Ofgem to investigate claims of UK wind farms overcharging billpayers £millions

Scottish offshore wind project [image credit : urbanrealm.com]

We knew wind farms were also subsidy farms but this could be even worse. Why ‘regulators’ need to get informed by the media before noticing anything wrong, or potentially wrong, is another question.
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Energy regulator Ofgem is investigating the claim that wind farms may have incorrectly added close to £51m to taxpayer bills since 2018, says CityAM.

A Bloomberg report found that 40 out of 121 studied projects overstated their output by ten per cent on average and one-sixth (27) of wind farms were found to be overstating by at least 20 per cent.

Ofgem said it was investigating the alleged behaviour and has asked the Energy System Operator (ESO) to look into the matter.

Latest energy policy announcements show that the UK Government has gone Insane

By David Turver at his ‘Eigen Values’ substack blog

Introduction

Back in the summer, there were signs that the consensus around Net Zero policy was starting to crack. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak then made his speech that watered down some Net Zero commitments and promised “a more pragmatic, proportionate, and realistic approach that eases the burdens on families.” However, in the run up to Christmas, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) made several announcements about various aspects of energy policy that can only add to consumer costs. These included various announcements about their hydrogen policy, a statement on carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) and an update on the business models for greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and power from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

This article explains that unfortunately, the announcements mark the end of any serious fightback against the Net Zero insanity and demonstrate that the Government has no idea about economics, thermodynamics or energy and has gone completely insane.

Climate Expert: Misinformation In The IPCC, Part 2

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

The article summary is shown below. See this link for expanded discussion and evidence. No punches pulled here. In short, the evidence doesn’t stack up, so the author – an expert in his own right – calls the IPCC’s cyclone claims ‘fiction’.
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A top conclusion of the recent Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that the attribution of observed changes in tropical cyclones to human influence has strengthened over the past 9 years.

The IPCC does not justify its claim that both the detection of changes and attribution have been achieved, says Roger Pielke Jr.

So in Part 1 of this exploration, I tracked back the claim and found that it had no support in the one paper miscited by the IPCC in support of the claim.

In this second part, I look at official data on tropical cyclones. The evidence also does not support the IPCC claim of detection and attribution related to tropical cyclones.

ULEZ Extension: Damning New Report Shatters ‘Scientific’ Claims Made By London Mayor Khan

The alarmist foundation for ULEZ expansion has disintegrated.

Read the new Together Declaration & Climate Debate UK report by Ben Pile demonstrating that neither the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) nor the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) find evidence of a causal link between air pollution and mortality.

Despite Khan claiming that 4,000 Londoners die each year, both UKHSA and COMEAP explicitly advise against framing the potential mortality risk associated with air pollution exposure in terms of deaths because it is untrue and unscientific.

UK climate activist arrested after attacks on banks

Oxford Circus climate demo [image credit: London Evening Standard]

Even ill-informed, climate-obsessed attention seekers calling themselves activists can take things too far, it seems. Having already got away with various reported actions that most people would consider to be outside the law, tolerance is wearing thin.
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LONDON (Reuters) — British climate activist Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion group, was arrested at home on Tuesday for conspiracy to cause criminal damage and fraud after her group attacked banks such as HSBC and Barclays, says yahoo!news.

Activists from the group smashed the window frontage of HSBC and Barclays in Canary Wharf last month and have targeted Lloyd’s of London as part of what the activists cast as a “Money Rebellion”.

A guessing game for climate data experienced sceptics.

I’m not writing anything in this post which will get it automatically flagged up to our blog hosts or anyone else. Look at the images and see what you think.

Figure 1. Incomplete teaser from the ONS, and my inductive reasoning.

“Climate fraud”: German EV support boosting sales of big SUV hybrids

BMW plug-in hybrid

German car buyers soon worked out that a heavily subsidised hybrid could often be bought for less than the non-hybrid version of the same model – but could then be run on fuel as much as they liked, making a mockery of so-called climate policies.
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Germany’s EV boom is partly thanks to generous government incentives, but these are also helping to boost sales of big SUVs, reports The Driven.

Government subsidies for electric vehicles are also given to plug-in hybrids which run both on battery power and a combustion engine.

Their sales have picked up by 463 percent compared to September 2019, and it is large SUVs such as the BMW X5 plug-in-hybrid that are profiting from the government premium, Georg Meck writes in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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.

Michael Moore’s new film skewers green energy

The non-solution to the non-problem gets another going-over. Anything that gives the lie to ‘clean green’ mythology and gets a few headlines has to be welcomed.
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A newly-released documentary from contrarian filmmaker Michael Moore calls green energy a fraud that is destroying the Earth, says Lorrie Goldstein @ The Toronto Sun.

Planet of the Humans also accuses the environmental movement of selling out to corporate and Wall St. interests, by shilling for these so-called renewable technologies.

The film premiered at the Traverse City Film Festival in July, but Moore released it on YouTube for free for 30 days on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on Wednesday.

No Plan B for Planet A

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Reality check for wide-eyed climate obsessives: the logistics of their so-called plan can never work.

PA Pundits International

By Paul Driessen ~

Environmentalists and Green New Deal proponents like to say we must take care of the Earth, because “There is no Planet B.” Above all, they insist, we must eliminate fossil fuels, which they say are causing climate change worse than the all-natural ice ages, Medieval Warm Period or anything else in history.

Their Plan A is simple: No fossil fuels. Keep them in the ground. More than a few Democrat presidential aspirants have said they would begin implementing that diktat their very first day in the White House.

Their Plan B is more complex: Replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, biofuel and battery power – their supposedly renewable, sustainable alternatives to oil, gas and coal. Apparently by waving a magic wand.

We don’t have a Planet B. And they don’t really have a Plan B. They just assume and expect that this monumental transformation will simply

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Prof. Ian Plimer: Earth is ‘not in a period of extinction’

‘Belief is in politics and religion, not science…follow the money’, says Professor Plimer.

Geologist and earth scientist Ian Plimer says the globe is not facing a climate emergency, telling Sky News Australia that “we are actually still living in an ice age.”

Professor Plimer’s comments come after Extinction Rebellion protesters have been calling on the government to declare a climate emergency – something the scientist said isn’t necessary.

“We live in horribly boring times,” he said.

Tesla owner sues company for alleged battery fraud

Tesla model X [image credit: IB Times]

In a world where car makers can remotely change the characteristics of a vehicle after selling it, obviously nobody wants the result to make the car less attractive to own than before. Did that happen here?

A Tesla owner has filed a suit against the carmaker claiming the company used a software update to deliberately reduce the battery range of his vehicle in an attempt to avoid a recall due to faults in these batteries, reports OilPrice.com.

Reuters reports the suit was filed earlier this week, with the plaintiff seeking class action status on the grounds that “thousands” of other owners of older Model S and X cars could have been affected.

In some cases, according to the allegations, the range reduction came in at as much as 40 miles.

Why Green Energy Won’t Work In The Alarmists’ Future

Image credit: MIT

If the global warming nightmare was to happen, solar and wind systems simply don’t work in high-heat environments. So why are activists pushing them, asks Climate Change Dispatch?

Everything, and I mean everything about the man-made global warming movement is rotten to the core, says Dr. Joel Adams.

Tens of thousands of our own brave and brilliant scientists, as well as websites such as Climate Change Dispatch, are fighting the good fight against the climate change fraud every day. It’s a fight we are working hard to win.

I just completed a 435-page book on the subject of climate change fraud and the people and motivations behind it.

I discovered that as bad as the scientific fraud is, the motivations behind it turned out to be worse. These motivations are to put it in a few words: money and a political totalitarian power grab by the political Left.

Peter Ridd: Crying wolf over The Great Barrier Reef

Great Barrier Reef, Australia [image credit:BBC]

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
Dr. Ridd points out that coral bleaching damage ‘looks terrible at first, but it quietly and rapidly grows back ready for the scientists to peddle their story all over again.’ Bad news is headlined, good news ignored.

The scare stories about the Great Barrier Reef started in the 1960’s when scientists first started work on the reef. They have been crying wolf ever since.

Scientists from James Cook University have just published a paper on the bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and were surprised that the death rate was less than they expected because of the adaptability of corals to changing temperatures. It appears as though they exaggerated their original claims and are quietly backtracking.

Solar and wind: some suggestions on how to inflate the numbers

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Another outbreak of lies, damned lies…and statistics from the renewables publicity machine gets exposed. This time it’s Belgium in the spotlight.

Trust, yet verify

The previous post focused on the contribution-of-solar-and-wind-to-total-load metric as used by our Flemish Minister of Energy. In short, there was a lot of electricity production by solar and wind on a Saturday afternoon (when electricity consumption is traditionally low) leading to a 45% contribution by those two power sources to total load. This was praised as a “new record”. We can’t control the sun nor the wind and consumption of electricity follows certain patterns, so some pretty high contribution values are bound to happen, making it a rather meaningless metric.

He also used other equally meaningless metrics in te past. At the beginning of the year, he surprised us all with the MWh-per-km² metric. According to this metric the Belgians are among the best in “Europe” when it comes to solar and wind energy! We are in the top 3 when it comes to production of solar energy…

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The Chequers Cabinet conclusions – an assessment by Lawyers for Britain

The fix is in. UK prime minister Theresa May is on her hind legs telling us black is white and expecting us to swallow the lie. Brexit minsters David Davis and Steve Baker have resigned. Foreign secretary Boris Johnson has followed suit. Several parliamentary private secretaries have also resigned in protest at TMay’s non-brexit plan.

Lawyers for Britain chair Martin Howe has written this assessment of the ‘Chequers deal’ summary released to the press. It lays out in strong terms just how deceptive TMay is when she claims in parliament that her Chequers deal represents the Brexit the country voted for. If it was, those ministers wouldn’t have felt the need to resign their positions.

Ever wonder where the 275 billion taxpayers money went that got poured down the EU carbon trading system hole?

Talkshop readers may remember a damning report by UBS about the billions of public money lost in the ETS carbon trading system. It calculated that if the money had been invested in modernising the European power generation fleet, CO2 could have been cut by 40% (and generate a huge number of high quality jobs). EU emissions rose 1.8% last year.

Despite all the recent turmoil over the UK steel industry and meetings in Brussels today, the reality is that the European Union has actually been subsidising the Chinese steel industry for years, in payments hidden amongst its efforts to combat Climate Change.

Using complex methods of carbon credits and carbon offsets, the EU devised rules on climate change ended up paying Chinese steel manufacturers billions to upgrade their steel mills and other energy intensive industry.

According to the analysis company, European Insights, almost €1.5 billion was paid to over 90 steel plants in China with the purpose of modernising them to consume less energy, and making the plants more efficient. Taken with the downturn in Chinese trade and the need for them to reduce world market prices to sell their product, the output of these mills has flooded onto the European market making steel products artificially cheap and endangering thousands of jobs in the UK. One plant alone, Anshan Iron and Steel, received a payment of €150 million to help pay for the installation of up to date equipment and replace the old inefficient Communist era machinery.

Bad books: How Ontario’s new hydro accounting could cost taxpayers billions

Hydro power lines in Ontario

Once again the high cost of so-called ‘green’ policies turns out to be politically embarrassing, and attempts to hide the true facts seem to have made things much worse.

As Ontarians head to the polls in June, voters have to make sense of two competing versions of their province’s bottom line: The Auditor-General’s and the Kathleen Wynne government’s, reports Toronto’s Globe and Mail.

Matthew McClearn investigates how creative accounting in hydro revenue made their math so different.

Uncertainties about human caused climate change were deleted from IPCC report.

Document Page 1 of 2
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
A major deception on ‘global warming’
Wall Street Journal; New York; lun 12, 1996; Seitz, Frederick;
Edition: Eastern edition
Start Pa~e: A16
ISSN: 00999660
Subject Terms: Research
Professional ethics
Greenhouseffect
Climate
Companies: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Abstract:
Frederick Seitz asserts that the report on global warming released in Jun 1996 by the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not the same version that was approved by the  contributing body of scientists listed on the title page. Seitz explains how the events that led to the IPCC report are “a disturbing corruption of the peer-review process” and says the deleted passages removed “hints of the skepticism” with which many scientists regard claims about global warming.

Polar bear attack paper invalidated by non-independent analysis

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Playing prosecutor judge and jury ensures the desired outcome in the minds of these climate alarmists. But all they’ve really done is damage themselves.

Shub Niggurath Climate

From Bart Verheggen’s blog, where he clearly identifies himself as a co-author of a paper in a post promoting it

Stephen Lewandowsky has co-authored (yet another) paper attacking climate skeptics. His colleagues-in-arms this time are long-time climate consensusite Jeff Harvey , Bart Vergheggen, and a cohort of ecologists along with Michael Mann. First author Harvey is well-known to climate commenters as a rant-prone passionate bulldog for the climate cause.

The main supposed finding of the paper is that zoologist Susan Crockford is the source of a number of skeptical blog posts. Harvey and colleagues claim a large figure (80%). The authors then claim to identify a ‘majority-view’ position in the polar bear literature, which they say is diametrically opposite of the Crockford-based blog position/s.

Polar bear alarmism has a checquered history and scientists Ian Stirling, Steven Amstrup and Andrew Derocher have been prominent proponents. All three have made several statements pushing…

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