RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/02/offshore-headwinds/

Biden’s 18th-century solution to a 21st-century energy problem

Green-energy dogma is like an ocean liner — slow to change course and difficult to halt. In Europe, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has magnified the folly of Europe’s energy policies: Massive subsidies for wind and solar power coupled with bans on hydraulic fracturing (fracking), widespread shuttering of nuclear plants, and increased dependence on Russian natural gas have created a perfect energy-supply storm.

In the U.S., the Biden administration is using the Ukraine invasion as an excuse to double down on green-energy and electric-vehicle policies, while simultaneously conspiring to keep gasoline prices high and berating oil companies for not producing more. Only last fall, Democrats were berating oil companies to make them produce less.

To recount the full extent of the Biden administration’s ongoing energy follies would require a long and depressing book. But one particular facet typical of the administration’s green-energy fantasies warrants special attention: its proposal to install 30,000 megawatts (MW) of offshore wind turbines by 2030, and 110,000 MW by 2050. That’s equivalent to installing one 850-foot-tall, 14-megawatt turbine, the largest available, every 30 hours for the next 28 years.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/almost_50_years_ago_emsoylent_greenem_portrayed_a_grim_future_for_2022.html

In anticipation of Earth Day 2022, it is a good time to reflect on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the release of the eco-apocalypse movie Soylent Green:

It’s the year 2022. Cumulative effects of overpopulation, pollution, and “climate catastrophe” have caused severe worldwide shortages of food, water, and housing. Scientists confirm oceanographic reports saying the oceans are dying. The food chain is disrupted. Food is becoming scarce, and the temperature is so hot that heat waves have become year-round thanks to climate change aka “global warming.”

Homeless people are everywhere; only half the workforce is employed while the other half is barely making it. Many people are illiterate and few factories are producing new goods.

The homes of the elite are barricaded, with private security. Only the elite can afford air conditioning. Strawberries are now a delicacy at $75 a quart. The situation with food has gotten so bad that people are being harvested off the streets and “recycled protein” is being distributed to the population.

The movie Soylent Green was produced and filmed in 1972 and released in 1973. It is a futuristic tale of doom, describing life in the year 2022.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/19/earth-day-has-become-polluted-by-political-correctness-and-ignorance/

The first Earth Day celebration, a nationwide environmental teach-in, held in 1970, was the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who was interested in environmental issues. He recruited Rep. Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded liberal Republican congressman, to serve as his co-chair, and they enlisted Denis Hayes, a young activist, to be the national coordinator.

In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience, and most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

Sadly, today’s Earth Day shares something with the current zeitgeist: It reeks of wokeness and political correctness.

Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for environmental activists to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize for a “woke,” liberal agenda. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility.

Many of those stumping for Earth Day on April 22 this year will oppose environment-friendly advances in science and technology, such as agricultural biotechnology (“GMOs”), fracking, and nuclear power. A pervasive meta-message will be disdain for the capitalist system that provides the innovation needed for effective environmental protection and conservation. (It’s no coincidence that poor countries tend to be the most polluted.)

Ironically, the theme of this year’s event – “Invest In Our Planet. What Will You Do?” – includes a progressive wish list, including reducing your “foodprint.” For those unfamiliar with this neologism (as we were), a foodprint “measures the environmental impacts associated with the growing, producing, transporting, and storing of our food – from the natural resources consumed to the pollution produced to the greenhouse gases emitted.” Ready to give up meat, anyone?

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

In the Monty Python sketch, “The Parrot,” a customer returns a parrot he had bought just 30 minutes before. Why? Because it is dead. The shopkeeper insists that the parrot is not dead but resting. Nothing the customer says can change the shopkeeper’s mind.

Our modern-day shopkeepers, the global warmists, insist a cataclysmic doom is our future unless we throw the entire world into a state of complete chaos.

There have been a number of studies on our side that show global warming is a hoax. Will the left do what we do, have a serious discussion of those studies? Absolutely not — they are not interested. 

If the hand of God were to deliver two stone tablets with 10 reasons why there is no global warming, would our global warmists listen? Never in a hundred years. The parrot is not dead.

The warmist’s messianic devotion to global warming is completely irrational. They won’t let any fact or reason get in the way of their blind assuredness. In the shopkeeper’s case, he didn’t want to give the money back. In our global warmists case, they are hiding their real agenda, global government.

Their logic is simple enough. How do you fight a global problem without global government? What is the biggest impediment to global government? The United States of America. Therefore, America must be destroyed.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/12/killing-fields-of-wind-energy-cannot-be-ignored/

A NextEra subsidiary’s recent revelation of the mass killing of bald and golden eagles exposed the ugly secret that nearly all wind projects share: the wanton destruction of rare and endangered species. On April 5, in a case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, ESI Energy pleaded guilty to killing more than 150 eagles in eight states. The company was fined $8 million.

The Justice Department said the company was fined for killing the birds “without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit.” In other words, the completion of paperwork would have made the killings legal.

For too long, the slaughter of birds by wind turbines has been allowed to continue under the faux emergency declaration of climate alarmists. But with bird mortality in the millions and the lack of promised benefits from wind energy, the only rational option is to end the development of wind farms.

Studies in the last two years have confirmed what scientists and conservationists have been saying all along: There is blood on the blades of these wind farms, causing irreversible damage to thousands of bird species, including those listed in endangered and vulnerable categories.

In 2021, scientists did a comprehensive study of wind-farm effects on mammalian and avian life. They considered 825 peer-reviewed articles that showed that the “construction, operation and maintenance of wind facilities affect mortality and behavior of mammals and birds as well as habitat suitability.” 

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-10-the-future-of-energy-in-the-us-which-projection-do-you-believe

What will the production and consumption of energy look like in the United States in 2050? There are two very different answers to that question.

On Side One are those who assert that we face a “climate crisis” that can only be addressed by the rapid forced suppression of the production and use of fossil fuels. Therefore, some combination of government coercion, investor pressure and voluntary institutional action will shortly drive coal, oil and natural gas from the energy marketplace, to be replaced by carbon-free “renewables.” And thus by 2050 we will have achieved the utopia of “net zero” carbon emissions.

Those on Side Two think that the Side One vision is completely unrealistic fantasy. Simple arithmetic shows that without massive energy storage no amount of building of wind and solar generators can make much difference in fossil fuel use for electricity production; and adequate energy storage devices to fill the gap do not even exist as a technical matter, let alone at remotely reasonable cost. Result: no matter what the grandees say, fossil fuel production and use in 2050 will be as high or higher than they are now.

Which Side do you think is right?

At the moment, all of the Great and the Good seem to have planted their flags on Side One. President Biden leaves no doubt as to where he stands. By Press Release of April 22, 2021, Biden committed the U.S. to a “net zero” economy by 2050:

On Day One, President Biden fulfilled his promise to rejoin the Paris Agreement and set a course for the United States to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad, reaching net zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.

And by various Executive Orders, Biden has the whole federal bureaucracy committed to the fossil fuel suppression project, from stopping drilling to blocking pipelines to decommissioning power plants.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/09/another-chapter-in-the-climate-war-against-democracy-and-prosperity/

Last month the Biden Administration unveiled the latest chapter in its climate war against democracy and Americans’ standard of living. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a series of new regulations on publicly traded companies to disclose “climate-related risks” and impact, each company’s green-house gas emissions, and a plethora of other costly compliance mandates.

The purpose of the new rules on “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) issues is not subtle. The SEC states it is for “increasing investor focus and reliance on climate and ESG-related disclosure and investment.” The SEC’s enforcement division also promised “the use of sophisticated data analysis to mine and assess information across [businesses], to identify potential violations.”

American capitalism and freedom, fueled by abundant fossil fuel energy, has brought prosperity to scores of millions of Americans and produced the world’s largest middle class. It has been under attack by Joe Biden’s army of bureaucrats and climate supporters. This current example will force the private sector to steer resources where the government demands. To drive home the point, the SEC promises to comb through and sniff out companies in search of violators and apostates to its climate edicts.  

Right on schedule, coinciding with the Biden Administration’s actions are the spoiled suburbanite snowflake class of credulous protesters demanding banks and financial institutions divest from oil, gas, and coal companies.

America is well on the way to a Chinese-style “capitalism.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/thirty-years-of-the-now-or-never-climate-cry/

The apocalyptic language of United Nations alarmists is back.

The 2,913 pages of the United Nations’ “Climate Change 2022” report make clear only that nothing is clear. Written in the incomprehensible language of climate science, there are only two things that are easily understood: the word taxes, which appears 270 times, and the word costs, which appears 1,585 times.

The entire report, full of technicalities, cross-references, and incomprehensible tables, generates more headaches than alarm. This is not for public consumption, quite obviously. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change keeps the taxes and the costs confined to the report — but it reserves the artillery of apocalyptic words for the press release. The headline reads, “The evidence is clear: the time for action is now.” (The “evidence” is the 2,913 pages that no one will read.)

In short, the apostles of the climate apocalypse are once again summarizing their strategy with the “now or never” war cry, the same one they screamed nearly 30 years ago in 1995 at the first climate summit in Berlin. “We are at a crossroads,” IPCC chair Hoesung Lee says in the press release. “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F). Without immediate and profound emission reduction across all sectors, it will be impossible,” Jim Skea, IPCC Working Group III co-chair, adds, building tension.

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

“It appears that the passage of time is the best explanation for climate change.”

Scientific data shows that the climate has consistently and naturally changed for billions of years, so yes, when we have late damaging frosts, they are caused by natural climate change. I hope a lot of money and time wasn’t wasted in coming to this logical conclusion. 

Late frost ices over French vineyards, threatens fruit crops

French vintners are lighting candles to thaw their grapevines to save them from a late frost following a mild winter (snip)

 The frost is particularly frustrating after a similar phenomenon hit French vineyards last year, leading to some 2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in losses. Scientists later found that the damaging 2021 frost was made more likely by climate change.

What didn’t cause late frosts is warming, supposedly caused by fossil fuel usage, rising CO2, humans, methane, cars and so many other things that the media, scientists, and others say we must stop using. It is a simple concept that fossil fuels and humans can’t cause both warming and cooling.