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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Our Fossil-Fuels Future By Robert Zubrin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/our-fossil-fuels-future/

Alex Epstein explains why the world needs more fossil fuels.

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, has delivered another knockout punch against Green ideology. Aptly entitled “Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less,” Epstein’s new work includes the comprehensive factual case for fossil fuels as he presented it in his earlier book. He then proceeds to eviscerate the mental framework behind the war on fuel.

Epstein begins his discourse by identifying the “knowledge system” being used to perpetrate the anti-carbon crusade. He then very reasonably states that any judgment regarding the positive or negative nature of any phenomenon, including fossil-fuel use, should include consideration of both its pluses and minuses. He then describes the extraordinarily positive impact of fossil-fuel use on the development and maintenance of modern civilization. In particular, he focuses on the unprecedented gains in health, productivity, education, mobility, safety, life spans, leisure time, living standards, environmental quality, and practically any other index of human well-being one could mention. He does this with the help of a series of graphs, as follows.

In figure 1, he shows that, far from causing a climate catastrophe, fossil-fuel use has virtually ended climate catastrophes, with the number of climate-related deaths falling 98 percent in the last century. Epstein says this is due not to any marked improvement in the climate but rather to increased societal resiliency as a result of our growing fossil-fuel-enabled technological powers. For example, deaths due to extreme temperatures have been greatly reduced through effective home heating and air conditioning, and deaths due to famine have been virtually eliminated both by the abundance produced by fossil-fuel-driven fertilized and irrigated agriculture and by modern society’s fossil-fuel-enabled ability to rapidly transport food around the world. In addition, he says, CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere has accelerated the rate of plant growth worldwide. This is true, as shown by NASA satellite data. He could also have mentioned that warming has expanded the growing season, as shown by EPA data. (Climate alarmists never mention this, either, even though it is the strongest proof of the reality of warming. Guess why not.)

The Climate Cult and Their Green Lethargy Future Environmentalists have waged war on fossil fuels, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism in general. Their “solutions” will make us all poorer, more vulnerable, and less free. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/03/the-climate-cult-and-their-green-lethargy-future/

When I was in Congress, I once went on a fact-finding trip to Pakistan. At the time, the country was being wracked by a terrorist bombing campaign intended, in large part, to destabilize the government of President Pervez Musharraf. What I found, however, was that President Musharraf was facing another threat to his rule. 

During a brief stay in Islamabad, my hotel room suddenly went dark one evening. It wasn’t terrorism. It was a rolling power blackout. Earlier, I had heard firsthand accounts of the dissatisfaction this caused Pakistanis, including how the rolling blackouts facilitated extremism’s spread and tactics. The blame for the blackout was placed squarely on Musharraf. As I looked out my window across an eerily darkened capital city, given all the challenges facing them, I couldn’t help but pity the Pakistani people for having to endure yet another tribulation: having to live with such a substandard power grid.

Now, the Pakistani people can pity me.  

Per Fox News, the apocalyptic climate cult is bringing their rolling blackouts to Michigan to benight the state whose ingenious, hardworking people and the unparalleled industrial prowess they built and operated had once put the world on wheels and kept the world safe. 

Green Energy Chickens Coming Home to Roost Never in history has a civilization willfully embarked on destroying its own material foundations. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/green-energy-chickens-coming-home-roost-bruce-thornton/

This year will graphically demonstrate the malign consequences of the misguided efforts to replace cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy with unreliable, inefficient “renewable” energy like wind and solar. Never in history has a civilization willfully embarked on destroying its material foundations, based solely on a hypothesis rather than scientifically established fact.

The first red flag alerting us to this feckless policy appeared during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Much of Europe––the most aggressive nations in replacing fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels––has grown dependent on Russian exports to make up for the energy lost from shutting down nuclear and coal-fired power plants. Since directly helping Ukraine by fighting is politically impossible, sanctions were imposed on Russia’s oil and gas industries.

But sanctions severe enough to concentrate Putin’s mind carried a political cost as well as an economic one. So Europe is still buying Russian energy, postponing tougher sanctions until the end of the year. The result has been the embarrassing and dishonorable spectacle of European countries helping to finance Russia’s brutal war crimes. Indeed some have accepted Putin’s condition that purchases be made in rubles, thus mitigating the damage to Russia’s economy.

Here at home, warnings of electricity blackouts across the country this summer have not slowed down many states’ increased efforts to shutter electrical plants powered by coal, natural gas, and nuclear fission. In New York, Governor Kathy Holchul has announced the state’s commitment to enforcing a requirement that new power plants must achieve “zero on-site greenhouse gas emissions for new construction no later than 2027.” This policy of wishful thinking follows New York’s Climate Act of 2019, which requires that all power generation comes from “green” sources by 2040, including 70% from renewable energy by 2030.

Green Rope-a-Dope: China Watches as America Greens By Joel Kotkin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/green-rope-a-dope-china-watches-as-america-greens/

If this is what we are being told we must do for the ‘Great Reset,’ it’s time to unset it.

The color green has long been associated with envy, but increasingly it’s becoming a pigment of mass delusion. Amid near-hysterical reporting about the climate, the U.S., and much of the West, is embracing willy-nilly policies likely to weaken our economy and boost China’s ascendancy at the expense of democracy and market economies.

In essence, China is adopting a version of the great Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” boxing strategy, which had the opponent wear himself out by launching harmless punches as Ali lounged on the ropes. Then, as the rival began to weaken, Ali would seize the moment and pummel him.

Much the same is happening with the emerging climate agenda. Under Paris and other accords, China, as well as India and other developing countries, essentially have been given a pass not to achieve “carbon neutrality” until 2060. The argument is largely (at least formally) that the West is responsible for the heavily hyped climate “apocalypse” because of its longer history of industrial growth, although neither China nor India seems eager to de-industrialize, cut itself off from medical advances, or otherwise halt its progress toward Western levels of prosperity.

The Energy ‘Transition’ — a Leap into the Dark By Andrew Stuttaford

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-energy-transition-a-leap-into-the-dark/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

Not for the first time, it strikes me that the transition away from fossil fuels may be moving rather more quickly than the technology upon which it is supposed to rely.

The Wall Street Journal:

Summer is around the corner, and we suggest you prepare by buying an emergency generator, if you can find one in stock. Last week the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned that two-thirds of the U.S. could experience blackouts this summer. Welcome to the “green energy transition.”

We’ve been warning for years that climate policies would make the grid more vulnerable to vacillations in supply and demand. And here we are. Some of the mainstream press are belatedly catching on that blackouts are coming, but they still don’t grasp the real problem: The forced transition to green energy is distorting energy markets and destabilizing the grid.

Progressives blame the grid problems on climate change. There’s no doubt that drought in the western U.S. is a contributing factor. NERC’s report notes that hydropower generators in the western U.S. are running at lower levels, and output from thermal (i.e., nuclear and fossil fuel) generators that use the Missouri River for cooling may be affected this summer.

Why Does Boston Buy Natural Gas from Russia? The environmental organizations have full veto power on all energy projects through the legal system. By Andy May

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/29/why-does-boston-buy-natural-gas-from-russia/

Europe is vulnerable and needs our natural gas; prices are absurdly high and going higher. Yet, everyone in the oil and gas industry is afraid to invest any money, even if they have financing available. Who wants to start a 10- to 20-year natural gas project, whether it’s a gas field, pipeline, or LNG (liquified natural gas) terminal, when the current administration is saying it will shut you down in 10 years?

“You’ve got six years, eight years, no more than 10 years or so,” says climate envoy John Kerry. “No one should make it easy for the [natural] gas interests to be building out 30- or 40-year infrastructure.”

In the meantime, India has relaxed its environmental regulations and plans to double its use of coal. China has cut coal import tariffs to zero to ensure energy security and lower costs.

The United States has an abundance of coal and natural gas. Yet, natural gas is actually imported, at great cost, to Boston’s LNG facility from Russia, Canada, and the Caribbean due to the lack of pipeline capacity. In late January natural gas from the Algonquin City Gate Hub (near Boston) sold for over $20 per million BTUs, and more than $23 on the futures market. Natural gas from nearby Pennsylvania cost just $4 in January.

Plenty of cheap natural gas is available in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, a few hundred miles away; and pipelines to supply New England are mostly built, but have been shut down by environmental lawsuits and regulatory hurdles. Because of the regional dearth of natural gas pipelines, and its high price, many in New England are burning oil for heat and electric power plants, and burned more coal in 2021 than in 2020.

One of the many ironies is that carbon dioxide emissions—the bogeyman of radical environmentalists—have decreased where there is sufficient natural gas to replace coal. But any additional gas for New England, as noted, must come from foreign sources.

The Economic Cost of Eliminating Fossil Fuels By Andy May

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/28/the-economic-cost-of-eliminating-fossil-fuels/

The debate on how much impact humanity has on climate change continues. As nearly everyone knows by now, there is no observational evidence that humans have a significant impact on climate, so the debate is mostly over which future climate projection is likely. It also isn’t clear that the changes we might cause are bad, most of the evidence suggests that additional CO2 and warming have been beneficial so far and will likely be beneficial in the future. But what if we do decide to eliminate fossil fuels? What is the economic impact?

Gregor Semieniuk, and nine co-authors have just published an open-access paper in Nature Climate Change discussing this option. The net present value of future lost fossil fuel profits exceeds $1.4 trillion, with $0.4 trillion lost in the U.S. alone. Compare this to the loss of about $2 trillion in U.S. home value during 2008, according to Zillow, due to the housing crisis. Note the two numbers are not directly comparable, as we are comparing fossil fuel profits to total home value, not homeowner’s equity. Average 2021 U.S. home equity is about $153,000 and the average cost of a home is about $374,900. This ratio reduces the $2 trillion-dollar 2008 loss in home value to a loss of 0.8 trillion in home equity. We could expect a serious economic shock from the loss of oil, gas, and coal assets.

Most of the risk falls on private investors who are overwhelmingly in OECD countries, especially in the U.S. and U.K. To better put this into perspective, the OECD GDP for 2021 was $59 trillion and the U.S. GDP was $21 trillion.

ESG’s power grows as banker is canceled for talking sense on climate change By Rupert Darwall

https://nypost.com/2022/05/24/hsbc-banker-stuart-kirk-suspended-for-climate-change-remarks/

Last Thursday, something extraordinary happened: A senior HSBC banker, Stuart Kirk, told the world that climate change, though real, is not something financial markets need worry about. “Unsubstantiated, shrill, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong,” one of Kirk’s presentation slides read.

The reaction was instantaneous. Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations climate secretariat, denounced Kirk’s remarks as “abhorrently outrageous,” words that might well describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but a banker’s presentation analyzing climate financial risk for what it is?

Four hundred years ago, people were burnt at the stake for believing the wrong things about religion. Today, they get fired for questioning the climate-change catechism.

Figueres demanded HSBC immediately cleanse itself of Kirk’s remarks and fire the climate heretic. “I do not agree — at all — with the remarks made at last week’s FT Moral Money Summit,” bank chief executive Noel Quinn duly declared, avoiding any mention of Kirk by name. “I am determined that our team won’t be distracted by last week’s comments.” On Monday, it emerged HSBC had suspended Kirk

A climate change class action lawsuit: is it viable? By Christopher Garbacz

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/a_climate_change_class_action_lawsuit_is_it_viable.html

A few days ago, I suggested that a climate change class action lawsuit should be filed against those parties that clamor to destroy the economy via a Green Agenda that seeks to ban fossil fuels. Some commenters raised an interesting point: How do you prove damages? I think it’s possible and would serve as a good basis for any legal complaint.

The Green Agenda is supported in part or full by the following parties: federal, state, and local governments; universities; Green NGOs; foundations; corporations; renewable proponents/owners; and entrepreneurs. A court could determine if these entities are correct that anthropogenic climate change really will destroy the planet and mankind along with it.

To date, there’s never been an open evaluation of this issue, which traces directly to the UN IPCC Reports and the reports’ subsequent use to justify destroying the present universe of fossil fuel energy that supports our economy. With witnesses battling it out in a single forum, the court could assess whether it’s more likely than not that the world faces catastrophic destruction.

If there is no proven scientific basis for the Green Agenda, then it should be abandoned. Those harmed by the Green Agenda should be awarded the assessed value of the damages suffered.

If you the internet for “A Climate Change Class Action Lawsuit,” you can find my article buried deep in Google. Every other site pulled up refers to lawsuits brought against governments for failing to implement the Green Agenda quickly enough to save the planet or against corporations accused of working to destroy the planet. This Green Agenda litigation is sufficiently well-established to suggest that there’s no reason not to bring a case that asserts the opposite charge: That the Green Agenda is destructive because the risk to the climate is non-existent. It just won’t be a Green lawyer bringing the case.

Putin’s Useful Idiots: How U.S. Climate Extremists Are Funding Russia’s Agenda By: Victoria Coates and Jennifer Stefano

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/19/putins-useful-idiots-how-us-climate-extremists-are-funding-russias-agenda/

The desolation of U.S. energy security has bolstered Vladimir Putin’s dangerous geopolitical aims.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illuminating an ugly truth: the anti-fracking war on America’s energy security is being waged by well-funded, radical U.S. environmental groups, as well as interests tied directly to Vladimir Putin. For years, the U.S. government has investigated Russian financial ties to environmental groups that push for ending U.S. fossil fuel production and have successfully shut down fracking sites and pipelines, to the detriment of U.S. workers and consumers.

Who benefits? Putin, because the desolation of U.S. energy security has bolstered state-owned Gazprom and his dangerous geopolitical aims.

Before the war on Ukraine, the U.S. Congress began exposing connections between Russia and little-known foundations that donate to major environmental groups such as Sierra Club and National Resource Defense Council (NRDC). The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released a 2014 report noting a small group of rich Americans was controlling environmental groups and collaborating with questionable offshore funders to maximize support. In 2017, two congressmen called for further investigation of the connection between these funders and Russia.