Tag: Collateral Damage

Wind vs. Ecology in Australia (Nick Cater reports)

“There are signs that we may be reaching peak madness as opposition to cowboy renewable-energy development grows in regional and rural Australia…. Anger about the rampant spread of solar, wind and transmission development proposals has galvanized communities into action.”

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“There are signs that we may be reaching peak madness as opposition to cowboy renewable-energy development grows in regional and rural Australia…. Anger about the rampant spread of solar, wind and transmission development proposals has galvanized communities into action.”

“I’m dismayed by the indifference of Green activists to the fate of the Greater Glider and other native wildlife that is losing its natural habitat in the rush for renewables,” Nick Cater recently posted. He continued with the specifics:

The vast hectares of native forest being destroyed to install wind turbines along the Great Dividing range is well documented in environmental impact statements for projects like the Upper Burdekin (Gawara Baya) Wind Farm in Far North Queensland.

Here’s an extract from the approval for the project given by Tanya Plibersek in April:

“To avoid and mitigate harm to protected matters, the Approval Holder must not clear more than:
“a) 605.3 ha of Sharman’s Rock Wallaby Habitat,
“b) 581 ha of Greater Glider (northern) Habitat, including:
“i) no more than 331 ha of Greater Glider (northern) Denning Habitat, and
“ii) no more than 250 ha of Greater Glider (northern) Foraging Habitat,
“c) 581 ha of Masked Owl (northern) Habitat,
“d) 614 ha of Koala habitat,
“e) 616 ha of Red Goshawk Habitat, including:
“i) no more than 331 ha of Red Goshawk Breeding Habitat, and
“ii) no more than 285 ha of Red Goshawk Foraging Habitat,
“f) 614 ha of Grey-headed Flying-Fox Foraging Habitat,
“g) 614 ha of Spectacled Flying-Fox Foraging Habitat
“h) 546 ha of Greater Large-eared Horseshoe Bat Roosting Habitat,
“i) 545 ha of Bare-rumped Sheathtail Bat Habitat,
“j) 614 ha of White-throated Needletail Habitat,
“k) 614 ha of Fork-tailed Swift Habitat, and
“l) 0 ha of occupied Magnificent Brood Frog Habitat”

These are vulnerable and endangered native species. Should the developers be allowed to destroy a single hectare of their precious habitat?

Cater added in “Collateral Damage” at his Substack site, Reality Bites with the subtitle “Destroying Greater Glider habitat is ok if you’re trying to save the planet”

The greater glider is in pole position to win the Marsupial of the Year contest. Australia’s largest gliding possum has pushed the much-fancied koala into second place in the latest rankings. Fittingly, the winner of the battle between creatures struggling for survival will be announced next week on Channel Ten’s The Project, a show that has been hovering on the brink of extinction for some time.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has been drumming up support for the panda-eyed eucalypt munchers with their teddy bear ears. “If smooth gliding, extra fluffy fur and smelly conversations are your thing, vote for the Greater Glider!” It urges on its website. It claims the Greater Glider population has halved in the last 20 years because of bushfires and logging.

This makes it odd, to say the least, that ACF is not raising a stink about Lotus Creek, where 310 hectares of old-growth forest are about to be bulldozed to make room for wind turbines. 

The Lotus Creek Wind Farm is 100 per cent funded by the Queensland Government and is supported by the Commonwealth. The environmental cost of the project in the Connors Range adjacent to the Glencoe State Forest is well documented. Researchers counted 138 greater gliders during their environmental assessment. The old-growth trees provide hollow dens for the creatures to rest during the day. The area offers a rich habitat for Koalas and Squatter pigeons and is a refuge for the Powerful Owl and White-Throated Needletail, all classified as vulnerable.

The culpability is at the top of government.

An ecological assessment report listing five Matters of National Environmental Significance under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act was placed on Tanya Plibersek’s desk shortly after she became Environment Minister in 2022. It gave Plibersek strong grounds to block the project as her Coalition predecessor, Sussan Ley, had done. Yet Plibersek overturned Ley’s decision and sanctioned the destruction of remnant bushland on the Great Dividing Range that was virtually untouched by farming.

The ACF has not raised an eyebrow about the Lotus Creek atrocity. Neither has it lodged an objection to Twiggy Forrest’s Upper Burdekin (Gawara Baya ) wind turbine development that received Plibersek’s rubber stamp in June. Ditto the French giant Neoen’s plans for Mount Hopeful 65 km west of Gladstone, approved by Plibersek in April, and the Boulder Creek Wind Farm she approved in June 2022, in which the Queensland State Government has a 50 per cent stake.

Cater continues:

Wind turbine developments also threaten to destroy greater glider and koala habitat at Mount Fox north of Ingham, Moah Creek and Boulder Creek to the west of Rockhampton. The Queensland government has approved all three, and Plibersek’s signature is regarded as little more than a formality.

The gulf between Plibersek’s actions and words is wide enough to be viewed from outer space. On Friday, Plibersek announced the Government would co-host the Global Nature Positive Summit next month in Gadigal Country, or Sydney as it was once known. “Australia can be a global leader in protecting and restoring nature and stopping biodiversity loss,” she said.

The “environmentalist” movement is at fault.

Yet our nature-positive Environment Minster has sanctioned the destruction of at least 1260 hectares of Greater Glider habit in old-growth forests in Queensland while supine environmental bodies like the ACF, Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society urge the Government to roll out renewables faster.

The three activist organisations, with a combined income of more than $58 million at their disposal last year, are staunch advocates of renewable energy and are strongly opposed to nuclear. None has been prepared to question the cumulative environmental damage of land-hungry wind, solar and pumped hydro schemes. They have shown little compassion for scores of rural communities with uglification forced upon them by pious city-based bureaucrats drawing lines on maps.

Continuing,

A decree by the European Union to ban imports of beef contaminated by de-forestation has gifted the laptop activists another chance to beat up on regional Australia.

 The ACF is running a slippery campaign of moral equivalence to portray tightly regulated rotational clearance of woody growth on well-managed Australian farms with illegal tree-felling by cattle ranchers in the Amazon Basin.

The activists want to change the definition of “old-growth” to anything older than 15 years. If beef farmers become collateral damage in the EU’s virtue-signalling campaign, so be it. To them, anything that hastens the glorious vegan revolution must be good.

The Save Our Big Backyard campaign raises the green left to new level of unsteady, bare-faced hypocrisy. There is ample evidence to show that the biggest threat to the sanctity of our native vegetation and wildlife comes from wind and solar farmers, not the cattle industry. Vast hectares of land that have survived more than 200 years of settlement farming are being sacrificed for the sake of the planet.

Cater asks, what will Australia’s future citizens and government officials think about the anti-CO2 crusade in light of its collateral damage?

Future generations will look back at these people with disdain. They will gaze at scarred hillsides where dynamite was used to build access roads and clear the ground for vast concrete pads as big as a football field to erect giant wind turbines which will have long-since been removed. They will wonder how on earth an affluent, sophisticated and environmentally conscious nation could sanction such things.

Future anthropologists will write textbooks about the religious fervour that led early-21st-century humans to believe they could harvest energy directly from the wind and the sun. They will be puzzled as to why they didn’t adopt nuclear technology, just as cultural historians of Mesoamerica are curious why the Aztecs never discovered the wheel.

There are signs that we may be reaching peak madness as opposition to cowboy renewable energy developers grows in regional and rural Australia, and people in the city begin to latch on. The backlash is particularly noticeable in Queensland, where the Labor government appears to have given up hope of retaining any seat north of Sandgate. Anger about the rampant spread of solar, wind and transmission development proposals has galvanised communities into action. Anti-renewable billboards funded by small donations have begun to appear along the Bruce Highway south of Gympie….

Final Comment

Nick Cater speaks truth to wind power on ecological grounds. His persistence documents the “it’s hard being green” quandary of the modern environmental movement, which has made a pact with the devil in its one-dimensional crusade. Will real environmentalists please stand up?

The Net Zero Cure is Far Worse Than the Disease

We hear a lot about how we are supposedly in a climate crisis and how The Science™ tells us we are about to succumb to global boiling. Most climate activists claim that we must cut emissions by spending more money on windmills and solar panels or we will all burn to a crisp.

I would describe myself as a lukewarmer, by which I mean that I acknowledge the earth is warming and that human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming. However, it is also true that the climate has changed dramatically without human intervention; clearly, there are other causes of climate change too.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY DAVID TURVER

We hear a lot about how we are supposedly in a climate crisis and how The Science™ tells us we are about to succumb to global boiling. Most climate activists claim that we must cut emissions by spending more money on windmills and solar panels or we will all burn to a crisp.

I would describe myself as a lukewarmer, by which I mean that I acknowledge the earth is warming and that human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming. However, it is also true that the climate has changed dramatically without human intervention; clearly, there are other causes of climate change too.

The strategy of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to Net Zero is classified as a “mitigation strategy” in the parlance of the IPCC. The alternative strategy is adaptation which means taking measures to adjust to climate change such as building flood defences, irrigation systems or developing new strains of crops to cope better with changing weather patterns. Most spending effort in the West is geared towards mitigation. But, what if the Net Zero cure is worse than the disease? What if mitigation is less effective than adaptation?

Mitigation Drawbacks

The mitigation strategy has significant drawbacks. First, mitigation only works if CO2 is the main climate control knob. But we know this cannot be the case because we can clearly see that temperatures have changed significantly over past millennia, as illustrated in Figure 1 below sourced from Figure 7.1 of the IPCC’s First Assessment report. These changes cannot have been caused by humans or our CO2 emissions.

Figure 1 – Global Temperature Change from IPCC First Assessment Report

Second, mitigation can only work if everyone else slashes emissions too and we can see from Figure 2 (from Our World in Data) that this is not happening.

Figure 2 – Global CO2 Emissions from 1900 to 2022 (Source – Our World in Data)

Moreover, there are plenty of potential climatic events that could occur that we ought to be prepared for, and which will require energy and ingenuity to deal with. For example, we could see another Mount Tambora-like eruption which ejected about 40km2 of material into the atmosphere and caused a reduction in global temperatures. This led to 1816 being termed the Year Without a Summer, where European summer temperatures were the lowest on record and led to an agricultural disaster with widespread food shortages and famine.

Adaptation Success

Adaptation has been a remarkable success. The rate of people dying from natural disasters has plummeted by a factor of more than 50 in the past century as shown in Figure 3 below, sourced from Our World in Data.

Figure 3 – Decadal Average Death Rates from Natural Disasters (Source: Our World in Data)

This improvement has come despite (more likely because of) the near 20-fold increase in CO2 emissions that we saw in Figure 2.

Cheap energy has led to big improvements in crop yields through mechanisation, irrigation and availability of fertiliser. Cheap energy has enabled flood defences to be built and homes to be more resilient to extreme weather.

Adaptation measures have many benefits. They require no international treaty and they can be applied locally where they produce results quickly. They also work to protect against changes in the climate that are not driven by CO2. Adaptation measures might also have additional benefits such as more efficient water use or more robust crop varieties. There is no reason why we cannot continue to adapt.

Risks of Net Zero

By contrast, the risks of Net Zero mitigation policies are manifest. First and most obvious, they cannot work against climatic changes that are driven by forces other than CO2. Second is the outright cost. In 2020, the National Grid ESO estimated the cost of the energy transition to be around £3 trillion. This is probably an underestimate because the cost of renewables has gone up since then (see AR6) as interest rates have gone up from almost zero to over 5%. To put this in context, U.K. GDP was £2.3 trillion in 2023, so the cost will be at least 1.3 times GDP. For further context, the budget for NHS England was £155bn in 2022-23, so the cost of Net Zero will be around 19 times the NHS budget.

The increased penetration of renewables has led to a massive increase in our electricity bills. This increase comes from renewables subsidies as well as grid balancing costs and the massive costs of expanding the grid out to remote offshore wind farms.

Expensive energy has led to creeping deindustrialisation as we have seen with the closure of Port Talbot and our last fertiliser plant. With geo-political tensions rising the closure of domestic steel, fertiliser and chemical industries means we are less able to defend ourselves and feed the nation in the event of a crisis.

Expensive energy also means we run the risk of missing out on the industries of the future such as AI. For instance, Amazon has recently bought a 960MW datacentre campus that is adjacent to and powered by a nuclear power station. Mark Zuckerberg has said the next generation of datacentres will be 1GW or above and Microsoft is considering building a $100bn datacentre campus that could consume 5GW for OpenAI by 2030. Clearly, AI is very energy hungry and suitable datacentres cannot be run on zephyrs and sunbeams, nor with expensive energy.

Our grid planning authority is planning to reduce total end user demand by about half to 600-800TWh per year by 2050, with just over 300TWh for industrial and commercial use, with the rest being used for heating homes and road and rail transport. However, just 10 of those 1GW datacentres would consume 87.6TWh in a year or about a quarter of the energy budget for the whole of industry and commerce. We are clearly heading towards a world of energy scarcity where we can no longer make the basic building blocks of a modern society, nor will we be able to compete in modern technologies. As Figure 4 below, again from Our World in Data, reminds us, there are no rich countries with low energy consumption.

Figure 4 – Energy Use per Person-vs-GDP per Capita (Source: Our World in Data)

Impact of Net Zero Policies

Net Zero is driving us to penury. Significant damage has already been done with productive industries shrinking compared to the whole economy since 1997. The trouble is, these industries are far more productive in terms of Gross Value Added (GVA) per hour worked than most service industries, and they consume more energy. This is why Sir Jim Ratcliffe has warned that the “chemicals industry in the U.K. is finished” and the main reason is that energy costs are five times those of the U.S. and there are carbon taxes levied on such products. This explains why we have lost six times as many jobs in energy intensive industries than have been gained in our green energy sector (see Figure 5).

Figure 5 – Hours Worked in Energy Intensive Industries vs Electricity Supply (1997-2021)

The job losses have not finished either, with Stellantis (owner of Vauxhall) warning that Labour’s plan to ban new petrol cars by 2030 will lead to plant closures.

Of course, Net Zero policies have also pushed up our electricity bills with the myriad of subsidy schemes costing about £11bn each year, with extra grid balancing and extension costs on top. Plus all of the climate doom-mongering is taking a toll on the mental health of children.

Even though this economic destruction is being carried out in the name of the environment, it is far from clear that wind and solar power are environmentally friendly. I showed in this article, using data mostly from the UNECE, that renewables rank poorly overall on a range of sustainability measures including land use and mineral intensity, see Figure 6.

Figure 6 – Wind and Solar Score Badly on a Range of Sustainability measures

Other studies using US DOE data into the material intensity of wind and solar power have shown a similar result, see Figure 7.

Figure 7 – Material Requirements by Energy Source

All we get in return for all this effort is expensive, intermittent energy that needs even more minerals to be mined to make the storage required.

Conclusions

It is my belief that the economic, social and national security risks of Net Zero policies are far greater than those posed by climate change.

The risks of climate change can be averted by continuing to adapt, just as we have for millennia. It is certain that unilateral action by the U.K., or indeed multilateral action by much of the West, will do nothing to change the weather while the countries of the developing world continue to increase their consumption of hydrocarbons to make themselves richer. Indeed, even if mitigation measures were adopted globally, it is naïve to believe that bad weather will cease and we will suddenly get the “stable climate” demanded by more than 170 lawyers.

Yet we continue down the path of Net Zero, wreaking havoc on industry, jobs and the environment, pushing up energy bills and damaging the mental health of our children. The Net Zero ‘cure’ is worse than the supposed climate change disease.

David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack page, where this article first appeared.

The “Insane” Plan to Save the Arctic’s Sea Ice

Anyone who watched the movie Snowpiercer, set in 2031, or the follow-up TV series will recall its premise: an experiment to arrest climate change with a stratospheric aerosol injection goes hopelessly wrong and ends up with the world condemned to a new ice age.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY SALLUST

Anyone who watched the movie Snowpiercer, set in 2031, or the follow-up TV series will recall its premise: an experiment to arrest climate change with a stratospheric aerosol injection goes hopelessly wrong and ends up with the world condemned to a new ice age.

Perhaps that’s what’s inspired Cambridge University’s Centre for Climate Repair. It has a team in the high Arctic busily experimenting with spraying seawater over a hole they’ve cut in the ice. The BBC’s Mark Poynting has the story:

The ultimate goal of the Arctic experiment is to thicken enough sea ice to slow or even reverse the melting already seen, says Dr Shaun Fitzgerald, whose team at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Climate Repair is behind the project.

Will it work or is it, as one scientist put it, “quite insane”?

“We don’t actually know enough to determine whether this is a good idea or bad idea,” admits Dr. Fitzgerald. They are drilling a hole in the sea ice that naturally forms in winter and pumping around 1,000 litres of seawater per minute across the surface.

Exposed to the cold winter air, this seawater quickly freezes, helping to thicken the ice on top. The water also compacts the snow. As fresh snow acts as a good insulating layer, now ice can also form more easily on the underside in contact with the ocean.

Like most self-respecting climate change panic projects, cranking this up to scale will have vast energy needs, to say nothing of manufacturing the pumps, quite apart from the possibility that the whole scheme might be insane:

“The vast majority of polar scientists think this is never going to work out,” cautions Martin Siegert, an experienced glaciologist at the University of Exeter, who is not involved in the project.

One issue is that the saltier ice may melt more quickly in the summer.

And then there’s the huge logistical challenge of scaling the project up to a meaningful level – one estimate suggests that you could need about 10 million wind-powered pumps to thicken sea-ice across just a tenth of the Arctic. 

A number of scientists – including the UN’s climate and weather bodies – have warned that these approaches could pose grave risks, including disrupting global weather patterns. Many researchers want to see them banned altogether.

“Geoengineering technologies come with enormous uncertainties and create novel risks for ecosystems and people,” explains Lili Fuhr, director of the Fossil Economy Programme at the Centre for International Environmental Law.

But if that scepticism sounds reassuring, don’t be fooled. Some of the critics remain dedicated to total decarbonisation. However, perhaps what we’re seeing here is the climate change industry beginning to fragment into feuding factions?

Still, surely all we need to do is ‘follow the science’. What could possibly go wrong?

The Arctic researchers are acutely aware of these concerns. They stress that they are simply testing the technology, and wouldn’t unleash it more widely until the risks are better known.

Where have we heard that before?

Worth reading in full.

Lancet Report Reveals Devastating Impact of Climate Policies on Public Health in Developing Countries

The Lancet Countdown 2022 Climate Change and Health Report (LCCCHR) and the IPCC Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report are scientifically unsound and utterly political. They feed into the framework of the UN Paris Climate Deal Negotiations’ alarmistic, hyperbolic, misleading and even deceitful information about climate change and health.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY MIKKO PAUNIO

The Lancet Countdown 2022 Climate Change and Health Report (LCCCHR) and the IPCC Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report are scientifically unsound and utterly political. They feed into the framework of the UN Paris Climate Deal Negotiations’ alarmistic, hyperbolic, misleading and even deceitful information about climate change and health.

The LCCCHR unwittingly exposes the devastating public health effects of the UN’s current Sustainable Development Goals (SDG6), which crucially omit hygiene as a basic aim. Conservation ideals written out in the UN sustainable development classic ‘Our Common Future’ in 1987 started the process which derailed hygienic principles and environmental health policies from the centre of the development agenda, even though they had produced a public health miracle in today’s affluent countries.

Affluent countries still benefit from the fruits of this agenda, which started in the 19th century. Western elites now deny the Global South the benefits of hygienic principles and good environmental health due to misguided green ideological beliefs – a cruel form of eco-imperialism. The deceitful, hyperbolically alarmistic and misleading LCCCHR was pivotal in promoting an alarmistic declaration on climate change and health adopted by over 120 countries at COP28 in Dubai.

The 2022 Lancet Countdown Climate Change and Health Report (LCCCHR) states that in the area of “climate change and food insecurity”, “diarrhoeal diseases are the leading cause of malnutrition in children younger than five years, while other infections can severely affect nutrient absorption and utilisation” – a statement that the World Health Organisation endorses. The origins of this idea came from the famous 1968 WHO monograph written by Harvard nutritionists.

LCCCHR fails to mention that this form of malnutrition is called stunting, which is a permanent condition. It develops if child has experienced sufficient number of diarrhoeal and other infectious disease episodes before his or her first birthday. Stunting is also intergenerational in nature. Accordingly, the LCCCHR authors confuse hunger and undernutrition and falsely claim that “food insecurity is increasing globally, with 720-811 million people hungry in 2020”.

The FAO report LCCCHR is referring to defines “hunger in the world as, as measured using the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU)”. Thus, as stunting is a permanent condition and intergenerational in nature, the most important determinant of “hunger” in the Global South is lack of hygiene conditions according to WHO, not lack of food.

In the World Bank we came to the same conclusion in our peer-reviewed report published in 2008, based on an extensive review of cohort studies that showed that infections play a critical role in the development of stunting. We tried with this report to revitalise hygienic principles to the centre of the global development agenda, because environmental health policies and legislation administered across multiple sectors – with hygienic principles and infection control in its core – helped to eradicate undernutrition from the OECD countries over the period starting from 1860s to around the 1960s. Thanks to these policies we became one head taller and smarter in the developed world. OECD countries are still enjoying the full benefits of these policies, because it is unthinkable to abolish legislation and institutions which guarantee hygienic conditions and high environmental health standards in rich countries.

Towards the end of the 19th century two sanitary officials, one in Massachussetts State Board (H.F. Mills) and the other in Hamburg (J.J. Reincke), scrutinised death rates in their respective areas. They both independently of each other discovered that clean water supplies and effective sewerage systems in urban areas brought down child deaths more than expected. For every prevented diarrhoeal death there were two to four additional prevented deaths from inter alia respiratory infections. The Mills-Reincke phenomenon was widely discussed in the 1920s and 1930s among public health professionals but was afterwards forgotten. Yet we were correct in our World Bank report to propose that this enigmatic phenomenon can be explained with improvements in hygienic conditions, as the WHO has also implied. As undernutrition is an acquired immunodeficiency caused by infections, this leads to increased mortality from, for example, measles. This explains, for instance, why measles mortality came significantly down in affluent countries well before mass vaccinations began.

The classic sustainable development report ‘Our Common Future‘ from 1987 developed by the World Commission on Environment and Development set out the future sustainable development goals of the United Nations in embryonic form. The Chairman of the World Commission was Norway’s Prime Minister (Labour Party) Gro Harlem Brundtland (MD, MPH). In addition to being a physician trained in Norway, she also holds a Masters degree in public health from Harvard University. Brundtland later became the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), with unfortunate consequences due to her conservationist ideals.

According to renowned urban development researcher David Satterthwaite, Brundtland made an unfortunate decision to omit the ‘Brown Agenda’ from ‘Our Common Future’. Brown Agenda promotes crucial infrastructural urban development such as the provision of fresh water supplies and the installation of sewerage systems i.e., the build-up of infrastructure that protects health. ‘Our Common Future’, with its core demand that world must reduce energy consumption by 50%, helped to mainstream global environmental conservation policies and steer the global development agenda, with adverse effects on investment choices. African countries would need investments in coal fired power plants, which are needed to support municipal water supply and sewerage systems and to diminish now rapid deforestation. Poor countries are often unable to raise capital due to lack of credit history on their own and need bi- and multilateral assistance from rich countries.

Thus, it is not a coincidence that LCCCHR does not mention hygienic principles and the need to revitalise environmental health practices in the development agenda. Letter H was dropped from the formerly holy trinity of water, sanitation and hygiene (WSH), which historically has its roots in godliness. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6) mentions only water and sanitation, because H needs water in quantity (around 200-250 litres per day per person) and electricity provisions to communities to pump clean water in and wastewater out from households. Conservationists intentionally do not allow poor people in the Global South to be blessed with the holy WSH trinity, but are unable – even if they very much wish – to take away WSH trinity from us ordinary people in rich countries. The holy WSH trinity was in the centre of the development agenda of the United Nations until the early 1990s.

I have previously described in detail the bitter scientific battle around the origins of childhood nutrition between ‘infectionists’ and neo-Malthusian ‘food securityists’ and how ineffective nutritional interventions and programmes finally replaced environmental health activities in the UN institutions starting from the early 1990s. This was based on just one small observational study from Bangladesh. Ultimately, the decision to remove environmental health and hygienic principles from the development agenda was simply an ideological choice promoted by conservationists and their mighty neo-Malthusian allies.

LCCCHR does not mention the Bradley classification of water-related diseases, of which water-washable diarrhoeal diseases are dominant (around 75-80 %) in unhygienic conditions and LCCCHR only mentions one category of water-related diseases i.e., waterborne diseases. According to the authors’ view, transmission of waterborne diseases is increasing due to climate change. This tells us vividly that the authors are unaware of the significance of hygienic principles. However, they are not the only ones, as even among health professionals in the developed world there is a widely held view that drinking water is the sole vehicle transmitting diarrhoeal diseases in developing countries. This bias allows Western do-gooders to provide the poor child with various development projects to supply a glass of clean drinking water and perhaps opportunities to wash his or her hands but nothing more. I call this belief a clean drinking water bias. I speculate that this bias owes to the fact that most large diarrhoeal outbreaks in highly developed countries with high hygienic standards tend to be waterborne. In unhygienic conditions, however, 24/7 hyper-endemic transmission of diarrhoeal diseases dominates and result from the inability to prevent infections including diarrhoeal infections by washing in a myriad different ways, which I have discussed extensively.

Deceptive LCCCHR

The current ‘scientific consensus’ of the health effects of climate change is buried on page 1,046 of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6):

An excess of 250,000 deaths per year by 2050 attributable to climate change is projected due to heat, undernutrition, malaria and diarrhoeal disease, with more than half of this excess mortality projected for Africa (compared to a 1961-1991 baseline period for a mid-range emissions scenario) (high confidence).

Every year there are over 50 million deaths around the world. LCCCHR does not mention this figure.

The current hype of the devastating health effects of climate change is based on the LCCCHR and the Synthesis Report of the IPCC AR6. To give further credibility to these ‘scientific’ reports, mainstream media reported last summer on issues like the ‘scorched earth’ and shocking public health effects of heat waves. Both LCCCHR and the Synthesis Report of the IPCC AR6 do not provide any new numerical estimates of the health effects of climate change but instead use colorful language to predict doom and gloom if Net Zero policies are not taken seriously. The lead authors of the LCCCHR in their latest commentary even use extreme language like this:

The threat is now to our very survival and to that of the ecosystem upon which we depend. Grave impacts of climate change are already with us and could worsen catastrophically within decades.

Between 1955 and the end of 2021, greenhouse gases (GHG) have trapped the energy equivalent of 374 zettajoules of heat in our oceans and atmosphere, the energy equivalent of 6.23 billion Hiroshima bombs.

LCCCHR gives the impression (in its figure four) that malaria is a growing problem due to climate change, especially in the Global South, by showing that since 1950 especially the “average number of months suitable for malaria transmission” has increased by 30%. However, the authors did not inform their readers that malaria mortality has dropped globally since 1950 by 75-88%.

For instance, these misleading statements are found in the LCCCHR:

Access to clean energy and technologies improves health, especially for women and children; low-carbon electrification, walking, cycling and public transport enhance air quality, improve health, employment opportunities and deliver equity. …

Accelerated decarbonisation would not only prevent the most catastrophic health impacts of accelerated heating, but, if designed to maximise health benefits, could also save millions of lives with healthier diets, more active lifestyles and improved air quality. …

Phasing out coal is particularly urgent because of its high greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution intensity.

In real life there are no practical clean energy solutions proposed by the ideologues to prevent the horrendous indoor air problem in many poor households of the Global South. Instead, as I have reported, the only way to climb the energy ladder in order to achieve clean indoor air is to rely on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). This feasible technology is rapidly spreading to South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The energy ladder concept was abolished in order to strategically steer discussions on energy policies in the development agenda similar to the effect of abolishing H from the WSH holy trinity for political reasons.

LCCCHR does not mention that it is not the industry, power production and traffic in megacities of the Global South that are polluting ambient air, but rather residential heating and cooking is the root cause of high levels of particulate matter in households and in ambient air in these cities. Thus, the implication that coal is to blame is misleading, since electricity and heat are produced in power stations with effective scrubbers. In Helsinki we had two extremely efficient coal plants, which were producing simultaneously electricity and heat, until green ideologues managed to close them (one is still running until 2025). Helsinki has among the cleanest ambient air quality of any metropolitan area in the globe. These efficient coal plants were granted a United Nations environment award for their cleanliness in 1991 among many other environmental awards. The closure of the first of these plants might jeopardise heat security of the population in Helsinki this winter if cold spells hit Helsinki in January and February.

One should also note that London got rid of the deadly smog of the 1950s primarily via the Clean Air Act of 1956, which banned use of the most polluting household fuels (e.g. the dirtiest coal) and permitted only smokeless fuel in cities. It also led to increasing the height of some industrial chimneys and built new power stations away from cities, so that the pollution was dispersed more widely.

One core policy statement or recommendation of the LCCCHR is that by discontinuing eating red meat and drinking milk, public health would miraculously improve across the globe. Alternative forms of proteins promoted by these ideologues include lab-grown hamburgers, fermented fungi patties and insect-based protein shakes. I do not want to eat these foods.

Health and adaptation issues are now high on the global agenda thanks to the Lancet Countdown 2022 Climate Change and Health Report and the Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate. During the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai in November 2023, a political declaration was adopted by more than 120 Governments to increase efforts to find solutions to better adapt to a changing climate and to accelerate mitigation efforts based on “health co-benefits” mitigation. As IPCC assessments reports continuously stress, the best way to improve climate resilience is to bring back the Brown Agenda in the centre of the development agenda. The main reason why developed countries have better ‘climate resilience’ compared to the developing nations is their health protection infrastructure. The green do-gooders do not want the Global South to be blessed with this vital infrastructure, which resulted in a public health miracle in the now affluent countries.

Mikko Paunio is an Adjunct Professor in Epidemiology at the University of Helsinki, Department of Public Health. 

Giberson on Negative Wind Pricing (2008)

The subsidy for renewable power is ending in blackouts and blackouts.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“This seems a little crazy. During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying ERCOT to take their power…. You could … build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.”

Some 15 years ago, Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem commented on a strange phenomenon–negative pricing by wind power, where operators with very low marginal costs (the wind is free) were paying takers per KWh to gain big tax credits, mostly federal.

Giberson’s analysis (reposted below) identified the malinvestment and ‘big anti-conservation incentive’. But he did not focus on what cumulatively would result from this distortion: a wounded Texas grid from chronic low prices/margins knocking out thermal generation. The unreliables–via government privilege– knocking out the reliables (what Bill Peacock would call predatory pricing).

More than a decade of artificially low pricing (negative and positive) resulted in premature retirements of gas-fired and coal-fired power plants and a lack of new (gas-plant) capacity additions. Combined with other government distortions, the stage was set for the debacle of debacles, Storm Uri in Texas in February 2021. [2]

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Also note the exchange (below) on this 2008 post between Lynne Kiesling and Giberson. Kiesling is slow to condemn wind and suggests more government involvement to address the problem. Her recipe? Build (uneconomic) transmission for wind. Add batteries (cost?). Regulate demand in the home via “smart meters” (Big Brother in the home?).

Back then, as today, she ignores a free market in electricity. [3] And she buys into climate alarmism and forced energy transformation, refusing to be politically incorrect for her rewards in a Statist environment (academic positions, etc.).

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Giberson’s Frequent Negative Power Prices in the West Region of ERCOT Result from Wasteful Renewable Power Subsidies follows:

What is with all of the negative power prices in the West region of ERCOT?

In the first half of 2008, prices were below zero nearly 20 percent of the time. During March, when negative prices were most frequent, prices were below zero about 33 percent of the time. After mostly taking the summer off, negative power prices were back to near 10 percent in October.

This seems a little crazy. During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying ERCOT to take their power. Consumers (at least at the wholesale level) are getting paid for using power, and the more power consumers use the more they get paid. These prices are a big anti-conservation incentive. You could, as a correspondent put it to me, build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.

In fact most of the regional power markets that are integrated into systems operations (so-called RTOs and ISOs in the U.S.) will produce a negative power price now and then. On the margin, a power supplier should offer power into the market at approximately the net marginal cost of supply, at least in a competitive market. These offers are typically at positive prices and the market will produce a positive price.

Infrequently, a power plant might choose to bid below the short term marginal price in order to stay in the market and avoid shutting down. It can be economically rational for operators of less responsive generation units to offer negative prices in order for it to avoid the costs of shutting down for just a few hours and then start up again when load increases – think coal-fueled or natural gas steam turbine. When energy load is very low, near zero or negative prices can result.

This isn’t the case in West Texas. Instead, the negative prices appear to be the result of the large installed capacity of wind generation. Wind generators face very small costs of shutting down and starting back up, but they do face another cost when shutting down: loss of the Production Tax Credit and state Renewable Energy Credit revenue which depend upon generator output. It is economically rational for wind power producers to operate as long as the subsidy exceeds their operating costs plus the negative price they have to pay the market. Even if the market value of the power is zero or negative, the subsidies encourage wind power producers to keep churning the megawatts out.

Evidence from market data suggests that wind power producers will accept prices down to about negative $35 MWh before they shut down, since marginal operating costs are very low for wind power we can conclude that the subsidies are worth about $35 – $40 for each MWh of wind output. [UPDATE: Chart now includes data through December 2008.]

Subsidies do this sort of thing – distort the market and lead to waste – and of course to some degree distorting the market is just what is intended when policymakers offer a subsidy. Only usually it isn’t so easy to see the evidence of the waste created by the subsidies. Wind turbines that operate more hours require more maintenance, so these hours spent producing negative-value electric power do consume real resources. At the same time, the conventionally-fueled generation that is forced offline temporarily will also face additional “wear-and-tear” and require additional maintenance because of the effects of shutting down and then restarting the machines. This extra wear-and-tear and extra maintenance also represents wasteful use of resources due to PTC- and REC-subsidized power production.

The subsidy for renewable power may be defended as compensation for avoiding the environmental costs associated with power produced by conventional means, but in this case the link between the payments and the possible reduced emissions effect is tenuous. In Texas the PTC is probably offsetting natural gas generation most of the time, perhaps a relatively efficient combined-cycle gas unit, but maybe an inefficient old steam generator. Sometimes the PTC will displace coal-fired generation. The environmental benefits will vary dramatically depending upon just which kind of unit is displaced by the subsidy, but the cost of the policy is the same. Surely there are more targeted and effective ways of achieving environmental goals.

A second possible defense for the renewable power PTC is that it will spur enough growth in the industry to allow progress in research and development and economies of scale to reduce costs in the future. I think these learning and economies of scale arguments are much abused in renewable policy discussions – treated as if they are somehow automatic if we only spend enough resources now. If learning by doing and economies of scale were automatic, the U.S. auto industry would now be a paragon of efficiency. (A paper on “Learning Curves For Energy Technology and Policy Analysis“, by Tooraj Jamasb and Jonathan Khler is on my “to read” list, but I haven’t read it yet.) In the wind energy case, the industry is led by huge international corporations like General Electric, Siemens, and Gamesa. These companies and many others have been in the business for years, and in some cases decades. This is hardly a case of an “infant industry” that needs a handout to grow to maturity.

Maybe there is a public good argument buried in this line of thinking, but like the externality argument my sense here is that some alternative approach would more effectively achieve the desired public policy goals.

I don’t see any easy approaches for Texas. The federal PTC is the main subsidy, and localized evidence of waste due to the PTC in part of Texas is unlikely to derail U.S. Congressional support. Even if more detailed examples of widespread waste could be produced, I’m not sure it would overcome the coming Congress’s warm fuzzy feelings for renewable power. Possibly Texas could take-away the Renewable Energy Credit for wind power generated at negative prices, and that would slightly reduce the waste. But the boom in wind power construction in Texas has already greatly reduced the value associated with a REC in Texas, so taking it away altogether wouldn’t do much. And really, the negative prices in ERCOT’s energy markets are only an especially visible indicator of the waste created by PTC-based distortions, any excessive investment in renewable power or production from existing wind power units at below-cost prices is wasteful.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that wind power or other renewable power projects are inherently wasteful. The policy design is at fault, not the technology. It is the policy that needs repair. Also, I don’t have an estimate of how significant this problem is. Maybe the waste is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but could be higher or lower. There may be more significant problems to work on. But the PTC is a key element of renewable power policy, and it is troubling that it causes waste.

Economics provides some guides for fixing the policy: if an externality is the problem, then tax the externality and compensate the harmed parties; if the goal is additional learning, don’t tie the payment to per unit output, tie the payment to progress toward the learning goal.

Renewable power industries are pushing for further expansion of the PTC. Before Congress agrees, it ought to try to find less wasteful ways to achieve intended public policy goals.

Kiesling (11-24-2008) There are two other factors that matter in this story:

1. Time required to build transmission
2. ERCOT’s transition from zonal to nodal wholesale market design

As these two factors take effect, those negative prices will change/diminish.

Is this really such a wasteful way to induce more investment in wind generation capacity? Yes, as we have more smart grid capabilities, and hopefully as storage evolves, these negative prices will change.

Giberson: Lynne, you are right that building transmission and improving congestion management (which comes as part of the value of moving from zonal to nodal pricing in ERCOT, sometime next year) will both reduce the frequency of negative prices.

In fact, ERCOT’s change in congestion management policy adopted approximately June 9 was associated with a fairly dramatic decrease in the frequency of negative prices. It would take a little more data than I have available at present on wind power output to sort out the value of the congestion management change vs. the usual tendency of wind power output to fall during the summer (and other seasonal factors) to sort out the relative impact of the congestion management change. The move to nodal should further improve congestion management and reduce the amount of time excess wind power is, in effect, shut-in in the west region.

But perhaps related is the fact that in September and October negative prices reached as far as the Houston zone in eighty-five 15 minute pricing intervals, whereas in the Spring there were only two 15 minute intervals of negative prices.

At least the subsidy is being passed along to more Texas consumers with better congestion management.

Smart grid & storage can both help overcome related problems. I’m not sure that these negative prices directly provide an incentive for storage, because I don’t anticipate that they will last beyond that transmission build-out and change to nodal congestion management. But even if the negative prices don’t persist, to some extent wind power in West Texas will remain out-of-sync with summer power demands and so smart grids, real time pricing, and storage can provide complementary value (at least given the wind patterns in West Texas, off shore winds tend to have different diurnal patterns).

While none of this – transmission, congestion management, smart grid, or storage – erases the allocative inefficiency due to the subsidy, they can all diminish the ‘collateral damage’ and thereby reduce the costs of the policy while maintaining the expected benefits.

And, like I say, I don’t estimate the amount of waste, so don’t claim this is the biggest problem. Maybe this is the best “second best” policy available, but I want to raise a point of information suggesting improvements are possible.

Comment: Giberson goes soft, very soft, on a major distortion that would lead Texas into “planned chaos,” to use a term of Ludwig von Mises. Instead, he reported on “collateral damage” of the day. To use a phrase of Milton Friedman, such is the tyranny of the status quo.

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[1] Also see Giberson, “More on Wind Power, Negative Prices, Transmission, and the Production Tax Credit (Dec 16, 2008).

[2] Record cold temperatures disabling natural gas infrastructure was the official narrative of the debacle. But wind and solar predictably fell off, representing tens of billions of dollars of immobilized investment when needed most. Regarding natural gas, off-the-shelf technology existed for weatherization, and a dress rehearsal occurred a decade before with wellhead freeze-offs. The unprecedented supply-side failure also reflected central planning errors by (PUCT/ERCOT) and demoted utility responsibility for the “obligation to serve.” EPA regulation of gas compressor stations and the “warmer winter” narrative from NOAA/climate models also played a role in the Texas debacle. For more analysis from a classical liberal perspective, see here and here.

[3] Free-market electricity policy would 1) abolish state and federal tax preferences and preferential take provisions for wind, solar, and other qualifying renewables (or thermal); 2) avoid/terminate mandatory open access transmission, a violation of property rights of asset owners; and 3) end franchise protection and rate-and-service regulation on electric utilities.

Electric Car Blamed for Deadly Fire on Cargo Ship Carrying 3,000 Cars

An electric car has been linked to a fire on a cargo ship carrying nearly 3,000 vehicles in the North Sea which killed one person and forced others to jump overboard.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY WILL JONES

An electric car has been linked to a fire on a cargo ship carrying nearly 3,000 vehicles in the North Sea which killed one person and forced others to jump overboard. The Telegraph has more.

Authorities warned the blaze, which began on Tuesday night off the Dutch coast on the 199-metre Panama-registered Fremantle Highway, “could burn for days” despite efforts to extinguish it.

Rescue ships sprayed water onto the burning boat in an attempt to cool it down. It was towed out of shipping lanes and a salvage vessel was hooked on to stop it from drifting.

The ship was carrying nearly 3,000 vehicles in total en route from Germany to Egypt when the fire broke out.

One crew member died in the flames and several were injured, with at least seven people jumping overboard in a bid to escape the quickly-spreading flames, before being rescued.

A helicopter airlifted the remaining people from the 23-strong crew off the ship. Those injured were being treated for breathing problems, burns and broken bones.

The cause of the blaze remains unknown, the Dutch coastguard said on its website, but a spokesperson for the department said earlier on Wednesday that it had erupted near an electric car.

A report from Dutch broadcaster NOS also quoted an unnamed official as suggesting the fire may have been sparked by an electric vehicle, one of some 25 on board.

“We are taking into account all scenarios,” the official said.

Authorities said the blaze was “most definitely still not controlled”.

“It’s a very hard fire to extinguish, possibly because of the cargo the ship was transporting,” said Edwin Versteeg, a spokesperson for the Dutch department of waterways and public works.

Sounds like it could be just the latest disaster caused by the unwelcome tendency of electric cars to spontaneously combust, raising further questions about the safety of the technology.

Worth reading in full.

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