alarmists frequently cite as evidence.

Even better news is that human casualties due to climate-related disasters, like wildfires, floods, and extreme temperatures, have been declining worldwide over time, even as the world modestly warms.

The reason why these deaths are declining is because of improvements and expanded access to emergency services, infrastructure, electricity, indoor climate control, and other developments—all of which come thanks to our continued and expanded use of fossil fuels and the myriad products they are integral components of, as discussed in Climate Realism posts here, here, and here, for example.

This brings us to Pope Francis’ criticisms of the Western lifestyle and heavy energy and fossil fuel use.

There is one part of the encyclical that makes an interesting point, that industrial projects that will contribute to local pollution are sometimes undertaken in an area only after the local residents are fed marketing ploys, promises, and “false information.” People are promised economic benefits, Francis writes:

Yet in reality, there does not seem to be any true interest in the future of these people, since they are not clearly told that the project will result in the clearing of their lands, a decline in the quality of their lives, a desolate and less habitable landscape lacking in life, the joy of community and hope for the future; in addition to the global damage that eventually compromises many other people as well.

This precise scenario applies to the peddlers of so-called “green energy” much more than to fossil fuel development, at least outside of countries where corrupt governments claim ownership and control the development of fossil fuels, doling out the benefits to their unscrupulous regimes and their crony allies while denying local people property rights in resources. An “energy transition” will require tons of land to be cleared for growing biofuel feedstock, placing solar panels and battery storage installations, and wind power plants. Not to mention the mining required to provide the minerals for those technologies, mining is often carried out under inhumane conditions using child and slave labor. In addition, Francis has seemingly not considered the land and resources still required to back up “renewable” power sources, which all have larger environmental footprints than traditional energy sources, even including the mining or drilling involved.

The human cost is expansive as well; fossil fuels have provided the transportation fuel as well as materials for infrastructure that make modern life possible, and are contributing to lifting Earth’s poor out of penury. Green energy, on the other hand, greatly expands the need for rare earth minerals and materials like cobalt, the mining of which famously involves the abuse of children and slave labor. Francis may be ignorant of the fate of those forced into working in the green energy supply chain, but if he is aware, he should have factored these issues into his statements

The solution presented by Pope Francis is, in practice, nothing more nor less than a “degrowth” agenda, and though he insists that the world’s poor need to be considered, the world’s governments, the World Economic Forum, and international banking structures, evince no real concern for helping the world’s poor by pushing these retrograde “net zero” policies. On the contrary, the international green agenda has so far resulted in more poverty and, as in the case of in the case of Sri Lanka, famine and violence.

The Pope gets two things right in Laudate Deum: human beings should be good stewards of the environment, and humans and our activities are not an inherent danger to the planet. Population control, the Pope argues, is not a reasonable solution to environmental problems. This is correct, and it is notable that the media did not report on this part of the encyclical. Unfortunately, Francis is seemingly oblivious to the fact that the activists who have influenced his perspective and with whom he is working on climate change, reject this view. Instead, they argue current human populations are too large and unsustainable. In their view, a much smaller population is needed to save the planet, and, as a result, they embrace and encourage harsh population control policies, that one guesses, from his statement, the Pope would find inimical Catholic doctrine.

If climate change was, in fact, catastrophic, or endangering the planet and human life, Francis’ concerns would be warranted, although the solutions he proposes would still be unjustified. Fortunately, evidence undermines those concerns. Francis would be better served by more moderate advisors on science and economics. Science and economics do inform normative choices, both morally and politically. Because of that, it is vitally important that all the facts are known, especially when the prescribed cures for climate change are so far-reaching, wrenching, and dangerous to human life.

This article originally appeared at Heartland

Author

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute.

Michael Kelly: The green energy Net Zero plan will require a command economy

Welcome to Net Zero. Welcome to slavery. Welcome for living in a world without cars, trains, airplanes and toilets.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Imagine the USA in 2050 has a net-zero emissions economy, as President Joe Biden has pledged that it will (the UK is also committed to this).

Three very large, interrelated, and multidisciplinary engineering projects will need to have been completed. Transport will have been electrified. Industrial and domestic heat will have been electrified. The electricity sector – generation, transmission and distribution – will have been greatly expanded in order to cope with the first two projects, and will have ceased to use fossil fuels.


I have had a long career in industrial and academic engineering, and recently retired as Professor of Technology in electrical engineering at Cambridge University. I’ve spent some time looking into the feasibility of these ideas, and these are the facts.

At the moment the USA uses on average 7,768 trillion British Thermal Units of energy every month, most of which is supplied by burning fossil fuel either directly for heat or transport, or indirectly to generate electricity.


Because an internal combustion engine converts the energy stored in its fuel into transport motion with an efficiency of about 30 per cent, while electric motors are more than 90 per cent efficient at using energy stored in a battery, we will need to increase the US electricity supply by about 25 per cent to maintain transport in the USA at today’s level. Let’s assume that replacing today’s fossil-powered vehicles and trains with electric ones will cost no more than we would have spent replacing them anyway: it’s not really true but the difference is small compared to the rest of this. I should note however that a small part of today’s transport energy is used for aviation and shipping, which are much harder to electrify than ground transport, but we’ll ignore that for now.

Next we need to electrify all the heat. If this heat was provided by ordinary electric heaters, we would need an extra electrical sector equal to the size of today’s. But if we mostly use air-source and ground-source heat pumps, and assume a coefficient of performance of 3:1 – optimistic, but not wildly unreasonable – then we only need new grid capacity equivalent to 35 per cent of the size of the present grid for the heat task.

So far, the grid in 2050 will need to be more than 60 per cent bigger than its present size. We also need to work on the buildings. US building stock is made up of nearly 150 million housing units, commercial and industrial buildings, with an estimated floor space of 367 billion square feet. Some of this is well insulated, much of it is not. All of it would need to be, for our heat pumps to work at the efficiencies we need them to. Based on a UK pilot retrofit programme the national scale cost for this is $1 trillion per 15 million population. The figure in the USA could therefore be about $20 trillion. It might be as high as $35 trillion.

We should note here that as with transport, some specialist types of heating cannot at the moment be done electrically, for instance in primary steel production. These will involve extra costs if net zero is to be reached, but we’ll ignore that for now, even though we’re going to need an awful lot of steel.


Now let’s get the power grid decarbonised and make it 60 per cent bigger and more powerful. Taken together, the US electrical grid has been called the largest machine in the world: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution ones. We will need to add a further 120,000 miles of transmission line. This will cost on the order of $0.6 trillion, based on US cost data.

The 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines will have to be upgraded to carry much higher currents. Most houses in the USA have a main circuit-breaker panel that allows between 100 and 200 amps (A) current into the house, although some new ones are rated at 300A. The 100A standard was set nearly a century ago, when the electric kettle was the largest single appliance. In a modern all-electric home, some of the new appliances draw rather higher currents: ground-source heat pumps may draw 85A on start-up, radiant hobs when starting up draw 37A, fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 46A, and even slow ones may draw 17A, while electric showers draw 46A. The local wiring in streets and local transformers were all sized to the 100-A limit. Most homes will need an upgraded circuit breaker panel and at least some rewiring, and much local wiring and many local substations will need upsizing. The UK costs have been estimated in detail at £1 trillion, which would scale to the order of $6 trillion on a per-capita basis.

As 60 per cent of the current electrical generation is fossil fuelled, we need to close all the fossil stations down and increase the remaining, non-fossil generation capacity four times over. There isn’t much scope for new hydropower, and so far carbon capture doesn’t exist outside fossil fuel production. Using a mixture of wind (onshore $1600/kW, offshore $6500/kW), solar ($1000/kW at the utility level) and nuclear ($6000/kW), the capital cost of this task alone is around $5 trillion, and we have not dealt with the enormous problem of wind and solar being intermittent.
So far we’re up to $32 trillion as the cost of providing the insulated buildings and the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in a net-zero world. Although not all borne by households, this figure is of the order of $260,000 per US household.

Now let’s think about intermittency. Sometimes there is no wind and no sunshine, and our largely renewables-driven grid will have no power. Current hydropower storage would run a net-zero grid in the USA for a few hours; current battery capacity could do so for a few minutes. Net-zero advocates often suggest simply building huge amounts of battery storage, but the costs of this are colossal: 80 times as much as the power plants, hundreds of trillions of dollars. And indeed this is simply fantasy as the necessary minerals are not available in anything like the required amounts. If prices climbed, more reserves would become economic – but the prices are already impossibly high.

Straight away, we can see that a net-zero grid with a large proportion of renewables simply cannot be built. But for now let’s just ignore the storage problem and look at some more numbers.
The UK engineering firm Atkins estimates that a $1-billion project in the electrical sector over 30 years needs 24 or more professional, graduate engineers and 100 or more skilled tradespeople for the whole period. Scaling up these figures for the $12 trillion of electricity sector projects just described, we will need 300,000 professional electrical engineers and 1.2 million skilled tradespeople, full time, for the 30 years to 2050 on just this part of the net-zero project. Based on the budget, we might expect the buildings retrofit sector to need a similar workforce of roughly three million people. This is a combined workforce roughly the size of the entire existing construction sector.

Now let’s think about materials. A 600-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) needs 300 tonnes of high-performance steels. We would need 360 5-MW wind turbines, each running at an optimistic average 33 per cent efficiency (and a major energy storage facility alongside which we are just ignoring as it would be impossibly expensive) to achieve the same continuous 600-MW supply. In fact, since the life of wind turbines at 25 years is less than half that of CCGT turbines, we would actually need more than 720 of them.


The mass of the nacelle (the turbine at the top of the tower) for a 5-MW wind turbine is comparable to that of a CCGT. Furthermore, the mass of concrete in the plinth of a single CCGT is comparable to the mass of concrete for the foundations of each individual onshore wind turbine, and much smaller than the concrete and ballast for each offshore one. We are going to need enormous amounts of high-energy materials such as steel and concrete: something like a thousand times as much as we need to build CCGT or nuclear powerplants, and renewed more frequently. This vast requirement is probably going to affect prices, both of materials and energy – and not in a good way – but for now we’ll just assume costs remain at something like current levels.

So we can see that the infrastructure parts of the net-zero project which are theoretically possible would cost comfortably in excess of $35 trillion and would require a dedicated and highly skilled workforce comparable to that of the construction sector as well as enormous amounts of materials. Net zero would also require several things which today are completely impossible: scalable non-fossil energy storage, very high temperature electrical industrial processes, serious electrical aviation and shipping. There would also be the matter of decarbonising agriculture. These things, if they can even be achieved, would multiply the cost at least several times over, to more than $100 trillion.

So the real cost of net-zero, or more likely of trying and failing to achieve it, would be similar to – or even more than – total projected US government spending out to 2050. There is no likelihood of that amount of money being diverted from other purposes under anything resembling normal market economics and standards of living.
The idea that net zero can be achieved on the current timelines by any means short of a command economy combined with a drastic decline in standards of living – and several unlikely technological miracles – is a blatant falsehood. The silence of the National Academies and the professional science and engineering bodies about these big picture engineering realities is despicable.
People need to know the realities of net zero.

Michael Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Royal Society of New Zealand, of the Institute of Physics and of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, as well as Senior Member of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in the USA. He is a trustees of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Net Zero Watch calls for a clearout at the Climate Change Committee

Net Zero Watch stand up against green and dangerous nightmares.

London, 13 October – Campaign group Net Zero Watch has called for a management clearout at the Climate Change Committee (CCC), accusing it of ‘shameless’ deceit over the costs of Net Zero.

The CCC yesterday criticised the Prime Minister’s delay of a few Net Zero plans, claiming that energy bills would be driven upwards as a result. But Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford points out that the CCC is being highly misleading with their claims.

“If your landlord is forced to put in expensive insulation measures in your flat, you might end up with lower heating bills. But you will certainly end up with higher rent bills, and you could even find yourself out of a home”.

Mr Montford points out that such duplicity is characteristic of the CCC’s behaviour. In 2021, he exposed a series of deliberate deceptions in the CCC’s financial models.* The Prime Minister and former Chancellor, Lord Hammond, have both recently said that the public has been systematically misled over the costs of Net Zero.

The CCC has been at the centre of the deception of the British public that Rishi Sunak referred to. They say that they are ‘disappointed’ not to be consulted about the recent policy changes, but what sane person would want to consult an organisation that is so wedded to trickery?

And Mr Montford has called for a new regime at the Climate Change Committee.

“Mr Sunak’s comments about the public being deceived about the cost of Net Zero were a challenge to the Green blob. But far from coming clean with us, the CCC are shamelessly carrying on as if nothing had happened. Sunak needs to have a management clear-out, or he will end up looking like a lame duck.”

Notes to editors

*After a two year legal battle, the CCC was forced to release its financial models to the public gaze. Mr Montford’s analysis revealed that: