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.
China has virtually total monopoly control over the processing and availability of natural and synthetic graphite, an essential component of almost all lithium-ion batteries, including electric vehicle batteries, which are 40% graphite by weight.
The problem has been largely ignored, even by policy makers and military strategists
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 8, 2024
WASHINGTON, DC. China has virtually total monopoly control over the processing and availability of natural and synthetic graphite, an essential component of almost all lithium-ion batteries, including electric vehicle batteries, which are 40% graphite by weight.
A new Net Zero Reality Coalition (NZRC) report explains how this monopoly enables the Chinese Government to affect Li-ion battery production, pricing and availability worldwide. China could control markets for equipment required to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, harm or bankrupt competitors, and even force nations to acquiesce to its geopolitical initiatives over Taiwan, the Pacific Rim, the Paris climate agreement and other matters.
“President Biden wants to convert gasoline and diesel cars, light trucks, semi-trucks, buses, trains and even military vehicles to battery power,” notes report author David Wojick, PhD. “He wants to force us to switch from natural gas to electricity for furnaces, stoves and water heaters. “Getting all that electricity from wind and sunshine means we’d need hundreds of millions of vehicle battery modules, plus millions of huge grid-scale batteries to back up intermittent, weather dependent wind and solar power, to avoid frequent and widespread blackouts,” Wojick emphasizes. As graphite requirements skyrocket, China’s monopoly power will also surge.
Processing and purifying graphite requires large amounts of toxic, dangerous hydrofluoric acid, as well as enormous amounts of reliable, affordable energy, the report points out.
“Safety and environmental regulations would likely make it too complicated and expensive to build those facilities in the USA and other Western countries,” says NZRC advisor Paul Driessen. “But China has shown a willingness to ignore ecological and worker safety issues, to produce graphite, as well as cobalt, rare earth elements and other materials for carbon-free economies, at nearly rock-bottom costs, to protect its monopolies and control supply chains.”
As a result, America’s energy systems, economy and military are becoming increasingly reliant on monopolist and often adversarial China for these critical raw materials. However, the realities of this graphite monopoly have flown under the radar of the White House, Congress, news media, and even energy and manufacturing sectors. Wojick and the NZRC are the first experts to raise awareness about this monopoly.
NZRC members include the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), American Policy Center (APC), Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Energy & Environment Legal
Institute (E&E Legal), Heartland Institute and International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC).
There’s only one reason why I don’t label this newest one filed on March 25, 2024 as a “Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit” – it doesn’t have Sher Edling’s official ‘signature’ on it.
There’s only one reason why I don’t label this newest one filed on March 25, 2024 as a “Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit” – it doesn’t have Sher Edling’s official ‘signature’ on it.
…a disinformation campaign beginning as early as the 1970s to discredit the burgeoning scientific consensus on climate change, deny their own knowledge of climate change-related threats, create doubt in the minds of consumers, the media, teachers and the public about the reality and consequences of burning fossil fuels, and delay the necessary transition to a lower-carbon future.
Want to see that almost identically again? Look no farther than Sher Edling’s 12/20/23 twin filings on behalf of two Native American Tribes in Washington state. Those twin filings just left out whose minds the ‘doubt’ was created in. What to see that same basic paragraph wording split into two pieces? It’s in Sher Edling’s nearly 6½ year-old filing of Marin County v Chevron, just without the word “burgeoning” and a couple others. Want to see that word-for-word identical again? Try Sher Edling’s seven weeks-old Chicago v BP.
A run-through of what earns the label “boilerplate copy” for most of the Sher Edling-handled lawsuits reinforces the ‘plagiarism problem’ here for Bucks County, along with how this latest lawsuit is vulnerable to being dismissed outright from being devoid of evidence to prove its main accusations … just like the others it copies from:
✓ “Bankroll” / “paid” / “funded scientists” – my dissection of Chicago focused on the new angle for the Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits, on how they were continuing in a pattern to switch out the word “bankroll” for “paid” in their accusation against Dr Willie Soon, and were clumsily now plagiarizing the supposedly unconnected California AG office’s filing. As I showed there, it was easier to drop in a translucent blue box to show where the identical text ended between California v Exxon and the Sher Edling-handled New Jersey lawsuit. — no report offered by the Smithsonian Institution that Dr Soon failed to properly report his funding
Bucks County vs Chicago concerning Sher Edling’s highly suspect new plagiarism problem? Identical.
The 178-page Bucks County filing is in a non word-searchable PDF format, but it is only a ten-page difference between it and Sher Edling’s 188 page word-searchable Chicago filing; To find what you want to see in Bucks County, just look for it in Chicago, then go back a few pages in Bucks County.
Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to more than one group of people that it would be wise to get some powerful plagiarism-detecting / illustrating software program to show just how much text is ineptly shared among these supposedly unrelated law firms filing “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits. These things have every appearance in the world as being efforts stemming from a common single template. That revelation by itself would shoot a huge hole in the notion about these are being independently-led actions which have made their own discoveries of evidence proving the industry colluded with corrupt scientists in disinformation campaigns.
Question is: who put together that common template at the beginning of this all?
The good news here: it seems just recently – perhaps – there might be a handy new means of getting to the bottom of who exactly promotes this traveling circus lawfare effort. As noted by the people at Energy in Depth on the same day of the filing, questions abound on whether the Bucks County officials were fully transparent about their decision to jump on this climate lawfare bandwagon. The Bucks County Commissioners who ultimately approved this decision are a three-member panel, two Democrats and one Republican.
My guess on March 25th was that the Republican minority member, Gene DiGirolamo, was outvoted by the majority, so I figured it might be worth a shot to email him the following day and point out that this and other technically plagiarized / boilerplate copy lawsuits might actually risk being dismissed in domino fashion, and that he might try advocating that his county should self-dismiss its lawsuit to avoid that embarrassing crash. I was disappointed to see a day later in various news reports that Commissioner DiGirolamo was widely quoted in various news reports with remarks – including “These companies have known since at least the 1950s” – looking like something written by Greenpeace people. That led me to wonder if emailing him was a mistake, where he could relay what I said to the handlers of these lawfare efforts and thus prompt that mob to start deleting some of their hidden incriminating documents.
Bucks Commissioner DiGirolamo Withdraws Support for County Lawsuit Targeting Big Oil
Now, that is a fascinating development. Did he receive and read my email? Was he persuaded by well-informed fellow Republicans and ordinary citizens that the fossil fuel industry could not have known with any certainty about catastrophic global warming as far back as the 1950s in the face of reports back then about runaway global cooling, and my email was one more bit added to the pile he received about the folly of entering into a fatally faulty lawsuit?
I don’t know. He hasn’t replied yet to my initial email or my followup inquiry a couple days ago.
Just as I recommend investigators – objective reporters / law firms representing the defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits / congressional staffers – to calculate how much apparent plagiarism is happening in this lawfare madness, I also recommend them to see if Commissioner DiGirolamo can offer some insight on how this particular lawsuit show landed in Bucks County.
In a recent interview, energy expert Ronald Stein discussed California’s shifting energy landscape and the challenges of transitioning away from fossil fuels. As a former engineer and author on energy issues, Stein provided insightful perspective on the complex trade-offs involved.
10:13 – What Many World Leaders Don’t Realize About Renewable Energy
In a recent interview, energy expert Ronald Stein discussed California’s shifting energy landscape and the challenges of transitioning away from fossil fuels. As a former engineer and author on energy issues, Stein provided insightful perspective on the complex trade-offs involved.
California has made reducing oil production and dependence on foreign imports a priority. However, Stein notes this has unintended consequences, like lost revenue for cities and increased costs passed onto consumers. While aiming to curb emissions, Stein argues the state’s policies may simply outsource them elsewhere through increased imports.
When it comes to renewable energy, Stein acknowledged the role of wind and solar but highlighted their limitations compared to fossil fuels. As electricity alone cannot replace the vast array of products derived from oil, a total transition away from oil may not be realistic given society’s material demands. Stein also raised questions around reliability and whether intermittent renewables can independently power necessities like healthcare and defense.
The interview shed light on issues often overlooked in green energy debates. Stein drew attention to the human and environmental costs of mining for electric car batteries in developing nations lacking proper regulations and oversight. For those living on just dollars a day, the energy transition remains out of reach without international cooperation and solutions.
Overall, the discussion challenged assumptions and advocated a more holistic view of this complex issue with no single or simple answer. As leaders pursue ambitious climate goals, carefully considering all perspectives will be important to equitable and responsible policymaking.
*Views expressed in this video/article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.
Landowners harboring threatened or endangered species on their property will soon be facing stricter scrutiny and the possibility of tougher land-use restrictions under new Endangered Species Act (ESA) regulations released by the Biden administration April 5.
Landowners harboring threatened or endangered species on their property will soon be facing stricter scrutiny and the possibility of tougher land-use restrictions under new Endangered Species Act (ESA) regulations released by the Biden administration April 5.
Biden’s political appointees at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) rewrote Trump-era rules finalized in 2019, which emphasized species recovery over federal micromanagement of private property. The new rules will take effect on May 6.
A key element of the Trump-era policy was its handling of areas unoccupied by a species at risk. Under the Trump rule, for an unoccupied area to be considered essential to a specie’s recovery, USFWS had to “determine that there was a reasonable certainty both that the area will contribute to the conservation of the species and that the area contains one or more of those physical or biological features essential to the conservation of the species.”
“In other words,” the Public Lands Council points out, “USFWS could not designate critical habitat in an unoccupied area that could not in the future actually support the life of a species. Now, the agency may designate critical habitat in any occupied area that it believes is ‘essential for the conservation of the species.’”
This change greatly expands the amount of land that can be brought under USFWS control, enabling “critical habitat” to be designated anywhere USFWS determines a species is at risk, including from such purely hypothetical factors as climate change.
Consideration of Economic Impact
Another radical change coming to ESA enforcement concerns the economic impact of a listing. Previously, regulations under the ESA did not explicitly prohibit federal officials from considering the economic impact of listing or habitat decisions. Such determinations were to be based on “the best available scientific and commercial information.” No more. The Biden regulations now explicitly state that determination on listing status and habitat designations must be made “without reference to economic or other impacts.”
In other words, USFWS officials are now free to make such designations without any consideration of how they will affect the livelihoods of rural communities located near a “critical habitat.”
Blurring the Difference Between Threatened and Endangered Species
When it was enacted in 1973, the ESA specified that species designated as threatened were to be treated differently than those at higher risk or endangered. Over the decades, however, the difference gradually disappeared, meaning the land-use restrictions imposed on property owners harboring a named species – whether threatened or endangered — were about the same. The 2019 Trump reforms that section of the statute to its original intent. This is crucial when it comes to an incidental take of a species because the blurring of distinctions raises landowners’ potential liability.
While the Biden revisions do not preclude USFWS from issuing species-specific rules to exempt certain practices from the prohibition of take, the new language will enable federal officials to largely ignore the statutory difference between threatened and endangered. In effect, the Biden administration has reimposed the “blanket” approach to species protection, putting the same prohibitions in place whether the plant or animal is threatened or endangered. This blurring of an important distinction constitutes a major gain for an administrative state eager to throw its weight around whenever the opportunity presents itself.
The new rules will provide a boost to the White House’s “30×30” plan, under which “at least” 30 percent of the nation’s land and water are to be “protected” by 2030. Increasing the amount of land set aside indefinitely for the recovery of a species is one of the ways the administration can achieve its 30-percent goal by the end of the decade.
Court Challenges
In a similar vein, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced how it intends to comply – or not comply – with the Supreme Court’s May 2023 Sackett v. EPA ruling, which limited EPA’s power to regulate certain bodies of water, including wetlands, under the Clean Water Act. EPA’s effort to circumvent the Sackett decision is being challenged in court, and the administration’s new ESA rules may soon be facing a similar fate.
In its 36th year, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) has a proud history that rebuts the erroneous ad hominem arguments hurled against its principles and principals. Ever since its humble beginnings, IER’s rock-solid research into the economics, political economy, philosophy, and history of energy markets have stood the test of time.
Ed note: The evolution of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), from a part-time to a full-time organization, is recounted below. (The earlier history of IER can be found here, here, and here. ) From inception, the institute has been a classical-liberal organization in favor of economic freedom–and thus consumers and taxpayers. In this regard, Wiki’s (erroneous) entry on IER is rebutted here.
In its 36th year, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) has a proud history that rebuts the erroneous ad hominem arguments hurled against its principles and principals. Ever since its humble beginnings, IER’s rock-solid research into the economics, political economy, philosophy, and history of energy markets have stood the test of time. Energy markets need to be free of, not controlled by, government—for human betterment and individual justice.
Under the direction of president and COO Tom Pyle, IER’s Washington DC organization is a trusted free-market voice in today’s contentious debates over subsidies for wind, solar, and batteries, ethanol mandates, and carbon-dioxide regulation. Thanks to our donors (thousands strong), IER’s education efforts have reached the media, the public, academia, and federal and state legislators.
Never has IER’s educational mission been more important. Both major political parties have increasingly politicized energy away from what consumers really want and need for their homes, vehicles, and businesses. The Biden’s Administration’s “whole of government” crusade against fossil fuels—accounting for 82 percent of U.S. and global energy consumption—props up uneconomic, unreliable, symbolic alternatives.
What F. A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit” is alive and well with government energy planning, whether done in the name of promoting national security, creating jobs, or addressing global climate change (all misapplied rationales).
The United States needs to shape and expand its domestic energy industry in accordance with profit/loss signals in the marketplace. This is capitalism proper—versus political capitalism, where a special government regulation or subsidy overrides the consumer verdicts.
Energy abundance, affordability, and reliability cut across class, race, and political boundaries. Artificial scarcity, price spikes, and Big Brother edicts (such as what light bulbs are legal to buy or sell) are the bane of government energy planning. Economic coordination and growth—and in the present context, economic recovery—require the type energy policies championed by IER.
We look forward to your input and support in the months and years ahead.
A Look Back
On June 26, 1989, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) was founded as a 501(c)3 public foundation in Houston, Texas. The original board members were:
Robert L. Bradley Jr., president
Nancy C. Bradley, secretary/treasurer
Emma B. Broussard
William A. Johnson
Howard H. Gano Jr., a CPA, would also join the board in this early period.
IER then centered on the burgeoning activity of its founder and president (me) with the publication of my first book, The Mirage of Oil Production (University Press of America, 1989), sponsored by the Cato Institute. The process that led to this book was my testimony before Congress in 1986 against the imposition of new import fees, as well as my work on what became Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience, which would be published in 1996 (Rowman & Littlefield).
A Part-time Organization
At the time of IER’s founding, Bradley was a full-time employee of Transwestern Pipeline Company, a natural gas transmission company that was wholly owned by Enron Corporation. A market analyst by day, he devoted nights and weekends to his scholarly activities and IER, making it a respected if small free-market think tank dedicated to energy issues. Humorously, the editor of Natural Gas Week, John Jennrich, labeled IER a “think bucket.” After all, the organization was essentially a one-person show.
Small steps were important ones in IER’s early years. In early 1991, publicity for Bradley in the New York Times led to a foundation grant to install an IER phone line. Each fundraising success was reason for celebration. And with enough activity, Bradley began preparing quarterly reports for IER’s small group of donors and other allies, a list that would grow over time from less than a hundred to several hundred.
IER leveraged its activities by teaming up with the Georgia-based Southern Regulatory Policy Institute (SPRI), which was the avocation of Jim Clarkson, an energy engineer with strong free-market beliefs. In November 1991, Clarkson merged the energy-focused SRPI into IER and joined IER’s board.
IER inherited SPRI’s booklet program, and with this printing capability, it began the series Studies in Market-based Energy Policy. One study, “Demand-Side Management: Ratepayers Beware,” by Douglas Houston of the University of Kansas, was highly publicized in the energy trade press and went through two editions.
In conjunction with its publications, IER began an adjunct scholar program. Doug Houston was an original member of the project, as was Jerry Ellig of George Mason University, who authored an IER booklet critical of public-utility regulation.
In March 1993, IER spearheaded a conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Cato Institute, “New Horizons in Natural Gas Deregulation.” This was a breakout event, with attendance of 130, favorable publicity, and a book of proceedings published by Praeger. The handsome volume was edited with an introduction by Ellig and Joseph Kalt, the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University. Two years later, IER and Cato repeated the success with another major conference, “New Horizons in Electric Power Deregulation.”
IER continued to grow around Bradley’s active writing and lecturing. Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience came out in 1996 and was followed in 2000 with the release of an energy primer for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability. But things were changing for Bradley in his day job in ways that caused conflicts.
In 1988, Enron chairman Ken Lay seized upon the climate-change issue as part of the company’s strategy to focus on natural gas as the ideal fuel for electric generation. The enemy to Enron was coal, which emitted one and a half times as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as did gas. To its credit, Enron developed new products to reduce the volatility and risk of long-term gas prices in order to foster a resurgence of gas demand for electric generation, but playing the political card was seen as necessary too.
Expanding its political model, Enron entered into the renewable energy business, first with solar power (1994) and then with wind power (1997). Thus, Enron was embracing the very energy path that Bradley was criticizing in publications and lectures. In 1997, in fact, Bradley—Enron’s new director of public policy analysis—had just published a major study for Cato: “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green.’”
Nevertheless, Enron valued Bradley for his extensive free-market connections (Enron had pro-market issues too), and Ken Lay, ever the politician and appeaser, acted as a buffer between Bradley and his critics at Enron. (Some of Bradley’s skirmishes with Enron Wind Company and Enron’s climate lobbyist are posted on the website PoliticalCapitalism.)
Full Time IER
Bradley’s 16-year career with Enron ended with the company’s bankruptcy. On December 4, 2001, a day after he was laid off, IER technically became a full-time organization for the first time. Some emergency funding was secured from free-market donors and Houston individuals and foundations to help Bradley make the transition.
Bradley turned his attention to two projects: authoring a book on the global warming debate and co-authoring an energy primer. A major new opportunity also presented itself: writing an insider book describing the rise and fall of Enron from a free-market, classical liberal perspective. There was also much fundraising to do, as well as attracting like-minded energy scholars to IER’s cause.
In 2003, Bradley published Climate Alarmism Reconsidered with the Institute of Economic Affairs, a London-based think tank with a classical-liberal outlook. The next year, Bradley (and coauthor Richard Fulmer, an IER senior fellow) published Energy: The Master Resource with Kendall/Hunt, a publisher of textbooks for the high school and college market. Bradley also began his Enron book project, which would grow into three stand-alone volumes. The first volume of the trilogy, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy, would come out in 2008.
A full-time IER gave Bradley the chance to expand the organization. This was much needed, for energy issues were growing with rising prices and political events. In 2003, Tom Tanton affiliated with IER. Rising to vice president, Tanton actively gave radio interviews, wrote op-eds, prepared studies, and made presentations at professional events. Tanton also managed IER’s new website and its blog feature, Tom Tanton’s Talkback. Based in California, Tanton is now a fellow in environmental studies at Pacific Research Institute in California and an adjunct scholar of IER.
IER Washington
In the spring of 2007, IER expanded its reach to the nation’s capital. Mary Hutzler, formerly Acting Administrator of the Energy Information Administration (Department of Energy), joined IER as a distinguished senior fellow. Robert P. Murphy joined IER as an economist. Andrew Morriss, a law professor and Ph.D. economist, became a senior fellow in 2007, as did, a year later, Robert Michaels, a professor of economics at California State Fullerton and an energy specialist.
These affiliations joined IER’s full time staff: President Rob Bradley and secretary/treasurer, Nancy Bradley. All other relationships were either on a consulting basis or were nonpaid affiliations. But IER’s achievements led to new opportunities to expand significantly and become what it is today: a major Washington, D.C.-headquartered, all-energy-all-the-time think tank.
On February 1, 2008, Tom Pyle joined IER as president and COO, with Bradley taking the new title of CEO. (For more information about staff and activities, visit IER’s website.)
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From its founding until the present, IER has been a principled free-market think tank, turning its deep scholarly research for academics into educational materials for audiences ranging from the interested public to policymakers. IER’s mission is stated here. Funding comes from the voluntary (non-taxpayer) contributions of individuals, foundations, and corporations who believe in our principled positions in favor of private property, voluntary exchange, and capitalist wealth creation.
“Large numbers of (sea) birds, bats and insects are already being killed by the spinning rotor blades. Horizon pollution, infrasound and drop-shadow are driving more and more people to despair, and there seems to be no end in sight.”
Thank you very much for your interest in the English translation of my new book ‘Down Wind’. It mainly describes the Dutch situation, but there are multiple examples reflecting situations in the United States and throughout Europe. Some description follows.
“Large numbers of (sea) birds, bats and insects are already being killed by the spinning rotor blades. Horizon pollution, infrasound and drop-shadow are driving more and more people to despair, and there seems to be no end in sight.”
Down Wind: The impact of large-scale energy production using wind turbines
In the summer of 2023, it became evident that the wind power industry was facing serious challenges. Sweden’s Vattenfall was denied permission by its own government for a wind farm on Sweden’s west coast. Why? “Negative impacts on the environment.” Vattenfall also cancelled the construction of a new offshore wind farm on England’s North Sea coast due to ‘cost’.
The “energy transition” looks to a ten-fold increase in industrial wind turbines. Currently, there are an estimated 200,000 wind turbines worldwide. To eliminate fossil fuels by 2050, approximately 2,000,000 more wind turbines would need to be constructed.
Has the wind industry finally come to its senses and recognised that building, installing and operating wind turbines is very expensive? That the huge amounts of materials – steel, concrete and plastic – cannot be extracted or produced in an environmentally friendly way? Not to mention the disposal after 20 years of operation. In fact, rotor blades still cannot be recycled and therefore have to be landfilled or incinerated.
Wind turbines significantly impact our environment–negatively. Large numbers of (sea) birds, bats and insects are already being killed by the spinning rotor blades. Horizon pollution, infrasound and drop-shadow are driving more and more people to despair, and there seems to be no end in sight. Honest calculations also show that wind power is not only very expensive, but also that power cannot be guaranteed due to the variability of the wind.
Isn’t it high time to recognise that wind power is nothing more than wind trading, so we should reconsider its role as the sought-after solution?
Unlike windmills of up to about 20-30 meters in height, the new wind turbines are of a very different caliber. Modern wind turbines reach tip heights as high as 260 meters, making them more than prominent in the landscape. Whereas tourists used to come to admire the beautiful Dutch, balanced landscape with its classic windmills, the same tourists are not too keen on looking at a horizon with dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of modern wind turbines.
This book begins with a bit of primal Dutch history of the windmill and then quickly moves on to the development of the first wind turbines, machines designed purely to generate energy. In addition to the development and use of this technology, the why of the energy transition is discussed. This has primarily become a prelude to the rise of all kinds of financial markets, particularly around CO2.
To understand the background of the entire energy transition – of which the excessive increase in the construction of wind farms is an important part – I first inform you extensively about the policy pursued and its motivation. In this book, I pay close attention to the harmful effects on humans and nature caused by the construction, installation and use, and removal of wind turbines.
All these harmful effects, in addition to the dangers that occur during operation, are explained with practical examples. I deliberately do not use the widely misused word “sustainable” in this book. The reason why will automatically become clear as you read. Finally, using practical examples, I also discuss exactly what climate policy means for your wallet.—————–
A book about the impact of large-scale energy generation with wind turbines comes not a moment too soon. Since government plans for the energy transition will entail far-reaching changes for the landscape and society, it was about time to inform the public about the background of the energy transition, a transition that is primarily focused on wind energy in the Netherlands, both on land and at sea. The coverage of this, through our public broadcasters and mainstream newspapers, has become increasingly one-sided and incomplete over the past decades. Therefore, it is quite possible that after reading this book, you may look differently at the energy transition in general, and wind turbines in particular.
My advice is to continue your own research after reading the book, to look for subjects that have aroused your interest, but especially those subjects where you have doubts whether the information I have presented is correct or not. To help you do this, I have included several references at the end of each chapter. That list, given the enormity of the subject, is obviously not complete. However, with the search terms in this book, you can do an excellent job.
Hopefully, after reading this book, you will agree with me that it is of utmost importance that the information in this book be widely disseminated. After all, as plans for wind energy continue to be realized toward 2050, the damage to the environment – flora and fauna – will begin to increase exponentially. Sharing information about the negative aspects of this wind trade is crucial. Only together can we turn back from the dead-end road we have taken.
Astronomer Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab predicted that a sungrazing comet might be visible during Monday’s total eclipse. He was right. Chinese amateur astronomer Lin Zixuan was in New Hampshire for the eclipse, and he photographed the disintegrating comet:
April 10, 2024: (Spaceweather.com) Astronomer Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab predicted that a sungrazing comet might be visible during Monday’s total eclipse. He was right. Chinese amateur astronomer Lin Zixuan was in New Hampshire for the eclipse, and he photographed the disintegrating comet:
Named “SOHO-5008”, the comet had been discovered earlier the same day by amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod, who noticed it in SOHOcoronagraph images. Battams quickly realized that the comet might be bright enough to photograph in the otherworldly twilight of the Moon’s shadow.
“Ground-based observations of sungrazing comets are extremely rare, so this would be a great opportunity to see an eclipse comet!” says Battams.
Soon after Zixuan photographed the comet, it disintegrated. SOHO has seen this happen more than 5000 times. Most doomed sungrazers (including this one) are members of the Kreutz family. Named after a 19th century German astronomer who studied them in detail, Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a giant comet ~2000 years ago. Several fragments pass by the sun and disintegrate every day, although most are too small to see.
Above: A SOHO coronagraph image of the disintegrating comet
Battams can recall only two other examples of sungrazers seen during a solar eclipse– one in 2020 (also a Worachate Boonplod discovery) and another in 2008. ” I think with modern imaging equipment and techniques, seeing a sungrazer during an eclipse is no longer hugely challenging, but it does require one crucial ingredient: the right comet at the right time. We got lucky this week!” he says.
The best picture, so far, of the sungrazer comes from Petr Horálek of Institute of Physics in Opava, who was in Durango, Mexico, for the eclipse:
“I got especially lucky with this shot with the comet SOHO-5008, which was discovered just before the eclipse,” says Horálek. “It was truly windy and partly cloudy, totality took 3 minutes and 25 seconds and the image is the result of HDR shooting (exposure from 1/4000 s to 2s). A total of 83 usable images were used (dark frames and flat fields applied).”
The North Atlantic, the Pacific Northwest (USA), and northern Finland were all warmer than today between 1000 and 2000 years ago.
Today’s (2000 CE) July air temperatures in the Azores – archipelago islands in the middle North Atlantic, ~1400 km west of Portugal – are visually shown to average about 10 to 11°C in a newly published reconstruction (Raposeiro et al., 2024).
This average air temperature is about 1 to 2°C warmer than this location’s Little Ice Age climate, or the coldest period (~9.1°C from 1750-1800) of the last 2000 years. However, the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) had temperatures reaching into the 13-15°C range, which is 3-4°C warmer than modern.
A temperature reconstruction from a lake in the USA’s Pacific Northwest (Baig, 2024) indicates glacial temperatures were only 1.0 to 1.6°C colder than the modern temperature, 12.2°C. Temperatures reached 13.7°C, or 1.5°C warmer than today, ~2500 years ago, and then fluctuated between 12.6 and 12.2°C from 1900 years ago until today, a period encompassing both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age.
Another lake sediment temperature reconstruction using branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) from northern Finland (Otiniano et al., 2024) suggests the modern temperature (represented as the blue diamond) is among the coldest of the last ~8000 years. Temperatures were much warmer than modern about 1200 to 1500 years ago, and throughout the period from 7000 to 3000 years ago.
By its 2019 Climate Act, New York has officially embarked on a great energy transition to Net Zero by 2050, with statutorily-dictated interim mandates along the way. The first of those mandates is 70% “emissions-free” electricity by 2030, only 6 years from now. This is far and away the biggest government-directed project that the State of New York has ever undertaken.
By its 2019 Climate Act, New York has officially embarked on a great energy transition to Net Zero by 2050, with statutorily-dictated interim mandates along the way. The first of those mandates is 70% “emissions-free” electricity by 2030, only 6 years from now. This is far and away the biggest government-directed project that the State of New York has ever undertaken. However, to date, relative to this project there exists no environmental impact statement, no feasibility study, no prototype, and no demonstration project to show how this can be done, let alone any detailed cost analysis to show how much it will cost.
Implementing the enforced energy transition is the responsibility of an alphabet soup of state agencies that makes the federal labyrinth of bureaucracies look simple and rational by comparison. Multiple overlapping departments, councils and authorities that have staffed themselves up with climate zealots take charge of pushing the transition forward — things like the Climate Action Council, the Department of Environmental Conservation, and the NY State Energy Research & Development Authority.
But meanwhile, there remain a couple of vestigial agencies tasked with keeping the lights on, notably the Department of Public Service and the NY Independent System Operator. Those two held something called the Zero Emissions by 2040 Technical Conference back on December 11-12, 2023. After all, somebody has to look over the minor “technical” issues along the way to our lofty climate goals for 2030 and 2040. Look as I might, I can’t find any reporting on, or reference to, this conference in any of the local press at the time or in the months since. However, my friend and partner in crime Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York), has tracked down information on the conference on various agency websites and on YouTube. On April 7, Roger posted a lengthy blog reporting on the first panel at the Conference; a somewhat different version of that post also appeared on Watts Up With That at about the same time. The slides for all the presentations at the Conference can be found as Item 72 on the public docket at this link.
I’ll just elaborate here on a few of the absurdities that Roger has uncovered.
The first panel at the Conference got the title “Gap Characterization.” The “gap” in question is the potential difference between electricity demanded by consumers and the ability of the system to produce electricity at any given moment. Such “gap” is predicted to arise during the course of the energy transition because of the simultaneous shuttering of the natural gas power plants that currently form the backbone of our grid and the increased demand for electricity from the forced electrification of things like building heating and automobiles. And where will the electricity come from to fill this gap? From the magical “DEFR,” of course. The “DEFR” is the Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource — the “resource” with all the good characteristics of fossil fuels but without any of the carbon emissions. The current amount of DEFRs in existence and actual use to generate utility-scale electricity in the world is zero.
A guy named Zach Smith gave the first presentation on the “gap” panel. Smith is the VP of System Resource Development at NYISO. Here is his first slide:
This thing warrants some careful study. The two graphs represent two different projection scenarios, for both resources and peak demand. The upward-sloping black line represents the peak demand. In the scenario in the left-hand graph, peak demand goes from the current level of about 32 GW up to about 60 GW in 2040, almost double. The right hand scenario has peak demand going only to about 40 GW by 2040, a far lower rate of increase. Frankly, with the proposed electrification of buildings and of automobiles, let alone the coming of AI, the projection of 60 GW is likely much more realistic.
Then we have the sources of the juice, shown in the bars. Natural gas is the big orange part in the middle. Currently, about 2/3 of the power comes from natural gas, most of the rest from hydro and nuclear, and some little slivers from things like wind and solar. Then we see the projected changes. Supposedly, large amounts of wind and solar emerge by 2035, and natural gas goes down a little. Then in 2035, the DEFR (lavender) emerges, and by 2040 becomes dominant. In the left-hand scenario, the DEFR — something that currently doesn’t exist at scale anywhere in the world — has supposedly been built to a capacity of about 50 GW, far more (indeed close to double) our entire current natural gas fleet, and far more than current peak demand. In the lower-demand scenario in the right-hand graph, the 2040 DEFR capacity is approximately equal to current natural gas capacity.
And get this: In the ISO guy’s view of resource adequacy, the sum of capacity from hydro, nuclear and the DEFR are almost equal to peak demand in both scenarios. Vast amounts of wind and solar capacity are built out, to more than 100% of peak demand in one scenario and closer to 200% of peak demand in the other scenario — but ISO doesn’t count on any of that to be available when actually needed. The DEFR needs to be able to back up the intermittent renewables to the extent of the entirety of peak demand. So why again are the renewables going to be built at all?
So what exactly is this DEFR that doesn’t even yet exist? Smith provides the following chart of the various possibilities that have been suggested:
Each column represents a criterion that the DEFR must meet to fulfill the role of replacing the natural gas. If you get a red mark, you are not up to the job. Well, hydro doesn’t get any red marks — but we have already used up all of our hydro capacity, and we don’t have another Niagara Falls. Wind and solar have obviously only been put on the list in order to reject them for multiple reasons. Really, there is only one possibility that is green all the way across: hydrogen combustion.
So that’s it. Are we supposedly going to go from zero to 50 GW of capacity of hydrogen combustion power plants by 2040? Currently, no such power plants exist in New York (or anywhere else in the world), nor are any under construction, or in the planning process (unless you consider this slide of Smith to be “planning”). Oh, and how about the capacity to produce the hydrogen? That doesn’t exist either. Is the plan to make it from electrolysis from sea water, using electricity generated by wind and sun? Then you are going to need about four to five times the capacity of wind and solar generators than Mr. Smith has in his scenarios. He seems to have forgotten about that. (Or maybe the assumption is that we will buy the hydrogen from China, although they currently don’t produce any either.). And how about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen from the production sites to the power plants? None of that exists or has been planned for yet.
Not a word about costs in Mr. Smith’s presentation. You wouldn’t want to concern the plebes with that kind of thing.
It is impossible to believe that any of this is real. I’ll bet you don’t remember President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address from 2003. Here is a White House press release about it from the time. A few excerpts:
Hydrogen is the key to a cleaner energy future:
It has the highest energy content per unit of weight of any known fuel.
When burned in an engine, hydrogen can produce effectively zero emissions; when powering a fuel cell, its only waste is water.
Hydrogen can be produced from abundant domestic resources including natural gas, coal, biomass, and even water.
The President’s FY 2005 budget proposes $228 million for the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, a $69 million increase (43%) over the FY 2004 budget.
At least it was $228 million, rather than $228 billion as Biden would have proposed. But here we are, twenty years later, and hydrogen is still nowhere. It will still be nowhere 20 years in the future. If produced in the “green” form from water, it will be easily 5 times as expensive as natural gas, and inferior to natural gas as a fuel in every respect.
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