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.
March is a peak month for auroras, and this should be a good one in the coming days.
A strong X-class solar flare lasting 5 hours has erupted on the sun, lifting a coronal mass ejection (CME) with an Earth-directed component. Play the right-hand video in the link, 1st comment, to see the CME near the end of the clip.
… the flare was unusual in that it involved two widely-separated sunspots than became magnetically connected during the flare.
R3 (Strong) levels were reached on 22 March, 2024. The flare activity began from Region 3614 (to the north), and was still in progress when another flare erupted from Region 3615 (to the south). It’s tough to say with certainty at this point which flare was the source of R3 level
When New York’s deteriorating and unloved Indian Point nuclear plant finally shuttered in 2021, its demise was met with delight from environmentalists who had long demanded it be scrapped.
But there has been a sting in the tail – since the closure, New York’s greenhouse gas emissions have gone up.
When New York’s deteriorating and unloved Indian Point nuclear plant finally shuttered in 2021, its demise was met with delight from environmentalists who had long demanded it be scrapped.
But there has been a sting in the tail – since the closure, New York’s greenhouse gas emissions have gone up.
Castigated for its impact upon the surrounding environment and feared for its potential to unleash disaster close to the heart of New York City, Indian Point nevertheless supplied a large chunk of the state’s carbon-free electricity.
Since the plant’s closure, it has been gas, rather then clean energy such as solar and wind, that has filled the void, leaving New York City in the embarrassing situation of seeing its planet-heating emissions jump in recent years to the point its power grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, as well as the US average.
“From a climate change point of view it’s been a real step backwards and made it harder for New York City to decarbonize its electricity supply than it could’ve been,” said Ben Furnas, a climate and energy policy expert at Cornell University. “This has been a cautionary tale that has left New York in a really challenging spot.”
The closure of Indian Point raises sticky questions for the green movement and states such as New York that are looking to slash carbon pollution. Should long-held concerns about nuclear be shelved due to the overriding challenge of the climate crisis? If so, what should be done about the US’s fleet of ageing nuclear plants?
For those who spent decades fighting Indian Point, the power plant had few redeeming qualities even in an era of escalating global heating. Perched on the banks of the Hudson River about 25 miles north of Manhattan, the hulking facility started operation in the 1960s and its three reactors at one point contributed about a quarter of New York City’s power.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is at it again. Straying from its core mission of “protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation,” the SEC is now taking the mantle of climate activist.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is at it again. Straying from its core mission of “protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation,” the SEC is now taking the mantle of climate activist. Chairman Gary Gensler’s signature policy, the Climate Disclosure Rule, was just approved in a partisan 3-2 vote. Companies will now have to disclose direct and indirect emissions that they produce to investors. This rule, in the guise of informing investors of material risks in companies, will overwhelm investors with information that is unrelated to actual risks to a company’s performance.
For example, how do the emissions coming from a company’s truck make an investment in that company riskier to investors? In this example at least, the answer is it doesn’t.
But even if you could find an example, the SEC already requires companies to disclose material risks, and insurers – whose entire business depends on analyzing and assigning material risk – do not factor in emissions.
So, what is the point of Climate Disclosure Rule? The SEC contends that the Rule is meant to inform investors on the climate risks of their investments. The trouble: investors don’t seem to care about climate risks. Letting the cat out of the bag, the SEC posted a study on their website which seems to demystify their motives, stating “investors only care about climate change risks when policymakers intervene, not about physical climate risks.” The SEC seems to be looking for a problem to their solution. Nonetheless, the agency continues to claim that investors are clamoring for climate risk information. But, as SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce noted in her dissenting comments, this creates a “hodgepodge standard” that could lead to the SEC creating disclosures for every type of social value. What’s next, will the SEC create antiwar disclosures, religious disclosures, or political ideology disclosures?
There is a point where over-disclosure is a threat to transparency, creating an obfuscation that hides real risks from investors. Spamming investors with non-material information will reduce the quality of the normal reporting process. Furthermore, the costs of disclosing every direct or indirect emission will be a significant burden borne by investors and eventually passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. For small companies, the compliance cost alone will be another job killing barrier to competing. For companies thinking of going public, this will be just another reason not to. This rule betrays the core mission of the SEC by making investments less transparent, markets less efficient, and preventing capital formulation.
The real reason the SEC is venturing into this murky terrain is that the current administration is beholden to the environmental social governance (ESG) movement, which seeks to starve disfavored industries and companies of capital. Climate disclosures are intended to shame U.S. businesses into divesting from such critical sectors as mining, logging, and power generation. Widespread adoption of the disclosures is essential for the creating an ESG economy that enriches the politically connected but leaves everyday Americans footing the bill with fewer jobs and higher prices. Unable to pass these unpopular policies through the ballot box or through the Congress, administrative agencies such as the SEC are the new battleground. The Rule is a big step in replacing the free market with an ESG-inspired state capitalism.
The Rule’s legality is highly questionable, which is why, despite being SEC Gensler’s main objective since taking office, it’s suffered delay after delay. After more than twenty-thousand public comments and intense public outcry, the SEC surrendered some important ground. Perhaps cowed by recent court decisions that require agencies to point to “clear Congressional authorization” for their authority, the SEC did a massive, last-minute rewrite, eliminating some major reporting requirements. But, even watered down, the final climate disclosure Rule clearly represents an overstep of the agency’s authority. The rule is clearly vulnerable to courts striking it down or to Congress reclaiming its authority through the Congressional Review Act to restrict the SEC to its actual mission.
My organization, the Financial Fairness Alliance, strives to uncover what the SEC and other U.S. regulators are up to. We believe that the public needs to be informed about what their government is doing because the government works for us, not the other way around. It is time for rogue agencies, like the SEC, to return to their core missions of protecting people and making our markets fair and transparent.
Justin Bis is the Director of the Financial Fairness Alliance. He has held senior government roles, including at the White House and the U.S. Department of Energy, where he assisted with recruiting top-level governmental leaders responsible for regulating the U.S. financial and energy markets.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Contributing to the Net Zero Transition in a Field Near You
I like lithium batteries. My 2019 iPhone has a lithium battery, and it shows no signs of degrading just yet. But when it comes to grid-scale batteries, is it a case of horses for courses?
In response to a comment by Mark, where he quoted the Guardian as saying
The NatPower investment would lead to the construction of 60 gigawatt hours of battery storage
I visited the internet, wondering not so much at first how much said storage would cost… but how much mass it would be. The cost was there in the quote – £10 billion, ’twas said. Not that much. Hardly enough to buy a couple of aircraft carriers (with or without the appropriate launch facilities for the best version of the available planes).
So, what about the mass? I mean, 60 jiggawatt-hours of battery is probably heavy enough to cause Britain to capsize or something.
Naturally, the internet is reluctant to divulge its secrets. But according to Electrek, a Tesla Megapack of 3.9 MWh is 83,996 lbs “max,” or, if you prefer, 38,180 kg. (This is for an LFP battery, which in September 2022 Electrek seemed to think Tesla had begun to use.)
However, it is a little difficult to work out what that mass comprises. It’s about 1% lithium, according to somewhere else on the internet.
What about if you scale up to 60 jiggawatt hours? You get 587,384,615 kg, which I’m writing in full because it’s a nice number.
In searching for this number, I came across several pages referencing the Pillswood battery energy storage system, “the biggest in Europe.”
According to the BBC, this collection of sessile Teslas cost £75,000,000, and is
said to be able to store enough electricity to power 300,000 homes for two hours
(at about 300 watts).
Pillswood, at 196 MWh, is 1/306th of the 60 GWh promised by GnatPower. I mean NatPower. Helpfully, its creator, Harmony (sic) Energy, have a case study on their website where more details of the project can be gleaned.
For instance, because the site was in a flood-sacrifice zone, they had to raise the entire thing 1.8 m off the ground.
In January 2022, we began to prepare the battery site itself, which involved the installation of 478 individual piles, each to a depth of around 15m. These were installed to support the steel frame elevating all of the electrical equipment approximately 1.8m off the ground.Harmony Energy
Gotta say, I think I would have looked for a place I could have put the batteries on the ground, but hey. Reading further down, this caught my eye:
The project will continue to be operated through Autobidder, Tesla’s algorithmic trading platform. Autobidder has demonstrated a strong track record over the past two years in managing both the Holes Bay and Contego BESS projects. These are two existing battery storage projects also developed by Harmony Energy Limited in conjunction with FRV.Ibid.
Autobidder? Sounds to this cynic like a trading algorithm trying to maximise the value of sales of energy from the battery rather than optimise the grid. What is it? According to Electrek again,
It’s a real-time trading and control platform for energy assets, like Tesla’s Powerpacks, Powerwalls, and Megapacks, optimized through machine learning to better use and more directly monetize the assets.Electrek
The algorithm had apparently “made” $330,000,000 for the owners of its batteries (worldwide) by September 2023. (And by that time had grown to manage 7 GWh.)
Obviously, offering a service to stabilise the UK’s grid and running an algorithm to maximise profit while doing so are two different things. Are they compatible? The situation is complex, but I invite the reader to consider a situation where say 30 GW of battery power is controlled by a merciless algorithm whose sole criterion for success is profit. If some proportion of this power is vital, i.e., if without it, a power cut will occur, we end up where the offer price can rise to crippling levels, and our grid managers are forced to bid up to it, knowing that the cost of an outage is far more.
Now, I’m not saying this is going to happen, because there is no evidence that battery owners will collude – each agreeing not to trigger sales until a set price is reached. Nevertheless, it makes me a bit twitchy. [And if one company has a large proportion of the supply, collusion is unnecessary.]
ASTERISK: What if they all use the same algorithm, but independently?
Generally, increased production causes a reduction in profit. Hopefully for the sake of household bills, this rule applies here. It is important to realise that the £10 billion for the Gnatpower batteries will have to be paid back within the ten-year lifespan of the batteries, with allowance made for interest and maintenance. (Assuming 4,000 discharges, I get a value of 10p/kWh to pay back the 75 mil for the Pillswood battery, without repaying interest, without operational costs, with free leccy to charge up with, and without profit.) (Context: the latest leccy price cap from Ofgem is 24.5p/kWh; there is a significant inflation between wholesale costs and the number on the bill. This figure from Ofgem is well out of date, but is the best I can find.)
The figure below shows Pillswood’s battery 1 (of 2) charging and discharging on 8th March 2024. Note that the day is divided into 48 half-hour blocks. Positive numbers are when the battery is sending leccy to the grid (maximum 50 MW).
Here you can see a list of grid-connected batteries in the UK, with who their owners are. At the moment we are up to 4 GW for an hour and a bit flat out. “Optimiser” tells you whose mighty algorithm runs the show.
Megapacks seem to be springing up all over the place. My prediction is that adding them to grids will not save citizens any money (although adding a solar installation and a battery might save a household money eventually – it’s obvious that the more expensive electricity gets, the more attractive off-grid solutions become). Electrek, cited here several times, are fans of Megapacks. This headline of theirs made me chuckle:
Because the battery is not replacing a coal plant: it’s replacing a heap of coal. Now, I know what you’re going to say: the battery extracts its own energy, so it’s better than a heap of coal. You still need a coal plant to convert the chemical energy in the coal into electricity. That is true. But the coal plant can produce electricity on its own, indefinitely, while the battery can only return what it borrowed, less a little lost in the conversion. The battery is not there to supply a baseload of power like a coal plant… it is there to contribute a little at peak times and to stabilise a grid that is made unstable by too much renewable electricity and not enough baseload.
What about the UK’s attached batteries?
These projects are not supported by taxpayer subsidy and will play a major role in contributing to the Net Zero transition, as well as ensuring the future security of the UK’s energy supply and reduced reliance on foreign gas imports.Paul Kavanagh, Harmony Energy
I’m not really convinced by those claims.
See also friend of the channel Francis Menton’s pieces on battery storage, including this recent post where, among other points, he notes the unfortunate frequency of fires associated with grid storage batteries.
The CEC says there are two key messages from the campaign: “Nuclear is a distraction”, and “Don’t risk Australia’s Future.”
The campaign is already appearing in more than 2,200 locations in city building lifts and lobbies in Sydney and Melbourne, and on animated digital billboards in airport lounges at Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne Airport.
…
The campaign by the CEC follows an intense push by the federal Coalition, amplified and often widely supported in mainstream media, to bring a halt to the rollout of large scale renewables, and keep coal fired power stations open until some sort of nuclear option becomes available.
…
It is becoming increasingly clear that the nuclear push is designed to bring the rollout of renewables to a halt – not just temporarily, but for good.
The Coalition’s chief advisors admit that nuclear, which apart from its extremely high costs, is inflexible and has poor ramping rates, to respond in changes of demand or supply, is effectively not comparable with a grid supplied larger by wind and solar, which needs fast and flexible capacity to support it.
In effect, because the grid is morphing from a system built around centralised “baseload” principles to a more distributed system based around wind, solar and flexibility, the two technologies – nuclear and renewables – are effectively incompatible.
I agree with the Clean Energy Council that the Australian opposition plan to build nuclear on decommissioned coal sites is not the best solution – though given 25+ years of failure to make renewables useful, their advocacy for more green energy is absurd.
Nuclear might be affordable in the long run, but financing high up-front costs is not something financially stretched energy consumers could easily absorb. Building low cost brown coal plants or refurbishing old plants would be a much better strategy for lowering end user energy prices.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of nuclear, and there are plenty of remote sites in Australia where nuclear would be the cheaper option. But ignoring our vast remaining reserves of brown coal does not make economic sense.
Brown coal does not have value as a saleable commodity, because unlike black coal, brown coal cannot be transported economically. Brown coal has lower energy density than black coal, and when stored for transport has a distressing tendency to spontaneously combust. Brown coal’s only value comes from digging it up then immediately shovelling it into an adjacent coal power plant.
Having said this, it is hilarious that an economically challenged opposition plan for dispatchable zero carbon nuclear energy is enough to crash actual investment in green energy.
At Klimanachrichten, Dr. Ludger Laurenz looks how solar influence on rainfall in Germany.
Precipitation patterns linked to the 22-year Hale cycle.
While droughts and periods of heavy precipitation in Germany are often blamed on CO2 climate change by the media and pseudo-experts, Laurenz sees a clear link to the 22-year solar Hale cycle. This can be detected in many historical weather data series.
To search for the solar influence on the annual precipitation sum, he used the data from the DWD dating back to 1903.
Finding: “Different precipitation trends are repeated every 22 years. This indicates solar influence.”
According to Laurenz, “The exceptionally high level of precipitation totals in the last year and the first two months of 2024 is very likely due to solar influence.”
Moreover, he found: “The evidence of solar influence on precipitation totals is even better if periods over the turn of the year are selected instead of the classic annual period from January to December, such as the 12-month period from July to June of the following year or the winter half-year. The solar influence on the precipitation sum is much stronger in the winter half-year than in the summer half-year.”
The solar magnetic cycle (Hale cycle) lasts approximately 22 years and can be detected in solar physical measurement data (Chapman et al. 2021) and the search for solar influence is based on Chapman’s formulations.
With the change from one Hale cycle to the next, the sun starts a new program of activity within a few weeks that repeats itself in the same pattern approximately every 22 years. Every single month and every single year of the 22-year Hale cycle is characterized by a specific solar activity pattern that affects the Earth’s atmosphere and creates weather trends.
Ms. Veretenenko’s latest publication from the Loffle Institute in Saint Petersburg has described the mechanism of the transformation of varying solar activity via the stratosphere to the troposphere and thus our weather.
Using the start years of the Hale cycles, it is easy to prove solar influence in historical weather data, Larenz shows.
To do this, the weather data from the same approx. 22-year cycle phases, starting with the respective start years of the Hale cycles, are stacked on top of each other. The result:
Every 22 years, extremely high and low annual precipitation totals accumulate in the same phases of the 22-year Hale cycle.
The billionaire Issa brothers have switched off more than a hundred electric car charging points across Asda stores in a blow to customers who want to plug in their vehicles while they shop.
Just 46 chargers left across supermarket’s stores, RAC reveals.
The billionaire Issa brothers have switched off more than a hundred electric car charging points across Asda stores in a blow to customers who want to plug in their vehicles while they shop.
New figures from the RAC reveal that Asda has slashed the number of electric vehicle chargers at its supermarkets by more than two thirds to just 46 devices over the past year. It had 165 devices at the start of 2023. The Telegraph has the story.
The reduction comes after the supermarket ended a partnership with electric vehicle (EV) charging company BP Pulse. Asda now has working EV chargers on just 2pc of its estates, or 22 shops.
Asda is the only supermarket to have slashed the number of active charging points it has, with others including Tesco and Morrisons investing heavily in the technology.
It comes as Asda struggles under the weight of billions of pounds of debts following its takeover by Mohsin and Zuber Issa and their private equity partners TDR Capital in 2021.
The Issa brothers also own petrol station empire EG Group, which late last year struck a deal with Tesla to roll out chargers across its petrol station sites in the UK and Europe.
Asda struck a deal to buy the UK forecourts of EG Group last year. However, it is understood that the Tesla deal will not apply to Asda car parks.
The supermarket is understood to be currently considering its options for replacing the EV chargers it has lost.
My question – where is the climate class action lawsuit on behalf of kids who suffered mental health damage at the hands of climate educators?
‘How long before climate change will destroy the Earth?’: research reveals what Australian kids want to know about our warming world
Published: March 21, 2024 6.04am AEDT
Chloe Lucas Lecturer and Research Fellow, School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences. Coordinator, Education for Sustainability Tasmania, University of Tasmania
Gabi Mocatta Research Fellow in Climate Change Communication, Climate Futures Program, University of Tasmania, and Lecturer in Communication, Deakin University
Gretta Pecl Professor, at IMAS and Director of the Centre for Marine Socioecology, University of Tasmania
Kim Beasy Senior Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Tasmania
Rachel Kelly Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Future Ocean and Coastal Infrastructures (FOCI) Consortium, Memorial University, Canada, and Centre for Marine Socioecology, University of Tasmania
Every day, more children discover they are living in a climate crisis. This makes many children feelsad, anxious, angry, powerless, confused and frightened about what the future holds.
…
Research and public debate so far has largely failed to engage with the voices and opinions of children – instead, focusing on the views of adults. Our research set out to change this.
We asked 1,500 children to tell us what they wanted to know about climate change. The results show climate action, rather than the scientific cause of the problem, is their greatest concern. …
In Australia, research shows 43% of childrenaged 10 to 14 are worried about the future impact of climate change, and one in four believe the world will end before they grow up.
…
The largest group of these questions (15%) asked for predictions of future events. Some 5% of questions implied the planet, or humanity, was doomed. They included:
Will all the reefs die?
How long before climate change will destroy the Earth?
How long will we be able to survive on our planet if we do nothing to try to slow down/reverse climate change?
Children across the world are facing physical, emotional, and social impacts of climate change. Despite burgeoning scientific and political climate discourse, the voices and opinions of children are underrepresented, as previous research has focused on the opinions of adults. This lack of representation contributes to feelings of disempowerment and betrayal. We investigate children’s priorities for climate knowledge, reporting on questions asked by approximately 1,500 Australian school students as part of a climate literacy engagement project. They reveal remarkable depth of consideration about climate change, with a stronger focus on impacts and action than on scientific causes. “What can we do?” was the core concern of 40% of questions, which often emphasized individual responsibility. Urgency and frustration were evident in questions about climate impacts posing an existential threat to life. Findings demonstrate the importance of considering children’s valid concerns when making decisions that affect their education, well-being, and future.
Thankfully some kids may be quietly receiving advice from parents or grandparents not to attend climate marches or commit acts of eco-terrorism.
… Social hierarchies perpetuated through family, school, and media norms support children making individual choices within existing systems but also delegitimize collective action that might disrupt these systems. This tension is described by Karsgaard and Davidson, who document a participatory research project involving 99 school students from 13 countries that led to the presentation of a white paper on childhood climate citizenship to the IPCC. The authors found that while the children participating in their project most often saw climate change as an issue of justice, they were limited in their ability to imagine different ways of dealing with this issue by the dominant framings of individualized responsibility and government leadership. Despite their age, children felt responsible for their participation in economic systems that damage the environment: “When describing how they might act to address climate change and climate injustices, students tended toward individualist behaviors in response to a deep sense of guilt over consumptive practices” …
If a bunch of monkey ancestors with brains the size of matchboxes could figure out how to thrive in a hothouse world, we could certainly manage.
Having said that, it is doubtful if anthropogenic CO2 could recreate anything like the hothouse conditions of the PETM, even if we burned every scrap of recoverable fossil fuel on the planet. Not only is the CO2 band of the atmosphere almost completely saturated, which severely limits the impact of additional CO2 on global temperature, the Earth has experienced significant geological changes since the PETM such as the establishment of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current 33 million years ago, which continues to exert a substantial cooling effect on the global climate. The Earth’s current geology is currently aligned so strongly against warming, from a geological perspective we are in the middle of an ice age, the Quaternary Glaiciation.
But kids are not being taught this basic science, this unequivocal proof that even if global warming occurs, global warming is not a threat to human survival and prosperity.
What really outraged me, a sizeable fraction of kids (1 in 4) believe the world will end before they grow up. Some of them feel guilty about “consumptive practices” they believe are wrecking the planet, which presumably includes eating meat and other high carbon, high calorie foods which kids need to develop to their maximum potential. Even worse, those children have been made to feel a deep sense of responsibility – even though, as kids, they have very little responsibility for the state of the planet.
How many of those 73,000+ people who die of Fentanyl overdoses every year in the United States, were kids whose climate educator convinced them there was no point trying to pursue life, liberty and happiness?
Future generations will look on our era of “climate education” as an age of collective child abuse, and will wonder why nobody stood up to the abusers and put a stop to it. Because there will be a tomorrow, and a day of reckoning.
Perhaps it will be the kids themselves who put a stop to educational child abuse, by suing schools and education authorities for lying to them about the dangers posed by global warming, and causing them to make harmful life choices. This outrageous situation is just begging for a smart lawyer to launch the mother of all class actions, on behalf of drug addicts and mental health patients whose lives were ruined by climate educators.
There will be a a tomorrow and a day of reckoning, even if 1 in 4 of the kids who will one day participate in that reckoning do not currently believe that there will be a tomorrow.
A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation challenges the popular but mistaken belief that weather extremes – such as flooding, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires – are more common and more intense today because of climate change.
London, 22 March – A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation challenges the popular but mistaken belief that weather extremes – such as flooding, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires – are more common and more intense today because of climate change.
Drawing on newspaper archives and long-term observational data, the report, written by Dr Ralph Alexander, documents multiple examples of past extremes that matched or exceeded anything experienced in the present-day world. Dr Ralph Alexander said: “That so many people are unaware of past extremes shows that collective memories of extreme weather are short-lived.” “The perception that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity is primarily a consequence of new information technology – the Internet and smart phones – which have revolutionised communication and made us much more aware of such disasters in all corners of the world than we were 50 or 100 years ago.”
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