Based on a non-fiction book of the same name by historian Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far is a 1977 epic war film depicting Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied operation using paratroopers to secure three bridges over three key rivers in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II. The phrase has come to mean “a long shot”, or an overly ambitious plan.
The metaphor can now be applied to 2023 regarding the onslaught of ESG bureaucratic regulation burdening enterprises around the world. Jon McGowan explains in his Forbes article The SEC’s New Rule May Inadvertently Kill ESG Funds. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Securities and Exchange Commission recently announced a rule requiring environmental, social, and governance funds to be 80% aligned with the fund’s stated goals. This could reveal a long-held secret of ESG funds: to be competitive, they are packed with more profitable investments that are not green.
ESG is a type of investing where non-financial factors
are considered in the decision-making process.
ESG has grown quickly over the past few years, pushed by global action to meet the net zero goals of the Paris Accords. Globally, those non-financial factors are primarily focused on sustainability. However, in the US there has been an added focus relating to LGBTQ+ issues that some have deemed political, causing controversy.
The growth of ESG has sparked regulation for sustainable reporting standards for businesses. The European Union was the first, with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards that were approved in July and set to go into effect January 1. The ESRS will require publicly traded and large privately held companies to report greenhouse gas emissions, actions taken by the entity to reduce GHG emissions, and other green policies. Eventually it will expand to small and medium-sized enterprises. While reporting will be mandatory, no environmentally friendly action is required. The SEC is set to release similar standards for the US in October.
[Note: Bloomberg reports this week Banks May Escape EU’s Toughest ESG Regulation So Far Lawmakers, member states are negotiating due diligence rule
Firms face new civil liability, large fines under the proposal
The increased interest in ESG caused fund managers and businesses to adjust their practices. This sudden shift raised concerns of greenwashing, or the exaggeration of environmentally friendly initiatives to appear greener than they actually are. A new term, climate washing, has recently developed that is specific to the exaggeration of climate change initiatives.
Greenwashing for marketing purposes, while misleading, rarely met the standard of a regulatory violation. However, when greenwashing is directed at investors it could violate financial regulations and fall under the authority of the SEC. The SEC recently fined Deutsche Bank’s investment arm, DWS, $19 million for “materially misleading statements” relating to greenwashing in ESG funds. However, enforcement is problematic as the threshold for what constitutes greenwashing was not previously defined.
That changed when the SEC announced a new rule that requires ESG funds to match at least 80% of their portfolio with the stated goals of the fund. This new rule came just weeks after the SEC issued a round of subpoenas to an unknown number of fund managers relating to their ESG fund practices.
While the 80% requirement will settle greenwashing concerns,
it could be problematic for the viability of ESG funds.
Environmentalist and aligned organizations have frequently expressed concerns that some ESG funds were stacked with investments that were contrary to sustainable goals.A 2022 study by ESG Book found that ESG funds on average produced 14% higher GHG emissions than traditional funds. The same study found ESG funds investing in mining and fossil fuels, including Shell, Exxon Mobile, and BHP Group. The ESG Book study is not alone or new. Multiple studies have been released by environmental think tanks chastising ESG funds for not being sustainable.
Fund managers are placed in a precarious position of trying to offer
environmentally friendly funds, while also
meeting their fiduciary duty to maximize returns.
In doing so, they are forced to offset the underperformance of sustainable investments with investments in companies that are high profit, but contrary to the green goals. The result is funds that are not truly green, but greenish.
The new SEC rule will force fund managers to limit that practice to 20% of the fund. The unsettled question is how that will impact returns.ESG funds already underperform compared to traditional funds, the 80% rule may make them no longer a viable investment.
Jock Finlayson describes how climate change policies are depleting Canadians’ financial means in his article Millions of Canadians May Face ‘Energy Poverty’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The term “energy poverty” is not yet part of day-to-day political debate in Canada, but that’s likely to change in the next few years. In Europe, the high and rising cost of energy has become a political lightning rod in several countries including Britain and France. Something similar may be in store for Canada.
The Trudeau government and some of the provinces are
aggressively pursuing the holy grail of decarbonization.
To achieve this, they’re engineering dramatic increases in carbon and other taxes on fossil fuels and promising to pour vast sums of moneyinto building new electricity generation and transmission infrastructure to help reduce reliance on oil, refined petroleum products, natural gas and coal. Both strategies point to higher energy costs.
Tax advocates say it is a small % of GDP. But it is still $10 Billion extracted from Canadian households
The Trudeau government has legislated a national minimum carbon tax set to reach $170 per tonne of emissions by 2030, up from $50 in 2022 and $65 currently. Ottawa has also imposed a “clean fuel standard” that will further raise the cost of fuel. These policies are driven by concerns over climate change, which is a risk, to be sure, but so is the prospect of rapidly escalating energy prices for Canadian households and businesses.
Energy poverty arises when households and families must devote a significant fraction of their after-tax income to cover the cost of energy used for transportation, home heating and cooking, and the provision of electricity. In 2022, the United Kingdom government estimated that 13.4 percent of households were in energy poverty, which it defined as needing to spend more than 10 percent of income to cover the cost of directly consumed energy.
There’s no single agreed methodology for assessing the prevalence of energy poverty. A recent Canadian study reports that in 2017, between 6 percent and 19 percent of Canadian households experienced some form of energy poverty, with an above-average incidence in rural areas, Atlantic Canada and among people living in older single-family homes. If accurate, this finding suggests that many more Canadians will soon become acquainted with the term as taxes on fossil fuels climband governments impose new regulations affecting the energy efficiency of buildings, vehicles, industrial equipment, appliances and agricultural operations.
Canada is blessed with plentiful and diverse supplies of energy. Over time, we have become an important global producer and exporter of energy, with oil, natural gas and electricity together expected to account for one-quarter of Canada’s merchandise exports in 2023. Canada is also an intensive consumer of energy, in part because of our cold climate, dispersed population and relatively high living standards.
80% of the Other Renewables is solid biomass (wood), which leaves at most 1% of Canadian total energy supply coming from wind and solar.
End-use energy demand in Canada is around 13,000 petajoules. Of this, industry is responsible for about half, followed by transportation, residential buildings, commercial buildings and agriculture. Refined petroleum products—all based on oil—are the largest fuel type consumed in Canada (around 40 percent of the total), followed by natural gas (36 percent) and electricity (16 percent). Biofuels and other smaller sources comprise the rest. These data underscore Canadians’ overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels to meet their energy needs.
Politicians in a hurry to slash greenhouse gas emissions via higher taxes
and more regulations must be alert to the risk that millions of Canadians
could find themselves in energy poverty by the end of the decade.
Jock Finlayson is a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute.
Those promoting hydrogen as a substitute for carbon fuels are blind to the physical and economic facts, as well as miscontruing CO2 as some kind of demon gas boiling the planet. Thus their crusade is absurd, exorbitant and pointless.
Hydrogen Replacing Carbon Fuels Is Absurd
The absurdity is explained by Sabine Hossenfelder in the video below: Hydrogen Won’t Save Us. Here’s Why. For those who prefer reading, I provide a transcript in italics with my bolds and added images.
Today I want to talk about something light. Hydrogen. Hydrogen is one of the currently most popular alternatives to fossil fuel in transport. Many companies and nations have put money into it.
In 2021, the number of hydrogen-fueled passenger cars bought in the UK was 12. Does that sound like a booming business? Not exactly. Indeed, a report from the British Science and Technology Committee that just appeared last month warned that “we do not believe that [hydrogen] will be the panacea to our problems that might sometimes be inferred from the hopes placed on it”.
Ouch. So what’s the deal with hydrogen? Hope or hype? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
Hydrogen Basics
Hydrogen is the first element of the periodic table. If you mix it with oxygen and put fire to the mixture you get water. This reaction releases energy, so if you do it under controlled conditions, you can drive a motor or turbine with it. The only exhaust you get is pure water, no carbon dioxide, no nitrogen oxides, no particulates, no radioactive waste, no chopped-up birds. It’s really difficult to complain about pure water.
But let’s not give up that easily, certainly we can find something to complain about. For example, hydrogen is a gas that, at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature, takes up a lot of volume, and it’s somewhat impractical to drag a zeppelin behind your car. That’s why to store and transport hydrogen, one compresses it by putting it under a lot of pressure. Typically, that’s something like 700 bar, or about 700 times atmospheric pressure.
At that pressure, the energy that one gets out of one litre of hydrogen
is one sixth of the energy one gets out of one litre of gasoline.
This means if you power a car with hydrogen, one needs more litres of hydrogen than one needs litres of gasoline to cover the same distance. But litres are a measure of volume. The amount of energy you get out of hydrogen per mass is about twice as high as what you get from gasoline. Then again, since the hydrogen must be kept under high pressure hydrogen tanks tend to be heavy compared to gasoline tanks. When everything is said and done, hydrogen-powered cars end up being somewhat heavier than gasoline-powered ones, but it’s not such a big difference.
Okay, but how do you get the energy out of the hydrogen? The technology for this isn’t new, it’s been around for more than 200 years. The first hydrogen fuel cell was developed by William Grove in 1839 but it was only in the 1960s that two engineers at General Electric proposed a smart way to go about it. They developed what’s now called a Proton Exchange Membrane. Those keep the hydrogen and oxygen largely separate and allow chemical reactions only at the membrane. That way it’s much easier to control the reaction which also makes the system safer.
Those hydrogen fuel cells were then further developed by NASA. One of the first uses was on the Gemini spacecraft, which was launched in the mid-1960s. They were later also used on the Apollo spacecraft that carried astronauts to the moon and for the space shuttle. The International Space Station uses hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity and also to produce drinking water for the astronauts on board.
The Hydrogen Market
So, hydrogen fuel cells have been around for a long time, but they’ve never been particularly popular. One of the reasons has certainly been that there was simply no need for them, because fossil fuels are considerably more convenient. Unfortunately, they have side-effects, which is why companies like Hyundai and Toyota have been selling hydrogen-fuelled cars for about a decade. BMW, Ford, and other automobile giants have plans for hydrogen cars, and some governments are looking at hydrogen to power their transit systems, for example Scotland and Germany.
The UK with its measly 12 sales in 2021, I admit, is a particularly sad example. For one thing, that’s only passenger cars. They also put about 50 hydrogen-powered busses on the road. And globally the market doesn’t look quite as dire. In total, about 16 thousand hydrogen powered cars were sold in 2021, about three thousand 500 of those in the US. The total number of new cars sold in 2021 was about 67 million, so at the moment it’s about one in four thousand new cars that’s hydrogen powered. It’s a small market, but it’s an existing market.
Some plans are extremely ambitious. For example, in May last year, the European Union rolled out a strategy called REPowerEU, with the goal of replacing up to 50 billion cubic meters per year of imported Russian gas with hydrogen. This’d mean replacing almost 10 percent of the EU’s total gas consumption with hydrogen power. That’s substantial.
It’s not only Europe. Many other countries are also investing in hydrogen production facilities, that includes Japan, Canada, Egypt, China, and the United States. For example, in March last year, the company Green Hydrogen International unveiled plans to create a plant in Texas that’ll use 60 Gigawatt of electricity from solar and wind to produce 2 point 5 billion kilograms hydrogen per year. It’ll be called Hydrogen City. And Individual companies are investing in it, too. Microsoft, for example, wants to use hydrogen fuel cells as climate-friendly backup generators for their data centres. As you see, hydrogen is booming. But.
The Colors Of Hydrogen
The first “but” that might spring to your mind is: But where does the hydrogen come from? Now, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Indeed, three quarters of all normal matter in the universe is hydrogen, but you normally can’t buy it in the supermarket. So where do you get it? Naturally occurring geological deposits of pure hydrogen are rare on Earth. Most of the hydrogen we have is bound, either in water or in methane. And this is where the problem begins. Because you have to break those chemical bonds to get the hydrogen and that requires energy.
Hydrogen is therefore not really a source of energy, but a storage system.
You use energy to create it in its pure form, transport it,
and then you release this energy elsewhere.
How environmentally friendly this is depends strongly on where the hydrogen comes from. To keep track of this, scientists are using a color scale. You all know this, but this is YouTube, so I have to say this anyway: The hydrogen itself has always the same color, which is transparent. This color scale is just a way of keeping track of the production method.
On this color scale, the rare, naturally occurring hydrogen is white. Hydrogen obtained from water using coal or lignite has the colors black or brown, respectively. Its production emits carbon dioxide and methane; both are greenhouse gases. Grey hydrogen is derived from methane and water; this also produces carbon dioxide and usually some of the methane escapes.
At the moment, almost all hydrogen is produced in one of those ways by using fossil fuels. According to the World Energy Council, in 2019 more than 95 percent of the hydrogen worldwide was assigned one of those colors, black, brown, or grey. This releases about 830 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. That’s 2 percent of the total global emissions and about the same as air traffic.
But there are more colors on the hydrogen rainbow. Next there is blue. Like grey hydrogen, blue hydrogen is made from methane, but the carbon dioxide is stored underground and does not escape into the atmosphere. This method is currently only used for1 percent of hydrogen production, but it could be expanded. The industry association Hydrogen Council has touted blue hydrogen as a climate-friendly initiative. It’s not entirely irrelevant, so let me mention that this council was created by the oil and gas industry. Many of its members have a financial interest in switching from natural gas to hydrogen produced from natural gas.
So maybe one shouldn’t take their argument that blue hydrogen is climate-friendly for granted. Hasn’t someone looked into this? Well, since you asked, in 2021, two American researchers calculated the amount of greenhouse gases released by grey and blue hydrogen technology. They not only took carbon dioxide into account, but also methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas. To make comparisons easier, the greenhouse effect from methane is usually converted to a carbon dioxide equivalent, which is the amount of carbon dioxide that would have the same effect.
They came to the conclusion that grey hydrogen has a carbon dioxide equivalent of about 550 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour and blue only slightly less, 486 grams. That’s about the same as the emissions you get from using natural gas directly to generate electricity. Part of the reason blue hydrogen performs so poorly is that not all the carbon dioxide from hydrogen production is captured and stored. Another reason is that the process of storing the carbon dioxide also requires energy and leads to carbon dioxide emissions. The authors estimate that under the most favourable conditions, it might be possible to reduce those emissions to around 200 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour by using renewable energy sources. So blue hydrogen doesn’t help much with climate protection.
Then there is green hydrogen, which is produced from water using renewable energy. Again that sounds good, and again, it’s not that simple. According to a calculation by researchers from Australia, greenhouse gas emissions from green hydrogen produced with solar energy are ideally about a quarter of those from grey hydrogen. Under realistic conditions, however, they find that emissions are comparable, particularly due to fluctuations in solar radiation that make hydrogen production inefficient. There is neither data nor any study for hydrogen production from wind but you expect this method to suffer even more from fluctuations because wind is far less reliable than sunlight.
And since these methods are inefficient, they are also expensive. Indeed, producing hydrogen with solar and wind is pretty much the most expensive way you can do it, according to a review in 2019. Now maybe those costs will go down a bit as the technology improves. But seeing that the biggest problem is that energy input fluctuates I doubt it’ll become economically competitive with the “dirty” hydrogen. This problem can be fixed by using nuclear power to generate hydrogen which has been assigned the colors pink and purple. A few projects for this are underway but it’s early days and nuclear power isn’t exactly popular.
OK, so we have seen that it isn’t all that clear whether hydrogen is climate friendly, and also, it’sexpensive. And this is only the production cost. It doesn’t include the entire infrastructure that’d be necessary to fuel a fleet of hydrogen cars. Remember you have to keep the stuff at several hundred bars and you can’t just use a normal gas station for that.
Water Supply
Let’s move on to the next problem that might come to your mind: where do we get the water from? From a distance, the world has no shortage of water, but freshwater can be scarce in certain regions of the planet. According to estimates from researchers at the University of Delaware, however, water supply issues probably won’t stand in the way of a hydrogen economy. They looked at a scenario in which we replace 18 percent of fossil fuels with hydrogen, and found that this would require about 2 percent of the amount of freshwater that’s currently used for irrigation.
Watch out, this figure has a logarithmic scale. You also see on this figure that using fossil fuels requires freshwater too, for cooling, mining, hydraulic fracturing, and refining, and it’s currently actually more than the projection for hydrogen. That’s 2 percent on the global average, but in some regions the fraction can be higher. For example, estimates for Australia are that you’d need about 4% of the water amount used for irrigation. So that seems a manageable amount, but it’s something to take into account if you want to make this work.
The Cold Start Problem
Another problem with water is that it can freeze. This is why you shouldn’t leave the beer in the car in the winter. And it’s also why hydrogen fuel cells like it warm. If the temperature drops more than a few degrees below zero, the water that the fuel cells create at start will freeze immediately, which swiftly degrades the membranes and tubes. It’s known as the “Cold Start” problem of hydrogen fuel cell. And, no, you can’t just pour antifreeze into it, remember the water is created in the fuel cell. So, you’ll either have to stay in California or keep your car warm. The solution that manufacturers pursue at the moment is pre-heating systems.
Rare Metal Shortages
But the biggest problem for a hydrogen economy may be making those proton exchange membranes to begin with. It’s not because it’s so difficult, but because they’re made of platinum and iridium. Platinum you may have heard of, it’s an expensive noble metal that’s also used for jewellery. The reason it’s expensive is that it’s rare. Iridium is also a noble metal. It’s so rare that most people have never heard of it. Both of those metals are difficult to replace with anything else in the hydrogen fuel cells.
That’s a problem because it means that the entire hydrogen economy hinges on the availability of those two metals. There’s only so much of those in the world and they are only in very specific geological formations. Almost all the platinum and iridium supply comes from only three countries: South Africa, Russia, and Zimbabwe, and colonies have gone out of fashion recently. China, which has invested heavily in hydrogen technology is already feeling the consequences.
And we’ve only just barely begun with building the hydrogen economy. This issue has been highlighted recently in reports from various international organizations including the International Energy Agency and the World Bank. According to the business consulting group Wood Mackenzie, the increased demand for platinum might be manageable in the near future, but it looks like by 2030 demand for iridium will be several times higher than the supply. I don’t know much about trade, but I think this isn’t good.
It’s possible to make fuel cells somewhat more efficient and decrease the demand for those rare metals. But this situation isn’t going to change and iridium isn’t going to move to the US even if you ask it really nicely.
Have we learned nothing from the Hindenburg Disaster?
Hydrogen Embrittlement
One final problem that’s worth mentioning is that hydrogen is just nasty to deal with. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule. If you squeeze it into a tank, it’ll creep into the walls of the tank. That destroys the chemical structure of the material and makes it brittle. It’s called “hydrogen embrittlement”. For this reason, hydrogen tanks must be thick and specially coated, which makes them both heavy and expensive. Like the cold start problem, this one’s basic chemistry and isn’t going to go away. And the need to keep the hydrogen under pressure makes the stuff inconvenient to handle. The city of Wiesbaden in Germany, for example, recently retired its six new hydrogen powered buses because the filling station broke down, sinking a few million Euro.
Summary
In summary, hydrogen production at the moment has a high carbon footprint because it’s almost exclusively done using fossil fuels. Reducing the carbon footprint of hydrogen production seems difficult according to estimates, but at the moment there’s basically no real-world data. Hydrogen produced by wind and solar will almost certainly not be economically competitive with that derived from fossil fuels but using nuclear power might be an option. Building infrastructure for a transport-system based on hydrogen would eat up a lot of money. It seems that rare metal supply for hydrogen fuel cells is going to become a problem in the near future which won’t help making the technology affordable. Keeping hydrogen stored and under pressure adds to the cost and makes those systems heavy which isn’t great for transport. And finally, hydrogen-powered cars don’t like cold temperatures.
So. Well, it seems to me that the British Science and Technology committee is right. A hydrogen economy isn’t a panacea for climate change. Indeed, the French have a similar committee that likewise concluded “l’hydrogène n’est pas une solution miracle”. I must admit that I was considerably more upbeat about hydrogen before I started working on this video. How about you? Did you learn something new? Did you change your mind? Let us know in the comments.
Summation: The Hydrogen Crusade is absurd because hydrogen
is not an energy source, but a storage system, and
natural properties and scarcities will not be suspended
for the sake of human ambitions.
The White House has awarded $7 billion dollars of tax money for the first seven U.S. hydrogen hubs. They say it will leverage $43 billion in private money. Yet, the rules only require a 50/50 match. We are far more likely to see a $7 billion private money match. Why put more of your own money at risk than you have to?
It is risky because green hydrogen costs at least five times more to produce than the methane reforming method, which makes 95% today. That is $5 versus $1. All of the regional hydrogen infrastructure will need to be built, and the future hydrogen demand will need to be created and incentivized. Because green hydrogen still costs more. Even with upfront and downstream aggressive subsidies.
Because it is tax money we don’t have, it is added to our unprecedented $33 trillion dollar national debt. We are at an inflection point where interest payments are more than our national defense budget. Debt interest is projected to be more than a trillion dollars by the end of the decade. And the Rich Men North of Richmond just keep spending.
It costs $5 or more to produce green hydrogen through hydrolysis. Which takes super heating, electrocuting, super chilling, and compression. Then additional costs for storage and transportation before it is used somewhere.
And it needs 53 times more water than hydrogen made. Not a good idea in dry California, which is awarded $1 billion in giveaway hub money.
All of this takes lots of full-time energy. Not the part-time unpredictable electricity wind and solar make. Let’s not talk about our stressed national grid with regular blackout and shortage notices. Or the fact that 60% of the electricity made for the grid comes from coal and natural gas.
Paying for full-time and part-time generation, and thousands of miles
of transmission wires will at least triple our electric rates in no time.
This hurts the poor the most, because they use the biggest amount of their budgets on energy costs. Stressing their lives, hurting their ability to live independently. All of this, while Biden and the democrats blather about climate justice and social justice.
We are doing all this subsidizing to stop
the addition of the super plant food CO2.
That is greening our earth, regrowing forests the size of France, and increasing crop yields and harvests around the world. To supposedly stop the warming of the planet that started naturally in 1850. As if we can.
The Rich Men North of Richmond are going to waste 100s of billions on green taxpayer giveaways on top of the $9.5 billion upfront hydrogen give away.
Throwing money at a climate emergency that doesn’t really exist is part of Bidenomics. Fueling inflation by spending money we don’t have, fueling high interest rates by fueling inflation.Making it difficult and expensive to harvest the fossil fuels that supply 80% of our energy. And sending 100s of billions, if not trillions, to our main rival and biggest threat, totalitarian, communist China is the Biden way.
Wind, solar, batteries, and soon EVs made in China with
forced labor, low-cost coal electricity and little environmental protections.
China burns more than half of the world’s 8.5 billion tons of coal used annually and is building hundreds of coal plants that last 50 to 75 years. I am sure they intend to use them for a few decades or 75 years.
For those that think CO2 emissions are important, China emits more than the U.S. and all the other industrialized nations combined. Including India, which is no slouch when it comes to using coal for power, getting even a larger percentage of their energy from coal than China.
We need to end this crazy fantasy of a centrally forced transition to hydrogen, wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles. It isn’t working and is making everything more costly. Because energy is in everything we eat, buy, use, consume, even Netflix and AI.
Summation: The Hydrogen Crusade is exorbitant because
the costs are unbearable and unsustainable,
a ruinous drain on our energy resources.
Hydrogen Replacing Carbon Fuels Is Pointless
The greatest insanity is that all of this crusade is unecessary. The delusional premise of the Hossenfelder video is that we and the planet need saving from CO2. When in fact throughout history, atmospheric CO2 changes lag Temperature changes on all time scales; from last month’s observations to ice cores showing climate changes over thousands and millions of years. Nothing in nature can be the cause of an effect if it occurs afterward. A thorough debate on this issue occured recently at Dr. Judith Curry’s website Climate Etc. on the topic Causality and climate. My synopsis is below.
I recommend the discussion thread at climate etc. (on going) as a tutorial for the competing paradigms regarding the CO2 cycle. I gained clarity from the lead author (a frequent and constructive participant) as well others on the core misunderstanding that has plagued such discussions for decades. Some comments are below in italics with my bolds.
First, note that the paper had a narrowly defined scope: to demonstrate from available data that changes in atmospheric CO2 lag rather than lead temperature changes. Because the authors recognized that this finding is contrary to IPCC consensus climate science, appendices were supplied to counter the expected objections crediting human CO2 emissions from hydrocarbons as the main, or sole source of rising CO2 since the Little Ice Age (LIA). As Koutsoyiannis explained in a summary comment near the end:
Demetris Koutsoyiannis September 29, 2023 at 4:54 pm
I think I have rebutted all the different critiques ON MY PAPERS. I am not going to reply to critiques on any other issues related to the issue of climate. Please make your critiques SPECIFIC, by quoting phrases in my papers that you think are incorrect. And before it, please read the papers.
For example you say:
> And that would be the cause of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere?
If you read the paper you will see that we write (p. 17): *What is the cause of the modern increase in temperature? Apparently, this question is much more difficult to reply to, as we can no longer attribute everything to any single agent. We do not claim to have the answer to this question, whose study is far beyond the article’s scope. Neither do we believe that mainstream climatic theory, which is focused upon human CO2 emissions as the main cause and regards everything else as feedback of the single main cause, can explain what happened on Earth for 4.5 billion years of changing climate.*
We have proposed a necessary condition for causality, which is time precedence of the cause over the effect. I hope you accept that necessary condition, am I wrong? We make our inference based on this necessary condition. Your numbers make no reference of time succession. When you find a way to test whether the direction in time is reversed, that will be great. But for now, all this looks to me an unproven conjecture. I hope you can excuse me that, being a Greek, I have to stick to Aristotelian logic.
You also say:
> While there is an elephant in the room, human emissions that released twice as much CO2 as measured in the atmosphere…
If this is the elephant, what is (copying from our paper, p. 25), *a total global increase in the respiration rate of ΔR = 31.6 Gt C/year. This rate, which is a result of natural processes, is 3.4 times greater than the CO2 emission by fossil fuel combustion (9.4 Gt C /year including cement production)*.
My Comment: The confounding issue in all this was identified as the mistaken analogy treating CO2 fluxes as though they are cash transactions between bank accounts. Within that notion, a natural source/sink must net out intakes and releases. Yet as others commented, geobiologists know that both absorption and release can be increasing or can be decreasing. The source/sinks function dynamically, not statically as assumed by the analogy.
What It Means: CO2 flows through Dynamic Reservoirs
The other puzzle piece is described by Ed Berry following his peer-reviewed paper Nature Controls the CO2 Increase II. A summary comment ties his analysis into the above discussion. Early in the thread the point was made that all CO2 sources are involved in supporting the level of atmospheric concentration at any point in time. Ed Berry made this point in this way.
He explained that when you look at the flow of carbon dioxide—”flow” meaning the carbon moving from one carbon reservoir to another, i.e., through photosynthesis, the eating of plants, and back out through respiration—a 140 ppm constant level requires a continual inflow of 40 ppm per year of carbon dioxide, because, according to the IPCC, carbon dioxide has a turnover time of 3.5 years (meaning carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for about 3 1/2 years). 140 ppm divided by 3.5 is 40 ppm CO2.
“A level of 280 ppm is twice that—80 ppm of inflow. Now, we’re saying that the inflow of human carbon dioxide is one-third of the total. Even IPCC data says, ‘No, human carbon dioxide inflow is about 5 percent to 7 percent of the total carbon dioxide inflow into the atmosphere,’” he said.
[Today’s level of nearly 420 ppm means that 120 ppm of inflow is required annually, or 120 +2 ppm if it is to increase as it has been. Where does 122 ppm of CO2 come from? Well, let’s say we can count on 6 ppm of FF CO2 (5%) and the other 116 being non-human emissions.]
Summation: The Hydrogen Crusade is pointless because
our carbon emissions do not determine either
atmospheric CO2 or the Earth’s temperatures.
Posted at Master Resource is a most encouraging development by the Kansas legislature. The article is Kansas Energy Freedom Now!The whole story is uplifting and I will only repeat here comments on what Kansas resolved and how nearly unanimous support was achieved. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Carrie Barth (R-Kansas, District 5) and Dennis Hedke, unapologetic supporter of the U.S. Constitution, acclaimed author of The Audacity of Freedom (2011), geophysicist, and former member Kansas House of Representatives (former Chair of the House Energy Committee), have drafted a clean and accurate Resolution for the Republican Party. This passed with overwhelming support. It appears to acknowledge that wind is not a good corporate citizen.
Representative Barth in an email:
Our Constitution of the United States gives the power to the people and states, not a dictator movement to control people. The “Green Agenda” is a joke. What they call green energy of wind and solar is anything but green other than it takes a lot of money to mine, build and construct, maintenance for the units, along with remediation when blades break off and the turbines catch on fire. It takes more green money from there to then build transmission lines that take people’s green land when eminent domain is used. Then people see transmission line tariffs on their energy bills. Oh, and wait, your rates never go down even though the energy industry tells you how cost effective it is.
I would refer to wind and solar as “brown or black energy”. They are unreliable and cause brownouts and blackouts. This hurts people, it hurts businesses, and even the ground under them turns brown.
CO2 is not a dangerous gas, nor a pollutant, to be avoided and scare mongered.
The Kansas Republican Party Platform opposes efforts to force communities to engage in sustainable development guidance from the federal government or the United Nations, which are actively attacking our local communities in an effort to implement the Paris Climate Agreement
Kansas is not to be victimized by lobbyists guiding KS into blackouts and profiteering from subsidies, and alliances with the UN Global Agenda
Kansas (Republican Party) supports alternative energy, while continuing to support oil and gas reserves within the State
Kansas will prefer reliable and affordable energy above all
Kansas (Republican Party) will reject energy projects that are obvious land grabs, funding foreign companies with taxpayer-funded grants and tying up valuable Kansas farmland for decades with projects that no company is ultimately held responsible for decommissioning at the end of their useful lives, even violating property rights of farmers affected by the projects
Kansas (Republican Party) opposes so called Cap and Trade schemes
The resolution concludes:
Whereas irrefutable evidence demonstrates that ill-health effects to mankind and the environment are occurring due to the side effects of industrial scale wind installations. These occurrences are widespread, wherever these installations have been constructed;
Therefore, be it resolved, the Republican Party of Kansas, in view of the preponderance of evidence, will support candidates and legislative intent regarding energy policy that will serve to provide protection to our citizens security, physical health, financial health, access to reliable energy and property rights across all Kansas counties.
Master Resource Comment
This is the first time we have seen a legislative body, organize, and nearly 100% agree, that climate change, which it always does and has done, should not be a driver for energy policy. It is the first time we have seen in such a document, a clear rejection of industrial wind and solar profiteers, and references to the irrefutable evidence of harm to the environment, people, and a clear intention to go forward with reliable, responsible, and cost-effective energy policy, while respecting property rights.
Question:
A lot of readers will be wondering how you and Rep Barth achieved a 180-1 vote for this very clear resolution. Given that KS has a pro wind record of placing wind factories in the State, even with a Republican House and Senate, is there a catalyst for this resolution at this time and at this place? Was a lot of lobbying needed, or was this more evolutionary, organic in nature due to the fast paced media pieces on changing perspectives of “renewables and climate”?
Answer: Former Chair, Dennis Hedke:
I perceive much of the reason for the success was due to the fact that the Committee reviewing the Resolution is heavily conservative. They had to present it to the Republican Party Delegates, which are probably also more conservative leaning.
The Legislators, Carrie excluded, are a lot more squishy, caring more about holding on to their seats, than acting with resolve and principle. There may be some renewed pressure on Legislators to resist the absolutely ridiculous reasons for being ‘green’. That remains to be seen. Many of them simply forget that “The Truth Will Set You Free”.
I forgot to answer your question about cost of electricity. My bills range from about .13/kwh to .14/kwh. Prices have increased by about 55% since wind power has been replacing coal and natural gas, commencing around 2011.
A new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit shows global energy consumption rising by 1.8% in 2024, hitting a new record high.
Despite high prices and supply disruptions, the report shows crude oil and natural gas demand climbing in 2024.
Demand for renewable energy is also expected to rise in 2024, climbing by 11%
Global energy and fossil fuel consumption is set to defy wars and high prices and hit a record high level in 2024, led by strong Asian demand, the Economist Intelligence Unit said in a new reporton Wednesday. Next year, global energy consumption is expected to increase by 1.8%, according to the EIU report.
“Despite still-high prices and unsolved supply chain disruptions, demand for fossil fuels will reach record levels, but demand for renewable energy will rise by 11%,” the authors of the report wrote.
Oil demand alone is expected to increase by 1.7% next year, per the report. Natural gas demand is set for 2.2% growth, led by Asia and the Middle East, while Europe will continue to see depressed demand as it looks to save gas and energy.
Renewable capacity additions are set for a record high this year at around 400 gigawatts (GW) and will continue to rise in 2024, according to the report. [Note that electricity generated is much lower than capacity ratings.]
Global oil demand is set to rise by 2.4 million barrels per day (bpd) to a new record-high this year and by another 2.2 million bpd next year amid an improving Chinese economy,OPEC said in its latest monthly report earlier in October, leaving its demand forecast for both 2023 and 2024 unchanged, despite fears of slowing economies and demand destruction. World oil demand is set to reach a record average of 102.1 million bpd in 2023, driven by a 2.3-million-bpd demand increase in the non-OECD region, OPEC noted.
Coal demand globally is also expected to remain at record-high levels this year, said none other than the International Energy Agency (IEA) earlier this year.
IEA Tries Self Fulfilling Prophecy Against Carbon Fuels
In its latest World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency has reiterated its claim that crude oil, natural gas, and coal will peak before 2030.
The agency sees the emergence of a new clean energy economy as providing hope for the way forward, emphasizing the economic case for clean energy technologies.
The report focuses on the importance of resilience and energy security, particularly due to the geopolitical developments currently disrupting energy markets.
Demand for oil, natural gas, and coal is set to peak before 2030, which undermines the case for increasing investment in fossil fuels. This is one of the outtakes from the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, released earlier today. While the agency does admit that investment in fossil fuels will remain necessary, it claims the growth era is over.
Last month, the agency’s head, Fatih Birol, wrote in an op-ed that
oil, gas, and coal demand were all going to peak before 2030
thanks to the increase in EV adoption and slower Chinese GDP growth.
According to the IEA, “The economic case for mature clean energy technologies is strong” and energy security is an increasingly important consideration, too.
“In 2020, one in 25 cars sold was electric; in 2023, this is now one in 5,” the report also said as part of its case for EVs.However, an EV sales database reveals that for the first half of this year, sales of battery electric vehicles, the true EVs, only represented a tenth of total sales. Combined with plug-in hybrids, EV sales accounted for 14.1% of total sales.
OPEC Takes a Different View
When Birol first mentioned peak oil, gas, and coal, he prompted an immediate reaction from OPEC, which slammed the head of the IEA for making unwise predictions that could threaten the world’s energy supply security.
“Such narratives only set the global energy system up to fail spectacularly. It would lead to energy chaos on a potentially unprecedented scale, with dire consequences for economies and billions of people across the world,” OPEC secretary-general Haitham al-Ghais said in September.
The release of the World Energy Outlook may now prompt a similar response from OPEC, which forecast recently that demand for oil is going to continue rising at least until 2045.
‘Any time you have energy, you have to dig something out of the ground’
The under reported truth, however, is that coal is key to the continuation of civilization as we know it. Apart from “providing more than 36 percent of global electricity” and accounting for “nearly one-quarter of the electricity in the United States” (per the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration), coal is necessary in the production of steel and other metals and is used in the manufacturing process of other materials city folk love, including cement. Coal is also critical in bringing about the “green, renewable” future we are told is inevitable (not to mention our first-world luxuries: smartphone batteries, fluorescent lights, computer monitors, etc.).
There are fifty critical minerals and metals in our beautiful black coal, and in the clay beneath needed to produce electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, rechargeable batteries, and so forth. Sarma V. Pisupati, professor of energy and mineral engineering and director of the Center for Critical Minerals at Pennsylvania State University, explains that the United States imports more than 50 percent of forty-three of those elements from other countries, and twelve of those fifty minerals are 100 percent imported.
Such a strong reliance on foreign countries, especially China, which the German Marshall Fund of the United States reports “dominates global critical mineral supply chains, accounting for approximately 60 percent of worldwide production and 85 percent of processing capacity,” is “an urgent matter of national security,” says Pisupati.
Which is where Pennsylvania — and Penn State — come in.
Data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) shows that “abandoned mine problem areas have been identified in forty-three of Pennsylvania’s sixty-seven counties.” Pennsylvania has some 5,000 miles worth of streams that have been polluted by acid mine drainage (AMD). In my own backyard (in Centre and Clearfield Counties), abandoned strip mines, described by our township solicitor as “lunar in nature,” are a playground for us backwoods folk. “The strippin’s” are where teenagers meet up to party under cover of steep high walls, coal refuse (or “boney”) piles and scraggly trees, side-by-side riders rip over rutted roads in packs each weekend and hillbillies sight-in their hunting rifles.
Yet in recent years, these “legacy coal mines,” as Pisupati calls them, have been garnering attention. Not because environmental agencies have seen the light about how important coal is, the strides the industry has made to purify the process, or because they’ve realized that re-mining is sometimes the only way to get to underground water discharges and address them, but because coal and its byproducts are a source of the critical elements necessary for a “greener” future.
“Because the old [pre-1977] coal mines were not under the new regulations, they were left abandoned, and there is a lot of water flowing through those old mines which gets oxidized, and there is a lot of acid coming out of that,” Pisupati says. “That acid actually brings out the rare earth elements and critical elements from the mines, so nature is doing some of this extraction for us. It could be viewed as a blessing in disguise, because right now we are importing these critical minerals from elsewhere.
“Acid mine drainage is flowing through those old mines and polluting our streams, so if we treat them to get these elements out, we’re actually doing a favor, and taxpayers don’t have to pay to clean these waters up if we generate money off of [the pollution]. There is work to be done, but it can be achieved so we can reduce our imports, we can make these materials right here, and we can clean up our environment.”
“Waste” produced from extracting and burning coal is increasingly becoming a misnomer. That “boney,” comprised of low-quality, “junk” coal mounded together with shale, clay, and other materials discarded during the mining process, for instance, is strewn in mountains, or “spoil piles,” throughout the region, “and the fly ash associated with coal-fired power plants are a potential source of critical minerals,” reports Penn State.
At one time, this low-quality coal and boney had no use and was piled up along old mines. Mountains of it literally surround my hometown. But now boney can be used in cogeneration (“cogen”) plants to generate electricity. According to Arnold, cogen plants “use fluidized bed combustors that operate at a lower temperature to capture all the sulfur.”
So if mining coal has the effect of unearthing the rare earth elements we so desperately need to combat “climate change,” and we need coal to make the cement and steel necessary to erect solar panels and wind turbines, and re-mining old abandoned mines offers the opportunity to extract even more rare earth elements while also cleaning up badly polluted lands and waters — the government should be handing out mining permits liberally, right?
“Getting remining permits is not easy,” Pisupati says.
Not only is obtaining a permit an expensive, onerous challenge, but one of the area’s few remaining coal operators likens getting a mining permit to “a criminal sentence.” It used to be that DEP inspectors would work with operators, or as a former operator puts it, “They’d tell me what we needed to do, and we’d do it.” Yet as fossil fuels, and coal in particular, are increasingly demonized, the regulatory rope tightens, unfriendly administrations impose harsh mandates.
And mining coal becomes more of a complicated, extremely costly burden
than the prosperity-generating industry that
helped the US win back-to-back world wars.
“You can’t get anything done with DEP breathing down your neck,” one coal operator tells me. “When you do get it done, it costs four times what it should and takes four times as long. And while green energy doesn’t work, and gets subsidized, we can’t survive without coal — and coal gets taxed like crazy!”
To mine coal, you see, you must first get that permit, which can take months, if not years. The engineering required to apply for the permit could run you in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, before you’ve dug so much as a shovel full of dirt.
Next, you invest millions in heavy equipment (a new Caterpillar 992 loader runs about $1.8 million — you’ll need a couple at each job site), fuel, wages, etc. You have payments on those machines and payroll to meet, so you hope your permit gets issued quickly!
Then the coal operator must post a performance bond, carefully calculated on each cubic yard of dirt he moves, combined with the prevailing price of diesel fuel. After the operator has removed the coal, but before he backfills, he must purchase and add hundreds of tons of limestone per acre to offset the possibility that he has exposed acidic rock that could affect nearby water quality. Meanwhile, his every move is scrutinized, and he is frequently fined by an overzealous career bureaucrat.
Then, if you happen to “touch” water associated with an old mine that predates the 1977 regulations, says Rachel Gleason, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, “You’re responsible for treating it for the rest of its life.”
“Meanwhile,” as an operator remarks, “it’s been making a mess for 100 years.”
Gleason points out that all active coal operations in Pennsylvania are fully bonded to the cost for DEP to reclaim them, to the tune of more than $1 billion. Despite the operators putting up — and risking — so much of their own fortunes, ESG initiatives inhibiting would-be operators’ abilities to get bank loans, and the fact that operators must have a proven track record to be permitted at all, there is “definitely a lot of regulatory uncertainty” that makes it “more difficult to mine, more expensive, and the [regulations] are constantly changing.
“When efforts to shut down industry outright aren’t accomplished,
they try to kill the industry with the strike of a thousand swords.”
“If you take a step forward,” an operator tells me, “the inspectors just want to push you a step back.”
Pisupati acknowledges there are “some gaps still in knowing how much we have, what we have, and where we have [it],” and that more exploration is needed to find the highest concentrations of critical elements. He says we “definitely need a project like the Manhattan Project to get out of this import-reliance situation.”
We also need to raise awareness to “every walk of life that they are using these rare earth elements in their daily life and to educate them about their importance and dependency [and how extracting them] can revitalize the entire region that is affected by abandoned coal mines,” Pisupati adds.
As for awareness, one coal operator offers this as a starting point: “Any time you have energy, you have to dig something out of the ground,” he says. “But you never see a billboard with a windmill up top and a coal mine underneath saying, ‘We’re getting our rare earths out of here for this windmill!’”
The latest edition of the State of the Climate Report, published this week in the journal BioScience, begins rather ominously: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory.” These sentences are meant to instill abject fear and evoke a sense of doom in the general public. However, they are patently absurd and ought to be disregarded outright.
Like almost every climate change report I’ve come across, the 2023 State of the Climate Report is full of red herrings and bombastic assertions that are intended to alarm the public into believing that climate change is an existential threat that must be stopped at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage and unintended consequences that their so-called solutions would inevitably bring to bear.
But what I find most alarming about this particular report, which 15,000 scientists signed, is the anti-human and anti-progress message that lies at the heart of it.
These messages are most prevalent in the part of the report titled “Scientists’ warning recommendations,” which includes “coordinated efforts” intended to “support a broader agenda focused on holistic and equitable climate policy.”
The authors erroneously claim that “economic growth” is the driver of the climate crisis and that it prevents them from achieving their “social, climate, and biodiversity goals.” Unsurprisingly, they lay the blame on the world’s most prosperous nations, particularly those located in the “global north,” which they argue are preventing the need for “decoupling economic growth from harmful environmental impacts.” As such, they suggest we “change our economy to a system that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption by the wealthy.”
As it turns out, this type of economic system has been implemented
many times over, most notably in the Soviet Union.
The results, in every single case, were downright dreadful.
In other words, these scientists dismiss the fact that economic growth under a free-market capitalist system, which has produced myriad technological advancements and innovations that have significantly improved the human experience in recent centuries, is a net positive. Casting economic growth and free enterprise in a mostly negative light is ludicrous. Thanks to economic growth over the past few decades alone, humans are living longer than ever before, in less poverty than ever before, are able to communicate across the world in the blink of an eye, and live more comfortably than ever before.
In their misguided worldview, economic growth is a net harm because it does not automatically allocate resources in an equitable manner.Spoiler alert: neither does socialism. Apparently, these scientists are unaware that as President John F. Kennedy famously put it, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Aside from their anti-economic growth stance, the authors also recommend “eliminating” “fossil fuels” and “transitioning away from coal” while calling for “funding to build out renewable energy capacity.” Based on statements like these, I wonder if the scientists who produce these types of reports are delusional.
If we were to eliminate fossil fuels and stop using coal as a fuel source,
the entire global economy would grind to a halt,
billions of people would suffer, and millions would die.
But maybe that is the point, or at least a part of it. One of the last recommendations the scientists make is downright chilling: “gradually decrease the human population.”
Make no mistake, for decades, climate-change zealots have been calling for degrowth and depopulation. From Paul Ehrlich to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the list is too long to catalogue. For some strange reason, this call for depopulation and degrowth is resonating across academia and the illiberal Left. Even worse, it seems to be in vogue among today’s youth.
Across the West or “global north,” birth rates have been declining precipitously. In many countries, including the United States, the birth rate has dropped below the level of replacement.
Sadly, the climate change-industrial complex, a multi-trillion-dollar money machine, has irrevocably corrupted the once-hallowed scientific community. As most scientists know, though are probably less-than-willing to go on record for fear of cancelation and loss of grants and such, climate change is not an existential threat. However, if we unflinchingly take their recommendations as gospel, and plow forward with their idiotic degrowth and depopulation agenda, you better believe humanity will face an existential crisis like none before: the possible extinction of the human species.
Addendum: Zero CO2 is a Suicide Pact (Dr. Happer)
Biznews published excerpts from an interview with Dr. William Happer Sign Elimination of CO2 is a suicide pact. Text below in italiics with my bolds and added images.
Overview
It’s safe to assume no one consciously sets out to challenge a narrative as deeply entrenched and emotionally charged as climate change. Dr William Happer, an American physicist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University, certainly didn’t. It was only in 1991, upon Happer’s appointment by President George W Bush as director of Energy Research in the US Department of Energy, that his interaction with climate change authorities – and their refusal to engage in customary scientific debate on climate change – piqued his interest.
Thereafter, Happer was dismissed for his contrarian views and ‘head butting’ with climate change luminary Al Gore, only to be brought back to Washington by former president Donald Trump in 2018. BizNews spoke to Happer about his prodigious career and discovery that the burgeoning climate change hysteria had no scientific basis. Happer meticulously detailed why and how CO2, the “demon gas”, is not a pollutant but is essential to mankind’s prosperity.
Professor William Happer on the effect of carbon dioxide on planet Earth
Carbon dioxide is what drives life on Earth. The growth of plants depends on carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide in the air diffuses into the leaves of plants through little holes, and the plants combine this with water and it requires energy. This energy comes from sunlight. So, the combination of carbon dioxide, the so-called pollutant, water and sunlight is what makes life. You know, that’s what we live on. And carbon dioxide at the present time is much lower [in] concentration than has prevailed over most of geological history. [During] most of geological history, it’s pretty clear from proxy records, CO2 levels have been two or three times greater than they are now.
We probably don’t have enough fossil fuels around to restore those levels
where plants evolve and where they function best.
But even the relatively small increases we’ve had – from maybe 280, 300 parts per million 200 years ago to a little over 400 today – that’s not a big increase. It’s 35%, maybe. But it has caused greening all around the Earth. You can see that from satellites looking down over the last two or three decades. Earth is getting greener. Especially arid regions are getting greener. You know, the edges of the great deserts of the Earth are shrinking. They’re not growing, they are shrinking.
They’re shrinking because of more CO2. And the reason is that there are a number of benefits from more CO2, but one of the most important ones is that if there’s more CO2, plants can live with less water. They don’t waste as much water with more CO2 in the air, because they grow leaves with fewer holes in them so they don’t leak as much water. And the little holes, the stomata – the little mouths, that’s what it means and it’s where the CO2 comes in – don’t open as wide. So, the problem with sucking CO2 out of the air, which is what plants have to do, is for every CO2 molecule that diffuses into your leaf, you lose a hundred water molecules diffusing the other way. This is a real dilemma for the planet.
It’s true. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it warms the Earth,
but the warming isn’t enough to matter.
It’s very small. And so, it’s probably beneficial on balance. If you double CO2, it seems like a lot, that’s a 100% increase of CO2. How much does that affect the cooling radiation that goes off to space? That sounds like a lot, but in effect it only decreases the radiation to space by 1%. So, 100% increase of CO2, 1% decrease in radiation to space. It’s a very small effect, and you don’t have to change the Earth’s temperature very much or cloudiness very much to bring it back into equilibrium with the situation before you increase the CO2.
So, it’s an ineffective climate influencer. Yet you get this demon gas that is going to cause us all to boil to death or something like that. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a trivial gas, but it’s very, very good for life on Earth. More CO2 has been wonderful for mankind because it helps provide the abundance of food we have today and it’s caused no harm, whatsoever.
On climate change activism having become like a religious cult
It is a religious cult for many people. Many people have stopped believing in traditional religions, you know? So, they don’t believe in God, but they need something beyond themselves to believe in. What could be more noble than saving the planet? “The planet is threatened by the demon gas CO2, so we’re going to save it.” The fact that it means essentially suicide for the human race doesn’t get into their brains. But that is what it means.
You cannot immediately eliminate CO2 and let the human population survive.
It can’t be done. So, it’s a suicide pact, you know, what is being proposed.
The movement is a joke – a little bit – but it’s not so different from a coalition of organised crime and religious fanaticism. And the religious fanatics … You know, you don’t argue with someone about their religion. This is not a joking matter. It brings crusades and religious wars and God knows what. So, that’s a big problem. There is this religious aspect; so many people now have been brainwashed into thinking there really is an emergency. And anyone who stands in the way of saving the planet is Satan incarnate. They are sincere people but they’re just badly misled.
Many of the most vociferous climate emergency folks; if you press them, they say, “Yes, the real problem is not fossil fuels, it’s human beings. You know, there are just too many people. We should not have more than a billion people.” We’re roughly eight billion now, so that means seven out of eight of us should disappear from the planet. This is extremely dangerous. It’s an evil cult.
On what has been lost owing to climate hysteria
The alarmist community recognised 20 years ago that the warming is a lot less than their models had predicted. “Just you wait,” they’d say, “Sooner or later it will warm. But in the meantime, we need something else to keep the alarm going.” And they seized on extreme weather and rising sea levels and ocean acidification… Things that really were not warming. And they changed the name from global warming to climate change because warming wasn’t going to cut it. There wasn’t enough warming.
Earth has an unstable climate which isn’t very well understood to this day, and it would be wonderful if we understood it better. But I think our ability to understand it has been set back very badly by the climate hysteria. So, what could’ve been 20, 30 years of good, basic research and real understanding of the climate has been wasted with hysteria about this false climate emergency, which does not exist. In the meantime, the real parts of the climate – which would be good to understand – have been ignored.
Irina Slav lists the rules strictly followed by leaders of the Great Energy Transition at her substack Irina Slav on Energy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
We call them climate crusaders, climateers, a cult, and other, less polite words. Essentially, however, the transition leadership is a club and I only say this because I’m in a good mood this week, seeing as the local case of global boiling has ended for the year.
Like every club, Transition Club has rules and we all must give its members top marks for following these, not least because following these rules is often quite challenging. Here’s why.
Rule #1: We do not talk about the problems. (Unless we absolutely have to.)
The IEA this week made its fans happy by releasing a new report that said the world needed to replace and build 50 million miles of transmission lines to make the transition work.
This would only take $600 billion annually by 2030, which is double the current investment rate for transmission lines. For context, the global transmission line network is half the length the IEA says we need right now.
The expansion needs to take place by 2040 because Climate Targets. In other words, the world needs to double its transmission line network in a matter of less than 20 years… after it took a century to build all the lines we currently have. Realistic, right?
In fairness, the IEA does hint that there might be a slight problem with securing all of the raw materials necessary for this enormous undertaking. It absolutely had to admit it, what with miners crying shortage all the time, annoying people. But that cannot stop the transition. Else we get global broiling.
Rule #2: Facts are obsolete. Only the transition matters. (Until facts punch you in the face.)
The UK government had a plan to replace gas heating systems in homes with hydrogen. It even scheduled local trials to see if it would work. I know, that’s almost unheard of in transition circles but they did. Following massive opposition from the target community, the government ditched the trial plan and started mumbling that maybe hydrogen for heating is not such a marvelous idea.
The facts: hydrogen — green hydrogen, that is — is expensive.
All hydrogen is also dangerous, which makes
the green variety even more expensive.
At the time the plans were made, these facts were shunned. The opposition of the locals in the village of Whitby, however, prompted their return to the scene, ultimately leading to this piece of news: Hydrogen for UK home heating should be ruled out, says infrastructure adviser
Summed up, the match between facts and fantasy in hydrogen sounds like this, per the FT: ““We do not see any role for hydrogen in the future of home heating,” said Nick Winser, NIC commissioner, arguing it was “simply not ready at scale” and risked being an inefficient use of green electricity.”
Rule #3: Tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it
Okay, this one is from a quote and here’s the whole quote:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
It kind of feels I can add nothing constructive to this description of the climate change narrative, especially if you consider the source, which appears to be (though not verbatim, I understand) a little book called Mein Kampf. I mean, if a tactic was tried in one context and it worked splendidly, you can totally make it work in another, and I’m not being ironic. The tactic does work.
It’s only too bad “the State” cannot shield the people from
the consequences of the lie for very long.
In Europe, we are witnessing in real time how the consequences, from which governments have been unable to shield their populations, are causing a turning political tide, with voters electing parties that do not prioritise the transition.
Land area required for wind farms to power London UK.
Rule #4: If it’s failing, double down
The countries with the greatest wind and solar power generation capacity in the EU also have some of the highest electricity prices. This is a mystery to absolutely no one with rudimentary mental acuity. And yet the billions continue flowing into wind and solar. And then, once a gas crunch hits, they start flowing into households.
Wind and solar clearly cannot work at the scale their fans want them to work. It is physically and financially impossible for them to make sense at that scale at this point in time. The evidence is there on a daily basis, courtesy of Electricity Maps and, I’m sure, other real-time tracking websites.
Transition Club has no truck with evidence, however, unless it’s the right kind of evidence, such as record-setting wind/solar output for some day or another. The rest is dismissed as irrelevant, disinformation, or simply ignored. And the billions keep flowing because there are targets to be hit in wind and solar installations. Whatever it takes.
Rule #5: Words and numbers are weapons
Old but gold and put to good use by the Club. All the talk about global boiling, the highway to hell, the accelerating extreme weather, the climate catastrophe and all the rest of it are water to the Transition Club agitprop mill. It keeps the lie going.
Numbers are even better: from the 99% of climate scientists who are in agreement about the climate and related catastrophies to all the CO2 emission updates and the horrific temperature readings from this summer we get actual numbers that stoke up fears that the planet is dying and we’re on our way out with it unless we kill the oil and gas industry and go full-wind/solar.
Or unless we check how the authors of the 99% consensus study came to their conclusion and what their sample size was, what the significance of those emission updates is for the total content of CO2 in the atmosphere, and how those temperatures were measured during the summer.
Rule #6: Questions are denial
This rule evolved organically from following all the others and sprouted actual disinformation laws, at least in the EU, for now, and not-so-official reporting rules for the media that require the climate narrative to be reported as fact despite evidence to the contrary, said evidence being dismissed as science denial and denialist propaganda, even when — and perhaps especially when — it comes from actual scientists.
Apparently, these days there are two kinds of scientists,the right and the wrong kind. The wrong kind are those asking questions, even though
science is by definition a process that involves a lot of question-asking.
Per the Oxford Dictionary science means “the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.”
Not in the transition era, it doesn’t. In the transition era, there is a right kind of observation and computer modelling to replace experimentation and testing of theories against evidence. Then there is the wrong kind, which is any systematic study of the physical and natural world that questions the right kind, using evidence.
The big news this week is the breakdown of Climate “Loss and Damge” talks in preparation for the Dubai COP to start end of November. The news report is repeated widely with the same headline and content. Example from Jakarta Post, Oct. 21, 2023: Climate ‘loss and damage’ talks end in failure
A crucial meeting on climate “loss and damages” ahead of COP28 ended in failure Saturday, with countries from the global north and south unable to reach an agreement, according to sources involved in the talks. The agreement to set up a dedicated fund to help vulnerable countries cope with climate “loss and damage” was a flagship achievement of last year’s COP27 talks in Egypt.
But countries left the details to be worked out later. A series of talks held this year have tried to tease out consensus on fundamentals like the structure, beneficiaries and contributors — a key issue for richer nations who want China to pay into the fund.
The failure “is a clear indication of the deep chasm between rich and poor nations”, Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy for Climate Action Network International, said in a statement to AFP on Saturday. “Developed countries must be held accountable for their shameless attempts to push the World Bank as the host of the fund, their refusal todiscuss the necessary scale of finance, and their blatant disregard for their responsibilities” under the terms of already established international climate agreements, he said.
At Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, governments tasked the committee with working out what a new loss and damage fund for climate victims should look like and present their proposals to Cop28 in November.
The fund is supposed to channel money to people who have suffered
loss and damage caused by climate change. This could mean rebuilding homes
after a hurricane or supporting farmers displaced by recurrent drought.
Failure to reach consensus risks delaying support to those in need.
But developing countries were incensed by a proposal to host the fund at the World Bank, painting it as a US power grab. And rich-poor divides persisted on how to define the “vulnerable” groups eligible for funds and who gets to control spending.
Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta is a Cuban diplomat and chair of the G77+China bloc, which represents all the developing countries.
Speaking from Aswan, he told reporters on Thursday: “At this late hour, a small group of nations responsible for the most significant proportion of the stock of greenhouse gases have tried to bargain potential support for a Fund on one side with eligibility and administrative arrangements.”
Developing nations have argued that the World bank is too slow, inefficient,
unaccountable and lacks the organisational culture to tackle climate change.
He said that consultations with the Washington-DC based bank had “displayed clearly” that it was “not fit for purpose in relation to what we’re looking for” and the fund should be set up as part of the United Nations instead.
Who benefits?
The second main division is over which countries are prioritised for funding. Developed countries want the funds to be allocated “based on vulnerability”.
There is no clear definition of vulnerability and Cuesta said this criteria would impede the fund’s ability to respond to recent climate-related floods in middle-income countries like Pakistan and Libya.
Developing countries fear that in practice “vulnerability” criteria mean funds will be restricted to just the world’s least developed countries (LDCs) and small islands developing states (Sids).
The 46 LDCS are mostly in Africa and parts of Asia. Major nations like
China, India, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa are neither LDCs or Sids.
Further splits include developing nations wanting a target of $100 billion of funding a year by 2030 to be included and developed countries wanting to earmark budgets for slow onset events, recovery and reconstruction and small countries.
Negotiators have almost agreed one thorny issue though. The US had pushed for the fund’s board to include seats for nations that paid into the fund, sparking accusations that they were trying to rig the board in rich nations’ favour.
Friday morning’s draft said there would be 12 board members from developed countries and 14 from developing ones. There could also be non-voting members representing indigenous peoples and climate-induced migrants, although negotiators have yet to agree that.
Climate Loss and Damage is a Legal and Moral House of Cards
Mike Hulme explained the house of cards underlying the claims for compensation from extreme weather loss and damage. He addressed this directly in his 2016 article Can (and Should) “Loss and Damage” be Attributed to Climate Change?. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
One of the outcomes of the eighteenth negotiating session of the Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Doha last December, was the agreement to establish institutional arrangements to “address loss and damage associated with the impacts of climate change.” This opens up new possibilities for allocating international climate adaptation finance to developing countries. A meeting this week in Bonn (25–27 February), co-organized by the UN University Institute for Environmental and Human Security and the Loss and Damage in Vulnerable Countries Initiative, is bringing together various scholars and policymakers to consider how this decision might be implemented, possibly by as early as 2015.
At the heart of the loss and damage (L&D) agenda is the idea of attribution—that specific losses and damages in developing countries can be “associated with the impacts of climate change,” where “climate change” means human-caused alterations to climate. It is therefore not just any L&D that qualify for financial assistance under the Convention; it is L&D attributable to or “associated with” a very specific causal pathway.
Developing countries face some serious difficulties—at best, ambiguities—
with this approach to directing climate adaptation finance.
This is particularly so given the argument that the new science of weather attribution opens the possibility for a framework of legal liability for L&D, which has recently gained prominence (see here and here). Weather attribution science seeks to generate model-based estimates of the likelihood that human influence on the climate caused specific weather extremes.
Weather attribution should not, however, be used to make the funding of climate adaptation in developing countries dependent on proving liability for weather extremes.
There are four specific problems with using the post-Doha negotiations on L&D to advance the legal liability paradigm for climate adaptation. First, with what level of confidence can it be shown that specific weather or climate hazards in particular places are caused by anthropogenic climate change, as opposed to a naturally varying climate? Weather attribution scientists claim that such knowledge is achievable, but this knowledge will be partial, probabilistic, and open to contestation in the courts.
Second, even if such scientific claims were defendable, how will we define “anthropogenic?” Weather attribution science—if it is to be used to support a legal liability paradigm—needs to be capable of distinguishing between the meteorological effects of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and those from land use change, and between the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, black carbon (soot), and aerosol emissions. Each of these sources and types of climate-altering agents implicates different social and political actors and interests, so to establish liability in the courts, any given weather or climate hazard would need to be broken down into a profile of multiple fractional attributions. This adds a further layer of complexity and contestation to the approach.
Third, L&D may often be as much—or more—a function of levels of social and infrastructural development as it is a function of weather or climate hazard. Whether or not an atmospheric hazard is (partially) attributable to a liable human actor or institution is hardly the determining factor on the extent of the L&D. A legal liability framework based on attribution science promotes a “pollutionist approach” to climate adaptation and human welfare rather than a “developmentalist approach.” Under a pollutionist approach, adaptation is primarily about avoiding the dangers of human-induced climate change rather than building human resilience to a range of weather risks irrespective of cause. This approach has very specific political ramifications, serving some interests rather than others (e.g., technocratic and centralized control of adaptation funding over values-centered and decentralized control).
Finally, if such a legal framework were to be adopted, then what account should be taken of “gains and benefits” that might accrue to developing countries as a result of the impacts of climate change? Not all changes in weather and climate hazard as a result of human influence are detrimental to human welfare, and the principle of symmetry would demand that a full cost-benefit analysis lie at the heart of such a legal framework. This introduces another tier of complexity and contestation.
Following Doha and the COP18, the loss and damage agenda now has institutional force, and the coming months and years will see rounds of technical and political negotiation about how it may be put into operation. This agenda, however, should not place climate adaptation funding into the framework of legal liability backed by the new science of weather attribution.
In this third and final review I survey the nascent science of extreme weather event attribution. The article proceeds by examining the field in four stages: motivations for extreme weather attribution, methods of attribution, some example case studies and the politics of weather event Attribution.
Hulme concludes by discussing the political hunger for scientific proof in support of policy actions.
But Hulme et al. (2011) show why such ambitious claims are unlikely to be realised. Investment in climate adaptation, they claim, is most needed “… where vulnerability to meteorological hazard is high, not where meteorological hazards are most attributable to human influence” (p.765). Extreme weather attribution says nothing about how damages are attributable to meteorological hazard as opposed to exposure to risk; it says nothing about the complex political, social and economic structures which mediate physical hazards.
And separating weather into two categories — ‘human-caused’ weather
and ‘tough-luck’ weather – raises practical and ethical concerns about
any subsequent investment allocation guidelines which excluded
the victims of ‘tough-luck weather’ from benefiting from adaptation funds.
One of the biggest and most contentious issues in climate politics is the provision of money to help poorer countries cut emissions and protect themselves from climate impacts. In 2009, wealthy nations pledged to “mobilise” $100bn in “climate finance” annually by 2020 to help vulnerable nations deal with climate change. As the title notes, even now the target has not been met.
Politicians and observers have warned that this failure could undermine trust between nations as they head into negotiations in Dubai. What is more, there are widespread concerns about the quality of finance being offered, with questions surrounding the use of loans instead of grants, different definitions of “climate finance” and insufficient funding for adaptation efforts.
In this article, which updates and builds on a previous analysis published in 2018, Carbon Brief assesses the state of international climate finance as nations prepare for the next COP. It uses the latest numbers collated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of mostly wealthy nations, many of which are responsible for contributing climate finance.
The OECD, a Paris-based intergovernmental economic organisation, asks its 36 member countries to report on their foreign aid, including climate finance. The data captures climate finance that is both bilateral (country to country) and multilateral (via international institutions) It also gives detailed information about funded projects. (The OECD calls this database “climate-related development finance” rather than strictly climate finance).
Key takeaways from 2015-2016 Report
Donor governments gave climate finance totalling $34bn in 2015 and $37bn in 2016, according to OECD estimates (note that this is not a full estimate of money counting towards the $100bn pledge – see below for more).
Japan was the largest donor, giving $10.3bn per year (bn/yr) on average over the two years. It was followed, in order, by Germany, France, the UK and the US.
India was the largest recipient on average, receiving $2.6bn/yr. It was followed, in order, by Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand
The single largest “country-to-country” flow was an average yearly $1.6bn from Japan to India.
The US was the top contributor to the multilateral Green Climate Fund (GCF) in 2016. (However, the US has now ended its support for the GCF).
Around $16bn/yr went to mitigation-only projects, compared to $9bn for adaptation-only projects. Around 42% of the finance consisted of “debt instruments”, such as loans.
Key takeaways from 2018-2019 Report
In 2019, the OECD found that climate finance had reached $79.6bn, up just 2% from 2018, and while official figures for 2020 are not yet available, Bloomberg reported that rich countries reckon they had raised $88-90bn, as of October 2021.
The shares attributed to countries are based on analysis by the World Resources Institute (WRI) of bilateral and multilateral development funds that can be traced to Annex II nations. These roughly align with the OECD’s figures, which are not broken down by country but, like the WRI’s, are partly derived from Annex II nations’ reports to the UNFCCC.
The remaining finance, indicated by the grey bars in the chart above, is made up of export credits, additional outflows from multilateral institutions and, most of all, private contributions by businesses and philanthropic groups (this is an approximation based on the OECD’s total values with the WRI estimates removed).
Private funds count towards the $100bn target, but the WRI did not include them in its analysis as the data is less complete and difficult to attribute to individual nations. The OECD estimates that annual private finance has been stable at around $14bn since 2017.
The top five finance providers – Japan, Germany, France, the UK and the US – have remained the same since Carbon Brief’s last analysis for 2015/16. These five nations contributed more than 60% of the 2018/19 finance. While Japan, Germany and France appear to be by far the biggest contributors, the WRI warns that the lack of clarity around climate finance reporting means the numbers should be approached with caution.
As in Carbon Brief’s previous analysis, India was by far the biggest recipient of climate finance, with more than double the funds received by the next largest, Bangladesh.Japan and Germany provided about 94% of the funds to India, almost all in the form of loans.
Implications
Climate finance figures are widely contested, with many global-south nations questioning how much funding is new and not simply diverted from other development funds. Criticism has also been levelled at the overreliance on loans and the inclusion of support for “high-efficiency” coal plants by Japan and Australia.
A recent assessment prepared by the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance concluded that developing countries require $5.8-5.9tn up to 2030 in order to fund less than half of the actions outlined in their official climate plans – although some of this would be funded domestically.
This year’s negotiations are likely to spark calls for a significant scaling up of finance, although the slow pace of proceedings means that, for the time being, the focus of new goal discussions will primarily be on agreeing a framework for future talks.
Nevertheless, there are various issues that could be on the table during this next phase, including ensuring that more money is spent on adaptation.
The Paris Agreement specifies that climate finance should aim for an even split between these two categories, but funding has long been skewed towards mitigation. According to Jan Kowalzig, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam, governments often tend to view such projects as more attractive investments:
“Since [mitigation projects] often have to do with energy, they seem to be more directly linked to a country‘s development, even though, of course, this is a huge misconception given the central (but, for politicians, often less visible) role of adaptation.”
Of the roughly $40bn average for the 2018/19 period, 39% of money went on mitigation, while just 25% went on adaptation – a slightly more even split than was recorded in Carbon Brief’s previous analysis for 2015/16.
However, other estimates, including the OECD’s own climate finance report, suggest a more pronounced split, with around three times as much finance going to mitigation than adaptation in 2018 and 2019.
This imbalance is a major concern amid rapidly escalating climate costs. The UN Environment Programme places current annual adaptation costs for “developing countries” at $70bn, but says they will reach $140-300bn by 2030.
Ensuring adequate adaptation finance in the coming years is, therefore, seen by many vulnerable nations as a key priority for post-2025 climate finance plans as they are developed.
We must also bear in mind that global warming is not the planet’s only challenge. We often hear that it is the defining issue of our time, but it is no such thing. By the 2070s, the IPCC — the U.N. climate change panel — estimates that warming will cost between 0.2 and 2 percent of global GDP. This is certainly a problem, but not the end of world.
Speaking of climate change in catastrophic terms easily makes us ignore bigger problems, including malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria and corruption. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change since the 1970s causes about 140,000 additional deaths each year, and toward the middle of the century will kill 250,000 people annually, mostly in poor countries. This pales in comparison with much deadlier environmental problems such as indoor air pollution, claiming 4.3 million lives annually, outdoor air pollution killing 3.7 million and lack of water and sanitation killing 760,000. Outside of environment, the problems are even bigger: Poverty arguably kills 18 million each year.
Every dollar spent on climate change could instead help save many more people from these more tractable problems. The current approach to subsidize solar and wind arguably saves one life across the century for every $4 million spent — the same expenditure on vaccinations could save 4,000 lives. Each person — and the next president — needs to decide his or her legacy.
Postscript: Financing for Climate Aid is a Fraction of the Full Cost of Climate Crisis Inc.
A fuller accounting of the climate crisis industry more likely exceeds 2,000,000,000,000 US$ per year (2 Trillion)
See Climate Crisis Inc. Update
Jock Finlayson describes how climate change policies are depleting Canadians’ financial means in his article 
Science Matters 