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 lightthey 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.
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.
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.
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 reportpublished 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.
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.
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.
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 slumpingin 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.
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.
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.
“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 youwould 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.
Once again equivocation rules climatists. After the uproar over demands to “phase out” hydrocarbon fuel, the wording was changed to say “transition away.” Thus the divide is papered over while alarmists claim agreement was reached to “leave it in the ground.” Others will point to language such as “transition away in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” Just like Paris COP, everyone pledges and celebrates as though something has changed
COP28 just concluded feverish negotiations in its final hours—actually, beyond its scheduled final hours—with the announcement of a final agreement Wednesday that includes language committing its near-200 participating nations to “transition away from” fossil fuels. That is the language negotiators landed upon to replace the previous language pledging to “phase out” the use of coal, oil and natural gas across the coming decades preferred by energy transition boosters.
Many observers are no doubt left wondering what the real difference is between the two phrases, other than that the “transition away from” language was found to be less offensive to big producers and users of these energy resources than a phasing-out turned out to be. It isn’t a bad question, to be sure.
Advocates for this final language claim it is “historic” in that it is the first time any of the 28 UN Conference of the Parties climate summits have overtly mentioned moving away from the use of fossil fuels in a final agreement. But it is fair to note that countries across the globe have invested many trillions of dollars—much of it funded by costly debt—in efforts to “transition away from” fossil fuels over the last three decades now and little has changed. The world still gets roughly 80% of its primary energy from coal, oil and natural gas, only a sliver less than it did at the turn of the century. The world will use record volumes of all three fossil fuels in 2023, and most experts project it will do so again in 2024 and beyond.
So, while this language may well be “historic,” it is also merely a restatement of commitments many of the signatory governments have already embarked upon for years and failed to achieve. Honestly, it is difficult to envision how what amounts to yet another COP-generated word salad will do anything to change the undeniable global dynamic.
Reuters quotes Anne Rasmussen, lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, assessing the language as uninspiring. “We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual, when what we really need is an exponential step change in our actions,” she said.
But COP conferences involving more than 190 participating countries with widely disparate economic and energy security priorities and 70,000+ attendees are not really designed to produce exponential step changes, are they? COP rules requiring unanimous consent to all language included in each subsequent final agreement ensure that commitments will inevitably be watered down with qualifying language designed to enable each country to act upon its own unique interpretation of what phrases like “transition away from” actually mean.
Those are bold words, but everyone should recognize that “real-economy outcomes” in, say, Peru or Uganda are likely to look entirely different than those in Belgium or Canada. The same is likely true of the respective outcomes we will see in the coming years in India as compared to the United States.
The Bottom Line
As an example: If China wished to signify a zeal to “transition away from” its own massive use of fossil fuels, it might decide to cancel its new program going into effect January 1, 2024, which will subsidize the building of hundreds more coal-fired power plants. Does anyone involved in COP28 expect that or any similar action by the Xi Jinping government as a result of its signing off on this agreement? Of course not. Beijing will interpret the phrase “transition away from” as it sees fit and continue to prioritize its national energy security over any climate commitments.
At the end of the day, this final agreement from COP28 seems destined to be remembered in the same vein as all previous COPs other than COP3 (Kyoto) and COP21 (Paris) are remembered—as, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, a lot of sound and fury signifying not much at all.
The map above from IEA shows almost 2000 hydrogen fuel projects around the world, intending to replace hydrocarbon fuels to save the planet. They dream of being operational by 2030 claiming that real world obstacles will be overcome if enough taxpayer dollars are thrown at the problems. The whole notion is fantastic (in the literal sense) for reasons detailed in a previous post.
But realities be damned, there’s virtue to be displayed, money to be made and no accountability for failure, so the charade will go on. On the map are some bubbles off the coast of Canadian maritime provinces, so let’s take a peek into how these projects are conceived and realized. Rod Nickel reports at the Globe and Mail Canadian wind-hydrogen project delayed one year in race to first European exports. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Green Hydrogen Project in Atlantic Provinces Delayed
One of Canada’s first projects to produce emissions-free hydrogen with wind energy has delayed its start by one year because operator World Energy GH2’s European customers need more time to develop special infrastructure to handle the product, the company said.
The delays illustrate the difficulties companies face in introducing a nascent product to replace high-emitting forms of fuel for transport, industry and homes. [The background post above notes how hydrogen makes containers and conduits brittle, not to mention its explosive potential.]
Have we learned nothing from the Hindenburg Disaster?
Half a dozen companies are advancing projects in the gusty Atlantic provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia to harness winds to power production of Canada’s first exports of emissions-free hydrogen. Canada signed a non-binding agreement in 2022 to ship green hydrogen to Germany starting in 2025.
But World Energy GH2, an affiliate of Boston-based renewable fuels producer World Energy, won’t make that timeline, managing director Sean Leet told Reuters.
“The offtakers are not going to be ready to accept product within 2025, actually not until 2027,” Leet said, referring to buyers who would pre-purchase some of the project’s hydrogen.
The challenges for prospective buyers involve developing new technology to ship, further process and transport the hydrogen by pipeline at its last destination, Leet said.
World Energy GH2 now hopes to start production in late 2026, he said. It requires approval from Newfoundland’s environmental department and strong pre-purchase interest to attract financing before starting production.
Those buyer commitments hinge on the Canadian government finalizing details of a tax credit for up to 40% of the
capital cost of building hydrogen plants, Leet said.
The company intends to build three onshore wind farms in Newfoundland to power production of 250,000 metric tons per year of hydrogen, at a total cost of $12 billion.
Advocacy group EnviroWatch NL, however, questions the efficiency of building wind turbines in Canada to produce hydrogen that will ultimately generate power for Europe thousands of kilometres away.
EverWind Fuels is on track to start production in Nova Scotia in 2025, said CEO Trent Vichie. Its plant, a converted fuel storage facility, would eventually produce 1 million metric tons annually of ammonia, a compound that is a practical form of transporting hydrogen.
EverWind, which declined to disclose the project’s capital budget, expects to strike firm buyer agreements in the first half of 2024, a spokesperson said, and has memorandums of understanding to sell hydrogen to German power companies Uniper and E.ON.
The Canadian government agreed in November to loan EverWind $125 million to build its project, which still requires provincial approval of its wind farms. EverWind’s hydrogen plant has already received environmental approval.
Germany-based ABO Wind is applying for permits and land for a Newfoundland onshore wind farm that will provide electricity to produce hydrogen for Braya Renewable Fuels’ refinery as early as 2027, Robin Reese, director of development for ABO Wind Canada said.
Newfoundland selected EverWind, World Energy GH2, ABO and Exploits Valley Renewable Energy Corp in August to proceed with their wind-hydrogen projects on government land.
U.S.-based Pattern Energy plans to secure European buying agreements in mid-2024 and start construction in 2025 for its wind-hydrogen project on private land in Newfoundland, Canada country head Frank Davis said.
Some Skeptical Comments on the article
EnviroWatch is asking the right question. Why use all this great wind energy to electrolyze water to make hydrogen to convert it (presumably) to ammonia for shipping to Europe to produce energy. It makes absolutely no thermodynamic sense whatsoever. I highly doubt ANY of these projects get built. To quote Susan Powter from the 90s, “Stop the insanity!”.
It makes no economic, thermodynamic or business sense. But it’s great politics.
I’m not thinking Billions but rather Trillions to be wasted on wind power before the world comes to its senses!Twenty- thirty years of spending. Reminds me of the treasure supposedly buried at Oak Island!
Problem is, the alternatives are all expensive mega-projects.Darlington was 5 years late and $10 billion over budget, and we haven’t built a new nuclear plant since then (30 years ago). New hydro dams have similar problems. Wind is small and cheap enough to actually get built in large numbers. Have to expand the energy supply somehow.
The actual Darlington nuke plants were 20% over budget not bad for a first of a kind. The rest was caused by government foolish delays in a high interest rate environment. The next 8 Candu’s were built on time in under 4 years and on budget at under $2/watt average the latest just completed in India.
The $25B refurb project is also on time and under budget.
Actually wind is of little use in Canada as it disappears in summer doldrums and winter cold snaps but maximizes during springtime when hydro flows max out. Its intermittancy makes it 10 times the cost of Candu.
Backing away from absurd, grandiose policies would
shift attention toward more practical measures
Is the era of Big Climate over? It may be that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has implicitly declared as much.
He would not say such a thing, as when Bill Clinton emphatically declared the “era of big government over” in the 1990s. Clinton was trying to show that he was a different kind of progressive, leaving behind the activist government of the 1960s. In contrast, the Vogue-photographed Trudeau was Big Climate’s most glamorous spokesmodel.
His absence at the UN climate jamboree in Dubai is thus striking.
Instead, conservative premiers Danielle Smith and Scott Moe are both on hand to promote oil and gas deals in the petro-state, but not the prime minister. Was it only eight years ago that a newly elected Trudeau descended upon the climate summit in Paris with a bloated retinue of hundreds, all the better to declare that “Canada is back?” He has now backed away.
Canada really isn’t back — we have never been quite so marginal in international relations as we are now — but certainly we were celebrated in Big Climate circles. In the heady days of 2019 Trudeau was even granted an audience with Greta Thunberg.
That was a sign, in retrospect, that Big Climate was in decline.
Inviting a Swedish teenager to indignantly lecture global leaders
indicated that Big Climate was entering its absurd phase.
Big Government, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Football (FIFA now, NFL in future) are behemoths that seem unstoppable, commanding all they survey. Then they enter their absurd phase, when their excesses become increasingly implausible. They don’t disappear. The advantage of being big is a certain momentum that carries forward, albeit diminished.
There is a point though when there is a qualitative change, even if massive quantity endures for a while. For Big Government, perhaps it was Clinton’s declaration. For Big Tobacco, it was when the assembled chief executives swore under oath that they had no idea that smoking could be addictive.
Big Climate had a good run. Ecological consciousness has been growing since the late 1960s. It’s a relatively easy sell. Everyone desires clean air, clean water, parks and natural beauty. Conservatives like conservation, after all, and progressives like government regulation to get there.
Big Climate was born out of that wider ecological movement, specifically at the 1992 “Earth summit” in Rio. The current Dubai “COP28” conference is the 28th “conference of the parties” that grew out of Rio 1992. Big Climate grew ever bigger, so much so that 70,000 delegates landed in Dubai this year. Along the way were milestones, such as Kyoto 1997 and Paris 2015, in which Big Climate managed to get wide agreement on re-ordering the global economy in principle, if not practice.
This year, though, one gets the sense that Big Climate has become wrapped in too many contradictions, capped off with a farcical conference in the petro-state’s air-conditioned desert. The incongruity of it all was nicely highlighted by the brouhaha that erupted when the Emirati conference chairman blithely declared that there was no real scientific basis to phase out fossil fuels.
Consider the Germans, Big Climate’s biggest booster in the heart of Europe. This year marked the end of German nuclear power, with the last reactors closed. Germany has now moved to a higher carbon future, burning coal and natural gas.
That proved a bit tricky when at war with Russia in Ukraine, so Germany turned to Canada for natural gas supplies. Trudeau refused to sell Germans our natural gas, directing them instead to Qatar. That strikes most folks as absurd.
Canada and Germany Sign Agreement to Enhance German Energy Security with Clean Canadian Hydrogen August 2022. And the hydrogen energy project is still pie in the sky.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden, who began his administration with an ostentatious cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, lest Canadian resources pollute the American energy grid, has now decided to increase imports of Venezuelan oil and gas. That, too, is absurd.
Then there are billions upon billions of dollars — with Canada and the EU scrambling to match American subsidies — being lavished upon electric battery manufacturers, making “green jobs” a giant tax-funded boondoggle. That the great climate villain in the auto sector, Volkswagen, is a beneficiary of such largesse only makes the absurdity more galling.
Yes, those are trillions of dollars they are projecting.
Against all that, Trudeau’s decision to compromise his climate agenda to save a few Atlantic ridings is a rather low-voltage issue. Yet it shows that Big Climate is losing its power.
The end of Big Climate may be good for the climate. Backing away from grandiose and absurd policies shifts attention toward more practical and reasonable measures that will garner wider public support.
COP28 in the desert is a suitable end to Big Climate. It ends with a bang, as it were. And Trudeau withdraws with a whimper.
Through Dec. 12, the “Climate!” crowd is swarming COP28, Dubai’s carbophobia cavalcade. The fact that these global-warming alarmists are surrounded by Earth’s deepest pools of fossil fuels makes their Hajj infinitely ironic.
Also astonishing is the nearly immeasurable impact of these people’s gyrations. They blow trillions of dollars, bludgeon human freedom, and yet do shockingly little to fix their vaunted “climate crisis.”
One practically needs an electron microscope to find their promised
reductions in allegedly venomous CO2 or supposedly lethal temperatures.
According to #ActInTime’s Climate Clock, high above Manhattan’s Union Square, humans have — at this writing — five years and 227 days until we boil to death in a cauldron of steaming carbon. Since The End is scheduled for Saturday, July 21, 2029 (mark your calendars!)
Big Government Democrats offer jaw-droppingly paltry climate benefits,
despite their spine-chilling predictions and unbridled interventionism.
Clean Power Plan Cost/Benefit
Obama-Biden’s proposed Clean Power Plan was a diamond-encrusted specimen of do-nothingism. According to a May 2015 analysis by their own Energy Information Agency, between 2015 and 2025, the CPP would have slashed real GDP by $993 billion, or an average of $39.7 billion per year.
It would have sliced real disposable income by $382 billion, or $15.3 billion annually. It also would have chopped manufacturing shipments by $1.13 trillion, or $45.4 billion per year.
EIA forecast a decrease of 0.035° Fahrenheit. This would have cranked a thermometer from 72° F way down to 71.965°. As Billy Joel once sang, “Is that all you get for your money?”
IRA Funded Green Energy Projects Cost/Benefit
Biden’s blessed Inflation Reduction Act budgeted $369 billion for green-energy projects. Goldman Sachs subsequently slapped a $1.2 trillion price tag on the IRA.
Danish environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg ran the IRA through the United Nations’ climate models. “Impact of new climate legislation,” Lomborg specified. “Unnoticeable: 0.0009°F to 0.028°F in 2100.” This would chill thermostats from 72° to 71.9991°. If we get lucky: 71.972°.
Biden said on Jan. 31 that “if we don’t stay under 1.5° Celsius” or 2.7° Fahrenheit, “we’re going to have a real problem.” If a 0.0009° F reduction costs $369 billion, then Biden’s 2.7° F goal would devour — brace yourself — $1.107 quadrillion — with a Q.
Biden EV Mandate Cost/Benefit
Emperor Biden’s electric-vehicle decree would require that at least 67% of new cars sold in 2032 be electric. This edict already is stalling the auto industry. On Nov. 29, 3,902 U.S. car dealers in all 50 states wrote Biden. Message: Stop tailgating! “Already, electric vehicles are stacking up on our lots,” the dealers complained. “The majority of customers are simply not ready to make the change.”
This chaos aside, Biden’s mandate would limit CO2 by 10 billion tons through 2055. Alas, China is expected to generate 320 billion tons of carbon in the next 32 years. So, Biden’s “savings” will asphyxiate in a giant Chinese carbon cloud.
Holman Jenkins of The Wall Street Journal calculates that Biden’s EV order will decrease planetary emissions by a whopping 0.18%. “The climate effect of the extravagantly expensive Biden plan will steadily approach zero,” Jenkins anticipates.
Bans on Gas Stoves and Heaters Cost/Benefit
Rather than jail criminals or deport illegal aliens, Governor Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., bans gas stoves and demands that gas heaters yield to electric heat pumps — never mind that her constituents freeze to death during post-blizzard blackouts.
“The global effect of the costly program of compulsory electrification will be a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of less than 0.05%,” the Empire Center for Public Policy calculates.
Summation
Obama, Biden, Hochul and their comrades might respond that no single bauble will fix everything, and every shiny object helps. Maybe. But these four schemes alone carry an enormously high price in shredded freedomandincinerated taxpayer dollars, yet still leave at least 99.82% of emissions untouched.
To quote another Briton, William Shakespeare, perhaps this “sound and fury, signifying nothing” is not about cutting emissions or curbing Earth’s temperatures.
Maybe it’s designed to help Democrats spend trillions of dollars to signal virtue, bark orders at the American people, and lavish taxpayers’ hard-earned cash on their politically connected pals— from the Potomac to the Persian Gulf.
Footnote:
The estimates of lowering temperatures come from IPCC-approved models, which presume that Global Mean Temperature (GMT) rises in response to rising atmospheric CO2. In fact that premise is itself dubious since basic physics requires that a cause precede an effect in time. The evidence points to changes in CO2 lagging rather than leading GMT changes. This is true on all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice cores spanning millenia.
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
Robert Malone writes at Brownstone Institute ‘Science’ in Service of the Agenda. Excerpts in itallics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden
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.
Olivia Murray reports at American Thinker 
Then there are billions upon billions of dollars — with Canada and the EU scrambling to match American subsidies — being lavished upon electric battery manufacturers, making “green jobs” a giant tax-funded boondoggle. That the great climate villain in the auto sector, Volkswagen, is a beneficiary of such largesse only makes the absurdity more galling.
Science Matters 