Big Green Inc.: Inside the $4 billion U.S. foundations funding Green activists

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

It seems some people in the US with money to burn are queuing up to try and buy the weather they think they want, with fossil fuels their primary target. The concept of natural variation of the climate has either totally escaped them, or they must think it belongs in the past only.
H/T The GWPF

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday, writes Michael Bastasch.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016.

Tony Thomas: Suffer your children

Of all the green/Left groups badgering schoolkids about human-caused global warming, the most determined is the Australian Academy of Science. It pushes its government-funded campaign to Year 9 students via the ‘Big Systems’ unit in its ‘Science by Doing’ course. About 16,000 Australian science teachers – two out of three – have signed on. The science teachers work in 80 per cent of secondary schools. About 160,000 users are registered, including 50,000 newcomers last year.

‘Big Systems’ is a revision of the Academy’s 2013 course. Here’s from the original (tinyurl.com/nwxj76e):

Lesson outcomes: At the end of this activity students will… appreciate the need to lobby at all levels of government to ignite and lead change – even if it is unpopular with the voters.

Ask [15-16 year old] students if they have ever taken action or advocated for a cause. Do they know of anyone who has? Key vocabulary: advocacy, campaign, champion, environmentalist.

If you were concerned about Earth’s sustainability, who would you vote for?

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.

CFACT billboard — Russia funneled cash to Greens to cripple energy

June 21, 2018 by CFACT

CFACT’s kicked off a new billboard on busy I-10 in Louisiana which reads, “Russia funneled Green groups millions of dollars to oppose fracking & cripple American energy,” and asks, “How’s that for COLLUSION?”

The billboard campaign was spearheaded by CFACT’s Graham Beduze and Adam Houser.

Russia wants to reduce and eliminate competition to its energy exports with the goal of keeping prices high and the world, particularly Europe, dependent on Russian energy.

What better allies could Putin find but the free world’s network of Green pressure groups?

Booker: Is obsession with global warming rotting the political class’s brains?

Wood burner [image credit: BBC]

That point was probably reached ten years ago when the UK’s notorious Climate Change Act was passed. Now we have things like this “Scandal of ‘killer’ wood burning stoves”.

The bitter truth is that these fiascos caused by our obsession with wood-burning are just a part of a larger disaster that taints almost every green scheme governments have foisted on Britain, writes Christopher Booker in the Daily Mail.

The Government earned plaudits from the green lobby yesterday for its new plan to crack down on the craze for wood-burning stoves.

As the Mail reported on its front page, the stoves chuck out lethal pollution, particularly from wet wood, and contribute to thousands of early deaths from lung and heart disease.

But hang on!

Ed Hoskins: UK Weather Dependent Renewable Energy installations: Installed capacity, costs and output 2017

Introduction

This post is concerned with the two main forms of UK Weather Dependent Renewable Energy in the UK, Wind Power, (Onshore and Offshore), and on grid Photovoltaic Solar Power.  In the UK these amount to ~75% of all installed Weather Dependent Renewable Energy.  The other Renewable energy inputs are traditional Hydro power ~8% and the remainder are other sources such as biomass, waste and landfill gas amounting to ~17%.

The capacity percentage, or load factor, of any power generating installation is calculated as the actual electrical output achieved annually divided by the nominal maximum Nameplate output.  This article uses the real measures of capacity reported in up to date time series data of UK Renewable installations.  It thus provides reasonably correct comparisons of the efficacy of Weather Dependent Renewables as is reported annually by the Renewable Energy Foundation in the UK.
 

Climate-industrial complex wasting £100 billion and shutting down debate – warns Lilley

Credit: Fenbeagle

H/T The GWPF

Former Trade and Industry Minister, Peter Lilley warns that vested interests in the renewables industry, politicians of all parties, the bureaucracy and academia have together largely suppressed debate about their reckless waste of public money exposed by the government’s own Review of the Cost of Energy by Dieter Helm.

In a paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Peter Lilley highlights Professor Dieter Helm’s devastating critique, outlined in the Cost of Energy Review which was commissioned by the government.

“Helm shows that the Climate Change Act objective of cutting emissions of carbon dioxide could have been met for a fraction of the £100 billion so far committed, which has already raised the cost of energy by 20%.”

Iberdrola chief says global renewable sector facing Enron-style endgame

As the 2008 financial crash fades into history, a sudden lack of availability of cheap money for big industrial projects could undermine some of the newer renewables enterprises, if or when bankers start asking for their ‘umbrellas’ back.

The chief executive of Spanish utility Iberdrola, Ignacio Galan, has warned of the prospect of financial disaster for the global renewable energy sector, reminiscent of the collapse of Enron, reports PEI.

Galan said that the imminent end of cheap finance would have a damaging impact on the new players to the green energy market, adding that these new non-industrial entrants with little experience were making overly aggressive bids on contracts to build renewable energy, thinking it was a financial “El Dorado”.

Winds of change blow through German parliament

Reblogged from Pierre Gosselin’s No-Tricks-Zone

As Germany’s established CDU and SPD “mainstream” parties find themselves imploding, the smaller parties who oppose Germany’s out-of-control Energiewende(transition to green energies) are rapidly becoming a formidable force and making their presence felt in Germany’s national parliament like never before.

For example Germany’s FDP Free Democrats, who refused to forge a coalition government together with CDU/CSU and Green parties, have become increasingly vocal critics of Germany’s green energy scheme.

Politicians ignoring the concerns German citizens
Last month in her first speech ever in the German Parliament, FDP parliamentarian Sandra Weeser slammed the struggling Energiewende and the latest signals to promote it even further.

Rupert Darwall: Green Welly Tories dig #Brexit industrial policy black hole.

The May government’s greenwashing is classic displacement activity. Productivity numbers released by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month should be front and centre of every government policy. Normally productivity growth falls in a recession but then bounces back to the previous trend, the ONS says. This time it didn’t. If productivity had returned to its pre-downturn trend, output per hour would have been very nearly 19.8 per cent higher. Imagine – workers’ pre-tax incomes one fifth higher; a fast-disappearing budget deficit; a government able to cut taxes and provide more resources for the NHS – taxing plastic cups won’t solve the NHS winter crisis – and more money for schools. A strong economy would sail through Brexit and not have ministers quivering in their boots. Instead the conversation is about disposable cups and plastic waste.

Environmentalists lose climate lawsuit over Arctic oil drilling

Norway’s Goliat oil platform [image credit: T3n60 @ Wikipedia]

Another attempt to use the law to get a court to take on the role of government over supposed climate issues bites the dust, assuming no appeal. The green groups were ordered to pay the state’s $94,000 legal costs.

Oslo District Court on Thursday ruled that Norway’s drilling for oil in the Barents Sea does not violate a constitutional right to a healthy environment, reports The Barents Observer.

The government acts in accordance with the law when awarding new petroleum exploration licenses for the Barents Sea, the ruling by Oslo District Court reads. Greenpeace, one of the three organizations which filed the lawsuit, has published the court’s 49-pages comprehensive ruling.

The lawsuit was challenging Norway’s 23rd oil licensing round arguing that opening up the Arctic continental shelf would violate the country’s Paris agreement commitments to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Green activists forced to withdraw false ‘50% off’ claim in wind power adverts

Greens playing propaganda tricks on the public? Probably not their first ‘offence’ of this kind…
H/T The GWPF

Environmental activists have withdrawn an advertising campaign after being accused of making false claims about the price of wind energy, says the Daily Mail.

The poster, launched in September by Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi and plastered around Westminster Tube station and across London’s transport network, claimed the price had fallen by 50 per cent over the past two years.

Spread the warmth this Christmas

The Paris Climate Treaty, the UK Climate Change Act, the US CO2 endangerment finding. These misconceived policies decided on by scientifically ignorant and socially cocooned politicians KILL people. Far more people die of cold and cold related illnesses than suffer from heat-stroke. As the effects of these policies bite harder on personal finances, we need to look after those vulnerable people in our communities who cannot afford to heat their homes, or don’t even have a home to heat.

Delingpole: Exposed – the Liberal astroturfers behind the global warming scare

A look behind the curtain shows climate-related campaigning is sometimes just a front for the machinations of American party politics, the goal being to undermine the Trump agenda.

In order to drain the swamp, President Trump must first destroy the global warming Green Blob, says James Delingpole at Breitbart News.

This is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from a series of data leaks and Freedom of Information (FOI) revelations exposing the relationship between left wing campaigners and the great climate change scam.

Global warming, it becomes clear, is primarily a left-wing political issue, not a scientific one. Green is the new red.

These leaks show how rich liberal backers—left-wing institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, eco hedge-fund billionaires like Tom Steyer, and the various socialistic Geek Emperors of Silicon Valley—are funneling millions of dollars into sock-puppet environmental organizations both to undermine Trump’s economic agenda and to finance his political opponents both in the Democratic Party and the GOP.

Graham Stringer MP: Now that’s an inconvenient truth

As a long-time critic of climate alarmism, chemistry graduate Graham Stringer MP is not surprised by the latest cracks appearing in the facade of modern climate science, as the GWPF reports.

Al Gore, the U.S. politician and self-appointed champion of the green cause, famously declared that ‘the science is settled’ on climate change. It was a claim that revealed far more about the intolerance of the environmental movement than the reality of scientific inquiry.

Research should be founded on critical analysis of the evidence, not on wishful thinking or enforcement of a political ideology. Now the hollowness of Gore’s assertion is exposed again by a vital new report that shows how the apocalyptic predictions of the green lobby have been exaggerated.

In a study just published by the respected journal Nature Geoscience, a group of British academics reveals that the immediate threat from global warming is lower than previously thought, because the computer models used by climate change experts are flawed.

Road to nowhere? Green groups call for EV rollout to be accelerated

Waiting for a recharge

When are people going to notice that making electric cars compulsory would/will limit them to travelling relatively short distances from home without a break, assuming they can afford one at all?

Green groups have urged the government to demonstrate its commitment to clean growth by accelerating the proposed ban on diesel and petrol engine cars and vans, reports Utility Week.

In a new report published today (25 August), the Green Alliance of environmental charities and groups has called on ministers to require all new cars and vans to be zero emission by 2030.

In its air quality plan, published last month, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs set a target that petrol and diesel should be banned by 2040.

RSPB fights Scottish govt. backed Tay and Forth wind farm developments

From the Evening Express

The Scottish Government gave consent to four major wind farms in the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay in 2014, but the RSPB launched a judicial review.

The charity initially won a court victory but it was later overturned, clearing the development and prompting the RSPB to seek a further appeal.

Scotland’s Court of Session last month refused the application for the case to be sent to the Supreme Court, but the RSPB has now applied directly to the UK’s highest court.

The charity said it recognises the role renewable energy has in reducing emissions but the current project could lead to major declines in the population of gannets, puffins and kittiwakes.

Peter Hitchens: The REAL villain behind your surging electricity bill

From part of Peter Hitchens Mail on Sunday Blog

I feel sorry for British Gas, attacked for raising the price of electricity. I still find it confusing a gas company sells electricity, but the facts are quite simple.

British Gas and the other power companies are raising charges because we have a mad Government. Under New Labour’s unhinged Climate Change Act, backed by the Tories and virtually unopposed in Parliament, we are steering straight into an iceberg.

Perfectly good coal-fired power stations all over the country are being shut down and blown up so they can’t be reopened, because of crazed Green regulations.

In some cases, they are being converted to burning wood chips imported from the USA. If this did any good (which is, er, unproven) it would be immediately cancelled out by the huge number of new coal-fired power stations recently built in India and China.

African children pay the price for “clean green” electric car battery technology

Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.

Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.

Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.

Monckton: Green policy kills jobs and causes energy poverty

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Excerpt from an open letter to the head of MIT:

Professor Reif of MIT says, “In 2016 alone, solar industry employment grew by 25 percent, while wind jobs grew 32%.” These numbers are highly misleading. In fact, they underscore how deficient these energy sources are as job creators.

Growing jobs by subsidy is easy, provided that one cares nothing for the far greater number of jobs destroyed by the additional taxation, energy price hikes or public borrowing necessary to pay for the subsidy. Several studieshave shown that the creation of one “green” job results in the loss of two to four jobs elsewhere in the economy. In Spain the estimated ratio was two jobs lost for each one created by renewable energy, prompting the government to finally end most renewable subsidies.

And yet, despite all those subsidies, wind and solar power generation expensively and unreliably account for 5.6% and 0.9% of total U.S. electricity production, respectively. On its own, electricity provides only a small fraction of total energy consumption, including transportation, industrial processes, heating and electricity generation, so these numbers actually exaggerate the contribution of wind and solar facilities to overall energy consumption.