‘We are not ready’: Divisions deepen over rush to finalise deep sea mining rules

Seabed mining

The ‘energy transition’ is supposed to replace thousands of coal-fired power stations and over a hundred million barrels of oil per year, amongst other fuels like gas and wood, in the name of an invented ‘climate crisis’. Not going to happen on the scale required, even if this new supply of minerals were to become available – with the aid of fossil fuel powered machinery. All that mining will, or would be, waste product one day.
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A growing number of countries are demanding more time to decide on rules that would allow companies to mine the deep seabed for minerals needed to manufacture batteries for the energy transition, says Climate Change News.

Last year, the small island state of Nauru, triggered a never-before-used procedure giving the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates mining activities in international waters, until July 2023 to fast-track deep sea mining exploitation rules.

Countries have discussed mining the bottom of the oceans for years but no commercial extraction has started in international waters. The ultimatum would allow the nascent industry to apply for mining permits as soon as next year.

Green fuels adding almost £10 to the cost of filling up a family car

For how much longer?
[image credit: thecostaricanews.com]

One of the many costs of carbon dioxide paranoia. How long do people want to go on paying, and allowing themselves to be bludgeoned into believing suspect climate theories while struggling to afford to run their own lives?
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Green fuels are adding nearly £10 to the cost of filling up an average family car, according to new analysis that will add more pressure on the Government to scrap their use, says the Daily Telegraph.

Petrol and diesel contain between five and 10 per cent biofuels, made mostly from wheat, maize and used cooking oil, the price of which has shot up since the war in Ukraine, even more than the cost of regular fuel.

As part of the Government’s net zero drive, E10 petrol was made the standard last summer, while B7 diesel was introduced in 2019.

World’s biggest carbon removal machine ‘freezes over’ in Iceland

Priceless!
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Enormous device to halt global warming brought to heel by unusually cold weather, reports The Independent.

Alternative source: World’s Largest Carbon Removal Facility Designed to Fight Global Warming Suffers Major Setback After Arctic Blast Freezes Machinery.

Watch: Tesla Owner Told Repairs Will Cost 20,000 Euros. He Chose Dynamite

Tesla plant [image credit: Steve Jurvetson @ Wikipedia]

Sometimes you’ve just had enough…
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Automobile giant Tesla leads the EV sector with innovations and new technology, says NDTV.

But that was not enough to stop a disgruntled customer from blowing up his Tesla car using 30 kg of dynamite.

Jaala, an idyllic and ice-covered village in south Finland’s Kymenlaakso region with just a few thousand people, witnessed a bizarre incident as the owner of a 2013 Tesla Model S set his car up for an explosion.

The crew of a YouTube channel – Pommijatkat – shot the entire episode that premiered on Sunday with the help of a few volunteers.

Full report here.

2020: The year of climate craziness

Climate laws have been passed by carbon dioxide fearing governments that won’t be in office when the due dates arrive. What happens if evidence-free climate superstition is still rampant when these legal requirements are not met?
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BEFORE it even began, 2020 was already marked to be a year of climate hysteria, says The Conservative Woman.

It was the UK’s turn to host the annual UN climate meeting, which was scheduled to take place in Glasgow earlier this month.

Hence, the first eighteen months of Boris Johnson’s premiership saw the erstwhile ‘libertarian’ attempting to establish himself as a global pioneer of green policymaking: banning all that moves ahead of the conference, like some kind of overweight peroxide Ed Miliband eco-virtue-signalling on ‘our’ behalf.

The arrival of Covid-19 caused the meeting to be postponed, but this has not dented the government’s green ambitions to make the UK’s economic suicide the first in what they hope will be a global pact.

About those ‘Green Energy’ unicorns… – The GWPF

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

The Manhattan Institute reckons: ‘By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.’

Before then, all that future waste has to be manufactured, largely from mined materials. Is the world ready for this?
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You think those baby unicorns grow on trees? Better think again, says Michael Walsh @ The Pipeline.

“Green” energy, in fact, comes with a very high price tag as this report from the Manhattan Institute makes clear.

As policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy.

Planet Of The Greens

Standard green response to criticism: ‘Shoot the messenger!’ They like to travel around the world telling people it’s a bad idea to travel around so much, due to some flaky climate theory.
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Attempts by eco-activists to censor and shut down Planet of the Humans reveals the green movement’s authoritarian nature that turns most aggressively on its own apostates.

Jeff Gibbs’ and Michael Moore’s new film, Planet of the Humans has been watched more than eight million times, says The GWPF.

It has cast doubt on the green movement’s claims to be concerned with the environment and questions the motivations and integrity of its leaders and backers.

In reply, environmental activists have attacked Moore and Gibbs, and called for their film to be censored.

EU Green Deal Should Be Canceled Because of Coronavirus, Czech PM Says

Not much chance of that in the absurdly climate-obsessed EU, but maybe a popular view in his home country given the massive costs and lack of worthwhile benefits of said ‘deal’.

Will COVID-19 be a reason to accelerate or slow Europe’s energy transition? The battle lines are already being drawn, says green Tech Media.

The Czech Republic’s prime minister, Andrej Babiš, has said the European Union should abandon its Green Deal and focus on fighting the spread of the coronavirus in an early sign of policy battles ahead.

Announced in December, Europe’s Green New Deal seeks to invest €1 trillion ($1.1 trillion) on the road to making the EU economy net-zero carbon by 2050.

Fertiliser could be used to power ocean-going ships

Bulk carrier

Here comes the latest ‘green’ pipedream that won’t work, as the report almost admits. Another thin excuse to bang the tedious climate change propaganda drum.

Ocean-going ships could be powered by ammonia within the decade as the shipping industry takes action to curb carbon emissions, says BBC News.

The chemical – the key ingredient of fertilisers – can be burned in ships’ engines in place of polluting diesel.

The industry hopes ammonia will help it tackle climate change, because it burns without CO2 emissions.

The creation of the ammonia itself creates substantial CO2, but a report says technology can solve this problem.

Biofuels are meant to clean up flying’s carbon crisis – they won’t

Image credit: United Airlines

More wreck-o than eco? Here we find that ‘biodiesel from food crops emits an average of 1.8 times as much CO2 as fossil fuels which increases to three times more in case of biodiesel from palm oil.’ Looks like another non-solution to the claimed problem.

The UK’s aviation industry is touting biofuels as a way to make plane transport greener. But some biofuels can end up doing more harm than good, says Wired.

In the next 30 years, the number of flights is expected to increase by 70 per cent.

Unless things change, by 2050 the aviation industry will have used up more than a quarter of all the carbon dioxide we can safely emit while keeping global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But the aviation industry says it has a way out.

The Western Link: A new failure highlights the overbuild of Scottish Wind and raises new questions

[image credit: beforeitsnews.com]

In short, Scottish wind power often produces too much for the electricity system to handle, yet more is planned. Meanwhile the super-expensive Western Link is failing miserably to draw off the excess power. Matt Ridley is trying to blow the whistle on this fiasco in the House of Lords, with some success.

Last weekend the Italian cable manufacturing company, Prysmian, released a statement announcing to the markets that the Western Link High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) interconnector between Hunterston and Deeside had failed again, on the 10th of January, says the Renewable Energy Foundation.

This grid link, which is a joint venture between Scottish Power Transmission (SPT) and National Grid (NG), employs cables manufactured by Prysmian.

This £1 billion project has a peak transit capacity of 2.25 GW and was designed solely to facilitate the export of Scottish wind power to the English and Welsh markets.

In doing so it was expected to reduce constraint payments to wind power, payments which amount to £630m since 2010, with a record £130 million in 2019 alone.

The project was expected to come online at the end of 2015 but in fact did not become fully operational until late 2018 and has been plagued with faults ever since.

Burning trees for heating won’t help with climate change: UK think tank

Most things the UK CCC suggests are likely to be a bad idea, but that’s another story. If this is all they can think of, they’re scraping the barrel. How long does the list of experts trashing tree burning policies have to get before the government takes any notice?

A suggestion by the UK Committee on Climate Change to burn more wood and plant replacement trees as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels has drawn criticism from think tank Chatham House (reports OilPrice.com), which says this is hardly the best approach to reducing emissions.

“Expanding forest cover is undoubtedly a good thing, if you’re leaving them standing,” energy expert Duncan Brack told the Daily Telegraph.

The UK blackout of 9 August 2019 is unlikely to be the last one

This GWPF report paints an uncomfortable picture of increasing instability in the UK electricity supply system, as ever more renewables are injected into it while older but more predictable thermal power plants are retired. The author says bluntly that until recently customers ‘could rely on the system. That is not the case today.’ Come the power cut, you’re on your own.

It has been widely claimed that Distributed (or embedded) Generation, such as solar and wind connected to the low voltage distribution network, reinforces electricity system stability.

The final reports into the widespread blackout of the 9th of August last year by the UK electricity regulator, Ofgem, and the British government’s Energy Emergency Executive Committee, E3C show that this is not the case.

Distributed Generation is now under the spotlight as a leading cause of the severity of the 9 August blackout, and as a hazard increasing future risks to security of supply.

California dreaming of an energy storage miracle

Solar power complex in California [USA.Gov – BLM – BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT]

This public statement looks long on ambition but short on realistic and/or affordable possibilities. They openly admit that existing ‘green’ tech won’t cut the mustard on its own, as everyone knew – or should have known – all along. In other words their legislated targets can’t be met, as things stand. The same problems will exist everywhere else that tries to enforce similar energy policies in pursuit of a ‘carbon-free’ mirage.

The California Energy Commission (CEC) has released a solicitation (GFO-19-305) to fund innovative, non-Li-ion energy storage research projects, including green electrolytic hydrogen systems, reports Green Car Congress.

The Commission notes that the state’s statutory requirements (SB-350, SB-100) for low-GHG electricity cannot be met with currently fielded technologies alone, because those technologies do not have the energy density, daily cycle capability, longevity, safety, and price to be viable for the diverse set of applications that will be needed in the State.

Converting coal plants to biomass could fuel climate crisis, scientists warn

You couldn’t make it up. Having for years rejected claims that industrial-scale burning of wood was not sustainable, climate obsessives now discover…exactly that. At least the media waited until the COP conference in Madrid ended, to avoid upsetting the delegates.

Experts horrified at large-scale forest removal to meet wood pellet demand, says The Guardian.

A few snippets from the article:

Climate thinktank Sandbag said the heavily subsidised plans to cut carbon emissions will result in a “staggering” amount of tree cutting, potentially destroying forests faster than they can regrow.

Biofuel sparks hundreds of farmer machinery repair complaints

What happened to testing, prior to making what looks like a disastrous change to working machinery in the name of climate ideology? Looks like the farmers are the testers.

The use of biofuel has sparked hundreds of complaints from farmers who claim it is forcing them into “unacceptable” costly machinery repairs, reports BBC News.

Adding biofuel – which is made from organic materials rather than fossil fuels – to diesel supplies is seen as one way of reducing carbon emissions from vehicles such as tractors.

But farmers say it has been clogging up filters and causing breakdowns.

NFU Scotland said more than 400 complaints have been made.

Opinion – Carbon capture and storage: Hasn’t Alberta learned its lesson?

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) [credit: cnet.com]

The author points to a recent report on CCS in a science journal which found “that it reduces only a small fraction of carbon emissions, and it usually increases air pollution.” Or in layman’s terms, it’s a waste of time and money even for greenhouse gas theory devotees.

Politicians tend to use CCS as a distraction when they don’t have a workable plan, says Graham Thomson @ CBC News.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

An Alberta cabinet minister walks into a news conference and praises the merits of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a way to significantly reduce the province’s emissions of greenhouse gases.

Not much of a joke, I know.

It wasn’t funny when on October 8, 2009 Alberta Energy Minister Mel Knight declared of CCS, “This, ladies and gentlemen, is action, action that will have immediate results locally as it markedly reduces greenhouse gas emissions.”

Summer Blackouts Beckon: Australia’s Renewable Energy Debacle Won’t Be Fixed with Batteries

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The greenblob will have to conjure up some other magic solution to their chronic power intermittency problems, if they hope to keep their ‘zero carbon’ myth going for a bit longer.

STOP THESE THINGS

Almost as soon as Joe Public worked out that wind and solar can never work, RE rent seekers started babbling about giant batteries saving the day.

STT will keep smashing the line about giant batteries overcoming the chaotic delivery of wind and solar, while RE zealots keep pushing it.

The pitch from RE zealots is that the solution to the chaos delivered by wind and solar is giant lithium-ion batteries, of the kind peddled by Elon Musk.

The reefer-smoking, Californian carpetbagger managed to offload one unit in wind power obsessed, South Australia, collecting $150 million for a battery that would power SA for all of 4 minutes.

Bill Gates has called the idea complete and utter nonsense: Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’

Apply a little maths, physics and economics and it’s pretty clear that the mega-battery myth is just…

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Filthy Future: The Staggering Cost of Cleaning Up ‘Clean’ Energy’s Toxic Mess

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What really happens – if anything – to land-based wind turbines at the end of their brief working lives?

STOP THESE THINGS

Wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies: cut the subsidies and once these things inevitably grind to a halt, they’ll never be replaced.

With an economic lifespan of something like 10-12 years (rather than the overblown 25 put forward by turbine makers and wind power outfits), over the next decade countries like Germany will be left with hundreds of thousands of 2-300 tonne ‘problems’ littering the landscape. With hundreds of turbines totally kaput, Germans have already been smacked with the harsh and toxic reality of their government’s so-called ‘green’ obsession.

And they aren’t alone.

Iowa’s wind industry has been going for barely a decade and already wind power outfits are sending thousands of tonnes of toxic waste to landfill.

In addition to 10-15 tonne toxic plastic and fibreglass blades, there’s a smorgasbord of toxic plastics, oils, lubricants, metals and fibreglass in the tower and nacelle; and…

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Study casts doubt on carbon capture

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

There was plenty of doubt already. Here they once again try to conflate life-giving CO2 with air pollution. This kind of crude and highly misleading propaganda intended to demonise an important trace gas has to be called out.

One proposed method for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere—and reducing the risk of climate change (claims Phys.org)—is to capture carbon from the air or prevent it from getting there in the first place.

However, research from Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford University, published in Energy and Environmental Science, suggests that carbon capture technologies can cause more harm than good.

“All sorts of scenarios have been developed under the assumption that carbon capture actually reduces substantial amounts of carbon. However, this research finds that it reduces only a small fraction of carbon emissions, and it usually increases air pollution,” said Jacobson, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering.