Rishi’s Empty ‘Net Zero’ Rhetoric – NZW

Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]

Net Zero Watch summarises: ‘Rishi Sunak’s recent speeches on Net Zero are long on rhetoric, but the decarbonisation juggernaut rumbles on uninterrupted.’ — Pursuing climate obsession at a slightly slower rate still doesn’t work. Carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant.
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Over in the Spectator, Fraser Nelson is inviting us to welcome a change in Rishi Sunak’s tone on Net Zero, says Andrew Montford @ NZW.

His interest has been piqued by the PM’s speech at COP28, which he says shows that Sunak has “started the difficulty work of moving the UK climate agenda from fantasy to policy”.

There will be no more precautionary-principle daftness, we are told, and attention is drawn to the Prime Minister’s claim that from now on decarbonisation will be pursued “in a more pragmatic way, which doesn’t burden working people”.

Nelson is quite correct that the whole drive for Net Zero is a fantasy. It is the triumph of political posturing and bureaucratic trickery over rational decisionmaking.

Cop28 president says there is ‘no science’ behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels

Abu Dhabi National Oil Company or ADNOC is the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates

“You’re reading your own media, which is biased and wrong. I am telling you I am the man in charge.” Classic.
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The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.

Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.

The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

Al Jaber made the comments in ill-tempered responses to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change, during a live online event on 21 November.

As well as running Cop28 in Dubai, Al Jaber is also the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’s state oil company, Adnoc, which many observers see as a serious conflict of interest.

Continued here.

Antarctic ozone hole moving in mysterious ways, research suggests

Credit: earthhow.com

At least one expert was ‘not convinced’ by the study’s results. The theory that the ozone hole’s seasonal size was/is strongly related to human activity is left looking a bit threadbare, even if the study doesn’t exactly say that. But if the alleged cause has been mostly removed and the hole persists, to a significant extent at least, what other conclusion is there? ‘Rare events’ is one suggestion.
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The hole in the Antarctic ozone layer has been getting deeper in mid-spring over the last two decades, despite a global ban on chemicals that deplete Earth’s shield from deadly solar radiation, new research suggested Tuesday.

The ozone layer 11 to 40 kilometers (seven to 25 miles) above Earth’s surface filters out most of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer and cataracts, says Phys.org..

From the mid-1970s, chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—once widely used in aerosols and refrigerators—were found to be reducing ozone levels, creating annual holes largely over the Antarctica region.

UK sued for counting wood burning with carbon capture as ‘negative emissions’

Biomass on the move [image credit: Drax]

Denounced by one opponent as ‘an accounting gimmick’ and ‘double counting’. The whole biomass from trees industry is once more outed as little more than a giant subsidy-grabbing confidence trick, from energy-intensive conversion of wood into pellets all the way to so-called carbon capture. Where are the real world benefits in this hugely expensive system?
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Environmental groups are taking the UK government to court on Monday (13 November) over plans to spend billions on Biomass with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), a technology aimed at removing CO2 from the atmosphere that is also being promoted by the European Union, says Euractiv.

Plaintiffs say BECCS technology relies on flawed accounting assumptions because it sees the carbon captured from wood burning as negative emissions when the process is at best neutral from a climate perspective.

“The government’s rationale for BECCS as providing negative emissions violates international carbon accounting protocols underpinning the Paris Agreement, to which the UK is a signatory,” said a statement from The Lifescape Project and the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PPI), two environmental groups that are the complainants in the case.

“Burning forest biomass and relying on BECCS for negative emissions will not contribute to the government’s legal obligation to achieve net zero by 2050,” they warned.

Britain ‘will need gas to avoid blackouts for decades’

The story here refers to Britain’s ‘gas addiction’, but a renewables addiction will be far more problematic. At present gas power stations are being made ever more uneconomic by government net zero policies, but low wind days and hours are a given. Energy intensive carbon capture plans will only make matters worse.
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The man running Britain’s gas network has said the country will need fossil fuels to prevent blackouts for decades to come despite calls for the Government to begin shutting off the pipes. — The Telegraph reporting.

Jon Butterworth, chief executive of National Gas, said a growing reliance on intermittent power sources such as wind and solar meant Britain would be increasingly reliant on gas to make up for shortfalls when renewable energy sources are not generating power.

Mr Butterworth said: “In 2022, the wind didn’t blow enough or at all for 262 days. And in those 262 days, we would have had rolling blackouts, or a full blackout across the UK if it wasn’t for gas.”

The BBC’s “due impartiality” hypocrisy – Net Zero Watch

Who if anyone does the BBC consider itself accountable to, or is it just a law unto itself these days?
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“Due impartiality” means one thing when it’s terrorists, and another when it’s critics of Net Zero, says Andrew Montford @ Net Zero Watch.

The BBC is currently taking a lot of flak for its refusal to refer to Hamas as “terrorists”. Its editorial guidelines, say that that journalists need to mindful of the need for “due accuracy and impartiality”, but say that the t-word is “a barrier to understanding”.

This is a strange position to take. As many people have observed, Hamas is, in law, a proscribed terrorist organisation, so one would have thought that any journalist who was interested in accuracy would need to refer to them as, well, terrorists.

The Nuclear Microreactor Race Is Heating Up

Image credit: turbosquid.com

The supposed climate/emissions angle is useful to the makers, although the article points out that ‘some experts and activists contend that the world can radically scale back hydrocarbons without using more nuclear power’. Of course not being intermittent and weather dependent is a selling point for electricity generation devices these days, for example in EV charging away from home.
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During a wide-ranging interview with The Epoch Times, the leadership of Nano Nuclear Energy Inc. predicted they would win the race to commercialize a reactor small enough to fit in a shipping container, says ZeroHedge (via OilPrice.com).

“By 2030, we’re pretty convinced we’ll be the first company to sell microreactors,” said Nano Nuclear CEO James Walker, a nuclear physicist who previously led the development of the Rolls-Royce Nuclear Chemical Plant.

Nuclear microreactors are meant to be nimble, mobile sources of heat or up to 20 megawatts of electricity.

World can’t ‘unplug’ existing energy system: COP28 head

Will the never-ending annual COP show series ever get to grips with the utter inadequacy of renewables? Or of the uselessness of blaming trace gases for the weather, as the globe-trotting hordes of delegates produce ever more of them to get to and from the venue?
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The president of the upcoming COP28 climate talks in Dubai called on Sunday for governments to abandon “fantasies” such as hastily ditching existing energy infrastructure in pursuit of climate goals, reports Phys.org.

“We cannot unplug the energy system of today before we build the new system of tomorrow. It is simply not practical or possible,” Sultan Al Jaber said during the opening session of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Climate Week, a UN-organized conference hosted in the Saudi capital Riyadh.

“We must separate facts from fiction, reality from fantasies, impact from ideology, and we must ensure that we avoid the traps of division and distraction.”

Much of international climate diplomacy revolves around the thorny issue of how and when to quit fossil fuels.

New study confirms Gulf Stream weakening, but cause unknown – or is it?

Gulf Stream map [image credit: RedAndr @ Wikipedia]

The lead and co-author have clearly different views on this:
Lead author: “While we can definitively say this weakening is happening, we are unable to say to what extent it is related to climate change or whether it is a natural variation.”
Co-author: “It saddens me to acknowledge, from our study and so many others, and from recent record-breaking headlines, that even the remotest parts of the ocean are now in the grip of our addiction to fossil fuels.”
What have headlines got to do with science research?
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The Gulf Stream transport of water through the Florida Strait has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with a 99% certainty that this weakening is more than expected from random chance, according to a new study.

The Gulf Stream — which is a major ocean current off the U.S. East Coast and a part of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation — plays an important role in weather and climate, and a weakening could have significant implications, says Science Daily.

“We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past,” states the journal article, “Robust weakening of the Gulf Stream during the past four decades observed in the Florida Straits,” published in Geophysical Research Letters.

‘Brace Yourself For An Onslaught Of Category 5 Climate Lies’ – hurricane season peak approaching

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Climate doom is about to go into overdrive yet again, as nature does what it does, wherever that may be. Hence the term: hurricane season, well-known in places like Florida.
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We’re about halfway through the 2023 hurricane season, predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters to be a near-normal year, and it’s been rather quiet, says Issues & Insights (via CCD).
[NOAA updated its forecast to above-normal on Aug. 10. –CCD Ed.]

But with a few storms brewing this week in the Atlantic, we expect to hear the usual shrieking from politicians, activists, and the media, blaming the weather on human-caused climate change.

Our suggestion is to pay no attention to the eco-screamers’ lamentations.

On Sunday, the National Hurricane Center issued advisories for a hurricane and a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean and an advisory for a tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific.

How carbon colossus China dwarfs Britain’s net zero push

The imaginary ‘fight against climate change’ takes a new twist, as a few inconvenient facts get an airing from an unlikely source, showing just how ludicrous UK political obsessions have become. Example: ‘Sir Tony was correct to note that in some years the rise in China’s annual emissions has indeed been greater than Britain’s total CO2 output.’
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Rishi Sunak might not have expected Sir Tony Blair to emerge as a net-zero sceptic, says the Telegraph (via MSN).

In the midst of a Tory battle over Britain’s carbon-reduction targets and the policies being used to get there, the last Labour leader to win a General Election sounded a note of caution.

Britain’s diminishing contribution to global CO2 emissions poses new questions in the fight against climate change, he suggested.

Matt Ridley: I’ll buy a new petrol car in 2029

The rush to electric vehicles risks killing our car industry, shackling us to China and bumping up our taxes to reduce global emissions by just 0.044%. That’s why I’ll be buying a brand new petrol car just before the 2030 ban

Daily Mail July 8

BMW i3 electric car plus battery pack [image credit: carmagazine.co.uk]

Britain’s electric vehicle transition and the ban on petrol car sales from 2030 are a slow-motion car crash. The technology is not ready, the cost will be vast, the logistics are forbidding, the reliance on China is worrying and the backlash from the public is likely to be harsh.

Worst of all, the benefits are derisory at best and may not even exist.

Yes, you read that right. It is possible that we could replace all of Britain’s cars and vans with electric vehicles and still find that carbon dioxide emissions are higher, not lower. Cost-benefit, hello?

June 2023 ENSO update: El Niño is here, says NOAA

Credit:NOAA

If it happens, as ‘temperature anomalies are continuing to increase’, it will no doubt be used by some as a peg to hang ‘human-caused warming’ on, despite being a long-established natural occurrence. Politicising the weather is routine nowadays.
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El Niño conditions have developed, as the atmospheric response to the warmer-than-average tropical Pacific sea surface kicked in over the past month, says NOAA.

We expect El Niño to continue into the winter, and the odds of it becoming a strong event at its peak are pretty good, at 56%.

Chances of at least a moderate event are about 84%.

Death Of The EV Dream, Er, Nightmare

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American fuels vs. Chinese batteries. Place bets now!

PA Pundits International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

Now that the American Dream has been turned into a nightmare in part by overspending that has led to the highest interest rates in the 21^st Century, it is high time to admit that, as Melanie Mcdonagh writes in The Telegraph, the electric vehicle dream, too, “has turned into a nightmare.”

Mcdonagh, who admits she does not drive, points out many problems, among them the horrific impact when a heavy, quiet-running electric vehicle hits an unsuspecting pedestrian or a cyclist. She also notes that some of these “vehicles” are collecting data on route history and road speed that governments (and corporations) can use for remote surveillance (and marketing gimmickry). Another problem is that the much heavier EVs could collapse bridges and force lengthy detours.

Mcdonagh, however, has barely scratched the surface of the mess created by the hipster culture that believes everything sacred…

View original post 908 more words

The wind and solar power myth has finally been exposed

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

All the arguments here have been expressed elsewhere – usually by climate sceptics – many times, but now the national press is more willing to let the cat out of the bag. The basic problem for renewables is energy storage, or lack of it and as the Telegraph article says, ‘The necessary miracle doesn’t exist’.
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Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future, says The Telegraph.

The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this.

This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.

These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.

Heating supplier: Why are we only talking about heat pumps?

Expensive heating [image credit: the Guardian]

Because the government can claim, rightly or not, that they’re cheaper to run than gas boilers? Like electric cars, heat pumps are best suited (if at all) for financial and other reasons to certain categories of property dweller, and the rest…not so much.
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An electric heating supplier has criticised the UK’s obsession with heat pumps when it comes to meeting net zero targets, says PropertyWire.

The government offers a £5,000 grant towards installing heat pumps, and so far just shy of 10,000 have been handed out since the scheme launched last year.

Keith Bastian, chief executive of electric heating company Fischer Future Heat, said installing 600,000 a year by 2028 is ‘optimistic at best’.

King Charles III Has a Climate Record to Live Down

Image credit: BBC News

Climate alarmism with an end date is asking for trouble, to say the least. Gems such as this from 2008 — Prince Charles: Eighteen months to stop climate change disaster — spring to mind.
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This Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III marks a significant moment in Britain’s history, says Rupert Darwall.

No previous constitutional monarch has expressed his political views so openly.

Unlike his mother and grandfather, whose opinions, if they had any, remained unknown to the general public, the king’s record-setting seventy years as heir apparent to the British throne saw him define himself as a deeply committed environmentalist.

Biden’s green spending blitz could plunge world into ‘dark ages’, warns Hunt

Subsidising net zero type so-called climate policies in the US is not only enormously expensive but globally disruptive as well, it seems. Climate protection becoming climate protectionism?
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Joe Biden’s flagship green energy policy risks plunging the world into the economic “dark ages”, Jeremy Hunt has warned.

The Chancellor urged world leaders not to put up trade barriers after the US President passed a $369bn package of subsidies to support climate and energy businesses, reports The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has drawn an estimated $200bn in investment since it was passed last year, according to estimates from the Financial Times, and both the EU and Britain have been forced to draw up responses of their own.

It has sparked fears of a new era of protectionism, where economies are closely managed through tariffs and subsidies.

Iveco CEO says Euro 7 vehicle emissions regulation is ‘plain stupid’

European Commission HQ, Brussels [image credit: Em_Dee @ Wikipedia]

The motor industry gets sandwiched between climate obsession and clean air fanaticism.
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The CEO of Italian truck and bus maker Iveco has condemned as “plain stupid” the Euro 7 standards which tighten vehicle emission limits for pollutants including nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide in the European Union from 2025, reports Euractiv.

Iveco Group’s Gerrit Marx said the regulation as currently drafted by the EU required cuts in emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulates which are “technically unfeasible”.

“The effort to get there is huge. And there is no real payback,” he said.

EU countries and lawmakers are due to negotiate the proposed legislation, which is designed to apply to cars and vans from July 1, 2025 and to buses and trucks two years later, this year.

Opposing wind farms morally unacceptable – ‘expert’

Well, the alleged expert Lord Deben – shortly to quit as chair of the pompously named Climate Change Committee – would say that, wouldn’t he?
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Communities opposed to wind turbines in their local area do not have an “acceptable moral position” according to a climate change expert.

Dozens of large-scale wind farm applications are being considered as Wales tries to reach net zero, says BBC News.

Campaigners say the ambition is putting the Welsh countryside at risk and south Wales already has several wind farms.