Climate Initiatives

Delusions of Davos and Dubai

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Edward Ring dispells the smoke and mirrors surrounding renewables in his American Greatness article The Delusions of Davos and Dubai – Part Two: Can Wind & Solar Energy Expand 50-100 Times? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Procuring 90+ percent of global energy from wind and solar energy is a fool’s errand.

In the most recent “Conference of the Parties,” otherwise known as the United Nations extravaganza that convenes every few years for world leaders to discuss the climate crisis, several goals were publicly proclaimed. Notable were the goals to triple production of renewable energy by 2030 and triple production of nuclear energy by 2050. Against the backdrop of current global energy production by fuel type, and as quantified in Part One, against a goal of increasing total energy production from 600 exajoules in 2022 to at least 1,000 exajoules by 2050, where does COP 28’s goals put the world’s energy economy? How much will production of renewable energy have to increase?

To answer this question, it is necessary to recognize and account for the fact that most renewable energy takes the form of electricity, generated through wind, solar, or geothermal sources. And when measuring how much the base of renewables installed so far will contribute to the target of 1,000 exajoules of energy production per year in order to realize—best-case scenario—800 exajoules of energy services, the data reported in the Statistical Review of Global Energy is profoundly misleading.

[ Ring is referring to the fanciful projections compared to realities reported in the 2022 consumption statistics from Energy Institute. For example, from that report

The graph shows that global Primary Energy (PE) consumption from all sources has grown continuously over nearly 6 decades. Since 1965  oil, gas and coal (FF, sometimes termed “Thermal”) averaged 88% of PE consumed, ranging from 93% in 1965 to 82% in 2022.  Note that in 2020, PE dropped 21 EJ (4%) below 2019 consumption, then increased 31 EJ in 2021.  WFFC for 2020 dropped 24 EJ (5%), then in 2021 gained back 26 EJ to slightly exceed 2019 WFFC consumption. For the 58 year period, the net changes were:

Oil        194%
Gas      525%
Coal     178%
WFFC  239%
PE        287%]

If we’re setting a goal of 1,000 exajoules of ultimate world energy production and assuming 80 percent of that 1,000 exajoules of energy input shall be realized as end-user energy services, then we have to examine how much usable energy wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear are actually being generated today. That means we need to know how much electricity they actually generate and send into the grid. An imputed, grossed-up number is not helpful.

It must be again emphasized that it is an extraordinary assumption to project an 80 percent retention of energy from input into the grid to actual end use. For example, we might assume that from the generating plant, 5 percent was lost in transmission, another 5 percent lost from charging and subsequently discharging the electricity to and from utility-scale storage batteries, another 5 percent in the charge/discharge cycle through an onboard battery in an EV, and another 5 percent converting that electricity into traction from the electric motor. Those are extraordinarily optimistic numbers, using a best-case example.

The point here is 1,000 exajoules represents the absolute minimum to which global energy production must grow in the next 25 years if every person on earth is to have access to enough energy to enable prosperity and security. How do we get there? Let’s take the experts at their word and assume that use of coal, oil, and gas will be completely eliminated by 2050.

On the chart below, the assumptions governing the future mix of fuels worldwide adhere to the resolutions just made at the recent Conference of the Parties. That is, nuclear energy will be tripled, and use of oil, natural gas, and coal will be eliminated. To take some of the pressure off of the required expansion of solar and wind energy, for this analysis, the sacrilegious assumption is made to double hydroelectric capacity, double geothermal production, and double biofuel production. It won’t matter much. Here goes:

There’s a lot to chew on in these data, but it’s worth the effort. Because the facts they present are immutable and carry with them significant implications for global energy policy. The first column of data shows how much fuel was burned or generated worldwide in 2022—the raw fuel inputs, which total 604 exajoules.

The second column of data shows the number of energy services that reached end-users in 2022 in the form of heating, cooling, traction, light, communications, etc. It is clear that for thermal sources of energy, the lower numbers reflect the currently estimated degree of conversion efficiency worldwide, about 40 percent. But for non-thermal sources of energy (appended to the right with “gen,” signifying generated energy), these numbers are based on terawatt-hour reports featured in individual sections of the Statistical Review dedicated to those sources of energy. Converted from terawatt-hours to exajoules, these are the actual amounts of electricity that went into transmission lines around the world to be consumed by end users.

The third column of data calculates a hypothetical 2050 global fuel mix based on the agreed COP 28 targets. As seen in column 4 “multiple,” nuclear energy is tripled in accordance with COP 28. Also, in accordance with COP 28, use of coal, oil, and gas is eliminated. Not agreed to at COP 28, but to help reach the 1,000 exajoule target, production of geothermal and biofuel energy are both doubled. That leaves the remainder of the needed power to be provided (in this example) equally by wind and solar. It is reasonable to assume, based on everything they’re saying in Dubai and Davos, that this is the model. This is the logical realization of what they’re calling for.

These calculations yield an overwhelming reality check.
Yet what assumption is incorrect?

The target of 1,000 exajoules is almost certainly too low. Nuclear power is tripled, and hydropower and biofuel are both doubled. None of that is easy; in the case of biofuel, it could be an environmental catastrophe. But even if those other non-thermal sources of energy were to increase two to three times, without coal, oil, and gas, a stupefying expansion of wind and solar would be required. “Tripling” these renewables doesn’t even get us into the ballpark.

To deliver 1,000 exajoules of power to the world by 2050, for every wind turbine we have today, expect to see more than 60 of them. For every field of photovoltaics we have today, expect to see nearly 100 more of them. Is this feasible? Because from Dubai to Davos, this is what they’re claiming we’re going to do.

Confronted with these facts, even the most enthusiastic proponents of wind and solar energy may hesitate when considering the magnitude of the task. Eliminating production of fossil fuel entirely by 2050 ought to be seen, for all practical purposes, as impossible. The uptick in mining, the land consumed, the expansion of transmission lines, the necessity for a staggering quantity of electricity storage assets to balance these intermittent sources, the vulnerability of wind and solar farms to weather events including deep freezes, tornadoes, and hail, and the stupefying task of doing it all over again every 20-30 years as the wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and storage batteries reach the end of their useful lives—all of this suggests procuring 90+ percent of global energy from wind and solar energy is a fool’s errand.

The Key to Energy IQ

Posted on by Ron Clutz

This brief video provides a key concept in order to think rationally about calls to change society’s energy platform.  Below is a transcript from the closed captions along with some of the video images and others added.

We know what the future of American energy will look like. Solar panels, drawing limitless energy from the sun. Wind turbines harnessing the bounty of nature to power our homes and businesses.  A nation effortlessly meeting all of its energy needs with minimal impact on the environment. We have the motivation, we have the technology. There’s only one problem: the physics.

The history of America is, in many ways, the history of energy. The steam power that revolutionized travel and the shipping of goods. The coal that fueled the railroads and the industrial revolution. The petroleum that helped birth the age of the automobile. And now, if we only have the will, a new era of renewable energy.

Except … it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not really a matter of will, at least not primarily. There are powerful scientific and economic constraints on where we get our power from. An energy source has to be reliable; you have to know that the lights will go on when you flip the switch. An energy source needs to be affordable–because when energy is expensive…everything else gets more expensive too. And, if you want something to be society’s dominant energy source, it needs to be scalable, able to provide enough power for a whole nation.

Those are all incredibly important considerations, which is one of the reasons it’s so weird that one of the most important concepts we have for judging them … is a thing that most people have never heard of. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the exciting world of…power density.

Look, no one said scientists were gonna be great at branding. Put simply, power density is just how much stuff it takes to get your energy; how much land or other physical resources. And we measure it by how many watts you can get per square meter, or liter, or kilogram – which, if you’re like us…probably means nothing to you.

So let’s put this in tangible terms. Just about the worst energy source America has by the standards of power density are biofuels, things like corn-based ethanol. Biofuels only provide less than 3% of America’s energy needs–and yet, because of the amount of corn that has to be grown to produce it … they require more land than every other energy source in the country combined. Lots of resources going in, not much energy coming out–which means they’re never going to be able to be a serious fuel source.

Now, that’s an extreme example, but once you start to see the world in these terms, you start to realize why our choice of energy sources isn’t arbitrary. Coal, for example, is still America’s second largest source of electricity, despite the fact that it’s the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive way to produce it. Why do we still use so much of it? Well, because it’s significantly more affordable…in part because it’s way less resource-intensive.

An energy source like offshore wind, for example, is so dependent on materials like copper and zinc that it would require six times as many mineral resources to produce the same amount of power as coal. And by the way, getting all those minerals out of the ground…itself requires lots and lots of energy.

Now, the good news is that America has actually been cutting way down on its use of coal in recent years, thanks largely to technological breakthroughs that brought us cheap natural gas as a replacement. And because natural gas emits way less carbon than coal, that reduced our carbon emissions from electricity generation by more than 30%.

In fact, the government reports that switching over to natural gas did more than twice as much to cut carbon emissions as renewables did in recent years. Why did natural gas progress so much faster than renewables? It wasn’t an accident.

Energy is a little like money: You’ve gotta spend it to make it. To get usable natural gas, for example, you’ve first gotta drill a well, process and transport the gas, build a power plant, and generate the electricity. But the question is how much energy are you getting back for your investment? With natural gas, you get about 30 times as much power out of the system as you put into creating it.  By contrast, with something like solar power, you only get about 3 1/2 times as much power back.

Replacing the now closed Indian Point nuclear power plant would require covering all of Albany County NY with wind mills.

Hard to fuel an entire country that way. And everywhere you look, you see similarly eye-popping numbers. To replace the energy produced by just one oil well in the Permian Basin of Texas–and there are thousands of those–you’d need to build 10 windmills, each about 330 feet high. To meet just 10% of the country’s electricity needs, you’d have to build a wind farm the size of the state of New Hampshire. To get the same amount of power produced by one typical nuclear reactor, you’d need over three million solar panels, none of which means, by the way, that we shouldn’t be using renewables as a part of our energy future.

But it does mean that the dream of using only renewables is going to remain a dream,
at least given the constraints of current technology. We simply don’t know how
to do it while still providing the amount of energy that everyday life requires.

No energy source is ever going to painlessly solve all our problems. It’s always a compromise – which is why it’s so important for us to focus on the best outcomes that are achievable, because otherwise, New Hampshire’s gonna look like this.

Addendum from Michael J. Kelly

Energy return on investment (EROI)

The debate over decarbonization has focussed on technical feasibility and economics. There is one emerging measure that comes closely back to the engineering and the thermodynamics of energy production. The energy return on (energy) investment is a measure of the useful energy produced by a particular power plant divided by the energy needed to build, operate, maintain, and decommission the plant. This is a concept that owes its origin to animal ecology: a cheetah must get more energy from consuming his prey than expended on catching it, otherwise it will die. If the animal is to breed and nurture the next generation then the ratio of energy obtained from energy expended has to be higher, depending on the details of energy expenditure on these other activities. Weißbach et al. have analysed the EROI for a number of forms of energy production and their principal conclusion is that nuclear, hydro-, and gas- and coal-fired power stations have an EROI that is much greater than wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power in a desert or cultivated biomass: see Fig. 2.

In human terms, with an EROI of 1, we can mine fuel and look at it—we have no energy left over. To get a society that can feed itself and provide a basic educational system we need an EROI of our base-load fuel to be in excess of 5, and for a society with international travel and high culture we need EROI greater than 10. The new renewable energies do not reach this last level when the extra energy costs of overcoming intermittency are added in. In energy terms the current generation of renewable energy technologies alone will not enable a civilized modern society to continue!

On Energy Transitions

‘Charities’ Spend Millions on Climate Change Lawfare

Posted on by Ron Clutz

In his article at The Hill Robert Stilson answers the question Why are ‘charities’ funneling millions into climate change lawfare? Excerpts in italiics with my bolds and added images.

Over the last several years, dozens of dubious climate change lawsuits have
been brought by state and local governments against the oil and gas industry.
They are bringing these cases with help from white-shoe law firms,
funded by non-profit money from Big Philanthropy.

Such attempts at “legislation through litigation” represent yet another example of the deeply regrettable tendency toward the ends-justify-the-means rationalizations common in contemporary political activism. The millions in tax-exempt philanthropic dollars apparently underwriting this lawsuit campaign also raise serious questions about the proper relationship between charity, politics and the judicial system.

Citing recently released tax filings, Fox News reported that the New Venture Fund, a registered 501(c)(3) charity and the largest constituent member of the giant left-of-center political nonprofit network managed by Arabella Advisors, had granted $2.5 million to the for-profit law firm Sher Edling in 2022. This was after it had funneled $3 million to the firm last year.

Sher Edling is best known for representing state and local governments in a slew of lawsuits against oil and gas companies, accusing them of downplaying or otherwise misrepresenting the impact that their products have on the global climate. The governmental plaintiffs (which include the states of Rhode Island and Delaware, the cities of Charleston, South Carolina and Baltimore, the county of Anne Arundel, Maryland, and others) are suing to force “Big Oil” to pay them compensation for the vast costs that these governments claim they are incurring due to climate change.

None of the plaintiffs have yet prevailed on the merits,
but the catch is they don’t necessarily need to. 

Activists hope that if just one case lands before “one judge in one state in one courtroom that sees a path to allowing these cases to go to trial,” discovery and the prospect of a jury trial could give them major leverage over the industry. The activists don’t necessarily need to win a verdict to achieve their ultimate objectives pertaining to future climate policy or legislation.

The money Sher Edling received from the New Venture Fund was apparently routed through one of the nonprofit’s countless fiscally-sponsored projects: the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation. It has no website or other public profile, but grant descriptions explain that the fund’s purpose is to funnel charitable dollars to “enable cities, counties, and states hard hit by climate change to file high-impact climate damage and deception lawsuits represented by expert counsel.” This was formerly a project of a different 501(c)(3) called the Resources Legacy Fund, before switching its sponsorship to the New Venture Fund.

Notably, the Collective Action Fund has received
significant support from Big Philanthropy.

Major known funders include the MacArthur Foundation ($9 million since 2017) and the JPB Foundation ($3.3 million from 2020 to 2022, plus another $1.15 million approved for future payment), in addition to six-figure totals from the Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

In an October 2023 letter responding to congressional inquiries, Sher Edling claimed that this philanthropic money does not underwrite specific lawsuits, but is instead used to support “the firm’s general operations in this area” — that is, climate litigation.

Because it would bypass the legislative process on a major issue of public policy, commentators have aptly labeled this whole phenomenon “legislation through litigation,” or even “lawfare.” They have raised important questions that more people should be asking. At least two overarching issues deserve particular mention.

The first concerns the nature of the lawsuits themselves. Climate change (and what should be done about it) is among the most contentious and consequential public policy issues of our time. The debate surrounding it involves major uncertainties and tradeoffs that carry with them direct personal ramifications for virtually every American. It is exactly the sort of issue that should be resolved though the political process, by voters and their elected representatives in Congress, not through a judicial process, by private lawyers and their ideologically motivated funders.

Moreover, it defies any notion of justice to hold the oil and gas industry civilly liable for producing and selling a product that is utterly essential to humanity’s survival — including these governmental plaintiffs’ own constituents. That is essentially what these lawsuits boil down to.

The second concern relates to the manner in which this litigation is evidently being at least partially financed. Big Philanthropy is routing millions of charitable dollars through a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit to a for-profit law firm, for the purpose of supporting a nationwide litigation campaign. Is there a point at which such an arrangement ceases to be “charitable,” in the sense that we collectively understand that term? If so, what should we do about that?

Government lawsuits against the oil and gas industry over the alleged impacts of climate change rest upon an entirely unjust theory of liability. They are an affront to both the civil justice system and the democratic legislative process.

That they are apparently being underwritten by giant private foundations is further evidence of just how far Big Philanthropy has moved away from what most Americans would consider “charity.”

Davos Men Outflanked by Davos Disrupters

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Stuart Thomson reports at National Post Carney in the battle for the soul of Davos.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

When the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos wrapped up
it was clear the Davos men were outflanked by the Davos disrupters

By the time the World Economic Forum’s annual conference wrapped up on Friday, it was clear this was the year the Davos men were sidelined by the Davos disrupters.

At the vanguard of these disrupters was Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, whose special address to the conference mixed dark warnings about the future of the West with optimistic celebrations of free market capitalism.

While Davos attendees gathered to hear panels about creating jobs, harnessing AI and revamping the economy to battle climate change, Milei made headlines with his warnings against “greater regulation which creates a downward spiral until we are all poor.”  In his speech, Milei warned the world against creeping towards socialism, arguing that collectivism in any form was the root cause of the West’s problems. The Argentinian president finished his speech with an enthusiastic flourish.  “Long live freedom, dammit!”

Core Theme for Davos 2024

The next day Mark Carney, the slick Canadian central banker, joined a panel on monetary policy and argued that his former colleagues deserved “very high marks” for their recent performance battling post-pandemic inflation.  To the populist right, which has been resurgent in the West and has trained its ire on Davos in recent years, Carney’s must have seemed like the more eccentric argument.

Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has boasted that he sniffed out the inflation problem in early 2022 well before the bankers and economists that Carney praised. Poilievre has also been withering in his criticism of current Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem, whom Poilievre has promised to fire if he gets the chance. And Poilievre is no fan of the World Economic Forum (WEF), or what his party refers to as “highfalutin trips” to its annual meeting, or its policies, which “do not align with those of hard-working Canadian families.”

For years, Carney has been trailed by rumours that he wants to succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader, which would set up a showdown with Poilievre. That would see Poilievre, among the new breed of Davos disrupters, facing off against the consummate Davos man.

And if a previous clash between the two men, at a virtual meeting of the finance committee in 2021, is any indication, it would be an ill-tempered contest. That committee meeting was a raucous affair that provoked no less than 10 points of order from other MPs. Poilievre accused Carney’s opposition to Canadian pipelines (while supporting investments in foreign pipelines in his role as as chairman of Brookfield Asset Management) as smacking of “the Davos elite at its worst.”

Although Poilievre has been accused of chasing conspiracy theories about the WEF, his criticism of Carney sounds more like the critique offered in 2004 by Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist who popularized the term “Davos man.”

Poilievre describes Carney as a global elitist who sees the world as an economic playground and national loyalties as an encumbrance or, at best, an irrelevance.  While most people have strong patriotic feelings, Huntington described a Davos man that saw himself as “global citizen” and identified with the world as a whole, in contrast to most people, who describe warm patriotic feelings for their home country.

“Comprising fewer than four percent of the American people, these transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations,” wrote Huntington.

Things have changed in the two decades since Huntington wrote his paper about the Davos men. When the London School of Economics Business Review in 2022 analyzed piles of press releases by the World Economic Forum, it found that growth and economic development were falling out of style. Words like “global,” “international” and “world” were also becoming passé. Instead, the World Economic Forum was concerned with the “Earth’s finitude and fragility” and words like “pollution” and “nature” had quadrupled.

It’s this new version of Davos that leaders like Milei want to disrupt.

The Argentinian’s libertarianism may have some overlap with Davos ideas from 20 years ago, but he’s a hostile figure at a conference where the terms “diversity,” “ethnicity,” and “equality” have increased five-fold in six years, according to the LSE Business Review analysis.

In fact, the neoliberal ideas about global trade that Huntington heard at Davos in the early 2000s would probably find some sympathy with both Milei and Poilievre, who are fans of the free market American economist Milton Friedman.  Both men have been, somewhat erroneously, compared to former U.S. president Donald Trump but, as long-time libertarians, they more closely resemble each other. Milei’s philosophy even drifts into anarcho-capitalism, a kind of concentrated libertarianism that even Friedman shied away from.

One thing Trump, Poilievre and Milei share, though, is a deep mistrust of the kind of ideas bandied about at Davos and the kind of people who traffic in them. Poilievre has vowed that if he becomes prime minister, his cabinet won’t be allowed to travel to the annual Davos conference, as ministers in the previous Conservative government did.

But given the media reaction to Milei’s performance, which evoked praise from conservative media and curiosity from the mainstream media, Poilievre might be kicking himself that he didn’t think to travel to Davos, to join in person with the new wave of Davos disrupters.

Rebuilding Trust?

 

More Cold Hard Truths about Solar Panel Farms

Posted on by Ron Clutz

George Franklin writes As more & more counties get more solar farms…Here’s some truth about solar farms.  H/T John Ray at Greenie Watch

I should start by telling you what bonafides I have for writing this. I am a retired aerospace engineer. A literal rocket scientist if you will. I worked on MX (Peacekeeper) Space Shuttle, Hubble, Brilliant Pebbles, PACOSS, Space Station, MMU, B2, the Sultan of Brunei’s half billion dollar private 747 with crystal showers, gold sinks and 100 dollar a yard coiffed silk carpets. I designed a satphone installation on prince Jeffry’s 757. I did all of the design work for the structure of Mark 1V propulsion module currently flying on at least 3 spacecraft that I know of. Some of the more exciting projects I have worked on are not shareable.

Solar panels are at best about 20% efficient.

They convert almost 0% of the UV light that hits them. None of the visible spectrum and only some of the IR spectrum. At the same time as they are absorbing light they are absorbing heat from the sun. This absorbed heat is radiated into the adjacent atmosphere.

It should be obvious what happens next. When air is warmed it rises. Even small differences in ordinary land surfaces are capable of creating powerful forces of weather like thunderstorms and tornadoes. These weather phenomena are initiated and reinforced by land features as they are blown downwind. It is all too obvious to me what will happen with the heat generated by an entire solar farm. Solar farms will become thunderstorm and tornado incubators and magnets.

Solar panels are dark and and they emit energy to the space above them when they are not being radiated. This is known as black-body radiation. Satellites flying in space use this phenomenon to cool internal components. If they didn’t do this they would fry themselves.

So solar farms not only produce more heat in summer than the original land
that they were installed on, but they also produce more cooling in winter,
thus exacerbating weather extremes.

So I conclude with this. There is nothing green about green energy except the dirty money flowing into corrupt pockets.  There is no such thing as green energy. The science doesn’t exist. The technology doesn’t exist. The engineering doesn’t exist. We are being pushed to save the planet with solutions that are worse than the problems.

Climate Weaponized for War on Meat

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Robert Malone writes at Brownstone Institute ‘Science’ in Service of the Agenda.  Excerpts in itallics with my bolds.  H/T Tyler Durden

We all know what climate change is. The truth is that the UN, most globalists, and a wide range of world leaders” blame human activities for climate change. Whether or not climate change is real or that human activities are enhancing climate change is not important to this discussion. That is a subject for another day. [That subject is pursued here GHG Theory and the Tests It Fails.]

Most climate change scientists receive funding from the government. So they must comply with the government edict and policy position that human activity-caused climate change is an existential threat to both humankind and global ecosystems. When these “scientists” publish studies supporting the thesis that human activities cause climate change, they are more likely to receive more grant monies and therefore more publications and therefore are more likely to be academically promoted (or at least to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of modern academe).

Those who produce a counternarrative from the government-approved one soon find themselves without funding, tenure, without jobs, unable to publish and unable to procure additional grants and contracts. It is a dead-end career wise. The system has been rigged.

And by the way, this is nothing new. Back in the day, during the war on drugs, if a researcher who had funding by the NIH’s NIDA (National Institute of Drug Addiction) published an article or wrote an annual NIH grant report showing benefits to using recreational drugs, that would be a career-ending move, as funding would not be renewed and new funding would never materialize. . . The administrative state at NIH does that! And anything that went against the war on drugs was considered a war on the government. Funding denied. 

The new wrinkle in what has now happened with corrupted climate change activism/ propaganda/ ”science” is that the manipulation of research is crossing disciplines. No longer satisfied with oppressing climate change scientists, climate change narrative enforcers have moved into the nutritional sciences. This trend of crossing disciplines portends death for the overall independence of any scientific endeavors. A creeping corruption into adjacent disciplines. Because climate change activists, world leaders, research institutions, universities, and governments are distorting another branch of science outside of climate science. They are using the bio-sciences, specifically nutrition science, to support the climate change agenda. It is another whole-of-government response to the crisis, just like with Covid-19.

They are distorting health research to make the case that eating meat is
dangerous to humans. Normal standards for publication have been set aside.
The propaganda is thick and easily spotted.

As the NIH is now funding researchers to find associations between climate change and health, it is pretty clear that those whose research is set up to find such associations will be funded. Hence, once again, the system is rigged to support the climate change narrative.

Some Recent “Peer Reviewed” Academic Publications on Climate Change and Diet:

Enter climate change regulations, laws, and goals – such as those found in UN Agenda 2030. Enter globalists determined to buy up farmland to control prices, agriculture, and eating trends. Enter politics into our food supplies and even the science of nutrition What a mess.

Below are some of the more outlandish claims being made in the name of climate science and nutrition. The United Nations’s World Food Program writes:

The climate crisis is one of the leading causes of the steep rise in global hunger. Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves. Hunger will spiral out of control if the world fails to take immediate climate action. 

Note that “Climate shocks” have always existed and will always exist. The existence of readily observed (and easily propagandized) human tragedies associated with hurricanes, fires, and droughts are embedded throughout the entire archaeological record of human existence. This is nothing new in either written human history or prehistory. This does not equate to a pressing existential human crisis.

In fact, reviewing the evidence of calories and protein available reveals a very different trend. Over time, per capita caloric and protein supplies have increased almost across the board.  Despite clear and compelling evidence that climate change is not impacting on food availability or undernutrition, websites, news stories, and research literature all make tenuous assertions about how the climate change “crisis” is causing starvation.

This is not to say that that the poorest nations in the world don’t have issues with famine; they do. It is an issue, but not a climate change issue. It is a gross distortion of available data and any objective scientific analysis of those data to assert otherwise.

The best way to stop famine is to ensure that countries have adequate energy
and resources to grow their own food supply, and have a domestic
manufacturing base. That means independent energy sources.

If the United Nations and the wealthy globalists at the WEF truly want to help nations with high poverty and famine rates and reduce our immigration pressure, they would help them secure stable energy sources. They would help them develop their natural gas and other hydrocarbon projects. Then they could truly feed themselves. They could attain independence.

Famine is not a climate change issue; it is an energy issue.

Apples and oranges. This is not “scientific.” Rather, it is yet more weaponized fear porn being used as a Trojan horse to advance hidden political and economic objectives and agendas of political movements, large corporations, and non-governmental organizations.  Facts matter.

 

 

Programming Judges for Woke Climate Rulings

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Olivia Murray reports at American Thinker America’s judiciary is quietly receiving ‘training’ from leftwing climate group.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

With Enlightenment came secularism, with secularism came relativism, with relativism came leftism, and with leftism comes judicial activism. No longer are Western courts viewed as a place of arbitration based upon absolute Judeo-Christian morality and standards of justice, but a vehicle to enact revolutionary change, where fairness and righteousness are in the eye of the executor.

According to a new report published by Fox News today, America’s judiciary has been quietly receiving climate change arbitration “training” from  a “little-known judicial advocacy organization” financed by “left-wing nonprofits.” Here are the details, from the article itself:

The Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Law Institute (ELI) created the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) in 2018, establishing a first-of-its-kind resource to provide ‘reliable, up-to-date information’ about climate change litigation, according to the group. The project’s reach has extended to various state and federal courts, including powerful appellate courts….

Climate activists protesting outside the Supreme Court July 1, 2022 after the court announced its decision in West Virginia v. EPA. Francis Chung/E&E News/POLITICO

When you have a group of people who don’t believe in the foundational values of America, this is what you get—a covert operation to transform what ought to be an unbiased and nonpartisan apparatus into a biased and partisan one. When the courts become an instrument to advance an agenda, it is a serious infringement on the right of a person or party to an impartial arbiter and the development is, naturally, alarming. When judicial minds receive “quiet training” in pseudo-science to ensure “climate justice” and “equity” are taken into consideration the threat of prejudiced decisions increases, and unconstitutional laws, and bureaucratic rules and mandates become “legal” despite any fact, reason, or authority to support their implementation.

Fox also reports that in just five years, the CJP “has crafted 13 curriculum modules” and hosted dozens of events—all in all, “more than 1,700 judges” have participated in CJP’s “training” scheme.

From ELI’s website on its CJP, we find this:

As the body of climate litigation grows, judges must consider complex scientific and legal questions, many of which are developing rapidly. To address these issues, the Climate Judiciary Project of the Environmental Law Institute is collaborating with leading national judicial education institutions to meet judges’ need for basic familiarity with climate science methods and concepts.

Now this isn’t a great analogy because certain sciences are settled—embryology establishes that life begins at conception, ultrasounds unequivocally determine that babies in the womb are actually living human beings, and biological reality aligns with the real reality of two sexes (everything else is mental illness), etc.—but how would the left handle a pro-life nonprofit being a very real presence in law schools, presenting its curriculum as objective (even though it actually would be) and the institution requiring its students to take the course? Or, a Christian outfit, asserting that humans are not gendered but sexed? Obviously, the useful idiots would lose their collective mind.

I wonder how we can expect those gas stove rulings to go? What about when the tyrannical government imposes a “carbon emissions” limit on all American subjects? And when the federal bureaucracy takes away the heating and cooling elements in our home? What happens if legislators dictate that grocery store chains can only sell a limited amount of beef—or, none at all?

Will these illegal actions be upheld? Well, presumably yes,
because a “trained” judiciary will be right there to rule the “right” way.

Background 

Critical Climate Intelligence for Jurists (and others)

Advice on Cross Examining Climatists

Time to Cross Examine Climatists

 

McKitrick: COP28 Worse Threat Than You Think

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A demonstration against fossil fuels at the COP28 United Nations climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. PHOTO BY PETER DEJONG/AP

Ross McKitrick writes at Financial Post: The only thing wrong with the globalist climate agenda — the people won’t have it  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Phasing out fossil fuels is going to cost way more than ordinary people
will accept.  Delegates to COP28 clearly didn’t understand that

It’s tempting to dismiss the outcome of COP28, the recent United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates, as mere verbiage, especially the “historic” UAE Consensus about transitioning away from fossil fuels. After all, this is the 28th such conference and the previous ones all pretty much came to nothing. On a chart showing the steady rise in global CO2 emissions since 1950 you cannot spot when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol entered into force (2002), with its supposedly historic language binding developed countries to cap their CO2 emissions at five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, which they didn’t do. The 2015 Paris Agreement also contained “historic” language that bound countries to further deep emission reductions. Yet the COP28 declaration begins with an admission that the parties are not on track for compliance.

Still, we should not overlook the real meaning of the UAE Consensus.

COP agreements used to focus on one thing: targets for reducing greenhouse gases. The UAE Consensus is very different. Across its 196 paragraphs and 10 supplementary declarations it’s a manifesto for global central planning. In their own words, some 90,000 government functionaries aspire to oversee and micromanage agriculture, finance, energy, manufacturing, gender relations, health care, air conditioning, building design and countless other economic and social decisions. It’s all supposedly in the name of fighting climate change, but that’s just the pretext. Take climate away and they’d likely appeal to something else.

Climate change doesn’t necessitate such plans.

Economists have been studying climate change for many decades and have never considered it grounds to phase out fossil fuels, micromanage society, manage gender relations and so on. Mainstream scientific findings, coupled with mainstream economic analysis, prescribe moderate emission-pricing policies that rely much more on adaptation than mitigation.

The fact that the UAE Consensus is currently non-binding is beside the point. What matters is what the COP28 delegates have said they want to achieve. Two facts stand out: the consensus document announced plans that would cause enormous economic harm if implemented, and it was approved unanimously — yes, by everyone in the room.

The first point is best illustrated by the language around eliminating fossil fuels. Climate policy is supposed to be about optimally reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As technology gradually allows emissions to be de-coupled from fuel use, there may eventually be no need to cut back on fuels. But activist delegates insisted on abolitionist language anyway, making elimination of fossil fuels an end in itself. Such fuels are of course essential for our economic standard of living, and 30 years of economic analysis has consistently shown that, even taking account of emissions, phasing out fuels would do humanity far more harm than good. The Consensus statement ignores this, even while claiming to be guided by “the science.”

The second point refers to the fact that all representatives of all governments worldwide endorsed policies that will, if implemented, do extraordinary harm to their own people. Where governments have made even small attempts to take these radical steps, the public has rebelled. This calls into question whom the COP28 delegates actually “represent.” A few elected officials did attend, but no one voted for the great majority of attendees. And have no doubt: even if some heads of state, whether courageous or foolhardy, did go to COP intent on opposing the overall agenda, they would almost certainly be browbeaten into signing the final package.

The UAE Consensus is the latest indication that the real fault line in contemporary society is not right versus left, it’s the people versus (for lack of a better word) the globalists. A decade ago this term was only heard on the conspiracy fringe. It has since migrated to the mainstream as the most apt descriptor of a permanent transnational bureaucracy that aspires to run everything, even to the public’s detriment, while insulating themselves from democratic limits.

A hallmark of globalists is their credo of “rules for thee but not for me.” Thousands of delegates fly to Davos or to the year’s COP, many on private jets, to be wined and dined as they advise the rest of us to learn to do without.

Two sides of the same coin.

On both COVID-19 and climate change, the same elite has invoked “the science,” not in support of good decision-making, but as a talisman to justify everything they do, including censoring public debate. Complex and uncertain matters are reduced to dogmatic slogans by technocrats who force-feed political leaders a one-sided information stream. Experts outside the process are accorded standing based solely on their obeisance to the preferred narrative, not their knowledge or qualifications. Critics are attacked as purveyors of “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Any opposition to government plans therefore proves the need to suppress free speech.

Eventually, however, the people get the last word. And despite nonstop fear-mongering about an alleged climate crisis, the people tolerate climate policy only insofar as it costs almost nothing.

The climate movement may think that by embedding itself in the globalist elite it can accelerate policy adoption without needing to win elections. In fact, the opposite is happening. Globalists have co-opted the climate issue to try to sell a grotesque central planning agenda that the public has repeatedly rejected. If the UAE Consensus is the future of climate policy, climate policy’s failure is guaranteed.

EV Push Imploding

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Levi Russell writes at Heartland The Rush to Force Everyone into Electric Vehicles is Imploding. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A recently published article in the peer-reviewed academic journal Transportation Research tells us that cars, even the supposedly anointed battery electric variety, are far too convenient and that the state must be empowered to “restrict car use.” The authors tell us that converting car lanes to bus lanes have reduced car use in Oslo. No surprise there. The fact that academia is floating this sort of policy should concern anyone who has any inkling of mistrust of the federal government.

Truly our freedom of movement is in peril.

Electric vehicles are not nearly as popular as their advocates would have had us believe, as sales are now slumping in the face of rising interest rates and a lack of so-called fast chargers. As we begin to bump up against mined mineral constraints and international relations complications, there’s no doubt the cost of making these glorified toys will continue to rise. A recent Consumer Reports publication shows that, over the last 3 model years, electric vehicles are less reliable than normal gasoline and diesel vehicles. So, several states want to ban the sale of reliable, inexpensive gas and diesel cars and force us to buy less reliable electric cars. Note well that the superior reliability of hybrids is likely down to the fact that car makers who are better known for their reliability make more hybrids. There’s nothing inherent to a hybrid that would make it more reliable than a gasoline engine vehicle.

[And in addition: No one wants to buy used EVs and they’re piling up in weed-infested graveyards Fortune magazine. No One Wants Used EVs, Making New Ones a Tougher Sell Too Bloomberg ]

Even our ability to travel using air travel is under the gun. A CNN op-ed recently floated the idea of limiting air travel through the use of carbon (read: sin) passports. We will be limited to traveling based on the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during the flight. The author wants this applied to cruise ships as well. It’s not hard to see this applied to your car as well.

Of course, such rules will not apply to the super-wealthy climate grifters.
They’ll be jetting all over the globe for their very important climate conferences.

And it’s not just transportation. In September, Reuters “fact checked” a claim that US cities had agreed to limit meat consumption, finding the claim false. And yet, we are told on a nearly daily basis that eliminating beef consumption is necessary to save the planet. The sin of using coal (but not apparently to create steel) has become the sin of eating a steak. What’s next? Rice? Pork?

Beginning in 2024, the German government will empower local electricity providers to limit the flow of electricity to heat pumps and electric cars. Such limits were the stuff of alleged conspiracy theories mere months ago. Now they’re a reality. Germany’s suicidal attempt to power their grid with nothing but wind and solar, killing off their own nuclear power generation over the last 20 years, has led to energy rationing. It’s not as if this is unpredictable. The unreliability of so-called renewables is common knowledge among energy experts.

It’s sensible for those who are concerned about their ability to choose where and when they travel, what they eat, and when they turn on their heaters and air conditioners to be skeptical of every single attempt to accrue more power by state and federal governments. That skepticism should turn into activism against these power grabs. Anyone who tells you these power grabs aren’t coming is telling you not to believe your own eyes.

Postscript Absurdum

Canada poised to pass rules that all new vehicles must be zero-emissions by 2035 Source Financial Post

The act to be announced in coming days aims
to phase out the sale of new combustion vehicles

The new rules will require zero-emissions vehicles — which include battery electric, hydrogen and plug-in electric vehicles — to make up 20 per cent of all new car sales in 2026, 60 per cent in 2030 and 100 per cent in 2035, the reports said.

 

Keep Your Head, Others are Losing Theirs Over Climate

Posted on by Ron Clutz

John Stossel’s interview with Bjorn Lomborg is featured in his article at Reason The Media’s Misleading Fearmongering Over Climate Change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

“Over the last 20 years, because of temperature rises, we have seen about 116,000 more people die from heat. But 283,000 fewer people die from cold.”

United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry says it will take trillions of dollars to “solve” climate change. Then he says, “There is not enough money in any country in the world to actually solve this problem.”

Yes, they are projecting more than 100 Trillion US$.

Kerry has little understanding of money or how it’s created. He’s a multimillionaire because he married a rich woman. Now he wants to take more of your money to pretend to affect climate change.

Bjorn Lomborg points out that there are better things society should spend money on.

Lomberg acknowledges that a warmer climate brings problems. “As temperatures get higher, sea water, like everything else, expands. So we’re going to maybe see three feet of sea level rise. Then they say, ‘So everybody who lives within three feet of sea level, they’ll have to move!’ Well, no. If you actually look at what people do, they built dikes and so they don’t have to move.”

Rotterdam Adaptation Policy–Ninety years thriving behind dikes and dams.

People in Holland did that years ago. A third of the Netherlands is below sea level. In some areas, it’s 22 feet below. Yet the country thrives. That’s the way to deal with climate change: adjust to it.

“Fewer people are going to get flooded every year, despite the fact that you have much higher sea level rise. The total cost for Holland over the last half-century is about $10 billion,” says Lomberg. “Not nothing, but very little for an advanced economy over 50 years.”

For saying things like that, Lomberg is labeled “the devil.”

“The problem here is unmitigated scaremongering,” he replies. “A new survey shows that 60 percent of all people in rich countries now believe it’s likely or very likely that unmitigated climate change will lead to the end of mankind. This is what you get when you have constant fearmongering in the media.”

Some people now say they will not have children because they’re convinced that climate change will destroy the world. Lomborg points out how counterproductive that would be: “We need your kids to make sure the future is better.”

He acknowledges that climate warming will kill people.

“As temperatures go up, we’re likely to see more people die from heat. That’s absolutely true. You hear this all the time. But what is underreported is the fact that nine times as many people die from cold…. As temperatures go up, you’re going to see fewer people die from cold. Over the last 20 years, because of temperature rises, we have seen about 116,000 more people die from heat. But 283,000 fewer people die from cold.”

A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Source: The Lancet

That’s rarely reported in the news.

When the media doesn’t fret over deaths from heat,
they grab at other possible threats.

CNN claims, “Climate Change is Fueling Extremism.”

The BBC says, “A Shifting Climate is Catalysing Infectious Disease.“

U.S. News and World Report says, “Climate Change will Harm Children’s Mental Health.”

Lomborg replies, “It’s very, very easy to make this argument that everything is caused by climate change if you don’t have the full picture.”

He points out that we rarely hear about positive effects of climate change, like global greening.

Spatial pattern of trends in Gross Primary Production (1982- 2015). Source: Sun et al. 2018.

 

“That’s good! We get more green stuff on the planet. My argument is not that climate change is great or overall positive. It’s simply that, just like every other thing, it has pluses and minuses…. Only reporting on the minuses, and only emphasizing worst-case outcomes, is not a good way to inform people.”

Synopsis of Lomborg’s Policy Recommendation (excerpted transcription)

If you’re a politician and you look at ten different problems, you’re natural inclination is to say, “Let’s give 1/10 to each one of them.” And economists would tend to say, “No, let’s give all of the money to the most efficient problem first and then to the second most efficient problem, and so on. I’m simply suggesting there’s a way that we could do much better with much less.

Of course if you feel very strongly about your particular area, when I come and say, “Actually, this is not a very efficient use of resources.” I get why people get upset. But for our collective good, for all the stuff that we do on the planet, we actually need to consider carefully where do we spend money well, compared to where do we just spend money and feel virtuous about ourselves.

If we spend way too much money ineffectively on climate, not only
are we not fixing climate, but we’re also wasting an enormous amount
of money that could have been spent on all these other things.

I’m simply trying to make that simple point, and I think most people kind of get that.  Remember, electricity is about a fifth of our total energy consumption. So, all everybody’s talking about is all the electricity, which is the easiest thing to switch over. But we don’t know anything about how we’re going to, know very, very little about how we’re going to deal with the other 4/5. This is energy that we use on things that are very, very hard to replace. So it’s a fertilizer that keeps 4 billion people alive. Making the fertilizer. It’s steel, cement, it’s industrial processes. Most of heating we use comes from fossil fuels, most transportation, that’s fossil fuels.

Know that if the U.S. went entirely net zero today and stayed that way for the rest of the century, consider how incredibly extreme this would be. First of all, you would not be able to feed everyone in the U.S. The whole economy would break down. You wouldn’t know how to get transportation. A lot of people would freeze. Some people would fry. There would be lots and lots of problems. But even if you did this and managed to do it, the net impact, if you run it through the U.N. climate model, is that you would reduce temperatures by the end of the century by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit. We would almost not be able to measure it by the end of the century. It would have virtually no impact.

Look, again, we’re rich and so a lot of people feel like you can spend money on many different things. And that’s true. I’m making the argument that for fairly little money, we could do amazing good. If we spent $35 billion, not a trillion dollars, just $35 billion, which is not nothing. I don’t think, neither you or I have that amount of money. But, you know, in the big scheme of things, this is a rounding error. $35 billion could save 4.2 million lives in the poor part of the world, each and every year and make the poor world $1.1 trillion richer.

I think we have a moral responsibility to remember, that there are lots and lots of people, so mostly about 6 billion people out there, who don’t have this luxury of being able to think 100 years ahead and think about a little bit of a fraction of a degree, who wants to make sure that their kids are safe.
And so, the next money we spend should probably be on these very simple and cheap policies.