Tag: The Conversion

Are you a loser with no friends? Blame climate change and buy a windmill!

Only an academic could come up with something this stupid. No bar is too low to crawl under in the quest to show Climate-change: Bad, Big Government Spending: Good.

From CFACT

By Joanne Nova

Only an academic could come up with something this stupid. No bar is too low to crawl under in the quest to show Climate-change: Bad, Big Government Spending: Good.

Poor Fiona Doherty, Assistant Professor of Social Work, may not have met anyone outside The Groupthink Blob to challenge her work and appears stuck at the pre-numerate stone age analysis stage.

Evidently it didn’t occur to her that if hot weather keeps people indoors and isolates them, then cold weather might do that too. (Caribbean holidays seem more sociable than Arctic ones). Apparently she didn’t consider that a bit of global warming and shorter winters might be a net benefit for social events.  Sadly, this also didn’t occur to her supervisor, grant assessor, students or the editors of The Conversion either.*

Still, at least she didn’t waste computer time trying to model something as complicated as costs minus benefits. This is strictly a case of every anecdote proves the point.

The good news is that no one is adjusting the numbers — the bad news is that’s because there are no numbers.

So here we are again back at tribal sorcery: lo and behold, loneliness strikes, the climate spirits are blamed, and the villagers are told if they want more friends, they need more solar panels.

Non-stop nonsense:

Climate change may be making us lonelier

Fiona Doherty, The Conversion*

As an assistant professor of social work at the University of Tennessee, I study converging social and environmental crises, including social disconnection and extreme weather. I’ve found that one of climate change’s most overlooked impacts may be its ability to worsen the continuing loneliness epidemic.

Studies show the amount of time Americans spent interacting with friends and family in person was declining even before the COVID-19 pandemic

As usual everything is “climate change”. It’s not like we had twenty years of explosive growth in the internet and smart phones to make us lonely too is it?

Severe storms, heat waves and wildfires can shut down the social life of a community, flooding out festivals, canceling community events and keeping people indoors.

Yes, back in the good old days there were no floods, or storms, they just had the Black Death, dysentery and yellow fever to keep them away from festivals.  It was so much easier then. As long as the horses didn’t go lame, and no one declared a war or anything.

They’re also evidence of how climate change isn’t just changing the environments we all live in, but also impeding our ability to connect with one another.

Evidence? What evidence?

Extreme weather keeps people apart

Extreme heat has dominated global headlines this summer. When outdoor temperatures become dangerous, people retreat indoors to stay in air conditioning or near electric fans. This can come with a social cost.

Let’s count how many days floods, fires or cyclones have left you trapped at home in the last ten years and missing out on line-dancing, bingo or birthday parties: Would that be 0.001% of the last decade or would it be less?

Humans have never had it so good in the battle against the elements.

It’s like some academics were born yesterday?

Severe storms and flooding can make travel unsafe or impossible, preventing people from leaving their homes, reaching family or attending social gatherings. These disruptions can erode the everyday interactions that help people feel connected.

And the solution is always more government spending:

One promising way forward is for cities and counties to invest in community hubs, such as public libraries, or create new gathering spaces across communities.

These spaces can bolster social connection year-round by hosting inclusive lifelong learning activities while also serving as cooling shelters and climate resilience hubs, providing resources to help residents prepare for disasters, phone-charging stations when power goes out elsewhere, and an internet connection.

Somehow all these groups paid for this “research”?

Fiona Doherty received funding from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University, the College of Social Work PhD Program at The Ohio State University, and Grand Challenges for Social Work for the research mentioned in this article.

To be fair, the professor did conduct a study of sorts. Sixteen people photographed places and things connected with their social lives, then discussed how extreme weather sometimes disrupted their travel plans.

Yes. It’s that bad.

It’s time we had a hard conversation about the point of universities and whether it’s time to shut them all down and start again?

This article originally appeared at JoNova

Offshore wind fantasy is crumbling against hard reality of metal, boat, cable, and money shortage

It’s so unfair, the wind is free, but who could have known we’d need metals, boats, cables, and magnets?

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

It’s so unfair, the wind is free, but who could have known we’d need metals, boats, cables, and magnets?

Governments waved their magic wands to declare the renewable transition would “bling” into existence, but they didn’t bother doing the sums on whether we could mine the vast resources in time, and what would happen to the prices of everything, if every other stupid fashion-obsessed western nation tried to do the  same thing at the same time.

At the academic safe space known as “The Conversion” Thomas York explains to baffled renewables fans why wind farm developers are mysteriously pulling out at the last minute. He doesn’t spell out the baby-nature of the economic reality, but we can read between the lines. The ship called The Infrastructure-Bill has arrived and it’s killing them: the price of steel, copper and aluminium has doubled and tripled; we can’t make the right boats fast enough to build the towers out at sea; everyone wants high-voltage cabling at the same time, and they all need the rare metals for the magnets, which are well, rare. Then, the delays in arranging all this mean the developers fall over their contract agreements timelines, so they start to lose subsidies.

Ultimately developers have raised their prices to cover the true costs, but then the customers aren’t happy. As the University of Leicester researcher says so poignantly when faced with the brutal reality of the market: “it [wind power] is simply not profitable enough”. He even admits “renewable energy still cannot compete with oil and gas.” Sacre bleu!

The UK government magic wand says it can generate 95% of energy from renewable sources by 2030. York, master of understatement, says the “target is now in jeopardy.”

Lordy, but the skeptics were right all along…

By Thomas York, at The Conversion*

Projects just kept getting bigger until it all broke:

The UK government’s strategy for tackling climate change received a major blow in May when Danish developer Ørsted announced that adverse economic developments had halted its 2.4-gigawatt (GW) Hornsea 4 wind farm in the North Sea.

Supply, meet demand: When everyone wants the same thing at the same time, prices rise

Building a wind turbine requires significant amounts of steel, copper and aluminium, all of which doubled or tripled in price between 2020 and 2023. Turbine manufacturers have raised prices in an effort to recover recent losses…

Impending national and international net zero targets also mean that developers globally are having to make earlier investments in transmission infrastructure. An exponential increase in demand for scarce high-voltage cabling has already led to high-profile cancellations of offshore wind farms in the US.

…  Rising demand for rare earth metals used to make magnets in turbine generators has also been snared by geopolitical issues.

There are just not enough boats:

Ørsted ceased work on its 2.2GW Ocean Wind development zone off the coast of New Jersey in 2023, citing a vessel delay in its decision to cancel the project.

According to the advocacy group WindEurope, demand for vessels capable of installing foundations and turbines and laying cables will outstrip availability within the next five years. The gap between the two is forecast to skyrocket between 2028 and 2030….

Delays caused by these issues can result in a problem known as “contract erosion”. In their contracts, developers have a commissioning window within which turbines have to start generating. If they are not operational within this time, they lose their subsidies on a day-by-day basis.

Ultimately, the market hath spoken:

Rising costs mean that even one of the world’s biggest wind farms, Dogger Bank in the North Sea, will not be profitable for its developer, Equinor. As a prospect for generating financial returns, renewable energy still cannot compete with oil and gas.

This is the key argument of economic geographer Brett Christophers in his recent book The Price is Wrong. Christophers argues that, if national governments continue to rely so heavily on private sector investment to build renewable energy, decarbonisation is unlikely to proceed as fast as it needs to. It is simply not profitable enough.

If the government had got out of the way and let the market speak twenty years ago without hiding the truth under a bonanza-fog of subsidies, we wouldn’t have wasted twenty years and trillions of dollars to find out it was not going to work.

_____________

*In 2019 The Conversation gave up conversing and banned skeptics. Thus, they became — The Conversion.