RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-3-8-why-do-renewable-energy-sourc

If you read the progressive press, or even a little of it, with an interest in matters of energy policy, then surely you know by now that it has become cheaper to produce electricity using the wind and sun than using fossil fuels. You know that because you have read it over and over again, in authoritative articles written by, and quoting, people who seem to know what they are talking about, and with no one ever raising any skeptical questions.

Here are some of the articles that may be among what you have read on this subject:

There was the Financial Times on November 8, 2018, in a piece titled “New wind and solar generation costs fall below existing coal plants.” The Financial Times — now there are people who really know what they are talking about. The article mainly relies on a study then just out from investment bank Lazard, reporting on what is called the “Levelized Cost of Energy” for various sources of generation: “The cost of new wind and solar power generation has fallen below the cost of running existing coal-fired plants in many parts of the US . . . New estimates published on Thursday by Lazard, the investment bank, show that it can often be profitable for US generation companies to shut working coal plants and replace their output with wind and solar power.”

Or perhaps you read the piece from CBS News on November 16, mostly relying on the same Lazard study, and titled “It’s now cheaper to build a new wind farm than to keep a coal plant running.” “The cost of building a new utility-scale solar or wind farm has now dropped below the cost of operating an existing coal plant, according to an analysis by the investment bank Lazard. . . . ‘There are some scenarios, in some parts of the U.S., where it is cheaper to build and operate wind and solar than keep a coal plant running,’ said a Lazard banker who was involved in the report.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/climate_change_theory_whats_wrong_with_it.html

Dr. William Lippincott is a retired environment scientist. His inferences are based on extensive literature research on the mechanisms of climate variability, a task open to any student of the scientific method.

How climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.
I can’t believe I’m still writing about climate change. I’d have stopped long ago were it not for persistent calls to blow up the U.S. economy in order to save the planet. The cult-like demand for action permeates every part of public life, government, media, academia, even K-12. Rep. Among the draconian policy solutions, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would have enormous negative impact on our economy.

For the record, climate does vary — think ice ages. And a combination of natural climate variability and measurement problems make the likelihood of singling out a human fingerprint very low. I look here at how climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.

The term ‘science’ properly refers to the scientific method, which is a system of inference designed to weed out incorrect ideas in favor of those supported by experiment and observation. The crux of the scientific method is rejection of theory rather than proof of it. From Bacon to Hopper and Feinman, it has been well understood that scientific theory must be “falsifiable,” that is, subject to test and rejection. Falsifiability depends on narrow and specific conditions imposed by theory. If the conditions fail, the theory is wrong.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/renewable-energy-land-use-san-bernardino-county/

The biggest county in America doesn’t want big solar or wind projects.

It may be the largest county in America by land area, but San Bernardino County, Calif., has decided it doesn’t have enough room for big wind or big solar projects. On February 28, the county’s board of supervisors approved a measure that bans large renewable-energy projects on more than 1 million acres of private land.

The move provides yet another example of how the energy sprawl that inevitably comes with large-scale renewable-energy deployment is colliding with the interests of rural landowners and local governments that don’t want “green” projects in their neighborhoods. Of course, there’s no small irony that that collision is happening in California, which passed a law last year that requires utilities to be getting 60 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030.

As Los Angeles Times reporter Sammy Roth drily noted, achieving those renewable-energy goals “will require cooperation from local governments — and big solar and wind farms, like many infrastructure projects, are often unpopular at the local level.” All across the country rural landowners and governments have been rejecting or restricting renewable projects, and they’re doing so at the very same time that left-leaning politicians and some of the country’s biggest environmental groups are claiming that the U.S. must quit using hydrocarbons and nuclear energy, and instead rely solely on renewable energy for our electricity.

In January, some 600 environmental groups, including 350.org, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Working Group, submitted a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives, which said that the U.S. must shift to “100 percent renewable power generation by 2035 or earlier.” It continued, saying any “definition of renewable energy must . . . exclude all combustion-based power generation, nuclear, biomass energy, large-scale hydro, and waste-to-energy technologies.” For good measure, it said this new hypothetical electric grid must have the “ability to incorporate battery storage and distributed energy systems that are democratically governed.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/dr_happer_will_set_them_free.html

President Trump has finally appointed someone to cure the U.S.’s disease of global warming hysteria

It was easy enough to predict that Trump would appoint Dr. William Happer to set up a Presidential Committee on Climate Science.

Two years have passed and have been lost. The first years of the Trump administration were hobbled by poor Cabinet picks, a proportion of whom conspired against him and others who were just hopeless. Scott Pruitt at the EPA should have got on with Dr Happer’s appointment straight away but instead spent $3.5 million on his own security detail. In the meantime, the climate juggernaut rolled on, producing 1,500 pages of alarmist nonsense in an official government report.

You can tell how important Dr Happer is by the forces that have been marshaled against him. The three major lefty media organizations — CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — all came out to say Dr. Happer’s efforts would be wasted. The Democrats are alarmed, calling Dr Happer’s proposed panel “dangerous.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/new_peerreviewed_study_reveals_majority_of_scientists_are_skeptical_of_global_warming_crisis.html

Without the claimed “scientific consensus” on global warming or climate change, the Green New Deal becomes just another progressive con game, but with the highest stakes ever.

Writing in Forbes, James Taylor shows that the supposed 97% “scientific consensus” on global warming is false:

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/02/the-politics

One has to wonder if the shock and despair described in David Bowie’s 1971 hit, “Five Years,” would be the preferred collective mentality for humanity, at least if the relentless propaganda campaigns of climate change activists are successful. And one must admit they have powerful allies at their disposal. A climate alarm consensus informs America’s entire educational, entertainment, and media establishments, along with most corporate marketing, and most political platforms from the local city council to the United Nations.

Climate alarm shouldn’t be a hard sell, and it isn’t. The horror inspired by natural conflagrations taps into primal, instinctual fears; when vividly imagining terrifying acts of nature, even the most hardened skeptic might have a moment of pause.

California’s horrifying wildfire that incinerated the town of Paradise in November 2018 is a good example. Later that month, retiring Governor Jerry Brown appeared on “Face the Nation” and predicted, “In less than five years even the worst skeptics are going to be believers.”

Taking shameless advantage of every natural disaster to stoke fears of climate change has become normal. In October 2018, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report predicting imminent global climate catastrophe. A month later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a grim “Fourth National Climate Assessment.” In both cases, news reports included cataclysmic images designed to tap our deepest, most unreasoning and terrifying species memories; tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, fires.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=23e577be66

In trendy progressive states here in the U.S., we know how we are going to solve “climate change.” We are going to slash our “greenhouse gas” emissions. Here in New York City, we’re going to reduce our GHG emissions by 80% by 2050. If you don’t believe it, you can just ask Mayor de Blasio. New York State? Same goal, 80% by 2050. California also has a goal of reducing GHG emissions 80% by 2050. Surely, this will solve the problem.

New York and California seem to think that they are big stuff in the world. After all, who is more important than we wealthy coastal U.S. elites? But unfortunately, on a global scale, we don’t really have enough population to count for much. As usual, when it’s time to do the arithmetic, the progressives fall on their faces. Let’s look at some numbers.

New York State has a population of about 20 million. California has about twice that population, 40 million. For comparison, the country of India has a population of about 1.4 billion — about 23 times the combined total of New York and California.

For greenhouse gas emissions, the latest number I find for New York come from 2015, with a total of 218.14 million tons of CO2 equivalent. With twice the population, California as you would expect has about twice the emissions, about 430 MMtCO2e in 2016 per this chart from Grist. For comparison, India’s emissions were about 2.4 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, or close to 4 times the combined total of New York and California. And India is still relatively early in the process of industrializing and building out its electrical grid.