Day: April 9, 2024

Greta Thunberg is the poster girl for hypocrites using the products they want to ban

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist, scolded the world’s leaders by exclaiming, “How dare you?” in reference to their perceived indifference and inaction to the climate crisis. More accurately, Ms. Thunberg’s question should have been, “How dare ME for demanding the products and fuels manufactured from crude oil that make MY life more comfortable?”

From CFACT

By Ronald Stein

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist, scolded the world’s leaders by exclaiming, “How dare you?” in reference to their perceived indifference and inaction to the climate crisis. More accurately, Ms. Thunberg’s question should have been, “How dare ME for demanding the products and fuels manufactured from crude oil that make MY life more comfortable?”

Politicians and environmentalists never discuss the need to maintain the supply chain of the products and fuels, now based on crude oil, which is essential to human flourishing. Nobody ever uses “raw crude oil;” thus, there would be no need for oil without people demanding PRODUCTS and FUELS made from crude oil!

Looking back at the history of the petroleum industry it illustrates that black, cruddy-looking crude oil was virtually useless unless it could be manufactured (refined) into oil derivatives. These derivatives are now the basis of the oil used to manufacture products such as medications, waxes, asphalt, lubricating oil, various plastics, solvents, and transportation fuels, which are essential for supporting modern lifestyles.

Policymakers are unaware that crude oil is not used in its natural, unrefined state. Crude oil is extracted from the earth and later refined into various fuels and oil derivatives that are the basis of products such as waxes, asphalt, lubricating oil, various plastics, transportation fuels, and a wide variety of other consumer goods.

Realistically, it’s a continuing increase in demand by the public for the PRODUCTS and FUELS manufactured from oil which is causing an increase in oil demand.

More than 6,000 products in today’s society that did not exist before the 1800s are based on oil derivatives manufactured from raw crude oil. These derivatives are used for the health and well-being of humanity and for the generation of electricity.

Interestingly, all electrical generation from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar is built with products, components, and equipment made from the same oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. Electricity came AFTER humanity discovered how to extract usable derivatives from that raw crude oil to make things. Before oil, we’re back to the pre-1800s.

Energy literacy starts with the knowledge that crude oil is the basis of our materialistic society. Conversations are needed to discuss the difference between just “ELECTRICITY” from wind turbines and solar panels that don’t work most of the time and the “PRODUCTS” that are the basis of society’s materialistic world. Wind turbines and solar panels are themselves made from oil derivatives and only generate occasional electricity but manufacture NOTHING for society.

World leaders have little comprehension that ridding the world of crude oil without a replacement in mind would be immoral and evil, as extreme shortages of the products now manufactured from fossil fuels will result in billions of fatalities from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths, and could be the greatest threat to the world’s population of 8 billion.

In 1977, after the 1973 oil crisis, the Department of Energy was established to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. However, today, with its 14,000 employees and a $48 billion budget, the D.O.E. continues to remain dead silent and has allowed California, the fourth-largest economy in the world, to increase imported crude oil from 5 percent in 1992 to almost 60 percent of total consumption.

California is home to 9 International airports, 41 Military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping ports in America. California’s growing dependency on other nations for crude oil poses a serious national security risk!

In addition, the Department of Energy has remained silent while electric vehicle policies have made America increasingly dependent on rare earth minerals and metals mined for those batteries under atrocious slave labor and environmental conditions in other countries that the DOE and bureaucrats ignore.

China controls a stranglehold of 80% of the global supply monopoly on rare earth minerals and metals, with the Congo in Africa a 90% source of vital cobalt.

In addition, life longevity is increasing with the support of products in our materialistic world, and weather-related fatalities are almost nonexistent, all because of the different fuels for planes, ships, trucks, cars, militaries, space programs, and all the PRODUCTS that did not exist before the 1800s.

The more than 6,000 products in today’s societies that were not around 200 years ago are based on crude oil now support:

We’re a materialistic society and need to replace oil to maintain the supply chain of products and fuels. None of the six ways to generate electricity (hydro, nuclear, coal, natural gas, wind, and solar) can make products for society; thus, electricity is not a source to support the supply chain of products and fuels.

I am NOT pro-fossil fuels, but I am pro for the products we get from fossil fuels. Ridding the world of crude oil without a “replacement” that can continue to support the supply chain of the more than 6,000 products now demanded by the 8 billion on this planet could result in the loss of billions from starvation, diseases, and weather-related fatalities.

So, before we jump out of the airplane without a parachute and revert to the pre-1800s, let’s identify the backup “source” that can continue to support the supply chain for making more than 6,000 products and the various fuels for the materialistic society of the 8 billion people on this planet.

The Age of Underpopulation is Here

The age of overpopulation is over. The age of underpopulation is here.  After decades of warnings and fear about an overpopulation crisis, population is now rapidly declining in most of the world. The overpopulation disaster predicted by world elites did not occur.

From Watts Up With That?

By Steve Goreham

Originally published in WND.

The age of overpopulation is over. The age of underpopulation is here.  After decades of warnings and fear about an overpopulation crisis, population is now rapidly declining in most of the world. The overpopulation disaster predicted by world elites did not occur.

Total fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman. Demographers tell us that a country’s fertility rate must be at least 2.1 children per woman to sustain the current level of population.

According to data from the United Nations, total world population still continues to rise, but population is declining in all major nations, where fertility rates have fallen below the minimum population replacement rate. Africa is the only continent where the population continues to grow. According to birth rates and without counting immigration flows, population is now falling in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, the United States, and all European nations except Monaco and the Faroe Islands.

For the last four decades of the 20th Century, world leaders warned of a coming catastrophe from an uncontrolled rise in global population. In 1950, the average woman was birthing about five children during her lifetime. Global population was growing at a rate of about two percent per year by 1955.

The Population Bomb, written by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, became a worldwide best seller. The prologue of the book stated, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The author warned of coming famines and resource shortages and advocated for compulsory population control.

The fear of overpopulation produced a population control movement by the early 1970s. A consistent theme of the movement was that population growth was unplanned. Ehrlich stated: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.”

The United Nations indicated that people were not intelligent enough to plan their own families. James Grant, Undersecretary General for the UN, wrote in 1992: “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology available to the human race.”

Convinced by the overpopulation elites, governments of the world endorsed tragic population control measures. By the 1970s, it became US government policy to grant foreign aid only if population control measures were implemented. The World Bank and the UN also established policies requiring population control in exchange for loans or aid.

During the last decades of the 20th Century, population programs proposed by Western intellectuals and the UN were implemented in the form of anti-human policies by the governments of China, India, and dozens of other nations. The government of India established sterilization and intrauterine device insertion quotas in 1966. Over 40 million people were sterilized between 1965 and 1985, most coercively.

The People’s Republic of China implemented population policies in 1970 and adopted a one-child policy for all families in 1979. By March 2013, the China government reported that 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations had been carried out since 1971. Sex-selection abortion became common and even the killing of girl babies was practiced in both China and India.

Population control policies typically disproportionally impacted disadvantaged races or social classes. In India, coercive policies often targeted people of lower castes. In 1966, sterilization programs were set up at federally funded Indian Health Service hospitals in the US. Thousands of Native American women were sterilized between 1966 and 1976, often without informed consent. In Peru, sterilizations targeted rural natives of Incan descent.

But the overpopulation intellectuals were wrong. Famine did not kill hundreds of millions of people as Ehrlich predicted. Instead, an agricultural revolution increased global output of corn, rice, and wheat by a factor of five from 1960 to 2023. The malnourished portion of world population declined from 30 percent in 1950 to 10 percent today and continues to fall.

The world fertility rate dropped from about five children per woman in 1950 to 2.3 children per woman in 2021 and continues to fall. The population growth rate dropped to 0.82 percent per year by 2021 and is declining rapidly.

Nations moved from agricultural, to industrial, to technological societies, achieving the elimination of infectious disease, improved sanitation, improved food supply, a decline in infant mortality, and rising levels of education. Women entered the work force in larger numbers and family sizes declined.

But despite tragic implementation of population control policies in several nations, today’s families are having fewer children, the world population is stabilizing, and the predicted overpopulation disaster did not happen. Governments now pursue programs to boost family size in China, Japan, South Korea, and many nations of Europe.

But didn’t population control programs cause the drop in fertility rates? The answer is “no.” Fertility rates dropped faster in South Korea than in China, driven by economic development, rising incomes, and increased levels of education and workforce participation for women, without forced population control measures. Fertility rates dropped faster in Brazil and Mexico due to demographic changes, than in India where forced population control was employed.

What is the lesson from the overpopulation crisis that did not occur? The United Nations, the intellectuals, and strident political leaders were dead wrong about overpopulation. People do not multiply like cancer cells. Rather than being a species “out of control,” humans plan their own families and react to changing societal conditions. The lesson from the overpopulation debacle is that people adapt to their environment.

But the United Nations and world elites now warn of a coming climate catastrophe. They demand a costly energy transition to Net Zero emissions. They demand that we change our transportation and our home appliances, that we stop eating meat, and that we adopt hundreds of other proposed climate-saving remedies. Will we have a climate disaster, or will the global elites be wrong again?

Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.

Wheeler, Chicken, Lynch – Central Great Barrier Reef, April 2024. Part 1.

The corals in the central region of the Great Barrier Reef have suffered through this last summer with some bleaching and also damage from cyclone Kirrily. There are seasons under the sea, just as there are on land – and in life.

Screenshot

From Jennifer Marohasy

By jennifer

The corals in the central region of the Great Barrier Reef have suffered through this last summer with some bleaching and also damage from cyclone Kirrily.   There are seasons under the sea, just as there are on land – and in life.

Even though large areas of reef crest are denuded of coral – colonies of clown fish have hung-on including at Lynch reef.   These little fishes, they still come out to say ‘Gidday’, at least to me.

Clown fish and their anemone at a mostly denuded reef crest, Lynch Reef, 3rd April 2024

That was my experience earlier this week when I had the privilege of diving five reefs off Townsville – Chicken, Wheeler, Davies, Lynch, and also John Brewer Reef.

These reefs are part of the central region of the Great Barrier Reef.  I was diving with Paul Crocombe the owner of Adrenalin Snorkel and Dive, and also Stuart Ireland the owner of Calypso Productions.   There is a combined 60 years of experience, much of it under the water at the Great Barrier Reef.

Stuart Ireland after a good dive, central Great Barrier Reef 3rd April 2024.
Paul Crocombe on board Adrenalin, 3rd April 2024

Paul and Stuart have seen cyclone damage before, and also bleaching.

We did find one reef, Wheeler reef, that was essentially intact, with an extraordinary diversity of fish, corals, and very little bleaching.   We will feature this reef in an IPA-sponsored short documentary about this adventure, soon. (You can find previous efforts online, click here.)

So, yes, it is the case that you can always find somewhere that is flourishing, even if overall conditions have not been so good.  In this little clip (click here, and following), that I’ve just now uploaded to Vimeo you can see Paul with the fishes at Wheeler reef on Wednesday 3rd April 2024.

https://vimeo.com/931277722

Not a lot of people get to dive at Chicken Reef because it is so far offshore, on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef; quite a way east of Wheeler.  (Not quite as far as Myrmidon, that I visited in October 2021 and blogged about back then, including click here.)

Stuart put the drone up at Chicken and got some impressive aerials. But with the choppy conditions it was impossible to make much out in terms of the condition of the corals from above the water, from a drone.

A drone vista of Chicken reef, 3rd April 2024.

I spent all of Wednesday on snorkel, and while Stuart had the drone up over me, I was taking photographs.

From an altitude of 120 metres it is not possible to see me from the drone, yet the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority fly at 150 metres for their aerial surveys to assess the health of the corals.
It is possible to just see me, above the corals at Chicken reef in this photograph taken at 40 metres.
At 10 metres above sea level you can see me from the drone, but not the corals. Conditions were quite rough, with lots of swell obscuring the view.

There was good coral coverage at this section of reef crest, at Chicken as you can see from my underwater photograph.

While Stuart photographed me with the drone, I photographed the corals with my Olympus TG6.

And when Stuart finally got into the water, I photographed him photographing one of the impressive large Porites at this reef, at Chicken reef.  There is a large plate coral just below him.

Stuart filming a giant Porites at Chicken Reef.

Then Stuart captured me above the same coral, free diving.

Jennifer above the same Porites at Chicken reef.

Stuart didn’t manage to get everything on camera.  Our lookout Robert, from Adrenalin Snorkel and Dive, saw a whale shark go straight over the top of Paul and Stuart at Chicken reef without them noticing. They were looking down, not up! I was some distance away on snorkel, free diving.

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are the largest extant species of fish, and the largest of the sharks and they feed on plankton.*

More about this adventure in my next blog post, Part 2 to come and there will be a short documentary.  We have so much footage!

So much thanks to Adrenalin Snorkel and Dive for the adventure with funding from the Institute of Public Affairs.
The reef crest where we dived at Lynch, in the south west corner, on the leeward side, much of it was barren, though there were large populations of parrot fish as you will see once we have made the documentary.

PS.  Following is a very short clip of a parrot fish at the crest of Wheeler reef, taken on Wednesday 3rd April 2024 – posting just now for my daughter across the other side of the Pacific in Seattle.   The parrots, they often make us laugh.

https://vimeo.com/931290546

******

Update Sunday 7th April.

I published a link to this post across at my official Facebook page, and my FB friend Dave Ross, another underwater legend, wrote that Whale sharks will eat fish even posting this great link to prove his point:

https://fb.watch/rhO94FC_f1

Helter Skelter Climate Policies

Yes, the carbon tax works great in a ‘first-best’ world where it’s the
only carbon policy. In the real world, carbon policies are piled high.

From Science Matters

 By Ron Clutz

Ross McKitrick explains the dangers of making climate policies willy-nilly in his Financial Post article Economists’ letter misses the point about the carbon tax revolt.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Yes, the carbon tax works great in a ‘first-best’ world where it’s the
only carbon policy. In the real world, carbon policies are piled high.

An open letter is circulating online among my economist colleagues aiming to promote sound thinking on carbon taxes. It makes some valid points and will probably get waved around in the House of Commons before long. But it’s conspicuously selective in its focus, to the point of ignoring the main problems with Canadian climate policy as a whole.

EV charging sign Electric-vehicle mandates and subsidies are among the mountain of climate policies that have been piled on top of Canada’s carbon tax. PHOTO BY JOSHUA A. BICKEL/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

There’s a massive pile of boulders blocking the road to efficient policy, including:

  • clean fuel regulations,
  • the oil-and-gas-sector emissions cap,
  • the electricity sector coal phase-out,
  • strict energy efficiency rules for new and existing buildings,
  • new performance mandates for natural gas-fired generation plants,
  • the regulatory blockade against liquified natural gas export facilities,
  • new motor vehicle fuel economy standards,
  • caps on fertilizer use on farms,
  • provincial ethanol production subsidies,
  • electric vehicle mandates and subsidies,
  • provincial renewable electricity mandates,
  • grid-scale battery storage experiments,
  • the Green Infrastructure Fund,
  • carbon capture and underground storage mandates, 
  • subsidies for electric buses and emergency vehicles in Canadian cities,
  • new aviation and rail sector emission limits,
    and many more.

Not one of these occasioned a letter of protest from Canadian economists.

Beside that mountain of boulders there’s a twig labelled “overstated objections to carbon pricing.” At the sight of it, hundreds of economists have rushed forward to sweep it off the road. What a help!

To my well-meaning colleagues I say: the pile of regulatory boulders
long ago made the economic case for carbon pricing irrelevant.

Layering a carbon tax on top of current and planned command-and-control regulations does not yield an efficient outcome, it just raises the overall cost to consumers. Which is why I can’t get excited about and certainly won’t sign the carbon-pricing letter. That’s not where the heavy lifting is needed.

My colleagues object to exaggerated claims about the cost of carbon taxes. Fair enough. But far worse are exaggerated claims about both the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the economic opportunities associated with the so-called “energy transition.” Exaggeration about the benefits of emission reduction is traceable to poor-quality academic research, such as continued use of climate models known to have large, persistent warming biases and of the RCP8.5 emissions scenario, long since shown in the academic literature to be grossly exaggerated.

But a lot of it is simply groundless rhetoric. Climate activists, politicians and journalists have spent years blaming Canadians’ fossil fuel use for every bad weather event that comes along and shutting down rational debate with polemical cudgels such as “climate emergency” declarations. Again, none of this occasioned a cautionary letter from economists.

There’s another big issue on which the letter was silent. Suppose we did clear all the regulatory boulders along with the carbon-pricing-costs-too-much twig. How high should the carbon tax be? A few of the letter’s signatories are former students of mine so I expect they remember the formula for an optimal emissions tax in the presence of an existing tax system. If not, they can take their copy of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy by Prof. McKitrick off the shelf, blow off the thick layer of dust and look it up. Or they can consult any of the half-dozen or so journal articles published since the 1970s that derive it. But I suspect most of the other signatories have never seen the formula and don’t even know it exists.

To be technical for a moment, the optimal carbon tax rate varies inversely with the marginal cost of the overall tax system. The higher the tax burden — and with our heavy reliance on income taxes our burden is high — the costlier it is at the margin to provide any public good, including emissions reductions. Economists call this a “second-best problem”: inefficiencies in one place, like the tax system, cause inefficiencies in other policy areas, yielding in this case a higher optimal level of emissions and a lower optimal carbon tax rate.

Based on reasonable estimates of the social cost of carbon and the marginal costs of our tax system, our carbon price is already high enough. In fact, it may well be too high. I say this as one of the only Canadian economists who has published on all aspects of the question. Believing in mainstream climate science and economics, as I do, does not oblige you to dismiss public complaints that the carbon tax is too costly.

Which raises my final point: the age of mass academic letter-writing has long since passed. Academia has become too politically one-sided. Universities don’t get to spend years filling their ranks with staff drawn from one side of the political spectrum and then expect to be viewed as neutral arbiters of public policy issues. The more signatories there are on a letter like this, the less impact it will have. People nowadays will make up their own minds, thank you very much, and a well-argued essay by an individual willing to stand alone may even carry more weight.

Online conversations today are about rising living costs, stagnant real wages and deindustrialization. Even if carbon pricing isn’t the main cause of all this, climate policy is playing a growing role and people can be excused for lumping it all together. The public would welcome insight from economists about how to deal with these challenges. A mass letter enthusing about carbon taxes doesn’t provide it.

Strasbourg court could rule that governments have to protect people from climate change

The European Court of Human Rights could rule that governments have to protect people from climate change.

Cases provoke backlash in UK with former minister describing the proceedings as ‘another attempted ideological power grab’.

The European Court of Human Rights could rule that governments have to protect people from climate change. The Telegraph has the story.

Judges from the court will decide next week whether people’s human rights have been breached by the failure of governments to protect them from the harmful effects of climate change.

If they rule in favour of three cases claiming their rights have been breached, it would mean that individuals could seek redress with the Strasbourg court and compensation if their governments failed to take sufficient measures to prevent their citizens suffering the consequences of climate change.

The cases have prompted a backlash from the UK Government whose lawyer Sudhanshu Swaroop KC told the court in one of the cases that it was effectively turning the court into a legislator.

He said the complainants were “asking the court to act as legislators rather than judges and to legislate for a global challenge without having global jurisdiction”.

Sarah Dines, the former home office minister who has called for the UK to leave the Strasbourg court, described it as a “yet another attempted ideological power grab on the part of a self-selecting and self-serving elite out of touch with reality”.

Read the full story here.