RUTHFULLY YOURS

Perhaps because his capital’s name was on the global accord being scrapped by one country, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, 39, wheeled out le grand geste, or grand gesture, in offering “refuge” to America’s climate scientists. As if such a fraud-riddled cast of characters were somehow about to be arrested. Or lose tenure. Or not get a grant. Or something.

In fact, it was for nothing more than President Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, a worthless global non-treaty premised on the fake claims of global warming and policed worldwide by an America-hating petty Eurocrat bureaucracy run out of Berlin. Because the U.S. simply does not want to be a part of the farce, Macron is going overwrought like so many of them and apparently offering asylum ahead of the knock on the door at midnight.

He’s gone off the deep end, just as most of them have.

The question remaining is whether he could actually be serious. Does he really mean to make Paris an oasis of global warming believers and then call it science?

Does he really think scientists in the States are going to give up their cushy tenured positions and hotfoot it to the charms of Paris, which has become considerably less charming, given the existing bureaucracy and existing refugee threat should one actually have to live there?

And more to the point, does he really think climate science, which has been shown time and time again to be a fraud-riddled, data-faked, hide-the-decline, messed up hockey stick, is actually going to buckle down and start producing some hard science, which so far it has failed to do?

Why not call in all the astrologers, quack-medicine practitioners, and soothsayers as well, and make Paris the world’s junk science empire? You know their public will be happy to pay for it, given all the virtue-signaling potential.

The business case for the Paris agreement has nothing to do with climate change. It goes like this: It is better to be part of any confab than outside of it. Like saluting the flag or bowing your head in church, there is no cost to being insincere, but there is a cost to not going along.

Let us understand something: 195 countries will not be dragged kicking and screaming to sign any agreement that imposes a cost on them. Such deals exist only because they provide an international imprimatur to what politicians were going to do anyway.

The oil countries like Saudi Arabia and Norway signed. They plan to keep producing oil. India and China plan to grow energy consumption until it is similar to the per capita consumption of the developed countries, at which point it will level off.

The U.S. and Europe intend to keep subsidizing green energy as long as domestic voters give them permission to do so, because the whole point of being in office is to redirect resources to interest groups best able to reward politicians for doling out the goodies.

The Paris countries agreed to meet certain emissions targets, and claimed an intent to hold a planetary temperature increase to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

Not only are the emission targets unenforceable, they have no intelligible relation to the temperature goal according to the very iffy science. By the shot-in-the-dark estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it’s even possible the rest of the century will bring little warming anyway.

And that’s good. Because the unenforceable cuts agreed to in Paris would be a rounding error even if carried out.

In the 30 years since global warming became a daily concern of the newspapers, one lesson has been reliably demonstrated for policy participants: There is no appetite in the body politic for the kinds of energy taxes and prohibitions needed to make a meaningful change in atmospheric CO 2 . CONTINUE AT SITE

For a bull in the china shop, President Donald Trump has so far gingerly stepped around the Paris climate accord. That dance could end as soon as this week, with Trump deciding whether to stay in or opt out.

“Out” should be the obvious answer. No U.S. interest is served by remaining part of the accord, which even its supporters say is mostly an exercise in window dressing — that is, when they aren’t insisting that the fate of the planet depends on it.

The treaty’s advocates, hoping to forestall a Trump exit, are trying to save the accord by arguing that it is largely meaningless. In this spirit, a piece in the liberal website Vox explained, the Paris accord “asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.” In other words, “Nothing to see here, just us climate-change alarmists playing pretend.”

And there is indeed much to be said for the worthlessness of Paris. Beijing pledges that China’s emissions will “peak around 2030.” By one estimate, this is when its emissions would peak regardless. So the world’s largest emitter is using the accord as a platform for climate virtue-signaling.

According to Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute, even if Paris is fully implemented and you accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s model for how emissions affect warming, it will produce a rounding error’s worth of decline in the global temperature by 2100 — .17 of a degree Celsius.

If Paris is such a nullity, why shouldn’t we simply pull out? This is where its supporters reverse field and contend that it will be a global disaster if the U.S. leaves. Supposedly the moral suasion involved in countries coming up with voluntary targets and having to defend their performance meeting them will drive an ever-escalating commitment to fight global warming.

Once upon a time, Paris was portrayed as a tool for steadily tightening restrictions on fossil fuels. The Obama team referred to one provision in the accord as “ratcheting up ambition over time.”

Whatever their opportunistic salesmanship at the moment, this clearly is still the goal of the treaty’s supporters and a reason why Trump should get out while the getting is good. International agreements acquire a dead-weight momentum of their own. Witness how hard it is to pull out of the Paris accord now, when it went into effect only last November. In another couple of years, it will acquire the sanctity of the Peace of Westphalia.

The treaty may be notionally voluntary, but climate-change activists will surely hunt for a judge willing to find a reason that the U.S. emission target in the accord is binding. Trump’s unhappy experience in the courts with his travel ban should make him highly sensitive to this judicial threat.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/wind-turbines-are-neither-clean-nor-green-and-they-provide-zero-global-energy/

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Matt Ridley and climate change campaigner Leo Murray debate the future of wind power:

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

Only two months ago, Tesco agreed to pay a £129 million fine for false accounting, when it overstated profits in its August 2014 trading statement. ‘What happened is a huge source of regret to us all at Tesco,’ chief executive Dave Lewis said, ‘but we are a different business now.’ Not so fast. On Monday, the supermarket giant announced that its UK stores and distribution centres would be switching to 100 per cent renewable electricity this year.

Tesco backs up its claim by saying that its UK electricity consumption will be supported by renewable energy certificates. As part of the EU’s promotion of renewable electricity, all member states are required to run schemes to guarantee the origin of electricity produced from renewable energy sources. In Britain, energy regulator Ofgem runs the Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (REGO) scheme that Tesco will use to support its 100 per cent renewable claim.

Last year, renewable sources supplied 24.4 per cent of electricity generated in Britain. Intermittent, weather-dependent renewable in the form of wind and solar accounted for 58 per cent of renewable electricity. The next largest comes from the environmentally destructive Drax power station. It used to be Europe’s largest coal-fired power station but now burns wood pellets sourced from North American forests. Under EU rules, wood imported from outside the EU is accounted for as a renewable, zero-carbon fuel source. Yes, the EU really thinks that burning American forests is renewable.

Renewable electricity generation by typeIn 2016Onshore wind 25.5%Onshore wind 25.5%Offshore wind 19.8%Offshore wind 19.8%Solar photovoltaics 12.4%Solar photovoltaics 12.4%Plant biomass 22.7%Plant biomass 22.7%Hydro 6.5%Hydro 6.5%Other 13.0%Other 13.0%Source: BEIS Energy Trends 6.1 / Author’s calculations

Given the high proportion of renewable electricity from weather-dependent capacity, what happens when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing? Would you buy chicken from a store that let its chill cabinets warm up? Is Tesco going to let its store go dark when there isn’t enough wind and solar electricity being generated? Of course, it’s not going to put itself out of business by shutting its stores when the wind speed drops.

Neither is Tesco putting its money where its mouth is. According to calculations by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, a lithium-ion battery with enough electricity to run everything in a house for a week would weigh more than a ton and triple your electricity bill. Tesco isn’t going down the route of bankrupting itself by buying up a huge proportion of the world’s output of lithium-ion batteries.

In reality, Tesco’s claim is based on a Big Lie, that electricity can be stored just like groceries, homewares and clothing. As every school child doing GCSE physics knows, electricity is extremely hard to store. Uniquely, electricity is a product line that has to be generated the moment it’s consumed. There is no stock of electricity waiting to be sold. One GCSE text book illustrates the puny scale of renewable electricity. A hydropower project in Chile’s Atacama Desert will have a capacity of 55 million cubic metres to give a potential generating capacity of 91.7 gigawatt-hours. The amount of solar power is only sufficient pump 45 cubic metres of water a day. Question: How long will it take to fill the reservoir? Answer: 3,346 years.