Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Mike Gallagher, CEO of Ports Australia – “You can’t put them out. So you can imagine it on the street if you can’t put them out, imagine them on a vessel out at sea or in a port.”
Mike Gallagher, CEO of Ports Australia – “You can’t put them out. So you can imagine it on the street if you can’t put them out, imagine them on a vessel out at sea or in a port.”
Warning over electric scooter and bike batteries amid daily fires
Fire crews are noting a spate of explosions caused by lithium batteries found in e-scooters and e-bikes – and it could even happen when they’re being shipped to shops.
“The fires we’re encountering almost on a daily basis are from our smaller e-scooters, e-bikes type of batteries,” Darren Mallouk from Queensland Fire Department’s Investigation Unit told 9News.
…
Mike Gallagher, CEO of Ports Australia, said ship fires caused by these flammable batteries were virtually impossible to safely put out.
“They are packed like sardines inside a tin, except these are very dangerous sardines,” he said.
“You can’t put them out. So you can imagine it on the street if you can’t put them out, imagine them on a vessel out at sea or in a port.”
…
In 2022, a cargo ship carrying luxury vehicles including EVs sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
The ferocity and speed of Lithium fires cannot be overstated, Lithium fires are more like tossing a match in a box of fireworks than a normal fire. The people in the video below were lucky to escape with their lives, there was no time to do anything but flee.
If professional firefighters struggle to extinguish lithium fires, nobody else should attempt it. Not only are you at risk of severe burns from exploding debris which are hot enough to melt steel, The fumes from Lithium are horribly poisonous.
Lithium is a powerful psychoactive. In small doses Lithium has therapeutic value in treating manic depressive disorders, but patients on Lithium have to have regular blood tests to minimise the risk of Lithium poisoning. Even at therapeutic doses Lithium can cause a variety of short and (if you are unlucky) long term insidious physiological ailments, including dementia like brain injuries, known as Lithium Neurotoxicity.
Even if firefighters control the blaze and save the house, would you really want to live in a house contaminated by Lithium? Sooner or later insurers will catch on that even if adjacent structures survive the blaze, there is a significant lingering litigation risk from people claiming their health was damaged by exposure to lithium.
Ship transport is the only part of the Lithium risk profile which seems fixable with current technology. The Lithium could be transported in a non-flammable form, such as Lithium carbonate, minimising the risk of fire. Though Lithium carbonate is still a dangerously toxic substance, applying similar protocols to transportation of other toxic substances should suffice for non flammable forms of lithium.
But converting non flammable forms of Lithium into batteries is very energy intensive, it requires lots of cheap energy – something green obsessed Western nations are struggling to provide to industry. So ships and their crews continue to risk their lives transporting unstable forms of Lithium such as finished Lithium batteries, to help green politicians maintain the fiction they are reducing CO2 emissions.
“EPA is attempting to hide its illegal electric vehicles mandate behind a ‘fleetwide’ average…. Congress has not directed EPA to force the adoption of electric vehicles, EPA is claiming this mandate unilaterally.” -CRA Tailpipe Coalition Letter
“EPA is attempting to hide its illegal electric vehicles mandate behind a ‘fleetwide’ average…. Congress has not directed EPA to force the adoption of electric vehicles, EPA is claiming this mandate unilaterally.” -CRA Tailpipe Coalition Letter (below)
The vote was 215-191, with all but one Republican and eight Democrats in favor. Twenty-five members did not vote.
“The very idea that the federal government would try and kill off gas-powered cars should scare anyone concerned with basic freedoms in this country,” noted Daren Bakst , Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. “EPA’s de facto electric vehicle (EV) mandate will hurt Americans, driving up prices and hurting mobility. It will especially hurt low-income households.”
A coalition letter dated September 19, 2024, explains why energy and mobility freedom is good policy–and mandates bad.
Dear Representative,
The undersigned organizations write to support disapproval under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of the Environmental Protection Agency Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Year 2027 and Later Light-Duty Vehicles. This rulemaking is beyond EPA’s authority, seeking to impose a de facto electric vehicle mandate on American consumers.
This rule on tailpipe emissions standards is a massive overreach, using a novel application of EPA motor vehicle authorities in an attempt to force a transition in the motor vehicles market to products that align with the ideological preferences of the Biden administration. This rule is a de facto electric vehicle mandate.
Congress has not given EPA the authority to require the purchase or production of certain types of motor vehicles or outlaw the purchase or production of other types of vehicles. Congress has not given EPA the authority to require the purchase or production of electric vehicles. EPA’s attempt to infer such power is contrary to longstanding administrative practice and contrary to recent Supreme Court precedent.
EPA openly stated that the intent of this rulemaking is to force a transition to electric vehicles. In this rulemaking and press announcements surrounding it, EPA repeatedly made clear that the intent of this rulemaking is to transition the motor vehicles market to electric vehicles, pollution reduction is merely an aside.
For example, the first sentence of EPA’s press release announcing the rulemaking states “Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new proposed federal vehicle emissions standards that will accelerate the ongoing transition to a clean vehicles future.” The rulemaking itself extensively focuses on trends in electric vehicle manufacturing and announced plans from automakers and state governments regarding electric vehicles.
But EPA’s mandate from Congress is to reduce criteria pollutants from vehicles, not to pick and choose what type of vehicles can be sold. EPA cites an executive order from the Biden administration as impetus for this de facto electric vehicle mandate, but an executive order does not create new authority.
EPA’s statutory authority is to control emissions of vehicles, not to require the manufacture and sale of entirely different vehicles. Congress has not directed EPA to force the adoption of electric vehicles, EPA is claiming this mandate unilaterally. The Clean Air Act directs EPA to reduce pollutant emissions from vehicles themselves, by for example requiring emissions control devices like catalytic converters.
Electric vehicles are entirely separate products, they are not an emissions control device for internal combustion powered vehicles. EPA is thus for the first time seeking to mandate substitution of a different product in order to comply with its tailpipe emissions standards. This is a novel application of existing authority, and is frankly illegal. This illegality is made clear by an alternative scenario where EPA mandates the use of mass transit rather than individual motor vehicles. This would certainly reduce emissions from motor vehicles, but would be transparently beyond EPA’s regulatory authority.
EPA is attempting to hide its illegal electric vehicles mandate behind a “fleetwide” average. EPA is setting fleetwide average standards for vehicles rather than setting individual standards for specific classes of vehicles as a means of hiding its de facto electric vehicle mandate.
While these two actions may appear indistinguishable in many applications, the distinctness is put on clear display by the EPA’s rulemaking. Setting fleetwide average standards at reasonable levels allows for the inclusion of new emissions control technologies in new vehicles. This has a similar effect to setting a reasonable emissions standard for each specific class of vehicles.
However, setting a fleetwide average at an unreasonably low level, as this rulemaking does, disguises that there is no means of compliance through new control technologies, the only means of compliance is transitioning to a different product. If EPA set the same unreasonably low standard for a given class of vehicles, it would effectively outlaw that class of vehicles.
If EPA were to directly say that a class of vehicles was illegal and require that an alternative replacement must be purchased, that would be clearly acknowledged as beyond EPA’s authority. Congress has given the EPA no such power. But using the “fleetwide” average set at an unreasonably low rate, EPA can pretend it is not outlawing the manufacture or sale of any class of products, while it is effectively requiring carmakers to produce and sell an alternative product (electric vehicles) as that is the only way to comply with the unreasonable low standard. But hiding behind a “fleetwide” average to attempt to disguise this kind of impermissible mandate does not suddenly give EPA the power to impose such a mandate.
This EPA rulemaking is clearly beyond the scope of the regulatory power granted to the agency by Congress. While this overreach will be litigated in the courts, a positive CRA decision now would ensure that consumers are protected today, rather than wait years for the issue to work its way through the court system.
Sincerely,
Thomas J. Pyle, President, American Energy Alliance; Tim Chapman, President, Advancing American Freedom; Isaac Orr, Vice President, Always On Energy Research; Bob Carlstrom, President, AMAC Action; Phil Kerpen, President, American Commitment; Myron Ebell, Chairman, American Lands Council; Margaret Byfield, Executive Director, American Stewards of Liberty; Richard Manning, President, Americans for Limited Government; Brent Gardner, Chief Government Affairs Officer, Americans for Prosperity; Grover Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform; Jeffrey Mazzella, President, Center for Individual Freedom; Craig Rucker, President, CFACT; Daren Bakst, Director, Competitive Enterprise Institute; Jerry Simmons, President/CEO, Domestic Energy Producers Alliance; Kristen A. Ullman, President, Eagle Forum; Craig Richardson, President, Energy & Environment Legal Institute; Beatrice Lam, Secretary, Fueling California; Cameron Sholty, Executive Director, Heartland Impact; James Taylor, President, Heartland Institute; Ryan Walker, Executive Vice President, Heritage Action; Jon Sanders, Director, Center for Food, Power, and Life, John Locke Foundation; Jason Hayes, Director of Energy & Environmental Policy, Mackinac Center for Public Policy; Brandon Arnold, Executive Vice President, National Taxpayers Union; Donna Jackson, Director of Membership Development, Project 21 Black Leadership Network; Paul Gessing, President, Rio Grande Foundation; James E. Enstrom, PhD,MPH, President, Scientific Integrity Institute; Frank Lasee, President, Truth in Energy & Climate; Kathleen Sgamma, President, Western Energy Alliance
Photovoltaic projects crumble in harsh alpine environments…Swiss solar panels on dam project fails after just 2 years.
Who cares if it works or not?
It’s often how the green racket works: Conjure up some green energy producing pie-in-the-sky project, no matter how unfeasible it may be, propose it to technically illiterate bureaucrats – who permit and fund it with little hesitation – build it, and, after realizing it won’t ever work, abandon it and let the next generation deal with the mess. In the meantime, you will have earned a tidy sum of money.
The latest likely example of such a project is “Axpo in Glarus Süd”, described at Blackout News here: “Solar panels at Muttsee dam fail after two years – solar plant not suitable for mountain use.”
PV system installed on a dam in Switzerland. AI-generated image, Source: Blackout News.
It was heralded as a pioneering project and designed to last 20 years while providing green power (at least in the summertime) to nearly 3000 people. But, as Blackout News reports: “After just two years, considerable problems are already apparent. Of the 5,000 or so solar panels installed, around 270 are damaged, reports the newspaper Südostschweiz.”
A solar system in the harsh environment of the Swiss Alps? What could possibly go wrong?
Surely the builders and those approving the project had to have been familiar with extremely harsh winter conditions and massive snowfalls of the Swiss Alps, and that the system would never have a chance. Obviously no one cares much about reality anymore. The important thing, it seems, is to grab all that green cash and make a stash.
Panels damaged after just 2 years
Already, just 2 years in operation, 270 panels (5%) of the Muttsee project need to be replaced, and that at an exorbitant cost. Just check out the Axpo promotion video and take a look at the equipment needed to build the project. The helicopters, cranes, rigging and this caliber of personnel aren’t cheap.
Axpo promotion video: “Construction start of Switzerland’s largest solar facility.”
So far I haven’t found data on the project’s return on investment time.
Another embarrassing fact: “The full extent of the damage only became clear when the snow at 2500 meters above sea level had completely melted,” reports Blackout News.
No one became aware of the damage until spring had arrived?
The article “The Chicken or the Egg? Spillover between Private Climate Action and Climate Policy Support” is a remarkable example of what can only be described as academic tail-chasing. What begins as an exploration of the interplay between individual climate actions—like reducing meat consumption—and broader policy support quickly morphs into an intellectual exercise that not only makes no new contributions to the field but also leads nowhere meaningful.
The article “The Chicken or the Egg? Spillover between Private Climate Action and Climate Policy Support”is a remarkable example of what can only be described as academic tail-chasing. What begins as an exploration of the interplay between individual climate actions—like reducing meat consumption—and broader policy support quickly morphs into an intellectual exercise that not only makes no new contributions to the field but also leads nowhere meaningful.
Abstract
People engage in many different activities with climate consequences, including mundane everyday activities, such as eating meals and either saving or throwing away leftovers, and collective actions, such as voting, participating in political events and in other ways expressing support for or resistance against climate-relevant policy. Does engaging in everyday climate-relevant activities have implications for support of climate policy, and vice versa, as suggested by research on pro-environmental behavioural spillover? A repeated survey was collected yearly between 2018 and 2022 from representative samples of Norwegians, most of whom participated in more than one survey. The surveys included self-reports about two everyday climate-relevant behaviours (eating red meat and discarding food waste) and the support for two types of policy to mitigate climate change (expansion of wind power and “carbon taxes” – the use of taxes or fees to regulate climate-relevant behaviour). Cross-lagged structural equation modelling of relationships between everyday climate-relevant behaviour and support for mitigation policy reveal that, as expected, all auto-regressive effects (of a latent variable on itself, measured one year apart) are highly significant. There are also significant, positive cross-lagged (i.e., spillover) effects, which are generally bigger between the two types of everyday behaviours and support for the two types of policies than between everyday behaviour and policy support. However, support for carbon taxes has a strong positive effect on reducing meat consumption. Hence, it appears that when it comes to climate actions, consumer and citizen roles are intertwined. Spillover effects are partly mediated through climate concern. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027249442400207X
It’s hard to take this seriously, given the obsessive focus on minor, everyday behaviors like how much meat someone eats or how they discard food waste. The attempt to link these trivial actions to monumental climate policy decisions is not only misguided but also reveals a striking misunderstanding of how real-world policy is shaped.
The Premise: Over-Analyzing the Mundane
The paper opens with a discussion on whether small, everyday activities, such as eating red meat or throwing away food, influence people’s support for climate policies like carbon taxes and wind power expansion. This premise alone raises a red flag. The assumption that these micro-level activities could meaningfully spill over into support for large-scale policy changes is more than far-fetched. It’s akin to suggesting that someone deciding to recycle their soda cans once a week will naturally lead them to demand a complete overhaul of national energy policy. It’s the ultimate case of over-extrapolation, with very little basis in observable reality.
The authors draw on a longitudinal panel study from Norway, collecting data over five years on red meat consumption, food waste, and support for two types of climate policies. According to the study, support for carbon taxes had a “spillover” effect on reducing meat consumption. However, here’s where the logic unravels: does anyone seriously believe that a person’s dietary habits shift simply because they support a tax? This assumption not only infantilizes voters but also underestimates the complexity of human behavior and political beliefs.
To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate possible spillovers not only from pro-environmental everyday behaviours to environmental policy support, but also from environmental policy support to pro-environmental everyday behaviours. We employ a design, where representative samples of the Norwegian population were interviewed once a year, five years in a row, using a structured questionnaire. Hence, our design allows for testing many more touchpoints than previous longitudinal spillover research, substantially advancing insights into the stability of behavioural spillover. The study focuses on two climate-relevant everyday behaviours: eating red meat and discarding food waste, as well as the support for two types of policy, which are considered essential components of climate change mitigation policy in many countries: the expansion of wind power and “carbon taxes” – defined here as the use of economic instruments like taxes or fees to regulate climate-relevant behaviour. Besides (1) investigating spillover between climate-relevant everyday behaviours and climate policy support, we also measure climate concern to investigate (2) how strongly the studied behaviours and policies are associated with climate change among the Norwegian public and (3) whether possible behavioural spillover effects are mediated through changes in climate concern (Höchli et al., 2019; Stangherlin et al., 2023). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027249442400207X
Behavioral Spillover: The Unproven Theory
At the heart of this paper is the notion of “behavioral spillover.” According to this theory, engaging in one pro-environmental action supposedly increases the likelihood of participating in another. The authors seem to believe that a positive correlation between small, individual actions and broader policy support is inevitable. But here’s the rub: correlation does not equal causation. The research acknowledges that these correlations are often weak and context-dependent, yet continues to beat the same drum.
Highlights
•Climate-friendly responding tends to spill over to more behaviours over time.
•The spillover process is partly mediated through increased climate concern.
The study finds that everyday behaviors like reducing meat consumption are more strongly correlated with support for specific climate policies, such as carbon taxes, rather than with unrelated environmental behaviors like reducing food waste. But does this really tell us anything meaningful? In reality, a person’s diet and their stance on environmental policies are shaped by a variety of factors—personal beliefs, economic interests, cultural values, and political ideologies. To suggest that these can be boiled down to a simplistic model of spillover, where one behavior naturally leads to another, is an insult to both the complexity of human behavior and the nuances of public policy.
The Real Driver: Ideological Alignment
What the paper only tangentially deals with and dismisses, is the likelihood that a pre-existing political or environmental stance drives both individual behaviors and policy support in tandem. It’s not that someone starts recycling, then suddenly supports a carbon tax—it’s that individuals who believe in the climate change narrative adopt both behaviors and policies simultaneously as part of a cohesive ideological framework.
For instance, those who believe in climate alarmism don’t stop at reducing their meat consumption. They support carbon taxes, advocate for wind power expansion, and make various lifestyle changes all at once. These actions don’t occur sequentially through behavioral spillover; they emerge from a broader belief system. It’s not a gradual process of persuasion but an all-in commitment to an ideological stance.
The study mistakenly treats behaviors like reducing food waste or supporting carbon taxes as isolated events that spill over into each other, when in fact they are all part of the same worldview. People who buy into the climate crisis narrative will, from the outset, support a wide array of environmental policies. Their stance on climate change informs all their actions at once, not step-by-step as the study implies.
Flawed Assumptions and Misplaced Focus
The authors make another fundamental mistake by conflating voluntary individual behavior with collective policy support. It’s true that climate change rhetoric often pushes the idea that personal responsibility—like recycling or cutting down on meat consumption—can make a real difference. However, this article takes that idea to absurd extremes by suggesting that such personal actions can influence large-scale policy shifts.
The paper references research that shows how people might feel morally “off the hook” after performing small pro-environmental actions, a phenomenon known as “moral licensing.” Essentially, people might justify continuing an environmentally harmful behavior because they’ve already done their bit for the planet. For instance, someone might feel that they can justify a transatlantic flight because they recycle. This leads to an obvious contradiction: are we really supposed to believe that both supporting carbon taxes and cutting down on red meat consumption is part of the same behavioral trajectory?
Carbon Tax and Wind Power: Economic Myths, Not Solutions
One of the core policy solutions discussed in the article is the carbon tax, often hailed as a magic bullet to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Support for carbon taxes is portrayed as having a spillover effect that leads to reductions in red meat consumption. But here’s where the argument takes a ridiculous turn. The authors seem to suggest that if we can just get people to support carbon taxes, they’ll start making more climate-conscious decisions in other areas of their lives, such as their diet.
This assumption is grounded in fantasy rather than fact. Carbon taxes have been politically divisive and economically burdensome wherever they’ve been implemented. They disproportionately affect low-income individuals while having a negligible impact on reducing overall emissions. The idea that support for these taxes somehow translates into a broader change in personal behavior is absurd. In fact, it’s far more likely that people will resent being taxed for behaviors they feel are necessary or justified, leading to backlash rather than spillover.
Wind power, another focal point of the study, is equally problematic. Expanding wind power, especially onshore, has been met with significant public resistance in many countries, including Norway. Wind farms are not only an eyesore; they also disrupt local ecosystems, harm wildlife, and create noise pollution. The idea that increasing support for wind power will lead to widespread pro-environmental behavior changes is detached from reality. People might tolerate a wind farm being built near their home because they feel it’s a necessary evil, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to suddenly adopt a vegan diet or stop driving their cars.
The Real Spillover: From Climate Policies to Economic Disaster
The authors’ focus on “spillover” misses the real issue: the spillover from misguided climate policies to economic and social harm. Policies like carbon taxes and massive investments in wind power are not without consequences. They lead to increased energy costs, job losses in traditional energy sectors, and greater economic inequality. Yet none of this is acknowledged in the article. Instead, the authors persist in their academic echo chamber, analyzing trivial behavioral shifts while ignoring the real-world impacts of the policies they champion.
Conclusion: Ideology, Not Behavior, Drives Climate Action
Ultimately, this article epitomizes what happens when academia becomes too wrapped up in its own theories and loses sight of the real world. The authors waste considerable effort on a question that is fundamentally flawed. Behavioral spillover is a red herring. It’s not that people’s small actions influence their broader political stances—it’s that their political stances dictate both their actions and policy support from the beginning.
To those who genuinely believe in the climate crisis narrative, every action—from skipping steaks to championing wind farms—is just another part of the same ideological framework. There’s no “spillover” effect; there’s simply a commitment to a worldview that demands conformity in both personal and policy spheres.
The study would have been better served by exploring the deeper ideological underpinnings of why certain people adopt these positions wholesale. Instead, it wastes its time analyzing trivial behaviors in isolation, giving us nothing more than a convoluted, circular argument that fails to address the larger picture.
In sum, the real driver here is political and ideological alignment, not individual behaviors influencing policy support. The authors, caught in their academic bubble, overlook the obvious: people who buy into the climate crisis narrative will support all the policies and behaviors at once—not as a result of any behavioral spillover, but because they see it all as part of the same belief system.
The atmospheric river currently over the Gulf of Alaska may be the strongest on record in that area.
The latest model runs show extreme values of the key measure of atmospheric river strength, vertically integrated moisture transport (IVT), which describes how much water vapor is being moved over a period of time.
The atmospheric river currently over the Gulf of Alaska may be the strongest on record in that area.
The latest model runs show extreme values of the key measure of atmospheric river strength, vertically integrated moisture transport (IVT), which describes how much water vapor is being moved over a period of time.
Below is the map of IVT for this morning, with values exceeding 1900. I have personally never seen anything like it.
An estimate of the strongest atmospheric river over observed for 1990-2019 by Dr. Lexi Henny of NASA/Goddard suggested this is the strongest atmospheric river during that period of record. Impressive.
The plume of moisture was very apparent in water vapor satellite imagery this afternoon (below). Do you see the southwest-northeast directed plume aimed at SE Alaska and BC? Some of the associated clouds have moved into Washington.
This atmospheric river is predicted to hit land as an AR-5, the strongest level observed. We can be thankful that the center of the river will make landfall north of Washington State, where only AR-2 levels should occur on the northern Olympic Coast.
By Tuesday, as much as a foot of rain will fall over the coastal terrain of BC
Strong atmospheric rivers are not infrequent over SE Alaska and BC this time of year, with the path of the moisture plumes reaching Washington State in November.
The fact we are in a neutral to La Nina year means that there is a higher probability of more rain than last year (an El Nino year)…something shown for the western Washington lowlands below.
Hypothetically, suppose you were distracted while you tried to change tropospheric jet streams, and accidentally gave away your national manufacturing to a foreign adversary. Next thing you know, you’re buying the batteries they make, and installing them in essential grid infrastructure and thousands of homes. You’re patting yourself on the back for getting a cheap deal (never mind the slaves) and it all seems dandy until one sunny day, a leader who was cheesed off with a trade deal, quietly switched off the “overcharge protection” on all of them remotely.
Hypothetically, suppose you were distracted while you tried to change tropospheric jet streams, and accidentally gave away your national manufacturing to a foreign adversary. Next thing you know, you’re buying the batteries they make, and installing them in essential grid infrastructure and thousands of homes. You’re patting yourself on the back for getting a cheap deal (never mind the slaves) and it all seems dandy until one sunny day, a leader who was cheesed off with a trade deal, quietly switched off the “overcharge protection” on all of them remotely.
At that point, millions of solar panels are pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front.
Brian Craighead – chief executive of Energy Renaissance, has come to warn us — it’s a hidden threat to national security. He says Australia has already installed 220,000 batteries that were made in potentially unfriendly places, and each home battery has roughly 7,500 times as much energy as a pager. As he remarks: “overcharge is when all hell breaks loose”.
Now, he happens to sell secure battery management systems — so he has an interest in scaring the socks off Energy Ministers and hyping things up, but ask yourself this: would Anthony Albanese have seen this coming?
“When everyone talks about battery safety, we tend to think about the chemical stuff – these fires that you see on videos of Tesla cars going up. But those are relatively unusual. The key thing to focus on is battery software … that’s what protects them from overcharging.
“Let’s say you were a bad actor from a bad country, here’s what you could do, and this would be horribly easy. For example, you could say on January 7, 2025, I’m going to turn off the overcharge on 200,000 batteries installed in homes in Australia. Nothing is going to happen until then.”
It would make a great movie, but a lousy life:
“A co-ordinated attack exploiting these vulnerabilities could lead to widespread fires, explosions, and a crippling of our energy infrastructure. The risk extends beyond individual homes. Large, imported grid-connected batteries are becoming integral to Australia’s national energy grid. These massive storage systems, often managed by foreign-developed software, could be susceptible to cyber-attacks or sabotage, posing a threat to national security and public safety.
“There’s a clear and present danger.”
As Craighead says (so colorfully) — it’s like pink-batts on steroids. (A program here in Australia where a Big Government-made bubble in home insulation killed 3 poorly trained people and set fire to 200 homes.)
In the end, after the bombs and the blackouts, the hit to the GDP and the death toll — it will all be deemed a dreadful accident, due to a fault in a minor part, and a hot day caused by climate change. Everyone will know what happened, but no one will want to risk the lobster-wine-coal-barley-beer-students deal, and besides the nation needs to order new fridges and solar panels.
Unless, of course the home-battery-bombs were a decoy in a larger hostile plan, in which case we’ll have bigger things to worry about.
Speaking of which:
The US banned the Pentagon from buying batteries from six Chinese manufacturers earlier this year.
This report examines several fundamental aspects of the State of Maine’s offshore wind development plan. It is divided into two parts. Part 1 examines certain economic issues, such as feasibility, cost, and progress to date. Part 2 explores the proposed development as it relates to the entire Gulf of Maine, namely because the project has not advanced to the point where the State of Maine’s responsibilities have been defined.
July 8, 2013 – Windfloat Floating Offshore Foundation and Vestas V-80 2MW Offshore Wind Turbine, Povoa de Varzim, Portugal. (Photo by Senu Sirnivas / NREL)
My research report — Maine’s Massive “Floating Wind” Folly — is up on the Net Zero Reality Coalition’s webpage hosted by CFACT which sponsored the research. See https://www.cfact.org/netzerorealitycoalition/, which has a lot of other research reports as well.
Below is my Executive Summary, followed by the latest bad news on this ongoing silly saga.
“Executive Summary
This report examines several fundamental aspects of the State of Maine’s offshore wind development plan. It is divided into two parts. Part 1 examines certain economic issues, such as feasibility, cost, and progress to date. Part 2 explores the proposed development as it relates to the entire Gulf of Maine, namely because the project has not advanced to the point where the State of Maine’s responsibilities have been defined.
The offshore wind plan calls for development of 3,000 MW of generating capacity, an amount that is roughly double Maine’s average electricity usage. The viability of Maine’s offshore wind plan depends entirely on the massive transformation of the state’s grid from fossil fuel use to electrification. It is clear that the citizens of Maine have not been informed of this vast transformation requirement. They have certainly not approved it.
The offshore wind facilities will consist of great numbers of “floating turbines” operating at a scale and degree of reliability that hasn’t been verified to work in the real world. Such an assumption makes the entire plan not only technologically speculative but also enormously risky.
Extrapolating today’s small-scale facility cost would make the price tag for this project around $100 billion. That could rise significantly once large scale, hurricane-proof technology is developed and adopted, if it ever is. It is important the citizens of Maine be made aware of such great costs, as well as the far greater cost of the required electrification to place them into operation.
The state of Maine has initiated development of a facility to manufacture the floating wind turbines. This effort appears to depend entirely on getting a nearly half-billion-dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. But this grant is likely illegal as the program is for funding highway projects, not offshore wind development. We will explore that in this report.
On the environmental impact side of the equation, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is in the process of leasing 15,000 MW of offshore wind development sites in the Gulf of Maine. The State of Maine’s proposed 3,000 MW development would come from some of these sites.
BOEM’s Environmental Assessment of this leasing program does not include the impact of building and operating the 15,000 MW generating capacity. They say that impact will only be assessed for individual leaseholds. This approach is mistaken as the full life cycle impact needs to be assessed prior to leasing, including the combined impact of all the leases taken together. A cumulative impact assessment is vital because it might affect the viability and nature of the leases.
The crucial need for a “cumulative impact” is also especially needed to assess the project’s impact on endangered whales, notably the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. The Gulf of Maine is designated as critical habitat for Right Whales under the Endangered Species Act.
The Environmental Assessment does include the leasehold sonar surveys prior to construction. Recent analysis has determined such surveys are likely responsible for numerous whale deaths along the Atlantic Coast. It is therefore imperative the BOEM and NOAA carefully assess the potentially lethal impact of leasehold surveys on whales before any surveys are approved.”
End of Executive Summary. Now for the bad news.
BOEM has scheduled the Gulf of Maine lease sale for October 29, 2024, just before the elections. They are trying to beat the clock since President Trump has promised to kill offshore wind if elected. Of course, they may also try to award leases before the inauguration because the development of awarded leases is much harder to stop.
Note that at the end of the Executive Summary above, I discuss BOEM, including the leasehold sonar surveys in the Environmental Assessment (EA). That was promised in the draft EA, but in the final EA, just published to make way for the quick sale, that assessment was completely dropped. No doubt, this was to avoid the new findings that sonar surveys can cause whale deaths in large numbers.
If Trump wins, I would like to see a separate Transition Team for BOEM handing out resignation letters. BOEM’s blatant disregard for whale deaths is despicable.
“Net Zero” — That’s the two-word slogan that has been adopted as the official goal of every virtuous state or country for decarbonizing its energy system. The “net” part is backhanded recognition that some parts of the energy system (like maybe air travel or steelmaking) may never be fully de-carbonized. Thus some kind of offsets or indulgences may need to be accepted to claim achievement of the goal.
“Net Zero” — That’s the two-word slogan that has been adopted as the official goal of every virtuous state or country for decarbonizing its energy system. The “net” part is backhanded recognition that some parts of the energy system (like maybe air travel or steelmaking) may never be fully de-carbonized. Thus some kind of offsets or indulgences may need to be accepted to claim achievement of the goal.
But the “net” thing is not for the easy parts of decarbonization. And by the easy parts, I mean the generation of electricity, and the powering of anything that can be run on electricity or batteries. In electrifiable parts of the energy system, there is to be no tolerance for “net”; only “zero emissions” will do. The official line is that zero emissions electricity is easy and cheap because it can be provided by the wind and sun.
The official line is wrong. As the build-out of these wind and solar generation systems continues to progress, it has become increasingly obvious that there will never be a zero-emissions electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun.
The reason should be obvious to everyone although, for some reason I cannot understand, it is not. The reason is that the intermittency of wind and solar generators means that they require full back-up from some other source. But the back-up source will by hypothesis be woefully underused and idle most of the time so long as most of the electricity comes from wind and sun. No back-up source can possibly be economical under these conditions, and therefore nobody will develop and deploy such a source.
This issue has already arisen in many places, as increasing generation from wind and sun has put natural gas power plants into back-up mode, running half or less of the time.
Now consider how things are supposed to proceed as we move to zero-emissions electricity. First, we build more and more wind and solar facilities. Second, we disallow natural gas or any other hydrocarbon fuel as the back-up. Now the back-up must itself be zero-emissions, and also dispatchable. In New York, our regulators have devised the acronym DEFR (“Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource”). Several possibilities have been suggested as the DEFR, the main ones being nuclear, hydrogen, and batteries. All possibilities for the DEFR that have been suggested share the characteristic that they don’t exist today at anything close to the scale that will be needed to fully back up an electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun. In other words, somebody will have to make a huge investment in one or more of these things on a grand scale if we are to have an electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun.
Given New York’s political environment, the regulators who have raised the need for the DEFR have generally buried their discussion of the subject deep in lengthy documents. Roger Caiazza, the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, has done yeoman’s work in digging up and highlighting these items. Roger has created a “Dispatchable Emissions Free Resource Page” where he has accumulated the key information.
For example, we have the Scoping Plan of the Climate Action Council, which Roger describes as “the ‘official’ Hochul Administration strategy description of the Climate Act transition.” The document is some 800+ pages of text plus appendices. Somehow, Roger made it to page 49 of Appendix G, where he found this quote:
During a week with persistently low solar and wind generation, additional firm zero-carbon resources, beyond the contributions of existing nuclear, imports, and hydro, are needed to avoid a significant shortfall; Figure 34 demonstrates the system needs during this type of week. During the first day of this week, most of the short-duration battery storage is quickly depleted, and there are still several days in which wind and solar are not sufficient to meet demand. A zero-carbon firm resource becomes essential to maintaining system reliability during such instances. In the modeled pathways, the need for a firm zero-carbon resource is met with hydrogen-based resources; ultimately, this system need could be met by a number of different emerging technologies.
Here is the Figure 34 that they mention:
It may be a little hard to read, but the dark gray is what they label the “Zero-Carbon Firm Capacity Need.” The width of that dark gray section gets up to well over 20 GW during the illustrated low wind/sun week. For reference, New York State’s current average electricity usage is well less than 20 GW. Meanwhile, even during this low wind/sun week there are times when this DEFR is not called on at all, and other times when it is called on for only a few GW.
So without saying so in as many words, they are telling us that as part of a predominantly wind/sun system we will need to build DEFRs of capacity equal to or greater than our entire current average electricity usage. But if the electricity system is powered mainly by wind and sun, then by definition the DEFRs are only going to operate a minority of the time. We will have now built an entire fleet of new nuclear power plants capable of fulfilling our entire peak electricity demand. Or maybe it’s an entire fleet of new hydrogen power plants of same capacity, or an entire fleet of grid-scale batteries of same capacity, only to keep them idle most of the time.
These are extremely capital-intensive facilities, which can only hope to be economical if they are operated to as much of their capacity as possible. Instead the proposal is that will be intentionally kept idle most of the time.
Who is going to make the investment in these DEFRs that will be kept mostly idle. Certainly, no private investors will do it without enormous government subsidies.
And if we were to build an entire system of these DEFRs capable of supplying all of our electricity needs to back up worst-case wind/sun lulls, wouldn’t it make far more sense just to leave out the wind and solar generation and go with the DEFRs all the time? Of course it would.
At some point this is going to become too obvious to ignore.
Many renewable energy stocks are dog shares to be avoided at all costs by investors seeking a reasonable rate of investment return. Perhaps not the advice you would receive in the advertising-compromised financial pages of mainstream media, and certainly not a message that resonates with promoters of the Net Zero fantasy.
Many renewable energy stocks are dog shares to be avoided at all costs by investors seeking a reasonable rate of investment return. Perhaps not the advice you would receive in the advertising-compromised financial pages of mainstream media, and certainly not a message that resonates with promoters of the Net Zero fantasy. The Renewable Energy Industrial Index (RENIXX) is a widely-consulted global stock capitalisation index of the 30 largest renewable energy industrial companies in the world and it has shown near zero growth since it was started in 2006, along with a reverse projection back to 2002. Over the last three years alone it has lost almost half its value.
The retail exchange traded fund iShares Global Clean Energy aims to “target access to clean energy stocks around the world”. Last year its value fell by 26.1% and from its inception in 2008 it has more or less halved an initial investment of £10,000. Greencoat Renewable PLC is a U.K.-quoted investment trust and the owner and operator of renewable energy infrastructure assets in Europe. It is said to provide “attractive risk adjusted returns with a compelling growth opportunity; supported by a robust regulator regime and managed by a proven investment manager” – which is one imaginative way of explaining a loss in share value of 18.6% over the last five years.
Out in the real world where serious money talks, it is becoming obvious that the conclusion has been drawn that many green technologies, unless subsidised by the state, provide profit-free, second-rate solutions to problems invented around a politicised climate crisis.
This is the graph showing the real world performance of RENIXX. Consider also that an investment made over the same period in the U.S. Dow Jones Industrial Index would have quadrupled.
The RENIXX covers a broad spectrum of activities including wind power manufacture and supplies, along with producers of solar PV cells. Current members of the Index include Orsted, Tesla and Vestas Wind Systems. The stock of this latter company has risen only 7% over the last 16 years and it has fallen 58% from a high in 2021. Typical of the RENIXX dogs is the U.S. operation First Solar which has risen since 2021 but is below its all-time high price reached in 2008.
In fact many of the indexes such as RENIXX would look even worse if the performance of Tesla was removed from the charts. Over its lifetime, Elon Musk’s Tesla share price has risen an astonishing 18,000%, although in common with almost all green shares it has suffered in recent years. But Tesla is the value exception with Real Clear Energy noting that its worth by 2021 soared to over $1 trillion, making it more valuable than Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Ford, BMW and Honda combined. Its stellar rise helps deflect from the dreadful performance of other green stocks including EV manufactures. Real Clear Energy notes that since 2020, 31 EV companies have gone public on U.S. stock exchanges, but only one, the Chinese Li Auto, has seen its price rise since an initial public offering. Most were real bow-wows, but standout disasters were recorded by Fisker (-99%), Nikola (-94%), NIO (-50%), Lucid group (-75%) and Rivian (-88%). Six other companies are already bankrupt.
One EV company, Plug Power, supplies hydrogen energy systems, and in its 27 years of existence has never turned a profit. In 2024 it lost $1.45 billion, up from a deficit in 2018 of $43.8 million. Even the big boys find renewable equipment a challenge. In 2023, Ford lost $4.7 billion on sales of 116,000 electric vehicles, or over $40,000 per vehicle. General Electric’s wind turbine business lost $1.1 billion in 2023.
Of course the excuses come rolling in. Same thing happened with the early dot.com revolution, it is argued. But the green revolution is not a free market gold rush. It peddles second-rate solutions and produces equipment such as cars that the market does not want to buy in bulk. Collecting the breezes and the beams is only viable with huge amounts of subsidies taken from trapped consumers. Nobody would build a windmill to supply power to the electric grid if their mouths were not first stuffed with taxpayer gold. In Britain, electricity prices are soaring and wind and solar power, which supplies barely 6% of total energy needs, requires an annual bung of £12 billion. In the U.S., the Biden Administration has thrown vast amounts of money around in a desperate attempt to boost a green economy that few people would be willing to start and support with their own hard-earned.
The supplicant nature of many green businesses perhaps explains their bombed-out share prices, along with the end of cheap interest rates and higher inflation. But provide a heady mixture of free money and subsidies designed to guarantee a profit and the chancers will initially beat a path to your door with any number of whacky schemes to save the planet. At the U.K. Energy department, Mad Ed Miliband and his band of weird wonks are currently entertaining any number of financial black holes including carbon capture, hydrogen manufacture and battery storage.
But the money – and borrowing capacity – is running out for luxury pet projects across Europe and the seemingly unlimited government spending will have to end in the near future. And fears are rising about the heavy environmental damage inflicted by EVs, the lack of national green jobs created, the further de-industrialisation of western economies and the horrific, mostly unreported, toll on wildlife caused by the countryside-blighting growth of monster wind turbines and overhead power cables.
It is said that if you want to predict how people will vote in an election, the prices offered by bookmakers are a more reliable guide than opinion polls, which are often distorted for the benefit of the paying customer. Next time someone is punting green stories, ask to see what their value is in the real commercial world where hard-won cash is not necessarily God, but it is a deeply religious experience. In these cases, past results are probably a very good guide to future performance.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Time magazine recently posted an article, titled “Is Climate Change Causing the Deadly Floods in Europe?” that, while providing some balance, still asserts that the recent flooding in Poland and other parts of Europe reflects a broader worsening pattern caused by climate change. This is false. There is no indication in the data showing a “pattern” of increasing flood severity or incidence.
Jacek Halicki, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Time magazine recently posted an article, titled “Is Climate Change Causing the Deadly Floods in Europe?” that, while providing some balance, still asserts that the recent flooding in Poland and other parts of Europe reflects a broader worsening pattern caused by climate change. This is false. There is no indication in the data showing a “pattern” of increasing flood severity or incidence.
Time admits that it’s “difficult to draw a conclusive link between this event and climate change,” but then says “experts say the most severe floods to hit the region in at least two decades fit into a broader pattern of extreme weather events.”
Later, Time quotes a professor from the University of Bristol who recommends attribution studies to determine whether or not the flooding is caused by climate change:
“It’s really difficult to relate a single event to climate change impact,” says Paul Bates, a professor of hydrology at the University of Bristol who specializes in the science of flooding. Bates says that in order to definitively prove whether or not climate change contributed to the flooding in Europe, researchers will need to conduct an attribution study, which takes at least several weeks. “Every time we do an attribution study, we tend to find that the events we see have been exacerbated by climate change, and I’m pretty sure that will be the case here, but we don’t yet conclusively know,” says Bates.
Several weeks for a peer reviewed study, that would be amazingly rapid.
As Climate Realism has pointed out before many times, attribution studies are over-trusted by the media and scientists, and are often used more like propaganda than science. Attribution studies compare unverified, counterfactual models of the Earth’s climate and emissions, assuming ahead of time that any difference between the models is due to human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. Neither model represents the world as it really is, and the modelers assume the conclusion before it is reached, using the models only to confirm their preexisting belief. As a result, the models never discover anything other than a human influence on weather events, and almost invariably suggest that human activities likely contributed to each event studied.
While it is true that warmer air holds more water, that does not translate directly to an increase in intense rainfall. Also, warming does not occur consistently even within a nation’s own borders, with some places (like cities) seeing more warming than the countryside, which in some places can even see cooling trends. Global average warming does not cause regional storms.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report indicates that there is no sign yet of any increase in heavy precipitation and pluvial (flash or rain-caused) flooding. And only under the most extreme, unrealistic scenario does the IPCC speculate with medium confidence that climate change might impact flooding after 2050. (See figure below)
Figure 1 – Table 12.12 | on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs)
The European flood discussed in the article was not unprecedented. The Danube River, which carried much of the flooding in Europe this year, had an even worse flood in 1997. Similar floods devastated Budapest in 1838, Vienna has always fought with the Danube, and there are many other longstanding historical records of major floods throughout history in the region.
Cities that invested in flood management fared better in the recent event than those that didn’t –this would be the case whether or not climate change was a factor in flooding trends. Overall, Time’s post isn’t that terrible, it is careful to not make any statements that are too certain when it comes to the climate connection. However, it is a mistake to suggest that there is an existing pattern of worsening severe weather like flooding caused by climate change when available data shows no changing trends.
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