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.
A story from The Associated Press (AP) reports that New York’s attorney general Letitia James has filed a lawsuit alleging that a meat producing company, JBS USA, was being misleading when it claimed it will achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. According to the lawsuit, “beef has the highest total greenhouse gas emissions of any major food commodity and beef production is linked to large-scale deforestation.” This claim by James is false, and real-world data proves this to be so.
A story from The Associated Press (AP) reports that New York’s attorney general Letitia James has filed a lawsuit alleging that a meat producing company, JBS USA, was being misleading when it claimed it will achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. According to the lawsuit, “beef has the highest total greenhouse gas emissions of any major food commodity and beef production is linked to large-scale deforestation.” This claim by James is false, and real-world data proves this to be so.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own data showing beef in particular and farm production in general is not a significant contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. Most climate alarmists immediately cite methane and beef production as a major factor, but the data shows it isn’t really a problem at all. From Climate at a Glance: Livestock and Methane we learn:
Climate activists often claim that ranchers, livestock, and meat production are a leading cause of rising greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has compiled information on greenhouse gas emissions by source. According to EPA, beef production accounts for 2 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, while livestock production accounts for less than 4 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
By contrast, U.S. agricultural crop production emits more greenhouse gases than total livestock production.
In the figure below, which looks at all greenhouse gas emissions by sector in the United States, note that beef production is less than half of the entire livestock sector, at just 2 percent. The data comes from EPA publication Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, 1990-2022.
Figure1 – Greenhouse gas emissions by sector in the United States. Note that beef production is less than half of the entire livestock sector, at just 2 percent. Source: Data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Graphic by Anthony Watts.
Further, note that virtually every other category compiled by the EPA has emissions far greater than that of livestock production. The lawsuit also claims deforestation is a major factor with beef production. The lawsuit apparently does not look at the actual trend in data, which is actually slightly decreasing for beef cows in the United States according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and as seen in figure 2 below.
Figure 2 – USDA cattle and cow inventories 1970-2023. Note beef cows are represented by the dark green portion of the graph, and show a slightly decreasing trend.
So with fewer beef cows, requiring less grazing acreage, there’s no possibility for increased deforestation in the United States.
In fact the trend is opposite, according to the USDA, research has found that over the past 20 years, U.S. forests are growing increasingly dense across most of the nation. Also, the World Economic Forum reports that the United States is aiming to plant 1 billion trees over the next 10 years. So even if national beef production was in fact causing deforestation, it will be mitigated.
But James, like many people who don’t have firsthand knowledge of farming or ranching, misses this inconvenient data. Even more inconvenient is the fact that methane emissions in the United States are actually slightly down since 1990 according to this EPA data in Figure 3:
The bottom line is that the lawsuit by James does not have any leg to stand on when it comes to looking at data related to the claims. Beef production has little impact on the total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and the issues of methane and deforestation are completely non-starters for such a lawsuit because the actual data is contrary to the claims.
It appears this lawsuit is nothing more than a climate activist looking to create yet another bogus show trial for the benefit of those that think climate change is a crisis and removing beef from the American diet is one of the ways to prevent future catastrophe.
The entire character of this winter has been characterized by a strong El Nino. However, El Nino’s days are numbered and its decline is proceeding rapidly right now.
The entire character of this winter has been characterized by a strong El Nino.
El Nino impacts have included low snowpack over Washington State, huge snowpack and heavy precipitation over California, and warm temperatures over the Upper Plains states.
However, El Nino’s days are numbered and its decline is proceeding rapidly right now.
First, consider the critical measure of El Nino: the sea surface temperatures in the central tropical Pacific (the Nino 3.4 area). The warmth of this El Nino peaked in late November (about 2.1°C above normal) and is now declining fairly rapidly (currently at roughly 1.3°C above normal).
But the cooling is really more dramatic than that: a LOT of cooling has been happening beneath the surface!
To demonstrate this, take a look at subsurface temperatures (the difference from normal) for the lowest 300 m under the surface for a vertical cross-section across the Pacific (below).
On 8 January, there was a substantial warm layer extending about 100 m beneath the surface.
But look at the same cross-section on 27 February.
Wow–what a difference! The warm water has dramatically cooled, with only a thin veneer of warmth evident for much of the Pacific.
Rapidly cooling has occurred beneath the surface and this cool water is about to spread to the surface.
If you really want to appreciate the profound cooling take a look at the amount of heat in the upper ocean for the western tropical Pacific (below, the difference from normal is being shown).
A very, very dramatic change has occurred. The heat content of the upper ocean peaked in late November and then plummeted. Declined so much that the water below the surface is now COOLER than normal.
El Nino fans will be further dismayed to learn that models are going for a continuous decline….so much so that they predict a La Nina next year!
So why should folks care about this major decline in El Nino here on the West Coast?
El Nino results in a trough of low pressure centered to our south and west, something evident in the upper-level maps (for 500 hPa, about 18,000 ft) for February hown below. The blue colors indicate lower-than-normal heights/pressures.
But with El Nino weakening, a major pattern change is possible, and the latest model forecast is for a major change, with a huge ridge (red color) over our region for March 13-20th.
FINALLY, we may experience some real springtime weather. Like highs in the mid-60s! I can’t wait. Tired of one frosty morning after another!
British battery metal refiners and electric car gigafactories are being handed cheap power deals by the Government as part of a battle to cut the West’s dependence on China.
Subsidised energy costs to make onshore production of key minerals more viable.
British battery metal refiners and electric car gigafactories are being handed cheap power deals by the Government as part of a battle to cut the West’s dependence on China.
Companies will get the energy relief from next month with the aim being to boost domestic production of key minerals needed for wind turbines, electric cars and defence technologies, officials and executives say.
With high electricity costs seen as a major barrier, however, insiders said the new measures are designed to make Britain more competitive internationally. Officials also want to deter so-called carbon leakage, where goods are made abroad using more polluting processes and then simply imported here.
It is understood that critical mineral refiners and battery factories are among those set to benefit from the relief, with the promise of the subsidies helping to seal significant investments.
One source familiar with the schemes said: “Helping to level the playing field on energy costs, and the added advantage of supplying green power for these new industries, really does start to shift the balance.”
One businessman behind two refinery operators in the North East said the subsidies had helped to ensure his development were viable.
Paul Atherley, chairman of Tees Valley Lithium and Pensana, which are building plants in Teesside and Humberside respectively, said the changes will cut the price his companies pay for energy from a quarterly average of 19 pence per kilowatt hour (kWh) to “single digits” in September.
Mr Atherley said: “The Government is keenly aware that they’re in competitive situations for locating these plants.
“The competition is coming from Europe, North America, Saudi Arabia – people are offering incentives – but the UK is doing a good job in trying to keep and attract businesses like ours.
“There are two big incentives: one is freeports for chemical parks at Humber and Teesside, and the second is these power deals.”
The battery factory planned by Jaguar Land Rover’s parent in Somerset is also likely to qualify for support, it is understood.
Not only did May commit the UK to the 2050 target, but in the years since she has doggedly called for the Government to move faster. Last year, just months before we became the first economy to halve emissions since 1990, she claimed we were “falling behind”.
The green blob
Enough of the pretence. The current path threatens our economy, society and democracy, and we urgently need a change of direction.
Political obituaries will not be kind to Theresa May. But there is one unwritten law of modern British politics the former prime minister understood: you can be wrong on climate change, provided you are wrong in the right way.
Whisper that net zero by 2050 will have deleterious social and economic costs, and accusations of “denialism” will swiftly follow. Yet warn that the “house is on fire” and the end time is at hand, and you’ll probably be given a book deal. The Telegraph has the story.
Not only did May commit the UK to the 2050 target, but in the years since she has doggedly called for the Government to move faster. Last year, just months before we became the first economy to halve emissions since 1990, she claimed we were “falling behind”.
Such attitudes are commonplace – and it will only get worse. Pity the prime minister in charge in 2033, when the sixth “Carbon Budget” kicks in, or in 2035, when electricity will apparently be fully decarbonised. A gulf now lies between the wishful thinking of the political class and economic reality, yet still the discourse is dominated by doomsday language and a worrying desire to silence dissent.
Consider the words of Climate Change Committee (CCC) boss Chris Stark, when asked for clarity over claims of a “mistake” (which it has denied) made by the body. “How’s this,” he told his team, “kill it with some technical language.” Like the clergy greedily collecting tithes from peasants unable to understand Latin, the green Blob seem to assume an unsuspecting public can be confused or shamed – usually both – into compliance.
The CCC, set up to advise government on climate policies, is useful to elected leaders eager to grandstand without taking responsibility or accountability for the choices they make for us. It allowed politicians to bypass the opportunity to scrutinise the 2050 target because they relied on the CCC’s apparently unchallengeable assessment that net zero was “necessary, feasible, cost-effective” and “achievable with known technologies”.
Yet in December, the OECD warned that the shift will leave our economy £60 billion – or 1.65 per cent – smaller. The idea that the green economy will lead to a jobs boom ignores the redundancies in those sectors that can never ride the net-zero wave, while the suggestion that the UK will be more prosperous and secure is difficult to square with our growing reliance on other countries for gas, oil, steel and the manufactures they rely on. It is time politicians ended the delusion that the current, top-down, centrally-planned approach to decarbonisation is the right one, and can be delivered at low cost.
Not long after electrical power was first harnessed, trolley cars began carrying passengers, getting their electric power from overhead wires. The trolley’s pantograph makes contact with the electrified wire to send power to the motor that turns its wheels.
Not long after electrical power was first harnessed, trolley cars began carrying passengers, getting their electric power from overhead wires. The trolley’s pantograph makes contact with the electrified wire to send power to the motor that turns its wheels.
By the 1920s, 17,000 miles of wire-linked electric streetcar lines ran through American cities. Today, the noble trolley is largely a curious memento of a bygone era – before automobiles and big, mobile buses began crowding urban streets.
In the interim, once-profitable trolleys were absorbed by conglomerates, and local governments began dictating trolley routes, fares, and times of service. Many eschewed the wisdom of dedicated routes and let trolleys get bogged down by traffic. Diesel-powered buses soon became the favored mode of public transport, all too often requiring growing subsidies to remain afloat.
Corruption, mismanagement, and a lackadaisical attitude toward service excellence have plagued public transportation almost from the day that the government and monopolists ran off the last small, independent trolley line operators.
By the 1930s many streetcar companies had switched to diesel-powered buses, which were cheaper and more flexible, and the trolley in most cities faded away only to resurface decades later as “light rail.”
Twenty years ago the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis posed the question whether the social benefits of light rail outweigh its costs. The essay assumed that transit must be publicly owned and regulated – yet the very history of the trolley shows that as soon as government took control, once-profitable vehicles became a huge liability.
The most shocking revelations in the Fed’s essay were that fare revenue covered so little of the operating cost (let alone maintenance, expansion finance, or other things real businesses must find answers for): St. Louis 28.2 percent; Buffalo, 21.4 percent; Baltimore (19.4 percent). The Fed’s conclusion? No privately owned system could ever be built or operated with such a dismal balance sheet.
The Fed made two errors. First, not calculating whether the public investment would stimulate the local economy enough to justify the cost. Second, not comparing the cost of allowing private entities to bid for individual routes.
Throwing public dollars at public transportation has long been popular among city mayors and increasingly with the federal government. It’s other people’s money, but you get the photo ops.
Recently, though, people have been complaining that this battery-electric bus craze was not their idea, but part of an elitist-inspired, poorly thought-out “drive to Net Zero.” Having gone into debt from round 1 of electric buses, cities gushed as President Biden allocated $7.5 billion to “stimulate” more purchases and thus more public debt.
Philadelphia’s SEPTA transit was an early purchaser of battery-electric buses, but as reporter Ryan Briggs wrote in 2021, “$2.6 million [already spent from a federal grant] and 25 broken buses later, the agency [was] rethinking its approach.”
The city’s electric buses, introduced in 2019, sat idle in a bus depot two years later, “riven by cracked chassis and other defects,” with no timeline for return to service.
President Biden visited bus manufacturer Proterra, for whom his Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm had once served as a board member.
Proterra buses were removed from service in Duluth, Minnesota after local officials saw that hilly routes and winter heaters drained their batteries too quickly. Indianapolis idled its BYD (Chinese) buses that had charging life issues. Albuquerque returned 15 BYD buses for the same reasons. The list is long.
The battery-electric bus nightmares continue. Just last month Edmonton, Alberta, city officials admitted it was a giant mistake to order sixty buses from now-bankrupt Proterra. Now the city is seeking over $82 million in damages from Proterra because buses failed to meet expected mileage ranges and had various hardware and body issues.
According to the proof of claim, “None of the buses achieved 203 miles on a single charge. On average, the bus range has been approximately 103 miles in winter and, at best, 155 miles in warmer weather.” Moreover, because of hardware issues, more than half were out of service on an ongoing basis.
Just days ago the Milwaukee County Transit System was ready to throw in the towel 15 months after putting 11 electric buses online. “Since it’s an infancy technology, not a lot of properties have been able to make a full transition over,” said MCTS enhanced transit manager David Locher. As in Duluth, only half the city’s electric buses were on the streets on a typical day.
Similar woes have plagued transit systems in Asheville, Colorado Springs, Austin, and other cities that have spent up to $1.2 million per often-idled bus. Still, the carnage continues.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who envisions her state with 2 million electric vehicles by 2030, wants to replace 17,000 school buses, at a cost exceeding $6 billion, starting in “297 priority districts” mainly in rural and low-income areas, all by leveraging a $125 million EPA grant. Prospects are Michiganders will be on the hook for many times that amount.
The mother of all electric bus nightmares, though, may be in London, England, where neither cost nor range nor frequent maintenance is the chief concern. In a two-day period in early January, an electric double-decker bus exploded and another London bus burst into flames. Both were completely destroyed. These fires came less than two years after six buses burned in Potters Bar, prompting other bus operators to move vehicles from alternative garages.
Still, in January, another fire caused bus company Go Ahead London to launch a “precautionary fleet check” of 380 of its electric buses. Six weeks later, the Driver Vehicle Standards Agency issued an emergency recall of 1,759 electric buses operating in and around London after identifying a fire risk in the US$1 billion fleet’s air conditioning and heating system.
According to the agency, there is no permanent solution now available to prevent future bus fires. Instead, operators of the high-tech buses are warned to “switch off the Hipsacold HVAC system if the vehicle is left unattended.”
Such is the level of threat posed by electric bus fires, the London Fire Brigade is rewriting its operations manual on dealing with these incidents. One new provision requires that in the event of a fire on an electric bus, a specialist hazardous materials officer must be sent to the scene, along with at least two fire engines.
The flap has extended to the political scene, as the “heat” on longtime London Mayor Sadiq Khan intensifies. Reform UK candidate Howard Cox had predicted that “rushing into new idealistic based choices” could create problems. He added, “The rosy picture of the promise of zero emissions has clouded ill-informed politicos’ judgments to ignore safety issues and the cost of replacing reliable and proven safer lower cost diesel buses.”
Fire is just one reason many cities are rethinking their commitments to battery-electric buses (which, being heavier, also tear up city streets quicker). Meanwhile, the largest trolley fire on record may be the one 21 years ago that tore through the National Capital Trolley Museum, destroying eight historic streetcars long since retired from service.
That said, maybe they should have stuck with trolleys – and diesel buses.
It’s one of the Government’s proudest boasts. Britain, it claims, has almost halved its greenhouse gas emissions from 800m tonnes in 1990 to just 417m tonnes in 2022.
UK’s ‘hidden’ carbon emissions fail to show the bigger picture.
It’s one of the Government’s proudest boasts. Britain, it claims, has almost halved its greenhouse gas emissions from 800m tonnes in 1990 to just 417m tonnes in 2022.
It’s a staggering decrease – a faster decline than almost any other advanced nation. And it is a fact that is used regularly by politicians to trumpet the UK’s progress.
“We’re far ahead of every other country in the world,” Rishi Sunak said in September. “We’ve had the fastest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the G7. Down almost 50pc since 1990. France? 22pc. The US? No change at all. China? Up by over 300pc.” The Telegraph has the story.
But can a nation whose population has grown by several million in the past two decades, with each citizen consuming more than ever, really have cut emissions by such a massive amount?
Part of the answer to that question lies in the databases of Leeds University where the UK’s official “consumption emissions” figures – the statistical elephant in the room – are compiled by a team led by Professor John Barrett.
When politicians say that emissions have fallen to 400m tonnes, they are referring to the greenhouse gases emitted within Britain’s borders, from power stations, cars, homes, offices and what’s left of industry. These are known as territorial – or production – emissions.
What they exclude is everything else, meaning all foreign-produced cars, clothes, food and every other import as well as the shipping that imports those goods into the UK, and most of the aviation fuel burned for passenger flights.
These overseas emissions used to be relatively small, but as the UK’s own industries have shrunk, they have become an ever-increasing proportion of the overall carbon footprint.
In 1990, overseas emissions totalled less than 200m tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. Since then the UK’s increasing reliance on imports means overseas emissions totalled 350m to 400m tonnes.
Last year the UK exported goods worth £393bn according to government data. However, Britain imported goods worth £581bn, resulting in an excess of £189bn.
“Within a couple of years, greenhouse gas emissions associated with UK consumption will result in more emissions outside the UK than inside the UK,” says Leeds University’s Barrett. “Emissions embodied in imports will be more than the total territorial emissions in the UK.”
In real terms it means that, in addition to the 400m or so tonnes of CO2 pouring from Britain’s homes, vehicles and remaining smokestacks, there are another 350m to 400m tonnes being produced on the UK’s behalf but in other countries. If you add those two figures together and make an adjustment for the UK’s exports, you get Britain’s overall carbon footprint – its consumption emissions – which now total around 750m to 800m tonnes.
It is a marked fall from 1990 when the UK’s consumption emissions totalled 1bn tonnes but nowhere near the 50pc cut claimed by Mr Sunak last year.
“We have provided the Government with the UK’s consumption-based emissions data for many years,” says Barrett. “However, it is rarely or never quoted when statements are made about emission reduction. I believe it should be. Both approaches are needed.”
Energy consumption figures give an answer as to why the UK’s own CO2 emissions have sunk so rapidly. In 2022, the country used less energy from all sources including coal, gas and renewables than in any year since 1970.
For a number of years, I’ve been observing demands of activists and promises of politicians that we transition our electrical grid to being supplied mainly by the intermittent renewables, wind and solar, with all large dispatchable sources (fossil fuel and nuclear) banished. Early on, I thought it was obvious that such a transition would inevitably mean that the only way to make the grid function full-time would be energy storage — on a vast scale never before contemplated or attempted.
For a number of years, I’ve been observing demands of activists and promises of politicians that we transition our electrical grid to being supplied mainly by the intermittent renewables, wind and solar, with all large dispatchable sources (fossil fuel and nuclear) banished. Early on, I thought it was obvious that such a transition would inevitably mean that the only way to make the grid function full-time would be energy storage — on a vast scale never before contemplated or attempted.
How much storage, and at what potential cost? This is actually an arithmetic problem, somewhat cumbersome but conceptually very elementary, and easily done with today’s widely-available spreadsheet programs. To help matters along, in December 2022 I produced my energy storage Report (“The Energy Storage Conundrum”), laying out the main options and the calculations involved. My conclusion was that I could not see any way that this could be done at remotely feasible cost. (Anybody who disagrees is welcome to prove me wrong.) Today, if somebody wants to effect an energy transition in a state or country, they can just look to my Report to quickly understand the nature and extent of the energy storage challenge.
What has actually occurred since December 2022 is that our “climate leader” jurisdictions — in the U.S., that would be New York and California — have moved forward with energy storage proposals that any moron can easily see will not work. Both states are in the process of spending huge sums of money on storage capacity that is so small as to be meaningless to address the problem, and at the same time not technically capable of meeting the challenge no matter the cost. Naturally, the federal government is also involved to pick up a big chunk of the wasted cost from its infinite pile of money.
As to New York, a reader sends me a link to this June 2023 federal Department of Energy letter to the New York bureaucrats, approving a loan guarantee for construction of a 300 MW battery storage facility for grid backup. The facility in question is proposed to be placed on some large barges and anchored in the East River in the bay that once was the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In some respects 300 MW is a very large battery storage facility. These are 4-hour duration batteries, so we are talking 1200 MWh of storage. My Report had a picture of a 150 MWh battery storage facility then under development in Queensland, Australia:
This one for New York would be eight times bigger! But would it be a meaningful amount of storage for backing up wind and solar generation? No. My report found, based on calculations from various jurisdictions, that about a month’s worth of storage would be the minimum needed to get through a full year without running out of power. A (30 day) month is 720 hours. New York State’s average electricity demand (from a 2023 NYISO Report linked in my previous post) is about 17,000 MW. So the 1200 MWh battery provides storage to back up the grid for — about 4.2 minutes. To get your 720 hours of backup, you will need about 10,200 of them. Bloomberg NEF gives the average 2024 price of a lithium ion battery as $150 per kWh. So this one 1200 MWh facility will run about $180,000,000 for the batteries alone. (Note that they are putting the batteries on barges and dredging the harbor to make it deep enough to anchor them there. Without doubt the final cost will be well more than double the $180 million.). 10,200 of these at the highly optimistic $180 million each will run close to $2 trillion.
Nobody in New York government is making these simple calculations. Instead, they forge ahead undeterred, without any idea how much storage is needed or how it is going to work or how much it will cost. This August 2023 article from Canary Media says that the Governor has set a goal of 6000 MW of battery storage by 2030:
[Governor Hochul] is pushing to increase the state’s battery storage capacity from about 300 megawatts today to 6,000 megawatts in 2030, to complement an expansive buildout of renewable generation.
As always, they speak of the wrong units, MW instead of MWh. But if these are the usual 4-hour batteries, 6000 MW would be 24,000 MWh. Now we’re up to about an hour and 25 minutes of storage for the State, versus a basic requirement of 720 hours. And that paltry amount will run us (at $150/kWh) at least $3.6 billion.
And California is no more numerate. Here’s a Los Angeles Times piece from October 2023 with figures on California’s plans for battery storage to back up its wind/solar-based grid:
If California is going to meet its ambitious goals to transition from electricity using fossil fuels, the state will need energy storage to shoulder a significant amount of the load. . . . Four years ago, the state counted a mere 250 megawatts of battery storage available to the California Independent System Operator, which manages the grid for 80% of the state and a small part of Nevada. By the end of this year, that number is expected to grow to 8,000 megawatts. And the amount of battery storage integrated fully into the grid is expected to increase to 19,500 megawatts by 2035 and 52,000 megawatts by 2045.
Once again, it’s the usual MW instead of MWh. But assume that that 52,000 MW in 2045 will be 4-hour duration batteries, so 208,000 MWh. At $150/kWh, that will cost California a cool $31.2 billion. And how long will that last if it starts fully charged and the wind is calm at night? This federal Department of Energy webpage gives California’s current annual electricity demand as 259.5 TWh, or 259,500 GWh. Divide by 8760 (hours in a year) and you get average demand of about 30,000 MW. So the 208,000 MWh of storage will last about seven hours. You’ll need about a hundred times that amount — at a cost of $3+ trillion — to get the 720 hours of storage that you will need.
The amounts of storage that they are talking about are so ridiculously inadequate that I won’t even bother getting to the issue of whether these lithium ion batteries can handle the physical task at hand, which in the real world would involve storing energy for a year and more before it is used, without having it drain away. But before closing, I would be remiss not to mention that both the Canary Media and LA Times pieces linked above devote considerable space to the issue of lithium ion battery fires. It seems that in both New York and California, the really tiny amounts of grid-scale battery storage built to date have been plagued by repeated major fires. From New York:
New York state is grappling with how to adjust its ambitious buildout of clean energy storage after fires broke out at three separate battery projects between late May and late July [2023]. . . . First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire. . . . Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.
Funny that these fires don’t seem to be news in the mainstream press. Here from the Canary piece is a picture of the fire at the Chaumont facility:
It’s the same exact story in California — repeated fires at the handful of grid battery storage facilities that have so far gone operational. From the LA Times piece:
[A] persistent problem keeps coming up — fires igniting at battery storage facilities. Most recently, a fire broke out at the Valley Center Energy Storage Facility in San Diego County on Sept. 18 [2023]. Although fire officials said the blaze was put out in about 45 minutes and extinguished by the site’s internal fire prevention system, businesses and the small number of homes within a quarter-mile of the industrial park where the facility is located were evacuated and shelter-in-place orders were in effect within a half-mile of the site. . . . In September 2022, a Tesla Megapack caught fire at a battery storage facility operated by Pacific Gas & Electric in the Northern California town of Moss Landing. No injuries were reported, but California Highway Patrol closed a section of Highway 1 and redirected traffic away from the site for hours.
Just wait until they have 208,000 MWh worth of these things out there.
After vote in Brussels last Monday evening, a majority of the European Parliament favored a Commission proposal that would no longer automatically classify electric cars as climate-neutral vehicles.
After vote in Brussels last Monday evening, a majority of the European Parliament favored a Commission proposal that would no longer automatically classify electric cars as climate-neutral vehicles.
In the proposal, the CO2 emissions of electric cars would depend on the electricity mix used to charge the car, meaning electric cars would not necessarily be classified as “electric only”.
The EU plans to reassess the phase-out of combustion engines, based on the latest data and developments.
So what has brought on this sudden episode of political sobriety in Brussels? Probably a good dose of reality. Here are 4 possible reasons behind the EU’s new position:
1. China
The automotive industry and many EU states warn of the economic and social consequences of a ban on combustion engines.
Electric car production in Europe cannot compete with the far lower costs in China. Europe’s car production would move overseas, and thus result hundreds of thousands of lost jobs – and lots of social unrest.
Currently Europe is already gripped by social unrest as farmers and truckers protest in the streets against radical green policies.
2. E-car emissions cheating
Currently, electric cars in the EU are given a CO2 emission rating of zero grams! This zero emissions claim is a lie in most cases as the calculation doesn’t take true electricity generation mix into account. Fossil fuels are still widely used in Europe to produce the electric power.
A true accounting would include the CO2 emissions of the electricity used to charge electric cars and make them look less attractive.
3. Climate-neutral fuels (e-fuels):
Efforts are being made to run combustion engines on climate-neutral fuels (e-fuels), which are produced from renewable energies and are thus CO2-neutral.
The EU Commission wants to examine whether newly registered vehicles with combustion engines that run on e-fuels can be registered from 2035. This would effectively suspend the ban on combustion engines, as e-fuels can be used emissions-free in practice.
4. The 2024 European Parliament election
It is scheduled to be held on 6 to 9 June 2024. So now is not the time to upset voters with unpopular legislation. The Brussels bureaucrats probably just want citizens to think they are being pragmatic and will not take a radical course after all.
In summary, the EU may be realizing that banning internal combustion engines, and replacing them with e-cars, is going to cause a lot more damage than good.
Developers are to be handed more cash to erect wind turbines and solar farms near towns and cities in a bid to get more power generation near to where it is needed.
Developers are to be handed more cash to erect wind turbines and solar farms near towns and cities in a bid to get more power generation near to where it is needed.
Renewable energy companies will be allowed to charge customers more for their power if they generate it close to where it is needed, rather than in sparsely populated parts of the country.
The scheme, to be formally announced on Tuesday by Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary, is designed to trigger a rush to build wind and solar infrastructure on farmland around cities.
The Government will introduce zonal pricing, with generators paid different rates according to the distance between their assets and consumers.
The UK will be divided into about half a dozen generating zones so that onshore wind and solar farms in the Home Counties could be paid more for their power than those in Scotland, for example.
Research by Ofgem suggests that making electricity prices higher in the South East, where demand is strongest and supply weakest, would incentivise solar developers.
They would be encouraged to buy up swathes of farmland in a region stretching from London to Bristol and up to Norwich and Cambridge for solar parks and wind farms.
Ofgem has calculated that 20 gigawatts of solar power generation is needed in southern England. Solar farms need up to 4,000 acres of land for each gigawatt, implying 60 million industrial solar panels need to be spread across an area equivalent to 40,000 football pitches.
The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England has warned that such a plan could mean many tenant farmers being thrown off their land, greater pressure on the green belt, and rural landscapes altered forever.
The government claims this will reduce bills, but this is just another of the lies about Net Zero. How enabling renewable energy companies to charge customers more will cut bills is a mystery.
But more to the point, why would we want to trash the countryside by covering it with hundreds of thousands of acres of solar panels, when they produce next to nothing in winter months, the time when demand for power is at its highest?
Yesterday for instance, solar generation only ran at 7% of capacity. Today it only reached a pitiful 1.96 GW for a few minutes.
Excerpt: …[A]n excellent new essay by Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute2 published today by The New Atlantis, titled — Did Exxon Make it Rain Today?. Nordhaus does a nice job explaining that disasters occur at the confluence of an extreme event and an exposed and vulnerable society, but most attention these days is paid to extreme events, and climate change in particular
Excerpt: …[A]n excellent new essay by Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute2 published today by The New Atlantis, titled — Did Exxon Make it Rain Today?. Nordhaus does a nice job explaining that disasters occur at the confluence of an extreme event and an exposed and vulnerable society, but most attention these days is paid to extreme events, and climate change in particular:
What determines whether hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and wildfires amount to natural disasters or minor nuisances, though, is mostly not the relative intensity or frequency of the natural hazard but rather how many people are in harm’s way and how well protected they are against the climate’s extremes.
Infrastructure, institutions, and technology mediate the relationship between extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the costs that human societies bear as a result of them. . .
The implications of this point will be counterintuitive for many. Yes, there are many types of disasters, like hurricanes and floods, that are causing greater economic costs in many places than they used to. But this is almost entirely because the places that are most exposed to weather disasters have far more people and far more wealth in harm’s way than they used to. Even if there were no global warming, in other words, these areas would be much more at risk simply because they have much more to lose.
However, what I find really interesting about Nordhaus’ essay is his discussion of how we got to a point where leading journalists and scientists are seeking to deny these rather obvious conditions and instead, to focus obsessively on human-caused climate change, and specifically on the fossil fuel industry as bearing responsibility for increasing disaster costs, contrary to an overwhelming scientific consensus.
Nordhaus explains that climate advocates have a long history of trying to tie disasters to climate change, dating back decades:
Those efforts intensified after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, with Al Gore using it as a centerpiece in An Inconvenient Truth.3 A few years later, in 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists convened a gathering of environmental advocates, litigators, climate scientists, and opinion researchers in La Jolla, California. Their explicit purpose was to develop a public narrative connecting extreme weather events that were already happening, and the damages they were causing, with climate change and the fossil fuel industry.
The IPCC, over decades of reports, has not concluded with high confidence that a signal of human caused climate change can be detected for most types of extreme weather, and especially those that result in the greatest impacts. That remains the case today.
For those wanting to promote climate action using contemporary disasters as a reason to act, the IPCC’s consistent conclusions — no matter how deeply buried in its reports — present a problem.
In a 2018 survey of environmental journalists … Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change.
So alternative facts needed to be created. Nordhaus explains:
Myles Allen, the climate scientist who is credited with creating the field of “extreme event attribution,” is described in the report as lamenting that “the scientific community has frequently been guilty of talking about the climate of the twenty-second century rather than what’s happening now.” Yet, he and other scientists at the gathering also acknowledged how difficult it is to identify the contributions of climate change to current extreme weather events. “If you want to have statistically significant results about what has already happened,” another scientist, Claudia Tebaldi, noted, “we are far from being able to say anything definitive because the signal is so often overwhelmed by noise.”
While much of the convening was ostensibly focused on litigation strategies, modeled on campaigns against the tobacco industry, the subtext of the entire conversation was how to raise the public salience of a risk that is diffuse, perceived to be far off in time and space, and associated with activities — the combustion of fossil fuels — that bring significant social benefits.
Nordhaus explains that a three-pronged strategy emerged from the 2012 meeting — lowering scientific standards (from those of the IPCC) to enable stronger claims, redefining the attribution of causality differently than the IPCC, and emphasizing the villainous nature of fossil fuel companies to give people an enemy:
During the meeting, Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard historian of science who popularized the connection between climate and tobacco, argued that scientists should use a different standard of proof for the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. “When we take these things to the public,” she argued, “we take a standard of evidence applied internally to science and use it externally.” But, she continued, the 95-percent confidence standard that scientists use “is not the Eleventh Commandment. There is nothing in nature that taught us that 95 percent is needed. That is a social convention.”
Others suggested that reframing the attribution of extreme weather to climate change could allow for stronger claims: rather than looking at whether there was any long-term detectable trend in extreme weather, scientists might instead focus on the degree to which climate change increased the likelihood of a given extreme event. And others believed that focusing legal strategies on a villain — fossil fuel companies conspiring to mislead the public about the danger of their product — would result in greater public acceptance of the claims that climate change was the cause of extreme weather.
As it happened, environmental advocates would pursue all of these strategies.
Nordhaus further explains that broader changes in the media occurred at a perfect time to boost these strategies aimed at creating a new narrative:
Not so long ago, news coverage needed to be credible to multiple audiences whose politics and values spanned a relatively broad spectrum of worldviews and values. But the proliferation of media outlets and platforms in recent decades, first with the rise of cable news and then the Internet, has increasingly fragmented media audiences.
Today, media outlets large and small compete in a far more crowded marketplace to reach much narrower segments of the population. This incentivizes them to tailor their content to the social and political values of their audiences and serve up spectacles that comport with the ideological preferences of the audiences they are trying to reach. For the audiences that elite legacy outlets such as the New York Times now almost exclusively cater to, that means producing a continual stream of catastrophic climate news.
I suspect that the only place that most of you reading this will encounter Nordhaus’ essay is right here at THB.4 Reporters on the “climate beat” know very well that acknowledging the existence of Nordhaus’ essay or the arguments he makes might offend the politics of their employers, readers, and colleagues.
Nordhaus explains that a large majority of environmental journalists refuse to engage narrative-challenging viewpoints (emphasis added):
Reporters and editors at these outlets are also well-aligned ideologically with their audiences. A national survey of political journalists and editors working for newspapers at the state and national level conducted in 2022 found that those identifying as Democrats outnumbered those identifying as Republicans by 10 to 1. A 2018 survey of environmental journalists by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that 70 percent reported trusting information from environmental advocacy organizations versus fewer than 10 percent from business groups. Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change.
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