Day: October 10, 2024

Anger at UK’s ‘bonkers’ plan to reach net zero by importing fuel from North Korea

A plan by the British government to burn biomass imported from countries including North Korea and Afghanistan has been described as “bonkers”, with critics saying it undermines the credibility of the UK’s climate strategy.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie

Can this Net Zero farce get any worse?

From The Guardian:

A plan by the British government to burn biomass imported from countries including North Korea and Afghanistan has been described as “bonkers”, with critics sayingit undermines the credibility of the UK’s climate strategy.

A bioenergy resource model, published in late summer, calculates that only a big expansion in the import of energy crops and wood from a surprising list of nations would satisfy the UK’s plan to meet net zero.

The government wants biomass to play a “significant role” in decarbonising all sectors of the economy in the years leading up to 2050, and has provided more than £20bn to businesses using it in the power and heat sectors over the past two decades.

About a third of the biomass used in the UK is imported. In 2021, 9.1m tonnes of wood pellets for use in energy production came from abroad – about 76% from North America and 18% from the EU. But there is not enough wood in these regions to supply the large expansion in bioenergy that the government is banking on.

The resource model sets out potential domestic and overseas sources of bioenergy. Only the most ambitious scenario outlined in the document would theoretically provide enough biomass to meet this demand, and it involves a huge increase in imports.

According to an assessment by Mary Booth, director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, this includes a list of countries that seem “improbable” as sources of significant volumes of agricultural and forestry biomass, including North Korea, Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives.

Booth criticised the way the model addresses changes in land use, and its assumption that energy crop area will increase exponentially globally and crop yields will increase by more than 50%. “This is all against a background of increasing climate change when whole regions are facing famine due to weather-induced crop failures,” she said. “It’s bonkers.”

As well as being unclear whether such a large volume of biomass would be available to the UK, the model does not attempt to explain how existing deforestation problems in countries such as Brazil or the lack of transparency in a dictatorship such as North Korea would comply with sustainability rules.

More fundamentally, Booth questioned the model’s assumption that bioenergy can actually limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists and environmental campaigners have long disputed claims that burning wood for energy is climate neutral, saying forests are unlikely to be replaced quickly enough to absorb the carbon emissions required to slow the climate crisis. A recent report showed that Drax, the UK’s largest power station, was responsible for four times more carbon emissions than the country’s last remaining coal-fired plant which closed last month.

Critics also question the government’s reliance on extensive use of carbon capture and storage to neutralise emissions from burning biomass. Drax’s operator plans to develop a “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” project using more government subsidies, but there are no such plants functioning with such systems in the world.

The former energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has also said importing wood to burn did not “make any sense”.

Furthermore, serious concerns have been raised about the affect of large-scale use of biomass on biodiversity, air quality, agriculture and soil health in the UK and abroad, as well as the potential for violation of Indigenous people’s land rights.

The government recognises some of these concerns. In a biomass strategy published last year it said only biomass use that complied with strict criteria was considered to be low carbon and to offer genuine CO2 emissions savings, and that it was considering strengthening these criteria.

But in January, a National Audit Office (NAO) report concluded that the government could not show its current arrangements were adequate to give it confidence that the industry was meeting sustainability standards.

Several months later, Drax agreed to pay £25m after the energy industry regulator Ofgem found it had submitted inaccurate data on the sourcing of wood pellets from Canada.

A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “is clear that biomass sourced in line with strict sustainability criteria can be used as a low carbon source of energy. We will continue to monitor biomass electricity generation to ensure it meets required standards.”

However, the IPCC itself says biomass should not automatically be considered “even in cases where the biomass is thought to be produced sustainably”.

DESNZ said it planned to consult on developing a “cross-sector sustainability framework” but would make no further comment because the biomass strategy and bioenergy resource model were subject to continuing litigation.

The rewilding charity the Lifescape Project, backed by the Partnership for Policy Integrity, has launched a legal case claiming the biomass strategy was illegal and would undermine the UK’s ability to achieve net zero by 2050.

Frances Lawson, a lawyer at Lifescape, said the strategy hanged on the resource model, which strengthened her organisation’s argument that the government’s wider approach to bioenergy was “irrational”.

Booth said the UK had backed itself into a corner by putting so much reliance on biomass in its plans to tackle the climate crisis. “They’re afraid to say the truth – that we all need to use a lot less energy,” she said.

The NAO said that if biomass could make the contribution to achieving net zero that the government expected, it may need to increase activity in other areas to reach its 2050 target. “This could include increasing the capacity of other types of greenhouse gas removal technology, encouraging greater behaviour change, or further innovation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/09/anger-uk-plan-net-zero-import-biomass-fuel-north-korea

Even in a perfect world where the trees cut down are all replaced, it could take a century or more for the new trees to absorb the carbon dioxide already  emitted. And each year we will be emitting more and more. I don’t recall being told that it is OK to carry on emitting, as long as we start cutting  back in 100 years time. On the contrary, we are told  we must start drastically cutting now.

And we don’t live in a perfect world. Even  in the US there is now indisputable evidence that virgin forests are being cleared for biomass, with no plans to replant.

So  the idea that we could somehow trust N Korea or Afghanistan is utterly absurd. And that is before we consider genuine environmental concerns, such as the loss of forest habitat and the fact that burning biomass is far more polluting than coal.

But  there again the whole idea of Net Zero is just as ridiculous. So I would not put anything past the idiot Miliband.

Nanny-state rule and banking-cartel may crash out coal plant and 4% of our electricity after Christmas

It’s another emergency on the Australian Soviet-style electricity grid. An entirely profitable and law abiding operation is potentially about to be shut down, putting 4% of the national electricity supply at risk, because the bankers want to save the world, and the government is helping them. Who runs the country, is it the PM or the banker cartel?

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Banker warfare to destroy businesses but make the weather nicer…

It’s another emergency on the Australian Soviet-style electricity grid. An entirely profitable and law abiding operation is potentially about to be shut down, putting 4% of the national electricity supply at risk, because the bankers want to save the world, and the government is helping them. Who runs the country, is it the PM or the banker cartel?

Delta Electricity needs a bank guarantee so it can keep trading in our national electricity market, but 15 banks have refused to supply that because of their own show-pony ESG requirements, designed to impress their ski buddies at Davos. Essentially, the bankers want to decarbonize our electricity grid, and make electricity more expensive for the poor, but can’t be bothered to run for election, so they are running the country the way they want anyhow — voters be damned.

It’s even more absurd that it looks, Delta isn’t asking for a loan — it’s profitable, it has the cash. But the bankers won’t even hold the cash and promise to pay it back when needed. Delta’s current bank guarantee runs out on Dec 31, and after that it won’t be legally able to supply electricity unless the bureaucrats change the rules. So Delta has issued an urgent request for a rule change to add the words “or cash” to the current market rules.

Anthony Albanese could solve this in five minutes. Apart from the banal rule change, all these banks are only allowed to trade in Australia with government approval, and their role is to serve the people, not to control the weather, or run political agendas. All the PM has to do is threaten to revoke their licenses or issue a new license to a competitor that will serve fossil fuel entities. He could also pull government contracts and pension accounts from bankers who boycott legal Australian entities for political reasons. (See how Ron de Santis did that in the US). The US Republican States have already solved this to some extent.

One of Australia’s oldest coal generators refused bank guarantees, operating status under threat

Delta Electricity, which operates the Vales Point coal-fired power station in New South Wales, has requested an urgent rule change from the Australian Energy Market Commission after 15 banks refused to offer it credit on emissions grounds.

Chief executive Richard Wrightson said he had even offered to deposit money with an institution as security, simply to procure the financial instrument necessary under the rules, but even that offer was refused.

“We’re actually not asking them to lend, we’re just asking them to issue a bank guarantee,’’ Mr Wrightson said.

“This de-banking is dangerous … I won’t describe it as a crisis now, but unless we prepare for this, it’s chaotic.’’

Delta Electricity runs the Vales Point coal fired station in New South Wales. It has a capacity of 1320MW, and was marked for closure in 2029, but the Czech group that owns it said it should run at least another 4 years. The poor sods.  What foreign company would want to invest in Australia any more with a rabid government that allows the banking mafia to run the electricity grid and to bankrupt legal entities on a whim?

What looks, acts and smells like a banker cartel?

What are the odds in a free market that 15 out of 15 banks decided to adopt the same “anti fossil fuel” boycott program at the same time? All of them are saying “No thanks” to the profits from arrangements with thermal coal. Speaking of which, why aren’t all the other private coal plants struggling? The plants owned by Alinta and EnergyAustralia are Chinese State assets, so President Xi is happy to help. But AGL and Origin Energy own coal plants and they aren’t begging for a rule change. Do they get a free pass from the bankers because they also own unreliable generators too? Is that how this works  — to squeeze out the only independent coal plant with no vested interest in sabotaging coal power?

The octopus grip of the big bankers spreads.

All the Australian “Big Four” bankers signed the GFANZ banker cartel agreement — ANZ, CommBank, Westpac, NAB, plus Macquarie Bank, and Bank of Queensland. They serve the globalist UN, or their BlackRock and Vanguard masters, not the Australian people. All banks depend on government protection for their ability to create legal currency out of thin air. If you or I loaned money we didn’t have, it would be called counterfeiting.

The money-printers have more control over our national grid than our PM seemingly has.

h/t Bally, RickWill,

Emma Pinchbeck To Head Up CCC

Just what we need –  a renewable lobbyist taking over at the Committee on Climate Change

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

Just what we need –  a renewable lobbyist taking over at the Committee on Climate Change:

An energy boss who has backed the need for more electricity pylons is to become the chief executive of the Government’s net zero watchdog.

Emma Pinchbeck, of the trade body Energy UK, will take over as chief executive of the climate change committee (CCC) next month.

The energy chief has argued that massive amounts of new infrastructure will be needed to transport renewable power across the country to meet the Government’s net zero targets.

She has also described the return of onshore wind as “delightful” after Ed Miliband ended the de facto ban in his first days as Energy Secretary.

Several communities in England are engaged in planning battles with the National Grid over new pylons, including more than 100 miles of cables in East Anglia.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/09/supporter-electricity-pylons-net-zero-watchdog

Emma Pinchbeck is best known as Deputy Chief Executive at Renewable UK, the lobby group for renewables. Prior to joining RenewableUK, she was head of the Climate Change team at environmental watchdog WWF-UK.

Not much hope of any objective thinking from our Emma then!

Hurricane Milton is Historic, but Not Unprecedented, Nor Climate Driven

Even as Hurricane Milton has borne down on Florida’s gulf coast, the mainstream media, such as, NBC News, The Atlantic, and NPR, to name a few outlets, have been hyping the claim that Milton is an unprecedented event, that would not have happened had humans not caused climate change. These claims are false as the press release below explains in detail.

From ClimateRealism

By Heartland Institute

Editor’s Note: Even as Hurricane Milton has borne down on Florida’s gulf coast, the mainstream media, such as, NBC News,  The Atlantic, and NPR, to name a few outlets, have been hyping the claim that Milton is an unprecedented event, that would not have happened had humans not caused climate change. These claims are false as the press release below explains in detail.

Press Release from The Heartland Institute

It is wrong to blame human activity and ‘climate change’ for strength of hurricane

Storms of similar size and strength hit Tampa Bay area in 1848 and 1921 when human contributions to carbon dioxide in atmosphere was negligible

Even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says there’s no climate signal in tropical storms

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (October 8, 2024) – Hurricane Milton is on track Wednesday to be one of the biggest storms to ever hit the Tampa Bay, Florida area, and is one of the few Category 5 hurricanes on record in the satellite era (1966-onwards). It may join Hurricane Michael in 2018 as the only Category 5 hurricanes to form in the Gulf of Mexico in October and make landfall at that strength.

While the history of Gulf hurricanes growing this strong and making a direct hit on Tampa Bay shows this is a rare occurrence, it is not unprecedented and “climate change” driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide is not to blame.

Climate and environment experts at The Heartland Institute – James Taylor, Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Steven Milloy – are available to the media to provide historical context for this storm.

They provide quotes below the following facts and perspective section of this release. To reach them for comment, please contact Vice President and Director of Communications Jim Lakely at media@heartland.org or call/text 312-731-9364.

FACT: Milton not without precedent

Storms of similar size and strength struck the Tampa Bay area in 1848 and 1921. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tracked at least 146 hurricanes that have formed in the Gulf since 1851.

Historical data show there has been little to no long-term trend since 1900 in Florida major hurricane activity through Hurricane Helene, which hit the panhandle last month.

People born in the 1950s or later did not experience the record-high hurricane activity of the 1940s, and the early 1900s activity was likely under-reported as virtually no one lived in Florida in 1900.

The following plot shows the intensity of major hurricanes (100 knots or greater maximum sustained wind speed) striking Florida since 1900, updated through Helene:

FACT: No trend in hurricane “intensification”

Many may claim that the rapid intensification of Milton is unprecedented. That is also false. As the chart below shows – based on a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters – there is no significant upward trend in “rapid intensification” in hurricanes that form in the North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico in the last 33 years.

FACT: No upward trend in hurricane activity

There is also no upward trend in global cyclone activity since 1980.

FACT: IPCC says no climate signal in tropical storms

Climate science itself says there is no connection between climate change and hurricane strength or frequency. In Table 12.12 on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (2023). Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) in time periods, shows no indication of a connection in the present, nor in the future.

The color in the table below corresponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white colors indicate where evidence of a climate change signal is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal. Note the colors for Tropical Cyclones in the table screencap below:

The following statements may be used with attribution. For more information about historical trends, please visit The Heartland Institute’s Climate at a Glance website.

  • Florida, and especially the Tampa area, has been enjoying a golden age of hurricane avoidance.
  • The Tampa area is uniquely vulnerable to hurricane strikes and a major hurricane strike will likely be catastrophic, even apocalyptic. Scientists tell us it is remarkable that no major hurricanes have struck Tampa for more than a century, and Tampa has long been overdue for another major hurricane.
  • The fact that such a remarkable streak without a major hurricane strike may finally come to an end is not an indictment of climate change, but an illustration of how hurricanes are becoming rarer as the planet modestly warms.
  • Climate scammers will undoubtedly attempt to link Hurricane Milton to climate change. However, hurricane activity – affecting Florida and America as a whole – is less frequent and severe than was the case decades ago. Climate change may not make all hurricanes disappear, but hurricanes are becoming less frequent and severe as the planet modestly warms.
  • Meteorologists report that upper atmosphere wind shear will likely disrupt Hurricane Milton and reduce its power and speed before its Florida landfall. Scientists have long connected warmer global temperatures with stronger upper atmosphere wind shear inhibiting hurricane formation and strength. This is why warmer water temperatures have not “supercharged” hurricanes.
  • Florida recently underwent an 11-year period without a major hurricane strike (ending in 2017), which is by far the longest such period in recorded history.
  • Florida recently underwent a 10-year period without a single hurricane strike of any size (ending in 2016), which is by far the longest such period in recorded history.
  • From 2009 through 2017, the U.S. experienced fewer hurricane strikes than during any other time period in recorded history.
  • The United States recently underwent a record 11 years without a major hurricane strike of Category 3 or higher (2005-2017).

James Taylor
President
The Heartland Institute

“We, of course, don’t know at this stage how powerful Milton will be when it makes landfall or where precisely it will strike, but if it hits Tampa Bay as is forecast, it will cause massive destruction. If it does, however, neither the hurricane itself in terms of strength or speed of formation, the timing in the hurricane season, nor the location will be unprecedented as so many stories have claimed. Neither data, nor the IPCC’s most recent assessment, provide any support for the claim that climate change is causing a worsening of hurricanes.

“Rather, the damage Milton wreaks in Tampa Bay, or wherever it ultimately makes landfall, will be the only unprecedented thing about it and that is not due to changed climate conditions but rather changed demographics. There is simply more people, property, and infrastructure in and around Tampa Bay than there was when similar hurricanes made a direct strike on the city in 1921 and 1848 – 103 and 176 years of global warming ago respectively.

“In 1921, Tampa Bay’s population was 135,000. Now it sits at more than three million. Hopefully, most people will heed the early warnings afforded by available technology and get out of harm’s way so fatalities, if any, will be low. But you can’t move homes and infrastructure, so the damage will be quite high – not due to the changing nature of hurricane, but to the expanding bulls-eye effect: more people and stuff in harm’s way means more damage.

“I pray wind shear knocks it down and/or it strikes a less inhabited area of the nation.”

Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Director, Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate & Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
hsburnett@heartland.org
214/909-2368

“While many in the media have been painting Hurricane Milton as ‘unprecedented’ with it being ‘juiced’ by climate change, a review of the factual record and scientific literature say otherwise. Tampa Bay has experienced major hurricanes in 1848 and in 1921, well before climate change was ever conceived.

“Further, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their most recent report showed clearly, they found no signature of climate change affecting hurricanes in any way. Milton’s 897mb lowest pressure isn’t even unprecedented, being the fifth lowest on record. While Milton remains dangerous, the attempt to paint it as a monster driven by climate change just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny and is unhelpful to those affected.”

Anthony Watts
Senior Fellow for Environment and Climate
The Heartland Institute
awatts@heartland.org

“Undoubtedly the focus of the media after Hurricane Milton will be on the climate change angle, despite the facts, and rapid-attribution con ‘studies’ will quickly come out to support the media narrative. It is a shame that instead of focusing on things that would actually help decrease the impact of natural hurricanes – such as storm resilient infrastructure and dispatchable power – the media will almost certainly promote fake news in order to generate even more fear and confusion.

“In the past, Florida’s government (especially recently) has been pretty good about responding to these disasters quickly and staying focused on helping people rather than wasting time playing the climate change card and shifting responsibility onto the people for daring to demand stable and affordable power. Let us hope this trend continues.”

Linnea Lueken
Research Fellow
Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
llueken@heartland.org

“The Tampa Bay area has been hit by mega-hurricanes at least twice before (1848 and 1921), there is no trend in hurricanes hitting Florida, no aspect of hurricanes is outside the range of natural variability, and it’s impossible for emissions to affect hurricanes in the first place since emissions physically can’t warm the oceans. Blaming hurricanes on emissions is an absolutely bankrupt claim.”

Steven Milloy
Senior Policy Fellow, E&E Legal
Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute
media@heartland.org

The Heartland Institute is a national nonprofit organization founded in 1984 and headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our website or call 312-377-4000.

“Resilience and Adaptation”: Mitigation Demotion Ahead?

The failure of climate mitigation policy grows ever more obvious. It was 36 years ago (1988) that the debate began on the front pages of the New York Times and other leading newspapers, and look where we are now. A tripartite fossil fuel boom … grassroot backlash against wind and solar installations … growing federal budget deficits with Green Energy bribes … and a significant divide in regard to nuclear and geoengineering as ‘climate fixers’.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr. 

“Mitigation has had far more attention than adaptation…. So thanks to various people who alerted me to a new guide to the often-ignored subject of adaptation….” (- David Shukman, below)

The failure of climate mitigation policy grows ever more obvious. It was 36 years ago (1988) that the debate began on the front pages of the New York Times and other leading newspapers, and look where we are now. A tripartite fossil fuel boom … grassroot backlash against wind and solar installations … growing federal budget deficits with Green Energy bribes … and a significant divide in regard to nuclear and geoengineering as ‘climate fixers’.

If the crisis is upon us, then the ‘climate dollar’ must go toward resilience and adaptation (R&A), not mitigation that has no effect on global climate for decades. David Shukman, BBC News Science Editor turned “Independent Consultant/Storytelling Expert,” recently posted:

A good friend once said our bodies can travel by jet but our souls have to walk.

I felt something similar with the contradictions of Climate Week in New York – finding positives amid the traffic fumes and hot air. With the Amazon burning and northern Nigeria underwater, immediate dangers are getting more attention, as they should, giving the week’s insipid slogan “It’s Time” some meaning.

And dealing with those dangers is now edging into the mainstream, at last. It’s a good sign that Boston Consulting Group (BCG), spotting a commercial opportunity, could rustle up a dozen speakers to talk about adaptation. Or is it resilience? Or ‘A and R’? Actually who cares, I thought, gazing out from the 45th floor, as long as new investments save lives in future fires and floods.

One problem is that “prevention doesn’t have a business case” – credit to Dr. Ashwin Vasan for that memorable line, at a Reckitt Bupa roundtable on healthy cities at the Goals House.

Shukman continued:

You might think it would be screamingly obvious to use less fossil fuel not only to slow the rise in temperatures but also to reduce air pollution to cut asthma cases to lighten the burden on hospitals, a beneficial chain reaction. Apparently not, though the case is gaining ground.

As with the two billion people whose health and productivity would be immeasurably improved by access to clean water, a scandal that’s “unforgivable” according to – name drop – Matt Damon, co-founder of Water.org which enables millions to get micro-loans to fund new water connections.

Hearing this master storyteller, it occurred to me that specifics like water supply – at risk from higher temperatures and increasing drought – are the best way to describe the effects of climate change….

Before I left, I spent a few hours in Queens, an often forgotten side of New York that has a view of the Manhattan skyscrapers but feels like another planet. Yoselin Genao Estrella introduced me to victims of flooding. Rain was forecast, making everyone edgy, because the heaviest downpours fill their basement apartments with sewage and threaten lives.

This is where the acronym ‘A and R’ really matters, because getting it right will make people safer in a climate that’s becoming more hostile. Much more to follow.

In the comments, Shukman added:

… waking up to the realities of our new climate. So thanks to various people who alerted me to a new guide to the often-ignored subject of adaptation….

And: “Mitigation has had far more attention than adaptation.”

One reader asked:

So did all of the hashtag#climateweek high-flyers come up with the simple great idea of (deeds not words*) stopping flying to climate conferences, here on in? Pledging hashtag#flightfree

I hope so. Been waiting decades for you to come up with that one. You know, ‘being the change’ ‘walking the talk’ ‘leading from the front’ ‘teaching by example’ And acting as if the truth is real. ‘Flying to climate conferences’ was a sick joke 30 years ago. A good idea like this could go a long way. And save our souls.

Shukman (meekly) responded:

Totally fair point. I’m sure everyone there, like me, believed that somehow their presence was making a difference whether through a well-timed nudge or a revealing insight or providing something useful for others to take back to their bosses and help make a case for change. For each of us, there’s the unavoidable fact that others, like you, will judge us which is never comfortable and which rightly forces some serious self-scrutiny.

I commented:

Resilience and adaptation have been at the core of the free market, wealth-is-health ‘climate policy’ since the beginning. Substitute ‘weather’ for ‘climate’, and this is the argument for the beginning of humankind.

“Climate livability”

“The popular climate discussion … looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability … because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability.” – Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp. 126–127.

Final Comment

Climate mitigation policy is at war with itself. Extreme weather from whatever cause, natural or anthropogenic, calls for immediate relief–and resilience/adaptation for next time. Mitigation policies are a crap shoot and decades out versus the present. Many birds loose in the bush versus one in the hand, so to speak.

And with resilience/adaptation increasingly chosen, the ‘negative externality’ of manmade greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly internalized by anyone’s math. Added to the saturation effect ((diminishing returns)) of CO2 forcing, it is increasingly game-over for the climate activists. May free-market wealth-is-health policies win.

Appendix

My exchange with David Shukman went further.

Shukman: “Rob, you’re right that mitigation hasn’t cut emissions so far but the effort has been hampered in no small way by the denial, distraction and doubt whipped by fossil fuel interests, you’d have to agree. Now, however, cost reductions for renewables are starting to change that picture. And on the question of living space, when did you last visit an oil field or open cast coal mine?!

Bradley: ” … the effort has been hampered in no small way by the denial, distraction and doubt whipped by fossil fuel interests…”

Far too simple and conspiratorial. Billions of consumers have strong preferences for the best energies–those that are the most affordable, available, and reliable. Those are the stock energies from the sun, not a very dilute flow that is intermittent.

Oil fields and coal mines produce very concentrated energies that are easily neutralized and covered up. Peter Huber made this point well (versus solar/wind sprawl):

“The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material than must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.”

Hans van der Loo commented to both Shukman and me:

at this moment we (wrongly) believe capturing trickle flows of solar energy with metal intensive rebuildables, somehow can replace multi-million years of stored ancient solar energy. However, Physics does not agree with that notion. 

Roger Pielke on Weather Attribution

Roger Pielke Jr looks at the science (or not!) behind extreme weather attribution

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Roger Pielke Jr looks at the science (or not!) behind extreme weather attribution:

In the aftermath of many high profile extreme weather events we see headlines like the following:

For those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such headlines can be difficult to make sense of because neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and certain claims of attribution.

How then might we understand such high profile claims?

Read his full analysis here.

His take away message is that weather attribution from the outset was deliberately intended for political and media purposes. It was introduced because the IPCC was able to find any real evidence that weather was actually getting more extreme.

He notes:

First, event attribution research is a form of tactical science — research performed explicitly to serve legal and political ends. This is not my opinion, but has been openly stated on many occasions by the researchers who developed and perform event attribution research.2 Such research is not always subjected to peer review, and this is often by design as peer-review takes much longer than the news cycle. Instead, event attribution studies are generally promoted via press release.

For instance, researchers behind the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative explain that one of their key motives in conducting such studies is, “increasing the ‘immediacy’ of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.” WWA’s chief scientist, Friederike Otto, explains, “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Another oft-quoted scientist who performs rapid attribution analyses, Michael Wehner, summarized their importance (emphasis in original) — “The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!”

.

It has certainly been successful in its objective. I can personally confirm that the BBC routinely not only headlines attribution claims as if they were fact, they even use them to reject my complaints, even when the actual data shows them to be false. To them, attribution claims and facts are interchangeable.

Gas Power Prevented A Blackout Yesterday

Thingvad is Trading Director at Hybrid Greentech, who specialise in Energy Storage Intelligence, so he is a reliable source.

The X Feed is from Andrew Orlowski, who writes for the Telegraph.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Joe Public

I find this very worrisome:

https://x.com/AndrewOrlowski/status/1843669739287261351/photo/1

Thingvad is Trading Director at Hybrid Greentech, who specialise in Energy Storage Intelligence, so he is a reliable source.

The X Feed is from Andrew Orlowski, who writes for the Telegraph.

This incident highlights the foolhardiness of relying so much on imported electricity. At the moment, of course, we were able to plug the shortfall, presumably with gas.

The Elexon chart below shows how the NSL Interconnector collapsed instantaneously at 7.50am BST and was only back up running at full power at 9.25am.

https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type

On this occasion, it was OCGT which was quickly ramped up to cope with the outage:

The more we rely on  I/C, the more we are vulnerable to these problems. And we won’t have gas power around to save us.

Wind and solar cannot replace oil

The elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is that crude oil is the foundation of our materialistic society as it is the basis of all products and fuels demanded by the 8 billion on this planet, of which only one billion existed less than 200 years ago.

From CFACT

By Ronald Stein, John Shanahan

The elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is that crude oil is the foundation of our materialistic society as it is the basis of all products and fuels demanded by the 8 billion on this planet, of which only one billion existed less than 200 years ago.

All hospitals, airports, communication systems, militaries, planes, trains, and vehicles are based on the products that did not exist before the 1800’s, that are now made from fossil fuels.

Humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels made from oil has grown to a whopping consumption of 100 million barrels a day. For those unfamiliar with a “barrel”, it contains 42 gallons, which equates to 4,000,000,000 GALLONS of oil needed every day to meet the demands of today’s lifestyle and economies.

As a refresher for those high profile “green” torch bearers that are dominated by the opinions of politicians, movie stars, and popular athletes, that are preaching net-zero emissions, wind and solar do different things than crude oil.

  • Wind turbines and solar panels only generate occasional electricity but manufacture NOTHING for society.
  • Today, ‘Big Oil’ only exists because of humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels made from oil.
  • Without crude oil, there would be nothing that needs electricity. Everything, like iPhones, computers, data centers, and X-Ray machines, that need electricity to function is made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil.
  • Renewables CANNOT make any of the products to make wind turbines and solar panels.

Anyone with logical thinking will conclude that the scam of the century is ridding the world of crude oil, before a replacement is identified to support the supply chain for humanity’s growing demand for the products and fuels made from oil, would be global suicide!

Today’s policymakers are incapable of sharing a plan to support a supply chain for the products and fuels demanded by today’s materialistic society and the economy that is dependent on huge infrastructures that did not exist before oil, as world leaders try to reduce their dependency on crude oil.

The world now sustains 8 billion people—ten times the population prior to the Industrial Revolution and thankfully is also experiencing record crop production. This rapid increase in agricultural output is partially attributable to an increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1940, This rise in CO2 levels alone is linked to major yield increases for corn, soybeans, and wheat.

Wind power needs enormous amounts of oil to make and turn the non-degradable turbine blades that are filling landfills when they wear out. To provide the infrastructure for the planned forests of turbines requires massive amounts of raw materials including limestone, steel, aluminum, lithium, cobalt, and nickel. To make way for the wind and solar farm fields, millions of trees are being cut down. Remember when we used to call environmentalists tree huggers? Where are they now?

Real science is also revealing that the massive span of solar panels over millions of acres of land are changing the natural atmosphere. The materials the panels are made of cause warming. In the winter they will cause cooling, thus exacerbating weather extremes. When air is warmed, as happens over the solar panels, it rises. Even small differences in ordinary land surfaces can create powerful forces of weather. In short, solar farms will become thunderstorm and tornado incubators and magnets. There is nothing green about green electricity. Farmers must beware of allowing their property to be used for these installations.                

MOST importantly today, there is a lost reality that the primary usage of crude oil  is NOT for the generation of electricity, but to manufacture derivatives and fuels which are the ingredients of everything needed by economies and lifestyles to exist and prosper. To reiterate, ‘Big Oil’ only exists because of humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels made from oil. Energy realism requires that the legislators, policymakers, and media that are demonstrating pervasive ignorance about crude oil usage, begin to understand the staggering scale of the decarbonization movement.

Many poorer developing nations do not share the Western elite’s obsession with reducing emissions. Since life for most people on earth is still a battle against poverty, hunger and disease, many countries, particularly India and much of Africa, will continue to focus on becoming richer through fossil fuels and the many products that have made richer countries have a more comfortable living lifestyle.

World leaders continue experiencing a “dangerous delusion” of a global transition to “just electricity” that they believe will eliminate the use of the crude oil that made society achieve so much in less than 200 years. Without those products made from petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil, the policymakers must be imagining no jets, ships, defense, or space programs!

Looking back at the history of the petroleum industry, it illustrates that the black cruddy looking crude oil was virtually useless, unless it could be manufactured (refineries) into oil derivatives that are now the basis of chemical products, such as plastics, solvents, and medications, that are essential for supporting modern lifestyles. The thousands of products that are based on oil are being used for the health and well-being of humanity and the generation of electricity did not exist a few short centuries ago.

Today, we have more than 50,000 merchant ships, more than 20,000 commercial aircraftand more than  50,000 military aircraftthat use the fuels manufactured from crude oil.  The fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of jets moving people and products, and the merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space programs, are also dependent on what can be manufactured from crude oil.

For aircraft and ships, just like that for the diverse options for the generation of unreliable electricity by renewables, they all utilize parts and components made from the oil derivatives manufactured from raw crude oil.

Policymakers need to participate in conversations to discuss the difference between just ELECTRICITY” from renewables, and the “PRODUCTS” that are the basis of society’s materialistic world.

This article originally appeared at All About Energy

Ryan Maue on Hurricane Hype

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

Checking on the corporate media this morning.

Seems “Category 6” is the narrative for Hurricane Milton. pic.twitter.com/RP22Hbk7xv— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) October 8, 2024

Who is demanding that a Category 6 be added to the hurricane scale?

Take a wild guess. pic.twitter.com/05MySRnTwH— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) October 8, 2024

Seems "Category 6" is the narrative for Hurricane Milton. Who is demanding that a Category 6 be added to the hurricane scale?

Climate Activists Frustrated by IPCC’s Refusal to Link Extreme Weather With Carbon Emissions

Last June, the state-reliant BBC reported that human-caused climate change had made U.S. and Mexico heatwaves “35 times more likely”. Nothing out of the ordinary here in mainstream media with everyone from climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale to UN chief Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres making these types of bizarre attributions.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

Last June, the state-reliant BBC reported that human-caused climate change had made U.S. and Mexico heatwaves “35 times more likely”. Nothing out of the ordinary here in mainstream media with everyone from climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale to UN chief Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres making these types of bizarre attributions. But for those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “such headlines can be difficult to make sense of”, observes the distinguished science writer Roger Pielke. In a hard-hitting attack on the pseudo-scientific industry of weather attribution, he states: “neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and certain claims of attribution”.

Pielke argues that the extreme position of attributing individual bad weather events is “roughly aligned” with the far Left. “Climate science is not, or at least should not serve as a proxy for political tribes,” he cautions. But of course it is. The Net Zero fantasy is a collectivist national and supra-national agenda that increasingly relies on demonising bad weather. With global temperatures rising at most only 0.1°C a decade, laughter can only be general and side-splitting when IPCC boss Jim Skea claims that British summers will be 6°C hotter in less than 50 years. Two extended temperature pauses since 2000 have not helped the cause of global boiling. In addition there are increasing doubts about the reliability of temperature recordings by many meteorological organisations that seem unable to properly account for massive urban heat corruptions.

The big problem for ‘far Left’ climate extremists is that event attribution is a form, in Pielke’s words, of “tactical science”. Such science serves legal and political ends and is not always subject to peer review. As the BBC and other media outlets can attest, the work is “generally promoted via press release”. It has been developed in response to the failure of the IPCC to detect and attribute most types of extreme weather including drought, flooding, storms and wildfires to human involvement, notes Pielke. Worse, the IPCC can find little sign of human involvement going forward to 2100.

Scientists cannot answer directly whether particular events are caused by climate change since extremes occur naturally. Meanwhile the IPCC is somewhat dismissive about weather attribution, or as Pielke terms it, “weather attribution alchemy”. It notes: “The usefulness or applicability of available extreme event attribution methods for assessing climate-related risks remains subject to debate.” The IPCC is a biased body full of climate alarmists, but its inability to attribute single events to humans is obviously highly irritating and somewhat inconvenient for activists and their media counterparts.

Dr. Friederike Otto runs World Weather Attribution (WWA) out of Imperial College London and is a frequent presence on the BBC. WWA is behind many of the immediate attributions of bad weather to human causes and its motives are clear. As Dr. Otto has noted: “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Otto is clear that the main function of such studies, part-funded by Net Zero-supporting billionaires and heavily pushed by aligned mainstream media, is to support lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. She explains this strategy in detail in the interview, ‘From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation‘.

The inability of the IPCC to attribute bad weather to humans has been viewed by climate advocates as “politically problematic”, continues Pielke. He notes the work of climate activists Elizabeth Lloyd and Naomi Oreskes who are worried that the lack of attribution “conveys the impression that we just do not know, which feeds into uncertainty, doubt or incompleteness, and the general tendency of humans to discount threats that are not imminent”.

Perish the thought that there should be uncertainty, doubt or incompleteness in the settled world of climate science. It is of course different from all other branches of science in that all its opinions are right and consequently there is no need for the unhelpful process of constant inquiry and experiment. It need hardly be added that no doubt exists at the BBC, where former Radio 4 Today Editor Sarah Sands wrote the foreword to a WWA guide for journalists. Recalling when the late Nigel Lawson suggested there had been no increase in extreme weather, Sands noted: “I wish we had this guide for journalists to help us mount a more effective challenge to his claim.” These days, Sands enthused, attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse”.

For her part, Otto is keen to crack down on the heretics. She was at the forefront of the recent notorious retraction of a paper in a Springer Nature journal that stated there was no evidence that the climate was breaking down. Written by four Italian scientists and led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti, they argued that a climate emergency was not supported by the data. Otto, who had previously worked in the Oxford School of Geography for 10 years, claimed the scientists were not writing in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly saying it should never have been published,” she demanded.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.