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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Switzerland’s Carbon Capture Plant Is a Giant Waste of Money By Spencer P. Morrison

On May 31, 2017 the world’s first commercial atmospheric carbon-capture plant opened for business in Hinwil, Switzerland.

The plant, designed and operated by a Swiss company called Climeworks, is different from existing carbon-capture facilities because it filters carbon dioxide out of the ambient atmosphere using proprietary technology, rather than from industrial exhaust, which is quite common.

Climeworks claims their facility will be able to remove 900 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. Furthermore, its modular design will allow it to be scaled up as the demand for carbon dioxide increases.

What do they plan to do with said carbon? Some of it will be pumped into nearby greenhouses to help the plants grow better, some will be used in carbonated beverages, and the rest will be sequestered deep underground in Swiss mines. The point? To stop climate change. Whether or not this is a worthy goal is beyond the scope of this article, but for the sake of argument, assume that climate change is a clear and present danger–even an existential threat. Does this project make sense?

No.

First of all, given the quantity of carbon Climework’s plant is able to filter from the atmosphere, it would take some 250,000 such facilities to meet even the relatively modest carbon sequestration goals recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change–that is 1% of total emissions by 2025. Presumably building these would cost a lot of money (although in fairness, Climeworks had not disclosed the cost of its project).

Also, in order for the company to be profitable, the carbon must be sold to greenhouses and pop manufacturers. Has it occurred to any of these “environmentalists” that the moment the lettuce is shipped out of the greenhouse, or the can of Sprite is opened that the carbon dioxide simply returns to the atmosphere. This plant will mostly just move carbon around, and is therefore useless.

The only way this facility actually removes carbon from the atmosphere is via sequestration, which is clearly not profitable. This means taxpayers will inevitably be on the hook for this “business” venture. Of course, carbon is used in oil wells, but more than enough of that is harvested locally from exhaust–no one needs Swiss atmospheric carbon.

Finally, Climeworks, and the entire green technology industry for that matter, appears to have forgotten that trees exist. Yes, trees. Trees naturally remove carbon from the atmosphere, and give us beautiful breathable oxygen. They basically do exactly what Climeworks does, except they are free–or dirt-cheap at the very least.

The best part is that trees are also very good at what they do. Depending on the climate and the type of tree, they can remove enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, and lock it away for centuries. In numerical terms, it only takes 98 “mature” trees (trees that can grow at least 20lb per year) to remove one ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and this number is for Canadian trees, which are not particularly verdant.

The Charade of the Paris Treaty The real problem with the global accord on climate change is that it would make no real difference By Bjorn Lomborg

Environmentalists were aghast when President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate treaty, with some declaring that the very survival of our civilization was at stake. But is the Paris accord really all that stands between the planet and the worst of climate change? Certainly not.

This is not to deny that President Trump’s announcement was problematic. He failed to acknowledge that global warming is real and wrongly claimed that China and India are the “world’s leading polluters.” (China and the U.S. are the largest emitters of carbon dioxide, and the U.S. is the biggest per capita.) It was far-fetched for him to suggest that the treaty will be “renegotiated.” Worse, the White House now has no response to climate change.

But the global consensus about the Paris treaty is wrongheaded too. It risks wasting huge resources to do almost nothing to fix the climate problem while shortchanging approaches that promise the most transformative results.

Consider the Paris agreement’s preamble, which states that signatories will work to keep the rise in average global temperature “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and even suggests that the increase could be kept to 1.5 degrees. This is empty political rhetoric. Based on current carbon dioxide emissions, achieving the target of 1.5 degrees would require the entire planet to abandon fossil fuels in four years.

But the treaty has deeper problems. The United Nations organization in charge of the accord counted up the national carbon-cut pledges for 2016 to 2030 and estimated that, if every country met them, carbon dioxide emissions would be cut by 56 gigatons. It is widely accepted that restricting temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius would require a cut of some 6,000 gigatons, that is, about a hundredfold more.

The Paris treaty is not, then, just slightly imperfect. Even in an implausibly optimistic, best-case scenario, the Paris accord leaves the problem virtually unchanged. Those who claim otherwise are forced to look beyond the period covered by the treaty and to hope for a huge effort thereafter.

The treaty commits nations to specific and reasonably verifiable (but nonbinding) cuts in carbon emissions until the year 2030. After that, nothing really is concrete, for a very understandable reason: Could you imagine a carbon-cutting promise made by President Bill Clinton being fulfilled by Mr. Trump? Could you see a Democrat in 2035 feeling honor-bound by policies set by Mr. Trump today?

Now ask the same sort of questions about every country that has signed the treaty. Rose-tinted hopes for the accord’s success rely on heroic assumptions about what tomorrow’s world leaders will do. If what we need is a carbon diet, the Paris treaty is just a promise to eat one salad today, pushing all the hard self-restraint far into the future.

History gives us cause for skepticism about overly optimistic forecasts, even over much shorter spans. In 1993, Mr. Clinton committed the U.S. to cutting emissions by 2000, but he ditched the promise seven years later. In 1992, the industrialized nations promised that they would lower their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Nearly every country failed. Before the Paris treaty, the Kyoto Protocol was sold as a key part of the solution to global warming, but a recent study in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management shows that it achieved virtually nothing.

In the wake of Mr. Trump’s exit from the Paris treaty, there have been many claims that solar and wind energy will soon be ready to power the world. This also isn’t true.

Just 0.6% of the world’s energy needs are currently met by solar and wind, according to the International Energy Agency. Even with implementation of the Paris treaty, solar and wind are expected to contribute less than 3% of world energy by 2040. Fossil fuels will go from meeting 81% of our energy needs to three-quarters. The energy expert Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba puts it bluntly: “Claims of a rapid transition to a zero-carbon society are plain nonsense.”

Though there are contexts in which solar and wind energy are efficient, in most situations they depend on subsidies. These will cost $125 billion this year and $3 trillion over the next 25 years, to meet less than 3% of world energy needs. If solar and wind truly out-competed fossil fuels, the Paris treaty would be unnecessary. CONTINUE AT SITE

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE CLIMATE CONFEDERACY

After President Trump rejected the Paris Climate treaty, which had never been ratified by the Senate, the European Union announced that it would work with a climate confederacy of secessionist states. Scotland and Norway’s environmental ministers have mentioned a focus on individual American states. And the secessionist governments of California, New York and Washington have announced that they will unilaterally and illegally enter into a foreign treaty rejected by the President of the United States.

The Constitution is very clear about this. “No state shall enter into any treaty.” Governor Cuomo of New York has been equally clear. “New York State is committed to meeting the standards set forth in the Paris Accord regardless of Washington’s irresponsible actions.”

Cuomo’s statement conveniently comes in French, Chinese and Russian translations.

“It is a little bold to talk about the China-California partnership as though we were a separate nation, but we are a separate nation,” Governor Brown of California announced.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the radical leftist described California as “a real nation-state”.

Brown was taking a swing through China to reassure the Communist dictatorship of California’s loyalty to an illegal treaty at the same time as EU boss Juncker was bashing America and kissing up to Premier Li Keqiang at the EU-China summit. It’s one thing when the EU and China form a united front against America. It’s quite another when California and China form a united front against America.

The Climate Alliance of California, New York, Washington, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Hawaii, Virginia and Rhode Island looks a lot like the Confederacy’s Montgomery Convention. Both serve as meeting points for a secessionist alliance of states to air their grievances against the Federal government over an issue in which they are out of step with the nation.

“We’re a powerful state government. We have nine other states that agree with us,” Brown boasted.

Two more and Jim Jones’ old pal could have his own confederacy.

All the bragging and boasting about how much wealth and power the secessionist states of the climate confederacy represent sounds very familiar. But that wealth and power is based around small enclaves, the Bay Area and a few dozen blocks in Manhattan, which wield disproportionate influence.

Top MIT Scientist: Dr. Richard Lindzen -“Global Warming Science Is ‘Propaganda’”

A leading MIT scientist claims that global warming science is based on pure propaganda, and that the “97 percent consensus” statistic is false.

According to Dr. Richard Lindzen, most scientists do not agree that CO2 emissions are the cause for climate change.

Dailycaller.com reports: “It was the narrative from the beginning,” Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told RealClear Radio Hour host Bill Frezza Friday. “In 1998, [NASA’s James] Hansen made some vague remarks. Newsweek ran a cover that says all scientists agree. Now they never really tell you what they agree on.”

“It is propaganda,” Lindzen said. “So all scientists agree it’s probably warmer now than it was at the end of the Little Ice Age. Almost all Scientists agree that if you add CO2, you will have some warming. Maybe very little warming.”

“But it is propaganda to translate that into it is dangerous and we must reduce CO2,” he added.

Lindzen if referring to the often cited statistic among environmentalists and liberal politicians that 97 percent of climate scientists agree human activities are causing the planet to warm. This sort of argument has been around for decades, but recent use of the statistic can be traced to a 2013 report by Australian researcher John Cook.

Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.

A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent.

“It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%,” said Dr. David Legates, a geology professor at the University of Delaware and the study’s lead author.

A 2013 study by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation found that Cook had to cast a wide net to cram scientists into his so-called consensus. To be part of Cook’s consensus, a scientific study only needed to agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet “to some unspecified extent” — both of which are uncontroversial points.

“Almost everybody involved in the climate debate, including the majority of sceptics, accepts these propositions, so little can be learned from the Cook et al. paper,” wrote Montford. “The extent to which the warming in the last two decades of the twentieth century was man-made and the likely extent of any future warming remain highly contentious scientific issues.”

Despite the dubious nature of the consensus, liberal politicians used the figure to bolster their calls for policies to fight global warming. President Barack Obama even cited the Cook paper while announcing sweeping climate regulations.

Getting It Wrong on Energy and Tax Reform By William O’Keefe

Groucho Marx, not exactly known as a political philosopher, nevertheless once aptly observed that politicians look for problems, find them everywhere, misdiagnose them, and apply the wrong solutions. A recent letter on tax reform priorities signed by 16 Democratic members of the House of Representatives leads me to believe Marx may have missed his calling. The goals of tax reform are supposed to be simplification, a level playing field, and increased corporate competiveness. What the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition proposes is the polar opposite.

Their proposal is an example of the willingness to punish the success and reward the failure of certain sectors of our economy. The focus of the letter is incentivizing “clean energy” but at its core it is nothing more than hostility toward fossil fuels and a fundamental misunderstanding of tax provisions for the energy sector. Unfortunately, this is nothing new and you would think by now proponents of this misguided approach to tax policy would have learned their lesson. But they haven’t and so they continue to propose the same ideas over and over, expecting a different result. The authors do reveal, however, that in addition to their hostility towards fossil fuels, they are using tax reform as a means of capturing more revenue to pass out to the chosen and favored few.

The basis for their “environmental tax priorities” includes discriminatory proposals to drive oil and gas out of our energy budget while attempting to replace them with alternatives. Since the great recession, the oil and gas industry has been a shining example of job creation and increased investment. The icing on the cake is that the energy renaissance has not only reversed the growth in imports but has made the United States the world leader in natural gas production.

Science fights back against the global warming fraud By Thomas Lifson

It has taken far too long, but the self-correcting mechanisms of science finally are contradicting the global warming fraud. Despite billions of dollars of grants for those who support the so-called “consensus” (itself, a lie), and the fear of retaliation, scholars interested in the truth are publishing a wave of scientific papers contradicting the orthodoxy.

Best of all: President Trump’s EPA chief has signaled that he sees that questioning of scientific hypotheses (and all scientific knowledge ultimately is a hypothesis, awaiting a possible correction based on new information) is legitimate.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt reignited a long simmering debate over a method of scientific inquiry that could upset the supposed “consensus” on man-made global warming.

In an interview with Breitbart’s Joel Pollak on Monday, Pruitt said he supported a “red team-blue team” set up to test climate science. Pruitt was inspired by an op-ed by theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, but others have been pushing this idea as well.

The team that will question the orthodoxy is seeing a wave of evidence come its way.

Kenneth Richards writes:

Just in the last few weeks alone, another 20 scientific papers were identified which link solar variations to climate changes, which means 58 papers have already been published in 2017.

Since solar activity does vary, it kind of makes more intuitive sense that this might affect climate more than the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Occam’s Razor favors this explanation. Check out this graph that Richards highlights:

After Paris: A Green Disaster in the Making in Germany By Alex Alexiev

What Trump repeatedly promised to do during the election campaign has been done, and America is no longer part of the Paris Agreement. Predictably, the mainstream media here and across the Atlantic have again gone totally unhinged with prophesies of doom for America, the imminent demise of the Trump administration, and the inevitable rise of Germany and Chancellor Merkel as the new leader of the free world.

This may indeed be a watershed event, but not at all as the left here and there imagines it. Contrary to the fervent desires of the leftist elites, it will result not in the political collapse of Trump’s America, but in the exposure of the incredible hypocrisy and ultimate weakness of the socialistic environmental schemes characterizing today’s “European project.” When it’s all said and done, either Europe will come back to its senses in close alliance with America, or it will not have much of a future.

Some may object to calling today’s E.U. a socialist scheme, pointing out that its leading member, Germany, has been led for 12 years by an allegedly conservative Christian Democrat government. It is a fact, however, that under Merkel, the CDU has moved so far left as to be virtually indistinguishable on most policy issues from its social-democratic coalition partners. As for the Paris Agreement itself, after a decent interval to allow for the requisite elites’ huffing and puffing while denying the inevitable, it will be quietly abandoned, much as the Kyoto Protocol was after the U.S. refused to be part of it.

Of vastly greater political significance are the inevitable shocks the E.U. faces after Paris as the huge penalties for poor policy choices made come due in the near future – and none more so than in the new putative leader of the free world, Germany. For largely unnoticed and unreported in the U.S., with one notable exception, Germany under Merkel has made catastrophic mistakes that require urgent and costly repairs. One stands out as particularly daunting: the wholesale effort to switch Germany to renewable energy, known as the energy transition, or Energiewende.

The Energiewende, in short, represented an effort to put into practice the principles behind the Paris Agreement and switch Germany’s electric system to renewable energy. It was introduced as early as 1991 in the belief that renewable energy could easily replace the hated fossil fuels if properly subsidized via a feed-in tariff and written into law as a Renewable Energy Act (EEG) in 2000. By offering subsidies of up to seven times the market price for electricity paid by the consumer, guaranteeing it for 20 years, and offering all manner of additional benefits, the government caused a renewable building frenzy in a country that is neither sunny nor particularly windy. And to the extent that there is wind, it is in the north, far from the industrial centers in the south that need the energy. To add insult to injury, in 2011, Merkel ordered the closing down of the nuclear industry that produced 30% of the country’s clean and cheap energy on the absurd assumption that Germany could suffer an earthquake and tsunami like what happened at Fukushima.

Thus, the renewable energy took off spectacularly, and the international green claque promptly declared Germany the paragon of environmental virtue and an example to be followed by all. But much of it turned out to be fake news, as documented in a new and devastating critique of the Energiewende by one of the founders of the German green movement and a pioneer of the renewable energy business, Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, who calls it “A Disaster in the Making.”

Philip Hopkins A Looming Disaster in Energy Security

Renewables will provide, optimistically, 10 to 20 per cent of global energy by 2035. There is no prospect of seriously reducing fossil fuel emissions without an accompanying fall in global standards of living directly implied by large reductions in per capita energy use

The constant headlines say it all: Australia’s energy system is in crisis. “High power costs floor business” says a lead story in the Australian Financial Review: “Shell-shocked businesses are re-assessing investments and jobs slugged by huge increases in electricity bills.” The Energy Users Association of Australia, which represents the country’s largest power users, believes major industries are on the verge of collapse because of the price of power. BlueScope Steel has warned that climate policies could produce an “energy catastrophe”. A country blessed with massive coal and gas reserves, economic resources that traditionally drive economic growth, has suffered a power blackout in South Australia and is suffering from extremely high power prices.

Let’s start with a brief overview of Australia’s energy system. Australia gets 73 per cent of its power from coal, 11 per cent from natural gas, and about 15 per cent from renewables (hydro 7 per cent, wind 4 per cent, rooftop solar 2 per cent and bio-energy 2 per cent). When the Hazelwood power station closed in March, Victoria lost 15 to 20 per cent of its base-load power, and the nation’s power capacity fell by 5 per cent. In Australia, coal is by far the cheapest way to produce energy and we’ve got plenty of it—hundreds of years’ worth in New South Wales and Queensland. Victoria has 200 billion tonnes of brown coal, enough for another 500 years. And it’s easily accessible—we’ve used less than 2 per cent of brown coal reserves since mining began in the early 1920s.

With coal comes greenhouse emissions, blamed by many scientists for “global warming”. Burning coal produces carbon dioxide, particularly Latrobe Valley brown coal, which is two-thirds water and has to be heated and dried before it can be burned. Gas, also a fossil fuel, produces fewer greenhouse emissions than coal, while renewables, hydro and nuclear produce none. So how does Australia go about trying to cut its greenhouse emissions? With no carbon price, the Renewable Energy Target (RET) rules. The current renewable targets are: the federal Coalition wants 23.5 per cent by 2023, with a 28 per cent target by 2030 under the Paris climate agreement; the federal Labor Party has a target of 50 per cent by 2020; South Australian Labor has a target of 50 per cent by 2025 (it’s now at 40 per cent); Queensland is similar; while the Andrews government in Victoria has a target of 25 per cent by 2020, 40 per cent by 2025. Logically, any curtailing of coal for other more expensive energy uses is going to flow through to higher electricity prices, although there are other factors at work, such as rising network charges.

Gas is more expensive than coal. It takes more capital to bring a gas well into operation than to open a coal mine. Gas power stations, though, are cheaper than coal stations to build. Renewables are inherently more expensive and cost at least three times as much as coal. This is mainly due to the materials they use, and the construction cost. The capital expense is borne mostly by the government; huge subsidies allow wind and solar to be considered economic, but is this so in reality? Money spent in capital construction must be recovered in energy, but renewables don’t produce much energy. The income they generate does not cover the capital cost. Renewables do have running costs; they have some operators. More importantly, they also have maintenance; for example, solar can’t afford to have solar panels covered in dust—it reduces their effectiveness. Figures showing the effectiveness of solar panels are determined in the laboratory; the real world is different. There is also the extra cost of building wind and solar connectors to the main grid. In addition there is the impact on the grid itself. With a mix of solar and thermal generators producing electricity, you challenge the stability of the system.

The intermittency of renewables creates pressure in the system. It has two damaging effects. First, the base-load plant has to shut down, but the plant is not built to shut down and come up to speed again. Normally it stays on line between major overhauls. Second, if you start bouncing the network around, you start to get failures of equipment on the network. In Victoria, there are gas turbines that can be brought on line and taken off quickly. These are mainly used for peak power, but with the Hazelwood closure, and the Andrews government planning to dramatically expand renewable power, some gas would effectively form base-load power, pushing up base power prices. Victoria may even end up importing black-coal power from New South Wales! Ironically, that’s why Victoria set up the State Electricity Commission in the first place—to mine brown coal instead of importing black coal from New South Wales.

The brute fact is that wind and solar are more expensive. The panel headed by the industrialist Dick Warburton estimated in its 2013 report that there existed a cross-subsidy for renewables of $9.4 billion between 2001 and 2013, with a further $22 billion required for the remainder of the scheme until 2030. That’s an average subsidy of about $3 billion a year. The report was ignored because Warburton was said to be a “climate change denier”, but the study concentrated purely on the economics of renewables. A recent report by BAEconomics came up with a similar figure, revealing that the government renewables subsidies were $3 billion in 2015-16. On one estimate, this equated to 6 to 9 per cent for the average household and up to 20 per cent for the industrial customer. These subsidies are not transparent, the report said. Almost three quarters come from government mandates paid for by customers and collected by third parties. Higher prices are passed on by retailers and paid for by consumers. These subsidies do not appear in government accounts, and are thus approximate in the report. The report’s other features include:

The Treasonous Secession of Climate Confederacy States Prosecute Governor Daniel Greenfield

After President Trump rejected the Paris Climate treaty, which had never been ratified by the Senate, the European Union announced that it would work with a climate confederacy of secessionist states.

Scotland and Norway’s environmental ministers have mentioned a focus on individual American states. And the secessionist governments of California, New York and Washington have announced that they will unilaterally and illegally enter into a foreign treaty rejected by the President of the United States.

The Constitution is very clear about this. “No state shall enter into any treaty.” Governor Cuomo of New York has been equally clear. “New York State is committed to meeting the standards set forth in the Paris Accord regardless of Washington’s irresponsible actions.”

Cuomo’s statement conveniently comes in French, Chinese and Russian translations.

“It is a little bold to talk about the China-California partnership as though we were a separate nation, but we are a separate nation,” Governor Brown of California announced.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the radical leftist described California as “a real nation-state”.

Brown was taking a swing through China to reassure the Communist dictatorship of California’s loyalty to an illegal treaty at the same time as EU boss Juncker was bashing America and kissing up to Premier Li Keqiang at the EU-China summit. It’s one thing when the EU and China form a united front against America. It’s quite another when California and China form a united front against America.

The Climate Alliance of California, New York, Washington, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Hawaii, Virginia and Rhode Island looks a lot like the Confederacy’s Montgomery Convention. Both serve as meeting points for a secessionist alliance of states to air their grievances against the Federal government over an issue in which they are out of step with the nation.

“We’re a powerful state government. We have nine other states that agree with us,” Brown boasted.

Two more and Jim Jones’ old pal could have his own confederacy.

Leftist Climate Change Fraud — Glazov Gang. How science got hijacked for a radical cause.

This new special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by David Howard, a Climate Change Researcher.http://jamieglazov.com/2017/06/07/leftist-climate-change-fraud-glazov-gang/

David came on the show to discuss Leftist Climate Change Fraud,unveiling how science got hijacked for a radical cause.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Jamie focus on Why Islamic Terror Targeted Children in Manchester, where he reveals how death cults always prioritize child sacrifice: