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.
When assessing the climate-altering effects of downwelling longwave radiation, the root mean square error associated with calculating this value is 29.7 W/m². For some reason, scientists characterize measurements with an observation error this large as “high accuracy”.
When assessing the climate-altering effects of downwelling longwave radiation, the root mean square error associated with calculating this value is 29.7 W/m². For some reason, scientists characterize measurements with an observation error this large as “high accuracy”.
In an imaginary world where no clouds exist (clear-sky), the surface longwave downward radiation (LWDR) calculated for a CO2 increase of 22 ppm (2000-2010) has been assessed to be 0.2 W/m² (Feldman et al., 2015) per decade, or 0.02 W/m² per year. This value is acknowledged to contribute just 10 percent of the LWDR trend over this period. The other 90 percent is linked to clouds and water vapor.
Climate modeling error in assessing LWDR is quite large. This is due primarily to the inability of the models to accurately assess the all-sky conditions occurring in the real world, where clouds exist.
Scientists acknowledge clouds are the principal “controlling factor” of LWDR trends, and yet their impacts “cannot be directly measured” (Du et al., 2024). Instead, they must be estimated using surrogate constructs with simulated values. Consequently, the real-world, all-sky atmosphere cannot be assessed with sufficient accuracy.
“With increasing attention to cloudy-sky LWDR retrieval, cloud-base height or cloud-base temperature is a primary controlling factor of cloudy-sky LWDR but cannot be directly measured by optical sensors and need to be estimated. To address this, some surrogate parameters are used to quantify the cloud contribution.”
Despite these fatal flaws, climate scientists eager to attribute climate forcing to human activity literally characterize measurements with observation error 150 times larger (~30 W/m²) than 10 years of CO2 forcing (0.2 W/m²) as “high accuracy.”
“This study generates an all-sky global LWDR product called LessRad LWDR with high accuracy.”
“Accuracy was evaluated using root-mean-square-error (RMSE), mean bias error (MBE) … an MBE of 5.5 W/m², and a RMSE of 29.7 W/m².”
“LessRad exhibits RMSE values of 29.7, 21.4, 31.0, 32.0, and 24.2 W/m² over the globe, low latitudes, midlatitudes, the Tibetan Plateau, the Arctic, and the Antarctic, respectively.”
Proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) claim CO2’s LWDR forcing is the factor driving modern climate change. However, if the CO2 forcing contribution to LWDR is 150 times smaller than the error in calculating the surface background LWDR, then there can be no valid attribution assessment for CO2 forcing in LWDR trends.
Chevron recently announced that it is moving out of California after almost a century and a half in the state. No wonder, since Sacramento sued the company, along with a number of other oil companies, for allegedly deceptive practices.
Jon Decker explains what’s at stake in the case awaiting US Supreme Court consideration. His Real Clear Markets article is The Supreme Court Must Stop Climate Extortion Schemes. Excerpts in itallics with my bolds and added images.
Chevron recently announced that it is moving out of California after almost a century and a half in the state. No wonder, since Sacramento sued the company, along with a number of other oil companies, for allegedly deceptive practices.
In their war on energy, progressive politicians increasingly turn to lawfare as another scheme to extract funds from productive citizens and dramatically reshape the economy. In the coming weeks, we’ll learn if the Supreme Court will stand up to them.
The critical case is Sunoco v. Honolulu, currently pending before SCOTUS. Honolulu is suing several oil companies, alleging their fossil fuel production caused significant damage to the city through rising sea levels and other climate-related infrastructure issues.
That these companies are being sued not for specific instances of purported environmental harm, but instead under “public nuisance” and “consumer fraud” laws for an alleged “multi-decadal campaign of deception” about the nature of their products is crucial. That’s because it lets progressive cities and states get around long-standing legal doctrine that kept climate cases in federal courts, where defendants are somewhat likelier to get a fair hearing.
Knowing that federal environmental law presents a more difficult path for litigation, activists instead went “venue shopping” with their climate agenda to deep blue states, knowing that a multi-jurisdictional assault would be unworkable, and potentially fatal, for American energy companies. The progressive politicians who support this approach not only see a boost for their careers and fundraising goals, but a potentially massive source of new government revenue.
Because Honolulu, like a spate of other lawsuits driven by ambitious progressive state AGs and prosecutors, models its assault on energy companies on the 90s tobacco wars. And they are unsurprisingly seeking an eye-watering settlement similar to what the tobacco industry was forced to pay (dollars that still flow to the government to this day).
But you don’t have to be a fossil fuel corporate booster or a climate change skeptic to recognize that these paydays will come at the expense of ordinary consumers and taxpayers, and of the economy as a whole.
Fossil fuels are ubiquitous in every sector, from agriculture and clothing to steel production, electricity, heating, and transportation. If this lawfare succeeds then every single one of these products and services—anything that takes energy as an input—becomes more expensive.
There’s also a kind of incoherence to the idea that a small handful of companies are alone to blame for perceived climate ills. What about the thousands of companies worldwide that are involved in the exploration, production, and distribution of fossil fuels – or the millions of companies that use fossil fuels to make their own goods and perform their services? That’s not even to mention the fact that the same few energy companies now being sued also play a critical role in the U.S. leading the world in CO2 emission reductions, through greater adoption of natural gas. How do the companies spearheading the natural gas renaissance figure into the supposed “deception” at work here?
The stakes here remind us that judges—and therefore elections—matter. Hawaii Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald, who ruled in favor of Honolulu and thereby triggered SCOTUS review, has been associated with the far-left Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI) Climate Judiciary Project, a group that “trains” and “educates” thousands of judges and government lawyers across the country to deliver legal outcomes favored by progressives.
The Supreme Court may be the last line of defense against fringe activists dictating energy policy for the rest of us.
But of course, SCOTUS itself is in the crosshairs of left-wing judicial scheming, with top Democrats, including presidential nominee Kamala Harris, threatening to pack the Supreme Court if elected. No doubt with judges in the Mark Recktenwald mode.
If Honolulu succeeds in its case, and progressives in their larger campaign of lawfare, Americans can say Aloha to higher prices.
Postscript on Arguing Deception in These Cases
As noted above, the rationale for filing these cases in state rather than federal courts depends on claiming consumer fraud, I.e. oil companies deceived the public while knowing about their damaging energy products. A good rebuttal against the “Exxon Knew” fiction is provided (with my bolds) by Randal Utech at Master Resource:
To say that Exxon knew the truth back in the early 80s is a laughable fallacy. Effectively they built a primitive model that is characteristically similar to the erroneous modern climate models of today.
Fundamentally their work is based on the poorly understood climate sensitivity (ECS) derived from radiative convective models and GCM models. To their credit, they actually acknowledged the high degree of uncertainty in these estimations. Today, even Hausfather (2022 vs 2019) is beginning to understand the climate sensitivity (ECS) is too high. CMIP6 is running still even hotter than CMIP5 and using ECS of 3 to 5° C rather than ~ 1.2° C as highlighted in Nick Lewis’s 2022 study.
CMIP6 should have been better because it incorporated solar particle forcing (Matthes et. al.) and as they incorporate more elements of natural forcing (an active area of research as we still do not have a predictive theory for climate), the effect is highlighting more underlying problems with the models.
However, Exxon investigators fell into the same trap that climate modelers of today where they build the models to history match temperatures and then wow, because they can create a model that appears to history match temperatures, they assume it is telling them something. Truth? Anyone can create a model to do this, but it would never mean the model is correct. While the models today are much more complex, they are based on a complex set of non-linear equations, and the understanding of the various sources of nonlineararity is poor. This opens up wide degrees of uncertainty yet wide opportunity for tuning. Furthermore, natural forcing is undercharacterized and deemed inconsequential.
The contrived sense of accomplishment in history matching is spurious correlation for an infinitesimally small period of time. Using Exxon’s internal analysis of CO2 climate forcing is little more than a propaganda tool. Current climate models, much more sophisticated, face the same problem of unknown, false causality.
The state of California is suing ExxonMobil, alleging that the company deceived the public about how effective recycling plastic products is and facilitating pollution.
The state of California is suing ExxonMobil, alleging that the company deceived the public about how effective recycling plastic products is and facilitating pollution.
Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit against ExxonMobil in San Francisco County Superior Court, asserting that the company participated “in a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.” In addition to being one of the biggest American players in the oil and gas industry, ExxonMobil is also a top producer of the chemicals and other inputs used to create plastic products, according to The Washington Post.
“For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Bonta said of his lawsuit in a Monday statement. “ExxonMobil lied to further its [record]-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health.”
California filed its lawsuit against ExxonMobil just one day after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that will ban the provision of plastic bags at the point of sale in stores. The new lawsuit against the oil, gas and petrochemicals giant aligns with “climate nuisance” lawsuits that have been filed in Democrat-controlled jurisdictions in recent years, which generally allege that major companies like ExxonMobil misled the public about their products’ role in climate change and should be held accountable for doing so.
ExxonMobil slammed California’s lawsuit in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective. They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills,” an ExxonMobil spokesperson said. “The first step would be to acknowledge what their counterparts across the U.S. know: advanced recycling works. To date, we’ve processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills. We’re bringing real solutions, recycling plastic waste that couldn’t be recycled by traditional methods.”
Bonta is rumored to have interest in running for governor to replace the term-limited Newsom in 2026, though the attorney general recently told the San Francisco Chronicle that he will not announce a prospective run until after November’s elections. Eco-activist groups, including the Sierra Club and Baykeeper, will be joining a Monday virtual press conference held by Bonta’s office to discuss the new litigation, the attorney general’s office said.
Judith Enck, a former official for the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who now runs an activist group called Beyond Plastics, commended Bonta for filing the lawsuit.
“This is the single most consequential lawsuit filed against the plastics industry for its persistent and continued lying about plastics recycling,” Enck said in a Monday statement. “Attorney General Bonta is leading the way to corporate accountability and a cleaner and healthier world. This lawsuit will set an invaluable precedent for others to follow.”
Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, slammed the lawsuit in a Monday post to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“The communist failure that is California is suing ExxonMobil because radical greens lied to everyone about the feasibility of recycling,” Milloy wrote in his post.
Bonta’s office did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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Can’t see the fishing nets that killed the dugongs, for the naturally occurring dioxins that made media headlines, is what I might have said on radio back more than two decades. At the time, it caused me much grief because the General Manager of Canegrowers Ltd didn’t want his Environment Manager maligning the fishing industry who it seemed were happy for the sugarcane farmers to take the rap for the dead dugongs.
Rare Dugong marine mammal swimming over sea grass. Underwater image taken on a scuba diving trip in Indonesia
Can’t see the fishing nets that killed the dugongs, for the naturally occurring dioxins that made media headlines, is what I might have said on radio back more than two decades. At the time, it caused me much grief because the General Manager of Canegrowers Ltd didn’t want his Environment Manager maligning the fishing industry who it seemed were happy for the sugarcane farmers to take the rap for the dead dugongs.
It is the case that I was Environment Manager for Queensland Canegrowers Ltd from 1998 through until 2003 – and that I did nothing about all the agricultural pesticides. That has been a recent accusation across at my official Facebook page.
I was employed to implement the findings of a three-volume audit of the sugar industry and its environmental impacts. I got off to a good start, but in 2001, with the launch of the WWF Save the Reef campaign everything was blown off course. I’ve written about that before, including how it begun here:
I first became aware of the specific issue of pesticide in dugongs in August 1998, long before the launch of that campaign.
A senior officer with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) phoned me with the news that a soon-to-be-published research study had found that elevated levels of pesticide residue, most likely from cane farming, were accumulating in the fat tissue of dugongs. Media headlines followed, including ‘Pesticide in reef creatures and cane burning link with dioxin in dugong’.
I obtained a copy of the study and found it was primarily an analysis of the type and quantity of dioxins found in the fat tissue of dugong carcasses that had been killed in fishing nets. Dioxins are a group of organochlorine compounds commonly associated with industrial waste incineration. The research paper made reference to a different study that had analyzed the dioxins found in soils under sugarcane cultivation and commented that the cane-land soils and dugong fat samples both had elevated levels of the same type of dioxins.
Concerned by this news, I contacted a dioxin expert at the University of Queensland. Dr Brian Stanmore informed me that the type of dioxin considered by the GBRMPA to be elevated in the dugongs was common and the least toxic of all dioxins. Furthermore, Dr Stanmore indicated that the level of dioxins found in the dugongs was less than the national average in people in the United States. He commented that ‘it looks like the dugong is better off than we are’.
The GBRMPA study clearly stated, ‘All (dugong) carcasses were in good condition at the time of sampling. All animal deaths were confirmed or suspected (fishing) net drowning.’
However, instead of focusing on net fishing practices, the GBRMPA subsequently provided funding for a full investigation by the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology (NRCET) into the likely origin of the dioxin considered to be at elevated levels in the dugong carcasses, including possible links with sugarcane production.
Two years later, the NRCET investigation concluded that the dioxin of concern to the GBRMPA was common in soils along the entire Queensland coastline, including in regions beyond sugarcane cultivation. Analyses of dated marine sediment cores indicated that the chemical was present prior to European settlement in Queensland. In other words, the dioxin is a naturally occurring organochlorine and not a pesticide residue. There are, apparently, many naturally occurring non-toxic dioxins.
That has never made media headlines.
******************
You can read more of this story in the piece I wrote for the IPA Review back when they regularly published me, the article is called ‘Deceit in the Name of Conservation’.
Editor’s Note: Scripps News and MSN reported on Puerto Rico’s recent filing of a lawsuit against big oil companies, “claiming their products caused climate damage … [and that] Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell and other big oil companies knew their products would pollute the island and negatively impact the climate, but did not tell consumers.”
Editor’s Note: Scripps News and MSN reported on Puerto Rico’s recent filing of a lawsuit against big oil companies, “claiming their products caused climate damage … [and that] Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell and other big oil companies knew their products would pollute the island and negatively impact the climate, but did not tell consumers.”
This lawsuit is one more baseless broadside intended by the government to fund its operations on the back of a deep pocket industry. Puerto Rico, like the dozens of other cities and states that have filed climate change lawsuits against big oil, ignore the fact that their residents and the governments themselves have benefitted from and still use and benefit from oil and gas use for transportation and thousands of products in daily use.
In addition, ExxonMobil and the other oil companies being sued cannot have known what is still in dispute: the extent to which human greenhouse gas emissions are playing in ongoing climate change, and whether such emissions are causing any harm (see Climate Realism’s hundreds of posts refuting this claim), or are possibly a net benefit. As discussed in the post below and numerous others that can be found the fact that some scientists working at Exxon believed decades ago based on the outputs of nascent, untested, computer models that CO2 emissions from energy use might result in some warming, does not count as knowledge, it was speculation then about matters still being debated today. Multiple courts have previously dismissed similar lawsuits, and the Harvard study most of them reference has been debunked. The guest post below specifically addresses the claim that Exxon (among other oil companies) knew they were causing dangerous climate change and hid it from the public they were obligated to inform. In fact, as it explains, the company knew nothing, so there was nothing to disclose.
“The contrived sense of accomplishment in history matching is spurious correlation for an infinitesimally small period of time. Using Exxon’s internal analysis of CO2 climate forcing is little more than a propaganda tool.”
“Exxon Knew” is a political-lawyer campaign focusing on certain internal company documents to make a case that the oil major knew that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were a future threat to human betterment.
Smoking gun? Hardly.
A half century later, the IPCC is still trying to update and figure out physical climate science. Exxon did not do a study on the benefits of CO2 or the offset of sulfur dioxide emissions. The concern way back then was Global Cooling, Peak Oil, and Peak Gas. And as the company knew, fossil fuels had no viable substitute, as in wind and solar.
This historical correction has been documented in many posts here at MasterResource, including:
To which I respond (expanded from my reply on social media):
To say that Exxon knew the truth back in the early 80s is a laughable fallacy. Effectively they built a primitive model that is characteristically similar to the erroneous modern climate models of today.
Fundamentally their work is based on the poorly understood climate sensitivity (ECS) derived from radiative convective models and GCM models. To their credit, they actually acknowledged the high degree of uncertainty in these estimations. Today, even Hausfather (2022 vs 2019) is beginning to understand the climate sensitivity (ECS) is too high. CMIP6 is running still even hotter than CMIP5 and using ECS of 3 to 5° C rather than ~ 1.2° C as highlighted in Nick Lewis’s 2022 study.
CMIP6 should have been better because it incorporated solar particle forcing (Matthes et. al.) and as they incorporate more elements of natural forcing (an active area of research as we still do not have a predictive theory for climate), the effect is highlighting more underlying problems with the models.
However, Exxon investigators fell into the same trap that climate modelers of today where they build the models to history match temperatures and then wow, because they can create a model that appears to history match temperatures, they assume it is telling them something. Truth? Anyone can create a model to do this, but it would never mean the model is correct. While the models today are much more complex, they are based on a complex set of non-linear equations, and the understanding of the various sources of nonlineararity is poor. This opens up wide degrees of uncertainty yet wide opportunity for tuning. Furthermore, natural forcing is undercharacterized and deemed inconsequential.
The contrived sense of accomplishment in history matching is spurious correlation for an infinitesimally small period of time. Using Exxon’s internal analysis of CO2 climate forcing is little more than a propaganda tool. Current climate models, much more sophisticated, face the same problem of unknown, false causality.
————-
Randall Utech, former Advisor Geoscientist at Schlumberger, has researched climate science for nearly 30 years with emphasis on geology, paleoclimate, and the glacial cycles. An interview with him by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists can be found here. Utech is author of On the Benefits of CO2 (April 11, 2023).
By contrast, Rowlatt’s drought in 2022 was not unusually severe at all. Thankfully Somalia’s climate is gradually becoming wetter, a boon for the country.
Any proper climate expert would know all of this. But Rowlatt knows nothing about climate. He is merely an activist, who spouts whatever nonsense his chums in Greenpeace tell him.
Somalia may be one of the poorest countries in the world and beset by violence, but it is “fixable”, according to its top climate official.
The country has been torn apart by more than 30 years of overlapping conflicts – including an Islamist insurgency, a civil war, and a series of regional and clan confrontations. Yet Abdihakim Ainte, the Somali prime minister’s climate advisor, still regards his country as “as story of potential – of promise”.
What makes his optimism all the more surprising is the fact climate change is amplifying virtually all the challenges his country faces.
One commentator described climate change as a “chaos multiplier”, because it exacerbates existing tensions and entrenches conflict in fragile states like this.
The most obvious effects of climate change here have been in agriculture. Somalia is still overwhelmingly an agricultural economy, with about two thirds of the population depending on farming and animal herding for most of their income.
In 2022 the country experienced its worst drought for 40 years – an event scientists estimate was made 100 times more likely by human-caused climate change.
And drought isn’t the only problem here. Last year Somalia experienced terrible floods as a result of rains scientists say were made twice as intense by human-caused global warming. The floodwater washed away precious soils killing hundreds of people and displacing one million others.
The effects of Somalia’s climate change “double whammy” are all too evident in the hunger clinic the Red Cross runs in a hospital in the port city of Kismayo on the south coast.
Every day a steady stream of mothers bring their malnourished babies here. Many have had to cross from territory controlled by al-Qaeda’s lethal affiliate, Islamist militants al-Shabab, to get here.
The UN estimates more than 1.5m children under the age of five are acutely malnourished in Somalia.
Somalia’s weather has always swung from drought to wet, but as the World Bank’s graph shows, droughts were considerably more severe during the 1970s, when the world was getting cooler. This was of course the time of the great Sahel drought, which lasted from the late 1960s to the early 80s and left millions dead across a vast swathe of sub-Saharan Africa from the west to Somalia in the east:
By contrast, Rowlatt’s drought in 2022 was not unusually severe at all. Thankfully Somalia’s climate is gradually becoming wetter, a boon for the country.
Any proper climate expert would know all of this. But Rowlatt knows nothing about climate. He is merely an activist, who spouts whatever nonsense his chums in Greenpeace tell him.
To produce this propaganda report, Rowlatt, along no doubt with his production team, flew to Somalia, burning goodness knows how many tonnes of oil to get there, not to mention costing licence payers thousands of pounds.
Are we at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels? That’s the theory advanced by an international coalition of politicians who aim to get us to net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050. Just one problem: Research from the experts in their own governments suggests it’s a nearly impossible task. Enthusiasts for net zero often say we’re on the cusp of an “energy revolution.”
Kite & Key explains in above video Why the Odds Are Stacked Against Net Zero. For those preferring to read I provide a text from the captions, though the video is entertaining along with great images, some of which are included with the text in italics with my bolds.
Overview
Are we at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels? That’s the theory advanced by an international coalition of politicians who aim to get us to net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050. Just one problem: Research from the experts in their own governments suggests it’s a nearly impossible task. Enthusiasts for net zero often say we’re on the cusp of an “energy revolution.”
And that theory has a big problem: Energy revolutions don’t happen — at least not in the way that politicians often describe. While it’s true that technological and economic factors sometimes change the energy mix — countries that get wealthier become less dependent on wood, for example — the broader trend in the history of the world’s energy consumption can be defined by three words: more, more, more.
In a power-hungry world, we keep adding new energy sources. But there’s rarely any subtraction. And, with global energy demand expected to increase by about 35% by 2050, it’s nearly impossible that we can get all the power we need from carbon-free sources. For instance, meeting the net zero goals would require the construction of over 9,000 nuclear plants by 2050. The number currently being built around the world? 59.
So, what will the future of energy really look like? Our video explores.
Transcription
It doesn’t happen that often. But every once in a while, a single generation witnesses a technological breakthrough that will change the world forever. The printing press. The beginning of human flight. And, for our generation, an inevitable full scale revolution in clean energy… …that’s running a little behind schedule… …Ok, way behind schedule.
“The beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” That’s how the United Nations referred to the outcome of a 2023 climate change summit held in…the United Arab Emirates. Which is sort of like having the Prohibition Conference in Vegas. Nevertheless, delegates from throughout the world left the gathering having pledged that the world would transition away from fossil fuels and get the world to net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050.
Now, the rationale for this is clear enough. Leaders from around the globe are worried that without a shift over to carbon-free energy sources like wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear the world will face significant problems as a result of climate change.
But, regardless of why they’re doing this, the more important question is whether they can do it. Because here’s the thing about energy revolutions: they don’t happen. At least not in the way that the UN is imagining. To understand why, it’s worth looking at the history of the world’s energy consumption – which looks like this.
Go back a couple of centuries and the world basically ran on “traditional biomass”– -which is a fancy way of saying … wood. We burned a lot of wood and also … dung. Then in the mid 19th century, coal came into the picture in a big way. By the 20th century, we’re using tons of oil.And natural gas is a big factor too, especially as we cross into the 21st century, and fracking makes it both abundant and more affordable. As the years went by, we added low-carbon sources of energy as well, like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar–though overall, they’re still a pretty small part of the picture.
Now, there are two important things to note about this chart. First, the history of the world’s energy consumption can be defined in three words: more, more, more. Which kind of makes sense. After all, pretty much everything that defines modern life involves a lot of energy. Between 1950 and 2022, for example, the population of the U.S. a little more than doubled. But in that same time period, our electricity use got 14 times larger.
And second, because of that “more and more, more” trend, the only things we’ve ever had that look like energy “revolutions” have been about adding new sources into the mix, not getting rid of existing ones as net zero goals propose.
Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean that nothing ever changes. In wealthier nations, the rise of cheaper natural gas has led to less coal usage, especially in the U.S. And poorer countries usually abandoned traditional biomass as they get wealthier, because no advanced nation powers itself by burning wood. We use it for much more sophisticated purposes…like doing psychedelics in the Nevada desert.
But using a little less coal or wood or relatively modest changes–and importantly are driven by cold, hard economic facts. By contrast, what the net zero goals entail is replacing all of this … with this … in just about 25 years. Based on little more than the fact that politicians just want it to happen.
To understand just how tall a task this is, it’s worth looking at what it would require to make it a reality. It’s estimated that meeting net zero goals would require deploying 2000 new wind turbines… …every day … for the next 25 years. To give you some context for that, the U.S. builds about 3000 new wind turbines… …a year.
Alternately, you could open one new nuclear plant every day for the next 25 years. For the record, that’s over 9,000 of them. And, also for the record, as of 2023, the number that were actually being built across the entire world was … 59. And here in the U.S. anyway, it generally takes over a decade to build them.
And those are some of the reasons why what politicians promise about net zero and what the experts in their own governments say…don’t exactly match up. The government’s U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, projects that by the year 2050, far from seeing a revolution in energy, America will be a little less reliant on coal, a little more so on renewables…and the rest of the picture looks pretty much the same as today.
And in fact, this is true for the entire world. The EIA ran seven different scenarios for what the world’s energy consumption could look like in 2050, and while all of them showed a significant increase in renewables … they also all showed a world that continued to get most of its energy from things like coal, oil, and natural gas. Not exactly “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.”
The reason for all of this: We simply can’t take enormous quantities of energy offline in a world where it’s predicted that we’re going to need almost 35% more of it by the year 2050. For one thing, there are a lot of poor countries around the world who are going to need dramatically more energy to bring themselves up to even a fraction of our standards of living.
And for another, the technologies of the future require vast amounts of power. By the year 2030, it’s estimated the computer usage around the world will take up as much as five times more of the world’s electricity production as it did even in 2020. The digital cloud we all use to store data already uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan. And with new energy-hungry technologies like AI on the way, things are only gonna move further in that direction.
Which means the real future of energy is probably: everything. Nuclear, natural gas, wind, and solar, oil, hydropower, coal. We’re going to need all of it. Probably not much wood though. Except for these guys.
When the Washington Post set out to map 485 million years of global temperatures, it uncovered an inconvenient truth in the climate change story: Earth’s been on a 50-million-year cool-down.
When the Washington Post set out to map 485 million years of global temperatures, it uncovered an inconvenient truth in the climate change story: Earth’s been on a 50-million-year cool-down. ZeroHedgehas more:
In recent years, particularly around mid-July (the peak of the Northern Hemisphere summer), there has been a noticeable surge in headlines featuring the “hottest day” ever on record in corporate media outlets – which is of course pushed by climate alarmist journalists citing questionable studies. This timing coincides with hot weather, so naturally, it’s quite convincing to persuade readers that the world’s oceans are boiling and planet Earth will ignite into a fireball unless drastic actions are taken – such as more climate taxes, ‘carbon credits’, banning cow farts, prohibiting new petrol-powered vehicle sales by X date and pushing spending bills to procure more solar panels from China, to save the planet.
The problem is that corporate media only focuses on recent history – and not “in context” (as they love to say). Context is particularly important when it comes to climate change – as their narrative collapses when looking at a long enough timeline.
To wit… a funny thing happened when the Washington Post tried to map out half a billion years of global temperatures and the “disaster of global warming” …
A funny thing happened as the WaPo tried to map out half a billion years of global temperatures and the “disaster of global warming” pic.twitter.com/HA6yxpf9V7— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 20, 2024
WaPo journalists cited a new study about Earth’s global surface temperatures over the last 485 million years. In 2023, Earth’s average temperature reached 14.98°C, well below the average 36°C the study showed around 100 million years ago. The trend shows Earth’s temperatures have been sliding for 50 million years. …
Maybe, just maybe, the level of human-caused global warming doom porn pushed by the Government, corporate media outlets, global NGOs and far-Left billionaires is not as apocalyptic as they make it sound.
A whole world of trouble will come your way if your plans are built on averages but you cannot live with the extremes. Or even with substantial variations. Europe, and other progressive energy parts of the world, are finding this out the hard way.
I’m not sure about you, but the last thing I want to talk about is elections. When I think of how much of my precious time has been wasted hearing about politics in the last year, I want to puke. No more from pollsters, talking heads, or statisticians.
Well, maybe I’d like to talk about statisticians, as in the old joke about the one that drowned because he forded a river that was only three feet deep, on average. See, isn’t that better than politics already? However, as funny as a drowned statistician may be, there is a serious side to the problem with relying on averages. You really can die, for starters.
Before getting back to death and/or politics again (redundancy, I know), let’s think about the use of averages. A car may be designed for the average – one doesn’t find the tallest person on earth and design an interior to accommodate them. The exceptions get to either bang their shins or dangle their feet, but that’s the way it has to be.
In other areas, it can’t work that way. Do you insulate your house for average conditions? No, of course not. Do you install an air conditioner for average conditions? Same. And on it goes. When the risk of harm goes up, we design for the extremes, not the averages. Or we should.
A whole world of trouble will come your way if your plans are built on averages but you cannot live with the extremes. Or even with substantial variations. Europe, and other progressive energy parts of the world, are finding this out the hard way.
In the race to decarbonize the energy system, wind and solar have taken a dominant lead. Nuclear is widely despised. Hydrogen has potential, but is a long way out, as a major player. On the assumption that Hydrocarbons Must Go At Any Cost, wind and solar are the winners. Bring on the trillions. Throw up wind turbines everywhere. Blanket the countryside in solar panels.
The media loves the wattage count as fodder for headlines; big numbers dazzle people. “The United States is on pace to install record amounts of wind and solar this year, underscoring America’s capacity to build renewables at a level once considered impossible…The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects the U.S. will install 37 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity this year, obliterating the previous record of almost 17 GW in 2016,” bleated the ironically named Scientific American website. Wow, gigawatts. No idea what those are but they sound huge.
What is the problem with all that capacity? Well, how good is it? Let’s see…at a 33 per cent capacity factor (used by the US government as apparently reasonable), that 37 GW is just over 12 GW of power contributed to the grid, on average. The assumption seems to be then that 12 GW of dirty old hydrocarbons have been rendered obsolete, and, for the energy rube, the number is an even more righteous 37 GW, because, you know, some days it is really windy all over.
But, what happens when that load factor is…zero? Because it happens.
The current poster child for the issue is Great Britain. The UK has 24 GW of wind power installed. The media loves to talk about total renewable GW installed as proof of progress, and the blindingly rapid pace of the energy transition.
However over the past few weeks wind dropped almost to zero, and output from that 24 GW of installed capacity fell to about 1 or 2 GW.
Ordinarily, that would be no problem – just fire up the gas fired power plants, or import power from elsewhere.
But what happens when that isn’t available?
More pertinently, what happens when the likelihood of near-zero output happens to coincide with the times when that power is needed most – in heat waves, or cold spells? That brings us to the current grave situation facing Europe as it heads towards winter. Gas storage is supposed to be filling rapidly at this time of year, but it’s not, for a number of reasons.
Natural gas isn’t supposed to be on anyone’s roadmap, though. The culturally hip website Wired talked (in early September) about the imperative to limit global warming: “To make the switch we need to switch to renewable energy, such as solar, wind and geothermal, right now. We’re making good progress on this; solar and wind energy are now cheaper than fossil fuels, and renewable energy was responsible for around a third of global electricity production in 2020.” The first glimmer into the damage of relying on averages starts to show.
A few weeks later, Wired shows that a few light bulbs may be going on: “There’s a tendency for the government to say the power sector is done, the sector has been decarbonised, the renewables transition is going at pace and all of that good stuff,” the article quotes the head of Energy UK.
The article’s author, after musing that seven UK energy supply firms have gone out of business so far this year (a result of having to pay more to generate/acquire power than their locked in sales values), makes one of those profound British understatements of the my-arms-are-cut-off-and-I-appear-to-be-in-a-spot-of-trouble-old-chap variety: “And we’re reliant on gas more generally than we thought.” No, foul dullard, we are more reliant than you thought. Anyone in the business of providing energy could have told you that, but the simpleton army wouldn’t listen. And now you pay.
They could easily have asked experts, like providers of hydrocarbons. But those people are today’s lepers. No one is interested in their opinion for fear of the appearance of collaboration. (Trudeau set up a “Net Zero Advisory Body” with the mandate to identify net-zero pathways; NZAB has posted the records of meetings to date (24); only once – once – has ‘oil and gas’ been mentioned in the records, and the context is dumbfounding: “Members received a foundational briefing on the oil & gas sector from federal officials.” FROM FEDERAL OFFICIALS. Meanwhile, the NZAB also heard a presentation directly from the David Suzuki Foundation. This should end well.)
Let’s drive this energy conundrum home a little better for all these people who are, as Principal Skinner put it on the Simpsons, “furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to comprehend the situation.”
The world has been sold a faulty bill of goods, based on a pathetically simplistic vision of how renewable energy works. A US government website highlights the problem with this example: “The mean turbine capacity in the U.S. Wind Turbine Database is 1.67 megawatts (MW), At a 33% capacity factor, that average turbine would generate over 402,000 kWh per month – enough for over 460 average U.S. homes.”
Thus armed, bureaucrats and morons head straight to the promised land by multiplying the number of wind turbines by 460 and shocking-and-awing themselves with the results. Holy crap, we don’t need natural gas anymore (as they tell me in exactly those words).
So they all start dismantling the natural gas system – not directly by ripping up pipelines, but indirectly by blocking new ones, by championing ‘fossil-fuel divestment campaigns’, by taking energy policy advice from Swedish teenagers – and then stand there shivering in dim-witted stupor when the wind stops blowing, and the world’s energy producers are not in any position to bring forth more natural gas.
It’s not just Britain that is squirming. A Bloomberg article (which I cannot link to as I will never willingly send Bloomberg a cent) notes the following unsettling news: “China is staring down another winter of power shortages that threaten to upend its economic recovery as a global energy supply crunch sends the price of fuels skyrocketing. The world’s second biggest economy is at risk of not having enough coal and natural gas – used to heat households and power factories – despite efforts over the past year to stockpile fuel as rivals in North Asia and Europe compete for a finite supply.”
It is profoundly important to recognize that these comments come from Bloomberg – a ‘news’ institution that is going far, far out of its way to demonize, deprecate, and decapitate the hydrocarbon industry. That hydrocarbon industry, by the way, is making major inroads in ways these demonizers deem impossible – developing carbon capture/storage, reducing methane emissions, working on hydrogen solutions, and even succeeding at First Nations inclusion such as demonstrated by groups like Project Reconciliation (trying to buy TransMountain) and the recent purchase of an oil sands pipeline by 8 local First Nations and Suncor. That same hydrocarbon industry is working overdrive to solve emissions problems and engage First Nations.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
A lot of the global energy-transition-now madness stems from such a basic inability to grasp certain fundamentals, which are not at all hard to understand if one wants to, but are impossible for those who require an energy villain to add righteousness to their campaign. You can install all the wind and solar you want, but if their output can go to zero, and more importantly if their output is more likely to go to zero when most needed (extreme heat (low wind, inefficient solar panels) or extreme cold (low wind, obvious solar shortcomings)), then you don’t have an energy system at all. And don’t put up your hand to say batteries are coming someday soon. The math on that as a NG replacement is even more laughable.
Yeah, yeah, I can hear it already, how terrible, coming down so hard on a bunch of hapless bandwagon-jumping commentators. Yeah, about that. That bandwagon is cutting off the world’s fuel supply at its knees. There will be consequences. Serious ones.
Hundreds of millions of people without adequate heating fuel in the dead of winter is not particularly funny. If a cold winter strikes, all the yappiest energy-transition-now dogs will fade into the woodwork, distancing themselves from the disinformation they’ve propagated and the disaster they’ve engineered. People in position of responsibility will have no choice but to speak out loud the words they’ve dared not utter for a decade: you need hydrocarbons, today, tomorrow, and for a very long time yet. So start acting like it.
Buy it while it’s still legal! Before the book burnin’ starts…pick up “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks for the support.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
Shockingly, energy policymakers do not understand that electricity and transportation cannot exist without products made from fossil fuels. Political bureaucrats and policymakers seem to be oblivious to humanity’s need for oil, as they are to these two basic facts:
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
‘Renewables’ only exist to generate occasional electricity, as they cannot make any products or fuels
Shockingly, energy policymakers do not understand that electricity and transportation cannot exist without products made from fossil fuels. Political bureaucrats and policymakers seem to be oblivious to humanity’s need for oil, as they are to these two basic facts:
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
‘Renewables’ only exist to generate occasional electricity, as they cannot make any products or fuels
In a world where policymakers want our energy mix to be dominated by wind turbines and solar panels to generate occasional electricity whenever the wind blows or the sun shines, there will be nothing to ‘electrify’ as there will be nothing that needs electricity.
Energy policymakers do not understand that everything that needs electricity is made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil, coal, or natural gas, from the light bulb to the iPhone, defibrillator, computers, spacecraft, and medications.
The elephant in the room that the energy policymakers refuse to discuss is that crude oil is the foundation of our material intensive society, as it is the basis of all products and fuels demanded by the 8 billion now on this planet.
Ridding the world of raw crude oil before we have a replacement to produce the oil derivatives currently manufactured from crude oil, we’re back to the 1800s.
The greatest threat to the world’s populations could be the future for billions to exist and prosper without those oil derivatives that are currently supporting more than 6,000 products for society.
Shockingly, energy policymakers, parents, teachers, students, and those in the media have no clue or understanding about the basis of the products in our daily lives from crude oil! Energy literacy at its worst.
Energy policymakers, armed with their lack of energy literacy, continue their pursuit to eliminate the only known sources of the products that support modern lifestyles and economies around the world.
More than 6,000 products based on oil are used for the health and well-being of humanity, and the generation of electricity did not exist a few short centuries ago.
Energy policymakers should know that there is no need to over-regulate the ‘suppliers of fossil fuels’ when there is no replacement to meet the supply chain of product ‘demands’ of our materialistic world. It’s obvious that energy policies are the real existential threat to billions across our planet.
Over the last 200 years, after the discovery of the products and transportation fuels that could be manufactured from crude oil, the world’s population has grown from 1 to 8 billion. It was the ‘products’ from oil that supported this tremendous growth in population.
Today, we have more than 50,000 merchant ships, more than 20,000 commercial aircraft,and more than 50,000 military aircraftthat use fuel manufactured from crude oil. The fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of jets moving people and products, the merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space programs are also dependent on what can be manufactured from crude oil.
If the United States energy policymakers follow California’s ‘so-called successes’ in continuing to reduce crude oil production, the country will have to continue increasing its reliance on foreign countries to meet America’s economic energy demands!
Petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil are the basis of products:
Products in manufacturing wind turbine blades, solar panels, vehicles, and everything that “needs” electricity.
Products widely used in healthcare include pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and plastic medical supplies.
Products for construction materials to décor and kitchen necessities.
Products of tires and asphalt used in transportation infrastructures.
Fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of commercial jets, moving people and products, merchant ships for global trade flows, and military and space programs.
Energy policymakers do not comprehend that Teslas are 100% made from crude oil.
EV tires, electronic components, upholstery, etc., are 100% made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Further, all the parts and components of every electricity generation system (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar) are also made from the oil derivatives manufactured from oil.
Before the 1800s and before the discovery of oil, we had no crude oil, products, electricity, or Teslas.
Mandating EVs and electricity generation from wind turbines and solar panels is mandating more use of crude oil.
Simplistically, to rid the world of oil usage, STOP using products made from oil!
If energy policymakers want to promote ridding the world of oil, they need to convince people to endure hardship and privation.
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