Climate Initiatives

Little Tin Gods

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

The audio track is a song for our times: Little Tin Gods by Don Henley from his album End of the Innocence.

“A new age is dawning
On fewer than expected
Business is usual”
That’s how the headline read
Some shaky modern saviors
Have now been resurrected
In all this excitement
You may have been misled

People want a miracle
They say “Oh Lord, can’t you see us?
We’re tryin’ to make a livin’ down here
And keep the children fed”
But, from little dark motel rooms
to “Six Flags Over Jesus”
“How are the mighty fallen”
So the Bible said

You don’t have to pray to a little tin god
Step out of the way for a little tin god
You might fear the reaper, you might fear the rod
But you never have to get down on your knees
You don’t have to holler, “please, please”
No, you never have to get down on your knees
For a little tin god

The cowboy’s name was “Jingo”
And he knew that there was trouble
So in a blaze of glory
He rode out of the west
No one was ever certain
What it was that he was sayin’
But they loved it when he told them
They were better than the rest

But you don’t have to pray for a little tin god
Step out of the way for a little tin god
You might hate the system, hate the job
But you never have to get down on your knees
You don’t have to holler, “please, please”
No, you never have to get down on your knees
For a little tin god

Throw down a rope from heaven
And lead the flock to water
The man in the middle would have you think
That you have no other choice
But to wander in the wilderness
Of all the upturned faces
If you stop and listen long enough
You will hear your own small voice

But you don’t have to pray to a little tin god
Step out of the way for a little tin god
You might fear the reaper, fear the rod
But you never have to get down on your knees
You don’t have to holler, “please, please”
No, you never have to get down on your knees
You don’t have to holler, “please, please”
You never have to get down on your knees
For a little tin god

 

Biden Nanny State Coming At You

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Mark Krebs exposes federal shenanigans in their war on home appliances in his Master Resource article Update: DOE Appliance Minimum Efficiency Standards.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

“It started with gas cooking.  It will end with getting gas out of homes and business entirely, If they can. Basically, what we’re witnessing is the energy equivalent of ethnic cleansing. I’ve been saying this for years but now it should be obvious.”

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under the Biden Administration has significantly accelerated the pace of minimum appliance efficiency rulemaking. With this acceleration, there has been a marked decrease in DOE’s analytical quality and transparency. The purpose of this update is to summarize:

  1.  Energy Conservation Standards for Consumer Conventional Cooking Products

2.  Energy Conservation Standards for Consumer Products; Boilers

3.  Energy Conservation Standards for Consumer Water Heaters

Note: In DOE-speak, the term ‘consumer’ means non commercial/industrial, or just residential.

Part 1: Consumer Cooking Products

On April 27, 2023, MasterResource published DOE vs. Gas Cooking: A Review of Critical Comments. On August 2, 2023, DOE reopened the docket with a “Notification of data availability and request for comment (NODA) with comments due September 1. More than 100 comments were filed.

Some commenters viewed the NODA and relatively short (30-day) comment period as a violation to the Administrative Procedures Act codified by 5 U.S.C. § 551(5)–(7) and the DOE’s “process rule” codified by 10 CFR 430 Appendix A to Subpart C. One such commenter making this case was the Institute for Energy Research (IER).

Other comments privided detailed content in opposition of DOE’s proposal for consumer cooking products.  My comments addressed what has changed since DOE determined (in 2019) that additional efficiency mandates for gas cooking appliances is not justified. In short, Biden happened. With that change, DOE resorted to a longstanding bias that any amount of net positive cash flow (greater than zero) on average was sufficient economic justification. I cited AHAM’s press release “Gas Cooking Appliances Remain at Risk Despite New DOE Data” for this NODA that succinctly justified what that amount now is:

“The revised data reduces consumer savings to just 9 cents per month.”

I contend no one would freely elect to invest in anything with that kind of return-on-investment (ROI). Additionally, 9 cents per month is far less than the uncertainty range within DOE’s economic calculations.  Besides, DOE’s economic calculations typically low-ball increased maintenance costs and over-inflate fuel costs (among many other biased input assumptions).

What else has changed is that DOE cost-effectiveness now includes highly controversial benefits from reduced climate change allowed by grossly inflated social cost of carbon (SCC) avoidance and health benefits from improved indoor air quality (IAQ).

Part 2: Consumer Boilers

On September 12, 2023, DOE held a public webinar to go over its proposal for increased minimum efficiencies for residential boilers. A 59-page slide deck for that meeting is here. (If you have never read one of these slide decks, I urge you to do so. It’s a relatively painless way of getting familiar with the ‘administrative state’ going about its business of picking winners and losers.)

There were many participants representing manufacturing interests that would be adversely impacted by DOE’s proposal, and they were quite vocal about it (in a professional way of course).  But why would manufacturers want to litigate? DOE would put some of them out of business. 

Part 3: Consumer Water Heaters

On September 13, 2023, DOE held a public webinar to go over its proposal for increased minimum efficiencies for residential water heaters that lasted 3 hours. A 74-page slide deck for that meeting is here. There were nearly twice as many participants on line compared to the number of webinar participants the day before for consumer boilers; and many of the participants represented water heater manufacturers, some of which would be devastated if DOE’s proposed mandates were finalized.

One manufacturer that stood out in this regard was Rinnai America. Rinnai is the sole manufacturer of non-condensing tankless water heaters in the U.S. Rinnai’s President stated, as I recall, that DOE’s proposed ban of non-condensing water heaters would shut down Rinnai’s new factory that cost $70 million. That, of course, would devastate the many involved.

Conclusions

DOE has been (ostensibly) ‘improving’ appliance efficiency for nearly a half-century. The low hanging fruit is long gone. In many cases, DOE is doing more harm than good and using unfair tactics to maintain control and reward its minions. What we have now is relentless self-serving “mission creep” of the administrative state and its “useful idiots” that forces consumers to fund the erosion of viable energy alternatives. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act is greatly aiding and abetting this forced transformation away from free market forces.

DOE doesn’t care what it costs to litigate. After all, DOE has the backing of the Department of Justice for such matters. In my opinion, DOE has strayed too far from any redeeming virtue that may have originally existed from the 1975 passage of EPCA. It’s past time for Congress clean up the mess it created by enacting EPCA and the numerous ambiguous loopholes that gives undeserved deference to the administrative state to interpret. A valid question is whether EPCA (and DOE for that matter) should be salvaged or scrapped.

Biden’s DOE wants to eliminate alternatives to electricity. 

This fixation became apparent to all with their planned elimination of gas cooking and ran head-on with consumers that hold gas cooking near-and-dear. Consumer preferences for gas cooking was and is a major obstacle to control via societal electrification overall. As this article hopefully conveys, it started with gas cooking. It will end with getting gas out of homes and business entirely, If they can.

Postscript:

The Department of Energy (DOE) quietly promoted a top adviser to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to a senior role overseeing home appliance regulations after he failed to clear Senate confirmation.

The DOE announced last week that Jeff Marootian was appointed to be the principal deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). The appointment came days after the White House withdrew his name from consideration to lead EERE as the office’s assistant secretary.

While Marootian’s nomination failed after Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., opposed him over the Biden administration’s crackdown on natural gas-powered stovetops, his appointment last week makes him the effective chief of the DOE’s EERE office.

More complete discussion on appliance war at Fox: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/experts-warn-biden-admins-water-heater-crackdown-hike-prices-reduce-consumer-choice

 

IMF Mad Hatters’ Notion of Hydrocarbon “Subsidies”

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

The recent IMF updated report on fossil fuel subsidies took on the appearance of the Mad Hatter’s tea party (Alice in Wonderland) when you look into what is claimed to be subidizing hydrocarbon energy.  Robert Lyman explains the tricks and dishonesty running through this ongoing narrative against conventional energy sources, while ignoring the massive taxpayer direct funding of wind and solar power.  His Financial Post article is Most fossil-fuel ‘subsidies’ aren’t actually subsidies.  Excerpts later on with my bolds and added images.  But my overview of the context for these remarks.

Context–Back to Basic Terms

Climate activists and renewables lobbyists are acting like Mad Hatters, twisting language and logic to pursue their agendas. Let there be some common sense injected here.

A subsidy would be when the government takes money that has been taxed, borrowed, or printed, and pays it to some company like Solyndra to do something that the market does not support. Often these subsidies subsidize technologies that do not exist and may never exist (and they say WE ignore the laws of physics.)

In contrast, a tax reduction is NOT a subsidy. A tax credit says an industry gets to keep more of its own money that it has produced selling a product people want and need in the free market.

There is a huge difference between a law that lets you keep more of your own money; and another law that actually gives you someone else’s money. The two are not the same thing. Actually, the oil industry pays higher taxation rates than other industries and subsidizes the government with the billions it pays in taxes, not the other way around.

There are also billions more in economic benefit to the nation from the jobs they create and the increased mobility and productivity people enjoy by using our transportation system based on hydrocarbon fuels.

The Big Lie:  IMF counts not charging companies the full costs of global warming
as a subsidy. Common sense says it isn’t

Economists are used to having their terminology misinterpreted, co-opted and misused, usually in the interests of politics. One of the most common words to suffer this fate is “subsidy.” The Gage Canadian dictionary defines a subsidy as “a grant or contribution of money, especially one made by a government.” Economists would agree with that definition. Governments, on the other hand, rarely acknowledge that they subsidize anything. They “invest” — though, curiously, they seldom refer to the rate of return on their investments.

I was reminded of all this by the news last week that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has published an updated version of its 2015 Working Paper on global and country-level subsidies for fossil fuels. According to the paper, total global subsidies “surged to a record $7 trillion last year,” equivalent to 7.1 per cent of world GDP. The paper’s authors estimate that scrapping these subsidies would: prevent 1.6 million premature deaths annually, raise government revenues by $4.4 trillion and put emissions on track to reaching official global warming targets. An annex to the report indicates that in 2020 Canada’s subsidies to fossil fuels were US$64 billion, or 3.8 per cent of GDP.

The paper’s extraordinary findings are almost entirely the result of how it defines “subsidy.”
It divides subsidies to fossil fuels into “explicit” and “implicit” subsidies.

Subsidies Wordplay

Explicit subsidies are the kind economists and ordinary people would recognize as subsidies: grants to cover some portion of the costs of production, as well as tax incentives and deductions (e.g., capital cost allowances) to fossil fuel producers for such things as investing in exploration and development.

By contrast, “implicit” subsidies are defined as “under-charging” producers for the environmental costs they generate from their exploration and production activities and consumers for perceived environmental costs not adequately covered by various consumption taxes (e.g., sales taxes, value-added taxes and carbon taxes).

So when, for instance, a country fails to impose a consumption tax high enough
to cover the perceived costs to society of climate change, congestion or
local pollution, the paper would classify that as a subsidy.

The working paper indicates that explicit global subsidies were US$450 billion in 2020, or six per cent of the total. Most of these are actually so-called tax expenditures: tax credits or deductions for investments in high-risk exploration and development activities, similar to those provided to firms in other sectors of the economy.

94% of Hydrocarbon “Subsidies’ Actually “Externalties”

That leaves the 94 per cent of subsidies that were what the paper refers to as “externalities.” Let’s be clear. Externalities are not subsidies. They are a cost or benefit of an economic activity that affects a third party not directly related to that activity. The cost is not always evident, nor is it clear by what mechanisms such costs and benefits should be shared. While the paper does not break down the percentages attributed to externalities, its 2015 predecessor estimated that the costs of global warming were 37 per cent, local air pollution 13 per cent, congestion 32 per cent, vehicle accidents five per cent and road damage two per cent. In effect, the paper is arguing that not making the fossil fuel industry pay the full cost of global warming constitutes a subsidy to the industry. The same for its not paying the full cost of local air pollution or of traffic congestion or road deaths, and so on. Attribution of any of these costs to fossil fuels is highly questionable, but one obvious question is why fossil fuels are to blame for road congestion. If all vehicles were electric, would there be no congestion?

The vast majority of what the paper calls “subsidies” thus relate to charges not imposed for the harmful external effects of consuming fossil fuels, especially in oil-producing countries that choose to impose lower excise and sales taxes on gasoline and other fuels. The paper finds that East Asia and the Pacific regions account for almost half of total global energy subsidies. In effect, the report concludes that the prices of energy should be substantially raised for the world’s poor. This, of course, was not noted in the media summaries of the paper.

The paper did not explain how it calculated Canada’s 2020 subsidies to fossil fuels but, given its general analysis, one can only assume it was based on the judgment that fossil fuel costs to consumers were not high enough. But in 2018, total taxes on gasoline alone were roughly $24 billion. One has to wonder how the IMF’s math figures that this, and the more recent increases in carbon taxes, still constitute under-charging for externalities.

A final difficulty with the IMF paper is that it excludes any consideration of the positive externalities from reliance on fossil fuels. They are the most secure, affordable, storable, and reliable energy sources we have, and the ones upon which the remarkable advances in the global economy over the last century have been based. That is well worth bearing in mind as we consider the meaning of “subsidy.”

Summary

The Mad Hatters turn things upside down. Society is subsidized and made wealthy by fossil fuels, not the other way around. Some of that wealth is being diverted to renewable energy companies who do not create enough value to be in business without direct payments of tax dollars. They prove it by declaring bankruptcy when their subsidies are reduced.  Worse, hooking up wind and solar intermittent power to electrical grids adds more cost and unreliability than the renewable power is worth.

Read More about Energy Subsidies Abuse

The Appalling Truth About Energy Subsidies at Euan Mearns

Renewable Energy Cost Explosion: €25,000 euros for each German family of four  Daniel Wetzel, Die Welt (translation by GWPF)

What’s an Oil Subsidy? Heritage Foundation

Net Subsidy Analysis: A Better Way to Assess Government Energy Policy MasterResource

Why the Best Path to a Low-Carbon Future is Not Wind or Solar Power Brookings Institution

Killing the Energy Goose Science Matters

At its prime, the Carrizo Plain (S. California) was by far the largest photovoltaic array in the world, with 100,000 1′x 4′ photovoltaic arrays generating 5.2 megawatts at its peak. The plant was originally constructed by ARCO in 1983 and was dismantled in the late 1990s. The used panels are still being resold throughout the world.

At its prime, the Carrizo Plain (S. California) was by far the largest photovoltaic array in the world, with 100,000 1′x 4′ photovoltaic arrays generating 5.2 megawatts at its peak. The plant was originally constructed by ARCO in 1983 and was dismantled in the late 1990s. The used panels are still being resold throughout the world.

 

Climate Initiatives

Green Energy Grinding to a Halt

Image | Posted on by Ron Clutz

Green Energy Activists are hitting hard realities, as summarized by Jonathan Lesser at New York Post Why wind and solar power are running out of juice.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

Green energy and the push to electrify everything have been in the news recently but for all the wrong reasons. Instead of the green energy nirvana politicians and green energy advocates have promised, economic and physical reality has begun to set in.

Painful Green Economics

Start with the economic realities of Wind Energy

The result: Even while Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch insists that “energy transition without wind energy does not work,” 2022 saw 16% less new wind-power capacity than in 2021, according to the American Clean Power Association.

Wind turbine manufacturers like Siemens and General Electric have reported huge losses for the first half of this year, almost $5 billion for the former and $1 billion for the latter. Among other problems, turbine quality control has suffered, forcing manufacturers such as Siemens and Vestas to incur costly warranty repairs.

In Europe, offshore wind output has been less than promised, while operating costs have been much higher than advertised. Offshore wind developers in Europe and the US are canceling projects because of higher materials and construction costs.

In Massachusetts, Avangrid, the developer of the 1,200 MW Commonwealth Wind project paid $48 million to get out of its existing contract to sell power to ratepayers. That way, the company can rebid the project next year at an even higher price.

Close by, the developers of the 1,200 MW SouthCoast Wind Project off Martha’s Vineyard will pay about $60 million to exit their existing contract.

Rhode Island Energy, the state’s main electric utility, recently rejected the second Revolution Wind Project because the contract price was too high.

And Ørsted, the Danish government-owned company that is developing the Southfork Wind and Sunrise Wind projects off Long Island — as well as the Ocean Wind project off the New Jersey coast — last week announced that, without additional subsidies and higher contract prices, it will have to write-off billions of dollars in potential losses.

In New Jersey, the legislature passed a law in July, which is likely unconstitutional, to bail out Ørsted. The legislation will award the company with several billion dollars of investment tax credits that were supposed to go to consumers.

Few Hosts for Land-Gobbling Wind and Solar Projects

Back on dry land, opposition to siting land-gobbling wind and solar projects continues to grow.

Local governments in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio have all rejected or restricted projects. Rural communities, it seems, do not want to host massive turbine farms — nor the high-voltage transmission lines needed to deliver electricity to power-hungry cities.

Electric Vehicles Leaking Money

Then there are electric vehicles.

Ford, which has bet heavily on its electric Lightning pickup and Mustang and received a $9.2 billion government-subsidized loan in January, revealed that it has lost $60,000 for every EV it sold in the first half of this year.

Rivian, another EV company, managed to reduce its losses per EV to around $33,000, a big improvement over the $67,000 loss per EV in the first quarter of the year.

Proterra, a Bay Area-based manufacturer of electric buses and batteries that had a $10 million loan forgiven by the Biden Administration, just filed for bankruptcy.

Alternative Energy Madness

Like the wizard in The Wizard of Oz, alternative energy proponents claim these are just temporary little potholes on the road to economic and climate nirvana — all of which can be filled with more money through renegotiated power purchase contracts and more zero-emissions mandates.

Alternative energy madness – and that’s what it is – has had its biggest impact in California.  But New York and New Jersey have adopted most of that state’s mandates.

Sales of new internal combustion vehicles will be banned beginning in 2035 in the states. All of the electricity sold to retail consumers will have to be “zero-emissions.”

Homeowners and building owners will be forced to replace gas- and oil-burning space and water heaters with electric heat pumps.   And, gas stoves will be regulated out of existence.

Carbon Taxes Draining Wallets

New York also will soon implement another California import: a carbon “cap-and-invest” program, which will impose a tax on fossil fuels sold by wholesalers and utilities.  The billions of dollars collected each year will provide a green slush fund, allowing the governor and legislators to hand out money to their politically favored cronies, as has so often been the case in the past.

Washington State began its “cap-and-invest” program in January of this year.  Modeled after California’s, Governor Jay Inslee promised the program would have “minimal impact, if any. We are talking about pennies.”

Instead, the program has raised gasoline prices – almost 50 cents per gallon so far this year. Washington State now claims the honor of having the highest gasoline prices in the nation: In Seattle, for example, the average price of regular gasoline is over $5 per gallon.

Of course, the entire point of the program was to raise gasoline and fossil fuel prices to encourage consumers to switch to electric vehicles, mass transit, electric heat pumps, and so forth.

But politics being what it is, Governor Inslee, along with environmentalists and legislative proponents, now blames greedy oil companies for the price increases.  ‘We won’t stand for’ corporate greed,” the Governor said at a July 20, 2023, press conference.

Once New York’s cap-and-invest program starts, probably next year, you can expect a similar outcome: higher gasoline and diesel prices, higher prices for natural gas and fuel oil used to heat homes and apartment buildings, and endless political demagoguery denouncing it all.

And Basic Physics Stand in the Way

As the push toward electric-everything powered by green energy barrels along, proponents also refuse to confront basic physical realities.

Electricity accounts for just one-sixth of all energy use. The rest is fossil fuels consumed for transportation, space and water heating, and manufacturing. Convert everything to electricity and electricity consumption will increase. A lot.

According to the New York Climate Action Committee’s Final Scoping Plan, New York will meet that increased demand by building almost 15,000 MW of offshore wind, like the Southfork Wind and Sunrise Wind projects, and over 40,000 MW of solar panels. (By comparison, the emissions-free Indian Point Nuclear Plant, which former Governor Cuomo forced to close, had a capacity of just over 1,000 MW.)

Because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, keeping the lights on will require far more backup resources. This “reserve margin” – basically, the amount of generating capacity available to step in and meet electric demand – will need to increase from the current 20% to over 100%.

In other words, for every MW of generating capacity in 2040,
there will have to be an equal amount or more in reserve.

That’s like having to buy a second car and keep it idling all the time in case the first one won’t start. The Scoping Plan claims this will be accomplished by building over 20,000 MW of so-called “dispatchable emissions-free generating resources” (DEFRs) and installing over 12,000 MW of battery storage.

Transition Plans Depend on Green Fantasies

Those claims are fantasy.

Start with DEFRs, which are generators that burn pure hydrogen manufactured from surplus wind and solar power. They have yet to be invented (we repeat – they do not yet exist). Nor do any large-scale commercial plants to manufacture green hydrogen exist either.

Hydrogen cannot be transported in existing natural gas pipelines. An entirely new infrastructure will need to be built.

Assuming a new technology will be invented by whatever date politicians decree is foolish. That’s not how technology works. Just ask everyone working on commercial fusion power, which has been just 30 years off for the last 50 years.

As for battery storage, 12,000 MW will provide at most 48,000 megawatt-hours of actual electricity. That may sound like a lot but based on the New York Independent System Operator’s (NYISO) most recent forecast, on a windless and cold winter evening in 2040, it would keep the lights on for only one hour.

The materials requirements for batteries also are staggering, which is one reason why replacing existing internal combustion cars and trucks will be impossible. Batteries require large quantities of cobalt, much of which is now mined in the Congo using child and slave labor. They also require lots of graphite, most of which comes from China – the same with the rare minerals needed for wind turbines and solar panels.

Much Pain for a Drop in the Bucket

Ultimately, nothing New York does will have any measurable impact on world climate because the state’s carbon emissions are minuscule compared to the 35 billion metric tons of total global emissions. As long as China, which accounts for almost one-third of world energy-related carbon emissions, India, and other developing nations focus policies on economic growth, rather than cutting emissions, New York’s efforts will have no environmental value.

Nuclear Energy Denial

Nevertheless, if politicians and environmentalists were serious about zero-emissions goals, they would abandon the electrification mandates, and abandon reliance on wind, solar, battery storage, DEFRs, green hydrogen, and other unrealistic and unreliable energy sources.

Instead, they would embrace the one existing technology that dare not speak its name: nuclear power. Unlike wind and solar, nuclear plants run all the time. New, small modular reactors will offer greater safety, lower costs, and easy scalability to meet increased electricity demand.

Storing spent fuel is a political issue, not a technological one, for which the best solution is to recycle and reuse it, as France has done for the last half-century without incident. The country is also developing a permanent storage site for nuclear waste that can no longer be reprocessed.

The economist Herb Stein once quipped that anything that cannot go on forever, won’t.

That’s true of New York’s current alternative energy madness.
It won’t save the world, but it will grind down the state’s economy
and its residents until the folly is too great to ignore.

Jonathan Lesser is the president of Continental Economics and an adjunct fellow with the Manhattan Institute.

 

Londoners Vs. ULEZ Cameras

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Background: 

Remember that the World Bank recognizes personal mobility as the defining characteristic of the Middle Class.  Also recall that as Aristotle stated, the Middle Class is the social buffer against tryanny by the elite and slavery of the poor.

Finally, be informed that C40 is a global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis. It was founded in 2005 as C20, and has since expanded to its current network of 96 cities, including London.  More at Daily Sceptic The Green Globalists Behind Ulez – and What They Have Planned Next  (Of course our virtue signalling Montreal Mayor Plante is all in on imposing ULEZ here.)

Freedom Fighters Take to the Streets of London

Within this context comes the report that Londoners are conducting an organized attack on the ULEZ cameras placed to enforce fines for people straying from their home neighborhood. The Remix News article is Hundreds of ULEZ cameras destroyed by vigilante group following wider London roll-out.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden

The group intent on disrupting London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s green vehicle tax
has received some political support despite its criminal activity.

Hundreds of Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) cameras have been vandalized by a vigilante group that opposes the controversial scheme, which extended across wider London this week and charges road users for traveling in non-compliant vehicles.

The scheme is part of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s green agenda to enhance the air quality across the U.K. capital; however, many critics of its extension into London’s suburbs consider it to be a regressive tax and cash grab that will hit working families the hardest.

A vigilante group known as the Blade Runners has been targeting newly installed cameras across the capital in a bid to disrupt the implementation of ULEZ as much as possible, and hundreds of cameras have already been hit.

Prior to the roll-out, which came into force on Tuesday, around 500 cameras had been marked as out of action or damaged, according to a map the vigilante group promoted. Many of the cameras targeted were located in London’s southeast with 156 of the 185 cameras around the districts of Sydenham and Sidcup being hit, as well as 18 of the 22 cameras installed in Bromley.

The camera map, published on a popular anti-ULEZ Facebook page, allows users to update it when a camera has been rendered out of action. The black pins represent cameras that are now missing or damaged.

In the southeast town of Orpington, just two of the new number plate recognition cameras were in working order on the day of the ULEZ expansion after vigilantes smashed, spray-painted, or cut the wires of 14 cameras on a single road.

Video footage and photographs of disruptors vandalizing the cameras have been published on social media, much to the delight of those critical of the scheme.

One camera was even installed just meters from a crematorium in order to
pick up funeral-goers, a camera that was swiftly taken care of by locals.

Despite their criminal activity, the vigilantes have received political support, including from a former Conservative Party leader and cabinet minister, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who insisted he was “happy” for Londoners to fight back because “they are facing an imposition that no one wants and they have been lied to about it.”

“A lot of people in my constituency have been cementing up the cameras or putting plastic bags over them,” he said. “The actions you are seeing show how angry people are at what is being imposed on them. Sadiq Khan has gerrymandered all the information – people have had enough.”

Last November, Khan announced the extension to the scheme, which had previously been reserved for central London, to all London boroughs despite overwhelming opposition to the plan.

It is the latest in a continuous assault by Khan on motorists, following the installation of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), extensive road-narrowing, and the excessive expansion of 20-mph zones.

When he was heckled at a public event back in March over the ULEZ roll-out, Khan suggested that those who opposed the plans were “far-right,” a remark that was met by derision and booing from the Question Time audience.

How Leftists Distract from Destructive Climate Policies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A lesson from Canada on how the left uses insults about trivia to disract from all the damage done by their misguided policies.  The photo above comes from a Star article: Justin Trudeau’s Liberals see lowest approval rating since they formed government, poll shows.  Brief excerpt below

Ottawa, August 9, 2023–  Justin Trudeau may have shaken up the Liberals’ front bench, but a new poll suggests he remains on shaky ground with voters.

Results from a new Abacus Data survey provided exclusively to the Star suggests that if an election were held today, 37 per cent of Canadians would vote Conservative, compared to 28 per cent for the Liberals.

So how do Trudeau’s press lapdogs at the subsidized CBC respond:  Pierre Poilievre drops the glasses as part of an image revamp.  And the acid is thrown by Tristin Hopper at the National Post: Nice try pretending you’re not a poindexter’: Inside the thoughts of Poilievre’s discarded glasses.  Some excerpts of the poison:

Dear Diary: ‘Unfortunately for me, mainstream Canadian women voters apparently like
politicians who conceal their need for corrective vision appliances’

OK, these are those nice Canadians after all. They’re not dropping indictments on the Conservative or blaming him for wildfires.  Still, like journos on the extreme left everywhere, they label the Conservative as Alt-Right, dangerous and irresponsible. But what are they covering up while ignoring the deep, growing unpopularity of this regime?

Here’s a hint from that same issue of National Post: Liberal net-zero scheme heralds dark era of ever-growing government.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault speaks to media in Toronto on Aug. 10, 2023. PHOTO BY ARLYN MCADOREY / THE CANADIAN PRESS

The draft clean electricity regulations, released last week, serve as a warning that neither the provinces nor industry nor common sense will stand in the way of the federal government’s commitment to meeting the radical emissions targets agreed to in Paris in 2015. Whether the Liberals will successfully force power grids to achieve net zero by 2035 is far from certain, but one thing seems clear:

The climate agenda has put the final nail in the coffin of deregulation.
Big government is here to stay.

The draft regulations were immediately attacked by the premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan as being “unconstitutional” and “unachievable.” Although there have been varying estimates of how much the transformation will cost — with Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault disingenuously claiming Canadians will save money by switching away from fossil fuels (which his carbon tax has artificially inflated in price) — there can be little question that it would be an expensive undertaking for the Prairie provinces.

Unlike British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland, they are not endowed with the geographical features that permit an abundance of hydroelectricity. Nor do they have a legacy of nuclear power, like Ontario does. Saskatchewan currently relies on fossil fuels for more than three-quarters of its electricity supply.

Alberta also relies heavily on fossil fuels, but is considerably greener than a decade ago. The province had planned to phase out coal generation by 2030, but has managed to make the transition ahead of schedule (something that’s almost unheard of in government), with its last coal plant due to be decommissioned later this year.

Lost in all this is any discussion of fostering competitive markets to spur innovation and bring down prices, or of limiting the size and scope of government. In the 1970s and early ’80s, governments were faced with many of the same challenges as they are today: inflation was rampant, economies were stagnating and crime was a blight on many cities. This spurred a wave of deregulation in many western countries, including Canada, which opened up sectors such as telecom and air travel, driving down prices, increasing choice and reinvigorating the economy.

In this country, both Alberta and Ontario experimented with electrical deregulation, with varying degrees of success. Ontario’s competitive market opened in 2002, but was short-lived, with the government quickly succumbing to political pressure over rising prices that were largely caused by unrelated factors. Alberta also caved to pressure that resulted in numerous market interventions before prices had time to stabilize, but was largely successful at creating a competitive electrical generation market and giving consumers some choice on the retail side.

But a competitive market is antithetical to the type of overbearing control
the Trudeau Liberals are looking to exert over electrical generation.

Not only will the new clean electricity regulations dictate what type of generators can be used, preventing companies and governments from striking a balance between the environment and affordability, they represent the latest change in a constantly shifting, and increasingly murky, set of environmental regulations that will only serve to scare away investors.

Not content to let the carbon tax incentivize market players to find ways to reduce emissions, the government has also imposed industry-specific emissions caps on oil and gas, introduced clean fuel standards, banned the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035 and made it virtually impossible to build new energy infrastructure, all while giving tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to favoured industries to produce products demanded by governments, rather than consumers.

Ottawa’s ever-changing rules do not provide the type of stability businesses need to make long-term investments — not just in energy and electrical generation, but in other sectors of the economy, as well. This is likely one of the reasons why Canada has seen a sharp decline in gross business investment since the Liberals took office in 2015.

The contemporary push to displace competitive markets with central planning comes at a time in which clear price signals could serve an important role in the energy transition. Many Canadian households and small businesses are charged for electricity based on the time of day, with prices dropping overnight and hitting a peak in the afternoon or early evening. But those traditional time-of-use patterns are quickly changing, and governments have significant concerns about the coming influx of electric vehicles overloading the grid.

Instead of harnessing the power of competitive markets as a force for good, however, the Liberals have chosen to increase the size of centralized bureaucracies and dictate how individuals, businesses and even other levels of government conduct their affairs. It’s a strategy that’s limiting individual freedom, subverting provincial autonomy, constraining the economy and making life increasingly unaffordable.

Montana Judge Answers Kids’ Climate Prayer

Posted on by Ron Clutz

From Climate Change, Holy Government Deliver us!

As many know, a Montana Judge ruled in favor of the kids in Held vs Montana.  I & I Editorial Board summed up the proceedings in an article Is This The Most Asinine Sentence Ever Written About ‘Climate Change’? Excerpts in italics with my bolds

District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled in favor of several young plaintiffs – ranging in age from 5 to 22 – saying they “have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as part of the environmental-support system.”

As proof of the harm the plaintiffs are suffering, the order has a list of horribles that includes:

  • “Olivia expressed despair due to climate change.”
  • “Badge is anxious when he thinks about the future that he, and his potential children, will inherit.”
  • “Grace … is anxious about climate change.”
  • “Mica gets frustrated when he is required to stay indoors during the summer because of wildfire smoke.”

(Perhaps the judge should have ruled against the adults who are filling these poor children’s minds with climate alarmist fantasies, but that’s another story.)

In any event, it was up to the crack reporters and editors at the once respectable Associated Press to come up with what is perhaps the most asinine sentence ever written about this issue.

“The ruling following a first-of-its-kind trial in the U.S.,” the AP reported, “adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.”

“A government duty to protect citizens from climate change”?
Think about that for a minute.

Someone should take these AP reporters aside and explain to them a basic fact of life: The climate is always changing. Always. Sometimes for the worse. Sometimes for the better.

They might go on to explain to these reporters that the best way to deal with an ever-changing climate isn’t to wish change away, or pretend that denying a drilling permit will make one iota of difference, but to encourage human ingenuity and prosperity.

That’s how you deal with a climate that is always changing. By adapting to it. It’s why deaths from naturally occurring disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and so on, have steadily fallen as mankind has become smarter and more prosperous.

The escape from accountability card widely used by politicians, currently played by Hawaii’s governor regarding Maui debacle.

Childish Appeal to Government to Fix Climate

The nearly religious appeal to government to fix the “climate problem” is childlike, even in the mouths of progressive politicians.  James L. Payne writes at the The Foundation for Economic Education How to Talk to Children about Climate Change.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

If in coming years we hope to curb the naive governmental interventions that bring so much ruin to the world, we need to address this belief in the efficacy of government.

We smile at seeing those young faces waving placards out in the rain, urging action on the problem of climate change. But our smile is tinged with frustration, with the feeling that the youngsters live in another dimension and that we don’t know how to reach them intellectually.

How They See It

The natural impulse is to want to explain how crushingly complicated is this issue. First, we point out, there is the uncertainty about the connection between human-released CO2 and storms, floods and fires, and all the other bad things that might happen. Then we want to explain that cutting down on CO2 is not easy, that everyone will have to make great sacrifices.

One has to weigh the different possible benefits that might come from stopping (or slowing) global warming against the costs of trying to counter it. This cost-benefit analysis involves a bundle of economic and moral questions. (For a good overview of the complexities of the climate change issue, read former NASA scientist Roy W. Spencer’s 2008 book Climate Confusion.) For example, would saving butterfly X from extinction (assuming we could guarantee it) counterbalance the harm done to the working poor by taking $1,000 a year from each of them in a carbon tax? And so on.

However, I think this impulse to debate the complexities of the issue is misguided. The activists do not base their position on reasoning and calculations. The Climate Kids don’t come to their demonstrations pushing wheelbarrows full of cost-benefit analyses. Most of them don’t even know what cost-benefit analysis is. More importantly, they don’t think they need to know about it.

This is because, in their way of looking at the world, it is not their responsibility to fix society’s problems. That task belongs to a higher power, to government. Their mission is simply to beseech this higher power to act. Once it decides to act, they believe, government has all the expertise needed to make the correct calculations and the ability to craft policies that solve the problem without significantly hurting anybody—well, anybody except the very rich.

We should not be all that surprised by their deep, instinctive trust of government. It is a social predisposition, one that affects all of us to some degree. The belief in government’s wisdom and power is imparted to children very early in life as an article of faith, like the belief in Santa Claus. As children grow up, they begin to notice that government has flaws and that political leaders are not as wise as originally supposed. As a result, their faith in government declines somewhat, so that by age 30, as traditional wisdom has it, most people grow somewhat skeptical about government’s ability to cure the world’s problems.

But not everyone, and especially not today’s climate activists. Faced with a staggeringly complex cost-benefit analysis that has most of us (older) folks scratching our heads, they are brimming with certainty that catastrophe is coming, and government can fix whatever is wrong.

Government Can’t Save the Planet

We were given a telling illustration of this simplistic faith earlier this year when 29-year-old US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presented her “Green New Deal” proposal. This House resolution mentions dozens of dangers and problems that she believes to be connected with climate change, from mass migrations, wildfires, and the loss of coral reefs to declining life expectancy, wage stagnation, and the racial wealth divide.

How are these all problems to be solved? Ms. Ocasio-Cortez does not propose any specific law or regulation. She does not advocate, let’s say, a 16 percent carbon tax and assure us that, according to her calculations, this measure will save 61 percent of the coral reefs, and prevent 53 percent of wildfires while reducing the income of the poor by only 8.2 percent.

Like the schoolchildren demonstrating in the street, she leaves the task of figuring out the specific answers to a higher power. Indeed, her resolution begins with this appeal to the higher power: “It is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” Thus runs the thoughtless faith in government, a faith so deep that even an activist who literally is the government herself looks to “government” to solve problems she can’t begin to analyze.

testers-will-become-extinct-600x330

If in coming years we hope to curb the naive governmental interventions that bring so much ruin to the world, we need to address this belief in the efficacy of government. We need to urge our young idealists to remember that government is not a god with magical powers to fix any problem we notice but an imperfect agency composed of fallible human beings. One way to begin this conversation is to pose this question: “Given what you know about the people who have been in charge of government, is it reasonable to expect, in the future, a high level of rationality and responsibility from government?”

Dr. James L. Payne is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and author. He earned his PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley, and he has taught political science at a number of universities including Yale University.

Summary

As the stool above shows, the climate change package sits on three premises. The first is the science bit, consisting of an unproven claim that observed warming is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. The second part rests on impact studies from billions of research dollars spent uncovering any and all possible negatives from warming. And the third leg is climate policies showing how governments can “fight climate change.”

It has warmed since the Little Ice Age with many factors involved, most of which are orders of magnitude more powerful than CO2.  Secondly, the last 1.5C of warming was a boon to humans and nature, and the next 1.5C will likely also benefit the world.  Finally it is naive to believe in government fixing the climate to prevent further warming.  Expensive, intermittent wind and solar power is the proposed solution, which accounts for just 2% of global energy consumed, and has proven disastrous anywhere it has been tried.  In the meantime the children are appeased by declaring a “climate emergency.”  Wake up and get real.

Time to Ban EVs

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The Fremantle Highway cargo ship burns uncontrollably in the Netherlands’ waters after a major fire erupted onboard. The vessel carried about 3,000 vehicles, including 25 EVs, from Bremerhaven (Germany) to Port Said (Egypt). The ship has been abandoned and is expected to sink. July 26, 2023

Stephen Moore makes the case in his BPR article Is it time to ban electric vehicles?.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

The New York Fire Department recently reported that so far this year there have been 108 lithium-ion battery fires in New York City, which have injured 66 people and killed 13. According to FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, “There is not a small amount of fire, it (the vehicle) literally explodes.” The resulting fire is “very difficult to extinguish and so it is particularly dangerous.”

Not only cars: Lithium bicycle batteries are responsible for 22 fires in New York, 2 deaths this year (Feb. 24, 2023)

Last year there were more than 200 fires from batteries from e-bikes, EVs and other devices.

A fire ignited at an e-bike shop and killed four people near midnight on the morning of June 20. Two individuals were left in critical condition. The fire commissioner has warned New Yorkers that such devices could be very dangerous and typically explode in such a way that renders escape impossible.

FDNY also reports that in just three years, lithium-ion battery fires have surpassed those started by cooking and smoking as the most common causes of fatal fires in New York City. It’s happening all over the country as these blazes have become commonplace. Cars and e-bikes are randomly blowing up in driveways and garages.

NYC going after pizza oven emissions. You’d have to burn a pizza stove 849 years to equal one year of John Kerry’s private jet

Now let’s be honest: 13 deaths in a city the size of New York with some 8 million people is hardly an epidemic. Regulations should always be based on a cost versus benefit calculation, or there would be no cars at all.

And yet the same scaremongers on the left who have zero tolerance and want bans for small risks when it comes to everything from swimming pool diving boards, gas stoves, plastic straws, vaping, fireworks and so on, have a surprisingly high pain threshold when it comes to people dying or suffering critical injured from “green” electric battery fires.

1960 Chevrolet Corvair

Or consider this: In 1965, Ralph Nader almost single-handedly helped ban the popular Chevrolet Corvair — famous for its engine placed in the back trunk of the car. Nader’s bestselling shock book “Unsafe at Any Speed” declared the car was deadly. But there was no real evidence of that claim, and to this day there are no reliable statistics on how many passengers — if any — died in Corvairs from rear-end accidents.

What is indisputable is that EVs will cause far more deaths than Corvairs ever did.

One other example: There have been more fatalities in just one city in a single year from lithium-ion batteries in cars than all the people who died from the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident — which was zero.

Yet, after the accident, thanks to the environmentalists’ fear campaign (with the help of the blockbuster anti-nuke movie “The China Syndrome”), no domestic nuclear plants were built for three decades. That is despite the fact that nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases.

But with EVs, the greens are pushing aside any concerns about the collateral damage of deaths and injuries. Biden wants to mandate that nearly ALL new cars sold in the U.S. be EVs by 2032. If that happens, many thousands of Americans may die or will be inured from electric vehicle fires.

All this is especially hypocritical because once upon a time the left’s mantra was “no trading blood for oil.” Now they are willing to trade blood in exchange for getting Americans to stop using oil. An irony of all this is that because of all the energy needed to produce windmills, solar panels and electric batteries, new studies are showing that the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to this “net zero” transition is close to zero. It turns out, green energy causes some pollution, too.

For the record, I’m not in favor of the government banning EVs or e-bikes or just about anything. I just believe that we should make policy decisions based on real and factual risk assessments, not false scares and sensationalism.

As for the future of EVs, maybe it’s time for Ralph Nader
to write a sequel to “Unsafe at Any Speed.”

Australians: Look Hard Before Leaping

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Peta Credlin exposes the radical plans of Australian politicos in her Spectator video ‘Insanity’: Cost of net-zero energy policies becoming clearer.

For those prefering to read the commentary, below is a transcript from the closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images.

In the Sunday papers I highlighted the growing Insanity of closing down coal-fired power stations when there’s no reliable alternative supply. And the fact that the Albanese government is planning to bring the same emissions obsession that’s given us some of the world’s highest power prices to other sectors of the economy.

Like housing, like farming meaning the food on your table, and like transport. It is a real worry these so-called sectoral plans, emission specific plans for each industry sector. Well they’re now being drawn up by the Climate Change Authority as part of the government’s ambition to announce yet more emissions reductions for 2035 on top of the 43 % they’ve already legislated for 2030.

Gas Stoves just the thin end of the wedge.

So that means:

♦  smaller herds and higher meat prices;
♦  bans on gas cooktops and heaters;
♦  forcing people to swap to expensive electric cars or use only public transport.

And the cost of these policies is finally becoming clearer. Ten days ago a group of experts Net Zero Australia have estimated the cost of getting to a 43 % reduction by 2030, as I said already legislated, will cost us 1.5 trillion dollars, that’s trillion with a t, not billion. These are experts from Melbourne, Queensland University and Princeton in the US. Now 1.5 trillion dollars is two-thirds of our annual GDP and this report says we need to find that in order to achieve these legislated targets due in just seven years time.

And that’s assuming that it’s actually feasible to build all the renewable energy required and all those extra transmission lines to get this decentralized intermittent power around to where we need it.  Now forget for a moment that Labor’s 83 % renewable energy target makes scant provision for Backup,  backup for when the wind doesn’t blow and of course the sun doesn’t shine. But we still need power 24/7.

Not only is this climate Crusade ruinously expensive,
but it’s also going to be Mission Impossible.

Australians might be broadly in favor of cutting emissions to do something about climate change, but it’s far from clear that we’re ready to pay all the extra costs. And it’s certain that more and more people are unhappy about what this means for them in practice.

We need somewhere between 10 to 28 000 kilometers of these new transmission lines. Towers some of them up to 80 meters tall, as high as the pylons on the Sydney Harbor Bridge. All built through national park lands or across prime agricultural land for Labor’s green dream to work. And as you’ll hear a little later on the show, Australian Farmers well you’re on the carpet despite some of the bribes being offered up to two hundred thousand dollars per kilometer for individual land holders.

Now that’s one of the reasons why the Hume link, just one of these new transmission lines is way behind schedule and already three billion dollars over budget. But without these new transmission lines, Hume Link in particular, well Snowy 2.0 is already years behind schedule and billions over budget. it just won’t work

I’ve been saying this for years, and you’ve been saying it as well: This is energy Madness. Why on Earth are we spending billions and billions of dollars in borrowed money just to take us back to the Dark Ages. It beggers belief.

A costly expansion of the Snowy hydro power storage scheme rests on transmission upgrades to succeed. (Supplied: Snowy Hydro)

 

Stop the Carbon Capture Insanity

Posted on by Ron Clutz

From the geniuses who brought you the missnamed IRA spending spree, a new push to suck plant food (CO2) out of the air to “fight global warming.”   The insanity is doubled:  Billions are wasted in an effort to deprive the biosphere of essential CO2.  LA Times How the Biden administration is pouring billions into technology that sucks carbon from the air.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The Biden adminstration is funding projects by Occidental Petroleum and Climeworks that will remove carbon dioxide from the air. The Climeworks plant in Hinwil, Switzerland, above, filters carbon dioxide from the air above a garbage incineration plant. (Climeworks)

Some Might Call it a Ruse

The technology is “essentially a giant vacuum that can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky,” Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm told reporters. “If we deploy this at scale, this technology can help us make serious headway toward our net-zero emission goals.”

Once operational, the hubs are expected to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking nearly half a million gas-powered cars off the road, Granholm said. Additional projects are expected to be announced next year, the Energy Department said.

Critics worry that carbon capture is too untested to be a reliable tool in fighting climate change. And some opponents see carbon capture efforts as a way to extend the life of facilities that produce or use fossil fuels.

Background:  Wasting Money on Carbon Capture

Robert Bryce explains in his Real Clear Energy article Carbon Capture Didn’t Make Sense 12 Years Ago And It Doesn’t Make Sense Now.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

It appears the reconciliation bill that includes some $370 billion in energy-related spending is going to become law. The measure includes a panoply of tax credits for alternative energy technologies, including incentives for electric vehicles, hydrogen, energy storage, and of course, billions of dollars in tax credits for wind and solar energy.

The measure also includes, according to the Congressional Budget Office, some $3.2 billion in tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that has plenty of supporters but precious little in the way of commercially successful projects. Back in 2018, Al Gore blasted CCS, calling it “nonsense” and an “extremely improbable solution.”

The new tax credits for CCS remind me that I published a piece in the New York Times on May 12, 2010, about the technology. In looking back, the piece is still relevant today. In fact, I wouldn’t change a word of it. Furthermore, my prediction about the difficulty of siting the pipelines needed to move the CO2 has already come true. For proof, see this August 6, Wall Street Journal article about the opposition to a proposed CO2 pipeline in Iowa.

In any case here’s my 12-year-old take on why CCS is a bad bet:

On Wednesday, John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman introduced their long-awaited Senate energy bill, which includes incentives of $2 billion per year for carbon capture and sequestration, the technology that removes carbon dioxide from the smokestack at power plants and forces it into underground storage. This significant allocation would come on top of the $2.4 billion for carbon capture projects that appeared in last year’s stimulus package.

That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering. Lawmakers should stop perpetuating the hope that the technology can help make huge cuts in the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions.

1. An Energy Intensive Process

Let’s take the first problem. Capturing carbon dioxide from the flue gas of a coal-fired electric generation plant is an energy-intensive process. Analysts estimate that capturing the carbon dioxide cuts the output of a typical plant by as much as 28 percent.

Given that the global energy sector is already straining to meet booming demand for electricity, it’s hard to believe that the United States, or any other country that relies on coal-fired generation, will agree to reduce the output of its coal-fired plants by almost a third in order to attempt carbon capture and sequestration.

2. Costly Pipelines for a Waste Gas

Here’s the second problem. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has estimated that up to 23,000 miles of new pipeline will be needed to carry the captured carbon dioxide to the still-undesignated underground sequestration sites. That doesn’t sound like much when you consider that America’s gas pipeline system sprawls over some 2.3 million miles. But those natural gas pipelines carry a valuable, marketable, useful commodity.

By contrast, carbon dioxide is a worthless waste product, so taxpayers would likely end up shouldering most of the cost. Yes, some of that waste gas could be used for enhanced oil recovery projects; flooding depleted oil reservoirs with carbon dioxide is a proven technology that can increase production and extend the life of existing oilfields. But the process would be useful in only a limited number of oilfields — probably less than 10 percent of the waste carbon dioxide captured from coal-fired power plants could actually be injected into American oilfields.

3. Impossibly Massive Scale

The third, and most vexing, problem has to do with scale. In 2009, carbon dioxide emissions in the United States totaled 5.4 billion tons. Let’s assume that policymakers want to use carbon capture to get rid of half of those emissions — say, 3 billion tons per year. That works out to about 8.2 million tons of carbon dioxide per day, which would have to be collected and compressed to about 1,000 pounds per square inch (that compressed volume of carbon dioxide would be roughly equivalent to the volume of daily global oil production).

In other words, we would need to find an underground location (or locations) able to swallow a volume equal to the contents of 41 oil supertankers each day, 365 days a year.

There will also be considerable public resistance to carbon dioxide pipelines and sequestration projects — local outcry has already stalled proposed carbon capture projects in Germany and Denmark. The fact is, few landowners are eager to have pipelines built across their property. And because of the possibility of deadly leaks, few people will want to live near a pipeline or an underground storage cavern. This leads to the obvious question: which members of the House and Senate are going to volunteer their states to be dumping grounds for all that carbon dioxide?

For some, carbon capture and sequestration will remain the Holy Grail of carbon-reduction strategies. But before Congress throws yet more money at the procedure, lawmakers need to take a closer look at the issues that hamstring nearly every new energy-related technology: cost and scale.

Footnote:  The project is not only impractical, its deluded objective is to deprive the biosphere of plant food.

See also:  Carbon Capture Boondoggle