Swiss parliament snubs European court climate ruling, dubbed “judicial activism”

Judges trying to punish governments for not controlling present or future weather is an absurdity ripe for knocking on the head. In any case, Swiss glaciers have advanced and retreated in the past with no input from the government or anyone else, so local climate variation is nothing new.
– – –
BERN (Reuters) -The lower house of the Swiss parliament voted on Wednesday to reject a ruling ordering Switzerland to do more to combat global warming in a move that could encourage others to resist the influence of international courts, reports Swissinfo.ch.

In April, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued an unprecedented judgment that said Bern had violated the human rights of a group of older Swiss women, the KlimaSeniorinnen, by failing to tackle climate change.

But Bern’s lower house on Wednesday followed in the steps of the upper house and passed a non-binding motion with 111 votes in favour and 72 against blasting the court’s “judicial activism”.

Europe’s missing climate marches – replaced by tractor convoys?

Climate alarmists complain their manufactured hysteria pot is cooling down, as protest focus has switched to other issues and/or boredom set in as the novelty wore off. Instead the victims of dogmatic net zero diktats, such as farmers, drive onto the streets of EU capitals to air their grievances. Is a return to political reality anywhere in sight?
– – –
Ahead of the 2019 European Parliament elections, Europe was rocked by massive climate marches, says Euractiv.

But as the 2024 elections approach, the streets remain silent.

As a series of climate marches swept across Europe in spring 2019, Brussels was no exception. At the movement’s peak, 70,000 people massed in the EU quarter to loudly demand greater climate action.

Russia finds vast oil and gas reserves in British Antarctic territory – what happens next?

Report: ‘Junior minister David Rutley last week told the EAC that his department had decided to trust Russian assurances it was just conducting scientific research.’ However, ‘reserves 10 times the North Sea’s output’ could be tempting – but not to most UK politicians, who prefer to import anyone else’s oil and gas in order to pose as climate friendly or something, while the government loses another court battle over its self-imposed net zero targets.
– – –
Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in areas claimed by the UK, reports The Telegraph.

The surveys are a prelude to bringing in drilling rigs to exploit the pristine region for fossil fuels, MPs have warned.

Reserves totalling 511bn barrels of oil – about 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – have been reported to Moscow by Russian research ships, according to evidence given to the Commons Environment Audit Committee (EAC) last week.

Power-hungry AI problem for climate policymakers

How AI Is Outsmarting Green Energy, Zero Carbon Fantasies

– – – Closing thermal power stations, and insisting on renewables instead in the name of climate obsessions, leads to reductions in reliable electricity supply. But the rise of data centres and AI increases the need for that reliable supply. Somebody has to lose out.

Is Net Zero a poisoned chalice for governments?

The American title of the article here is ‘Europeans Ditch Net Zero, While Biden Clings To It’. Maybe an exaggeration as nobody has tried to ditch it entirely, even if some policy targets have been watered down, re-scheduled or even dropped (possibly). But the unreality of it all is at least beginning to make itself felt, as governments try desperately to pretend it’s all a great idea that just needs a few tweaks here and there, while ever more of their citizens feel the pain of it all.
– – –
You know you’ve stumbled through the looking glass when European politicians start sounding saner on climate policy than Americans do, says the Wall Street Journal (via Climate Change Dispatch.

Well here we are, Alice: Europeans are admitting the folly of net zero quicker than their American peers.

The latest example—perhaps “victim” is more apt—is Humza Yousaf, who resigned this week as Scotland’s first minister.

That region within the U.K. enjoys substantial devolved powers over its own affairs, including on climate policy.

Electricity barrier: net zero climate policy means the UK housing crisis is getting worse

If there isn’t enough power for the new homes, where’s the power for all the soon-to-be mandatory electric vehicles supposed to come from? Net zero policy by climate obsessives is busy degrading the entire power grid to an increasingly part-time system. This is just one of the knock-on effects.
– – –
Our inadequate electricity network is stopping the building of thousands of new homes. And the necessary move to low-carbon heating and cars is only increasing demand, says The Guardian.

Oxford has a severe housing problem. With house prices 12 times the average salary, it has become one of the least affordable cities in the country. Its council house waiting list has grown to more than 3,000 households, with many having to live in temporary accommodation.

An obvious solution is to build more homes, but those trying to do this face a big barrier: electricity.

UK Government defeated in High Court over climate plans – as usual

Time for yet another revised ‘net zero emissions’ plan. Whether any country that used to depend largely on fuel-burning power stations for electricity can meet the demands of its own time-limited climate plans/targets is open to question. The BBC report once again wheels out the old climate propaganda con trick of pretending that sunset shadow effects are scary pollution clouds in its report image.
– – –
The government has been defeated in court – for a second time – for not doing enough to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reports BBC News.

Environmental campaigners argued that the energy minister signed off the government’s climate plan without evidence it could be achieved.

The High Court ruled on Friday that the government will now be required to redraft the plan again.

In response the government defended its record on climate action.

How the death of a mega-turbine rattled US offshore wind

Three New York wind projects were dropped after the massive wind tower they were to be based on was cancelled. This report notes that analysts say ‘bigger wind turbines tend to break more’. Planting ever-larger top-heavy objects on long thin poles in zones with potentially stronger winds clearly has its challenges. Even getting them to their site can be a major undertaking.
– – –
The wind industry’s global race to make ever-bigger turbines stumbled to a sudden slowdown last week, jarring U.S. offshore wind projects, says E&E News.

When GE Vernova confirmed that it was canceling one of the largest wind turbines ever designed, it signaled a pause in an arms race that for years had led manufacturers to go higher, longer and wider when building towers, blades and other components.

Now, that decision is reverberating across U.S. efforts to build wind projects in the Atlantic.

Britain must spend £30bn to strip CO2 from atmosphere and hit net zero, experts warn

This ‘essential’ expense would likely go the way of HS2 and double or triple in real cost, with at least some costs continuing well after the target date. Absurd is too weak a word to describe this fear of a harmless trace gas essential to nature. CO2 is not pollution.
– – –
Britain must invest [sic] £30bn in a network of massive air cleansing systems designed to strip CO2 from the atmosphere if it is to reach net zero, a government-funded report has warned.

The “direct air carbon capture systems” would remove up to 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year and then pump it into disused oil and gas reservoirs under the North Sea or Irish Sea, says The Telegraph.

Without such a scheme the UK will never reach its target of net zero emissions by 2050, according to the report by Energy Systems Catapult, a government-funded body that promotes innovation.

The UK’s Climate Change Act ‘faces a stress test’

So says an ardent fan of the idea of human-caused weather variations, who thinks UK climate laws were ‘once the envy of the world’. But unwelcome reality strikes in due course, because those in charge ‘underestimate just how far-reaching the necessary changes are’. The article tries to make out that a bit more belt tightening will do the trick, which almost certainly underplays the pain ahead if the current over-the-top net zero policies are persisted with.
– – –
The Scottish government’s decision to row back on its 2030 climate pledge illustrates the crux of any target: it’s easy to set one with a big political flourish, but harder to follow through with a careful plan to achieve it, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

Does that mean that targets for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gas driving climate change are worthless? Not necessarily.

There are two types of climate target: the empty promise and the calculated ambition. Only one of these works.

Climate policy fiasco: Scot Nats mocked for replacing flagship green target with ‘accelerated’ plan

Humza Yousaf is just another in a long list of politicians in various countries forced to backtrack on extravagant and disruptive so-called climate change plans. Attempts to reinvent their national electricity systems, along with numerous other energy-related interventions like mandatory electric car target dates, are proving a lot tougher to achieve than imagined when breezily announced. They all ignore the fact that nature relies on carbon dioxide to survive and grow. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: “If you don’t like our climate targets, we have others.”
– – –
Humza Yousaf and his Green coalition partners have been mocked after insisting they were pursuing an “accelerated response to the climate emergency” by abandoning a flagship greenhouse gas target, says The Telegraph.

The First Minister admitted that his government was scrapping Nicola Sturgeon’s promise to cut Scotland’s carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 after experts warned it was unachievable.

He said it would be replaced by “an accelerated climate change proposal and plan”, including a controversial measure to impose a new carbon tax on large country estates.

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said during First Minister’s Questions: “Only Humza Yousaf could believe that slamming on the brakes – because that is exactly what the SNP is doing this afternoon – is an acceleration.”

Europe is revolting against the tyranny of electric cars

As Scotland makes an embarrassing climbdown on its much touted ‘net zero’ targets, widespread problems with the big EV push due to public resistance are highlighted. Bad news for climate worriers and the EV industry, a glimmer of hope for nearly everyone else.
– – –
The rest of Europe, Remainers like to tell us, is forging ahead into a glorious green future while Brexit Britain is stalling, the government backsliding one by one on its net zero commitments, says Ross Clark @ The Telegraph.

It is hard to square that narrative with what’s really going on across the channel. In March, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, registrations of new electric vehicles plummeted by 11.3 per cent.

In Germany – the grown-up country that’s supposed to show childish Britain how it’s done – the drop was even more precipitous at 28.9 per cent.

Swiss climate policy – a case of failing to do the impossible?

Phrases like ‘action against climate change’ and ‘climate protection’ are uttered without any clear idea of what, if anything, they might mean. Natural variation at all timescales is an ongoing process, but difficult to measure or predict with any accuracy. Warming has followed the lengthy Little Ice Age, but now some countries – even those with glaciers and ‘snow-capped’ peaks like Switzerland – are being saddled with a legal obligation to attempt to put the brakes on that, by swallowing the argument that a trace gas in the atmosphere is the main source of a supposedly solvable problem of slightly rising temperatures.
– – –
Switzerland, known for pristine countryside and snow-capped [sic] peaks, is facing scrutiny of its environmental policies after becoming the first country faulted by an international court for failing to do enough against climate change, says Phys.org.

The European Court of Human Rights’s ruling last week highlighted a number of failings in Swiss policies, but experts stressed that the wealthy Alpine country was not necessarily doing much worse than its peers.

“The judgment made it really clear that there are critical gaps in the Swiss domestic regulatory framework,” said Tiffanie Chan, a policy analyst at the London School of Economics and Political Science specializing in climate change laws.

“But it’s definitely not a Switzerland-only case,” she told AFP.

Net zero mania update: German transport minister warns of weekend driving ban

Unsurprisingly he gets accused of ‘scaremongering through absurd proposals’. But isn’t the real issue a blind insistence on the unworkable ideology of so-called climate policy that lies behind the proposals? Muttering about pollution is just a means of confusing people into accepting the argument that CO2 is a problem.
– – –
Germany’s transport minister has warned that driving will have to be banned at the weekends unless the country’s net zero laws are changed, says The Telegraph.

Volker Wissing’s FDP party wants the law amended so the polluting transport sector can miss carbon emissions reduction targets, as long as Germany as a whole reaches them. [Talkshop comment – carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant].

But the change is opposed by the Greens, who are part of the three-way coalition with the pro-business FDP and the Social Democrats (SPD), led by Olaf Scholz, the chancellor.

Negotiations over the law have dragged on since September last year.

European court rules human rights violated by ‘climate inaction’

A victory for cloud cuckoo land thinking. The court has in effect granted a disputed hypothesis the status of truth, based on its assumption that ’emissions’ are driving changes in the climate. Once courts can pick sides in scientific debates, where does that lead?
– – –
A group of older Swiss women have won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights, reports BBC News.

The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of heatwaves linked to climate change.

The court said Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate.

It is the first time the powerful court has ruled on global warming.

The crews bracing themselves for a rise in electric car fires

Firefighter: “Our preferred approach is to let them burn themselves out”. EV fires ‘create a variety of toxic chemicals’. They ‘have to be “quarantined” away from other vehicles even after the fire appears to have been put out’, in case they re-ignite days or even 2-3 weeks later. Other types of car are still available, but in increasingly restricted numbers due to so-called climate policies.
– – –
Each year, Essex Fire and Rescue Service focuses on one area of “top-up” training for its crews, says BBC News.

In recent years, this has included sessions on firefighting at height and managing hazardous materials.

This year, a new course is being introduced: How to deal with electric vehicle fires. Why?

In the new world of EVs and AI, renewable green energy means more gas or coal capacity, not less

Technology demands are outrunning misguided climate/energy policies. ‘Officials admit – more hogs means a bigger trough’ (Telegraph) but laws of physics can’t be overridden by government demands, however much they insist on barking up the wrong tree with puny renewables and rejecting available fuel sources.
– – –
It is no secret that the expanding suite of AI technologies are becoming powerful drivers of additional demand for electricity, says The Telegraph.

They are, simply put, enormous energy hogs.

This technological revolution seems destined to soon overwhelm and dominate almost every aspect of modern society, but there’s a catch: It is taking place simultaneously with coordinated efforts by national and international governments to prematurely do away with some of the cheapest and most abundant forms of 24/7 power generation.

The energy hogs, in other words, are lined up at the electricity trough, but that trough is being forced to run dry by ill-considered public policies.

Labour’s net zero target faces £116bn ‘investment challenge’

Challenge is putting it mildly. Cloud cuckoo land beckons once again in the form of impossible but supposedly climate-related targets. Some timescales are hard to shorten just by uttering demands.
– – –
A report by Policy Exchange, supported by analysis from Aurora Energy Research, outlines challenges facing Labour’s aim to achieve a decarbonised power grid by 2030, says Energy Live News.

The report highlights a £116 billion additional investment requirement.

This finding, based on modelling, emphasises obstacles such as planning reforms, supply chain limitations and workforce shortages.

The analysis underscores difficulties in accelerating renewable energy deployment and scaling up infrastructure.

UK carbon capture strategy ‘outdated and unrealistic’ as costs doubled

The policy was unrealistic even before it became outdated. The costs have already put most climate-obsessed countries off, and the UK can’t avoid that barrier either.
– – –
The UK Government’s energy policy centred around carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) is outdated and unrealistic, a new report has warned.

Think tank Carbon Tracker has today said that cost estimates for deploying CCUS have more than doubled from the £20bn in taxpayer funding initially scoped in December last year, reports City AM.

This strategy was based on the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, published in the sixth carbon budget in December 2020.

The farmers’ net zero revolt has come to Britain

About time, says The Telegraph. Similar farming rules are expected to follow for England. Pursuit of impossible climate dogmas is running into the ever-pressing need to earn a living, with predictable results.
– – –
There are demonstrations in Cardiff. Ministers are being pelted with food. And there are marchers with banners complaining that traditional livelihoods are under threat.

Welsh nationalists and the Labour establishment would probably prefer that it was the English, and the wicked Tories, who were facing a wave of popular protests.

But the action by farmers across Wales is directed at the devolved administration, and against its reckless imposition of fanatical net zero rules.