RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-life-expectancy-carbon-netural-oil-coal-fossil-fuels-ukraine-war-russia-china-fossil-fuels-

If you can afford a Tesla, you probably find it hard to imagine that there are some 3.5 billion people on Earth who have no reasonably reliable access to electricity. Even less obvious may be the way rich countries’ pursuit of carbon neutrality at almost any cost limits economic opportunities for the world’s poor and poses serious geopolitical risks to the West.

Anyone on an investment committee has likely spent untold amounts of time discussing ways to mitigate the impact of climate change, but they’ve likely never heard anyone state one simple and incontrovertible fact: The widespread exploration and production of fossil fuels that started in Titusville, Pa., not quite 170 years ago, has done more to benefit the lives of ordinary people than any other technological advance in history.

Before fossil fuels, people relied on burning biomass, such as timber or manure, which was a far dirtier and much less efficient source of energy. Fossil fuels let people heat their homes in the winter, reducing the risk of death from exposure. Fossil-fuel-based fertilizers greatly increased crop yields, reducing starvation and malnutrition. Before the advent of the automobile, the ability for many people to venture far from their hometown was an unfathomable dream. Oil- and coal-burning transportation opened up access to education, commerce, professional opportunities, and vital services such as medicine. There has been, and remains, a strong correlation between the use of fossil fuels and life expectancy.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-5-reality-cannot-penetrate-into-the-fantasy-world-of-climate-campaigners

It was only a few weeks ago when the UN’s International Energy Agency issued its Report on “CO2 Emissions in 2021.” (The Report does not bear a precise date, but only “March 2022.”) I covered the IEA’s Report in my previous post a few days ago. The Report gives detail as to the obvious fact that world CO2 emissions, after a downward blip in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, have resumed their rapid increase, mostly attributable to massive deployment of coal-fired electricity generation resources in large-population developing countries like China and India.

In any rational world, this Report would have to have dashed any remaining dreams of climate campaigners that overall world CO2 emissions would see anything but large ongoing increases for the foreseeable future. The climate-obsessed jurisdictions in the U.S. and Europe already represent only a shrinking minority of world energy consumption, headed for insignificance as the large-population countries of the developing world join the fossil fuel age. For example, why would a small-population jurisdiction like New York — with about 20 million people, compared to about 2.8 billion for the combination of China and India, and with existing fossil-fuel electricity generation capacity of about 25 GW — struggle to reduce its fossil-fueled electricity generation by, say, one GW per year, when China alone is adding 38 GW of coal-fired power plants this year, and another 47 GW next year, with hundreds more gigawatts worth of coal plants already in the pipeline?

The answer is that reality just can’t penetrate into the fantasy world of the climate campaigners.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/06/here-comes-another-climate-deadline-that-will-pass-without-notice/

We’ve heard so many declarations that our “last chance” to avoid global warming has arrived that we’ve lost count of the number of times the world has ended. But the sirens continue to wail, the latest from a United Nations grandee who says humanity has to act “now or never” to avoid overheating its host planet. Pardon us while we yawn.

According to Jim Skea, a European academic who co-chairs the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III, “it’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming” to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Keeping Earth’s temperatures in check “will be impossible,” he said, “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors.”

Skea’s comment arrived wrapped up in Working Group III’s just-released report on global warming mitigation, part of the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment. The media, which loves to breathlessly report the demise of the world caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, says the 1.5-degree limit “is recognized as a crucial global target because beyond this level, so-called tipping points become more likely. These are thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic shifts in Earth’s entire life support system.”

OK, then. But let’s back up a moment. Or maybe 13 years. That’s when Prince Charles said, with a deep, trust-me earnestness, that our world had only “100 months to act” before we had done so much damage that the effects of global warming would become irreversible.

Then last year, about 150 months after his previous doomsday prediction, the prince said that the upcoming climate summit in Glasgow was “quite literally … the last chance saloon” to stop the scourge of warming.

Yes, one man is a university researcher, the other an effete figurehead. But they have a common thread. They’re both wrong. And are unlikely to be right in their lifetimes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/why_dont_the_media_ever_ask_why_previous_ipcc_predictions_have_been_so_wrong.html

Once again, the UN intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning that we are doomed by climate change.  The media, Biden administration, and the IPCC like to scare people. This article by Yahoo News senior editor Ben Adler does not answer simple questions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday released its latest report, which found that nations are falling short of their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert catastrophic climate change. While the technology exists to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) of average global temperature increase — the goal that virtually every nation agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement and reaffirmed last year in the Glasgow Climate Pact — current policies put the world on a trajectory toward at least twice as much warming.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the report’s conclusion “damning.” The Working Group III report marks the end of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment, with strong words for countries that have failed to act on climate change.

“The jury has reached a verdict. And it is damning,” Guterres said in a statement. “This report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a litany of broken climate promises. It is a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.” (snip)

Without a dramatic shift in policy, Guterres warned, “We are on a fast track to climate disaster: Major cities under water. Unprecedented heatwaves. Terrifying storms. Widespread water shortages. The extinction of a million species of plants and animals.”

In 1989 the IPCC said we only had ten years left!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/pete_buttigieg_smirks_to_americans_to_go_green_or_get_used_to_soaring_gas_prices.html

Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has a smarmy, smiling message for all of us pudknocker Americans who don’t quite buy into the ‘going green’ agenda of the Bidenites:

Here’s what he actually said:

…so, less dependent on foreign oil, and that protects us from shortages at fuel stations, but here’s the thing  to remember, even if all of the oil we use in the U.S.A. were made in the U.S.A., the price of it is still subject to powers and dynamics outside of the U.S.A. Which means that until we achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy created here at home, American citizens will still be vulnerable to wild price hikes like we are seeing right now..

..which is smug, certain, smiling, and … and a very odd message to shill out to the American public as gas prices hit $5.85 a gallon on average in California and $4.26 nationally, and midterms beckon.

It’s an astonishingly ignorant and charlatan-like statement.

Buttigieg argues that domestically produced green energy is somehow not subject to global price swings, while only oil and natural gas somehow are.

How do we unpack this?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_religiofication_of_climate_change.html

Climate change is the unofficial state religion of the Biden administration.  In his commentaries on mass movements, Eric Hoffer warned of the “religiofication” of practical purposes into holy causes and noted, “Blind devotion and religiosity leads to belief that the movement is virtuous and a source of strength.  The adherent identifies as a supporter and defender of a holy cause.”  

The Supreme Court has not established a formal definition of religion.  Standards differentiating religious and similar non-religious beliefs remain elusive.  The Second Circuit Court noted that for the purposes of the First Amendment, beliefs that constitute a religion are evaluated on whether the beliefs are sincerely held.  The 10th Circuit Court quoted philosopher William James’s definition of religion: “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.” 

Barbara Burnett attempted to define religion from a twentieth-century perspective, drawing on Clifford Geertz’s thesis of applying five tests based on symbolic anthropology.  Judge Adams of the Third Circuit Court distilled the definition to three points, honoring Supreme Court precedent and the practical needs of the courts.

Climate change fulfills both Geertz’s anthropological and Judge Adams’s legal tests to qualify as a religion.  The movement deals with fundamental questions dealing with the sacred planet.  The believer’s passions are deeply held, comprehensive, and nurtured and promulgated by an array of organizations representing all aspects of worldwide society.  The true believer views climate change as a good vs. evil phenomenon.  The threats to the planet are not theoretical, but realistic and personal.  The liturgy of the religion is promoted by a network of teachers who disseminate its beliefs, practices, ceremony, and rites.

Climate czar John Kerry stated that walking away from global warming at Kyoto sent a message of duplicity and hypocrisy and that ignoring the twelve-year doomsday forecast issued in 2019 spelled certain disaster for the planet.  When criticized for using a personal jet to accept a climate award in Iceland, he placed the onus on others and replied, “If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.” 

https://spectator.org/can-ukraine-kill-climate-change/

All apocalyptic movements end in failure, but often only after they have wreaked untold damage on the societies that believe in them. That’s the takeaway from Richard Landes’s Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, which explores the appeal of these movements over the centuries, their chief characteristics, and how they take over societies and eventually run out of steam.

Global warming, for all its scientific veneer, has the basic characteristics of an apocalyptic movement: there is a prophecy of impending doom, a demand for repentance and societal self-sacrifice (in this case, giving up the fossil fuels upon which industrial society depends), and a sense of urgency that if action is not taken immediately, it will be too late. In the end, if the required sacrifices are made, there is an idyllic future. In this case, it’s a green new world, powered by sun and wind. Since its emergence in the 1980s, the global warming apocalypse has shown remarkable resilience, emerging stronger than ever from a near-death experience in November 2009 when leaked emails between top climate scientists exposed their shenanigans in suppressing scientific dissent and deleting data.

What probably saved the movement was that the West’s political elite had by then committed themselves. At the beginning of 2009, global warming had scored its most important convert: President Barack Obama. The hacked emails became news just before 40,000 delegates, including over 100 heads of state, Obama among them, converged on Copenhagen for the 15th annual UN climate conference.

In 2018, the movement obtained a major public relations boost when Greta Thunberg launched an international children’s crusade. President Donald Trump took the United States on a brief time out, but even while still on the campaign trail, now-President Joe Biden promised, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels.” At the 2021 UN climate conference in Glasgow, Biden showed up from Rome in an 85-car emissions-spewing cavalcade. This time, along with the unusually huge number of delegates — including 27 from Palau (total population: 18,000) — he was one of 120 heads of state. Today, the movement would seem by most measures to be at its peak, riding what Landes would call its “cresting wave.” Yet, it is possible that the crisis in Ukraine may mark the beginning of its end.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/600203-the-sec-tries-its-hand-at-climate-policy

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) remit includes ensuring candor, honesty and transparency in what public companies tell investors. Yet it will spend the next few weeks and months trying to fool us into believing that its new 510-page proposal on mandatory climate disclosure is solely about protecting investors and has nothing to do with climate policy or achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

No one should be fooled.

Materiality is the governing principle of corporate disclosure requirements. In 2010, the SEC issued 29 pages of guidance on climate-change disclosures. With respect to what is now called climate-transition risk, the guidance requires that companies “should consider specific risks they may face as a result of climate change legislation or regulations and avoid generic risk factor disclosure that could apply to any company.”

This common-sense approach is now being superseded by an SEC-specified climate-risk reporting and accounting framework that will run in parallel with traditional financial reporting requirements, with its own verification and attestation regime necessitating the employment of legions of climate consultants.

At the heart of the SEC’s new climate-disclosure regime is quantification of a company’s greenhouse gas emissions, at three levels: those emitted directly as a result of its own operations (Scope 1); those emitted from generating the electricity it consumes (Scope 2); and those emitted by its suppliers and customers (Scope 3). “Greenhouse gas emissions in many respects resemble financial statement disclosures,” writes Commissioner Allison Herren Lee, who, as the SEC’s acting chair in March 2021, initiated the process that led to the current proposal. Such disclosures, she claims, provide “critically important insights into a company’s operations.”

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=e79d572f7c

If you are even a semi-regular reader of this blog, you know about the energy storage problem that is inherent in the effort to eliminate dispatchable fossil fuels from the electricity generation system and replace them with wind and solar. As discussed here many times, other than with nuclear power, the storage problem is the critical issue that must be addressed if there is ever going to be “net zero” electricity generation, let alone a “net zero” economy based on all energy usage having been electrified. For a sample of my prior posts on this subject just in the last few months, go here, here and here.

The problems of trying to provide enough storage to back up a fully wind and solar system without fossil fuels are so huge and so costly that you would think that everyone pushing the “net zero” agenda would be completely focused on these issues. And given that the issues are quite obvious, you would think that such people would be well down the curve with feasibility studies, cost studies, and demonstration projects to make their case on how their plans could be accomplished. Remarkably, that is not the case at all. Instead, if you read about the plans and proposals in various quarters for “net zero” in some short period of years, you quickly realize that the people pushing this agenda have no clue. No clue whatsoever.

Today, I am going to look at discussions of the storage situation coming out of three jurisdictions with ambitious “net zero” plans: California, Australia and New York. First a very brief summary of the problem. It is (or certainly should be) obvious that wind and solar generators have substantial periods when they generate nothing (e.g., calm nights), and other times when they generate far less than users demand. Get out a spreadsheet to do some calculations based on actual historical patterns of usage and generation from wind and solar sources, and you will find that to have a fully wind/solar generation system and make it through a year without a catastrophic failure, you will need approximately a three-times overbuild (based on rated capacity) of the wind/solar system, plus storage for something in the range of 24 – 30 days of average usage. For these purposes “usage” at any given moment is measured in gigawatts, but usage for some period of time is measured in gigawatt hours, not gigawatts. California’s average electricity usage for 2020 was about 31 GW; Australia’s was about 26 GW ; and New York’s was about 18 GW.