RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/24/that-dirty-green-energy/

We argued last week that California’s blackouts offered a grim preview of the left’s energy agenda. But that’s only part of the carefully concealed truth about renewables. Those solar panels so precious to the you-must-conform greenshirts are a particularly nasty environmental menace.

“The state, once known for its plentiful, cheap and reliable energy supplies, is now dealing with rolling blackouts as its green energy infrastructure buckles under the strain of summer heat,” we said Thursday, because the wind sometimes refuses to blow and the sun isn’t always shining, not even in California.

Of course a few virtue-signaling commenters charged to the table in their electric vehicles to praise the virtues of renewable energy, which in California will be limited primarily to wind and solar. Hydro sources, responsible for more than 12% of the state’s electricity, won’t be included in the portfolio in 2045, the year power is to be by decree generated by renewables only. Other renewables, such as geothermal, maybe 5%, and biomass, not much more than 2%, provide such minute portions of California electricity they are hardly worth mentioning.

Left out of the often mistaken, never in doubt assertions of renewables’ unalloyed goodness is the fact that the hardware used is hardly renewable. It wears out and needs to be replaced. Then what?

“The problem of solar panel disposal ‘will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment’ because it ‘is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle,’” writes energy analyst Michael Shellenberger, quoting a Chinese recycling official.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/21/greenlands-melting-ice-sheet-nothing-to-worry-about/

Even with a pandemic to exploit, the political left and its communications department, which most know as the mainstream media, still have time to sow fear about global warming. Now, they tell us, we have to worry about Greenland’s ice sheet because it’s reached the “point of no return.” Which makes a potent fear factor but fails to tell all of the story, which isn’t quite like the one the press wants to sell.

“The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass at accelerated rates in the 21st century,” says a new research paper published in Nature’s Research Communications Earth & Environment, “making it the largest single contributor to rising sea levels.”

In a separate statement, we’re told that “nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.”

The report inspired such headlines as:

“The Greenland ice sheet is melting to a point of no return: study” — The Hill
“Greenland ice sheet lost a record 1m tonnes of ice per minute in 2019” — The Guardian

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/nuclear_to_replace_wind_and_solar.html

If you still believe in the global warming hysteria movement, you should face reality and dump wind and solar for nuclear.

In the words of James Hansen, the scientist most responsible for promoting global warming, wind and solar are “grotesque” solutions for reducing CO2 emissions. Michael Shellenberger, a prominent activist, has the same opinion. Hansen and Shellenberger, as well as many other global warming activists, have come to the conclusion that nuclear energy is the only viable method of reducing CO2 emissions from the generation of electricity. Nuclear reactors don’t emit CO2. Coal and natural gas do.  Hydroelectric electricity does not emit CO2 either, but opportunities for expansion are limited. In the United States most of the good sites have already been developed.

Wind and solar are grotesque because there are many problems. Promoters of wind and solar simply lie about the problems. Reducing emissions of CO2 by one metric tonne, 1000 kilograms or 2204 pounds, is called a carbon offset. Carbon offsets are bought and sold, usually for less than $10 each.  If you build wind or solar plants to displace electricity from natural gas or coal plants, you will generate carbon offsets. Each carbon offset generated will cost about $60 if electricity from a coal plant is displaced. If electricity from a natural gas plant is displaced the cost per carbon offset will be about $160.  Wind and solar are expensive methods of generating carbon offsets.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/23/the-climate-virus-hysteria-needs-to-shelter-in-place/

Give the global warming alarmists credit. They never let circumstances distract them. Even amidst a pandemic, they continue to pump fear and fanaticism. It doesn’t matter to them if their fearmongering produces grave human costs.

Take a look at these headlines from just the last few days:

“Climate change: Summers could become ‘too hot for humans.’” — BBC
“Climate change: Polar bears could be lost by 2100” — BBC
“Climate Change Poses ‘Systemic Threat’ to the Economy, Big Investors Warn” — New York Times
“Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios” — Washington Post
“Why the next president should establish a Department of Climate” — Vox

That’s a heavy load of mania for the public to bear. So we’d like to present a single headline in rebuttal:

“Climate-change hysteria costs lives – but activists want to keep panic alive.”

It tops an op-ed in the New York Post written by Michael Shellenberger, who last month apologized, “on behalf of environmentalists,” for being part of the “climate scare we created over the last 30 years.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/07/the-arctics-hottest-day-not-so-fast/

“Last year, climate alarmists were beside themselves to alert the world that an all-time high temperature was scorching Antarctica. Just lately they’ve tried the same con with the Arctic, this latest claim no more credible than its predeccessor. It seems the only thing reaching new heights is the climateers’ shamelessness .”

Midsummer madness takes many forms. The combination of seasonal heat and light can produce eccentric behaviour when a global virus is hogging the headlines, such as the tendency to ramp up a single, yet-to-be-confirmed temperature measurement at a remote location – this time in northeast Siberia – into a climate scare.

Consider the media reaction to an alleged 38C reading on June 20, 2020 – “around 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the first day of summer” – at Verkhojansk, a Russian town ten kilometers inside the Arctic Circle (66°33′48.1″ north latitude), population about one thousand. It was like striking a match in a room full of hydrogen at the Hyperbole Club. From Helsinki to Kilkenny, from Scotland to Geneva, London and beyond, the MSM and Twitterati went wild with climate-angst (here, here and here).

Introducing the “unbelievably superhot” event on BBC’s Science in Action program five days later – Record high temperatures – in the Arctic – the presenter said: “It’s out of the COVID-pan and into the global warming fire.” Steve Vavrus, a University of Wisconsin climatologist, was one of the guests. Asked whether he was seeing “trends in the duration or regularity of these kind of persistent weather ratings”, Vavrus was even more emphatic:

This is connected to global warming. We’ve seen record warming for many years, if not most years of this decade. We know the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. One of the most important things to remember about this Arctic heatwave we’re experiencing right now is that it’s really not a fluke event. It’s an exclamation point on a long-term Arctic trend.”

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/07/08/scott_stringer_burdens_new_york_city_taxpayers_with_his_woke_ways_498355.html

New York City comptroller Scott Stringer is at again. Last Wednesday, the man responsible for the New York City Employees’ Retirement System’s (NYCERS) five pension funds wrote to the CEOs of 67 companies demandingthat they disclose the demographics of their employees by race, gender, and ethnicity—including in their leadership and senior management. “Creating a national movement on the green economy. That’s what Sunrise has been all about,” Stringer earlier declared at a virtual People’s Assembly on BlackRock in May. It’s one thing to have Sunrise Movement activists agitating for a far left Green New Deal that Congress is highly unlikely to pass. It’s quite another to have a climate activist running the $150bn of the city’s pension funds—the nation’s fourth largest.

According to a March report by the City’s Independent Budget Office, the Covid market meltdown, causing a 20% decline in asset values, would require an extra $412m in employer contributions for 15 years. The city’s pension funds were already in poor shape. Three years ago, a realistic estimate of NYCERS pension liabilities implied an average funded ratio of 47%, meaning that the NYCERS pension funds had less than half the money needed to pay promised benefits.

Putting a longtime climate activist in charge of running city pension money has turned out to be financially disastrous.