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’.
– – –
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

.
.
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…

View original post 935 more words

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.
– – –
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.
– – –

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.
– – –
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

.
.
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…

View original post 181 more words

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

.
.
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…

View original post 1,208 more words

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.
– – –
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.
– – –
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?
– – –
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

.
.
‘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…

View original post 923 more words

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.
– – –
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

.
.
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…

View original post 900 more words

Congressional Democrats just admitted the US can’t afford the Green New Deal

Anyone thinking the benefit (?) would be a noticeable effect on global temperatures is going to be disappointed, as the article points out. Government-controlled climate is a fantasy, however much the exchequer is robbed.
– – –
Democrats accidentally showed their hand by voting for a new loophole to the U.S. House of Representatives budget rules, says the Washington Examiner.

The “pay as you go” rule, which imposes a modicum of fiscal restraint by requiring spending increases to be accompanied by spending cuts to keep the national deficit from growing, now specifically excludes climate change-related bills.

In going forward with it, the House essentially admitted that we can’t afford the Green New Deal and that Democrats don’t want you to know how much it costs, either.

Carving out special treatment for big-government climate programs will give Congress license to spend with abandon on nominally eco-friendly initiatives without the slightest impact on climate change.

Removal of dairy cows would have minimal effect on ’emissions’, say researchers

Climate obsessives will have to find something else to try and bother the long-suffering public with.
– – –
The dairy industry in the United States is massive, says AgriMarketing .

It supplies dietary requirements to the vast majority of the population.

This same industry also contributes approximately 1.58 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

A commonly suggested solution to reduce greenhouse gas output has been to reduce or eliminate this industry in favor of plant production.

A team of Virginia Tech researchers wanted to uncover the actual impact that these cows have on the environment.

California is scrambling to avoid blackouts – not using the refrigerator could help

Solar power complex in California [USA. Gov – BLM – Bureau of Land Management]

Welcome to the inglorious green revolution, where the lives of ageing gas power plants have to be extended and various other mini ‘solutions’, some relying on equipment owned by individual citizens, have to be adopted in a frantic effort to keep the lights on. Of course none of this was necessary before renewables were deemed to be the future of electricity supply, in the vain hope of altering the climate. What’s next if these measures are not enough?
– – –
Sometime next summer, there’s a decent chance a heat wave will bake the American West, and California’s power grid will again be stretched to its limits, says TechXplore.

As the sun sets, solar panels will start generating less electricity even as temperatures remain high.

Power plants that burn natural gas will fire up as quickly as possible, in a race to keep air conditioners blowing and avert the need for rolling blackouts.

But the fossil fuel won’t be alone in riding to the rescue.

As power supplies tighten, lithium-ion batteries—some connected to sprawling solar farms in the desert and others tucked away in household garages—will dispense electricity produced during the afternoon sunlight.

A small but growing number of household batteries will be part of coordinated networks, discharging in unison as dictated by the needs of the grid.

Meanwhile, millions of people will cut back on electricity use in their homes, in some cases because state officials asked nicely and in others because they’re getting paid to conserve.

U.S. Solar Industry Itching To Import Chinese Panels

.
.
There may be a place for some use of solar panels, but replacing all fuel-burning power stations isn’t it.

PA Pundits - International

By Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. ~

The chief beneficiary of the incoming Biden administration’s climate agenda will be none other than the People’s Republic of China, the same outfit that brought the world COVID-19.

Purveyors of renewable energy are eager to take advantage of Biden’s pledge to move the U.S. from fossil fuels to renewable energy and are already taking legal action to smooth the transition. On December 29, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and solar-power developers, including NextEra Energy Inc. and Invenergy Renewables LLC, asked the U.S. Court of International Trade to issue an injunction prohibiting an October proclamation by President Trump that raised tariffs on imported solar equipment.

The Trump proclamation removed a tariff exemption on two-sided, or bifacial, solar panels, almost all of which are manufactured in China. As reported by Bloomberg (Dec. 29), the lawsuit contends the Trump administration “failed to follow the required procedures” before…

View original post 392 more words

Massachusetts will require all new cars sold be electric by 2035

Electric car charging station [credit: Wikipedia]

Climate fever is spreading, in the minds of political leaders at least. They forget, or don’t know, that most so-called greenhouse gas is water vapour – not carbon dioxide – so reducing ’emissions’ can make little difference to the total figures even if such a goal was useful, which is doubtful to say the least.
– – –
On the last day of 2020, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and his administration shared a plan that will deal a major blow to fossil fuel automakers while severely cutting the state’s greenhouse-gas emissions in the next decade and beyond, says CleanTechnica.

These changes include the mandate that all new cars sold in the state will be electric by 2035, The Boston Globe reports.

2020 – what a year of climate alarmism tells us about green ideology

From: Ben Pile at Climate Resistance

Many climate alarmist’s failed predictions were centred around 2020. This video examines just ten, and argues that they were produced not by science, but by ideology.

This is proved by the fact that rather than suffering any consequences to their careers or public standing, fearmongering individuals and institutions enjoy continued and undeserved success.

The analysis of the ten predictions was produced by Steve Milloy and can be read at his website.
[Or via the Talkshop, here].

More climate craziness: a burp-catching mask for cows

Image credit: Zelp

Fashion accessories for cows: how much more absurd and foolish can climate obsession get? Atmospheric methane is negligible anyway, being measured in parts per billion.
– – –
Methane from cattle accounts for a significant amount of global warming [Talkshop comment: evidence-free assertion] — startup Zelp has a comfortable and stylish solution, says Wired.

There are 1.6 billion cattle on Earth, and their burps and farts are becoming a big problem.

Cows expel methane, a colourless and odourless gas which is approximately 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the planet.