‘Obscene’ UK windfarm subsidies revealed

Some electricity consumers may feel like muttering obscenities if they see the figures. Meanwhile the BBC insists renewables are now cheaper than coal.
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The Global Warming Policy Forum has condemned what it called the “obscenity” of windfarm subsidies and has called for a complete rethink of energy policy.

GWPF research has shown that just six offshore windfarms are now sharing £1.6 billion pounds in subsidies between them every year.

Three receive annual subsidies of over a quarter of a billion pounds each year.

Federal auditors question viability of the German ‘energy transition’

‘The donkey goes on to the ice until it breaks’ – German proverb [image credit: evwind.es]

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum & Die Welt.

While the auditors are piling on the criticism, the politicians are toying with the idea of producing hydrogen from solar energy in Morocco. That would surely be good for another upward twist to the already spiralling costs of the ‘green dream’.
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The Federal Audit Office has accused the Federal Ministry of Economics of insufficiently monitoring the energy transition and of poorly managing it.

The auditors have now renewed this criticism of energy policy expressed three years ago in a further special report – and added an explosive analysis of security of supply.

60,000 Belgians take government to court over alleged climate inaction

Cue football stadium quips. We seem to be living in an age of IPCC-generated mass delusion, whipped up by the media, as far as the climate is concerned.
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SOME 60,000 Belgians are suing the government for inaction in the fight against global warming in a case that opened today in a civil court in Brussels, reports thejournal.ie.

Launched in 2015 by the association Klimatzaak (the climate case, in Dutch), the procedure follows a similar one in the Netherlands that led to a ruling against the Dutch government.

The cases attack governments for not respecting the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Brits were misled about cost of Net Zero

Government estimates usually mean ‘not less than’, but this is worse than that. It’s supposed not to be possible to tie the hands of future governments on policy matters, but that’s what the Climate Change Act does, based on the notion that CO2 is ‘harmful’ – except for plant growth and in fizzy drinks.
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Brits were misled about the cost of the Government’s net zero carbon emissions target by 2050 after Whitehall officials played down the estimated £70 billion annual hit, says The Sun (via The GWPF).

In bombshell emails released after a two-year FOI battle, Treasury civil servants admitted to then-Chancellor Philip Hammond that the cost of going green would likely be £20 billion a year more than the £50 billion figure they were told to champion publicly.

Technology Tease: On The Cruel Promise of a Renewables/Hydrogen Fuelled Future

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Undermining reliable electricity supply is deemed to be sound policy by many governments. Their only escape route is to be out of office before the full force of such folly becomes only too clear to all.

STOP THESE THINGS

Gormless PM struggles to grasp his only solution to RE crisis.

The wind and solar industries were built on lies, run on myth and are fuelled by subsidies, so the only way forward is more of the very same.

It took politicians and punters around a decade to cotton on to the hopeless unreliability and chaotic intermittency of solar and wind power.  Which required an altogether new approach from the rent seekers’ spin doctors.

Over the last year or two, mythical mega-batteries have been pitched as the perfect answer.

But the economics clearly don’t stack up: the biggest battery in the world – that cost taxpayers a cool $150,000,000 – sits in a sheep paddock near Jamestown in South Australia’s mid-North and would power that purportedly wind and solar ‘powered’ state for all of four minutes when the sun sets and calm weather sets in.

Hardly bang for buck, particularly…

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France found guilty of climate inaction in ‘historic victory’

‘Hoist by their own petard’ springs to mind. French courts are now willing to hear from ‘direct victims of climate change’. How they might define climate change remains to be seen, as the insanity gets further embedded into the system.
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A court in Paris has ruled that France’s government is guilty of climate inaction in a ground-breaking legal case, reports Euronews.

The decision comes after a group of NGOs, with the support of two million citizens, filed a lawsuit against the French government for failing to meet the country’s commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The legal claim was hailed as the “L’Affaire du siècle” or “the case of the century” by activists, who first started the dispute in March 2019.

How the UK Climate Assembly manufactured consent

No coincidence that Ireland and France also held similar climate charades around the same time. All part of the promotion of useless ‘net zero’ ideology.
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This stage-managed Assembly is a sham, says Spiked-online.

There is no democratic mandate for extreme climate policies.

As I have been pointing out for over a decade here on spiked, the political consensus on climate change is not shared by the public – or, at best, the public’s appetite for climate policy has not been tested democratically.

And governments are well aware of this, too.

UK Climate Assembly was undemocratic–Ben Pile

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Just as undemocratic as the Irish version, the French version etc. Funny how they all came up with the same idea at the same time…

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

London, 29 January: The UK Climate Assembly, which claimed to have delivered a mandate for a green revolution, could not have delivered a mandate of any kind, according to a new analysis published by the Global Warming Policy Forum.

According to the report’s author, Ben Pile, the Assembly was set up to deliver a preordained result:

Pile says that the Assembly was actually set up because the public were unpersuaded of the case for radical action.

The UK Climate Assembly: Manufacturing Mandates can be downloaded here

https://www.thegwpf.com/climate-assembly-was-undemocratic/

Ben’s conclusion sums it up nicely:

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UK Government ordered to release Net Zero cost calculations

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

Don’t mention the cost…this could be the funniest thing you read all day today. Any ‘official estimate’ is almost certain to fall short of reality.
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London, 21 January: The government faces a major embarrassment after the Information Commissioner ordered the Treasury to release an email containing its official estimate of the cost of decarbonising the economy, says The GWPF.

In June 2019, some weeks after Parliament adopted the 2050 Net Zero target as law, the then chancellor Philip Hammond wrote to Prime Minister Theresa May, warning that her plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 was likely to cost the UK more than £1 trillion.

In his letter, the chancellor wrote that the costs meant that less funding would be available for schools, the police and hospitals, pointing out that Net Zero would render some industries “economically uncompetitive.”

Banning Gas-Powered Vehicles Means A Crushing Change For America

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‘By my plan, by 2045…’ – insert ‘about two decades after my term of office has ended’.

PA Pundits - International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

The election of the Biden-Harris ticket will, we are told, hasten the death of the internal combustion engine in the United States. Once the sale of new gasoline engine vehicles is banned, the only question remaining is how long before driving them is also outlawed? Well, incoming Vice President Kamala Harris promised that, “By my plan, by 2045 we will have basically zero emission vehicles only. 100 percent by 2045.”

President-elect Biden has promised in his two trillion dollar “climate change” plan [a major downsize from Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion Green New Deal] “rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring 100 percent of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emission vehicles (ZEVs).” Harris has called for this ban to begin by 2035, perhaps even sooner, if the momentum for change continues.

To jumpstart the transformation of the 99.5 percent of the…

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Command & Control: Subsidised Wind Power Central to Britain’s Great Socialist Reset

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As COVID drains the national exchequer, plans to hose a few trillion pounds at the phantom problem of innocuous carbon dioxide molecules go almost unnoticed.

STOP THESE THINGS

As Margaret Thatcher put it: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

That adage, however, doesn’t appear to trouble Britain’s current PM, Boris Johnson, whose plan to squander a further £50,000,000,000 on subsidies and over-the-market contracts for intermittent offshore wind power beggars belief.

But that colossal crony-capitalist boondoggle, is a mere snip by comparison with the £3 trillion that he’s planning to squander on an effort to completely remove carbon dioxide gas from the British atmosphere – well, at least the kind generated by all human activity, that is.

Andrew Montford takes a look at the numbers in order to get a grip on the cost of Boris Johnson’s ‘net zero’ CO2 plan for Britain.

Honesty is needed on the huge costs of attempting “net-zero”
Conservative Home
Andrew Montford
5 December 2020

Politicians can be divided into those who like to spend big…

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2020: The year of climate craziness

Climate laws have been passed by carbon dioxide fearing governments that won’t be in office when the due dates arrive. What happens if evidence-free climate superstition is still rampant when these legal requirements are not met?
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BEFORE it even began, 2020 was already marked to be a year of climate hysteria, says The Conservative Woman.

It was the UK’s turn to host the annual UN climate meeting, which was scheduled to take place in Glasgow earlier this month.

Hence, the first eighteen months of Boris Johnson’s premiership saw the erstwhile ‘libertarian’ attempting to establish himself as a global pioneer of green policymaking: banning all that moves ahead of the conference, like some kind of overweight peroxide Ed Miliband eco-virtue-signalling on ‘our’ behalf.

The arrival of Covid-19 caused the meeting to be postponed, but this has not dented the government’s green ambitions to make the UK’s economic suicide the first in what they hope will be a global pact.

China steams ahead with weather cooking project bigger than India.

I usually avoid weather modification as a topic as it tends to bring out the ‘chemtrail’ theorists and other assorted window-lickers in force, but this is big enough to warrant an exception. So have at it Talkshoppers, does a project of this size have bad international implications, or are China using technology beneficially to reduce crop damage within their own borders?

This from CNN. As a concept, cloud seeding has been around for decades. It works by injecting small amounts of silver iodide into clouds with a lot of moisture, which then condenses around the new particles, becoming heavier and eventually falling as precipitation.

A study funded by the US National Science Foundation, published earlier this year, found that “cloud seeding can boost snowfall across a wide area if the atmospheric conditions are favorable.” The study was one of the first to ascertain definitively that cloud seeding worked, as previously it had been difficult to distinguish precipitation created as a result of the practice from normal snowfall.

That uncertainty had not stopped China investing heavily in the technology: between 2012 and 2017, the country spent over $1.34 billion on various weather modification programs. Last year, according to state news agency Xinhua, weather modification helped reduce 70% of hail damage in China’s western region of Xinjiang, a key agricultural area.

France plans to jail ‘ecocide’ offenders for up to 10 years under new laws

CO2 is not pollution

A selected handful of the citizens of France have spoken, so the die is cast. No-one wants pollution, but do they intend to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant (like the USA), or even as a ‘danger to the environment’? Tell it to the plants and vegetation that rely on CO2 from photosynthesis to produce glucose, essential to survival.
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Environmental offenders could be handed a fine of up to €4.5 million, or 10 years in prison. The law is meant to punish those who commit a “general crime of pollution” or “endanger the environment”, says DW.com.

France is set to make serious intentional damage to the environment punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as part of a planned “ecocide” law, government ministers said in remarks published on Sunday.

The law was proposed following a recommendation made by the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, an environmental committee of 150 people, created by the government a year ago.

France’s top court gives government three months to honour climate commitments

It seems courts in some countries are now in effect regarding as proven something that is not proven, namely that rises in Earth’s meagre 0.04% atmospheric carbon dioxide content will necessarily cause serious problems requiring urgent governmental action – whatever that may be – to ‘tackle’ the situation. Not only is this not proven, but science was arguing against such theories in published papers as far back as 1900, and continues to do so in various quarters today. The upshot is that, in these countries at least, governments have lumbered themselves with the legal duty of trying to reduce Earth’s average temperature, on pain of being found in contempt of court (or some such charge) for not trying hard enough, or at all. Not what President Macron would have had in mind when he strutted the stage at his notorious 2015 Paris climate summit.

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France’s top administrative court has given the government a three-month deadline to show it is taking action to meet its commitments on global warming, reports Yahoo News with AFP.

The Council of State, which rules on disputes over public policies, said that “while France has committed itself to reducing its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, it has, in recent years, regularly exceeded the ‘carbon budgets’ it had set itself.”

It also noted that President Emmanuel Macron’s government had, in an April decree, at the height of the first wave of Covid-19 infections, deferred much of the reduction effort beyond 2020.

Climate scientists fly more than other researchers, first global study suggests

Climate conference transport

It takes more than a ‘climate emergency’ to keep climatologists on the ground. It’s almost like they don’t take their own theories seriously, although professors not travelling isn’t going to make any difference anyway. Do as they say, not as they do.
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Climate change researchers, especially professors, fly more than other researchers—but are also more likely to have taken steps to reduce or offset their flying, a new study has found.

Climate change researchers, especially professors, fly more than other researchers—but are also more likely to have taken steps to reduce or offset their flying, a new study has found.

The large, international survey of more than 1,400 university researchers was carried out by the UK Centre for Climate and Social Transformation (CAST), which is coordinated by Cardiff University, reports Phys.org.

A follow-up experiment with more than 350 researchers found that providing information about the impacts of aviation and support for workplace policies increases intentions to fly less.

The large-scale study—the first of its kind to survey climate academics about their travel for conferences, fieldwork and meetings—is published in the journal Global Environmental Change.

Director of CAST Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who led the study, said the findings were “unexpected” but said it also suggested “knowledge alone is not enough” to tackle global warming.

Russell Cook: BBC ( sort of … ) Corrects Radio 4’s “How They Made Us Doubt Everything”

Guest post by Russell Cook, who for a long time has been setting the record straight on the lies propagated by climate alarmists about the oil and gas industry. Check out his website at http://gelbspanfiles.com/

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And in doing so, they inadvertently dug a deeper hole for themselves.

The longer backstory to this situation is in my July 31, 2020 “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh” blog post, and in my August 5 followup, concerning unsupportable claims in a BBC podcast report about Limbaugh’s alleged involvement with a fossil fuel industry-orchestrated disinformation campaign that supposedly targeted a specific ethnic group, and Limbaugh’s outrage over the false accusation and the silliness of the ‘targeted people’ line.

Reducing the root problem to one paragraph: back in the late 1990s, the otherwise long-forgotten environmentalist group Ozone Action gained fame for its ‘bombshell report’ about a so-called leaked memo set which were alleged guidelines for an industry conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” through an informational campaign targeting “older, less-educated males” and “younger, lower-income women.” Kert Davies, formerly at Ozone Action and Greenpeace who’s currently heading Climate Investigations Center / Climate Files, has been telling and retelling the narrative of how that memo set proves the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. He did so in an obscure podcast back in late 2018, and he did so again in this two month-old BBC podcast report.

Facebook launches a ‘climate change information’ centre

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Facebook, accountable only to its investors, now intends to pose as a proxy authority on the world’s present and future climate. But the author of the article below wants Facebook to go further and impose its own views on people, while hiding behind the usual catch-all accusation of ‘climate change denialism’ but offering no definition of it. Presumably suggesting that a carbon dioxide level of 0.04% in the atmosphere might not be a massive climate problem is beyond the pale, and should be suppressed? Without clarity about what is out of bounds in discussion, the risk of unfair censorship is obvious.
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Even as Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, admits that climate change “is real” and that “the science is unambiguous and the need to act grows more urgent by the day” the platform appears unwilling to take steps to really stand up to the climate change denialism that circulates on its platform, says Techcrunch. 

The company is set to achieve net zero carbon emissions and be supported fully by renewable energy in its own operations this year.

But as the corporate world slaps a fresh coat of green paint on its business practices, Facebook is looking to get out in front with the launch of a Climate Science Information Center to “connect people with science-based information.”

The company is announcing a new information center, designed after its COVID-19 pandemic response. The center is designed to connect people to factual and up-to-date climate information, according to the company.

Council ‘sorry’ as energy company collapses

This scheme trumpeted: “Since July 2018 all of the electricity we supply to our customers is 100% green*. Whichever tariff you take from us all of the electricity we provide is certified as being sourced from UK based wind and solar generators.”
But now comes the real cost – a loss of many millions of pounds incurred by local ratepayers as it all goes pear-shaped. If anyone is surprised, they shouldn’t be.
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The council leader admits selling the customer base will not make back the millions it invested, reports BBC News.

Robin Hood Energy (RHE) is shutting with the loss of 230 jobs despite millions poured into it by Nottingham City Council.

British Gas will take on its customer base of thousands of homes in England.

The council said the sale will not make up all its losses, which leaked documents suggest are £38.1 million.

Hypocrisy claim as scientists call on EU to ‘correct’ biomass carbon accounting rules

Carbophobes discover biomass burning is far from ‘carbon neutral’. It’s taken some of them a long time to admit that it’s one of their clumsiest attempts to ‘tackle’ the phantom that is human-caused climate change.
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Europe’s academies of science have called on EU lawmakers to introduce a “radically new standard” in the blocs’ Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to ensure net carbon emissions from biomass power stations are “properly accounted for and declared”, reports Euractiv.

The ETS is the EU’s flagship tool for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and obliges power generators, industrial emitters as well as airlines to buy CO2 permits on the market to cover some of the pollution they emit.

But although the ETS currently assumes that all biomass is carbon neutral, Europe’s academies of science say this is mostly not the case.