EU project wants ‘Lifestyle changes to keep the world from warming up’

Money to burn?

The supposed model citizen of the future will have a prescribed minimalist lifestyle pattern to follow, using as few resources as possible and generally living small under various restrictions not seen today, if this kind of thinking – backed by EU finance – is anything to go by. All to be determined with the aid of ‘citizen thinking labs’.
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Scientists widely agree that we must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic climate impacts, claims Phys.org. [Talkshop comment – ignoring all the scientists that disagree with human-caused warming theories].

Environmental scientist Laura Scherer investigates how we should change lifestyles to achieve this temperature goal.

Her research is part of the 4.8-million-euro Horizon 2020 project EU 1.5° Lifestyles.

Europe’s heavy industry unlikely to survive Net Zero

Irsching 4 gas power plant, Bavaria [image credit: E.ON]

Government interfering in commercial markets for ideological reasons may well work out badly, and this looks like an obvious example. Bowing down to climate dogma doesn’t do anybody any favours.
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It is becoming ever more evident that much of Europe’s heavy industry is unlikely to survive the EU’s unilateral Net Zero policy, says The GWPF & Financial Times.

The EU’s carbon price reached a new record high of 45 euros ($54) a tonne on Tuesday.

As the carbon price is expected to increase much further in the next few years, European industrial groups are desperately calling for the introduction of a carbon border tax, hoping that it will save them from international competitors that are able to produce much cheaper.

Tech needed to halt climate change still underdeveloped, IEA complains

The notion of buying a climate with the aid of future tech is looking as far away as ever. Certainly not within the dreamt-up deadlines we’re fed with almost daily, at the present rate of ‘progress’. The obvious solution being of course to ditch the unscientific ‘net zero’ fantasies and rejoin the real world, but that’s too much to ask of the climate obsessives running most governments today.
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Global climate targets can only be reached with a major acceleration in clean-energy innovation, as many of the technologies required to bring down CO2 emissions are currently only at the prototype or demonstration phase.

This is the conclusion of a joint report released Tuesday from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), reports DW.com.

“Around half the emissions reductions to get to net zero by 2050 may need to come from technologies that are not yet on the market,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a press release.

UK to speed up target to cut carbon dioxide emissions

Ever-rising energy costs and a blizzard of new regulations await as the government dives further down the climate rabbit hole.
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Radical new climate change commitments are to become law in the UK, Boris Johnson will announce this week.

The prime minister will say carbon emissions will be cut by 78% by 2035 – almost 15 years earlier than previously planned – which would be a world-leading position, says BBC News.

And for the first time the climate law would be extended to cover international aviation and shipping.

But Labour said the government had to match “rhetoric with reality”.

The Green Mirage

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Wind is generating a mere 1-2% of UK electricity today, the cause being a high pressure weather system with very low wind speeds, which no amount of subsidy can ever prevent. Discuss.

Science Matters

John Constable writes at Civitas The Green Mirage: Why a Low-Carbon Economy May be Further Off Than We Think. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images. h/t Real Clear Public Affairs

Findings:

• The prospects for a sustainable, low-carbon economy as the result of current UK national and EU-wide policies are poor.
• Empirical experience in Spain and Germany shows that the costs of supporting renewable energy generation are too high.
• Rising employment in the renewable energy sector compared to the wider UK economy stems from unsustainably high subsidies.
• Renewables are naturally less productive, so as they are relentlessly pursued, a painful rebalancing of the economy will occur, with fewer jobs and less economic growth.

Bottom Line: The current prospects for a sustainable low-carbon economy are poor in both the UK and across the European Union (EU). Germany and Spain have already clearly shown what happens when state coercion forces…

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America Pursues Expensive Electricity While Much Of The World Lives In Energy Poverty

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Climate virtue signallers demand belief in their fool’s paradise, regardless of cost.

PA Pundits - International

By Ronald Stein ~

With many still living with little to no access to electricity, American politicians are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity with offshore wind turbines on the East and West Coasts.

The U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA) has already documented that offshore wind continues to be one of the most expensive forms of electricity generation.

Energy poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21^st century. Electricity is the one of the simplest solutions to improved health, economic opportunity, education, nutrition, and comfort in the developing world, especially for women and girls.

In the world’s poorest countries, there are 11 million children in the world dying every year.

Those fatalities are from the preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth as many developing countries have no…

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Why are people not doing more about climate change? — asks BBC Scotland

Scotland’s new Queensferry Crossing road bridge [image credit: BBC]

‘Saving the world’ just isn’t value for money to most Scots it seems, as they look at their ever-rising energy bills. And buying any brand new car is an expensive option anyway. Much-touted ‘green’ ideology and the shrill propaganda of climate alarmists don’t work so well in the real world, where economics matter more than ’emissions’. 
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Cost and confusion are the two main reasons people are not changing to greener options, the BBC finds.

I drive a diesel car, eat meat and just a few months ago had a gas boiler installed in my house, that’s quite an admission for an environment correspondent who reports on climate change, says BBC Scotland’s Kevin Keane.

The problem is that greener options are financially out of reach for me and – it seems – most Scots. That is something I have been investigating for BBC Scotland’s Disclosure.

World feigns climate concern as most nations ignore Paris Agreement

‘Cutting emissions’ means economic self-harm and loss of secure electricity supplies. This morning the UK is importing over 14% of its power, and its extensive wind turbine fleet is producing a pitiful 2.4% of the total supply. Gas is saving the day, but nobody wants to build new gas plants any more due to the ‘challenging economics’.
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A UN climate summit to be held in Glasgow in November will fail unless more countries follow Britain’s lead and make far more ambitious plans to cut emissions, the United Nations has said.

Only two of the world’s 18 largest greenhouse gas emitters — the UK and the European Union — — the UK and the European Union — have so far submitted plans for the COP26 summit that lay out extensive commitments and policies to reduce emissions, says The Times (via The GWPF).

Texas Power Freeze-Down Demonstrates Political Climate Craziness

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Always remember: “The guaranteed output of wind + sun = 0.”

PA Pundits - International

By Larry Bell ~

Texas just sent a very chilling message to the rest of the nation about what to expect your life to be like with President Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan AKA, “Green New Deal,” in order to save the planet from overheating.

It seems he’s already overachieving that goal.

An unusual Arctic blast that spread across the state from the tip of the Panhandle all the way to the Rio Grande Valley has left millions of homes and businesses here without electricity.

A series of forced rolling blackouts were required to prevent power grid collapse as single-digit temperatures froze wind turbines and hobbled dozens of power plant operations.

How could this possibly happen here in Texas?

This isn’t supposed to be California, after all, where over-dependence on wind and solar power destabilized the grid during a record 2020 heat wave.

California already leads the nation with the least…

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The search widens for hot rocks that provide power

Geothermal Power Plant in Iceland [image credit: Wikipedia]

Tapping into geothermal energy always seems like one of those ideas that maybe works in a few local areas, but won’t make a massive difference on the global scale. There’s also its earthquake problem to dent the enthusiasm of climate-obsessed ‘green’ ideologists.
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Drilling holes into an extinct volcano might sound like an unusual start to an energy project, says BBC News.

But that’s what J Michael Palin, a senior lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand, is planning to do.

His project involves drilling two boreholes to a depth of 500m (1,600ft) and monitoring the rock to see if it is suitable to provide geothermal energy.

“It has been known for some time that the Dunedin region has surface heat flow about 30% higher than expected based on previous measurements,” says Dr Palin.

It is that free heat that Dr Palin is hoping to tap into.

U.S. energy crisis deepens with nearly 5 million in the dark

Some of the points regularly made by critics of the energy policies of climate obsessed leaders with fixed ideas, get an airing here. If reports like this don’t make it obvious to all that renewables-based policies aren’t working and won’t work, what will? All this is happening when the planned switch to electric-only transport has, fortunately for all, barely started.
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The energy crisis crippling Texas’s power system continued to spread, with nearly 5 million people across the U.S plunged into darkness as authorities fought to avoid a total collapse of the grid, says Bloomberg.

Homes and businesses from North Dakota to Texas are losing power in the middle of an unprecedented deep freeze that has broken daily temperature records in hundreds of places.

Japan is driving around in circles on reducing emissions from motor vehicles

Toyota’s Prius model

The Toyota boss reckons hybrids are a better idea than all-electric since no expensive new power supplies or charging points are needed, with recharging built-in to the vehicle. Also, lifetime CO2 emissions are comparable to EVs when all factors are taken into account. (No range anxiety
either). As someone demanding realism, one suspects he’s not too impressed by on-off renewables either.
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In his first policy speech as prime minister last October, Yoshihide Suga pledged to reduce Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, thus giving substance to the government’s goal of eliminating the need for fossil fuels in the latter half of the 21st century, says the Japan Times.

Part of that goal is to ban new internal combustion engine cars by the mid-2030s, a pledge addressed by Akio Toyoda, the president of the world’s No. 2 automaker, Toyota Motor Corp., and chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, during a Dec. 17 online news conference he held under the latter capacity.

Toyoda derided the government policy as being ill-informed and unrealistic.

Radical Left Executive Orders Discredit Biden’s Unity Talk

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Here come the decrees based on dodgy climate ideology. What could possibly go wrong?

PA Pundits - International

By Craig Rucker ~

The torrent of ruinous policy emanating from the White House continues unabated.

As one internet memester put it, “pace yourself Joe, you have four years.  You don’t have to destroy the country your first week.”

Generations of Americans worked tirelessly to achieve energy independence.  They realized the dream at last, until President Biden rushed not only to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, but now to block future oil and gas leases on all federal lands.

Energy analyst Ron Stein writes at CFACT.org that “Biden, like his favorite state of California, is doing everything possible to INCREASE the cost of electricity and fuels, that drives up the cost of everything.”

President Biden also ordered the entire federal fleet of over 600,000 cars and trucks be converted to electric vehicles, no matter where they are!  Good luck finding a place to charge those short-range monuments to…

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Richard Betts Finally Gives Up On Science – Embraces Politics, Ideology and Pseudoscience

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Not seeing any evidence of the ‘milder winters…expected in the United Kingdom (Murphy et al. 2018), with less frequent cold extremes and new high temperature records’ so far this winter. Snow or sleet at random every few days would be more in line with reality.

climatecontrarian

Over the years, Richard Betts of the Met Office, has been the ‘sceptic’s friend’; a down to earth, reasonable, approachable, pragmatic scientist who actively sought to present a balanced view on the risks associated with climate change and to counter the alarmism and hyperbole put out in the press and supported by some of his more enthusiastic peers, as well as overtly political climate activists. Sadly, he has now jumped the shark completely, even to the point of insulting sceptics by implying that they are ‘deniers’, a term he always refrained from using. He’s even, by the sound of it, helping Extinction Rebellion fanatics arrested for breaking the law defend their actions in court by providing them with scientific ‘evidence’ which supposedly justifies their unlawful activities.

Heed blame for extreme weather – my new article in @Nature on extreme event attribution and why it's important and useful

This draws on…

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Scottish Government has ‘no plan B’ and reliant on ‘unproven technology’ to hit climate targets

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

All these political climate fantasies will get rumbled in the end. The cracks between the ‘ambitions’ and reality just keep getting wider, and that’s not just the SNP in Scotland, it’s everywhere you look.
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EXPERTS have warned the Scottish Government’s strategy for hitting ambitious climate targets by 2030 is based on “wishful thinking” amid fears there is no plan B in the event untested technology cannot be scaled up, says The Herald (via Latest News Post).

Scottish Government ministers have published their climate change update after MSPs pledged to reduce 1990 levels of carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 on the way to becoming carbon neutral by 2045.

But experts have raised concerns that using carbon capture and storage (CCS) and negative emissions technology (NET) to decarbonise heavy industry such as the oil and gas sector are not based on evidence it can be done in time.

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.”

Conform to EU’s ‘carbon’ obsession – or pay its trading price

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

How is this dogmatic ‘do as we do or else’ approach, of trying to impose narrow-minded climate views on the whole world, not going to stoke up a pointless trade war?
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If UN climate summit (COP26) fails to deliver, the EU will press ahead with unilateral carbon border taxes, EU official warns.

The European Union’s proposed carbon border charge is essential to the survival of its own industries and the bloc will impose the levy on non-EU competitors unless they commit to lowering their emissions, the bloc’s climate policy chief said on Monday.

The EU’s executive Commission is expected to propose its carbon border adjustment policy before the end of June as part of a broader package of climate laws aiming to cut emissions by 55% before the end of the decade.

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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Carbon capture is vital to meeting climate goals, say scientists – but industrial-scale wood burning is OK?

Drax power station, generating 7% of Britain’s needs, is partly converted to burning imported woodchips.

More climate doublethink here. While supporting the burning of wood pellets to generate electricity, thereby creating massive carbon dioxide emissions that may reside in the atmosphere for a number of years, some climate obsessives insist that removing such emissions from the atmosphere is ‘desperately needed’. The illogicality of this has been largely ignored, but now Friends of the Earth Scotland and others have complained that CCS has a “history of over-promising and under-delivering”. Will CCS ever be viable either in terms of cost or practicality? If anything, current evidence points in the other direction.
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Supporters insist that storage technology is not a costly mistake but the best way for UK to cut emissions from heavy industry, says The Guardian.

Engineers and geologists have strongly criticised green groups who last week claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes – for reducing fossil fuel emissions – are costly mistakes.

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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