Day: July 22, 2024

7 weeks of rain and 5 years in prison

5 years ago, we published an article about Roger Hallam in this blog. He is the founder of XTinction Rebellion and an activist with Stop Oil. Interestingly, these groups are/were financed with money from oil heirs. Already in 2019 we had many doubts about the “story” of Hallam, it was simply too implausible.

 By KlimaNachrichten

5 years ago, we published an article about Roger Hallam in this blog. He is the founder of XTinction Rebellion and an activist with Stop Oil. Interestingly, these groups are/were financed with money from oil heirs. Already in 2019 we had many doubts about the “story” of Hallam, it was simply too implausible.

“No, you don’t have to comb through meteorological data from Wales to find such a summer rainy period. At least not in the last 10 – 15 years. Small spoiler: They didn’t exist!

However, the perception of Extinction Rebellion (XR) sect founder Roger Hallam is completely different. In an interview in Der Spiegel, he talks about his apparently traumatic experience with the 7 weeks of rain in Wales that destroyed his carrot harvest. The fact that the interviewer did not notice some inconsistencies in Hallam’s statements does not exactly speak for him. But that’s just the way it is with human perceptions.

Hallam described himself as a small farmer, at the same time he had 25! jobs were lost due to the demonstrably non-existent rainy period. The year of his personal tragedy was also no longer quite familiar to the XR founder. “10 – 15 years ago” he stated in the interview that it had also caused him a loss of several hundred thousand pounds.

Let’s imagine that the loss of so much money endangers one’s own existence. Would we not be able to name the exact year later? The amount of his loss (“several hundred thousand pounds”) also did not arouse any skepticism in the interviewer. According to Ökolandbau.de, the contribution margin in carrot cultivation is the equivalent of GBP (British pounds) 6,300 per hectare. Calculated on profit, it is GBP 2,100 per hectare. For every hundred thousand GBP loss, Hallam would have had to cultivate almost 16 hectares (contribution margin) or 50 hectares (profit). Only with carrots, mind you.”

Extinction Rebellion XR has become a bit quiet. They stood out above all for their costumes, which would have been a credit to any season of Game of Thrones. In Germany, the “Last Generation” took over the actions, in the United Kingdom Stop Oil. This included smearing art or blocking roads. Recently, the verdict was handed down and Hallam was hit hardest. He is now allowed to spend 5 years in prison thinking about whether these were really good protest actions. Hallam had repeatedly failed to comply with court requirements. And of course, in his opinion, the system is corrupt. Or maybe the jug only goes to the well until it breaks. BBC:

“Hallam said in a statement during the trial: “The corruption of our judges by the carbon state has crossed a line in the sand. ” This is an opportunity, and an obligation, to act. We only have a limited amount of time to halt the unimaginable horrors of climate and social collapse – and to save our democracy.” The law of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, which was introduced in 2022, outlaws direct action that causes “serious harm” to a section of the public. This can include property damage, injury, serious distress, annoyance or inconvenience. In April 2023, Morgan Trowland, who scaled the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, was jailed for three years for an offence under the new legislation. The judge in the M25 case argued that Parliament had made clear it saw non-violent direct action against national infrastructure as serious and passed a law allowing him to hand down sentences of up to 10 years – more than for some violent offences.”

In Germany, climate activists are still getting off comparatively mildly. RBB:

The Tiergarten District Court has sentenced a 32-year-old activist of the “Last Generation” to imprisonment without parole. She had glued herself to roadways several times and sprayed buildings with paint.

A 32-year-old climate activist from the group “Last Generation” has been sentenced to one year and four months in prison for several actions in Berlin. She was found guilty of resisting law enforcement officers, coercion and damage to property, as a spokeswoman for the Tiergarten district court announced on Wednesday. The sentence was imposed without parole. The verdict is not final.

Waging War on Modern Agriculture and Global Nutrition

The World Economic Forum says the world faces a new crisis, “One-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from food production.” With the world’s population expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050, it is therefore “urgent” that we launch a “radical” and “comprehensive” transformation of the global food system – from “reinventing” farming to “reimagining” how food is produced, processed, distributed, consumed and disposed of.

From Watts Up With That?

Demands for organic or subsistence farming worldwide would devastate nature and nutrition

Paul Driessen

The World Economic Forum says the world faces a new crisis, “One-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from food production.” With the world’s population expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050, it is therefore “urgent” that we launch a “radical” and “comprehensive” transformation of the global food system – from “reinventing” farming to “reimagining” how food is produced, processed, distributed, consumed and disposed of.

Reinforcing this message, Stop Ecocide Now founder Jojo Mehta expanded on Greta Thunberg’s incendiary 2020 rant that “our house is on fire and you’re fueling the flames.” Farming is a “serious crime,” equal to “genocide,” Ms. Mehta told elites at the 2024 WEF meeting in Davos.

Their grasp of agriculture is epitomized by Michael Bloomberg’s suggestion that anybody can be a farmer: “You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, you add water, up comes the corn.”

Modern farming and its supposedly dangerous greenhouse gas emissions are a tad more complicated.

Modern mechanized farming employs oil derivatives as fuel for equipment and feed stocks for herbicides and pesticides, natural gas to dry grain and make fertilizers, and livestock to provide protein.

Tractors, trucks, farmers and livestock emit carbon dioxide, adding to the 0.04% of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere (equivalent to $40 of $100,000). Cattle emissions add methane to the existing 0.0002% CH4 in the atmosphere (20¢ of $100,000). Nitrogen fertilizers add to the “dramatic” 200-year rise in atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O), bringing it to a still minuscule 0.00003% (that’s 3¢ of $100,000).

These emissions allegedly drive “cataclysmic” climate change and extreme weather, endangering all life on Earth. But then what caused five Ice Ages (including the Pleistocene Era and its mile-high glaciers, which ended 12,000 years ago), the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, and the Little Ice Age (1350-1850) to come and go?

Of course, natural forces can’t drive climate hysteria and WEF-Gore-Biden anti-fossil-fuel agendas. Fear-mongering political, activist, media and academic elites therefore ignore them.

In the Real World, the wondrous reality is that, after centuries of excruciatingly slow progress, agricultural advances over the past 75 years have been nothing short of astonishing. Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution employed plant breeding techniques that multiplied yields of vital grain crops, saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Since 1950, American farmers increased per-acre corn yields by an incredible 500% and other crop yields by smaller but still amazing amounts – while using used less land, water and fuel … and fewer fertilizers and pesticides per ton of produce. Their exports helped slash global hunger and malnutrition even further.

Meanwhile, despite supposed impacts from manmade climate change, farmers in Brazil, India and many other countries have also enjoyed record harvests.

Multiple miracle technologies contributed. Hybrid seeds combine valuable traits from different related plants. Biotechseeds protect crops against voracious insects and destructive viruses, while reducing water and pesticide demand. Virus-resistant biotech cultivars have even replaced endangered papayas in Hawaii, cassava and bananas in Africa, and other crops.

Nitrogen (ammonia) fertilizers, synthesized from natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen, have joined phosphorus and potassium in supercharging soils. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide spurs plant growth and reduces water demand even further.

Long-lasting herbicides control weeds that would otherwise steal moisture and nutrients from crops – and enable farmers to utilize no-till farming that avoids breaking up soils, reduces erosion, retains soil moisture and preserves vital soil organisms.

Technologies developed in Israel make it possible to grow an amazing array of crops in the Negev and Arava Deserts, which receive a fraction of the annual rainfall that Arizona gets. Desalination plants turn seawater into 80% of Israel’s drinking water, dramatically reducing pressure on the Sea of Galilee, manmade reservoirs and groundwater supplies.

Israelis then recycle 90% of their home, business, school and hospital water – for use in agriculture, where drip irrigation delivers precise amounts of water precisely where crops and other plants need it, minimizing evaporation.

Huge high-tech tractors use GPS systems, sensors and other equipment to steer precise courses across fields, while constantly measuring soil composition, and injecting just the right kinds and amounts of fertilizers and herbicides, along with seeds, to ensure optimal harvests.

Not all these technologies are available across the globe. However, farmer can access information about both the technologies and the modern practices through online libraries and programs on cell phones.

Instead, this progress is under assault – by ill-advised or ill–intended, but well-funded organizations that want to turn the Green Revolution into Green Tyranny, Eco-Imperialism and global malnutrition.

Their hatred of biotech crops is intense and well-documented. But many also despise hybrid seeds. They want modern herbicides and insecticides banned, in favor of “natural” alternatives – which are often toxic to bees, fish, other animals and people and have not been tested for long-term harm to humans.

These agricultural anarchists also demand “natural” fertilizers, which typically provide a fraction of the nutrients that modern synthetic fertilizers do. At the very least, they want global organic farming, which would mean much lower crop yields per acre than conventional farming, and plowing many millions of additional acres of wildlife habitat and scenic land, to get the same amounts of food.

They say people in Africa, Asia and Latin America should practice subsistence farming – which they prefer to call “traditional” farming, Agro-Ecology, “food sovereignty,” or the “right to choose” “culturally appropriate” food produced through “ecologically sound and sustainable methods,” based on “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices.”

In plain English, Agro-Ecology is rabidly opposed to biotechnology, monoculture farming, non-organic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and even mechanized equipment and hybrid seeds.

You can imagine how Agro-Ecologists would react if African farmers wanted to assert their food sovereignty, self-determination and right to choose by planting biotech Bt corn, to get higher yields, reduce pesticide use, enjoy better living standards and send their kids to school. The agro-anarchists would vilify them as vile supporters of violence against women, land-grabbing corporations, mass expropriation of indigenous rights, genocide and other “crimes against humanity.”

They also promote “alternative protein.” They say Africa would be “the perfect laboratory” for testing new foods – such as “crackers, muffins, meat loaves and sausages” made from lake flies. In fact, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Popular Science magazine and many other outfits extol the virtues of “entomophagy” – the clever progressive term for eating bug burgers, instead of hamburgers.

They even offer recipes and techniques for processing “edible insects” into tasty, nutritious products that can improve diets and livelihoods, create thriving local businesses, and even promote inclusion of women. In fact, they say, bugs can have twice as much protein per pound as beef; grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, beetles, ants and cicadas make great snacks, desserts, guacamole and even entire meals; and mealworms have “an earthy flavor, similar to mushrooms,” making them excellent additions to brownies. Sautéed with a little salt, mealworms also make “protein-boosted potato chips.” Yummy!

Who are these guys – these agriculture and nutrition anarchists and revolutionaries? Stay tuned.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.

Did The Guardian Just Blow Up the Exxon Knew Narrative?

So much for the big secret big oil conspiracy. Marathon Oil published an article in 1977 in a company periodical suggesting CO2 might cause mass starvation.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

So much for the big secret big oil conspiracy. Marathon Oil published an article in 1977 in a company periodical suggesting CO2 might cause mass starvation.

US oil company ran 1977 article predicting climate crisis could cause starvation

Marathon Petroleum predecessor warned of potential for ‘social and economic calamities’ in decades-old publication

Geoff Dembicki Thu 18 Jul 2024 22.00 AESTShare

The corporate predecessor to America’s largest refiner of oil, Marathon Petroleum, explained in a company periodical nearly 50 years ago that global temperature rise potentially linked to “industrial expansion” could one day cause “widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities”.

This decades-old description of climate breakdown is from a 1977 issue of the magazine Marathon World and is attributed in the article by an unnamed author to several experts including a scientist working for a top US agency.

“Although climatologists disagree on the underlying reasons, many see a future climate of greater variability, bringing with it areas of extreme drought,” said the magazine, previously published by Marathon Oil Company, which later split into Marathon Petroleum as well as the exploration and production company Marathon Oil.

Marathon Petroleum is among several oil and gas companies – including Exxon, Shell and BP – currently being sued by the city of Honolulu for allegedly engaging in a coordinated communications effort “to conceal and deny their own knowledge” of catastrophic climate impacts caused by burning their products.

…Read more:

 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/us-oil-marathon-petroleum-climate-change

A company periodical is not exactly a secret internal memo.

Suggesting oil companies knew we were heading for certain doom back in the 1970s and tried to hide that knowledge is an absurd position even without this latest revelation, because climate scientists themselves were offering wildly differing opinions in the 1970s.

Well credentialed scientists like Gifford Miller, Stephen Schneider, Chester Langway and James Hayes appeared in the wildly popular 1978 documentary “In search of … The Coming Ice Age”. The scientists in the documentary defended their claim the world could be on the brink of a global cooling catastrophe. Schneider suggested using nuclear reactors to melt the polar ice caps.

I remember watching this documentary as a kid. The presenter was Leonard Nimoy, the original Star Trek Doctor Spock. All the adults were worried about this icy threat to their children’s future.

The lack of certainty about the science is further supported by the “secret” internal memos which are the alleged smoking guns of the fake Big Oil conspiracy narrative. For example, the following is a copy of the Glaser 1982 memo, which was circulated to Exxon management.

,1982_ExxonHerunterladen

The memo, and bear in mind this was a private internal memo, is anything but certain that climate change will have catastrophic impact. For example, at the bottom of Page 4, continuing to the top of Page 5.

“There is currently no unambiguous evidence that the earth is warming. If the earth is on a warming trend, we’re not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5° needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations. On the other hand, if climate modelling uncertainties have exaggerated the temperature rise, it is possible that a carbon dioxide induced “greenhouse effect” may not be detected until 2020 at the earliest”.

Why didn’t oil companies adjust their positions when global warming activists started to dominate the scientific debate, and scientists like Stephen Schneider jumped ship and joined the global warming camp?

There is a lot of evidence CO2 does not drive climate change – in the paleo record, CO2 follows climate change, not the other way around. Something else triggered the climate change which drove historical changes in CO2 level – including downward shifts in temperature when CO2 levels were high.

Causality Analysis Finds Temperature Changes Have Determined CO2 Changes Since The Phanerozoic – Watts Up With That?

But there is a more obvious explanation for oil companies executives and other corporates don’t take every pivot of the scientific doomsday movement seriously – alarmists keep getting their predictions wrong.

Hardly a day passes we don’t discover yet another “settled science” disaster prediction turns out to be dead wrong.

Yale360: CO2 is Greening the Deserts – But it is Still Bad News – Watts Up With That?

Whatever happened to the 1.5C global warming safety limit?

Media Reports Earth’s ‘1.5C Temperature limit’ was ‘breached for 12 months in a row’ – Nothing Bad Happened – Watts Up With That?

The predictive failure and alarmism of the scientific catastrophe movement was as obvious in the 1970s as it is today. For example, Paul Ehrlich’s blockbuster 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted mass starvation within a decade.

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

Many of the oil company executives who ignored global warming alarmism in the 70s and 80s would have been well aware of predictive failures like Ehrlich’s book, and would also have been aware of scientists like Stephen Schneider, who in just a few short years jumped ship from demanding fossil fuel be shut down to prevent the next ice age, to demanding fossil fuel be shut down to prevent the world from overheating. They would have all seen Schneider preaching global cooling in the “In search of” documentary, and their own researchers would have told them how Schneider flip-flopped between global warming scares and global cooling scares in the 1970s.

Wikipedia suggests the date of Schneider’s global warming awakening occurred in 1974, but if this is the case, why did Schneider appear in the 1978 “In search of” documentary and suggest melting the ice caps? Was it a case of “what is Schneider saying this week?”. No wonder oil company executives didn’t take it seriously.

Against this decades old backdrop of unsettled science and flip-flopping doomsday claims, there is one thing we do know for sure.

The year oil companies are shut down is the year six billion people die from starvation.

Fossil fuel is utterly essential for producing the fertiliser and pesticides, and transporting the food which allowed the world’s population of millions to grow into a global population of billions. Even nuclear power couldn’t replace all the ways fossil fuel makes our modern society possible, without trillions of dollars of additional investment. If fossil fuel was withdrawn today, or even over the next decade, food production methods would be forced to return to the agricultural practices of the 18th century, and most people alive today would surely die.

Biden’s Energy Policies Directly Cost U.S. Households More Than $2,548 Since 2021

Energy prices continue to surge due to President Joe Biden’s radical energy and climate agenda, according to an analysis by The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank. The analysis depended entirely on data from Biden’s U.S. Energy Information Administration.

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

By Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett

*Editors’ Note: As two previous reports have shown (one from 2022, one from 2023) Biden’s climate and energy policies have resulted in rising electricity, heating, and fuel costs., harming average U.S. households. 

Energy prices continue to surge due to President Joe Biden’s radical energy and climate agenda, according to an analysis by The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank. The analysis depended entirely on data from Biden’s U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In 2021, household electricity prices increased 8 percent. Electricity price increases accelerated even more in 2022, and continued to rise in 2023. Since December 2020, the last month before Biden took office, residential electricity prices have increased by 23 percent.

Key Points

Over the past three years:

  • Residential electricity prices have increased 23 percent
  • Industrial electricity prices have increased 19 percent
  • Home heating oil prices have increased 69 percent
  • Oil prices have increased 52 percent
  • Natural gas prices have increased 32 percent
  • Gasoline has increased $0.97 per gallon, or 42 percent

After three years of Biden’s energy policies, the average U.S. driver has spent at least an extra $548 per year in higher gasoline costs while the average household has expended $318 in higher electricity costs. Households that use natural gas have spent an extra $586 over the past three years, and those using home heating oil have paid a whopping $3,068 more.

Since Biden entered the Oval Office, the average American household has directly paid at least $2,548 in higher direct energy costs. This is the cost calculated by averaging price increases from January 2021 through December 2023, which means the actual added cost of energy is likely even higher.

The Heartland Institute analysis states: “Rapidly rising energy prices are not accidental. They are the predictable result of Joe Biden’s war on abundant, affordable, and reliable energy. The Biden administration has implemented dozens of policies that have caused energy prices to spike.”

To read the full report, click here.

An Example of What “Climate Alarmist Propaganda” Looks Like

An Example of What “Climate Alarmist Propaganda” Looks Like

From Watts Up With That?

An Example of What “Climate Alarmist Propaganda” Looks Like

Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

Shown below are U.S. daily weather graphs for Thursday July 18, 2024, as presented in the O C Register and L A Times morning newspapers respectively.

For an additional comparison these 2 U.S. whether graphs are shown side by side below.

The daily July 18 high and low temperatures for all the U.S. cities listed are the same in both these daily weather graphs.

Guess which of these two newspapers (hint – look at the amount of “red”) has been pushing a completely biased climate alarmist propaganda campaign for decades?

And yet the news media wonder why their claims have such low credibility marks from the public with AXIOS reporting a record low 39% of the public indicating “they don’t trust the media at all.”

Clearly this outcome is well supported and completely justified. 

Help Wanted:  Storyline Developer

In the spirit of co-operation, I’d like to help publicize the effort of Ed “Show Your Stripes” Hawkins, a climate crisis hawk at University of Reading in his search for “a motivated researcher to develop storylines of extreme weather events, including their attribution.”

From Watts Up With That?

Opinion by Kip Hansen

In the spirit of co-operation, I’d like to help publicize the effort of Ed “Show Your Stripes” Hawkins, a climate crisis hawk at University of Reading in his search for  “a motivated researcher to develop storylines of extreme weather events, including their attribution.”

You see, the first part of the job is to develop storylines of extreme weather events.   You might think that his just means “make up stories”  or maybe “invent Just-So stories” for extreme weather events, then blaming them on Climate Change.     You might be right. 

The Extreme Weather Event Storylines are important for the types of climate science done in Hawkins’ department at University of Reading – supplying quotable storylines blaming climate change for extreme weather events to The Guardian and other media gets the University and Hawkins  in the news and helps bring in research funds. 

This Post-doc will be guided by a technique made-up by Hawkins himself:

“This project will develop a reanalysis-based approach to translate observed historical and recent extreme weather events into different climates to quantitatively describe how those weather events and their impacts would be different in warmer or cooler ‘counter-factual’ worlds.”

Oh, yes, the “reanalysis-based approach” is to be based on Hawkins et al. 2023:  “ESD Ideas: Translating historical extreme weather events into a warmer world”.

Note:  “Earth System Dynamics  [ESD] – An interactive open-access journal of the European Geosciences Union”.

Here’s a sample:

“A new reanalysis-based approach is proposed to examine how reconstructions of extreme weather events differ in warmer or cooler counter-factual worlds. This approach offers a novel way to develop plausible storylines for some types of extreme event that other methods may not be suitable for. As a proof of concept, a reanalysis of a severe windstorm that occurred in February 1903 is translated into a warmer world where it produces higher wind speeds and increased rainfall, suggesting that this storm would be more damaging if it occurred today rather than 120 years ago.”

and

“Whenever a severe weather event occurs with harmful impacts in a particular region, it is often asked by disaster responders, recovery planners, politicians, and journalists whether climate change caused or affected the event. The harmful impacts are caused by the unusual weather, but climate change may have made the weather event more likely, more severe, or both. In those cases, the harmful impacts may be partly or even mostly due to the change in climate. In some cases, the worst consequences may be due to the vulnerability or exposure of the local population or ecosystems, or due to a combination of many other factors.”

This not-so-scientific approach only seeks to “develop plausible storylines” – in short, just something that the general public, ignorant as they are as to the real causes of weather and climate, will be willing to swallow without question – you see, the storyline just needs to be  plausible:

Plausible — that’s Hawkins’ word, not mine.  The storylines they want are not even intended to be scientifically valid.

Readers might want to read the proof of concept example in the paper…a masterpiece of model fiddling, cherry-picking multiple-model-runs output for the run that supports one’s hypothesis and the unholy hubris involved with the pretense that climate models of the past, present or future output single, definitive and true representations of moment-in-time regional single-factor weather features.

But, hey, the position pays well:

Salary: £33,966 – £44,263 per annum ($44,000 to $57,000)

Only those lacking scientific integrity and having flexible moral fiber need apply.

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

Let me supply the “end snarcasm ” tag here:  “/snarc”. 

There, I hope you are satisfied.  Sometimes I get a “little testy” and it just kinda boils over.

Honestly, I laughed out loud when I read the following line in Hawkins’ paper where the authors admit:

“This approach offers a novel way to develop plausible storylines for some types of extreme event that other methods may not be suitable for.”

My apologies to some that might be offended and to some others, not.   

Thanks for reading.

# # # # #

Inflation be damned: Brown coal power is just 1c per kilowatt hour in 2024

Imagine, in this cost-of-living crisis, if the nation discovered a 430 billion ton deposit that could produce electricity at a tenth the cost of gas and hydroelectricity? What a bonanza — the people could live like kings with heated pools, large homes, indoor spas and businesses would flock to the state to set up production lines. The state would become a trade giant and a mecca for tech.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Brown coal is the best kept secret in Australia

Imagine, in this cost-of-living crisis, if the nation discovered a 430 billion ton deposit  that could produce electricity at a tenth the cost of gas and hydroelectricity? What a bonanza — the people could live like kings with heated pools, large homes, indoor spas and businesses would flock to the state to set up production lines. The state would become a trade giant and a mecca for tech.

Then imagine they let themselves be spooked into not using it for fear it would cause bad storms in a hundred years? Like the country is run by teenage girls…

Source: AER

Despite the costs of everything rising in 2024, the brown coal plants in Victoria are still offering to supply wholesale electricity at $8 per megawatt hour (which is 0.8c per kilowatt hour). That’s the average winning bid from brown coal plants across Quarter 1, 2024.

In the chart below of the last five years of quarterly prices, we can see that every single quarter brown coal power is the cheapest source of electricity there is bar none. (Wind and solar power, with their crazy negative prices, don’t count because they’re subsidized up-the-kazoo. Their real cost is paid through other hidden means. It’s either that, or the negative prices tell us wind and solar power are so awful you have pay people to take those toxic electrons away…).

In the last quarter brown coal set the winning bid price about 15% of the time. These were the times  when there was enough brown coal power in Victoria that the grid managers didn’t have to buy any black coal, gas or hydro power at all.

The more coal power Victoria has, the more often the wholesale price will be insanely low…

Because of the way the auction works, the highest successful bidder sets the price for everyone. In theory, generators are supposed to bid the lowest price they’d accept and then the AEMO takes the cheapest offers first until it meets the full demand.

And it’s the same all across the Eastern Coast of Australia — in New South Wales was getting bids from brown coal generators at $12 per megawatt hour. In South Australia, $11. In Queensland $13, and in Tasmania $7.

DATA

The AER has the data on the price setting bids.   NSW | QLD | Victoria | SA | Tas

Bravo! ‘Twisters’ Director on Not Mentioning Climate Change: Movies Shouldn’t ‘Preach a Message’

‘Twisters’ Director on Not Mentioning Climate Change: Movies Shouldn’t “Preach a Message”

Director Lee Isaac Chung on why his meteorological disaster movie doesn’t reference global warming.

From Climate Depot

By Marc Morano

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/twisters-climate-change-1235949639

‘Twisters’ Director on Not Mentioning Climate Change: Movies Shouldn’t “Preach a Message”

Director Lee Isaac Chung on why his meteorological disaster movie doesn’t reference global warming.

BY JAMES HIBBERD

Excerpt: So if you’re making a 2024 movie about a tornado outbreak the likes of which have never been seen before, there’s a rather convenient raison d’etre sitting right there. Simply have Daisy Edgar-Jones frantically look at some Doppler radar and mutter an actual study statistic like: “The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society projected a 6.6 percent nationwide increase in the frequency of supercell thunderstorms by the end of the century because of global warming — but nothing like this!” and suddenly your summer tornado popcorn movie has a bit of “but seriously tho, this could really happen” semi-scientific heft.

But to hear director Lee Isaac Chung tell it, even such a throwaway reference would be like beating red state moviegoers over the head with a DVD copy of An Inconvenient Truth.

“I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like it is putting forward any message,” Chung told CNN. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

There is a scene where a local farmer played by Maura Tierney says that storms and floods are becoming more frequent, but she doesn’t mention climate change.

“I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what’s happening on the ground … we don’t shy away from saying that things are changing,” Chung added. “I wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we’re preaching a message, because that’s certainly not what I think cinema should be about. I think it should be a reflection of the world.”

Federal judge blocks Biden’s ban on new U.S. LNG export terminals

Saying the Biden administration’s “pause” in approving new liquefied natural gas export terminals “is completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy,” U.S. District Judge James D. Cain on July 2 ordered the policy to be “stayed in its entirety, effective immediately.”

From CFACT

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

Saying the Biden administration’s “pause” in approving new liquefied natural gas export terminals “is completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy,” U.S. District Judge James D. Cain on July 2 ordered the policy to be “stayed in its entirety, effective immediately.”

Attorneys general from 16 red states had petitioned the Louisiana-based court to lift the moratorium on approvals of new LNG export projects, arguing the White House had illegally skirted regulatory procedures.

Specifically, they said allowing the Department of Energy to conduct studies on the climate, economic, and national security impacts of approving more LNG export terminals conflicted with the Natural Gas Act’s provision that the department must ensure “expeditious completion” of such reviews in determining whether the projects “are in the public interest.”

Judge Cain, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump, also said the Energy Department violated the Administrative Procedures Act by failing to provide notice and a public comment period. It remains to be seen how “expeditiously” Energy Department officials, especially political appointees of President Biden, will go about lifting the moratorium and reviewing permits for LNG export terminals.

American LNG exports have doubled in the last four years, reaching markets in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. According to the Energy Department, seven such terminals are operating in the U.S. — two in Texas, two in Louisiana, and one each in Georgia, Maryland and Alaska. Two more are under construction — one each in Texas and Louisiana. Thirteen more have been approved but are not yet under construction — five each in Texas and Louisiana and one each in Mississippi, Florida, and Alaska. And six more — five in Louisiana and one in Texas — await approval by the Energy Department.

In addition to U.S. environmental groups that see a vigorous American LNG export industry as undermining their goal of crippling the fossil-fuel industry, the chief beneficiary of the moratorium was Russian President Vladimir Putin. After Mr. Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, European countries were eager to wean themselves from dependency on Russian natural gas, knowing full well that buying Mr. Putin’s gas helped fuel his war machine.

Importing LNG from the U.S. was seen as an attractive alternative.

European countries — notably Britain and Germany — had sunk untold billions of euros into wind and solar projects, resulting in soaring prices for electricity for both residential and commercial customers. U.S. LNG could provide Europe with the baseline power that weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels cannot. While contracts between European buyers and American LNG suppliers are not affected by the moratorium, European governments were taken aback by the prospect of uncertain American deliveries of natural gas in the future. For Mr. Putin, by contrast, Mr. Biden’s kneecapping of the U.S. natural gas industry could not have come at a better time.

From a geopolitical perspective, Mr. Biden’s LNG moratorium fits nicely into the White House’s fondness for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicle batteries, the raw materials for which are largely found in Chinese supply chains. Mr. Biden’s vaunted energy transition involves transferring wealth and power from the U.S. to America’s most potent global rivals.

Judge Cain’s ruling on LNG export terminals marks another setback for the White House’s climate agenda, aimed at a forced transition to green energy, regardless of the consequences for U.S. consumers and America’s position in the world. It came four days after the Supreme Court, in a landmark opinion, overturned a 40-year-old legal precedent known as Chevron deference, which required judges to defer to federal agencies’ interpretation of ambiguously written laws.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the high court stripped bureaucrats of that power and returned it to judges in accordance with the Constitution’s separation of powers. Both the Obama and Biden administrations had used Chevron deference to have the entrenched bureaucracy issue rules pushing their climate agenda, along with other policies, including health care and student loan forgiveness.

Just as Judge Cain’s federal court in Louisiana has undercut a White House policy that strengthened Russia at the expense of the U.S. and its allies, the Supreme Court has curtailed the regulatory state’s power to impose policies, such as de facto EV mandates, that ultimately benefit China’s quest for global dominance.

What started as domestic courtroom disputes over the constitutionality of regulatory initiatives has spilled over into the most perilous international situation since the late 1930s.

This article originally appeared at The Washington Times

Global Greening Becomes so Obvious That Climate Alarmists Start Arguing We Need to “Save the Deserts”!

The world is ‘greening’ at an astonishing and rapidly growing rate and deserts are shrinking almost everywhere you look. All due, it seems, to a natural rise in carbon ‘plant food’ dioxide, not forgetting the small annual 4% portion contributed by humans burning hydrocarbons. Inconvenient to the political Net Zero narrative of course – along with high numbers of polar bears, cyclical recovery in Arctic sea ice and recent record growth of coral on the Great Barrier Reef – so there is naturally little mention in mainstream media and politics.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

The world is ‘greening’ at an astonishing and rapidly growing rate and deserts are shrinking almost everywhere you look. All due, it seems, to a natural rise in carbon ‘plant food’ dioxide, not forgetting the small annual 4% portion contributed by humans burning hydrocarbons. Inconvenient to the political Net Zero narrative of course – along with high numbers of polar bears, cyclical recovery in Arctic sea ice and recent record growth of coral on the Great Barrier Reef – so there is naturally little mention in mainstream media and politics. “Desertification is turning the Earth barren,” reports the Guardian, and the expansion of drylands is leaving entire countries “facing famine”. Great story, shame about the facts. A recent article in Yale Environment 360 states that rather than shrivelling and dying, vegetation is growing faster and deserts are retreating.

In fact many scientists now think that this process will continue to accelerate into the future. According to the Yale article, CO2 is “fast-tracking” photosynthesis in plants. By allowing them to use scarce water more efficiently, the CO2-rich air fertilises vegetation growth in even some of the driest places, observes Yale. For some time there has been “growing evidence” of global greening in all biomes, not just drylands, evidence that we can note has been ignored by the promoters of Net Zero. A Carbon Brief ‘explainer’ claimed that desertification has been described as the greatest environmental challenge of our time “and climate change is making it worse”.

Carbon Brief is funded by green activist billionaires including Sir Christopher Hohn, a past provider for recently jailed Roger Hallam and Extinction Rebellion. Its desert climate hysteria, like that of the Guardian, is therefore to be expected. Interestingly, Yale Environment 360, which is part of the Yale University School of the Environment, also receives heavy direct and indirect financial support from activist groups including ClimateWorks along with the Hewlett and Ford Foundations. The article is significant since it represents a ‘mainstream’ breakthrough in discussing global greening which has been obvious for some time in specialist scientific circles.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the Yale article tries to rain a little on the greening parade with a dose of climate gloom. Greening created by agricultural irrigation of fields can “obliterate arid-land ecosystems”. But this surely is human-caused and nothing to do with a changing climate. “Save the deserts” may not be a popular environmental message, “but arid eco-systems matter”, continues Yale. Of course there will be many who point out that if a few scorpions have to up sticks to make way for the better nutrition of millions of African children, this is a small price to pay.

The article highlights much of the recent scientific work on global greening that has received coverage in publications like the Daily Sceptic but has been downplayed and more often than not ignored by messengers of the Net Zero narrative.

Ground-breaking work in 2016 saw a team of 33 scientists from eight countries study NASA satellite images, and they found that since 1980 between a quarter and a half of the planet’s vegetated areas had shown an increase in their leaf area index (LAI), a standard measure of the abundance of plant life. Work at this time suggested a 14% increase in vegetation. A 2021 study at the University of California concluded that there had been a 12% increase in photosynthesis, with CO2 fertilisation again the primary cause. A 2020 assessment from scientists at the Woodwell Climate Research Centre found that greening was “much more extensive than previously acknowledged”, and more than three times greater than desertification. Yale noted findings that the greening encompassed 41% of the world’s drylands, from India to the African Sahel and northern China to south-eastern Australia.

Chinese scientists have also been on the case. Last year, researchers at Lanzhou University found a “global divergence” between aridity and leaf area in drylands during the past three decades. This “decoupling” was said to be due to the effect of CO2.

In February, the Daily Sceptic reported on another group of Chinese scientists who found that over the last two decades about 55% of global land mass revealed an “accelerated rate” of vegetation growth. “Global greening is an indisputable fact,” they state.

They produced the above map based on four datasets that showed greening accelerating since 2000 in 55.8% of the globe. Faster growth in India and the European plains (dark blue colouring) was said to be the most obvious. Healthy growth can also be observed in the Amazon region, equatorial East Africa, southern coastal Australia and Ireland.

None of these findings should be a great surprise. CO2 levels have been much higher in the past going back 600 million years. Plants thrive at levels three times higher than current atmospheric CO2 and the near denudation amounts of the last few million years. During the last glacial period up to around 12,000 years ago, levels of atmospheric CO2 dropped to such dangerously low levels that plant – and human – life was severely threated. Even with the small recovery we have seen in the recent past, plants grow larger and utilise existing water resources much more efficiently. This recovery of CO2 levels in the atmosphere holds out hope for higher food resources in many parts of the world that suffer from periodic famines.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.