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.
Smart water meters must be made compulsory across all households to protect the UK against climate change, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has warned.
Smart water meters must be made compulsory across all households to protect the UK against climate change, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has warned.
The government agency is urging ministers to ramp up the rollout of devices, as it claims water supplies were becoming one of the country’s biggest challenges.
In its latest report, NIC officials said water companies should have the power to compel all homes to accept smart meters as part of a “concerted campaign to reduce water demand”.
The UK used about 10bn litres of water a day in 1960 but that has since risen to around 15bn.
On Wednesday, CFACT’s Greg Neff was present to directly question State Street’s Board of Directors about their openness to start financing more fossil fuel projects during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. He was pleased to get an answer from none other than the company’s chief CEO himself, Ronald O’Hanley.
On Wednesday, CFACT’s Greg Neff was present to directly question State Street’s Board of Directors about their openness to start financing more fossil fuel projects during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. He was pleased to get an answer from none other than the company’s chief CEO himself, Ronald O’Hanley.
Neff, the first questioner of the day, asked, “In the opinion of many shareholders, State Street was wise to jump on the bandwagon to pull out of Climate Action 100+. Can we now expect to see the company also start backing more viable energy sources like oil, gas and nuclear as opposed to costly and unreliable solar and wind?”
State Street’s CEO O’Hanley responded, “State Street’s position on energy is that we act in the long-term value of our investors. Our stewardship activities, where we choose to vote, are based on the investment desires of our clients and what we, along with them, determine are in their best interests. In the case of energy, we are a huge investor in all forms of energy. Our investment in energy really reflects the percentage that energy constitutes of the market capitalization overall. And I think you will find we are a broad-based investor in all forms of energy.”
State Street has long been associated with aggressively promoting “Environmental, Social, and Government” criteria through its investment strategies. It has taken criticism for its activism from GOP lawmakers and Free Market think tanks like CFACT for its promotion of woke issues and climate alarmism in recent years and has slowly backpedaled. In February, State Street, along with JP Morgan and BlackRock, pulled out of Climate Action 100+, an organization formed to pressure companies into reducing their greenhouse gas emissions along the lines of the Paris Accord.
After the meeting concluded, Neff delivered this optimistic assessment of the company’s direction: “While it would be ideal for the company to not throw resources into markets that can only be viable so long as they receive government subsidies, it does appear that this S&P 500 company is starting to understand that kowtowing to the radical green agenda is not a good business decision. Hopefully they will back more stable forms of energy in the near future. We’ll see!”
CFACT has many more meetings of publicly traded companies they will be attending in the coming weeks and will be reporting the results here.
“Misinformation” — It has been one of the most-used buzzwords of the past few years. The “misinformation” label has been applied by advocates on both sides of the political divide in the attempt to discredit their opponents.
“Misinformation” — It has been one of the most-used buzzwords of the past few years. The “misinformation” label has been applied by advocates on both sides of the political divide in the attempt to discredit their opponents. Numerous assertions that have dominated the news cycle for months or even years have ultimately proven to be completely false, that is, “misinformation.” Examples of such assertions that have been established as “misinformation” include the assertion that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election; the assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian plant; and the assertion that the Covid virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
After the thorough discrediting of so many false narratives during these years, there remain plenty of narratives still out there that richly deserve the “misinformation” label. But of those, which is the very worst, the very most pernicious? Here is my candidate: the assertion that the cheapest way to generate electricity today is with wind and solar generators.
I recognize that there are many candidates for the title of the worst of all misinformation, and we are dealing here with a very crowded field. Numerous other endlessly-repeated false assertions contend for the title, many of them having very large real-world consequences. For example, other serious contenders for the title of “most pernicious misinformation” could include the assertion that emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases constitute a danger to human health and welfare; or the assertion that Israel is conducting a “genocide” against Palestinians. Undoubtedly, you have other candidates to add to the list.
So why do I say that the assertion of wind and solar being the cheapest ways to generate electricity is the very most pernicious of misinformation currently out there? Here are my three reasons: (1) the assertion is repeated endlessly and ubiquitously, (2) it is the basis for the misallocation of trillions of dollars of resources and for great impoverishment of billions of people around the world, and (3) it is false to the point of being preposterous, an insult to everyone’s intelligence, yet rarely challenged.
How ubiquitous is the assertion that wind and solar are the cheapest ways to generate electricity? Try Googling the question “What is the cheapest way to produce electricity?” You will get multiple pages of results advocating for wind and solar electricity, with almost no mention of the problems or costs of intermittency. A few examples of what turns up:
The top result from Galooli.com, March 13, 2022, “Which Renewable Energy is Cheapest? A Guide to Cost and Efficiency”: “According to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook and other research projects, solar and wind energy have continued to occupy the top spots in terms of the cheapest renewable energy sources. Both energy sources cost significantly less than fossil fuel alternatives and continue to become more affordable every year.”
Next up, decarbonization.com, August 2, 2023, “Ranked: The Cheapest Sources of Electricity in the U.S.”: “According to Lazard’s 2023 analysis of unsubsidized LCOE in the U.S., both onshore wind and utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies are more cost-effective than combined cycle natural gas power plants. In the case of onshore wind, this has been true since 2015.”
Next, carbonbrief.com, October 13, 2020, “Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA.”: “The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries. That is according to the International Energy Agency. . . .”
Keep going for dozens of these for page after page. Try to find in any of them a serious discussion of the costs of backup, storage, or transmission upgrades to try to make an electrical grid work with these intermittent generators. You won’t. And don’t think that the high-brow mainstream sources can be trusted for anything better. Here is the New York Times from August 17, 2023: “The cost of generating electricity from the sun and wind is falling fast and in many areas is now cheaper than gas, oil or coal.”
In the face of hundreds of different journalism outlets endlessly repeating in unison the mantra of cheap “renewable” electricity, it becomes difficult to blame the voters or the politicians for just nodding along with the crowd. Why do any mentally taxing independent thinking when everybody seems to be saying the same thing?
The problem is that the idea that wind and solar make the cheapest electricity is plain wrong. At least, it is plain wrong if the electricity you are talking about is the reliable sort that works whenever you want to turn on the switch. The idea that wind and solar are cheapest fails to take account of any of the ancillary costs necessary to make a fully-functioning grid: the entire system of backup facilities to provide the power when the wind is not blowing and the sun not shining; the transmission facilities to take the power from wherever is windy or sunny to anywhere else it may be needed on a moment’s notice; the batteries or other storage facilities to save up energy in anticipation of inevitable wind and solar droughts; and so forth. In short, the idea that wind and solar generation of electricity are the “cheapest” is classic misinformation, the endless repetition of an assertion that is clearly false and known to be false.
Meanwhile, among the people incapable of seeing through the fog of misinformation on this subject are our current President, and the Governors of New York and California. In the case of the states, they throw tens of billions of dollars of handouts and subsidies to develop wind and solar facilities (hundreds of billions of dollars in the case of the feds), never having the presence of mind to realize that none of that would be necessary of this method of generation were actually cheaper as claimed.
Between the vast mis-allocation of resources and the sheer preposterousness of the proposition in question, I think that this assertion of wind and solar electricity generation being “cheapest” definitely has the claim for the number one spot.
The grisly streak of neo-Malthusianism that runs through the green movement reared its ugly head earlier this week when former United Nations contributing author and retired UCL Professor Bill McGuire tweeted that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic.
The grisly streak of neo-Malthusianism that runs through the green movement reared its ugly head earlier this week when former United Nations contributing author and retired UCL Professor Bill McGuire tweeted that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic. The tweet was subsequently withdrawn by McGuire, “not because I regret it”, but people took it the wrong way. McGuire is the alarmists’ alarmist, suggesting for instance that human-caused climate change could lead to more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The Daily Sceptic will not take his views the wrong way. They are an illuminating insight into environmental Malthusianism that does not get anything like the amount of publicity it deserves.
Every now and then Sir David Attenborough allows the genial TV presenter mask to slip to reveal a harder-edged Malthusian side. Speaking to BBC Breakfast in 2021, he suggested that the Earth would be better off without the human race, describing us as “intruders”. In 2009, Attenborough became the patron of the Optimum Population Trust and told the Guardian: “I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.” In 2013, he made the appalling remark that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Too little land, too many people, was his considered judgement.
Any consideration of the refusal of food aid these days brings to mind the 19th century Malthusian Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant during the Irish famines who saw the starvation as retribution on the local population for their moral failings and tendency to have numerous children. He is said to have seen the great loss of life as a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of reform and regeneration.
Anti-human sentiment is riven through much green thinking. In 2019, Anglia Ruskin University Professor Patricia MacCormack wrote a book suggesting humans were already enslaved to the point of “zombiedom” because of capitalism, and “phasing out reproduction is the only way to repair the damage done to the world”. Green fanatics can be a joyless crowd – it is not enough to declare a climate crisis, now they want a ‘nookie’ emergency. As the economist and philosopher Robert Boulding once remarked: “Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”
But at least most of them – one must fervently pray – stop short of Clemson University Philosophy Professor Todd May, who has asked if human extinction would be a tragedy. He is of the considered opinion that it might be a good thing “for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering”. But he did accept that the policy would cause “significant suffering” among those who had much to lose by dying.
In an interesting paper published in 2022, the science historian Dr. Emily Klancher Merchant notes that environmental Malthusianism – the idea that human population growth is the primary driver of environmental harms and population control is a prerequisite to environmental protection – is experiencing a “resurgence”. She notes the views of Philosophy Emeritus Professor Sarah Conly who contends that it is not only wrong to have more than one child in the current environmental climate, but humans do not even retain the right to do so. Biologist Dr. Colin Hickey says that the threats posed by climate change justify “population engineering”, which he defines as the “intentional manipulation of the size and structure of human populations”. Governments should act to enforce a one child policy.
It is not an exaggeration to state that at the core of the modern green movement is a visceral hatred of humanity. There are just too many people on the planet, why won’t half of them just go away? The unnecessary Covid lockdowns were the ultimate luxury treat for many middle class fanatics – tons of social control, quiet streets, anyone not ‘essential’ locked away, plenty of food and drink in Waitrose. The American journalist H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy”. Imposing collective lock-away misery on entire populations – let joy be unconfined.
Industrialisation over the last 200 years has brought enormous benefits to humankind and given many people a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors. Life in the ‘natural’ state is nasty, brutish and short, a fate still awaiting almost every species on Earth, except, at the moment, homo sapiens. The green movement is a rejection of enlightenment and progress. It seeks to impoverish populations with Net Zero fantasies backed by deceitful claims of climate collapse, mass extinctions and non-existent climate refugees. Any move to stop humans procreating children is evil personified. Actual triumphs of environmentalism such as the massive recent greening of the planet and the protection of wild spaces as countries become richer are ignored. We have seen many such destructive cults in the past – a drive to control other people whatever the cost – a cost not borne, of course, by the saviour class itself. A war on essential hydrocarbons is really an undeclared war on humanity and human development.
Treble pandemics all round.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironmental Editor.
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