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.
They are right to do so: green fanatics aspire to dictate every aspect of life, for you and everyone else in the world, just as the National Socialists and the Communist commissars tried to do.
The Net Zero bandwagon was always going to grind to a halt when it bumped up against hard realities. As Abraham Lincoln observed, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. To which the physicist Richard Feynman added the important rejoinder that you can’t fool nature either.
The eco-zealots in the think tanks, the civil service and the Green Blob have been trying to do both. Consider, for example, the oft-repeated claim that wind and solar power are cheap, which is demonstrably false, and carefully overlooks the fact that a renewables-dominated grid would require trillions of pounds of electricity storage to make it function without backup. As a result, we have seen gigawatts of wind and solar power installed, and the slow strangulation of investment in conventional energy sources. However, nature, refusing to be taken in by all the claims of ‘cheap renewables’, has responded with 20 years of relentless electricity price rises.
The silver lining to the very dark cloud of the Ukraine war and the energy cost crisis that followed is that most people now realise that a world with rising energy costs is not very pleasant at all. Others have been awakened, perhaps rather unexpectedly, by the Biden administration’s decision to launch its own Net Zero spending spree. It is rapidly becoming clear that this has the potential to turn into a disaster for the U.K.
Already unable to compete with the cheap energy and cheap labour of the Far East, many businesses are now having to face the reality that they will soon be unable to compete with the U.S. either, because of its abundance of cheap gas and its tidal wave of subsidies. Even companies that have been here for years are now thinking of upping sticks and crossing the Atlantic to take advantage of the green bonanza on offer. The U.K. and much of Europe are therefore facing an exodus of businesses, and a drying up of foreign direct investment. That could be catastrophic for the economy, and for Government finances already reeling from the pandemic.
The realities of Net Zero are also hitting home for the general public. The threat that the project represents to livelihoods and liberties is becoming more evident by the day. Recently, the mathematician Norman Fenton tweeted an excerpt from a Government-funded report that set out what Net Zero U.K. might look like: no airports, no shipping, no beef and lamb to eat, and most food imports eliminated. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? Lots of people thought so, and the tweet went viral, garnering over three million views.
The threat of being effectively locked into a 15-minute zone of a city has also concentrated minds. Anti-ULEZ protests are kicking off, and civil disobedience has followed in their wake, with cameras vandalised, bollards ripped out and barriers destroyed. Awareness of the threat of programmable digital currencies, which would allow the authorities to dictate your purchases (“No beef for you this week!”), is becoming more widespread too.
Seeing such policies alongside the restrictions on movement and lifestyle, and the ongoing censorship of criticism and opposition, many will conclude that climate catastrophism is simply the latest manifestation of mankind’s habitual tendency to totalitarianism. They are right to do so: green fanatics aspire to dictate every aspect of life, for you and everyone else in the world, just as the National Socialists and the Communist commissars tried to do.
So, as more and more of the impacts of Net Zero hit home, word of the economic and societal threat is spreading. Another surge in energy prices next winter or the winter after could prove the final straw for hundreds of thousands of businesses and the public alike. A small ray of hope is that in some parts of the world, the green cult is having to make compromises. The EU was recently forced by Germany to abandon its planned ban of combustion-engined cars. At the recent G7 meeting, ministers refused to set a date for the elimination of coal from the bloc’s energy systems, rolling back a pledge made at the Glasgow climate summit.
Yet most Western governments, including Mr. Sunak and his cabinet, remain almost entirely in thrall to green dogma. The reality is that far too many of them are Net Zero ideologues themselves, and far too many of the rest are cowed by the antics of the eco-zealots and the fulminations of their supporters in the mainstream media. We should expect no real change of direction under the current generation of ministers and MPs.
This inability to tackle the Net Zero cost crisis is almost certain to clear the way for Labour to sweep into power and to do… precisely nothing about the energy crisis. The damage being done to our economy and society will continue, and perhaps even accelerate.
But eventually a turning point will be reached, and the public, mugged by reality, will realise where the Establishment is taking them. They will look at the cold, dark, miserable Net Zero world that Norman Fenton described and will refuse to go any further. They will instead return to the path they have chosen in the past, the path to liberty and prosperity. The established political parties cannot see the inevitability of this reversal, but eventually they will have to accept it, and follow on behind, or face becoming irrelevant.
Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford are Director and Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch.
No prizes for guessing why those networks are hard-pressed: step forward ’net zero‘ climate obsession. Lack of reliable electricity supply didn’t happen overnight.
No prizes for guessing why those networks are hard-pressed: step forward ’net zero‘ climate obsession. Lack of reliable electricity supply didn’t happen overnight. – – – National Grid is quitting its foray into developing carbon capture and storage in the UK, in a blow to the Government’s net zero ambitions, says the Daily Telegraph.
The FTSE 100 company is abandoning its plans to develop new pipelines in the Humber region to take carbon dioxide emissions out to the North Sea.
Its National Grid Ventures arm is in talks to sell the onshore pipeline project to partners, and has already quit another phase of the project.
Carbon capture and storage is considered key to the Government’s plans to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but is not yet up and running at scale in the UK.
Power plants in the Humber region hoping to start capturing their emissions missed out on a fresh round of government support announced at the end of last month.
National Grid said it wants to focus instead on its electricity networks, which are in major need of upgrades to help cope with the rise in wind farms, electric cars and heat pumps.
A spokesman said it was “committed to managing a smooth transition” as it moved to transfer its carbon capture interests to partners. . . . BP is now expected to become the system operator from end to end.
The realities of Net Zero are also hitting home for the general public. The threat that the project represents to livelihoods and liberties is becoming more evident by the day.
People are waking up to the dark side of the Absolute Zero plan
The totalitarian wet dreams of a UK government consortium of academics are lighting up the internet. As Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford from NetZeroWatch say — people are starting to pay attention in a big way:
The realities of Net Zero are also hitting home for the general public. The threat that the project represents to livelihoods and liberties is becoming more evident by the day. Recently, the mathematician Norman Fenton tweeted an excerpt from a Government-funded report that set out what Net Zero U.K. might look like: no airports, no shipping, no beef and lamb to eat, and most food imports eliminated. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? Lots of people thought so, and the tweet went viral, garnering over three million views.
The Prof Norman Fenton thread that got 3.4 million views on Twitter is, would you believe, about a 2019 UK Government funded research report. Who knew the masses could get that excited about a 31 page prehistoric report on energy policy, but holy-cajoley: it’s a wake up call of just how savage the Absolute Zero plan aims to be. And this matters more than you might think. Without magical new technologies the current Net Zero targets can only be achieved with Absolute Zero emissions.
The totalitarian wet dreams of a UK government consortium of academics are lighting up the internet. As Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford from NetZeroWatch say — people are starting to pay attention in a big way:
The realities of Net Zero are also hitting home for the general public. The threat that the project represents to livelihoods and liberties is becoming more evident by the day. Recently, the mathematician Norman Fenton tweeted an excerpt from a Government-funded report that set out what Net Zero U.K. might look like: no airports, no shipping,no shipping and lamb to eat, and most food imports eliminated. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? Lots of people thought so, and the tweet went viral, garnering over three million views.
The Prof Norman Fenton thread that got 3.4 million views on Twitter is, would you believe, about a 2019 UK Government funded research report. Who knew the masses could get that excited about a 31 page prehistoric report on energy policy, but holy-cajoley: it’s a wake up call of just how savage the Absolute Zero plan aims to be. And this matters more than you might think. Without magical new technologies the current Net Zero targets can only be achieved with Absolute Zero emissions.
With no new magical inventions this is “the Gap”
How much will the totalitarians end up getting — as much as we we let them
That report from the UK FIRES research programme is rather tamely calledAbsolute Zero: Delivering the UK’s climate change commitment with incremental changes to today’s technologies, as if we just need baby steps to get there.
But instead, as Fenton highlights, the key points are all mapped out in gruesome detail — just as if a well funded group of academic ideologues unleashed their fantasies with no constraints. The acceleration is breathtaking: all airports except Heathrow, Belfast & Glasgow need to close by 2030. There will be no flying at all by 2050. As far as cars go, there needs to be no new petrol/diesel cars by 2030; by 2050 road use is restricted to 60% of today’s level.
All the things you love like food, heating and energy will be restricted to 60% of today’s level by 2050. So life will be a lot colder and hungrier unless there’s a lot fewer people to share it with. And naturally the ’15 minute prisons‘, I mean ‘cities’ are key to all of this.
It is The Great Reset in glossy grand bureaucratic art:
It’s much closer to real policy than you might think
It’s only a research report, not an act of Parliament (yet), but as Norman Fenton points out, Net Zero is morphing into Absolute Zero, because Absolute Zero is what has to happen if the UK current Net Zero policy is going to achieve targets that are already set in legislation:
Fenton: And for those who still think the absolute zero agenda is not baked in to Govt thinking, note that it only differs from the official net zero agenda in its 2030 objectives (i.e. the speed at which it must happen). The 2050 objectives are the same.
… In other words, the inhumane FIRES project strategy is simply a realistic statement of what is required to meet the UK Govt’s insane net zero 2050 target as enshrined in the 2019 Climate Change Act amendment (which every political party supported but nobody voted for).
Net Zero has to morph to Absolute Zero
Julian Allwood is one of the authors and a Cambridge University Engineering Professor and he’s scathing about the reality of the current “Net Zero” plans which rely on future discoveries. He said all this in 2021:
The government’s roadmap is based on a “fantastically religious belief”, Allwood said, that fledgling, future technologies can deliver the 68 per cent cut in emissions that needs to be made in the next nine years to keep the country’s COP26 pledge.
“Net-zero doesn’t mean anything”
As a result, he argued that we should be aiming for “absolute zero” rather than net-zero by 2050.
This sentiment was echoed by prominent philosopher Timothy Morton… The tub represents the atmosphere and the water atmospheric carbon … You’ve still got the bath full of water,” he said. “That’s the problem. We have to actually get the bath down lower.” “Net-zero doesn’t mean anything,” Morton continued. “One of the translations of net-zero by 2050 is: I support mass extinction.”
Absolute zero requires giving up cement and air travel
“…there’s huge potential for innovation. But it’s not the innovation of magic beans fertilised by unicorn’s blood, which is all that’s in the political climate today. It’s new businesses that are truly compatible with zero emissions.”
The same guys that complain about the religious faith of Net Zero fantasies are the ones who have a religious faith that CO2 is a problem in the first place, O’ Believers of Holy Climate Models!
Fenton was interviewed by Laura Ingraham a few weeks ago:
This is the same Professor Norman Fenton readers here might remember from the Dec 2021 vaccine study in the UK which had those incendiary graphs of excess deaths in the UK following the peak of vaccination in every age group. His graphs of mortality in the UK are still my first choice to show that the link between excess deaths and vaccination in a cause and effect sense.
Their electricity consumption for a heat pump is based on an efficiency rating of 333%. In other words, you will get 333 KWh of heat from 100 KWh of electricity.
But this is a wildly optimistic figure, unless you have ultra high levels of insulation and live in the mildest part of the country.
According to The Eco-Experts website, who themselves are devoted to pushing heat pump technology, the best you can expect is 300% efficiency, and many people will get much worse. And as they say, this means you will actually end up paying more in running costs for a heat pump, not less.
Using Octopus’ prices, with 300% efficiency, we get:
17097 KWh of heat = 5699 KWh of electricity
At 34.19p per KWh, the cost = £1948, compared with a gas boiler cost of £1788
They also claim a saving of £109 from a smart meter, but you would have shift half of your heat demand to night time, which I suspect would be unacceptable to most people and leave homes cold during the day. And nothing comes for free, as the smart tariff charges an extortionate rate of 51.78p between 16.00 and 19.00. So you might save a bit on heating, but you would pay more for all of the other electricity you use during that period:
They also claim a saving from eliminating the gas standing charge, but this would mean you would have to give up your gas cooker, gas fires and any other gas appliances.
And there is no evidence that heat pumps are cheaper to maintain. Our gas boiler is 14 years old, and has literally only needed a few hundred spending on services.
Finally, there is one issue that Octopus have failed to mention – hot water. Heat pumps are not sufficient on their own for supplying the hot water we need everyday.
One solution would be to instal a much more powerful heat pump, but the running costs would be much greater, as well as the capital cost.
There is also the possibility of hybrid heat pumps, which can use electricity/gas/hydrogen to top up the heat of the water. Again capital and running costs increase.
But I suspect most people would simply choose to buy a separate electric water heater, also adding to the installation cost. But more significant would be the higher running costs:
The average energy demand for hot water is about 4000 KWh pa. At a gas price of 10.46p, this would cost £418. But at an electricity price of 34.19p, this rises to £1367.
As far as Octopus is concerned, heat pumps and the Net Zero agenda is a religion. And they will lie and cheat to get their way.
Supreme Court deals blow to oil companies by turning away climate cases
PUBLISHED MON, APR 24 202310:45 AM EDT
Lawrence Hurley
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed lawsuits brought by municipalities seeking to hold energy companies accountable for climate change to move forward in a loss for business interests.
The court turned away oil company appeals in five cases involving claims brought by cities and municipalities in Colorado, Maryland, California, Hawaii and Rhode Island as part of efforts to hold businesses accountable for the effects of climate change.
[…]
“Big Oil companies have been desperate to avoid trials in state courts, where they will be forced to defend their climate lies in front of juries, and today the Supreme Court declined to bail them out,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental group.
Why is this “fake news”? Because it’s not really newsworthy and certainly not a “blow to oil companies.” It just means that the junk climate lawsuits will have to work their way through State and Federal courts. This ruling was foreordained by the 2022 SCOTUS 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. (I don’t care if foreordained might not be the right word here.)
The misguided 2005 SCOTUS 5-4 decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency essentially federalized the issue of regulations related to climate change. The subsequent 2009 endangerment finding essentially self-empowered the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
The mind bogglingly stupid Clean Power Plan of 2015 effectively established a framework for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. While being baseless in fact and law, these three events essentially blocked junk climate lawsuits in State courts. In 2016, SCOTUS stayed the Clean Power Plan in a 5-4 decision.
The stay was issued along party lines, with the five conservative-leaning justices voting for the stay and the liberal-leaning justices voting against it. However, four days after the high court issued its stay, Justice Antonin Scalia passed away. Because the Court issued its stay prior to Justice Scalia’s death, it remains in place. However, there is now a 4–4 tie among the justices as to whether the EPA has the powers it proposes to exercise under the Clean Power Plan. The Court is expected to remain at just eight justices for quite some time, due to an impending standoff between President Obama and the Senate over Justice Scalia’s replacement. If that is the case, then the ultimate decision on the legality of the Clean Power Plan may lie with the D.C. Circuit for the time being, due to Supreme Court rules on ties. In the event of a tie, the Court upholds the decision of the lower court, but that decision does not apply outside the circuit and does not create precedent.ABA
Had Donald Trump not crushed Hillary Clinton in 2016, SCOTUS would have upheld the Clean Power Plan, the EPA would be aggressively regulating greenhouse gas emissions and, as a consolation prize, the junk climate lawsuits would be deader than Elvis. SCOTUS is now composed of 3 Justices who will always uphold the Constitution, 2 who will almost always uphold the Constitution, a Chief Justice who will usually uphold the Constitution and 3 who will always uphold the Communist Manifesto… {/Rant Off}
In 2022, the Court ruled that the Clean Air Act did not empower the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions to the extent imposed in the 2015 Clean Power Plan.
Congress did not grant the Environmental Protection Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act the authority to devise emissions caps based on the generation shifting approach the Agency took in the Clean Power Plan.
Under the “major questions doctrine,” there are “extraordinary cases” in which the “history and the breadth of the authority that [the agency] has asserted,” and the “economic and political significance” of that assertion, provide a “reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress” meant to confer such authority. This is one such case, so the EPA must point to “clear congressional authorization” for the authority it claims. It cannot do so.Oyez
This effectively opened to floodgates to junk litigation against energy companies. These junk lawsuits have no merits and will only succeed when juries rule on emotion. Ultimately, this will probably come back to SCOTUS for the final decision.
Monday’s high court decision also finds that the Clean Air Act does not completely bar state law claims regarding interstate pollution, ClearView noted, adding “therefore, these cases can and should be adjudicated by state courts.” The industry wagered that the state lawsuits might be quashed by the Clean Air Act, which federal agencies have used to address carbon emissions.
The research firm noted that the state court process can take a year or more and any decision on the actual merits of the cases “could still be years away.”
It also said that allowing the cases to play out in state court does not prevent the energy companies from winning on the merits — by arguing that federal law bars the cases. Nor does it prevent federal review of future state court rulings.
“The Supreme Court may still yet be the final word on the merits of the climate liability cases — several years from now,” ClearView wrote.E&E Climatewire
“YAWN!”
But… Hey… EXXON KNEW… Right?
This cartoon appears on page 62 of the Charleston SC lawsuit and nearly every other junk climate lawsuit:
Figure 1. This is Figure 3 in the Charleston lawsuit. It is Exxon’s “Black” cartoon. The exact image and caption are in multiple junk lawsuits.
The exact same image, including the caption is in Delaware’s recent junk lawsuit. The graph is from what is known as the “Black presentation” and supposedly reveals Exxon’s secret knowledge of climate change, which was being withheld from the public. The “infamous” 1978 Black presentation was derived from government and academic publications and conferences on the so-called greenhouse effect.
Here’s what Exxon (and/or Mobil) knew in 1978…
Figure 2.. Exxon knew that most government and academic scientists wanted more research money.
Figure 3. In 1978, Exxon knew that the effects on sea level and the polar ice caps would likely be negligible, models were useless and more effort should be directed at paleoclimatology.
Black’s allegedly proprietary climate model was just a cartoon based on publicly available literature. I overlaid HadCRUT4 (Northern Hemisphere) on the Black cartoon:
If HadCRUT4 is right (it isn’t), it’s now only slightly warmer than the “approximate range of undisturbed climate in past few centuries.” Just like the models of today, the observations track at or below the 95% confidence band. Way back in 1977, Exxon Knew that the climate models overestimated warming!
What’s even funnier? The “Black presentation” was made during the height of That 70’s Climate Crisis Show. If the climate models are correct (they aren’t), ExxonMobil and other purveyors of fossil fuels saved the world from this:
Figure 5. The Climatariat tell us that temperature observations have followed the black curve and that the blue curve is what the temperatures would have done if we just agreed to freeze in the dark for the sake of Polar Bears. Modified after IPCC AR4
Just imagine the lawsuit if Exxon and all of the other purveyors of fossil fuels had stopped producing and selling fossil fuels back when they first learned “that unrestricted production and use of fossil fuel products create greenhouse gas pollution that warms the planet and changes our climate,” and this actually occurred:
The social, or financial, cost of carbon has become a widely-used metric after its creation by economist William Nordhaus, who subsequently won a Nobel prize, in the 1990s. The measurement calculates the damage caused by a ton of emissions, factored with the ability to adapt to the changing climate.
Under Nordhaus’ DICE model the 2020 social cost of carbon is $37 a metric ton but Bressler’s addition of the mortality cost brings this figure up to $258 a ton. This change to the model would imply that an economically optimal policy would be to radically reduce emissions to reach full decarbonization by 2050, a scenario that has also been backed by climate scientists as one that would avoid the worst ravages of global heating.
“Nordhaus came up with a fantastic model but he didn’t take in the latest literature on climate change’s damage upon mortality, there’s been an explosion of research on that topic in recent years,” said Bressler.The Grauniad, July 2021
This carbon tax calculator only goes up to $50/ton. Just multiply the $50/ton tax by 4.7 to get the effect of a $235/ton tax.
A $258/ton carbon tax would have this effect on reliable energy prices:
Figure 5. Impact of a $235/ton carbon tax.
While numbers can vary depending on grades of gasoline, on average, the combustion of 1 gallon of gasoline yields 8.89 kg of CO2.
1 metric ton = 1,000 kg
$235/metric ton = $0.235/kg
8.89 kg/gal x $0.235/kg = $2.09/gal… Slightly higher than the calculator
How does a gallon of gasoline, which weighs less than 3 kg, yield nearly 9 kg of CO2?
Molecular weight:
O = 16
C = 12
Chemical equation for combustion of octane:
2[C8H18] + 25[O2] → 16[CO2] + 18[H2O]
The C comes from gasoline, the O2 comes from the air.
The Grauniad article even idiotically states that “three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person”… Splain this then:
From 1800 to 1900, per capita energy consumption, primarily from biomass, remained relatively flat; as did the average life expectancy. From 1900 to 1978, per capita energy consumption roughly tripled with the rapid growth in fossil fuel production (coal, oil & gas). This was accompanied by a doubling of average life expectancy. While I can’t say that fossil fuels caused the increase in life expectancy, I can unequivocally state that everything that enabled the increase in life expectancy wouldn’t have existed or happened without fossil fuels, particularly petroleum.
Our modern society would not exist without fossil fuels and it would collapse in a heartbeat if fossil fuels were made unavailable and/or unaffordable.
The Modern World Can’t Exist Without These Four Ingredients. They All Require Fossil Fuels
Modern societies would be impossible without mass-scale production of many man-made materials. We could have an affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to good education and health care without any microchips or personal computers: we had one until the 1970s, and we managed, until the 1990s, to expand economies, build requisite infrastructures and connect the world by jetliners without any smartphones and social media. But we could not enjoy our quality of life without the provision of many materials required to embody the myriad of our inventions.
Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.
[…]
Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of over forty books on topics including energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy. His new book is How the World Really WorksTime Magazine
Natural gas literally feeds half the people on this planet.
“Trends in human population and nitrogen use throughout the twentieth century. Of the total world population (solid line), an estimate is made of the number of people that could be sustained without reactive nitrogen from the Haber–Bosch process (long dashed line), also expressed as a percentage of the global population (short dashed line). The recorded increase in average fertilizer use per hectare of agricultural land (blue symbols) and the increase in per capita meat production (green symbols) is also shown.” Erisman et al., 2008
The climatariat modelers claim that fossil fuel emissions are killing 8 million people per year… While real world data demonstrate that 4 billion people would quickly starve to death without fossil fuels and the other 4 billion people would be deprived of damn near everything required for life in the modern world.
The hysterical demands to end fossil fuels are essentially demands for genocide. Under the right (or wrong) circumstances, junk lawsuits could be the first wave in such a genocide. While these junk lawsuits are unlikely to succeed with the current ideological composition of the US Supreme Court, Justices Thomas and Alito are in their 70’s. If Biden is given an opportunity to replace them, the Court would have a solid 5-4 left wing majority. Such a court would wholeheartedly uphold such thermonuclear lawfare against the fossil fuels industries and capitalism in general.
This issue is at least as important as our recent global financial crisis – probably more so in the long run. It has been said that regulating carbon dioxide emissions will make the United States the cleanest Third World country on Earth. And whoever controls carbon dioxide emissions will control the world.Dr. Roy Spencer, April 2009
President Emmanuel Macron, who was already doubling down on the low carbon technology even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dialled up concerns across the continent over energy security, is pushing to have the first in a series of six new reactors up and running by 2035.
President Emmanuel Macron, who was already doubling down on the low carbon technology even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dialled up concerns across the continent over energy security, is pushing to have the first in a series of six new reactors up and running by 2035.
The plans, which could be extended by at least another eight reactors, are the linchpin in France’s vision to reduce its net emissions to zero over the next three decades, in line with international agreements to limit the rise in average global temperatures.
In order to stand a chance of turning this vision into reality, the government estimates it needs to find another 100,000 nuclear specialists of all guises, from engineers and project supervisors to boilermakers and electricians, over the coming six years.
Looming large, beyond hurdles with design approvals and financing for the €52bn programme, is an even more basic question — whether France, Europe’s main atomic nation, still has the industrial capacity and people to make the projects happen on a scale it has not contemplated since the 1970s. “The biggest challenge is whether we know how to orchestrate a very large industrial project.
No one really does these in Europe any more. It’s China, India,” says Antoine Armand, a lawmaker in Macron’s Renaissance party who steered a recent parliamentary probe into the state of France’s energy sector.
For others, doubts over when France will be able to deliver are a reason to pursue the rollout of renewable energy in a much greater way in the short term.
“We’re going into this with a sort of forceful optimism saying everything is going to be fine. However, today, there is nothing to guarantee that,” says lawmaker Barbara Pompili, a minister under Macron in his first term, but who has just left his party.
It’s obvious to any person with the faculty of critical thinking that intermittent renewable “green” energy will never work to power a modern economy. So as various U.S. states and foreign countries press forward on their crash programs to go fully “green” with their electricity generation, the next obvious question immediately arises: who will be first to hit the green energy “wall”? That is, which state or country will be the first to find that without enough reliable generation its electricity system no longer works? And how will that impact the population?
But let’s now look at South Africa. South Africa is one of the wealthiest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is not saying much. The World Bank gives its per capita GDP as about $7000 for 2021. (For comparison, the U.S. per capita GDP is around $70,000. while wealthier European countries like Germany, the UK and France have per capita GDP in the range of about $40,000 – $50,000.).
Unlike wealthy Western countries, South Africa is far from completely developed, and has never achieved a fully-built-out electrical grid. The country has a legacy electricity infrastructure, almost entirely based on coal generation, dating from prior to the accession to power of the ANC in 1994. But South Africa needs a big increase in its electricity supply to become a fully-developed economy. Its population has grown rapidly (from about 43 million in 1994 to 60 million today). Meanwhile its electric utility, Eskom, is heavily indebted with little further ability to raise private capital. Thus the country substantially relies on Western aid to support and expand its supply of electricity. As an example of what is occurring in the realm of Western aid for electricity infrastructure, the World Bank stopped financing coal power plants in 2013 and stopped financing oil and gas extraction projects in 2017.
And thus South Africa has become a mostly-willing guinea pig for the green dreams of Western elites. According to Climate Home News from September 19, 2020, the South African government put out a so-called Integrated Resources Plan in 2019 “outlin[ing] a transition from polluting coal generation to renewable sources like solar and wind.” In September 2020, according to the same CHN piece, “theSouth African cabinet . . . approved a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is on record on multiple occasions over the past several years as supporting a Net Zero transition for his country.
On the ground in electricity generation in South Africa, here’s what I can learn. The New York Times reports on March 14, 2023 that over the past decade plus, since the wind/solar fad took hold, the country’s coal power plants have been allowed to become “dilapidated” due to poor maintenance and disinvestment. Meanwhile, the focus going back as far as the turn of the century has moved to developing wind and solar resources to provide electricity. A December 2021 piece from the Alexandria Engineering Journal provides a comprehensive overview of the growth in renewables in South Africa. The initial demonstration wind project was constructed by Eskom in 2002. Here is the lengthy list of wind projects subsequently completed:
Nor has South Africa lagged in the march to solar energy. From the same piece in the Alexandria Engineering Journal, here is a list of solar projects (for some reason not including the years, but they are almost entirely post-2010):
So surely by now the wind and sun must be providing the abundant and nearly-free electricity for all? Hardly. Here is a pie graph of the current electricity generation mix, stated to be based on data from the UN’s International Energy Agency:
Yes, after all of that effort, the wind generation is up to a full 2% of South Africa’s electricity, and solar 1%. And, from CNN, January 18:
South Africans have endured power cuts for years but 2022 was the worst on record with 205 days of rolling blackouts, as aging coal-fired power plants broke down and state-owned power utility Eskom struggled to find the money to buy diesel for emergency generators. So far this year, there have been outages every day. The situation worsened again last week when Eskom said it would implement more cuts because of breakdowns at 11 coal-fired generating units.
According to CNN, any individual home or business is getting hit with about 12 hours a day without power, generally coming in increments of about 4 hours at a time, and often without notice. It’s disgusting to watch what the self-important international functionaries are doing to this poor country. But at least we’re learning what the green energy “wall” looks like in practice.
“The planned energy transition towards ‘net zero’ using ‘renewable’ energy, will inevitably lead to massive environmental destruction, with a six-times increase in environmental damage by 2050. This is concluded by scientists in a recent study [in Nature].”
“The planned energy transition towards ‘net zero’ using ‘renewable’ energy, will inevitably lead to massive environmental destruction, with a six-times increase in environmental damage by 2050. This is concluded by scientists in a recent study [in Nature].” (below)
The planned energy transition towards ‘net zero’ using ‘renewable’ energy, will inevitably lead to massive environmental destruction, with a six-times increase in environmental damage by 2050. This is concluded by scientists in a recent study (https://lnkd.in/emQwZBi2).
The EU has adopted a net-zero strategy that comes with the installation of even more wind turbines and solar panels. The North Sea has already been sacrificed to become an industrial power generator, while NGO’s, like Greenpeace and WWF keep silent. It becomes clear that politicians, as well as NGOs, are willing to give up forests, land and wildlife habitat for their ineffective net-zero dream.
Six times more damaging impacts In the study, scientists calculated the energy generated per square kilometer occupied by the plant, including the infrastructure. The conclusion: so-called ‘renewables’ inevitably encroach on wildlife habitat due to their large area use, leading to a six-times increase in damaging impacts by 2050. In total, an area the size of the EU would be needed to supply the world with sufficient ‘renewable’ electricity. In contrast, nuclear would only need an area less than a third of The Netherlands. For example, onshore wind uses a staggering 350 times higher surface area than nuclear.
Massive environmental problems The choice for these unsustainable renewables also comes with impacts due to mining for minerals and deforestation to harvest balsa wood for the wind turbine blades. This leads to huge environmental problems, slave labor and deforestation in the tropics. On top of that, documented mortality of birds, bats and especially insects caused by wind turbines, a fact also largely ignored by leading NGO’s, makes wind energy an even less desirable option.
True environmental crisis The present study shows that the ‘net-zero’ policy results in a true environmental crisis, not caused by climate change, but by unsustainable mitigation measures, as dictated by politicians. In that context it is just incomprehensible that Greenpeace and WWF are currently suing the European commission for including natural gas and nuclear energy as ‘green’ investments. These organizations have turned against their original mission: protecting the environment. They have become ignorant and an enemy of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
The infrastructure burden of utility-scale wind and solar is part of mainstream thinking. Not only the above Nature article but also a Princeton study two years ago, “Net Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure and Impacts,” quantified the problem. The 345-page analysis, authored by 10 Princeton researchers and 8 external collaborators, was summarized by Peter Behr and Jeffrey Tomich, “Biden’s Dilemma: Land for Renewables” (March 24, 2021):
Picture an area of land equal to the combined territories of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island — 228,000 square miles in all. That’s the space that could be required to site most of the massive deployments of wind and solar generation required to fulfill President Biden’s goal of a net-zero-carbon economy by midcentury, according to a recent first-ever project to attempt mapping that future.
‘Machining up’ the pristine in the name of the environmental is a strange thing to behold. Fossil fuels are the friend of the landscape, the living space. Stated Peter Huber in Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (Basic Books, 1999, pp. 105, 108):
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.
Advantage fossil fuels, the sun’s energy work over the ages versus dilute, intermittent energy flow from the sun and wind.
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[1] Abstract: This paper introduces the annual energy density concept for electric power generation, which is proposed as an informative metric to capture the impacts on the environmental footprint. Our investigation covers a wide range of sources classified by rated power and compares different regions to establish typical spatial flows of energy and evaluate the corresponding scalability to meet future net-zero emission (NZE) goals. Our analysis is conducted based on publicly available information pertaining to different regions and remote satellite image data. The results of our systematic analysis indicate that the spatial extent of electric power generation toward 2050 will increase approximately sixfold, from approximately 0.5% to nearly 3.0% of the world’s land area, based on International Energy Agency (IEA) NZE 2050 targets. We investigate the worldwide energy density for ten types of power generation facilities, two involving nonrenewable sources (i.e., nuclear power and natural gas) and eight involving renewable sources (i.e., hydropower, concentrated solar power (CSP), solar photovoltaic (PV) power, onshore wind power, geothermal power, offshore wind power, tidal power, and wave power). In total, our study covers 870 electric power plants worldwide, where not only the energy density but also the resulting land or sea area requirements to power the world are estimated. Based on the provided meta-analysis results, this paper challenges the common notion that solar power is the most energy-dense renewable fuel source by demonstrating that hydropower supersedes solar power in terms of land use in certain regions of the world, depending on the topography.
Conclusion:
This paper revealed that the land and sea requirements for future power generation facilities are currently projected to significantly change by 2050. The obtained annual energy densities for 870 real-world power sources were used to estimate the environmental footprint of the future energy mix. A sixfold increase in the spatial extent of the worldwide power generation resulted not only result from the fact that new renewable energies are more challenging to harvest than the existing mix of sources but also from the fact that global electrification will experience a threefold increase by 2050.
Our paper provided evidence that, in a worldwide sense, hydropower is the most energy-dense renewable source. However, this is not the case when one considers certain regions, e.g., where the topography does not favor hydropower generation or in areas where the performance of solar power is much higher than the global average.
It must also be emphasized that hydropower exhibited the highest standard deviation among the investigated sources. The standard deviation of the annual energy density ranged from 0 to 1.67 TWh/km2. The upper standard deviation of hydropower was very close to the lower standard deviation of nuclear power, at 1.88 TWh/km2, but far higher than that of the natural gas population.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, our work also demonstrated that nuclear power exhibits a higher annual generation density than that of natural gas power plants, considering the land occupation of pipelines and mining to feed gas-fired power plants. In this paper, the generation density of a nuclear power plant included the safety surface in addition to the nuclear power plant itself.
While biomass is by far the most dilute renewable energy source, this paper found through a population study of 148 specimens that onshore wind farms are the second most dilute source for power generation based on the assumptions of the spatial extent outlined in this paper. Even though our paper confirmed the order of magnitude in earlier studies, the limitations of the assumptions should be stated. Our calculations considered the total site area where wind farms are distributed. There occur empty areas between wind turbines that could be utilized for grazing, agriculture, and recreation. When the occupied area of wind power only considers tower footprints and access roads, the specific power could easily increase by at least an order of magnitude. However, this does not fully represent the high spacing between the distributed sources of a wind farm and the low scalability in space-limited regions. High land requirements also generate significant implications for the need for materials and infrastructure to collect energy from wind turbines. There exist potential indirect effects on wildlife and degradation of the quality of landscapes, and the visual footprint is significant throughout the entire area. The wind power performance could be enhanced in the future via technological improvements such as wake steering, which could be used to enhance the annual energy production of spaced turbines in wind farms.
Hey, these are just “suggestions.” Go ahead and spend twenty years and a few hundred billions of dollars trying to build it out. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t, try something else.
As stated in my previous post of April 19, two separate Reports addressing the question of New York’s net zero electricity future have recently been brought to my attention. These two Reports are distinct from the so-called Scoping Plan, issued by the state’s Climate Action Council. The Scoping Plan is supposed to be the official word on how we are to achieve “net zero” electricity by some time in the 2030s. Unfortunately, this Scoping Plan is not a feasibility study, or anything close to that, and despite enormous length — 700+ pages between text and appendices — really comes down to no more than a direction to the low status people to figure out how to achieve the decarbonization mandates set by their superiors.
And thus we find that well-informed New Yorkers (a small number at this point), upon recognizing and inquiring about the rank inadequacy of the Scoping Plan, are being directed by their politicians to these other two Reports as supposedly containing the answer to how this is going to be done. One of the Reports, issued by the electric utility Con Edison in late 2022, was discussed in my April 19 post.
My subject today will be the other Report, titled “Initial Report on the New York Power Grid Study.” It has an issue date of January 21, 2021. Who wrote it? Under a heading “Prepared By” on the cover page, we find credit first given to unnamed “staff” of the New York Department of Public Service and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority; but then there is a list of some seven named authors, all of whom come from two consulting companies, the Brattle Group and Pterra Consulting.
Reader Bill Ponton has sent along several comments on this Report, and I’m going to feature those.
If you were to start reading this Report, the first thing that will strike you is that the authors are at pains to let you know that they are making no commitments here as to anything important, like exactly how much new stuff needs to be built, how much it will cost, and whether it will work. Rather, they’re just tossing out some ideas on how to get started. A few excerpts from the Executive Summary:
Meeting these [Climate Act] milestones will require investment in renewable generation, as well as storage, energy efficiency measures, electrification of the transportation and heating sectors, and electric transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure. . . . To meet these directives, the PSC, through the Department of Public Service, initiated a set of system studies, collectively referred to as the Power Grid Study (PGS), which is the subject of this Initial Report. . . . The three PGS studies suggest the following potential distribution, local transmission, and bulk transmission needs. . . .
Hey, these are just “suggestions.” Go ahead and spend twenty years and a few hundred billions of dollars trying to build it out. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t, try something else.
Most of the Report addresses transmission issues. But the subject of how much wind, solar and storage capacity to build does finally turn up in Appendix E. At page E-3 we find this table of “initial scenario” installed renewable capacity (in MW):
Add up the solar and wind rows, and you get about 21 GW of renewable capacity by 2030, and 46 GW by 2040. They then assume that they will get some 58,155 GWh of useful generation from the 21 GW of renewable capacity in 2030. But Ponton — who has just completed a study of actual results from wind and solar generators in the UK in 2022 — thinks that they have way over-estimated how much usable generation they can get from this 21 GW of wind and solar capacity. He calculates that if New York’s 2030 results are approximately the same as those of the UK for 2022, the actual usable generation from the renewables will be more like 35,760 GWh. From an email from Ponton on April 18:
It is difficult to believe that NY State could have any different outcome in 2030 other than the UK results in 2022. . . . They will be sorely disappointed finding that they will only be able to generate about half the renewable energy that they anticipate in 2030 even if they meet their ambitious renewable capacity buildout plans.
But far more absurd is the provision in this Report for prospective energy storage. Note the numbers in the table above — 3 GW in 2030 and 15.5 GW in 2040. As usual they leave out the duration of the batteries. But Ponton wrote to the lead author of the Report from the Brattle Group, a guy named Hannes Pfeifenberger, to get the information. Result:
I asked one of the principal authors of the NY Power Grid study report, Hannes Pfeifenberger, how did he intend to balance fluctuations in wind power and he stated that the biggest factor was 17 GW of battery storage with a maximum duration of 6-hr, totaling 102 GWh. His response is surprising. I calculated that with wind power capacity of 84 GW, there was 59,851 GWH of wind energy curtailed and 48,071 GWH of gas turbine energy used. In theory, the curtailed wind energy could be stored and then subsequently discharged to substitute for the energy provided by the gas turbines, but would require energy storage of 12,000 GWH.
102 GWh versus 12,000 GWh. So, as usual with the studies we can find for places like New York and California, they’re off on the storage requirement by a factor of more than 100.
Is it possible that Ponton and I are missing something and these guys actually know what they are doing? I suppose. But then, why not build a demonstration project and prove us definitively wrong?
UPDATE, April 23: Below is a rendering from my energy storage report of a grid battery storage facility under construction in Queensland, Australia, by a firm called Vena Energy. Its stated capacity is 150 MWh.
150 MWh is 15% of one GWh. So it will take about 80,000 of these to provide New York with its 12,000 GWh of grid storage. At $250/KWh (highly optimistic) the cost will run around $3 trillion — well over double New York’s annual GDP.
Climate doomsayers and cancel culture work to justify counseling for bureaucrats’ climate grief
Paul Driessen
US Fish and Wildlife Service employees are struggling to cope with feelings of trauma and loss over the world’s changing climates and imperiled environments. Their work repeatedly confronts them with ecological changes, but even a sense of “anticipated loss” perhaps decades from now requires compassionate help. Or so the FWS and American Psychological Association tell us.
The FWS is thus offering paid leave to employees who attend “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief” training. When the House Natural Resources Committee called the sessions a colossal waste of money, the agency downplayed their cost and scope. But naturally the “woke” programs don’t end there.
FWS Director Martha Williams is also pushing diversity-equity-inclusion-LBGTQ programs as the agency’s “number one priority” (or perhaps number two, after climate change). Employees can take as much paid time off as needed for DEI and “gay pride” programs and eco-anguish counseling.
There’s no word about programs to help employees deal with widespread habitat and wildlife destruction that will result from millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, due to “net zero” policies implemented in the name of averting the “climate crisis.” Apparently no programs offer paid leave to participate in “conservative pride” campaigns or study Earth’s historic ice ages, warm periods, little ice ages and decades-long droughts.
That’s hardly surprising. The FWS and Interior Department were getting eco-centric and anti-fossil-fuel when I worked there 35 years ago. Like American and Western society in general, their culture has simply gotten more noticeably and intolerantly devoted to extreme environmentalist agendas since then.
Movies, television and news stories, constant instruction in what to think, rather than how to think, an absence of religion and ethics in many schools and homes, and incessant themes of inequality, victimhood and global doom foster widespread tension, anxiety and depression. They leave too many children, teens and adults unable to cope with life and setbacks, less respectful of authority and human life, inured to violence, and aggressively intolerant of opinions that differ from their own ideologies and agendas.
Even before they were forced to endure Covid-induced lockdowns, nearly 20% of Americans were taking antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, some linked to precipitating acts of violence; a third of high school students experienced prolonged anxiety, depression and hopelessness; and almost one in five teenagers had contemplated suicide.
Social isolation, minimal physical and outdoor activity, video games and reading self-selected online media have amplified depression and “chronic incapacitating mental illness” in America and many Western countries. Also hardly surprising, the problems are increasingly blamed on climate change.
“Climate grief is real,” self-proclaimed experts insist, and it’s spreading rapidly among young people. “The future is frightening,” 77% of 10,000 young people ages 16-25 from the USA and other countries told “climate anxiety” and “climate depression” investigators. Many children have climate nightmares.
“The climate mental health crisis” already affects people who have “lost everything in worsening climate infernos,” claims a NASA scientist and climate activist who’s certain we face “the end of life on Earth as we know it.” He’s not alone in being convinced that every extreme weather event and ecological calamity today is due to or made worse by fossil fuel and agricultural emissions.
“I don’t want to be alive anymore,” wailed a four-year-old who’s clearly been indoctrinated already. “The animals are all going to die, and I don’t want to be here when all the animals are dead.”
Parents fantasize about killing their children, over fears of a “climate-ravaged future.” Parents, teens and even children increasingly consider suicide.
At least one psychologist has based his entire practice on addressing climate psychoses. The Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of “climate-aware therapists,” and a “peer support network” offers grief therapy modeled on twelve-step drug addiction programs.
There’s only one real solution to this epidemic, other “experts” insist: Governments must “take action now” to “end the climate crisis,” to eliminate “the death knell of climate chaos” that threatens us. Otherwise the epidemic of anxiety, depression, pills, climate grief and suicide will steadily worsen.
This is nonsense, insanity. We don’t have a climate crisis.We have a climate fear-mongering crisis.
We don’t need to “fix” exaggerated and over-hyped climate problems. We need to end the junk science, the indoctrination dominating news stories and classroom discussions about energy and climate change, the censorship that prevents alternative, reality-based facts and voices from being heard, the massive government funding of one side of this crucial debate.
Claims of “unprecedented” temperatures and extreme weather, floods and droughts have no basis in real-world evidence. The “climate crisis” exists in greenhouse-gas-focused computer models, headlines and hype, not in reality. There is no unprecedented upward trend in the frequency of violent US tornados, or US landfalling hurricanes, for example – though the 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes hitting the United States between Wilma (October 2005) and Harvey (August 2017) is an all-time record.
Unfortunately, viewpoints, evidence and experts challenging climate crisis claims are too often banished from school curricula, news and social media, and government policy discussions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “summaries for policy makers” often misrepresent scientific findings and advance frightening but unsupported scenarios about Earth’s future climate. The IPCC also ignores studies that demonstrate how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide improves plant growth and wildlife habitats, how climate has changed repeatedly throughout Earth’s history, and that eliminating fossil fuels would result in extensive ecological damage from wind, solar, battery and transmission line mining and installations.
China, India and other countries are rapidly expanding their oil, gas and coal use, to improve their economies and lift billions out of poverty. China dominates raw material and “green tech” supply chains, making the West increasingly reliant on China for energy, economy and national defense needs – via Chinese mines, processing plants and factories that operate under minimal standards for pollution control, habitat destruction, and slave and child labor. As a result:
* Nothing the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia do will have any effect on global fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions.
* Western foreign and domestic policy options will be restricted by reliance on adversarial nations for pseudo-renewable energy materials and technologies.
* Prices for energy, goods and services will skyrocket, because every megawatt of wind and solar must be duplicated with backup batteries or generators.
* Politicians and bureaucrats – egged on by loud, often violent mobs – will increasingly dictate our energy consumption, living standards, home sizes, vacations, and what we can eat, drink, drive and buy.
These are the real existential threats to democracy, society, humanity and planet. Parents, voters, legislators and judges concerned about our future must take action now to stop this insanity.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.
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