Day: April 28, 2024

Coral Bleaching. What They Don’t Tell You

There was significant coral bleaching this last summer. It was remarkable at the Keppel Islands. But because scientists have been falsely calling it every year, this important fact is likely to be lost to our collective memory. It is also a problem when my colleagues deny this bleaching.

From Jennifer Marohasy

By jennifer

There was significant coral bleaching this last summer.   It was remarkable at the Keppel Islands.  But because scientists have been falsely calling it every year, this important fact is likely to be lost to our collective memory.  It is also a problem when my colleagues deny this bleaching.

If we deny when there is bleaching, and claim bleaching when there is none – it is impossible to know the cycles and their causes.

Last Sunday morning, at Secret Cove, I watched the turtle come out from under a stand of stark white coral – bleached coral – and swim towards me.

We swam together for a short while.  It looked across at me. I held its gaze.  It propelled itself gracefully forward with its fore flippers.

I tried to keep up.

Then the turtle veered off, in a different direction – away from me, and towards more stark white bleached coral.

The turtle that I swam beside at Secret Cover, last Sunday.

The turtle was not bothered by me and seemed oblivious to all the coral bleaching.

The creatures under-the-water last Sunday morning, they seem oblivious to the colour of the coral that was mostly stark white, some healthy chocolate brown (replete with symbiotic zooxanthellae/good microalgae), and some brown from infestations of macro algae smothering the corals.

To my eye, the fish and other creatures seemed randomly distributed, which is to say they could be found across the reef irrespective of the colour of the coral.

It was not at all how the BBC have described coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef – they have recently been using the terms ‘ghostly white’, ‘spooky white’, ‘like a graveyard’.   These journalists are clueless (CLICK HERE).

Secret Cove a week ago was badly bleached – and it was teeming with life.   But to know this, it is necessary to get under the water.

A big shout out to Jenn and the rest of the crew at Keppel Dive on Great Keppel Island (CLICK HERE). Thank you for the opportunity to dive so many coral reefs last weekend – thank you for your care and for finding the Epaulette shark at Secret Cove.

Trying for a selfie, with my Olympus TG6 at Secret Cove. This was Friday before last, from the little boat.

To know that many of the stark white corals are still alive it is necessary to observe them up close.   For example, the brain coral (perhaps a Lobophyllia sp. or Caulastrea sp.) did look ‘ghostly white’ from a few metres away.   But up close – after I reset my camera to take a macro – you can see that the polyps are still very much intact, that the polyps have a carpet-like texture concealing separate corallites.

A close-up of the brain coral that looked stark white from a distance, certainly badly bleached but still very much alive.   My fingers as a reference for colour and size.  About 6 metres under the water.

We even found a Moray eel.  I only managed to photograph its head, after waiting.  Its long slender body hidden under the corals.

A Moray eel poking its head out from under the corals at Secret Cove last Sunday.

Secret Cove fringes Great Keppel Island, reportedly with some of the worst of the coral bleaching, considering the entire Great Barrier Reef this last summer.

The BBC also mentioned ocean acidification and high temperatures – unprecedented they claim.   Again, they are just making stuff up.

I’ve noticed that the journalists and the scientists, from all sides of the political divides, increasingly just add to the established narratives rather than checking the data, or even visiting a coral reef.   This makes me an outlier – relevant only because you are reading me.   (For sure the institutions and sometimes even my colleagues and even social media want me cancelled so be sure to subscribe at my website for weekly e-news: CLICK HERE)

It is the case that our oceans are not acidic, not at all.   I wrote about this in a chapter for ‘Climate Change, The Facts’ back in 2017 (CLICK HERE).

As for the water temperatures, this last summer was hot, but not exceptionally so.

I write this, not with reference to the wholly contrived coloured maps they show you on the nightly news often for the whole Earth and always showing continuous increase (as though there is never winter), but rather with reference to more reliable location specific temperature data for the Keppel Islands.   For example, considering Australian Institute of Marine Science data for Square Rocks, and Bureau of Meteorology data for Rosslyn Bay, we can see that there is still a strong seasonal component to the temperature data and that this last summer temperatures were well within the expected seasonal cycle.

So, what caused the coral bleaching this last summer that has been so severe, particularly at the southern Great Barrier Reef, and particularly at the Keppel Islands?

The Moon has a particular influence on sea levels.

We see this not just in the daily and monthly cycles, but the Moon also causes the less well understood 18.6-year declination cycle.

The Moon takes a month to complete a revolution around the Earth. But it doesn’t follow the same path, moving above the Earth’s equator for two weeks and below the equator for two weeks of each month.  The distance above and below the equator changes with this 18.6 year cycle.  This is because as the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees relative to the Sun causing the seasons, the Moon is tilted at 5 degrees relative to the Earth, and every 18.6 years, the angle between the Moon’s orbit and Earth’s equator reaches a maximum that is the sum of Earth’s equatorial tilt (23°27′) and the Moon’s orbital inclination (5°09′) to the ecliptic. This is called major lunar standstill, and I define it as occurring when the distance that the Moon travels south is more than 28 degrees south each month.

While we may intuitively expect larger sea tides as the Moon approaches its maximum declination considering this 18.6-year cycle, because the gravitational forcing of the Moon is less well aligned with the gravitational forcing of the Sun on the Earth at this time, we see on average lower sea tides at least in the data for the nearby Rosslyn Bay gauge for the last few months.

I suspect that the bleaching at the Keppel Islands this last summer can be blamed on the Moon; specifically that the lower tides caused by Maximum Lunar Declination combined with a short period of clear skies and no winds caused the water to stay continuously warm for a longer period than usual, in a way that was catastrophic.

That is my hypothesis.

The popular claim, the consensus claim consistent with anthropogenic global warming theory that the atmosphere replete with greenhouse gases has been warming the ocean is not credible, at least not considering the location specific data for Square Rocks between North Keppel Island and Great Keppel Island.  The available Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) data shows that the water is consistently warmer than the air above it.   As the water is consistently warmer than the air, it is not logical to suggest that the air is warming the water.

Green is water, blue is air. Scroll to a version of this chart a little higher in this post complete with legend.
Under the water at Secret Cove, last Sunday morning.

*** Notes/Key References

Dr Alison Jones has been monitoring coral cover across reef flats and slopes in the Keppel Islands for some years. If this work continues, we could know the extent of the recovery in numbers – measured.   More information here:  Jones & Berkelmans.  Keppel Islands reefs: Baseline study 2008-2010.  CLICK HERE.

There was significant reporting of coral bleaching at the Keppel Islands in 2006, corresponding with the last maximum lunar declination; more information here: Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching surveys 2006. GBRMPA Research Publication No. 87 CLICK HERE.

The shark, under the water at Secret Cove last Sunday morning.

Understanding Lunar Declination …

Today, the Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun. But this tilt changes. During a cycle that averages about 40,000 years, the tilt of the axis varies between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees. Because this tilt changes, the seasons as we know them can become exaggerated.

Every 18.6 years, the angle between the Moon’s orbit and Earth’s equator reaches a maximum of 28°36′, the sum of Earth’s equatorial tilt (23°27′) and the Moon’s orbital inclination (5°09′) to the ecliptic. This is called major lunar standstill. Around this time, the Moon’s declination will vary from −28°36′ to +28°36′.

“Because of the inclination of the Moon’s orbit with respect to the Earth’s equator, the Moon is above the horizon at the North and South Pole for almost two weeks every month, even though the Sun is below the horizon for six months at a time. The period from moonrise to moonrise at the poles is a tropical month, about 27.3 days, quite close to the sidereal period. When the Sun is the furthest below the horizon (winter solstice), the Moon will be full when it is at its highest point. When the Moon is in Gemini it will be above the horizon at the North Pole, and when it is in Sagittarius it will be up at the South Pole.   Quoting from Wikipedia, CLICK HERE .

Stingrays; so many, last Sunday at Secret Cove.
Teeming with life, last Sunday at Secret Cove. And this photograph is for my Facebook friend Dave Ross.  He always remembers the many names for this fish that is so common at the Keppel Islands.

New Academic Hyperbolic Buzzphrase: Environmental Conciliation

In the labyrinthine corridors of academic fantasy, where reality often takes a back seat to the whimsical, Geo Takach and Kyera Cook have delivered a masterstroke of hyperbole with their new creation: “environmental conciliation.” This term, aimed to bridge the chasm between environmental protection and Indigenous reconciliation through the power of arts-based communication, presumes to address crises that, upon closer inspection, might be less of a cataclysm and more of a construct of the modern academic echo chamber.

From Watts Up With That?

This one is not likely going to catch on.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09632719231224115

In the labyrinthine corridors of academic fantasy, where reality often takes a back seat to the whimsical, Geo Takach and Kyera Cook have delivered a masterstroke of hyperbole with their new creation: “environmental conciliation.” This term, aimed to bridge the chasm between environmental protection and Indigenous reconciliation through the power of arts-based communication, presumes to address crises that, upon closer inspection, might be less of a cataclysm and more of a construct of the modern academic echo chamber.

The treatise reads like a satire, earnestly proposing that painting, sculpting, and performing can somehow mitigate what they describe as dire environmental and societal injustices. One must pause to admire the audacity of suggesting that centuries of complex socio-political issues and so-called ecological degradation can be remedied with a palette and some brushes. It’s a charming notion—if only the foundation of these crises weren’t as overblown as the remedies proposed.

Takach and Cook’s narrative plows ahead with all the finesse of a bull in a china shop, weaving “decolonizing critiques” and “holistic environmental ideologies” into a tapestry that seems to depict a world on the brink of collapse—a portrayal that dramatically overestimates the severity of environmental shifts while undervaluing the resilience of both nature and human societies.

The invocation of “environmental conciliation” as a solution is a particularly delightful flourish. It’s as if they’ve proposed that the cure for a mild headache is a full brain transplant. The term itself is a new badge for the academic elite to wear, a token of virtue signaling that pays homage to the altar of crisis creation. The problems they aim to solve with their arts-infused approach—supposed rampant environmental destruction and the erosion of Indigenous cultures—are described with an urgency that seems misaligned with reality, inflated for the sake of securing grant money or perhaps, seminar invitations.

As we wade deeper into the quagmire of their argument, we find that the practical applications of their arts-based approach are as nebulous as they are nonsensical. The suggestion that social justice and environmental recovery might spring forth from the same well that fuels community theater projects is a comedic goldmine. One could almost envision the next UN climate summit held in an art gallery, where diplomats resolve carbon emission disputes through interpretive dance and collaborative collage-making.

In sum, Takach and Cook’s article does not just stretch the imagination; it vaults it into a realm where reality is optional, and every academic whim is entertained with the gravity of a Papal decree. It’s a bold exercise in the art of making mountains out of molehills and then proposing to level them with a paintbrush. Truly, if the world were as fraught with peril as they suggest, one might indeed hope for more pragmatic solutions. But since the imminent collapse of civilization is not as imminent as they’d have us believe, perhaps we can afford to chuckle at the notion of “environmental conciliation”—right after we finish our watercolor sunset.

Read this “research article” at your own risk of brain cell loss.

Pope Francis Speaks as Climate Bigot

Pope Francis told CBS News this week that climate change deniers are “stupid” to refute compelling evidence of a climate emergency.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. reports at Climate Change Dispatch Unchristian: Pope Francis Says Climate Deniers Are ‘Stupid’, Skepticism ‘Perverse’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Pope Francis told CBS News this week that climate change deniers are “stupid” to refute compelling evidence of a climate emergency. [emphasis, links added]

“Some people are stupid (necios), and stupid even if you show them research, they don’t believe it,” the pontiff told CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell when asked what he would say to the deniers of climate change.  “Why? Because they don’t understand the situation, or because of their interests, but climate change exists,” the 87-year-old pope asserted.

Pope Francis had never before sat down for an extensive interview, one-on-one, with a U.S. television network during his 11-year pontificate.

Pope Francis has been a vocal enthusiast for the war on climate change, calling global warming “one of the most serious and worrying phenomena of our time” and urging “drastic measures” to combat climate change.

He has expressed his opinion that any skepticism regarding an alleged “climate emergency” is “perverse.”

The pope has also singled out the United States as particularly to blame for the “climate emergency,” even though it is one of the countries with the cleanest air in the world.

“If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” he stated last October.

Among the “fools” denounced by the pope for their “perverse” skepticism of the climate crisis are a group of over 1,600 prominent scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, who issued the “World Climate Declaration” last August, refuting the existence of a so-called “climate emergency.”

Among other things, the Declaration asserted that climate models have proven inadequate for predicting global warming, that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant, and that climate change has not increased natural disasters.

The world has warmed “significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing,” the text states, and the gap between the real world and the modeled world “tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.”

“There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts, and such like natural disasters, or making them more frequent,” the document declared. “However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.”

“There is no climate emergency,” it concluded. “Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm.”

“We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are,” it added.

Goofy Greens and Regulators Threaten Nuclear Revival

Despite its commitment to “no more gas, oil, or coal,” Friends of the Earth has launched a campaign against one of the nation’s “greenest” governors, California’s Gavin Newsom. Their goal? To stop the U.S. Department of Energy from doling out $1 billion to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant (no gas, oil, or coal there) open past its planned 2025 closure date.

From Watts Up With That?

By Duggan Flanakin

April 16, 2024

Despite its commitment to “no more gas, oil, or coal,” Friends of the Earth has launched a campaign against one of the nation’s “greenest” governors, California’s Gavin Newsom. Their goal? To stop the U.S. Department of Energy from doling out $1 billion to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant (no gas, oil, or coal there) open past its planned 2025 closure date.

Newsom, whose policies are among the world’s most aggressive against gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles and tools, last year stated that, “the Diablo Canyon power plant is important to support energy reliability as we accelerate progress towards achieving our clean energy and climate goals.” Diablo Canyon today supplies nearly a tenth of California’s electricity.

The aptly named FOE claims that “the environmental impacts from extending the lifespan of this aging power plant at this point in time have not been adequately addressed or disclosed to the public.” Other groups, too, spread fear about nuclear energy. But by far the most powerful obstacle for nuclear energy enthusiasts to overcome lies within the federal government.

While nuclear energy has accounted for about 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S., and in 2023 supplied nearly half the nation’s carbon-free electricity, a new report from the Government Accountability Office says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must more fully consider possible impacts of climate change on the nation’s mostly aging nuclear power plants.

The message? The GAO report says that climate-related threats to nuclear power plants range from worsened droughts that dry up water supplies needed for cooling reactors to sea level rise and storm surge flooding. Despite its regulatory obtuseness, the report said the NRC should include “data” from future climate projections [scary scenarios?] in safety risk assessments along with the historical data the NRC relies upon. All this adds costs.

Douglas McIntyre, the former editor-in-chief of 24/Wall St., last month said that, despite the obvious need for nuclear power, “many Americans, perhaps remembering Three Mile Island, do not want nuclear energy to be part of the solution.” And a recent Pew Research poll found that, “Critics highlight the high cost of nuclear power plant projects and the complexities of handling radioactive waste.”

By contrast, the U.S. Department of Energy has argued that the U.S. will need an additional 550 to 770 gigawatts of clean, firm capacity to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and that nuclear power is one of the few proven options that can fill this need. Moreover, nuclear power plants create high-paying jobs with concentrated economic benefits for the communities most impacted by the energy transition.

These dichotomous messages from the DOE and NRC are highlighted in a recent article by ThorCon International co-founder Robert Hargraves, who bluntly stated that the U.S. is not building commercial nuclear power plants – while 16 other nations are – “because NRC and EPA regulators are so misinformed about radiation.”

Regulatory overkill is a likely culprit in the failed six-reactor, 462-megawatt project NuScale had planned in cooperation with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, part of the DOE’s Carbon Free Power initiative for small modular reactors. Several towns pulled out and sank the project as the estimated price for power rose from $58 per megawatt-hour (MWh) to $89/MWh.

Misguided safety assumptions created a regulatory jungle so complex that startup Atomic Canyon is offering AI to help applicants navigate the NRC’s database of 52 million documents. U.S. nuclear energy regulators, Hargraves charged, do not analyze data about human health effects of radiation from nuclear power; instead, they rely on groupthink consensus evolved in NGOs originally misled in the 1950s by grant-seeking geneticists.

For decades these geneticists claimed radiation damage to chromosomes was increasing. But when children of the survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bomb attacks exhibited no such effects, the anti-nuclear scientists switched to alleged cancer impacts. And a major flaw in their analysis is what caused the cost of nuclear energy to skyrocket.

While studies of those survivors found no excess cancers in people receiving less than 0.1 Gray (joules of energy absorbed by kilogram of tissue), regulators set public radiation limits 100 times lower, mistakenly limiting accumulated dose rather than dose rate. In the real world, setting a maximum daily dose of 0.02 Gray (rather than the current maximum cumulative annual dose of 0.001 Gray) would provide a large safety margin.

Salisbury University Professor of Finance Danny Ervin pooh-poohs the fears of nuclear foes, saying “the next wave of nuclear can’t come soon enough.” That “next wave” includes scalable nuclear reactors, notably the TerraPower initiative sparked by Bill Gates. This advanced facility, coupled with a molten salt energy storage system, will be capable of increasing output for nearly six hours during peak demand periods at a projected cost of about $4 billion.

The plant will be powered by an advanced Natrium reactor cooled with liquid sodium instead of water [eliminating one concern of skeptics]. With a capacity to generate up to 500 megawatts, it will provide ample energy to power approximately 400,000 homes.

Of equal importance is that its location at a former coal-fired power plant in Wyoming enables easy integration into the existing electric grid while stimulating the local economy. This contrasts with wind turbines and solar arrays, which often are located far from existing transmission lines, require massive footprints, and operate intermittently, thus requiring backup power generation.

Over in England, X-Energy, in partnership with Babcock International subsidiary Cavendish, has proposed to develop a 12-reactor plant using the company’s Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled reactor design.  The Teesside array, which should be operational by the early 2030s, is the first of what the companies hope will be a fleet of up to 40 of the 80 MWe power plants in locations across the United Kingdom.

Cavendish Nuclear managing director Mick Gornall boasts that, “a fleet of Xe-100s can complement renewables by providing constant or flexible power, producing steam to decarbonize industry, and manufacturing hydrogen and synthetic transport fuels. Deployment will also, he said, create thousands of high-quality, long-term jobs nationwide.

Uranium-rich Nigeria thinks it has a solution to the radioactive waste management issue that has been a big bugaboo for the nuclear energy industry worldwide. The solution relies on the NST SuperLAT, which NuclearSAFE Technology co-founder Dr. Jimmy Etti-Williams calls “a breakthrough in nuclear waste management.”

SuperLAT will, says Etti-Williams, process, package, load, store, and transport nuclear waste in casket containers to several thousand feet underground, yet able to be retrieved as needed for fuel in reactors to generate low-carbon-footprint energy. This geological nuclear waste disposal technology is designed to isolate and dilute nuclear waste in line with universal regulations.

The SuperLAT technology should, says Etti-Williams, satisfy International Atomic Energy Agency and other stakeholder concerns about nuclear waste storage accidents, leakages, or terror risks. He boasts that Nigeria can have its own uranium plants to boost its own and pan-African development efforts.

There’s an old saying, which first appeared in 1902 in Puck’s Magazine, with the message, “People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” It is high time, many now believe, for the nay-saying over-regulators to stop interrupting nuclear progress.

And on that front, too, there is good news. Nuclear Matters has announced an online gathering entitled, “The Path to Progress: Modernizing the NRC,” scheduled for May 2.

At the event, a four-person panel moderated by the Nuclear Energy Institute’s John Kotek will discuss the urgency of NRC modernization in order to unlock the benefits of nuclear technology innovation to revitalize the U.S. nuclear energy industry.

The anti-nuke FOEs (sic) will have little left to argue once these and other innovative nuclear projects prove successful and safe when brought to the fore in other nations – places like England and Nigeria. But those who seek reliable, safe, and clean technologies to generate the electricity in quantities needed tomorrow will only be satisfied if the archaic rules can be recrafted to accommodate them.

Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

Great Lakes ‘Icebreaker’ Wind Project: Bury the Dead

The Great Lakes “Icebreaker” project, with $13 million of DOE/taxpayer money wasted, is a boondoggle waiting to end. Yet the Chicago Tribune tries to gin up hope for an expanded project to prop up the Net Zero narrative. Sherri Lange of North American Platform Against Wind Power and Great Lakes Wind Truth responds in her letter-to-the-editor below.

From The Master Resource

By Sherri Lange

Ed. Note: The Great Lakes “Icebreaker” project, with $13 million of DOE/taxpayer money wasted, is a boondoggle waiting to end. Yet the Chicago Tribune tries to gin up hope for an expanded project to prop up the Net Zero narrative. Sherri Lange of North American Platform Against Wind Power and Great Lakes Wind Truth responds in her letter-to-the-editor below.

Dear Editor

I read the piece by Nora Schoenberg, Illinois may be up to bat next to build first Great Lakes wind farm after Cleveland drops project (Chicago Tribune), with interest.

We respectfully point out that the Icebreaker failed for numerous reasons, not all financial, not all regulatory.

The mass outpouring of objections, literally from the entire globe, it is certain had some impact on the OPSB (Ohio Power Siting Board), and in 2014, then Chair Todd Snitchler agreed with many objectors, showed that the bench line for safe harbor for the project had not been achieved. There was a laundry list of “to do’s” that included: errors, omissions, contradictions, and minimal analyses. More in-depth study of bird and bat populations, mortality and pre and post construction studies of various kinds were needed, impacts of ice throw and impacts to boating communities, were part of his and our objections. These were presented by leading objectors from both sides of the border.

These objections remain in situ. No reasonable proposal to protect wildlife has ever been proposed by the Developer, who morphed from LEEDCo, to Icebreaker. In essence, the over-riding objection of contaminating 20% of the world’s remaining fresh water reserves still is place, and will be forever. Each wind turbine contains lubrication and oil of some 800 gallons, which requires replenishment and cleaning. Knowledge of the environmental impacts grows by the hour, and offshore wind generation generally is being regarded through financial losses lenses more carefully.

We would ask regulators and policy makers in Illinois to examine the exorbitant cost of offshore, the failures at various projects internationally, the damage to oceans and the quintessential harm to economies, local and more broadly, as the sweep of eco virtue signalling is clearly in a death spiral.

Polluting the Great Lakes is not a good idea, and only breeds grief in the making; we fully imagine no State or province can manage the obstacles, because they are truly GINORMOUS. And impractical. And requiring magic glasses. It’s time to allow the Ontario sensible moratorium, and the Icebreaker meltdown, to be the gold standard.

Chicago may wish for a larger project, not a demonstration project, but the grim realities will match the egotistical idea.

Let it go.

P.S. Toronto Wind Action achieved the first offshore moratorium for the Great Lakes with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, matched finally by four other moratoria including the offshore Provincial moratorium, which persists to this day. This was achieved, by convincing legislators to abide by an ‘abundance of caution.’ The Icebreaker did not survive the scrutiny and obstacles of literally tens of thousands, and in the end, did not end with a bang, but a whimper.

New Document Release Reveals Greens Engaging in Fraud to Deceive Ministers and Push German Nuclear Phase-Out

All of our countries are crazy in various ways, but when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY EUGYPPIUS

All of our countries are crazy in various ways, but when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy.

In 2011, a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. If you check a map, you’ll notice that Fukushima is in a country called Japan, which it turns out is a different country from Germany. The Fukushima disaster had zero to do with the Federal Republic, but then-Chancellor Angela Merkel felt the need to solve the problem of Fukushima by phasing out nuclear power in Germany, even though tsunamis and earthquakes are not a problem in Germany, because Germany is a country in Central Europe and not an island nation in Asia.

That is crazy enough, but it gets much crazier. Months before announcing the nuclear phase-out, Merkel’s Government had passed energy transition legislation to secure Germany’s path towards a zero-emissions future. We resolved to ditch our most significant source of emissions-free power, in other words, just months after resolving an energy transition to emissions-free power. At this point you would be justified in wondering if Germany suffers from some kind of shamanistic cultural phobia of electricity in general, that is how crazy this is. These insane choices had the near-term consequence of increasing our dependence on Russian natural gas. Otherwise, they ensured that power generation in Germany would be vastly more expensive than necessary and also vastly more carbon intensive than necessary.

Now, crazy demands explanations, and observers have proposed various theories for the German climate nuclear crazy. Two of them deserve mention here:

  1. The 1968 generation in Germany suffered from unusual radicalism, sharpened by moral anxiety over National Socialism, and resolved to outcompete all others in the project of self-abnegating virtue. Our culture developed a deranged anti-nuclear movement that in a fit of typical German thoroughness also came to embrace opposition to nuclear power. The Chernobyl disaster radicalised the pink-haired anti-nuclearists still further, and these cretins grew up to become news anchors, school teachers and book authors, effectively indoctrinating the next generation according to their parareligious delusions.
  2. German politicians after the Cold War – especially Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel – harboured a subtle and not entirely unreasonable desire to strengthen ties with resource-rich Russia. They decided that the anti-nuclearists and the Green Party could be instrumentalised towards this end. The energy transition and the nuclear phase-out increased our dependence on Russian gas, and this was a feature more than it was a bug.

These are mutually supporting theories, but I don’t think either of them can fully account for the bizarre phenomenon before us. Germany energy crazy is a very deep problem and it will keep historians busy for many generations.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Germany under Merkel’s successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, decided along with the rest of the liberal West that Russia was bad, bad, bad and that evil Putin had to be punished with self-immolating sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. This new spasm of high-minded moralising further attenuated our energy situation, ushering in an entirely self-made energy crisis. The Greens, now in government, were determined to proceed with the last stages of the nuclear phase-out, even with our natural gas supplies in doubt. Only when they saw themselves staring into the abyss of political doom did they grudgingly agree to give our last nuclear plants a three-and-a-half month lease on life. We Germans and our energy policy had out-crazied everyone else, we had made ourselves the laughing stock of the entire world, that is how crazy we were.

The Greens fought ruthless bureaucratic battles to shut off the last remaining nuclear power plants, and in the years since they have fought ruthless legal battles to keep the records of all this under seal lest their idiocies ever see the light of day. In open court, they argued that these documents must remain secret, because the German Sonderweg in all things nuclear “has to be defended in the future, both domestically and to our international and European partners” and “if the documents were to be disclosed, the negotiating partners of the Federal Government could counter our arguments”. Yes, you read that right: lawyers for the German Ministry of Economic Affairs stood before a judge last year and begged him not to release internal records relating to the German nuclear phase-out because their contents were so discrediting that they would make the policy impossible to justify at home and defend abroad.

Our Government, then, is not only crazy. Its members also know that they’re crazy, they love being crazy, they wish to persist in their crazy and they hope only that nobody else finds out about their crazy. It is like a middle-aged man with a crippling addiction to foot porn worried that his wife might stumble across his browsing history, except transmogrified into the form of a major European industrial power.

Happily, journalists for the excellent news magazine Cicero won their court battle and succeeded in forcing the release of the deeply embarrassing nuclear memos. Today Daniel Gräber has published his long-awaited analysis of these records, and what it reveals is really and truly abysmal. These documents show high civil servants literally falsifying expert reports. They show these same officials withholding information from their boss, Economics Minister Robert Habeck, lest he inconveniently arrive at the right conclusions. And they show an oblivious and wilfully deceived Habeck, still dreaming of becoming Chancellor one day and terrified of alienating the rabid antinuclearists of his own party.

Before we get to the highlights, I must introduce you to our cast of characters. They are a colourful bunch indeed. At the pinnacle of this tragicomedy is of course Habeck himself, our valiant Minister of Economic Affairs. He hails from the technocratic, so-called ‘realist’ wing of the Green Party, which means that he is Hard-Headed Very Serious Visionary and not just another crazy Leftist hippie.

Habeck as he wishes to be seen and as state media strive to portray him: the far-sighted, deeply intellectual statesman. In fact, as we will see, he is a total idiot.

Habeck’s even stupider colleague, Annalena Baerbock, ended up being the Green Chancellor candidate in the 2021 elections because feminism. Frustrated ambitions can ruin the best of men, to say nothing of petty pseudointellectual children’s book authors.

Next, you must meet Habeck’s powerful State Secretary, Patrick Graichen. This odious man, who was forced to resign May 2023 in the face of a nepotism scandal, was Habeck’s energy tsar during the 2022 crisis. He came to the Ministry following years as a lobbyist at Agora Energiewende, a think-tank responsible for devising and promoting much of the present German renewables lunacy.

Third in line is Stefan Tidow, who looks like what would happen if you blended a shark with an accountant. He also has a background at Agora, where he worked for a time under his friend Graichen. When the Scholz Government came to power, Tidow became State Secretary in the Ministry for the Environment, responsible for nuclear supervision.

Finally, there is Tidow’s subordinate, an insane lawyer named Gerrit Niehaus. Like his boss Tidow, Niehaus appears to truly loathe nuclear power for unfathomable reasons, and that is very unfortunate, because the Green Environmental Minister placed him in charge of “Department S”, the division responsible for nuclear regulation. I cannot find a good picture of Niehaus, so for the purposes of this post I invite you to imagine an unpleasant male visage of your choosing.

As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th 2022, Habeck and his Ministry knew that their plans to abolish nuclear power were in doubt. Habeck initially suggested he was open to delaying the phase-out, and his subordinates commissioned an assessment from internal experts on whether extending the lifetime of our last nuclear plants would enhance energy security. These politically neutral civil servants produced a four-page memo explaining in detail all the reasons that shutting down power plants in the face of a looming energy crisis might be a bad idea, and why it might be wise to keep them running through the winter. All the arguments that would emerge in the autumn as the energy crisis deepened were thus, as Gräber explains, “on the table right from the start… well-prepared by civil-servant experts whose job it is tend to the welfare of the entire country rather than of any specific party”.

Fascinatingly, Habeck claims that he never saw the assessment. His energy tsar Graichen, intent on phasing out nuclear power by the end of the year even if it meant freezing to death in the dark, seems to have sent it directly to the waste bin – condemning his boss to say stupid and wrong things on television for months to come.

Meanwhile, Graichen’s counterpart in the Ministry of the Environment, our accountant-shark Tidow, was working just as hard to subvert inconvenient reports on his end. On March 1st 2022, his Ministry commissioned an assessment on “scenarios compatible with nuclear safety”, should the last nuclear plants be allowed to run beyond December 31st. The authors of the report – including two outside consultants – affirmed that safety concerns did not stand in the way of extending plant lifetime “for several years” beyond the scheduled phase-out date.

Tidow’s subordinate in “Department S”, Gerrit Niehaus, found this document to be highly inconvenient, and he immediately began rewriting it. Amusingly, he replaced every occurrence of the word for “nuclear power” (Kernkraft) with the slightly more ominous-sounding “atomic power” (Atomkraft). “Then,” Gräber writes, “he set about turning the core message of the memo into its opposite.” It took him two days to do this. On March 3rd the new, falsified memo was ready, now scrubbed of the original authors’ names and sourced only to “Department S”. It argued that extending the life of Germany’s final nuclear plants by even a few months represented too great a risk to contemplate. And once again, Habeck was kept in the dark. Niehaus’s boss, Tidow, withheld the original assessment and forwarded only Niehaus’s doctored version to Graichen at the Economics Ministry. With it came a note: “Don’t formally deliver, only for you.”

There ensued an astounding comedy of the absurd. Apparently doubting that Habeck would have the appetite to read even the doctored memo, Graichen drew up an entirely new document, entitled ‘An examination of the continued operation of nuclear power plants in view of the war in Ukraine’. Of course, this was yet another bureaucratic invention that recommended against extending the life of the last German nuclear plants, and this on an even more egregiously pseudointellectual basis. Graichen promptly forwarded this fraudulent derivation of a falsified memo of a genuine assessment to Habeck – who of course really, really loved it.

It was a Friday evening, but Habeck’s intellectual orgasm was so intense that he spent the evening and much of the next day rewriting Graichen’s farce into a long question-and-answer dialogue. Having finished this labour of love, our proud schoolboy happily forwarded it to Graichen and Tidow, explaining that he had reworked Graichen’s “marvellous paper” into an FAQ, “because I believe this has to be NARRATED. If you want to read about this, so will everyone else”. Habeck suggested that they send this fourth narrative derivation of Graichen’s fraudulent reconception of Niehaus’s falsified memo of a genuine assessment to the nuclear plant operators the next day, at noon.

Our bureaucratic wizards now had a very delicate problem. As Niehaus explained, Graichen’s memo (derivation number three) was a complete disaster – “grossly wrong in legal terms” and mistaken in other respects as well. Habeck had unknowingly taken all of this ignorance into his “NARRATIVE” and was now demanding they use this monument of ideological idiocy to tell the actual experts – the nuclear plant operators – how things had to be. There followed, as Gräber writes, “a lively email exchange in which Habeck’s people wondered what they should do about the story written by their boss, which was based on false facts”. They finally posted a “radically shortened” and “heavily rewritten” version to the Ministry website on March 8th.

In the end, the Green bureaucrats lost the battle but they won the war. All the fake, invented reasons why the nuclear plants could not be left running into the spring melted away as the energy crisis deepened and the Government found themselves toeing the brink of political annihilation. The plants did go offline, however, if a little later than Graichen, Tidow and Niehaus had hoped. The Greens declared victory and Habeck dreams of his future Chancellorship to this day. What remained in the archives of Habeck’s ministry were the awkward leavings of their radicalism, ignorance and will to deceive, which in this case at least they failed to keep from us.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.