RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a3f66ecf7b

The COP 28 climate confab opened today in Dubai. Some 70,000 true believers in the energy transition are said to be gathering. And not one of them appears to be either willing or able to do the simple arithmetic that shows that this can’t possibly work.

So far, no country that has made a commitment to “net zero” has officially backed off. (Argentina may soon become the first.). Things proceed as if all that is needed is to build sufficient wind and solar generation facilities, until eventually you have enough of them to meet demand. But that’s not how this works. The absurdity becomes more obvious every day. Can somebody please tell the poor people making fools of themselves in Dubai?

Let’s consider the latest from Germany. According to Statista here, Germany consumed 511.59 TWh of electricity in 2021 (latest year given, although the numbers have recently changed very little from year to year). Divide by 8760 (number of hours in a year) and you learn that Germany’s average usage of electricity is 58.3 GW. So, can you just build 58.3 GW of wind and solar generators to supply Germany with electricity?

Absolutely not. In fact, Germany already has way more wind and solar electricity generation capacity than the 58.3 GW, but can’t come anywhere near getting all its electricity from those sources. As of June 2023 Germany had 59.3 GW of generation capacity from wind turbines alone, and (as of end 2022) another 67.4 GW of generation capacity from solar panels. The total of the two is 126.7 GW — which would supply more than double Germany’s usage at noon on a sunny and breezy June 21. But, according to Clean Energy Wire here, through the first three quarters of 2023, the percent of its electricity that Germany got from wind and solar was only 52%. Capacity seemingly sufficient to supply double the usage in fact only supplies half. That’s because the supply does not come at the same time as the demand, and the wind/solar generation system provides no mechanism to shift the supply to a time to meet the demand.

And why doesn’t Germany just double the amount of its wind/solar generation, so that those sources would go from supplying 52% of usage to 100%. Because it doesn’t work that way. If they double the wind and solar generation, then on the sunny/breezy June 21 mid-day they will now have over 250 GW of electricity generation — more than 4 times what they need — so they will have to discard or give away the rest. But on a calm night in January, they will still have nothing and need full backup from some other source. Multiplying the wind/solar generation capacity by 10 or even 100 (referred to as “overbuilding”) will increase the costs of the system exponentially, but will never be enough to keep the lights on all the time. Or you can try energy storage to save up the surpluses to cover the deficits, but that also multiplies the costs of the system exponentially. For more than you will ever want to know about energy storage and its costs, read my December 2022 energy storage report, “The Energy Storage Conundrum.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/net-zero-fails-the-cost-benefit-test-paris-climate-accord-cop28-748ae52d?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

World leaders are gathering in Dubai for another climate conference, which will no doubt yield heady promises along the lines of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to keep the global temperature’s rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. But they’d be wiser not to. New research shows how extravagant climate promises are far more wasteful than useful.

A new special issue of the journal Climate Change Economics contains two ground-breaking economic analyses of policies to hold global temperatures to 1.5 degrees and its practical political interpretation, mandates to reach net zero, usually by 2050. Though more than 130 countries, including most of the globe’s big emitters, have passed or are considering laws mandating net-zero carbon emissions, there’s been no comprehensive cost-benefit evaluation of that policy—until now.

One of the Climate Change Economics papers is authored by Richard Tol, one of the world’s most-cited climate economists. He calculates the benefits of climate policy using a meta-analysis of 39 papers with 61 published estimates of total climate change damage in economic terms. Across all this, Mr. Tol finds that if the world meets its 1.5 degree promise, it would prevent a less than 0.5% loss in annual global domestic product by 2050 and a 3.1% loss by 2100.

If that sounds underwhelming, blame one-sided reporting on climate issues. While headlines tend to focus on stories of violent climate catastrophes and modeled worst case scenarios, the data reveal a far less frightening picture. Despite a drumbeat of stories this summer about rising heat deaths, higher temperatures also prevent cold deaths, and so far in much greater number. Globally, the result has been fewer overall temperature-related fatalities. Writ large, the damage the world experiences each year from climate-related disasters is shrinking, both as expressed in fraction of GDP and lives lost.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/01/save-the-salmon-kill-the-humans/

A leaked Biden administration document is “a strong sign” that the U.S. will consider breaching four Snake River dams to promote salmon populations on the river. Normally, we wouldn’t care, but the push to tear down these (and other) dams exposes the rank hypocrisy of the “climate change” zealots.

Those four dams are hydroelectric stations. In other words, they are sources of clean, carbon-free energy. According to the non-profit NW Energy Coalition, they produce about 1,000 megawatts of power throughout the year, but that can climb to 2,200 MW during peak energy demand.

So, where’s that energy to replace that loss supposed to come from? Coal plants?

Well, that’s what this leaked document was about. The Biden administration says it’s willing to spend $1 billion to find new “clean energy” sources to replace what the dams produce today.

“The draft agreement says the government will help plan and pay for tribes in the Pacific Northwest to develop enough clean energy resources to serve as replacement power for the lower Snake River dams,” reports ABC News.

There’s also $5 million for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to “identify the best ways to meet the region’s energy resource needs and clean energy goals while accounting for breaching of the dams and the loss of their hydropower,” according to the Lewis County Chronicle.

Think about the insanity of all this.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/30/five-reasons-why-climate-skepticism-and-dissent-are-important/

Today a blithering throng of nascent tyrants, fevered zealots, useless office-holders, hypocrites and ignoble grifters will gather to kick off 28th United Nations Conference of the Parties in the grand pursuit of “global transformative climate action.” For nearly two weeks they will rail and prattle endlessly about how important it is to end fossil fuel use, nag those they slander as “deniers,” tell new lies, restate old lies, hold themselves up as saviors, dine sumptuously – then board jets, many of them privately owned, that burn oceans of hydrocarbon-based aviation fuel to return home.

The legacy media, naturally, will go gleefully along for the ride. They will employ the usual terminology – emergency, crisis, apocalypse, warmest, hottest, wettest, driest, melting, temperature records, accelerating change – that is intended to both frighten the public and boost their green cred that is earned by showing just how much one really cares about the climate.

While this spectacle grinds on, it can’t be forgotten that the global warming narrative should not be taken as indisputable fact. Here are five reasons that we can’t blindly trust and follow the political left’s climate line:

As we recently mentioned in regard to the political left, which is now almost entirely radicalized, the issue it is raging about at any given moment is not the real issue. It is “only an occasion,” says David Horowitz, once a member of the New Left, “to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” The constant screeching over man-made global warming is simply a pathway to accumulating ever-greater political power and control.
Science, real science, not politicized, self-serving Tony Fauci science, demands skepticism and dissent. Minds should never be closed off to the possibilities that are beyond current scientific findings and theories. Science can never evolve or grow if today’s accepted truths are not challenged tomorrow. The “politically motivated manufacture of scientific consensus corrupts the scientific process and leads to poor policy decisions,” says Judith Curry, former professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and now president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network. “Consensus enforcement,” she continues, “interferes with the self-correcting nature of science via skepticism, which is a foundation of the scientific process.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-saves-planet-by-skipping-climate-summit/

Every year the UN throws its global warming shindig.

This year it’s “COP28: Climate action can’t wait”. It waited for all the COPS before this, but this time it can’t wait.

Except that sadly Biden won’t be attending this year. Why? The official word is Israel. The less official word? Naptime.

Biden seems to be preserving his energy in other ways. It’s customary on foreign trips for the president to schmooze with other leaders at dinners once the meetings are over. Less formal and structured than the events preceding them, the dinners offer a chance for leaders to bond, talk through differences or amplify a point. On two recent international trips, Biden has chosen to skip the nighttime socializing.

When he didn’t attend a dinner during the NATO summit in Lithuania earlier this month, aides said he was preparing for meetings and a major speech the next day and noted he’d already been overseas for four days. He was a no-show at a dinner with his counterparts in Bali last fall.

Whatever the reason though, by keeping Air Force One grounded and avoiding flying around the world with a massive delegation, he’s already done more to reduce ’emissions’ than everyone at COP28.

COP28, hosted in Dubai, by a major oil state, provides nothing but an opportunity to schmooze and plot to steal taxpayer money.

Biden may be too tried to go around the world again, but at least he’s for once actually reducing his own energy use instead of telling Americans to make do with less.

After struggling to find a campaign theme, maybe he’s finally stumbled on one. Save the planet, stay in your basement.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/28/another-climate-snow-job/

A federal bureaucrat is telling us that due to human activity, global snowfall is in decline. There’s no reason to be worried, though. We’ve seen the climate doomsday predictions before, and somehow they always turn out to be wrong.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, we were assured by the British Independent that “​​Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” (Don’t bother to try to find the story in the Independent’s archives – that page doesn’t exist or has been moved, presumably because it’s an embarrassment to the newspaper.) In that article, reporter Charles Onians appealed to the correct authorities, citing David Viner, then a senior scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, who declared that “within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event.’”

He told Onians that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Onians also cited David Parker of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, who, in the reporter’s words, said that “ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes – or eventually ‘feel’ virtual cold.”

The Independent’s story was published in March 2000. Northern Hemisphere snow cover that year was 7.14 million square miles. So far in 2023, snow is covering 7.23 million square miles of the Northern Hemisphere. In between, there was a low of 6.26 million square miles (2007) and a high of 8.97 million square miles (2002). As recently as 2019, the coverage was as wide as 8.59 million square miles.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/why_governments_have_replaced_god_with_global_warming.html

For millennia, monarchs ruled by some form of divine right.  If not asserting god-like powers, they claimed to be acting as God’s emissaries here on Earth.  You can imagine the effect this had on devout peoples of any faith.  How could the great unwashed masses dare question any royal’s divinely inspired orders?  This paradigm kept government authorities towering over those they ruled.

The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution crashed through the walls of absolute monarchies and reoriented political systems on the foundations of natural law, religious toleration, constitutional government, and individual liberty.  Twentieth-century postmodernism later led to a rise in religious agnosticism and a growing uncertainty about even the existence of God.  First, philosophers stole monarchs’ divine right to rule; then they convinced new generations to question God altogether.  

Unsurprisingly, both of these intellectual revolutions weakened the innate authority upon which governments relied.  Stripped of any divine pretense for exerting power over their subjects, governments have been attempting to justify their existence ever since.

From this perspective, it is easy to see why those with power today have gone all-in on “global warming” fearmongering.  By replacing God with the apocalyptic threat of “climate change,” governments have effectively created a “higher power” that they exclusively control.  Instead of beseeching citizens to follow God’s will here on Earth, governments beseech them to “follow the science.”  The “science,” for its part, is treated as some kind of infallible religious scripture that can never be questioned.  It doesn’t matter that climate models have been wildly incorrect, that research has been fabricated, that sea levels are not rising, or that the proposed “solutions” for manipulating naturally dynamic climates will accomplish nothing.  Governments have decreed, “The science is settled,” and once the “science” has spoken, no lowly heretic may disagree.

In truth, the “global warming” con is about three things: gods, money, and control.  

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-11-18-at-the-new-york-krazy-klimate-konference

On Thursday (November 16) a publication called City & State (specializing in covering New York state and local government) put on a conference they called the “2023 Clean Energy in New York Summit: New York’s Path to Sustainability.” Let’s call this the New York Krazy Klimate Konference. I showed up to observe and report on the festivities, along with another prominent skeptic, Roger Caiazza of the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York blog.

The Krazy Klimate Konference featured a gaggle of high-ranking New York bureaucrats and legislators, there to report on New York’s exciting progress toward Net Zero nirvana; plus an even larger gaggle of grifters and parasites looking to cash in on the big piles of government loot sure to get passed out along the way. The co-Chair of New York’s Climate Action Council — Doreen Harris — gave the Keynote address. Other presenters included several members of the State Assembly, as well as bureaucrats in charge of the so-called “energy transition” on the Governor’s staff, at the State Energy Research & Development Agency (NYSERDA), at the City Department of Environmental Protection, at the City Department of Buildings, and so forth. Wind and solar energy grifters were also prominently featured.

As readers here likely know, the first big step in New York’s transition to carbon-free energy is supposed to be the construction of some 9000 MW nameplate capacity of off-shore wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. Contracts for about half of that have been issued after a competitive bidding process. Unfortunately, between July and October, nearly all of the contractors for the off-shore wind announced that they were walking away from the deals, absent massive price increases. The Public Service Commission thereupon rejected the price increases, but as of the time of the Konference nobody had figured out the next step. Thus, as we listened to the speakers, New York’s headline initiative to move toward carbon-free energy was literally dead in the water.

You might think that the focus of a Konference like this would be addressing the very serious obstacles that stand in the way of the hoped-for energy transition.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-toll-of-bidens-green-enthusiasm-national-security-gdp-growth-energy-transition-059e58b5?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Amid the violent challenges to the world system in Ukraine and the Middle East, it’s easy to overlook the corroding economic pillars of international order. Under President Biden, American economic policy is morphing into a toxic combination of protectionism and green activism guaranteed to slow growth and create global friction.

That matters. Seventy-five years ago, in 1948, the wheels were coming off post-World War II American foreign policy. Moscow was toppling democratic governments in Europe. Mao Zedong was marching on Beijing. Violence stalked the Middle East as fighting between newly independent Israel and its neighbors created a massive humanitarian crisis and threatened a wider war.

As the global system teetered precariously, President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall understood three big truths. First, peace in a nuclear age could last only if the U.S. and its allies had the power and will to deter the enemy powers seeking to overturn the world order. Second, at least on the basics, foreign policy had to be bipartisan. Third, the American-led world system had to raise living standards both at home and abroad. At home, we could never sustain the necessary defense budgets or limit polarization unless the economy delivered for the average American family. Abroad, only rising living standards could promote the political stability and pro-capitalist sentiment that our system needed to survive.

That’s not how the Biden administration does business. Even as threats mount, it plans to shrink the defense budget in real terms. No one in the White House seems to be engaging with people like Sen. Jim Risch and Tom Cotton the way Harry Truman wooed Republican internationalists in the 1940s. And the White House remains committed to economic policies that will undermine growth at home while eroding political and social stability across much of the Global South.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20127/forced-electric-vehicles

[O]ur federal and state governments are investing huge sums of money into projects that will benefit a foreign government [Chinese Communist China] one that might not have America’s best interests in mind.

The harshest reality check may come in the form of expensive inventory build-up of unsold EVs that Ford thought customers would buy but is now finding out that customers do not want.

Another red flag for EVs is the lack of profitability for Ford and GM’s models. Ford lost $32,000 on every EV it sold in 2023 and expects its EV business to lose $4.5 billion on the year. GM saw its quarterly profits cut by $1.5 billion due to EV losses.

It is time for our policy makers to stop and seriously evaluate if we as a nation are prepared to make these gigantic investments in unproven technologies that risk our nation’s energy and transportation leadership.

Now is not the time for communist-style “central planning,” or to let ideologues drive America’s policy and its future over the proverbial cliff.

The recent headlines regarding the forced transition from gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles to electrical vehicles (EVs) are screaming “Slow down!” even as federal and state governments are barreling along trying to regulate and mandate them.