Day: September 17, 2024

The Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Part I

Early last summer, during some internet search, Google’s AI Overview told me that Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI), that is the difference between incoming solar irradiance and outgoing solar plus long wave infrared, is 0.5 ± 0.47 W/m2. Like most facts that AI Overview offers, I gave it little attention at the time, but filed it away in my memory.

From Watts Up With That?

Kevin Kilty

Early last summer, during some internet search, Google’s AI Overview told me that Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI), that is the difference between incoming solar irradiance and outgoing solar plus long wave infrared, is 0.5 ± 0.47 W/m2. Like most facts that AI Overview offers, I gave it little attention at the time, but filed it away in my memory.

Later, I began to ponder the number. Several things occurred to me. First, the uncertainty seemed to me an attempt to avoid writing the value as 0.5 ± 0.5 and thus potentially including zero in whatever confidence interval was being expressed. After all, it is difficult to speak of the world starting to cook, when a confidence interval on the source of heat includes zero – i.e. no heat source at all. Second, the number is very small considering that at any given time in the temperate zones incoming solar irradiance might be over 1,100 W/m2 and is highly variable to boot. I wondered “How does one measure this imbalance number and how well can we characterize its uncertainty?” What I expected to learn was that EEI is a very small number when compared to the variability of climate, and that its magnitude is greatly uncertain.

It’s difficult to get AI Overview to repeat things at a later time, and there was no use searching for the original source of the 0.5 ± 0.47 W/m2 figure using it. I eventually located the origin of this value but learned that it referred not to the EEI per se. Rather, it was a measure of decade to decade change in EEI.  Along the search, however, I found an array of EEI values at different places stated in different ways.[1] Estimates ranged from 0.47 W/m2 to 1.0 W/m2.

Some of this dispersion apparent in all these values can be explained as figures covering different time periods. For example, figures of  0.47 W/m2 and 0.76 W/m2 quoted by Von Stuckmann et al [2] are for the time periods 1971-2018 and 2010-2018 respectively. Nonetheless, this is a rather large dispersion of estimates for energy imbalance considering that one person described it as “ the most fundamental metric that the scientific community and public must be aware of as the measure of how well the world is doing in the task of bringing climate change under control…”

In addition, the values pertaining to uncertainty for this very important number are unclear. Are they one-standard deviation values, 95% confidence intervals, 90% values or something else? It turns out they are a mixture.  Since a number of people argue that the EEI is increasing with time, are these mean values over some time period plus uncertainty that are detrended or are they instantaneous at some particular time?  Many questions to answer.

Let’s see what we may learn in some selected literature research.

Energy accounting

Earth’s energy accounting is not terribly different from double-entry financial accounting. There is a revenue account (incoming solar irradiance) and the expenses of outgoing longwave and reflected solar irradiance. Meanwhile in our energy ledger we have an assets account where I would place any energy additions to doing useful things like warming the planet or greening it, but which alarmists would call the liabilities account, perhaps, and a Earth’s energy equity account.

However we might name these accounts, our double entry system must balance, and this should provide two independent ways of determining energy balance or lack thereof.  In one way we look at the flows of energy crossing a boundary at satellite level. In the other method we look at all the places where energy appears to have accumulated. In principle the two ought to produce the same numbers to within the uncertainty of each.

Magnitude and Uncertainty

Since energy imbalance is one of many metrics being employed to argue for changes to livestyles, products, and the economy as a whole, it had better be proven to be a highly certain menace. At a minimum this means being accurately measured.

Uncertainty of a measurement is not merely a matter of the randomness of a process being measured or randomness in sampling of a population. It has to include all aspects of a measurement, from the inherent randomness of the process being measured, through uncertainties of instrument construction, calibration, drift, installation (think of the surface stations project here), algorithms, and data reduction. If a stationary process is sampled in a truly random fashion, then the dispersion of measurements might encompass all of the components of uncertainty.[3] Exceptions to this include systematic errors and bias. Errors and bias are a particular concern when specialized or unique instruments and platforms are involved, because this equipment, consisting maybe of only a few units, will not produce a statistical ensemble, and the biases are unlikely to be recognized in the measurement statistics alone.

In particular, Henrion and Fischoff found that measurements of physical constants tended to group near one another even when later, and better, measurements showed this grouping to be extremely unlikely.[4] They suggested this to be an artifact of the sociology of physical science. In one sense there was a conflict between a desire to produce the definitive work (small  uncertainty) and the surety of being correct (larger confidence bounds) with the former winning out often. Another finding was that scientists did a poor job of evaluating bias and that supposedly independent research groups could be nudged toward a value found by the most influential group among them (Bandwagon effect). In climate science a similar nudge is produced by a desire to produce shocking results – an effect one might call this the “it’s worse than we thought” bandwagon.  

Direct measurements of energy flow

A direct measurement of energy imbalance is available from satellite measurements. Nasa’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System experiment (Ceres) involved seven different radiometers flying on five different satellites beginning in 1997. These radiometers enabled direct measurement of incoming solar radiation, outgoing solar radiation, and outgoing LWIR.  Two of these satellites had an end of operational life in 2023, but continued to operate afterward. Terra and Aqua are both now experiencing fuel and power limitations. A new addition to this experiment, Libera, is scheduled to fly early in 2028. This program has discovered some interesting things over the years.

In a September 2022 conference, Norman G. Loeb summarized the CERES mission, its findings, and some consequences of these findings.[5]  According to this presentation, Earth’s energy imbalance has doubled from 0.5 ± 0.2 W/m2 during the first 10 years of this century to 1.0 ± 0.2 W/m2 recently. The increase is the result of a 0.9 ± 0.3 W/m2 increase absorbed solar radiation that is partially offset by a 0.4 ± 0.25 W/m2 increase in outgoing longwave radiation.

What do these uncertainty estimates mean and how credible are they? To answer the “what” part of this question, slide number 20 in the powerpoint is reproduced in Figure 1.

This shows a comparison of direct measures of in and out radiation against planetary heat uptake, which I will address next, but which amounts to an independent, indirect measure of radiance imbalance. The two measures trend closely together at 0.5 ± 0.47 W/m2 per decade. This slide reveals the source of AI Overview’s summary! The uncertainty is identified as a confidence interval (5%, 95%); so, ±0.47 translates to ±0.29 as a standard deviation. What looks good in this graph is the agreement in what we suppose to be two independent estimates of energy imbalance.

Further research shows this agreement to not be all it seems. Whatever coverage factor these ± figures refer to (𝞼, 2𝞼, 90% CI, 95% CI, etc), a number built from change in solar energy minus outgoing longwave would calculate to 0.5 ± 0.39 W/m2; this combined with 0.5 ± 0.2 W/m2 of a previous decade would equate to 1.0 ± 0.44 W/m2, not 1.0 ± 0.2 W/m2. Unless of course there is some negative correlation between and among them which is never explained. I have had real trouble making the figures I read consistent with one another. There’s more.

I began my research on uncertainty of the energy imbalance by referral back to a special volume of JGR from May 1986 dealing with the instrumentation for the predecessor of CERES which was the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE).[6] There we find

“These instruments are designed to provide radiant flux and radiant exitance measurements to better than 1% measurement uncertainty over a 2-year orbital lifetime.”[7]

This source of uncertainty does not cover the total that is possible, but what is important is to compare this source of uncertainty with attempts to rectify CERES satellite estimates of EEI with ones based on heat uptake. In a paper the title of which explains a lot,”Toward Optimal Closure of the Earth’s Top-of-Atmosphere Radiation Budget,” we learn that calibrations of the instruments involved are accurate to 1-2%.[8] The underlying uncertainty of the instruments, themselves, doesn’t seem to have improved from ERBE to CERES.

There are two tables in this paper that are pertinent to our question of uncertainty. Table 1 from this paper shows the very large variations in imbalance of tens of W/m2 that are due to internal climate variability – variations which are far larger than credible EEI due to forcing. Table 2 from this paper shows a list of known and unknown biases. The known ones run the range from -2 to +7 W/m2, and that the EEI obtained from satellite measurements is too large by a factor of perhaps five to be credible.

While it seems that the intrinsic uncertainty of the instruments has not improved significantly from ERBE to CERES, there are improvements to the measurements of the energy budget that have come from correlations between CERES instruments, and other space platforms and ground truth. Irrespective of the cleverness of these schemes they bring with them uncertainties from other instruments, platforms and algorithms which should be propagated into results. I wished to see a full analysis of uncertainty somewhere, but I did not find one.

More concerning, though, is the discussion on algorithms to improve this circumstance for purposes of climate modeling by, in one case, making adjustments to LWIR radiance measurement and also different adjustments to SW radiance measurements in order to produce an EEI compatible with estimates of planetary heat uptake. The adjustments made at this time were not small but rather a factor of two larger than EEI itself.[9] In other words, estimates of heat uptake in the oceans and atmosphere have nudged the satellite measurements in a preferred direction. The two methods of estimating EEI are not independent of one another. We don’t really have a double entry accounting system.

Planetary Heat Uptake

Those places on Earth where excess energy might be retained are as follows:  1) Temperature change of atmosphere below tropopause, 2) Temperature change of oceans above 2000m depth, 3) Temperature of ground surface/subsurface and 4) Change to cryosphere temperature and phase change. A recent review of all this data and results can be found in von Schuckmann et al (2023).[2] Some estimates are truly remarkable with a claimed relative uncertainty below 10% (uncertainty divided by expected value) considering that 2) through 4) are places hidden from direct measurement.

However, the authors appear to recognize their uncertainty estimates are not so rosy. They say

“The ensemble spread gives an indication of the agreement among products and can be used as a proxy for uncertainty. The basic assumption for the error distribution is Gaussian with a mean of zero, which can be approximated by an ensemble of various products. However, it does not account for systematic errors that may result in biases across the ensemble and does not represent the full uncertainty.”

Nonetheless, we are told in perhaps the most optimistic case that the present rate of heat uptake is 0.76 ± 0.1 W/m2  [2] or perhaps as good as 0.77 ± 0.06 W/m2[10]. These figures come from adding up the totality of contributions 1) through 4) in our list; though 89% is from the ocean alone. The indicated uncertainty should come at least from adding the respective uncertainties of the contributors in quadrature, just as though these data are uncorrelated, independent and unbiased estimates of the same thing.

Figure 2. Storage of energy imbalance in the ocean. From K. von Schuckmann et al. (2023) Heat stored in the Earth system 1960–2020, © Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The gigantic effort of accounting for where all the energy imbalance goes done by von Struckmann et al [2] which involves 68 co-authors at 61 institutions is an avalanche of data stated in various units, over different time periods, and coming from numerous sources and subsets of sources. It is extremely difficult to sort out. Figure 2 shows just one example of what I see as discrepancies in the compilation. Compare, for instance, heat stored in the ocean from 1960 to 2020 to heat stored from 1993 to 2020. The depth range 0-2000m surely is made from the sum of 0-700m and 700-2000m as the sums in each case clearly show. Yet the uncertainty figures are impossible to reconcile. In one case uncertainties of 0.1 and 0.04 combine to 0.1 and in the other case the same combine to 0.2. Maybe there is covariance between the two depth ranges; though Figure 2 in Von Schuckmann et al [2] shows obvious positive correlation in all depth ranges – something that should amplify uncertainty not reduce it.

Acceleration of EEI

One prominent theme of all this work on energy imbalance is that the heat uptake is accelerating. Loeb et al [10] suggest that satellite observations show energy imbalance has doubled from 0.5±0.2 W/m2 during the 2000 to 2010 time period to 1.0±0.2 W/m2 during the 2010 to 2020 period – what I’d call decadal estimates. The increase is the result of a 0.9±0.3 W/m2 more absorbed solar radiation, partially offset by 0.4±0.25 W/m2 increase in outgoing longwave radiation.

Once again I face some troubles making all of this consistent. One would infer the result of increasing solar radiation and also increasing outgoing LWIR, here, by the rules of adding uncorrelated estimates, to be 0.5±0.4 W/m2, but which Loeb [5] characterizes as 0.5±0.47 W/m2, with a (5% – 95%) confidence interval. It’s puzzling.

Von Struckmann et al [2] suggest the equivalent decadal numbers to be 0.48±0.1 W/m2 and 0.76±0.2 W/m2 (which uncertainties they call a 90% confidence interval, 5%-95%), which are, if the stated uncertainties are to be believed, far smaller than what Loeb et al [10] calculates.

 Neglecting all the differences, however, it is apparent all groups are presenting evidence of accelerated imbalance. Is this well established, though?

 I decided to perform a little experiment with the uahncdn_lt_6.0 dataset (University of  Alabama, Huntsville). I used an ordinary least squares linear regression. The month to month linear coefficient of increase is 0.0013C, and the 95% confidence interval runs (0.0012 to 0.0014 C/month). Figure 4 shows this. As Dr. Spencer has written on his blog, this 0.02C change per year is what results from increased CO2 forcing and anything departing from it is some influence of climate variability.

 A close inspection of Figure 3 indicates the data are not randomly scattered about the best fit line. Their trend looks rather flat near the origin and at several places there is a bit more data below the line than above. Some extreme values occur at the end of the time series. This shape suggests some curvature like a squared term.

Figure 3.

So, I fit a quadratic function only to the data (small diagram in the upper left of Figure 3), and got what seems to be a remarkably good fitting curve that has zero slope at the origin and rises monotonically to the end. Ah! Evidence of an accelerating trend?

Not quite.

The fraction of variation explained by a line is 51% and by a quadratic is 53% – an insignificant difference. The standard error of residuals is no different (0.198 versus 0.195), and one suspects that the data don’t quite meet the requirement of being independent and identically distributed across its domain. In fact, it is simple to show there is correlation in this data across multiple time scales, and the correlation alone might fool a person into seeing a trend not there. This tendency toward a flattening followed by a brief but sharp rise appears in other data covering the entire past century as well, say 1920-1945. These temperature data are much too variable to establish a preference for the quadratic trend over the linear one.

Conclusions

When I began this effort I expected to discover that my search for energy imbalance would find a very small number with a very large uncertainty. This is exactly what I found. In addition, I was surprised to see that estimates of heat uptake provided a large nudge to satellite data, which leaves the estimates not independent. I also should have figured that whatever value of EEI that resulted would serve some purpose in promoting worry over climate change.

 Something that all investigators in this EEI community do is tie energy imbalance to a litany of problems in the present world. To them a warming planet is nothing but trouble; there seems no upside at all. Von Schuckmann et al [2] even go so far as to calculate, from their estimates of imbalance, and even considering the acknowledged unknown uncertainties and assumptions involved, how much CO2 would have to be removed from the atmosphere to bring us back to year 1988, or to keep the Earth below 2C temperature change from the late 1800s. Why these two goals are important isn’t clear but we are told that they somehow will prevent climate problems.

But issues that cause panic are not related to puny temperature change. Heat waves do not arise from a 1C or even 1.5C background temperature rise. They arise from UHI approaching 10C and resulting from the way we have constructed our mega-cities, which are full of energy dissipating equipment and cut off from countryside breezes. Sea level rise, being puny, does not cause flooding – failures of civil engineering and people building in places they shouldn’t are what cause flooding. Knowing the EEI, which might be interesting in its own right, will aid in preventing none of this.

References:

1- See for example: Trenberth, et al, Earth’s Energy Imbalance, Journal of Climate, 27, 9, p.3129-3144,  2014 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00294.1; V. Schuckmann, et al, Heat stored in the Earth system: where does the energy go?, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 12, 2013–2041, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2013-2020, 2020; Loeb, N.G., et al. Observational Assessment of Changes in Earth’s Energy Imbalance Since 2000. Surv Geophys (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-024-09838-8;

2-v Schuckmann, et al, 2023, Heat stored in the Earth system 1960–2020: where does the energy go? System Science Data, 15(4), 1675-1709. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-1675-2023

3 -Guide to Uncertainty in Measurement. Available online at https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/2071204/JCGM_100_2008_E.pdf

4-Max Henrion and Baruch Fischoff, Am J. Physics. 54,791, 1989. See also Science. 289, 2260-2262, 29 September 2000.

5-Loeb, Norman, Trends in Earth’s Energy Imbalance, ISSI GEWEX Workshop, September 26-30, 2022, Bern, Switzerland. Powerpoint online at: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220010511/downloads/Loeb_2022_compressed.pptx.pdf

 6-B. Barkstrom, and G. Smith, The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment’  Science and Implementation,  Reviews of Geophysics, v. 24, n 2, p. 379-390, May 1986 

 7-Kopia, L. Earth Radiation Budget Experiment Scanner Instrument, Reviews of Geophysics, v. 24, n 2, p. 400-406, May 1986

 8-Loeb et al, 2018, Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) Energy Balanced and Filled (EBAF) Top-of-Atmosphere (TOA) Edition-4.0 Data Product, Journal of Climate, DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0208.1 “With the most recent CERES edition-4 instrument calibration improvements, the net imbalance from the standard CERES data products is approximately 4.3 , much larger than the expected EEI.“

 9-Loeb, et al, 2009, Toward Optimal Closure of the Earth’s Top-of-Atmosphere Radiation Budget. J. Climate, 22, 748–766, https://doi.org/10.1175/2008JCLI2637.1.

10-Loeb, et al, 2024, Observational Assessment of Changes in Earth’s Energy Imbalance Since 2000. Surveys in Geophysics; https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-024-09838-8

More Solar Silliness In The New York Times

Hyping solar energy is one of America’s most renewable resources. For instance, in 1978, Ralph Nader declared that “everything will be solar in 30 years.” In 1979, President Jimmy Carter declared the US needed to capture more energy from the sun because of “inevitable shortages of fossil fuels.”

Solar panels on the roof of our house in Austin, September 13, 2024.

David Wallace-Wells claims solar energy is getting so cheap it could be “effectively free.” But solar prices aren’t falling, they’re rising. And solar’s being left in the shade by natty.

From The Robert Bryce Substack

Robert Bryce

Hyping solar energy is one of America’s most renewable resources. For instance, in 1978, Ralph Nader declared that “everything will be solar in 30 years.” In 1979, President Jimmy Carter declared the US needed to capture more energy from the sun because of “inevitable shortages of fossil fuels.”

In 2011, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman claimed we are “on the cusp of an energy transformation driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power.” In 2015, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pledged that if elected president, she would oversee the installation of 500 million solar panels.

In 2021, the Department of Energy released a study that claimed solar “has the potential to power 40% of the nation’s electricity by 2035.” That’s a mighty big claim. Last year, solar accounted for about 5% of US electricity production. Furthermore, solar only provided about 2.2 exajoules of primary energy to the US economy out of 94.2 EJ used. The DOE also claimed solar could reach 45% of US electricity production by 2050. (That same year, President Joe Biden declared that climate change poses “an existential threat to our lives.”)

The solar hype continued last month in the pages of the New York Times with an article by David Wallace-Wells headlined, “What Will We Do With Our Free Power?” The nut graf of Wallace-Wells’ article appeared near the end when he claimed, “the exploding scale and disappearing cost of solar do mean that the energy game will now be played according to some pretty different ground rules.”

Before going further, a disclosure is in order. I understand the economics of solar. About eight years ago, we had 8.2 kilowatts of solar capacity installed on the roof of our house. Why? We got three different subsidies to do so. We now produce about 12 megawatt-hours of electricity per year and have cut our annual electricity bill in half. Further, that was the second solar system we installed on our home here in Austin. We got fat subsidies for the first system, too.

For the record, I’m opposed to all energy subsidies unless I’m the one getting them. But I digress.

Back to Wallace-Wells. He is correct in reporting that solar capacity is growing. Last year in the US, solar capacity grew nearly four times faster than wind capacity. Solar grew by 24.8 gigawatts, while wind capacity grew by 6.3 GW. Further, due to its higher power density, solar will continue to grow faster, both here in the US and around the world. Wallace-Wells goes on to repeat the same shopworn arguments we’ve been hearing for nearly 50 years: solar is getting cheaper, capacity is growing, sunshine is free, and therefore, it really is different this time. He writes:

Because the sun can be simply counted on to rise every day, you don’t need to pay in any ongoing way for a commodity input, like oil or gas, to keep the system humming — only to set it up initially to manage and endure the novel challenges of drawing reliable energy from the giant fireball 94 million miles away. And over the next decade, even that all-in cost is expected to fall in half again. Negative electricity prices, in which consumers are actually paid to consume electricity, are already a recurring feature in the world’s mature markets.

He continued:

Though it seems like a line from starry-eyed science fiction, the dream of electricity “too cheap to meter” arose first in the giddy early days of nuclear power, the phrase coined by the midcentury atomic advocate Lewis Strauss…And it is easy to get carried away with the gauzy utopian possibilities of energy both functionally infinite and effectively free.

But there ain’t nothing free about solar or any other form of energy, and there never will be. For as long as humans have been on this planet, our most fundamental quest hasn’t changed. We seek more energy so we can convert it into more useful power — computing power, motive power, cooking power, cooling power — so that we can do more productive work. That’s what we humans are about. Yes, we may have dubbed our species homo sapiens, but we are, in reality, homo faber. And that making and doing requires ever-increasing amounts of power.

The latest figures from LevelTen Energy show that solar prices aren’t falling, they are rising.

Wallace-Wells can cheer until my PV panels are destroyed by the next hail storm, but he might consider resting on his pom poms for a moment to report on what’s happening in the marketplace. As seen above, solar prices aren’t falling. They are rising. In July, consulting firm LevelTen Energy reported that prices for solar power purchase agreements rose 3% during the second quarter and that solar prices have nearly doubled since 2020. LevelTen said the price surge reflects “the development challenges that are collectively placing upward pressure on solar PPA prices across North American markets.” It continued, saying the challenges include:

Long interconnection queues and permitting difficulties. But in recent months, additional uncertainties have been introduced through the expansion of tariffs on Chinese PV components as well as a new investigation into allegations of duty circumvention and dumping practices from PV component producers in Southwest Asia. These events illustrate a trade law environment that is growing increasingly challenging for solar developers in the United States.

Wallace-Wells barely mentions China in his article. But trade laws are casting big clouds over the solar sector. Three years ago, the Biden Administration issued sanctions against multiple Chinese companies due to their connections with Uyghur slave labor.

In May, in “Shanghaied,” I published the graphic above. Remarkably, six different agencies of the federal government are saying the Chinese government is carrying out genocide in Xinjiang, the province that produces some 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon. Given that reality, it’s not surprising that solar cheerleaders like Wallace-Wells, Bill McKibben, and others don’t want to talk about their favorite industry’s near-total reliance on Chinese supply chains.

Wallace-Wells also ignores the vast disparity in solar deployment around the world. He claims, “by some ways of tabulating, solar power is already cheaper than all other new sources of electricity for something like 95 percent of the world.” And what are those ways of tabulating? He doesn’t say. That begs the question: if solar is so cheap, why isn’t Africa using more solar? As seen in the graphic above, the unfortunate answer is that solar is still mainly used in wealthy places. That helps explain why California, a state with 39 million people, is generating twice as much electricity from solar as Africa, even though the African continent has roughly 36 times more people than the Golden State.

By now, it should be clear that Wallace-Wells cares more about the narrative about solar than marketplace realities. Speaking of the market, as seen above, the growth in natural gas-fired generation has swamped the increase in solar since 2015.

As seen above, that growth continued last year when gas-fired generation grew by 115 terawatt-hours while solar increased by 21 TWh. Put another way, gas-fired generation grew five times faster than solar last year.

A final point, and it’s one that I’ve made before. California has added more solar than any other state in the country. And as it has added more solar, electricity prices in California have increased at an alarming rate. As I pointed out last month in “Kamala America?” in absolute and percentage terms, California’s electricity prices have surged more than any other state in the country since 2008 when then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a mandate for renewable energy.

In March, my favorite Energy Bad Boys, Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, wrote an excellent piece here on Substack called “How to Destroy the Myth of Cheap Wind and Solar.” And destroy, they did. Orr and Rolling asked the critical question: if wind and solar are so cheap, why do they make electricity expensive? Their answer was straightforward:

We aren’t building a new electric grid from scratch, so we should be comparing the cost of new wind and solar with the cost of existing power plants that these intermittent generators would hope to replace. The truth is that we already have reliable, depreciated assets that produce electricity at low cost, and they could’ve kept doing so for decades. This means that building new wind and solar adds to the cost of providing electricity to the grid. If wind and solar were truly lower cost than other forms of energy, we would expect states like California and Minnesota, which have high penetrations of wind and solar, to see falling electricity costs. Instead, electricity prices in these states have increased much faster than the national average.

Graphic from Energy Bad Boys article: “How to Destroy the Myth of Cheap Wind and Solar.”

Orr and Rolling concluded:

The intermittency of wind and solar imposes unique expenses on the electric grid that require an evaluation of the entire electric system in order to derive meaningful cost estimates from these generators. This is difficult to do, which is why most people don’t do it.

The “unique expenses” that Orr and Rolling mention are becoming more apparent by the day. Consider California, which has more installed solar capacity than any other state, about 49.4 GW. But the state’s all-out solar push has created a regressive tax on the poor and middle class. Last month, the Public Advocates Office at the California Public Utility Commission reported that solar subsidies in the state will cost ratepayers who don’t have rooftop solar panels about $8.5 billion this year.

Furthermore, those costs are rising. As seen in the graphic above, pulled from the PAO’s report, the cost shift related to net energy metering, which subsidizes rooftop solar, has more than doubled since 2021. Here’s the key section from the report:

The subsidies, paid for by non-rooftop solar customers, are a contributing factor to high electricity rates. This cost burden — commonly referred to as a cost shift — to non-rooftop solar customers of Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric has risen from $3.4 billion annually in 2021 to $8.5 billion annually by the end of 2024, and it will continue to grow in coming years.

To put this in perspective, remember that California has the dubious distinction of having the highest poverty rate in the country. And yet, in its headlong pursuit of solar energy in the name of climate change, it is imposing a regressive energy tax on the people who can least afford it. Ashley Brown, the executive director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, rightly calls the proliferation of rooftop solar systems and the returns they provide to lucky people like me, “a wealth transfer from less affluent ratepayers to more affluent ones.” It is, he says, “Robin Hood in reverse.”

Alas, none of these facts about solar energy made it into Wallace-Wells’ article. But they are facts.

What I’m reading

As I explained last month in “Where Are The Pro-Nuclear Democrats?” the Democratic Party can’t be taken seriously when it comes to nuclear energy. Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute provided more proof of that in his September 4 piece about Matthew Marzano, who the Democrats have nominated for a spot on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Nordhaus called him the “most unqualified candidate” ever put forward for that agency. As I reported during the Democratic National Convention, top Democrats have been mouthing the right words about nuclear energy, but the party didn’t mention it in its platform. Joe Biden has never, to my knowledge, endorsed nuclear, and I will bet $100 here and now that Kamala Harris will not utter the words “nuclear energy” between now and November 5.

Yesterday, Nordhaus followed up with a review of Marzano’s testimony at his recent confirmation hearing. Nordhaus said that it was clear that if Marzano is seated at the NRC, “he will be a defender of the status quo, not an advocate for regulatory modernization.”

I’ve said many times that the US nuclear sector has enormous potential. Dozens of paper reactor designs are hoping to get licensed by the NRC, and numerous startups are filled with bright and ambitious people who want to see their reactors pump juice into the grid. The obstacles, though, are obvious: regulation, capital, and fuel. Until the Democrats get serious about the regulation part and, thus, about reforming the NRC, which includes nominating the best people for the commission, the domestic nuclear industry will continue to struggle

Tennessee leads the way toward a U.S. nuclear revival

On September 3, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the city of Oak Ridge, birthplace of the U.S. nuclear energy industry, announced new details about “Project IKE,” a new nuclear energy development boosted by the new Tennessee Nuclear Energy Fund. Paris-based Orano USA has agreed to build a uranium enrichment centrifuge facility on the Roane County side of Oak Ridge. The project, said Lee, is the single largest investment in Tennessee history.

From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

14966866 – bulb with nuclear power plant

On September 3, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the city of Oak Ridge, birthplace of the U.S. nuclear energy industry, announced new details about “Project IKE,” a new nuclear energy development boosted by the new Tennessee Nuclear Energy Fund. Paris-based Orano USA has agreed to build a uranium enrichment centrifuge facility on the Roane County side of Oak Ridge. The project, said Lee, is the single largest investment in Tennessee history.

Lee explained that the fund, created by the Tennessee General Assembly with a $60 million 2023-24 budget, has been highly successful in recruiting nuclear energy projects. Orano is the second of four projects announced in the last six months, further strengthening Tennessee’s status as “the number one state for nuclear energy companies to invest and thrive,” said Lee.

Orano specializes in uranium mining/conversion/enrichment, used nuclear fuel management and recycling, decommissioning shutdown nuclear energy facilities, federal site cleanup and closure, and developing nuclear medicines to fight cancer. KNOX reporter Daniel Dassow says the Orano announcement “heralds a new historical development: the second Manhattan Project” in the “Secret City.”

Just days earlier, NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. announced its purchase of a 1.64-acre site in Oak Ridge’s historic Heritage Center Industrial Park for its headquarters.  NANO is a vertically integrated advanced nuclear energy and technology company that is developing portable microreactors.

A month earlier, Kairos Power began construction of its next-generation salt-cooled demo reactor in Oak Ridge, and back in April, TRISO-X received a $148.5 million tax credit from the federal government for its advanced nuclear fuel plant in the city. Oak Ridge and nearby Knoxville together are home to 154 nuclear companies and the iconic Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In the words of Oak Ridge city council member Sean Gleason, “East Tennessee is becoming once again, after 80-plus years, the place the nation is looking for to lead the next nuclear race. Let Oak Ridge win another race,” he added. “We’ve done it before.” Unlike the weapons-grade first Manhattan Project, Orano will produce low-enriched uranium to be used in commercial reactors to generate electricity.

Kairos Power’s 35-megawatt iterative non-power demonstration molten salt nuclear reactor, dubbed Hermes, will be its first nuclear build. With completion expected in 2027, Hermes is part of the California-based firm’s “rapid iterative development approach” to developing and marketing nuclear power plant designs based on its fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor technology. The hope is to have a commercial-grade reactor operational in the early 2030s.

Even before Congress passed the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act in July, renewed interest in nuclear energy had stirred a movement across the U.S. Construction began in June for TerraPower’s Natrium reactor 1 demonstration project in Wyoming, the nation’s first advanced reactor project to move from design into construction. TerraPower chairman and founder Bill said Gates that the company’s “innovative Natrium technology” will power America’s future – and the world’s.

Up in Michigan, the state in July re-upped its support for the reopening of the closed 800-megawatt Palisades Nuclear Power Plant with a second $150 million investment. The U.S. Department of Energy earlier conditionally approved $1.5 billion to help restart the plant, which was closed in 2022 by 2025. The Michigan effort may be duplicated at mothballed nuclear reactors in Iowa and Pennsylvania.

NextEra Energy Inc., whose Duane Arnold plant on the Iowa prairie was damaged by a windstorm in 2020, and Constellation Energy Corp., whose Three Mile Island reactor 2 shuttered in 2019 after 45 incident-free years, are looking at restarting if it can be done safely and economically. These nuclear plants, if reopened, could provide nonstop baseload power needed to run high-energy-using data centers.

Florida, too, is taking a look at adding advanced nuclear technology reactors to its nuclear energy portfolio, which today includes the St. Lucie and Turkey Point plants owned by Florida Power & Light. The state’s public service commission has a legislative directive to submit a report by next April that would include the possibility of adding nuclear power at military bases.

The action parallels a Biden Administration working group seeking to deliver “an efficient and cost-effective deployment of clean, reliable nuclear energy.” The White House also said the U.S. Army is pursuing using advanced reactors to power Army bases and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is working to streamline permitting for nuclear projects.

On another front, new efforts to recycle nuclear waste, held up for decades by legal and regulatory barriers, are also on the drawing boards. The nuclear waste disposal issue has been a major thorn in the side of any new nuclear power construction in the U.S., but a new bipartisan consensus has emerged in which even diehard former nuclear opponents now see nuclear energy as acceptably “clean.”

The original process for repurposing spent nuclear fuel, developed in the U.S. in the 1950s, has been in profitable use in other countries for decades – but not in the U.S., where anti-nuclear activists long prevailed. In 2020, a startup company called Curio developed its own innovative, environmentally sustainable nuclear fuel recycling technology.

Orano hopes to reprocess spent nuclear fuel at its new Oak Ridge facility, using the technology it has used to reprocess more than 40,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel since 1976, much of which was placed back into reactors at its facilities in France, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany. France thus has no need for interim dry storage of light water reactor used nuclear fuel.

President Carter essentially shut down spent nuclear fuel recycling in the U.S. in the 1970s, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today has identified 23 gaps in its regulations for reprocessing that it has never fully resolved even though the means for doing so have largely been identified. A full commitment to recycling nuclear waste may also require changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

A new report from the Institute for Energy Research notes the growing discussion about expanding nuclear power in the U.S. has under the Biden Administration focused on enormous taxpayer subsidies to help cover prices increases caused by onerous regulations and statutes. There has also been talk – but not much action – on streamlining regulations and reforming federal laws to make American nuclear power price competitive with that in other countries.

Former President Trump is campaigning on a platform that includes cutting energy bills by up to 70% by eliminating what he sees as needless, burdensome regulations. A second Trump Administration would likely cut subsidies for inefficient and habitat-damaging wind and solar projects and focus on regulatory and statutory reforms to cut the entry and operational costs for nuclear power.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle for a growing U.S. nuclear power industry is the fact that the U.S. has since 1992 been dependent on imports for most of the 40 million pounds of uranium needed to fuel the nation’s existing nuclear power plants. Domestic uranium production peaked in 1980, and today the nation relies on Canada and Australia for 36% of its uranium and on Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan for 48%.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

California Browning from Electricity Policies

As a resident of California for more than six decades, I am aware that the availability of continuously generated electricity in California is deteriorating and will get worse!

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Ronald Stein explains the devastation in his Heartland article The Golden State of California Is Turning Brown Without Continuous Electricity.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

As a resident of California for more than six decades, I am aware that the availability of continuously generated electricity in California is deteriorating and will get worse!

The “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies in California that are supported by Governor Newsom and the Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris have led to the state’s most expensive electricity and fuel prices in America and increasingly high cost of living, housing, and transportation, coupled with an increase in crime, smash-and-grab robberies, homelessness, pollution, and congestion that has caused many tax-paying residents and companies to exodus California to more affordable cities and states.

California’s net move-out number of residents in 2022 alone was more than 343,000 people that left California — the highest exodus of any state in the U.S.

The California Policy Institute counted more than 237 businesses that have left the state since 2005. Among these businesses were eleven Fortune 1000 companies, including AT&T, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently made a startling admission: U.S. electricity demand will double by 2050, and meeting that soaring demand will require the equivalent of building 300 Hoover Dams.

The last California Nuclear Power Plant at Diablo Canyon, a 2.2 GW plant generating continuous uninterruptable electricity, is projected to close soon. In nameplate only, it would take 1,000 2.2MW wind turbines to generate 2.2 GW, but then, it’s only intermittent electricity vs. the continuous uninterruptable electricity from Diablo demanded by the California economy!

As a result of the “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies and renewables of wind and solar stations built at the expense of taxpayer dollars, California now imports more electric power than any other US state, more than twice the amount in Virginia, the USA’s second-largest importer of electric power. California typically receives between one-fifth and one-third of its electricity supply from outside of the state.

Power prices are rocketing into the stratosphere and, even before winter drives up demand, are being deprived of continuous electricity in a way that was unthinkable barely a decade ago. But such is life when you attempt to run the economy on sunshine and breezes.

Projected electricity costs for California Businesses

Further, these so-called “green” electricity sources of wind and solar are not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. They also endanger wildlife.

California’s economy depends on affordable, reliable, and ever-cleaner electricity and fuels. Unfortunately, policymakers are driving up California’s electric and gas prices, and California now has the highest electricity and fuel prices in the nation. Those high energy prices are contributing to the pessimistic business sentiment. California’s emission mandates have done an excellent job of increasing the cost of electricity, products, and fuels to its citizens.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that these supposed “green” alternative methods of generating electricity won’t work — especially as electricity demand is projected to double by 2050 due to AI, charging of EVs and data centers, government-mandated electric heating and cooking, and charging grid-backup batteries. Intermittent electricity from wind and solar cannot power modern nations.

These “green” wind and solar projects primarily exist because they are financed with taxpayer money, i.e., disguised by taxpayers as “Government Subsidies.”

“GREEN” policymakers are oblivious to humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels from fossil fuels, as they are to these two basic facts:

(1)  No one uses crude oil in its raw form. “Big Oil” only exists because of humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels made from oil!

(2)  “Renewables” like wind and solar only exist to generate intermittent electricity; they CANNOT make products or fuels!

To rid the world of crude oil usage, there is no need to over-regulate or over-tax the oil industry; just STOP using the products and fuels made from crude oil!

Simplistically:

STOP making cars, trucks, aircraft, boats, ships, farming equipment, medical equipment and supplies, communications equipment, military equipment, etc., that demand crude oil for their supply chain of products.

STOPPING the demands of society for the products and fuels made from oil will eliminate the need for crude oil.

The primary growth in electric power usage is coming from new data centers housing AI technologies. It is expected that over the next few decades, 50% of additional electric power will be needed just for AI, but data centers CANNOT run on occasional electricity from wind and solar.

Cal matters raises concerns about state policy to phase out ICE vehicles in favor of EVs.

How will the occasionally generated electricity from wind and solar support the following:

  • America’s military fleet of vehicles, ships, and aircraft?
  • America’s commercial and private aircraft?
  • America’s hospitals?
  • America’s space exploration?

Despite Governor Newsom’s and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s support for the “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies in California, it’s time to stimulate conversations about the generation of continuously generated electricity to meet the demands of America’s end users.

Court Blocks Biden-Harris Methane Emissions Rule In Five States

A federal judge temporarily halted the enforcement of a Biden-Harris administration rule in five states on Thursday designed to reduce methane emissions and minimize natural gas waste on federal lands.

From Watts Up With That?

The Daily Caller

Mariane Angela

News Reporter

A federal judge temporarily halted the enforcement of a Biden-Harris administration rule in five states on Thursday designed to reduce methane emissions and minimize natural gas waste on federal lands.

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Traynor issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily blocks the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from enforcing a new rule that was implemented in April in North Dakota, Montana, Texas, Wyoming and Utah, according to The Hill. These states argued that the federal rule, which mandates oil and gas companies to implement waste reduction plans and leak detection programs on public lands, constitutes an overreach of federal authority, infringing upon state rights.

The contested rule requires operators to curtail the venting, flaring and leaking of natural gas during oil extraction processes, the outlet reported. The Biden-Harris administration has made it part of its climate agenda to reduce certain emissions, like methane, the primary component of natural gas.

Traynor stated in his decision that the states are likely to prevail because “on the merits of their claim, the 2024 Rule is arbitrary and capricious” and pointed out that various aspects of the rule are “inadequately explained” and “contradictory,” the North Dakota Monitor reported. This regulation impacts federal and tribal territories, and the Fort Berthold Reservation hosts the majority of oil and gas extraction on tribal lands in North Dakota.

BLM, under the Department of the Interior, argued that venting and flaring natural gas squanders public and Native American resources, cutting significant royalty revenues for taxpayers, tribes, and states, while exacerbating climate change, the North Dakota Monitor stated. However, Judge Traynor contends that the BLM lacks the authority for air quality control, a power reserved for the Environmental Protection Agency and the states by the Clean Air Act.

North Dakota challenged the rule, claiming it infringed on state sovereignty and would diminish state revenue from oil and gas production, while the BLM estimated the rule could generate over $50 million in tax revenue, the North Dakota Monitor reported. Traynor further questioned the economic benefit of the rule and said that it “offers no rationale why flaring is more economically productive than venting.” (RELATED: Biden Admin Moves To Ban New Oil Leases On 1.6 Million Acres Of Land)

The North Dakota Petroleum Council celebrated the decision as a victory for the oil industry, citing that the rule would have imposed stringent flaring limits and costly compliance requirements, particularly burdening smaller operators, the North Dakota Monitor stated. In response, Republican North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum lauded the court’s temporary injunction, accusing the Biden administration of overreaching on federal land oil and gas production regulations.

The White House, Burgum and the North Dakota Petroleum Council did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Australia Introduces Legislation to Outlaw Disagreeing With the Government

As Australia approaches its next cycle of state and federal elections, the radical Aussie Federal Government is pushing laws which could silence media criticism of their key policy positions.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

As Australia approaches its next cycle of state and federal elections, the radical Aussie Federal Government is pushing laws which could silence media criticism of their key policy positions.

‘Attack on our freedoms’: Government’s revised online misinformation bill slammed as ‘chilling assault’ on free speech

Labor’s new online misinformation bill has been slammed as a “chilling assault” on freedom of speech, with critics claiming the government’s definition of “serious harm” could capture “any difference of opinion”. 

Patrick Hannaford Digital Reporter
4 min read
September 12, 2024 – 5:00PM

…

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland introduced the legislation to Parliament on Thursday, claiming misinformation and disinformation pose a “serious threat” to Australian’s  “safety and wellbeing” as well as “our democracy, society and economy”.

The Albanese government was forced to abandon a previous draft version of the laws after they were widely condemned by everyone from media organisations and tech companies to civil liberties groups and even the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Minister Rowland said the government had listened to the feedback and the new legislation had been revised to “carefully balance the public interest in combatting seriously harmful misinformation and disinformation with the freedom of expression that is so fundamental to our democracy”.

But critics are already lining up to attack the bill, with the Institute of Public Affairs describing the legislation as “the single biggest attack on freedom of speech in Australia’s peacetime history”.

“Misinformation legislation introduced into federal parliament today represents a chilling assault on every Australian’s right to free speech. The new Bill broadens provisions to censor speech, which even the government’s fatally flawed first draft did not include,” said John Storey, the Director of Law and Policy at the IPA.

…Read more: 

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/attack-on-our-freedoms-governments-revised-online-misinformation-bill-slammed-as-chilling-assault-on-free-speech/news-story/03f202bf41f4255fd0f7c4b4c05682fe

The Institute of Public Affairs has this to say about the new laws.

Revised Misinformation Laws Amp Up Assault On Free Speech

Written by: John Storey
12 September 2024

“Misinformation legislation introduced into federal parliament today represents a chilling assault on every Australian’s right to free speech. The new Bill broadens provisions to censor speech, which even the government’s fatally flawed first draft did not include,” said John Storey, Director of Law and Policy at the Institute of Public Affairs.

The revised Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 grants the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) enormous power to fine social media companies if they are found to have failed to properly censor ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. The new Bill contains three fundamental flaws:

  • A revised definition of ‘misinformation’ to mean content that is ‘verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive’ would create legal powers for politically biased fact-checkers to determine what is true and false (Clauses 13(1) and 13(2)).
  • It creates an unelected and unaccountable star chamber bureaucracy with the power to launch investigations and hearings to ensure compliance with censorship guidelines that can target mainstream Australians (Schedule 2, Clause 2).
  • A new definition of ‘serious harm’ is even broader than the first bill and can potentially capture any difference of opinion (Clause 14).

“The government’s proposed ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ laws are the single biggest attack on freedom of speech in Australia’s peacetime history, and have no place in a liberal democracy such as Australia,” said Mr Storey.

“The big tech companies will become the censorship and enforcement arm of the federal government to shut down debate and speech that it disagrees with.”

“Under these laws even the truth will be no defence. If a citizen were to disseminate information which was factually true, but ACMA or a fact checker labelled it ‘misleading’ or ‘deceptive’ because it ‘lacked context’, then that information would fall within the scope of these laws,” said Mr Storey.

The revised legislation has not taken into account the deep concern of many mainstream Australians who can now be targeted by an unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy for prosecution for simply stating genuinely held opinions online.

“The federal government has not listened to the concerns about free speech raised by mainstream Australians. Instead, they are pandering to its political base by actually broadening the censorship powers of ACMA, such as introducing by stealth a change to the definition of ‘harm’ to include ‘vilification’,” said Mr Storey.

Previous research by the Institute of Public Affairs found that fact-checking organisations were systematically biased and targeted the ‘No’ campaign in the Voice to Parliament referendum. That research found

  • So-called ‘fact-checkers’ published 187 fact checking articles related to the Voice – 170 of these assessments, or 91%, targeted claims of those who supported the No case.
  • Almost every example supporting the No case was assessed to be false. 99% per cent of assessed claims supporting the No case were deemed ‘false’, whereas only 59% of the comparatively few claims assessed supporting the Yes case were deemed ‘false’.

To download the IPA’s previous research click here.Read more: 

https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/media-releases/revised-misinformation-laws-amp-up-assault-on-free-speech

The IPA article (above) suggests individuals as well as organisations could be targeted.

The following submission from the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering (ATSE) and the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) makes it very clear that climate skepticism is in the firing line of the new disinformation laws. If this legislation is passed, going by this submission Australia’s premier scientific bodies will push for anyone who publicly disagrees with their alarmist stance on climate change and the Great Barrier Reef to be silenced using the new laws. They even slipped in a reference to President Trump (top of Page 4).

,joint-aas-atse-submission-finalHerunterladen

I’m not sure exactly what Anthony would do with a subpoena from the Australian government to cease and desist publishing climate “disinformation”, and to provide the full contact details of all authors, but I’m guessing it would make for a fun WUWT article.

Our favourite reef rebel Peter Ridd has started producing a series of videos on Australia’s woke scientific institutions and other interesting topics, well worth watching, in my opinion demonstrating why Australia’s science institutes are unfit to be gatekeepers of scientific truth. It was one of Peter’s videos which alerted me to the extremist submission above.

Elon Musk, who has very much been in the firing line for standing up to the Australian Government and winning, has just one word for this latest push to suppress freedom of expression.

As WUWT has previously shown, what is happening in Australia is part of a bigger picture. Across the world, radical left wing politicians appear to be acting simultaneously to silence opposition to their policies.

In South America and Europe, freedom is being eroded by increasingly punitive laws aimed at silencing critics of left wing policies.

Musk’s X banned in Brazil after disinformation row

Could Elon Musk actually be arrested and X cancelled?

The USA is not immune to this worldwide radical attempt by governments to impose censorship of “disinformation”.

Did the European Union Just Try to Illegally Censor US Free Speech?

The USA has strong protections against the Federal Government coercing public speech, but this has not stopped the European Union from allegedly applying indirect coercion to censor people in the United States – possibly at the behest of the Biden Administration.

In at least one case the Federal Government has been accused of acting directly to censor Americans – in my opinion a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.

Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to ‘censor’ some COVID-19 content during the pandemic

Politics Aug 27, 2024 11:26 AM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says senior Biden administration officials pressured Facebook to “censor” some COVID-19 content during the pandemic and vowed that the social media giant would push back if it faced such demands again.

WATCH: Meta’s Nick Clegg on the challenges of AI content and misinformation

In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg alleges that the officials, including those from the White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”

…Read more: 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-some-covid-19-content-during-the-pandemic

The US Constitution is an inspiration to the world, an effort by some very clever people to try to safeguard the freedom they paid for with blood for future generations. But your Federal Government just allegedly got away with a flagrant breaches of the First Amendment. No politician or staffer who allegedly committed these acts has faced any serious legal consequences for their actions. The people responsible for these alleged violations of the constitution, so far have gotten away with their alleged crimes.

Unless you elect politicians who uphold and protect the laws and constitution of the United States, what is happening in Australia right now could easily happen to the USA, regardless of the protections enshrined in the US Constitution. Unless wrongdoers face genuine legal consequences for violating the constitution, those who violate the constitution will feel safe to continue violating the constitution whenever convenient. The constitution is a document – it needs the support of politicians, attorneys, a judiciary and a people who believe in and work to uphold the safeguards in the US Constitution to make it work.

LA Times: ‘It’s almost shameful to want to have children’ – ‘Climate Anxiety & the Kid Question’

Jade S. Sasser is an associate professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. Her research explores the relationships between reproductive justice, women’s health and climate change, and she’s the host of the podcast “Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question.” The following excerpt is from her newest book, “Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future,” which was published earlier this year.

From Climate Depot

By Marc Morano

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-11/climate-anxiety-and-the-kid-question

By Jade S. Sasser

Excerpt: Jade S. Sasser is an associate professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. Her research explores the relationships between reproductive justice, women’s health and climate change, and she’s the host of the podcast “Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question.” The following excerpt is from her newest book, “Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future,” which was published earlier this year.

These interviewees have more climate change knowledge than most people do. All of them are college-educated; most of them either grew up or have lived for some time in Southern California; and most have taken environmental studies classes, either as undergrads or in graduate school.

Their experiences as members of marginalized groups have shaped their experiences with climate emotions like anxiety, fear, and trauma — as well as hope and optimism. Paying closer attention to those emotions and mental health in communities of color, including how they shape reproductive plans, will become an increasingly important component of climate justice in the United States.

…

Melanie, a 26-year-old Native American woman, was raised on the Navajo reservation and in Southern California. She idealizes having a big, happy family, but there are aspects of the world that give her pause, so she struggles with whether it’s morally OK to have children.

“ I think I may not have children although I do want them,” she notes. “Just because, with all of the things we see going on in the world, it seems unfair to bring someone into all of this against their will.”

Melanie’s feelings about climate change include a general sense of powerlessness and lack of control over other people’s actions, which directly translates into her fears about parenthood: “With climate change, we’re the driving force of things breaking down, but then also, the planet’s going to do what the planet’s going to do. … So … it almost feels, like, kind of shameful to want to have children.”

 Germany’s “Great Transformation” Rapidly Transforming Into The “Great Awakening”

Germans, once seemed to be caught up in a dreamland and unwilling to wake up from it, appear to have finally awakened to the fact the country is in deep DEEP  trouble. Especially the the under 25 age group.

From NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin 

Young Germans are rebelling…

In response to draconian COVID lockdowns, censorship, media bias, economic collapse and infrastructure decay, Germany’s youth swings to the right. 

Germany’s political establishment will soon pay dearly for its errors, arrogance and insolence. 

A profound and accelerating mood swing is underway across Germany, and nothing is stopping it. And the more the establishment tries to denounce it, the more the elites are getting rebuffed.

Germans, once seemed to be caught up in a dreamland and unwilling to wake up from it, appear to have finally awakened to the fact the country is in deep DEEP  trouble. Especially the the under 25 age group.

Quiet but powerful rebellion

Germany’s youth have woken up and have undergone a truly profound change of mind. The days of Fridays for Future, led by Greta Thunberg, have disappeared faster than a snowball on a hot summer day. Indeed, the youth have kept their “we’ll be watching you” promise, and, ironically, hate what they are now seeing: a crumbling of their country and future.

Now they are leading a quiet but powerful rebellion.

COVID lies

It started in 2020. Recall how just a few years ago, Germany’s young population was all caught up with Fridays For Future hype and climate hysteria. Then, suddenly, it got interrupted by the COVID pandemic. The youth, like everyone else, got locked down and were forced to abide by ridiculous rules and experimental medial treatment. No age group suffered more than young people under 20. Today these young people have since realized that the media and political establishment lied to them.

War lies and energy woes

The next fundamental lie then revealed: The warm and fuzzy Greens and Socialists weren’t pacifists at all but rather reckless warmongers who cheered on the war in Ukraine.

Next, a major natural gas pipeline was clandestinely sabotaged by the west, which led to skyrocketing energy prices and inflation. Suddenly the youth’s dreams of a future of prosperity went up in smoke. Next, the German Greens began to call for imposing harsh policies on everyone, threatening to make life even more unbearable for the poor.

Censorship

To make things worse, during COVID and the Ukraine war, the youth became aware of just how “democratic” the west really was. Dissidents were silenced as censorship spread across major social media platforms. In Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, people expressing different views found themselves slandered and criminalized. Dissident leaders were even arrested and locked up.  Thousands of social media accounts were suspended.

In July, 2024, we saw Germany’s “far right” Compact magazine get raided by German special forces and shut down by the overzealous socialist Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser.

Last month, instant messaging service Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested by French authorities. His crime: providing free speech. The youth now realize how “free speech” in the west is just a joke.

Open borders and immigrant violence 

Last month’s killing of three people (and many more injured) by a Syrian refugee at a festival highlighted a long streak of growing violence by migrants. The public reacted by loudly calling Europe’s border policies into question. Despite a string of lofty promises, politicians have taken no real action to stem the flood of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

Crime and violence have made many parts of Germany unsafe, and it’s dawning on the youth that their country is potentially going to hell in a basket. On September 1st, voters in the states of Saxony and Thuringia turned out in large numbers, and handed the right wing AfD party huge results.

Once voting Green, the youth under 18 have swung in masses to the right. Last August in Thuringia, 9000 youths under age 18 were asked in a survey who they would vote for. The winner by a huge margin was the right wing AfD party, pulling in 37.4% of the vote – more than double compared to 16.5% it got in 2019. The Greens, on the other hand, lost a whopping 83% of their supporters, see here.

German bridge is falling down

Popularity for the German Greens and Socialists is in collapse, and so is Germany’s infrastructure.

Last week, part of a major bridge in the Saxony city of Dresden mysteriously collapsed. The incident highlights Germany’s neglect of its own infrastructure while it funnels tens of billions of euros into dubious green projects at home and abroad. The collapse of the Dresden bridge is an accurate metaphor for Germany.

“Part of the AfD’s success can be attributed to its economic policy,” reports Unherd here. “It calls for an end to government subsidies that distort the market, an end to the country’s expensive green energy transition and, crucially, a reversal of the current deindustrialisation. If such moderate economic policy is abandoned by the centrists in power, then voters will look elsewhere.”

Stick to the Weather, World Meteorological Organization, Africa’s GDP Is Not Declining

The Associated Press (AP) posted a story describing a study by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) which claims climate change is costing Africa as much as 5 percent of its GDP. Data show this is false. Extreme weather has not become more frequent or severe in Africa, and GDP in the different African regions and particular countries cited by the WMO and discussed in the AP story has grown substantially during recent period of climate change.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

The Associated Press (AP) posted a story describing a study by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) which claims climate change is costing Africa as much as 5 percent of its GDP. Data show this is false. Extreme weather has not become more frequent or severe in Africa, and GDP in the different African regions and particular countries cited by the WMO and discussed in the AP story has grown substantially during recent period of climate change.

Monika Pronczuk, the writer of the AP story, “African nations are losing up to 5% of their GDP per year with climate change, a new report says,” uncritically parrots the WMO’s claims that “African nations are losing up to 5% of their GDP every year as they bear a heavier burden than the rest of the world from climate change.”

“‘Over the past 60 years, Africa has observed a warming trend that has become more rapid than the global average,’ said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo, warning that it is affecting everything from food security to public health to peace,” wrote Pronczuck.

She should have checked the data.

As Climate Realism has discussed repeatedly, hard data from the United Nations and other government and international agencies refute any claims that climate change is making Africa’s weather worse or causing food insecurity. The latter claim has been debunked in repeated Climate Realism articles, here, here, and here, for example, which show that crop yields and production across the continent, except in areas of civil and cross border strife driven by religious and political conflicts, have regularly set records amid modest climate change.

Climate Realism has also shown that recent extreme weather events have not, in fact, been unusual in Africa’s history nor have they been more severe in recent decades, here, here, and here, for instance. In the few countries where food production has been hampered and economic growth has declined across multiple years in Africa, research shows it is consistently due to political strife, from civil wars, cross border conflicts, or political corruption. Climate change has not been a factor.

The main thrust of the WMO report is that because climate change has caused increasingly severe weather, it has also resulted in a GDP decline with African countries having to spend a disproportionate percentage of their incomes mitigating climate change. But since the former is false, the latter is as well. And, indeed, data consistently show substantial GDP growth across the period of recent climate change in the regions and countries discussed in the AP story, and one would presume the WMO report. In fact, the growth rate there has been at or above the world’s average GDP growth rate as a whole. For instance:

  • Data from the African Development Bank (ADB) shows GDP growth in the region of West Africa at or above 3 percent since 2000, topping 4 percent two of the four years. The further projects growth in each of the countries for the remainder of 2024 and through 2025, stating; “[g]reater agricultural output, expansion in the services sectors, and reforms to strengthen private sector participation in energy and mining are expected to drive growth in Benin (6.4 percent), Gambia (6.2 percent), Togo (6 percent), Mali (4.8 percent), Sierra Leone (4.6 percent), and Burkina Faso (4.1 percent).”
  • Data from the World Bank show that, excluding the high income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, since 2000, GDP growth in the poorest countries has topped 6 percent five different years, five percent once, 4 percent five times, and only experienced negative growth in a single year, in 2020, the year of the pandemic. The poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa experienced GDP growth rates of 4.3 percent, 3.7 percent, and 3 percent respectively in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

The AP mentioned Mali and Zambia in particular as countries suffering economic hardship due to climate change, but the data tells a different story. Over the past decade, Mali has seen its GDP grow every year but 2020, with growth topping 5 percent five of the past 10 years (spiking to 7.1 percent in 2014), and topping three percent every other year.

Zambia’s GDP history tells a similar story. Zambia’s growth in 2023 was 5.8 percent, the highest single year during the past decade, and except for the pandemic year of 2020, Zambia’s annual GDP increased, topping 3 percent growth in all but two growth years.

The WMO is a specialized agency of the United Nations whose mandate covers weather, climate, and water resources. It is staffed with meteorologists and other scientists who specialize in weather, not economists, and as such it is not known for its incisive economic acumen or analysis. No one goes to the WMO to analyze economic trends or for its forecasts of economic growth. Based on its uninformed, deeply flawed analysis climate change’s purported threat to Africa’s GDP, it might be a good idea for the WMO to stay in its lane and leave economic forecasting to economists.

Also, it might behoove the AP to do some simple fact checking (it takes just a few minutes through the magic of the internet), looking at existing hard data on trends before promoting economic analyses from organizations without apparent economic expertise. In fact, even when economists pronounce something, its would still be a good idea for the AP to check the data before uncritically parroting a claim as if it were the gospel truth.

California Crews Begin Mowing Down Region’s Iconic Joshua Trees for Solar Farm

However, in 2020, Avantus (the developer behind the project) received an exemption from Newsom’s Fish and Game Commission to clear the trees. Arguably, the 2023 measure is a cover for the realities that are now being played out in the state.

From Watts Up With That?

 Legal Insurrection

by Leslie Eastman

Back in 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom offered a bill giving the state’s iconic Western Joshua Trees “protected” status.

The Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act was prompted by the California Fish and Game Commission’s inability to act on a petition filed more than three years ago seeking to list the living symbols of the California desert as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act.

“Compromise is always painful,” said Brendan Cummings, conservation director of the Center for Biological Diversity and an author of the petition. “But at the end of the day, I’ll be happy if this bill passes.”

The Newsom Administration’s intervention reflects a volatile reality: Opponents of the petition warn that listing the western Joshua tree could derail private property improvements and renewable energy projects designed to help meet California’s climate change goals of shifting the state’s electricity system entirely off fossil fuels by 2045.

However, in 2020, Avantus (the developer behind the project) received an exemption from Newsom’s Fish and Game Commission to clear the trees. Arguably, the 2023 measure is a cover for the realities that are now being played out in the state.

As I noted in an earlier post, climate cultists insisted that they needed to chop down the Joshua Trees to save them from the carbon dioxide plants actually need for life. In the senseless quest for renewable energy utopia, a solar energy firm was given permits to proceed with the Aratina Solar Center, over the deep concerns and objections of area residents.

Despite comments and concerns from residence in Boron and Desert Lake, the Kern County Board of Supervisors approved a solar farm project which will include five different sites in the East Kern County area; the board voted on the approval at their October 12th meeting in Bakersfield.

It appears a massive green energy project cannot begin without a substantial outcry from the nearby residents, whose communities are being deeply impacted with few real gains in sustainable or reliable energy.

This week, work began on felling 3,500 of the 4,700 Joshua Trees that are on the site of the solar farm.

A 2020 survey counted 4,700 trees on the project site. Since then, however, the size of the project has been reduced.

Hundreds of Joshua trees appeared to have been destroyed in the last week, but on some portions of the site the trees still stand, residents said. Neither the company nor government agencies would say how many trees have been cut down. Avantus, the developer, said fewer trees will be destroyed than the government approved.

Heavy equipment has not yet started leveling the land where the trees were felled to prepare for the solar panel installation.

Residents fear the earth-moving work will increase the threat of valley fever — a fungal respiratory infection that is transmitted in dust. A local group found the fungus that causes valley fever in samples of topsoil from the five parcels surrounding the towns where the solar panels will be built.

Residents are continuing to fight, launching a petition to halt further destruction of the Joshua trees.

A petition against the project was launched earlier this summer and currently has over 52,000 signatures.

“Ancient Joshua Trees are going extinct, and we must save them. The Aratina Solar Project in Boron, California, is approved to destroy nearly 4,000 ancient Joshua Trees in this forest…These iconic trees have stood for centuries, providing habitat for numerous species and contributing to the unique biodiversity of our region,” the petition read.

https://twitter.com/WendyReedTweet/status/1824609541730001039

If California politicos were seriously interested in reliable and affordable energy and protecting Joshua trees, they would be making plans to erect Generation IV nuclear reactors.

Instead, we are going to spend decades recovering from the environmental damage caused by climate cult pseudoscience.