In 2017, congressional investigators found that a money trail linked Russia to millions of dollars funding U.S. nonprofits to work against U.S. shale gas in order to influence the U.S. energy market. Specifically, investigators found that NRDC, Sierra Club, and Climate Action Network were all found to have received millions of dollars of funding in grants from a shady San Francisco-based company called “Sea Change” that a money trail linked back to the Russians. Indeed, it is an open secret that Russians have funded anti-fracking and anti-natural gas propaganda in America for decades, as environmental groups funded the campaigns of Democrats and pressured them to ban fossil fuels.
These same environmental groups relentlessly attacked President Trump and his appointees (I was one) as “anti-science,” “enemies of the EPA,” and “climate change deniers,” pulling out all the stops to frame President Trump’s pro-American energy agenda as harmful to the environment. President Trump knew then what we are all seeing now: Energy independence is crucial to our security, and we don’t have to shut down industry with duplicative and costly regulations to protect our environment.
After spending millions to elect Biden, the environmental left got its wish: Biden canceled America’s Keystone XL pipeline, blocking the safe transport of oil from one of our closest allies and killing thousands of jobs. At the same time, Biden removed President Trump’s sanctions on the Russian NordStream2 pipeline, giving Putin the green light to move forward.
Biden canceled oil and gas leasing on 2.46 billion acres of federal on and off-shore lands, effectively crushing American energy supplies. He unleashed his federal regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and more to hamper energy exploration, production, and transportation with new regulations. Finally, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent, Biden’s regulators at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took one more step to embolden Russian oil by clamping down on pipeline permits and LNG-export terminals, which could have helped supply American gas to the rest of the world.
https://legacy-assets.eenews.net/open_files/assets/2017/07/07/document_pm_02.pdf //
very few of Biden’s punitive moves against American energy would actually help the environment. Numerous studies have shown that pipelines have no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions since crude oil would still be extracted, and shipping it by rail or tanker instead of pipeline results in up to 42 percent higher emissions and more leaks.
Furthermore, American natural gas is far cleaner than Russian gas. A major 2019 study by the U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory found that Russian gas piped to Europe has up to 22 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than European coal. U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) delivered to the EU, in contrast, has up to 56 percent fewer total emissions than EU coal, the report shows.
Means of Transport CO2 equivalent emissions per passenger km
Short Flight ✈️ 255g
Medium Car (Gasoline) 🚗 192g
Medium Car (Diesel) 🚗 171g
Medium Flight ✈️ 156g
Long Flight ✈️ 150g
Bus 🚌 105g
Medium Motorcycle 🏍 103g
Gasoline Car (Two Passenger) 🚘 96g
Medium Electric Vehicle 🚙 53g
National Rail 🚂 41g
Ferry ⛴ 19g
Eurostar (International Rail) 🚞 6g
Flying on a short flight or driving alone are the most carbon-intensive travel methods. However, adding one more passenger to your car ends up cutting the emissions in half, making driving more efficient.
, it’s worth breaking down categories of flights more, as their emissions depend greatly on their route length:
- Short Flights: For example, domestic flights within a European country, or flights within a U.S. state have the highest individual carbon footprint.
- Medium Flights: For example, international travel within Europe, or between U.S. states, have a significantly lower carbon footprint per person.
- Long Flights: Flights over 3,700 km (2,300 mi), about the distance from Los Angeles to New York, have the lowest carbon footprint per person.
Why are longer flights far more eco-friendly than short-range flights? It’s because take-off uses much more energy than the ‘cruise’ phase of a flight. For short flights, the efficient cruise phase is relatively short-lived.
The U.S. is preparing to save the world from climate change because of fossil fuels by preparing to pockmark the planet’s surface with mineral mines. //
The session started with Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) reviewing the bidding the mineral resources risks faced by the United States in a post-climate change industrial base world. In it, the need for metals and minerals to build and maintain post-oil infrastructure will make the United States far more dependent on countries like Russia, China, and countries in Africa, where the mines that produce chemicals needed for computers, vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and other accouterments of a renewables-based world will change the power balance of global stability. //
Bottom line, we’ll be digging new holes in the ground because our cars will need four to 10 times as much metal and mineral content per vehicle. It must come from somewhere. So much for the pristine wilds of Alaska, or anywhere else we happen to find rare earth minerals in the New World. //
Murkowski noted in her remarks that the U.S. must also be thinking in terms of strategic mineral reserves for defense and security purposes. The tensions of limited resources and zero-sum competition begin anew. //
In the next 100 years, it’s only going to be a portion of the First World that will make the conversion to this expensive, mineral-based system. The rest of the world will keep burning oil and gas. And most of the human race’s population growth will take place in those parts of the world. So, by my reckoning, the trajectory of the carbon emission curve of planet Earth isn’t going to change much. It is just what it is.
Environmentalist still have little idea just how much strip mining and ore processing the climate change community has bought into to meet the goals of their global advocates. There will be a lot of money to be made, as ordinary people’s lives are forced to change. I’m anticipating this clash of values among the “woke” is coming as reality sets in. //
Humanity is quite literally exchanging one form of scorching the earth for another one. The whereabouts of the resources will change who has political and economic power. It’ll create economic competition among the world’s industrialized societies for minerals that will cause stress, embargoes, and wars. It’s how matrices work. This is the sound of inevitability.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with this “woke” version of climate change. //
What we will see in the remainder of the 21st century will be the consequence effects of the decisions Climate Change policies are creating now. My instinct says they won’t be pretty. Turning over apple carts never is. The constant is the voracious energy appetite of the First World. All we are doing is changing its diet.
After listening to how the policy community is talking about planning for the future, it may not be for the better. Bit of a Pandora’s Box. Either naively not well thought through or rife with hubris flying on wings of wax that will melt all too soon.
Efforts to reduce carbon pollution using ethanol appear to have backfired. //
For over a decade, the US has blended ethanol with gasoline in an attempt to reduce the overall carbon pollution produced by fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks. But a new study says that the practice may not be achieving its goals. In fact, burning ethanol made from corn—the major source in the US—may be worse for the climate than just burning gasoline alone.
Corn drove demand for land and fertilizer far higher than previous assessments had estimated. Together, the additional land and fertilizer drove up ethanol’s carbon footprint to the point where the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions—from seed to tank—were higher than that of gasoline. Some researchers predicted this might happen, but the new paper provides a comprehensive and retrospective look at the real-world results of the policy. //
Today, most gasoline sold in the US contains 10 percent ethanol, and about a third of the corn crop in the country is used to produce the fuel. While other sources would qualify, including ethanol derived from cellulose, “most RFS biofuel production has come from conventional corn ethanol,” the study’s authors pointed out. //
Expanding biofuels production would only add to the inflation, the researchers found. “Our estimates imply that for every billion gallons per year (BGY) expansion of ethanol demand, we would expect a 5.6% increase in corn prices; 1.6 and 0.4% increases in the areas of US corn and cropland, respectively; and attendant increases in GHG emissions, nutrient pollution, and soil erosion,” they wrote.
Europe’s aggressive leap towards ‘green’ energy is proving to be a grave mistake, making it reliant on aggressive foreign neighbors. //
Gas, coal, and nuclear are needed to offer instantaneous energy when unreliable renewables, which also pollute, fail to meet the job. Europe’s energy needs have complicated negotiations with Russia as Putin appears ready to deploy troops into Ukraine in the face of a divided opposition.
The European Commission put forward a plan today that defines what counts as a “sustainable investment,” something that’s all but required to manage a transition to clean energy. But to the chagrin of several EU countries, environmental groups, and asset managers, the proposal would allow both natural gas and nuclear to qualify as “contributing substantially to climate change mitigation.”
The split-the-baby approach came about because some countries, including Germany and Poland, lobbied for the inclusion of natural gas, while others, notably France, lobbied for nuclear power. Germany, which is in the process of shuttering its nuclear power plants, remains heavily dependent on coal and has been boosting its use of natural gas to “transition” away from coal. France, on the other hand, uses relatively little natural gas and gets nearly all of its electricity from nuclear power plants.
The end result appeased many EU countries, which tend to favor one fuel or another, but four, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, expressed their displeasure. “We are undermining the entire credibility of our Green Deal,” Bas Eickhout, a member of European Parliament from the Netherlands, told CNN. “And on the gas side, I really don’t see it. I fail to see the added value.”
Unhealthy proposal
Even people who had a hand in the plan aren’t happy. Andreas Hoepner, a professor at University College Dublin who helped advise the EU on the plan, told The Washington Post that the proposal was the equivalent of “calling french fries salad.”
While nuclear power is a true low-carbon fuel, producing lifetime carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions on par with wind and solar, its inclusion as a sustainable energy source is controversial in Europe. Several countries, including Germany, Denmark, Austria, and Spain, oppose the construction of new nuclear power plants, mostly because of concerns about safety and waste storage.
Intended to make carbon taxes more popular, the scheme doesn't make an impression.
Beginning in June, all sunrooms included in new construction projects will be required to show they will not create “unwanted solar gain.” The change, noted Daily Mail, is part of “a raft of measures” aimed at “future-proofing” homes against summers where temperatures are predicted to reach 104º F. Though “well above what is currently experienced in Britain,” such highs would “cause conservatories to become unbearably hot, often increasing the temperature uncomfortably indoors too.”
Wait — so would 200 degrees, but so what?
Incidentally, the average daily temperature in the UK in July is 70 degrees. (More than half of the United States just laughed out loud and said “Hold my beer.”)
And not to nitpick, here — but whose business is it to determine whether a sunroom becomes “unbearably hot” or “uncomfortably warm” throughout a particular residential home, anyway — the homeowner or the British government?
- 1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
- 1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969)
- 1970: Ice Age By 2000
- 1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
- 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
- 1972: New Ice Age By 2070
- 1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
- 1974: Another Ice Age?
- 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life (data and graph)
- 1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
- 1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes (additional link)
- 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend (additional link)
- 1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s
- 1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs
- 1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they’re not)
- 1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
- 1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it’s not)
- 2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is
- 2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy
- 2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024
- 2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018
- 2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013
- 2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
- 2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to ‘Save The Planet From Catastrophe’
- 2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014
- 2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015 (additional link)
- 2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’
- 1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide
- 1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources
- 1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years
- 1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years
- 1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s
- 1980: Peak Oil In 2000
- 1996: Peak Oil in 2020
- 2002: Peak Oil in 2010
- 2006: Super Hurricanes!
- 2005 : Manhattan Underwater by 2015
- 1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985
- 1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable
- 1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
- 1970s: Killer Bees!
- 1975: The Cooling World and a Drastic Decline in Food Production
- 1969: Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century
- 1972: Pending Depletion and Shortages of Gold, Tin, Oil, Natural Gas, Copper, Aluminum
- 1970: Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980
- 1988: World’s Leading Climate Expert Predicts Lower Manhattan Underwater by 2018
- 2005: Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020
- 2000: Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past
49.1989: UN Warns That Entire Nations Wiped Off the Face of the Earth by 2000 From Global Warming - 2011: Washington Post Predicted Cherry Blossoms Blooming in Winter
Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.
None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.
What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.
More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.
While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.
Dutch Lawmaker Refutes the Claim that '97% of Scientists Agree on Manmade Global Warming' – PJ Media
“How often do we hear,” Baudet says, “that 97% of scientists agree that humans are the cause of climate change; that this climate change is severe, posing a major threat to the planet; and that we need a drastic reduction in our carbon dioxide emissions.”
“All of this, and I do mean all of it, is false. It’s a blatant lie that 97% of scientists agree with it. In reality, only 1.6% agree with [those] statements,” he goes on, after which he explains that there are major disagreements on this among climatologists, geologists, chemists, physicians, and so on.
“This myth” about the 97% was famously propagated by former U.S. President Barack Obama. “On May 16, 2013, he posted, and I quote,” Baudet explains, “’97 percent of scientists agree, climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.’ With this tweet, Obama referred to a paper published the same year by a man named John Cook.”
And that’s where it goes wrong. Because Cook is a “controversial” climate activist who even runs a ridiculous alarmist website called scepticalscience.com. “In this paper, he aims to demonstrate an overwhelming scientific consensus with the obvious intention of strengthening the environmentalist cause. To do so he analyzed 12,000 articles published in learned journals containing the words ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change.’ He then subdivided these articles into seven different categories.” //
That’s right. In fact, only 1.6% of papers stated that mankind plays a significant role in global warming.
Cook made that 1.6% look like 97%, however, and he did so by using some handy statistical tricks. As they say: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. //
As a result, Baudet concludes, you can only say that a majority of scientists believe that there has been “a slow, marginal warming trend since the 1850s. But the end result that 97% of scientists would agree that man is mainly responsible for this is utter nonsense.
Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!
Everday Astronaut has an excellent article on this: https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/
Summary: some exotics suck, but modern rockets are inconsequential at current volumes.
The impact of rocket pollution is mostly symbolic, especially tourist flights. They're seen as the most conspicuous consumption by much of the general public. Why should an average Joe who is struggling to get by sacrifice to combat climate change while billionaires are dumping hundreds of tons of carbon into the air to fly to space?
There are already good answers to that question, but they are nuanced, and the answer could be quite clear. Bezos' rocket already runs on Hydrogen, he should be paying a little extra for green Hydrogen, just for PR reasons. Musk has already committed to using synthetic methane on Starship. Branson doesn't have an easy answer, but he's mostly irrelevant in the symbolism arena. //
Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!
~16.25 billion gallons of jet fuel burned per year.
One Falcon 9 launch, 25,000 gallons of Kerosene in the 1st stage (the 2nd stage is effectively burning it above the atmosphere, so not sure you can count that).
30 launches in 2021. 750,000 gallons of kerosene.
Total around the world launches of Rockets in 2021 was, what? 60 ish? Many smaller rockets. Let's just double that though and say 1.5 million gallons.
That is ~3.33% of all of the jet fuel burned...in one day. For an entire YEAR of launches at the current rate.
Metholox will produce somewhat lower emissions per joule of energy released to launch a rocket.
So basically, you are talking less than 1/10th of 1% of the entire aviation industry. It would be nice if it was zero emissions. Also of note, SpaceX is looking to do carbon capture and generate methane for launch at some point (though not soon, they will be using in situ wells at their launch facility for the methane).
Until such a point as rocket launching maybe approaches >1% of aviation emissions I think we can safely consider it a rounding error.
edit actually the above should be less than 1/100th of 1%. //
Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!
A very large percentage of the information about those hurricanes comes from satellites. So there’s a pretty big impact from rocket launches.
From my personal perspective, I think a few things are clear. Climate change is real, but from what I garner it’s also completely natural. Our planet is a complicated ball of life-sustaining gases, temperatures, and interwoven ecosystem that spins at just the right angle around a giant ball of gas at just the right distance, and has for millions of years. Even a minor change to that balance could affect the weather on our planet and history shows that has happened to major effect in the past.
I also know that inside the protective bubble that encases our planet, the ecosystem we are a part of has amazingly adaptive qualities. For instance, one of the biggest fears of the climate alarmists is the introduction of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that somehow greenhouse gases would throw off the entire balance of nature and cause some kind of apocalyptic event.
However, according to NASA, that extra CO2 is causing the planet to undergo a “global greening.” In other words, vegetation is beginning to grow more, and in places where it hasn’t typically been seen before.
The fact is that information that wrecks the church of climate change’s narrative comes out pretty regularly. Denunciations of leftist-born climate models happen within the scientific community with more frequency than you’re led to believe.
a recent video by John Stossel highlighted that despite there being evidence left and right that pokes holes in the claims of the climate alarmists, they refuse to show up and defend their points.
https://youtu.be/b8JZo6PzpCU //
why is it that so many of the proposed solutions require government control of everything? Why isn’t the solution to spring forward with technological development to make something like fossil fuels and coal irrelevant? Why do we need to revert to the failed economic system of socialism and not use the developmental momentum of capitalism to create new technologies and environmentally beneficial products? //
I would like real scientific data to be discussed, not just data that makes it seem like something is leaning in your favor and then declaring the debate over as that very data becomes outdated the following week.
I think the climate is changing as it has for thousands of years. I don’t think the world is going to end in 12 years. I’ve heard the world is going to end enough times without it actually ending. I think we have a lot of time to sit and really understand the global climate and what affects it and introduce solutions that will lessen our impact.
Coal plants such as Drax, Ørsted Energy’s Avedøre power station, in Denmark; and the Rodenhuize thermal power plant, in Belgium; started to transition from coal to wood pellets. (Ali Lewis, the head of media and public relations for Drax, disputed Quaranda’s description. “How can we be ‘gaming the system’ when the carbon accounting for biomass is derived from the principles set by the world’s leading climate scientists at the U.N. I.P.C.C., and we follow those rules to the letter?” Lewis asked.) //
By 2019, biomass accounted for about fifty-nine per cent of all renewable-energy use in the E.U. The Dogwood Alliance estimates that sixty thousand acres of trees—trees that would have otherwise sequestered carbon—are burned each year to supply the growing pellet market. Global demand for wood pellets is expected to double by 2027, to more than thirty-six million tons. And although the entire premise of burning wood as renewable energy hinges on the assumption that trees grow back, there is no binding governmental or industrial oversight for replanting trees at all. “There’s no requirement that Drax or anyone has to replant trees, and no requirement that whatever they’re planting has to come back as natural forest,” Quaranda said.
Even if there were strict protocols for replanting trees, it takes between forty and a hundred years for a new tree to pay down the carbon debt racked up by logging and burning an old one. //
Pellets made from these trees are shipped from ports (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is one; Prince Rupert, British Columbia, is another) to England, where they are loaded onto custom-built trains, brought to Drax, and burned to supply around six per cent of the electricity used in the U.K.
The Dogwood Alliance has extensive photographic evidence of whole trees in North Carolina and Virginia being piled up on trucks that are headed for Enviva’s pellet mills, which require some fifty-seven thousand acres of timber per year to operate. //
We pulled up to a giant, open-ended metal shed, where railroad tracks came in one side and out the other. Here, trains bearing the slogan “Powering Tomorrow” carry pellets in from the English ports. Seventeen trains per day, with twenty-eight cars each, bring twenty thousand tons of pellets to this shed every single day.
Hawaii just won praise during the recent international climate crisis for pursuing renewable energy. I sure hope their new power systems work during this blizzard. //
However, in the interest of science, I will note that the peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea often get snow in the winter.
The summits are home to space observatories. Visitors traveling to the peak of Mauna Kea are advised to use only four-wheel-drive vehicles because of the steep terrain.
“Bear in mind, there is no one who lives up there,” said Maureen Ballard, a Weather Service meteorologist in Honolulu. “We do get snow there pretty much every year.”
lhw | November 27, 2021 at 12:16 pm
The AMO is well known and at least partially understood. It is a 70+ year cycle in which warm water is pumped up to the Arctic. The exact cause is perhaps not well understood, but it appears to sync with solar activity. There are some thoughts that the heat engine is being driven by clouds in the Arctic which change the albedo. The last minimum was the 1970s, previous one was around 1905. Most recent max was around 2012. We are now on the downtrend. The Arctic ice cover has increased in each of the past five years. It is now within 1 sigma of the mean of the past 40 years.
There is a real problem with a lot of things. One of the biggest is making measurements starting in about 1980 during the uptrend of the ΑΜΟ. It is like making measurements from february to july and then predicting that we will be all incinerated by Christmas. The other problem is measuring temperature in urban areas where the changes in hydrology, albedo, and energy dumping corrupt any temperature measurements.
Expect it to get gradually cooler through 2045 or so. The northeast passage should be frozen up a bit before 2030. In a thousand years, we will have to rely on solar energy and nuclear energy for our energy in general. We have used up the stored solar energy of fossil fuels. Rushing headlong into it at the moment for the wrong reasons is going to be a disaster in ten years or so. //
alaskabob. | November 27, 2021 at 3:56 pm
We shall see on the oil. If we ever cannot drill it, we will synthesize it. Long hydrocarbon chains are just too useful. They are a nice way to store energy in a stable configuration for long periods of time not to mention being the feedstock to all sorts of other stuff.
I wonder if the usual idjets who are against ng understand what that is used for commercially. You steam reform ch4 to create ch3oh (methanol. You then take the methanol and turn it into formaldehyde which you use to make building materials like plywood. Live in a house? You need ng to build it these days. That is just the start of stuff. Eat food? Well gosh gee. More steam reforming to create H2 and then pound it together with N2 to make NH3. Corn loves ammonia fertilizer.
Oh well…. //
2smartforlibs. | November 27, 2021 at 1:09 pm
No, this is one of the shorter cycles. See: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/11/23/leif-svalgaard-responds-to-willie-soon/ This is the longer cycle that is shorter than 100 years. There is also a cycle at about 210 years and 900 years if you look at the fossil record. The Milankovitch cycle is tens of thousands of years and is driven by the change in the earth’s orbit, not the radiation from the sun. The Milankovitch cycle has its shortest period at about 100K years.
But don’t fret, the goalposts have been moved again. As of 2019, the UN said “only 11 years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change”:
That gives us until 2030 — or 58 years after the warnings of 1972. Advocates for change believe if they just scream louder, or write more like the Book of Revelations, they’ll get the world to agree to a complete upheaval of modern life and trillions in spending. But after decades of alarmism, they sound like the boy who cried warming. People have tuned them out.
Climate change is real, but adapting to it, mitigating it with technology is the most realistic solution. Will China and India just give up on coal, gas and oil overnight? No, and neither will the United States. But emissions already are falling in Western countries, the world is innovating.
We predict things are going to get better. Ten years. Twenty years, tops. Maybe 30
Yet there is more evidence that what is occurring is related to solar energy output than SUV’s. I have noted before, the Sun has likely entered into the modern Grand Solar Minimum (2020–2053) of sunspot activity. This means that there will be a significant reduction of solar magnetic field and activity like during Maunder minimum leading to a noticeable reduction of terrestrial temperature.
This theory better aligns with the record-breaking cold in the Antarctic as well as the early freeze in the Arctic that just stranded 18 ships. //
Clearly “experts” are baffled by climate. Therefore, there should be no rush to impose remedies that likely will not work, yet have the potential to harm people economically, lower the standard of living, and line the pockets of bureaucrats.
The “Clean Energy Performance Program” is not needed to meet climate goals, and might actually undermine them.
Consider Waxman-Markey. That’s the name of the “cap and trade” climate legislation that passed the House but failed in the Senate in 2010. It had a climate goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020. Instead, the U.S. reduced its emissions by 22 percent.
Had cap and trade legislation passed in the Senate, emissions would have declined less than 22 percent, because Waxman-Markey so heavily subsidized coal and other fossil fuels. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, “the Environmental Protection Agency projects that even if the emissions limits go into effect, the U.S. would use more carbon-dioxide-heavy coal in 2020 than it did in 2005.”
The same thing would likely have been true for the Clean Energy Performance Program, which lock in natural gas. Consider France. According to the Commision de Regulation de L’Energie, €29 billion (US$33) billion was used to purchase wind and solar electricity in mainland France between 2009 and 2018. But the money spent on renewables did not lead to cleaner electricity. In fact, the carbon-intensity of French electricity increased.
After years of subsidies for solar and wind, France’s 2017 emissions of 68g/CO2 per kWh was higher than any year between 2012 and 2016. The reason? Record-breaking wind and solar production did not make up for falling nuclear energy output and higher natural gas consumption. And now, the high cost of renewable electricity is showing up in French household electricity bills. //
What threatens the continued operation of nuclear power plants, and nuclear energy in general, is the continued subsidization of renewables, which the Clean Energy Performance Program would have put on steroids. Under the program, utilities would have received $18 for each megawatt-hour of zero-emissions energy it produces between 2023 to 2030, on top of the existing $25 per megawatt-hour subsidy for wind energy.
Under such a scenario, notes energy analyst Robert Bryce, a wind energy company "could earn $43 per megawatt-hour per year for each new megawatt-hour of wind energy it sells. That’s a staggering sum given that the wholesale price of electricity in New York last year was $33 per megawatt-hour. In Texas, the wholesale price of juice was $22 per MWh.” //
A better approach would be for Congress to seek nuclear-focused legislation to expand nuclear from its current 19% of U.S. electricity to 50% by 2050. It should take as a model the British government’s announcement yesterday that it would put nuclear energy at the center of its climate plans. Global energy shortages triggered by the lack of wind in Europe have led nations to realize that any efforts to decarbonize electricity grids without creating blackouts must center nuclear power, not weather-dependent solar and wind.
If you look at the inner-city areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, or New York, you find a laundry list of issues, from homelessness to rampant crime to cold-blooded murder, almost exclusively attributable to a liberal-socialist policy that has been codified into law. And what does the progressive-left say is the answer? Whaddya know! More Government. More Socialism.
That doesn’t mean that Conservative policies don’t often require force to implement or that those policies don’t create problems bigger than those they intended to fix; it’s just that Conservative policies do those things less often. If Conservatives stuck more often to Conservative principles, they would seek to remove the barriers and triggers which create the problems we are seeing in the first place, the majority of which can be sourced back to the government. Libertarian-leaning conservatives, such as me, are so often frustrated because we watch so-called “conservatives” believe that the answer to the problems caused by socialist policies is simply more government, in the hands of these “conservatives.” What makes conservatives who engage in this action hypocrites is that they are acting like the very liberals they criticize. //
This brings us back to the statements made by the Former President on Monday at COP 26 Climate Summit in Scotland. As always, Obama started with some pandering nonsense which led him to commit what is, to my people, a grievous cardinal sin:
“Since we’re in the Emerald Isles here, let me quote the bard, William Shakespeare, ‘What wound,’ he writes, ‘did ever heal but by degrees.'”
Yes, while the President spoke in Scotland, he suggested they were in Ireland and quoted an Englishman. //
“I can afford to give up a lot of my current lifestyle to benefit the planet because I’ll still have a lot left over. A lot of folks don’t have that cushion. So that means that any climate plan worth salt has to take these inequities into account.”
That leaves me with just one question: What the hell is stopping you? //
If, again, climate change was such a grave threat to our existence, and immediate action is necessary, why would you only give up some? Why would you not give it all up? Why wouldn’t you take the totality of the action available to you, with as much immediacy of which you were capable, to combat climate change? And why is it that Obama thinks he can state so openly and plainly that he just isn’t doing anything and is waiting for others to tell him what to do when he is there, demanding action? Would not the sentence, “I have given everything up to help contribute to climate change goals,” or even “Here is the immediate action I am taking to help combat climate change,” serve his agenda better than, “Welp, someone hasn’t made me do anything yet.” Is the left’s only motivation for an action done so at the end of a barrel of a gun? //
No one in socialism sees themselves as “the worker.” They all envision themselves as some grand societal architect, and that they, in their endless benevolence, will do what is best for the rest of the plebes. It is only when they realize that they too will have to live under the rules they are setting, that they seek ways to create exemptions for themselves, because well, their benevolence has earned it. Obama’s words are no different. He wants to plan. He wants to discuss. He wants to pontificate. But when the sustainable rubber hits the road, he has less than zero intention of ever committing to, let alone engaging in, any meaningful change in his life.