RUTHFULLY YOURS

ttps://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/biden_doj_sets_up_a_new_office_of_environmental_justice__headed_by_another_fanatic.html

As if we didn’t need yet another government agency in this age of behemoth federal spending, the Biden administration has saddled the U.S. with a new one, the Office of Environmental Justice. The $1.4 million monstrosity will be buried within the U.S. Department of Justice under the authority of U.S. associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, who set up the new bureaucracy-enforcer arm. It will be headed by one Cynthia M. Ferguson, whose title is acting director. And you can bet it’s going to be a problem.

According to the Washington Examiner:

The Justice Department is launching a new Office of Environmental Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday, which will seek to redress health risks from climate change faced by minorities and low-income people in the United States.

“Although violations of our environmental laws can happen anywhere, communities of color, indigenous communities, and low-income communities often bear the brunt of the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution, and climate change,” Garland said at a news conference on Thursday.

“For far too long, these communities have faced barriers to accessing the justice they deserve,” Garland said, adding that the Justice Department “will prioritize the cases that will have the greatest impact on the communities most overburdened by environmental harm.”

Which sounds like a shakedown operation. We already know that activist groups have conspired with the Environmental Protection Agency for millions in payouts as well as the ‘right’ to write regulations themselves in exchange for not protesting the agency. We saw the details of that scandal in the late Obama years, after President Trump’s officials came to power and put a stop to it. Remember this?

In fulfilling his promise to end the practice of regulation through litigation that has harmed the American public, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt issued an agency-wide directive Oct. 16 designed to end “sue and settle” practices within the agency.

Sue and settle refers to the practice of special interest groups filing suit against federal agencies with the two parties coming to an agreement outside of the normal rule-making process. These settlement agreements are negotiated behind closed doors with no participation from the public or affected parties.

…and…

For example, between 2009 and 2012, EPA chose not to defend itself in over 60 lawsuits from special interest advocacy groups. These cases resulted in settlement agreements and EPA publishing more than 100 new regulations — including the recent Clean Power Plan.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=3e2507af14

My previous post on Tuesday contained some highlights from the May 3 public hearing of New York’s Climate Action Council. The CAC is the body that is charged with devising a “Scoping Plan” to inform all us New Yorkers how we will achieve “zero carbon” electricity by 2030 and a “zero carbon” economy by 2050. I attended the hearing for about two and a half hours, during which about 60 people spoke.

Reflecting on the hearing a few days later, I think there are a few more highlights that would interest the readers, and will give some more insights into the nature of progressive thinking.

As stated in my prior post, of the 60 or so speakers, all but myself and four others were vigorous supporters of the critical necessity of achieving the stated zero carbon goals by the given dates as an urgent matter of saving our planet and our children. This was so despite what appeared to me to be manifestly huge issues of physical feasibility and cost that are almost certain to cause these grand “net zero” energy schemes to fail. The CAC’s draft “Scoping Plan,” as it currently exists for public comment, does not consider these feasibility or cost issues in any remotely adequate fashion, if at all. That fact did not appear to bother the overwhelming majority of the speakers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/green-judges-vs-american-gas-mountain-valley-pipeline-fourth-circuit-court-of-appeals-11648155967?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Here’s a hard political reality behind high energy prices: It has become nearly impossible to build a natural gas pipeline in the U.S. Consider West Virginia’s Mountain Valley pipeline, which has come under a relentless siege by green groups and activists in judicial robes. While more than 90% complete, the pipeline is in danger of getting cancelled.

The 304-mile interstate pipeline aims to deliver natural gas from Appalachia’s Marcellus and Utica shale deposits to the mid- and south-Atlantic regions. A pipeline shortage has reduced the incentive for drillers to produce more natural gas. Yet states in the mid- and south Atlantic desperately need more gas as their populations grow.

Federal regulators have signed off on most of Mountain Valley’s environmental permits, but greens have filed lawsuits at every turn. Oddly, their repeated challenges keep landing before the same Fourth Circuit three-judge panel of Roger Gregory, James Wynn and Stephanie Thacker even though cases are supposed to be assigned to judges at random.

These same three judges also blocked a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, only to be overruled by a 7-2 Supreme Court majority in 2020. A few weeks later, Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled the pipeline, blaming exploding costs, delays and uncertainty from future litigation. They probably saw what was happening to Mountain Valley.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

Today I trekked out to Brooklyn to testify at a public hearing on New York’s plans to achieve “net zero” electricity by 2030 or so, and a “net zero” economy by 2050. Actually, it wasn’t much of a trek — the hearing took place at an auditorium in Brooklyn Heights, near the first subway stop on the other side of the East River.

The organization holding the hearing was the New York Climate Action Council. This body was created under New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (Climate Act), and is tasked with figuring out how to achieve the statutorily mandated net zero targets. The first statutory target is 40% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, which as a practical matter means that fossil fuels must be almost completely eliminated from the electricity sector by that date. The Council issued its Draft Scoping Plan for how to achieve the targets on December 30, 2021. The Draft Scoping Plan is some 300 pages of text plus 500 pages of appendices; but the gist comes down to, we will order the private sector to eliminate emissions by various dates certain, and then it is up to the little people to work out the details. Today’s hearing allowed for members of the public to comment on the Draft Scoping Plan, supposedly so that any appropriate adjustments can be made before the Plan becomes final later this year.

The Climate Action Council has some 21 members. A full list can be found here. Seven of the 21 attended today’s hearing. I’m going to give you a list of these people and their titles, to give an indication of the extent to which the Council is dominated by environmental activists and political functionaries with no background or interest in how a huge electrical grid might actually get converted to “net zero” as an engineering matter. The members present were: Doreen Harris, President and CEO of the New York Energy Research and Development Authority; Basil Seggos, Commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation; Roberta Reardon, Commissioner of the New York State Department of Labor; Robert Rodriguez, Acting Secretary of State of New York; RuthAnne Visnauskas, Commissioner and CEO, New York State Homes and Community Renewal; Peter Iwanowicz, Executive Director, Environmental Advocates NY; and Raya Salter, Lead Policy Organizer, NY Renews. Of these, maybe Ms. Harris of NYSERDA knows something about how the electrical grid works. Then again, maybe she doesn’t.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2022/05/02/clean-energy-has-a-dirty-little-secret-n1593821

Clean energy has a dirty little secret, just revealed by MIT science writing student Shel Evergreen: Its “unsustainable” appetite for minerals and the dirty ways they’re obtained.

From Evergreen’s report for Ars Technica:

In South America’s Atacama Desert, salt flats are dotted with shallow, turquoise-colored lithium brine pools. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, children chip at the ground for cobalt. In China, toxic chemicals leach neodymium from the earth.

All that extraction “presents humanitarian, environmental, and logistical challenges,” she writes.

Scenes like those might already be familiar ground for those who aren’t wedded to the green fantasy of clean energy. But what you might not know is just how much worse things are going to have to get for Mother Earth if the Greens (no relation) are going to “save” her.

The International Energy Agency warned last year that “to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, overall mineral requirements would need to increase six-fold.”

“Those minerals have to come from somewhere, and that often involves harmful sourcing, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and limits on the mineral supply.”

It’s somehow news that we can’t put minerals that we don’t have into solar panels, electric car batteries, or wind turbines. It ought to be news — GIANT BOLD-TYPE HEADLINE news — that clean energy means increased carbon emissions.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-25-comedy-gold-how-to-relieve-your-climate-anxiety

Every day you read how the “climate crisis” is real, and rapidly getting worse. Humans burning fossil fuels to support out-of-control consumerism have brought the earth to the brink of disaster. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, and plagues of every sort are proliferating. Of course, you are feeling all the natural human reactions: fear, dread, not to mention overwhelming guilt at your own role in causing the crisis through the grave sin of enjoying your life. In short, you have entered the state known to the experts as “climate anxiety.”

The New York Times, as usual, was way out front on this issue. Back in July 2021 they published a long piece by Molly Peterson with the headline “How to Calm Your Climate Anxiety.” Subheadline: “Between wildfires, heat waves and hurricanes, we’re all feeling nervous about the future. But stewing or ignoring the problem won’t ease your burden.” Yes, if you are a writer for the New York Times you fully expect that among the readership it is accurate to say that “we’re all” feeling the climate anxiety. How could we not? Kindly, Molly, tell us how bad it is. Excerpts:

Evidence that climate change threatens mental health is mounting, according to a recent report from Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation. Higher temperatures are tied to depressive language and higher suicide rates. Fires, hurricanes and heat waves carry the risk of trauma and depression. . . . Young people especially report feeling debilitated by climate anxiety and being frustrated by older generations. “They try to understand, but they don’t,” said 16-year-old Adah Crandall, a climate and anti-freeway activist in Portland, Oregon. “I am scared for my future because of the inaction of adults in the past.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18469/wind-solar-power-us-economy

When President Biden and other advocates of wind and solar generation speak, they appear to believe that the challenge posed is just a matter of currently having too much fossil fuel generation and not enough wind and solar; and therefore, accomplishing the transition to “net zero” will be a simple matter of building sufficient wind and solar facilities and having those facilities replace the current ones that use the fossil fuels.

They are completely wrong about that.

The proposed transition to “net zero” via wind and solar power is not only not easy, but is a total fantasy. It likely cannot occur at all without dramatically undermining our economy, lifestyle and security, and it certainly cannot occur at anything remotely approaching reasonable cost. At some point, the ongoing forced transition… will crash and burn.

[I]t doesn’t matter whether you build a million wind turbines and solar panels, or a billion, or a trillion. On a calm night, they will still produce nothing, and will require full back-up from some other source.

If you propose a predominantly wind/solar electricity system, where fossil fuel back-up is banned, you must, repeat must, address the question of energy storage. Without fossil fuel back-up, and with nuclear and hydro constrained, storage is the only remaining option. How much will be needed? How much will it cost? How long will the energy need to remain in storage before it is used?

There should be highly-detailed engineering studies of how the transition can be accomplished…. But the opposite is the case. At the current time, the government is paying little to no significant attention to the energy storage problem. There is no detailed engineering plan of how to accomplish the transition. There are no detailed government-supported studies of how much storage will be needed, or of what technology can accomplish the job, or of cost.

It gets worse:…. Ken Gregory calculated the cost of such a system as well over $100 trillion, before even getting to the question of whether battery technology exists that can store such amounts of energy for months on end and then discharge the energy over additional months. And even at that enormous cost, that calculation only applied to current levels of electricity consumption…. For purposes of comparison, the entire U.S. GDP is currently around $22 trillion per year.

In other words: we have a hundred-trillion-or-so dollar effort that under presidential directive must be fully up and running by 2035, with everybody’s light and heat and everything else dependent on success, and not only don’t we have any feasibility study or demonstration project, but we haven’t started the basic research yet, and the building where the basic research is to be conducted won’t be ready until 2025.

Meanwhile the country heads down a government-directed and coerced path of massively building wind turbines and solar panels, while forcing the closure of fully-functioning power plants burning coal, oil and natural gas. It is only a question of time before somewhere the system ceases to work…. [I]t is easy to see how the consequences could be dire. Will millions be left without heat in the dead of winter, in which case many will likely die? Will a fully-electrified transportation system get knocked out, stranding millions without ability to get to work? Will our military capabilities get disabled and enable some sort of attack?

No sane, let alone competent, government would ever be headed down this path.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/how-much-has-earth-day-cost-us

“The cost of housing is higher, the cost of energy is higher, and people sit longer in traffic (emitting more pollutants) because of NEPA. Former President Donald Trump instituted new rules to help streamline the NEPA process. This week, President Joe Biden undid the reforms. This is just one more reason why, if Biden wants to know why the cost of energy is going up, he needs to look in the mirror.”

Rachel Carson died before the first Earth Day in 1970, but her book Silent Spring is widely acknowledged to have inspired the modern environmental movement that pushed for its creation. Carson did not actually call for an end to all use of the pesticide DDT, but the movement she spawned definitely caused the decline of DDT use in fighting malaria — a policy that has led to the deaths of millions worldwide.

Everyone benefits when scientists like Carson do the hard work of identifying substances that cause people harm. Unfortunately, activists often take this information too far, ignoring the benefits that many chemicals provide to humanity.

The most effective environmental laws, the 1963 Clean Air Act and the 1972 Clean Water Act, try to strike a balance between the harms caused by pollution and the benefits that potentially polluting activities provide. They try to limit human exposure to pollution through permitting processes and cost-benefit analyses that can ultimately be challenged in court.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-20-the-new-york-times-does-energy-storage

If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you know that the mythical transition to an energy future of pure “green” wind and solar electricity faces a gigantic problem of how to provide energy storage of the right type and in sufficient quantity. To make the electrical grid work, the wildly intermittent production of the wind and sun must somehow be turned into a smooth flow of electricity that matches customer demand minute by minute throughout the year. So far, that task has been fulfilled largely by natural gas back-up, which ramps up and down as the sun and wind ramp down and up. But now governments in the U.S., Europe, Canada and elsewhere say they will move to “net zero” carbon emission electricity by some time in the 2030s. Natural gas emits CO2, so “net zero” means that the natural gas must go. The alternative is energy storage of some sort.

Clearly, it is time to start figuring out how much energy storage we’re going to need, and of what type. Indeed, it is well past time to start figuring that out. If our government were even slightly competent, and also serious about “net zero” electricity by 2035, it would by this time have long since put together detailed feasibility and cost studies and demonstration projects showing exactly how this is going to work. Naturally, they don’t have any of that.