RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://manhattan.institute/article/the-crippling-economic-costs-of-green-energy-subsidies

The green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have been justified by the Biden Administration as a booster of U.S. economic growth and jobs.  But when the subsidies are tallied and the overall impacts evaluated, the IRA is a job and economic growth killer. 

Under the IRA, the lion’s share of subsidies will be paid to wind and solar developers.  The subsidies will not expire until electric industry carbon emissions fall by at least 75% below 2005 levels, after which they will gradually decrease.  Even the most optimistic forecasts prepared by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that this will not occur until at least 2046.  Thus, the subsidies for wind and solar will continue unabated for decades.  In total, the subsidies will far exceed what the U.S. government spent in today’s dollars to combat the Great Depression.

The single largest subsidy is the federal investment tax credit (ITC).  Most wind and solar projects will be able to claim a minimum 30% ITC, plus be eligible for an additional 10% credit if the projects rely on domestic manufacturing for components.  

The EIA’s optimistic forecast projects about 900,000 megawatts (MW) of solar photovoltaics, 350,000 MW of onshore wind turbines, and 24,000 MW of offshore wind by 2046.  If all of this generation is built, it will result in direct ITC subsidies totaling between $500 billion and $1 trillion, depending on construction costs.  The greater the costs, the larger the subsidies.  Although wind and solar proponents still claim costs are falling, the reality is the opposite.   Offshore wind developers, especially, are clamoring to renegotiate contracts they signed previously, including guaranteed price adjustments for increasing costs, and relaxing the domestic content requirement so they can claim the additional 10% ITC.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/08/the-doomsday-cult-needs-to-recalculate-its-many-failed-predictions/

Five years ago, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown said, with great certainty, that “in less than five years, even the worst skeptics will be believers.” While we’re not sure why some skeptics are in his mind worse than others, it’s clear that he was wrong.

Wrong as the prediction of the end of snow was wrong. Just as wrong as Prince Charles, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Gore, celebrated activist James Hansen and the tiresome, we’ll-have-no-coal John Kerry declaring we have fewer than 100 months or 12 years or 10 years or four years or 500 days to save Earth from the menace of man-made global warming.

We’ve had a half-century of various failed climate and ecological predictions, 18 of them “spectacularly wrong,” yet the carbon-obsessed doomsayers continue to insist that a planetary tragedy is imminent. The difference between them and the end-of-the-world cults that have to recalculate the day of the apocalypse when their prophecies come and go without incident is that much of the Western world has bought into the climate zealots’ hysteria.

In addition to the many botched timeline predictions, there is also the temperature dashboard warning light message. Once we reach a global temperature that is 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than that of the preindustrial era (whatever that was), we will have arrived at a disastrous threshold. Never mind that there is no such thing as a measurable global temperature, or that the temperature record is unreliable, or that the 1.5 degrees was not established by science but a number agreed upon in order to forge a climate agreement.

And never mind that somehow we have essentially hit that 1.5 degrees Celsius tipping point (the climate holocaust should materialize any day now, right? – the lunatics at the Guardian of course say we’re on the verge of catastrophe) and at the same time, the Associated Press reports “the world is heading for considerably less warming than projected a decade ago.” 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/06/evs-arent-the-edsel-of-the-21st-century-theyre-far-worse/

Economist Steve Moore recently compared EVs to the ill-fated Edsel, “one of the textbook marketing flops of all time.”

“All the automotive experts and Ford executives said it was a can’t-miss. Henry Ford (the car was named after his son) guaranteed hundreds of thousands of sales. But one big thing went wrong: Nobody ever bothered to ask car buyers what they thought of the new car,” he wrote.

“Given the all-in approach to electric vehicles at Ford and General Motors, it’s clear that Detroit never got the message.”

With all due respect to our good friend Steve, there is one key difference between the Edsel of the 1950s and EVs of the 21st century.

Taxpayers weren’t on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars when the Edsel flopped.

The amount of taxpayer money being lavished on EVs is mind-boggling. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill included $7.5 billion in subsidies to build EV chargers. (Two years later, not one charger has been built with those funds.) President Joe Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” includes billions more in tax incentives for battery manufacturers and EV buyers.

In August, Biden’s Energy Department announced plans to “fuel the auto industry’s transition to electric vehicles with $12 billion in loans and grants.”

This, and much more, is all on top of the $22 billion in federal and state subsidies, regulatory credits, and other breaks that have already been showered on EVs. The Texas Public Policy Foundation estimates that EVs would cost $50,000 more than they do today were it not for all this “help.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/cop28-climate-conference-just-super-bowl-virtue-signaling-real-damage

It is tempting to dismiss COP28 as the Super Bowl of virtue signaling. But that would be to ignore the massive damage being done to our country by the unrealistic and costly climate policies of the Biden White House. The administration’s wrong-headed “leadership” on phasing out fossil fuels, which currently provide nearly 80% of U.S. energy, is a highlight of COP28; their policies are making Americans poorer and less secure.   

To wit: since Joe Biden took office, electricity prices have soared 24%; during President Trump’s four years in office, average electricity prices actually declined. 

COP 28, the annual climate talkathon, has had its light moments. Some 80,000 attendees are participating, a large number of whom are traveling by emissions-spewing private jets. Over the weekend, some of those planes were frozen to icy runways in Munich as global warming was trumped by unseasonal cold and blizzards which blanketed much of Europe.   

Moreover, the event is being held in Abu Dhabi, a major oil producing nation, and hosted by Sultan Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). In the lead-up to the meeting, leaked briefing documents revealed Jaber was plotting to use his position as host to negotiate new oil and gas deals with foreign governments, even as a central theme of COP28 was the phase-out fossil fuels.  

Worse, a video from two weeks ago surfaced on Monday in which Jaber questioned the entire premise behind ditching oil, gas and coal.  “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,” Al Jaber said. He was also critical of the questioner, saying he had anticipated a “sober and mature conversation” not an “alarmist” one. 

The Biden White House embraces extreme climate alarmism, and is sending scores of officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Climate Czar John Kerry to COP 28. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/05/most-deserving-of-a-lump-of-coal/

Climate czar John Kerry, who must have nightmares of everyone’s carbon footprint but his own, dreams of outlawing coal-fired power plants across the world. Doing so is “how you can do something for health,” he said from the United Nations 28th global warming cocktail party in oil-rich Abu Dhabi. Avoiding blackouts and holding down electricity prices are also good for health, but health is not what the warming activists are interested in.

After declaring that “​​there shouldn’t be any more coal power plants permitted anywhere in the world,” the White House’s climate hector in chief admitted “the reality is that we’re not doing it.”

How dare India, with a growing population of 1.43 billion, displease the imperious Kerry by asking “​​private firms to ramp up investments in new coal-fired power plants to meet a dramatic rise in electricity demand and bridge nearly 30 gigawatts of additional requirement by 2030.” How dare the Chinese unleash “a massive coal power expansion” to meet its needs.

It’s as if they want to get a small taste of the sweet life Kerry has enjoyed for all of his now nearly 80 years on Earth, the advantages that come only when cheap and plentiful electricity is available at the flip of a switch. He won’t stand for it.

Neither will others of his despicable ilk. The administration that Kerry represents has committed the country to halt new coal plant construction while killing off existing plants.

“We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities,” Kerry said in a statement crafted with nothing at all in mind but a blind, dead-end agenda. 

“The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants.”

And replace them with what? Solar and wind power? As we and others have argued so many times before, the renewables transition is a fantasy, certainly on the timetables policymakers and bureaucrats have forced on the rest of us, and likely well beyond those.

https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/private-jets-headed-global-warming-conference-literally-frozen-runway

While world leaders spoke at a ‘global warming’ conference in Dubai, located in the heart of the Arabian Desert, discussing the usual: banning gas stoves, cow farts, and petrol-powered vehicles, a powerful snowstorm grounded all flights at Munich Airport in Germany. 

“Private jets in Munich on the way to Dubai global warming conference are literally frozen on the runway, which has turned into a glacier,” said Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and former NOAA chief scientist. 

If world leaders actually believed in global warming, they would’ve not flown private jets to the desert. Furthermore,  having a global warming conference in an area where it snows is just bad optics for these virtue-signaling elites. 

https://www.aol.com/news/climate-summit-leader-said-no-212018909.html

The president of the COP28 climate summit, Sultan Al Jaber, recently claimed there is “no science” that says phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, in comments that have alarmed climate scientists and advocates.

The future role of fossil fuels is one of the most controversial issues countries are grappling with at the COP28 climate summit. While some are pushing for a “phase-out,” others are calling for the weaker language of a “phase-down.” Scientific reports have shown that fossil fuels must be rapidly slashed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees — the goal of the Paris climate agreement, and a threshold above which scientists warn it will be more difficult for humans and ecosystems to adapt.

Al Jaber made the remarks during the She Changes Climate panel event on November 21, which came to light on Sunday in a story published by the Guardian, and in video that CNN has reviewed. Al Jaber was asked by Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and current chair of the Elders Group, an independent group of global leaders, if he would lead on phasing out fossil fuels.

In his response, Al Jaber told Robinson, “there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5.” He said he had expected to come to the She Changes Climate meeting to have a “sober and mature conversation” and was not “signing up to any discussion that is alarmist.”

He continued that the 1.5-degree goal was his “north star,” and a phase-down and phase-out of fossil fuel was “inevitable” but “we need to be real, serious and pragmatic about it.”

In an increasingly fractious series of responses to Robinson pushing him on the point, Al Jaber asked her “please, help me, show me a roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuels that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”