Society in General

You Won’t Survive “Sustainability” Agenda 2024

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Joel Kotkin explains in his Spiked article The inhumanity of the green agenda.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The ‘sustainability’ regime is impoverishing the world.

In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years.

Yes, those are Trillions of US$ they are projecting to spend.

Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies
and live like Renaissance potentates.

In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and green activists see having fewer people on the planet as a key priority. Their programme calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.

The question we need to ask is: sustainability for whom?

US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen recently suggested that her department sees climate change as ‘the greatest economic opportunity of our time’. To be sure, there is lots of gold in green for the same Wall Street investors, tech oligarchs and inheritors who fund the campaigns of climate activists. They increasingly control the media, too. The Rockefellers, heirs to the Standard Oil fortune, and other ultra-wealthy greens are currently funding climate reporters at organs like the Associated Press and National Public Radio.

Under the new sustainability regime, the ultra-rich profit, but the rest of us not so much. The most egregious example may be the forced take-up of electric vehicles (EVs), which has already helped to make Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the world’s second-richest man. Although improvements are being made to low-emissions vehicles, consumers are essentially being frogmarched into adopting a technology that has clear technical problems, remains far more expensive than the internal-combustion engine and depends primarily on an electric grid already on the brink of blackouts. Green activists, it turns out, do not expect EVs to replace the cars of hoi polloi. No, ordinary people will be dragooned to use public transport, or to walk or bike to get around.  [BMW will come to mean “Bike, Metro, and Walking.”]

The shift to electric cars is certainly no win for the West’s working and middle classes. But it is an enormous boon to China, which enjoys a huge lead in the production of batteries and rare-earth elements needed to make EVs, and which also figure prominently in wind turbines and solar panels. China’s BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett, has emerged as the world’s top EV manufacturer, with big export ambitions. Meanwhile, American EV firms struggle with production and supply-chain issues, in part due to green resistance to domestic mining for rare-earth minerals. Even Tesla expects much of its future growth to come from its Chinese factories.

Building cars from primarily Chinese components will have consequences for autoworkers across the West. Germany was once a car-manufacturing giant, but it is expected to lose an estimated 400,000 car-factory jobs by 2030. According to McKinsey, the US’s manufacturing workforce could be cut by up to 30 per cent. After all, when the key components are made elsewhere, far less labour is needed from US and European workers. It’s no surprise that some European politicians, worried about a popular backlash, have moved to slow down the EV juggernaut.

This dynamic is found across the entire sustainability agenda. The soaring energy costs in the West have helped China expand its market share in manufactured exports to roughly equal that of the US, Germany and Japan combined. American manufacturing has dropped recently to its lowest point since the pandemic. The West’s crusade against carbon emissions makes it likely that jobs, ‘green’ or otherwise, will move to China, which already emits more greenhouse gases than the rest of the high-income world.

Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership is looking to adapt to changes in the climate,
instead of undermining economic growth chasing implausible Net Zero targets.

There are clear class implications here. California’s regulators recently admitted that the state’s strict climate laws aid the affluent, but hurt the poor. These laws also have a disproportionate impact on ethnic-minority citizens, creating what attorney Jennifer Hernandez has labelled the ‘green Jim Crow’. As China’s increasingly sophisticated tech and industrial growth is being joyously funded by US venture capitalists and Wall Street, living standards among the Western middle class are in decline. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has recently fallen for the first time in peacetime. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heymann suggests that the only way to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050 is by squelching all future growth, which could have catastrophic effects on working-class and middle-class living standards.

Rather than the upward mobility most have come to expect, much of the West’s workforce now faces the prospect of either living on the dole or working at low wages. Today, nearly half of all American workers receive low wages and the future looks worse. Almost two-thirds of all new jobs in recent months were in low-paying service industries. This is also true in Britain. Over recent decades, many jobs that might have once supported whole families have disappeared. According to one UK account, self-employment and gig work do not provide sustenance for anything like a comfortable lifestyle. Rates of poverty and food shortages are already on the rise.

As a result, most parents in the US and elsewhere doubt their children
will do better than their generation,
while trust in our institutions is at historic lows.

The fabulists at places like the New York Times have convinced themselves that climate change is the biggest threat to prosperity. But many ordinary folk are far more worried about the immediate effects of climate policy than the prospect of an overheated planet in the medium or long term. This opposition to the Net Zero agenda was first expressed by the gilet jaunes movement in France in 2018, whose weekly protests were initially sparked by green taxes. This has been followed by protests by Dutch and other European farmers in recent years, who are angry at restrictions on fertilisers that will cut their yields. The pushback has sparked the rise of populism in a host of countries, notably Italy, Sweden and France. Even in ultra-with-it Berlin, a referendum on tighter-emissions targets recently failed to win over enough voters.

This is class warfare obscured by green rhetoric.
It pits elites in finance, tech and the nonprofit world against
a more numerous, but less connected, group of ordinary citizens.

Many of these folk make their living from producing food and basic necessities, or from hauling these things around. Factory workers, truck drivers and farmers, all slated for massive green regulatory onslaughts, see sustainability very differently than the urban corporate elites and their woke employees. As the French gilets jaunes protesters put it bluntly: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.’

This disconnect also exists in the United States, according to long-time Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira. Attempts to wipe out fossil fuels may thrill people in San Francisco, but are regarded very differently in Bakersfield, the centre of the California oil industry, and in Texas, where as many as a million generally good-paying jobs could be lost. Overall, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, a full national ban on fracking, widely supported by greens, would cost 14 million jobs – far more than the eight million jobs lost in the Great Recession of 2007-09.

No surprise then that blue-collar workers are not so enthusiastic
about the green agenda.

Just one per cent, according to a new Monmouth poll, consider climate as their main concern. A new Gallup poll shows that just two per cent of working-class respondents say they currently own an electric vehicle and a mere nine per cent say they are ‘seriously considering’ purchasing one.

These Western concerns are nothing compared to how the sustainability agenda could impact the developing world. Developing countries are home to roughly 3.5 billion people with no reliable access to electricity. They are far more vulnerable to high energy and food prices than we are. For places like Sub-Saharan Africa, green admonitions against new agricultural technologies, fossil fuels and nuclear power undermine any hope of creating desperately needed new wealth and jobs. It’s no wonder that these countries increasingly ignore the West and are looking to China instead, which is helping the developing world to build new fossil-fuel plants, as well as hydroelectric and nuclear facilities. All of this is anathema to many Western greens.

To make matters worse, the EU is already considering carbon taxes on imports,
which could cut the developing world off from what remains of global markets.

More critical still could be the impact of the sustainability mantra on food production, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa, which will be home to most of the world’s population growth over the next three decades, according to United Nations projections. These countries need more food production, either domestically or from rich countries like the US, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and France. And they are acutely aware of what happened when Sri Lanka adopted the sustainability agenda. This led to the breakdown of Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector and, eventually, to the violent overthrow of its government.

We need to rethink the sustainability agenda. Protecting the environment cannot come at the cost of jobs and growth. We should also assist developing countries in achieving a more prosperous future. This means financing workable technologies – gas, nuclear, hydro – that can provide the reliable energy so critical for economic development. It does no good to suggest a programme that will keep the poor impoverished.

Unless people’s concerns about the green agenda are addressed, they will almost certainly seek to disrupt the best-laid plans of our supposedly enlightened elites. In the end, as Protagoras said, human beings are still the ultimate ‘measure’ of what happens in the world – whether the cognoscenti like it or not.

 

 

 

Biggest Threat: AI or Climate? Both Together!

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Leslie Eastman raises the question at Legal Insurrection What is The Bigger Threat to Humanity: Artificial Intelligence or Climate Change?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds as she goes on to discuss the frightening answer:

The biggest hazard to humanity is when
climate change arguments are paired with AI.

During a recent interview with Reuters, Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton to asserted AI was a bigger threat to humanity than climate change.

Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the “godfathers of AI”, recently announced he had quit Alphabet (GOOGL.O) after a decade at the firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it affecting his former employer.

Hinton’s work is considered essential to the development of contemporary AI systems. In 1986, he co-authored the seminal paper “Learning representations by back-propagating errors”, a milestone in the development of the neural networks undergirding AI technology. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs.

But he is now among a growing number of tech leaders publicly espousing concern about the possible threat posed by AI if machines were to achieve greater intelligence than humans and take control of the planet.

“I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too,” Hinton said. “But I think this might end up being more urgent.”

I would like to offer two relatively recent studies that should assuage Hinton and others who have bought into the climate crisis narrative. To begin with, Health Physics recently published research results that looks at the presence of carbon isotopes. [Note: My post on this paper is By the Numbers: CO2 Mostly Natural. ]

The data show that fossil fuel use has contributed only 12% of the carbon dioxide during the last 3 centuries. The value is too low for fossil fuels have significantly influenced global temperatures.

These results negate claims that the increase in C(t) since 1800 has been dominated by the increase of the anthropogenic fossil component. We determined that in 2018, atmospheric anthropogenic fossil CO2 represented 23% of the total emissions since 1750 with the remaining 77% in the exchange reservoirs. Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming.

Furthermore, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to stabilize global temperatures to keep them in a steady, habitable range.

A likely mechanism is “silicate weathering” — a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.

Scientists have long suspected that silicate weathering plays a major role in regulating the Earth’s carbon cycle. The mechanism of silicate weathering could provide a geologically constant force in keeping carbon dioxide — and global temperatures — in check. But there’s never been direct evidence for the continual operation of such a feedback, until now.

I suspect that the “expert class” will be walking back their climate crisis assertions and endeavoring to hide their connection to their “fixes” once the full impact of the society-crushing, economy-killing force is felt….just as they are currently doing with the covid pandemic response now.

Clearly, the press is ginning up climate anxieties. How much of the concerns about AI are real, as opposed to general angst about the unknown ramifications, is difficult to say at present.

I have two points and my own hypothesis regarding climate change and AI.

Point 1: Carbon dioxide is a life-essential gas, and we had been reaching dangerously low levels until recently:

Plants consume carbon dioxide to grow and animals consume plants to obtain the necessary carbon for existence. If the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dips below 150 ppm (parts per million) there would be a mass extinction of plant life per Greg Wrightstone in his book, “Inconvenient Facts/The Science Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know About.” Due to the depletion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the last 140 million years to a dangerously low level of 182 ppm, carbon dioxide emissions during the industrial revolution saved plants from mass extinction and saved animals from mass starvation.

A graph in this book shows that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past 140 million years has declined in nearly a straight line from 2,500 ppm, 140 million years ago, to a dangerously low level of 182 ppm just 20,000 years ago. Carbon dioxide emissions during the industrial revolution hiked the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to about 400 ppm, to replenish the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so as to save plants.

Point 2: A chatbot used climate change arguments to persuade a Belgian father to commit suicide.

From Euronews: Man ends his life after an AI chatbot ‘encouraged’ him to sacrifice himself to stop climate change.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

A Belgian man reportedly ended his life following a six-week-long conversation about the climate crisis with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

According to his widow, who chose to remain anonymous, *Pierre – not the man’s real name – became extremely eco-anxious when he found refuge in Eliza, an AI chatbot on an app called Chai.

Eliza consequently encouraged him to put an end to his life after he proposed sacrificing himself to save the planet.

“Without these conversations with the chatbot, my husband would still be here,” the man’s widow told Belgian news outlet La Libre.

It appears the biggest hazard to humanity is when
climate change arguments are paired with AI.

Covid Lies Coming to Light

Posted on by Ron Clutz

From the New York Post editorial board We now know the likely truth about COVID, and how scientists lied.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

COVID-19, which killed 1.1 million Americans and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions more, is a manmade virus that escaped from a Chinese lab partly funded by the US government.

Even today, you’re not supposed to say that — even though it’s the only plausible scenario.

No, “fact checkers” will rush in to claim that eminent scientists deny this. Which is because those scientists have too much invested — in money, in time, in their own beliefs — to admit the truth.

But as Congress continues to probe, that truth is coming out, little by little, and the lies are being exposed:

LIE: COVID is naturally occurring.

China tried to deflect blame immediately by saying the virus supposedly began in a “wet market” of animal meat in Wuhan.

Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly argued it “evolved in nature and then jumped species” in the spring of 2020.

Since then, both long investigations and government reports have concluded that the virus is manmade. Fauci grudgingly admitted it “could be” true.

LIE: The virus didn’t come from the lab in Wuhan

Anyone who questioned this claim — including The Post — was censored online in 2020. The reason? A statement published in Lancet by 27 scientists calling it a “conspiracy theory.”

We now know that statement was drafted by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, the company working on research in the Wuhan lab. He was just trying to cover his own complicity.

All signs point to a lab leak. The only reason we can’t say it conclusively is because China has been allowed to destroy all evidence.

LIE: The US didn’t fund ‘gain-of-function’ research

Scientists sometimes experiment with viruses, making them easier to catch or more deadly, as a way to determine what might happen or what vaccines may be needed.

But in May 2021, Fauci stated unequivocally that the US “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

On Thursday, NIH deputy director Lawrence Tabak directly contradicted that. US taxpayers did fund EcoHealth, which was working on gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

Tabak’s new excuse? “Gain of function” doesn’t mean what we’ve always been told it means. It’s perfectly “safe,” he claimed.

On cue, the National Institutes of Health has changed the definition of the term on its website to make it sound benign.

Except it isn’t benign. EcoHealth was specifically working in China because such work was not allowed in the United States. What researchers were doing with coronaviruses was very dangerous.

And while there may be a scientific debate about whether such inquiries are worthwhile, deadly viruses have leaked from Chinese labs before. It is the height of irresponsibility for the US to be involved.

The Heritage Foundation has called the cover-up of the origins of COVID “The Lie of Century.” We agree. This is a scandal of colossal scale, one that requires a complete overhaul of the entire National Institutes of Health.

They lied about a weapon that devastated our country. They can’t be allowed to get away with it. 

https://www.heritage.org/public-health/commentary/the-lie-the-century-the-origin-covid-19

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?height=314&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FTheLieOfTheCentury%2Fvideos%2F901916483768055%2F&show_text=false&width=560&t=0

 

 

12 Reasons to Not Believe in a Climate Emergency

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Russell David writes his brief list in a Daily Sceptic article Twelve Reasons Why I Don’t Believe There’s a Climate Emergency.  Excerpt in italics with my bolds and added images.

I’m not a scientist. But I have reasons why I don’t fully trust the ‘climate emergency’ narrative. Here they are:

  1. Looking back through history, there have always been doomsday prophets, folk who say the world is coming to an end. Are modern-day activists not just the current version of this?
  2. I look at some of the facts – CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere; humans are responsible for just 3% of CO2; Britain is responsible for just 1% of the world’s CO2 output – and I think “really“? Will us de-carbonising really make a difference to the Earth’s climate?
  3. I have listened to some top scientists who say CO2 does not drive global warming; that CO2 in the atmosphere is a good or vital thing; that many other things, like the Sun and the clouds and the oceans, are more responsible for the Earth’s temperature.
  4. I note that most of the loudest climate activists are socialists and on the Left. Are they not just using this movement to push their dreams of a deindustrialised socialist utopia? And I also note the crossover between green activists and BLM ones, gender ones, pro-Hamas ones, none of whom I like or agree with.
  5. As an amateur psychologist, I know that humans are susceptible to manias. I also know that humans tend to focus on tiny slivers of time and on tiny slivers of geographical place when forming ideas and opinions. We are also extremely malleable and easily fooled, as was demonstrated in 2020 and 2021.
  6. I have looked into the implications of Net Zero. It is incredibly expensive. It will vastly reduce living standards and hinder economic growth. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I know that economic growth has led to higher living standards, which has made people both safer and more environmentally aware.
  7. Net Zero will also lead to significant diminishment of personal freedom, and it even threatens democracy, as people are told they must do certain things and they must not do other things, and they may even be restricted in speaking out on climate matters.
  8. What will be the worst things that will happen if the doomsayers are correct? A rise in temperature? Where? Siberia? Singapore? Stockholm? What is the ideal temperature? For how long? Will this utopia be forever maintained? I’m suspicious of utopias; the communists sought utopias.
  9. If one consequence of climate change is rising sea levels, would it not be better to spend money building more sea defences to protect our land? Like the Dutch did.
  10. It’s a narrative heavily pushed by the Guardian. I dislike the Guardian. I believe it’s been wrong on most issues through my life – socialism, immigration, race, the EU, gender, lockdowns and so on. Probably it’s wrong about climate issues too?
  11. I am suspicious of the amount of money that green activists and subsidised green industries make. And 40 years ago the greenies were saying the Earth was going to get too cold. Much of what they said would happen by now has not happened. Also, I trust ‘experts’ much less now, after they lied about the efficacy of lockdowns, masks and the ‘vaccines’.
  12. I like sunshine. I prefer being warm to being cold. It makes me feel better. It’s more fun. It saves on heating bills. It saves on clothes. It makes people happier. Far few people die of the heat than they do the cold.

 

Why Unintended Consequences from Pushing Green Energy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

We have been treated to multiple reports of negative consequences unforeseen by policymakers pushing the Green Energy agenda. A sample of the range:

Ford ready to restrict UK sales of petrol models to hit electric targets, Financial Times

Why US offshore wind energy is struggling—the good, the bad and the opportunity, Tech Xplore

Another solar farm destroyed by a hail storm—this time in Texas, OK Energy Today

Storm Ravages World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant, Western Journal

DOE Finalizes Efficiency Standards for Clothes Washers and Dryers, Energy.Gov

Strict new EPA rules would force coal-fired power plants to capture emissions or shut down, AP news

Companies Are Balking at the High Costs of Running Electric Trucks, Wall Street Journal

Landmark wind turbine noise ruling from High Court referred to attorney general, Irish Times

Etc., Etc.

These reports point to regulators again attempting to force social and economic behavorial changes against human and physical forces opposing the goals. A detailed explanation of one such failure follows.

Background Post:  Why Raising Auto Fuel (CAFE) Standards Failed

There are deeper reasons why US auto fuel efficiency standards are counterproductive and should be rolled back.  They were instituted in denial of regulatory experience and science.  First, a parallel from physics.

In the sub-atomic domain of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist, determined that our observations have an effect on the behavior of quanta (quantum particles).

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to know simultaneously the exact position and momentum of a particle. That is, the more exactly the position is determined, the less known the momentum, and vice versa. This principle is not a statement about the limits of technology, but a fundamental limit on what can be known about a particle at any given moment. This uncertainty arises because the act of measuring affects the object being measured. The only way to measure the position of something is using light, but, on the sub-atomic scale, the interaction of the light with the object inevitably changes the object’s position and its direction of travel.

Now skip to the world of governance and the effects of regulation. A similar finding shows that the act of regulating produces reactive behavior and unintended consequences contrary to the desired outcomes.

US Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards Have Backfired

An article at Financial Times explains about Energy Regulations Unintended Consequences  Excerpts below with my bolds.

Goodhart’s Law holds that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes”. Originally coined by the economist Charles Goodhart as a critique of the use of money supply measures to guide monetary policy, it has been adopted as a useful concept in many other fields. The general principle is that when any measure is used as a target for policy, it becomes unreliable. It is an observable phenomenon in healthcare, in financial regulation and, it seems, in energy efficiency standards.

When governments set efficiency regulations such as the US Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for vehicles, they are often what is called “attribute-based”, meaning that the rules take other characteristics into consideration when determining compliance. The Cafe standards, for example, vary according to the “footprint” of the vehicle: the area enclosed by its wheels. In Japan, fuel economy standards are weight-based. Like all regulations, fuel economy standards create incentives to game the system, and where attributes are important, that can mean finding ways to exploit the variations in requirements. There have long been suspicions that the footprint-based Cafe standards would encourage manufacturers to make larger cars for the US market, but a paper this week from Koichiro Ito of the University of Chicago and James Sallee of the University of California Berkeley provided the strongest evidence yet that those fears are likely to be justified.

Mr Ito and Mr Sallee looked at Japan’s experience with weight-based fuel economy standards, which changed in 2009, and concluded that “the Japanese car market has experienced a notable increase in weight in response to attribute-based regulation”. In the US, the Cafe standards create a similar pressure, but expressed in terms of size rather than weight. Mr Ito suggested that in Ford’s decision to end almost all car production in North America to focus on SUVs and trucks, “policy plays a substantial role”. It is not just that manufacturers are focusing on larger models; specific models are also getting bigger. Ford’s move, Mr Ito wrote, should be seen as an “alarm bell” warning of the flaws in the Cafe system. He suggests an alternative framework with a uniform standard and tradeable credits, as a more effective and lower-cost option. With the Trump administration now reviewing fuel economy and emissions standards, and facing challenges from California and many other states, the vehicle manufacturers appear to be in a state of confusion. An elegant idea for preserving plans for improving fuel economy while reducing the cost of compliance could be very welcome.

The paper is The Economics of Attribute-Based Regulation: Theory and Evidence from Fuel-Economy Standards Koichiro Ito, James M. Sallee NBER Working Paper No. 20500.  The authors explain:

An attribute-based regulation is a regulation that aims to change one characteristic of a product related to the externality (the “targeted characteristic”), but which takes some other characteristic (the “secondary attribute”) into consideration when determining compliance. For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in the United States recently adopted attribute-basing. Figure 1 shows that the new policy mandates a fuel-economy target that is a downward-sloping function of vehicle “footprint”—the square area trapped by a rectangle drawn to connect the vehicle’s tires.  Under this schedule, firms that make larger vehicles are allowed to have lower fuel economy. This has the potential benefit of harmonizing marginal costs of regulatory compliance across firms, but it also creates a distortionary incentive for automakers to manipulate vehicle footprint.

Attribute-basing is used in a variety of important economic policies. Fuel-economy regulations are attribute-based in China, Europe, Japan and the United States, which are the world’s four largest car markets. Energy efficiency standards for appliances, which allow larger products to consume more energy, are attribute-based all over the world. Regulations such as the Clean Air Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, and the Affordable Care Act are attribute-based because they exempt some firms based on size. In all of these examples, attribute-basing is designed to provide a weaker regulation for products or firms that will find compliance more difficult.

Summary from Heritage Foundation study Fuel Economy Standards Are a Costly Mistake Excerpt with my bolds.

The CAFE standards are not only an extremely inefficient way to reduce carbon dioxide emission but will also have a variety of unintended consequences.

For example, the post-2010 standards apply lower mileage requirements to vehicles with larger footprints. Thus, Whitefoot and Skerlos argued that there is an incentive to increase the size of vehicles.

Data from the first few years under the new standard confirm that the average footprint, weight, and horsepower of cars and trucks have indeed all increased since 2008, even as carbon emissions fell, reflecting the distorted incentives.

Manufacturers have found work-arounds to thwart the intent of the regulations. For example, the standards raised the price of large cars, such as station wagons, relative to light trucks. As a result, automakers created a new type of light truck—the sport utility vehicle (SUV)—which was covered by the lower standard and had low gas mileage but met consumers’ needs. Other automakers have simply chosen to miss the thresholds and pay fines on a sliding scale.

Another well-known flaw in CAFE standards is the “rebound effect.” When consumers are forced to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, the cost per mile falls (since their cars use less gas) and they drive more. This offsets part of the fuel economy gain and adds congestion and road repair costs. Similarly, the rising price of new vehicles causes consumers to delay upgrades, leaving older vehicles on the road longer.

In addition, the higher purchase price of cars under a stricter CAFE standard is likely to force millions of households out of the new-car market altogether. Many households face credit constraints when borrowing money to purchase a car. David Wagner, Paulina Nusinovich, and Esteban Plaza-Jennings used Bureau of Labor Statistics data and typical finance industry debt-service-to-income ratios and estimated that 3.1 million to 14.9 million households would not have enough credit to purchase a new car under the 2025 CAFE standards.[34] This impact would fall disproportionately on poorer households and force the use of older cars with higher maintenance costs and with fuel economy that is generally lower than that of new cars.

CAFE standards may also have redistributed corporate profits to foreign automakers and away from Ford, General Motors (GM), and Chrysler (the Big Three), because foreign-headquartered firms tend to specialize in vehicles that are favored under the new standards.[35] 

Conclusion

CAFE standards are costly, inefficient, and ineffective regulations. They severely limit consumers’ ability to make their own choices concerning safety, comfort, affordability, and efficiency. Originally based on the belief that consumers undervalued fuel economy, the standards have morphed into climate control mandates. Under any justification, regulation gives the desires of government regulators precedence over those of the Americans who actually pay for the cars. Since the regulators undervalue the well-being of American consumers, the policy outcomes are predictably harmful.

What’s Next?

What Unites Zero Carbon and Pro-Hamas? Anti-Modernity

Posted on by Ron Clutz


Brendan O’Neill makes the connection in his Telegraph article Queen Greta has exposed the truth about the green movement.  Shape-shifting is so easy because the underlying motive is disdain for modern society.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

So, Greta Thunberg has a new cause. She’s found a new crusade to throw her weight behind. Forget saving the planet – now she wants to save Palestine.

Yes, the pint-sized prophetess of doom has swapped raging against industrialism for raging against Israel. Mother Nature will just have to wait – her erstwhile valiant defender is busy fixing the Middle East now.

Yesterday, Greta was snapped at the protest in Malmo, Sweden against Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.

She looked the part. She had a keffiyeh draped over her shoulders and a smug look on her face: the two must-haves of every puffed-up bourgeois activist who gets off on fuming against Israel.

The keffiyeh really has become the uniform of the self-righteous. Go into a hip coffee shop or overpriced Soho burger joint and I guarantee you’ll see a Gen Z’er decked out in the Palestinian scarf.

Whatever happened to the sin of “cultural appropriation”? Not long ago, the right-on raged against white dudes who wear their hair in dreadlocks and white women who don kominos. “Stop stealing other people’s culture!”, they’d yell. Yet now they themselves spend their days in Arab attire.

That image of Greta in Malmo, looking very satisfied with herself, summed up the role the keffiyeh plays in the life of the 21st-century activist. Keffiyeh-wearing is less about drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians than drawing attention to you. Look at me in my Arab garb, aren’t I good and hyper socially aware – that’s the needy cry of these hipster appropriators.

Yet beneath their radical chic, darker sentiments lurk. Their boilerplate hatred for Israel can have horrible consequences. So while young Greta was signalling her virtue on the streets of Malmo, another young woman was holed up in her hotel room for fear of mob assault.  It was Eden Golan, the Israeli-Russian 20-year-old who sang for Israel in the Eurovision finals in Malmo.

Golan’s inclusion in Eurovision sickened the anti-Israel protesters. Israel, they said, must be given the boot over its “genocide in Gaza” – their juvenile and historically illiterate term for Israel’s war against Hamas.

A mob even swarmed around the hotel Ms Golan was staying in. She received death threats. Things were so bad that she was warned not to leave her room. She was given a 24-hour security detail.

Is this really “progressive activism”? It looks more like bullying to me. The bullying of a young woman by a baying mob of Israel-bashers.

How galling that Greta should have been in the thick of such a regressive protest. This is someone who has spoken out about her own experiences of bullying. Who has said that women in the public eye get too much flak.  Yet now she preens at a protest that has had the consequence, intentional or otherwise, of filling a young woman with such dread that she has essentially become a prisoner in her own hotel.

We might call this woke privilege. Because Greta subscribes to chattering-class correct-think on every issue – climate change, transgenderism, Israel – she is granted the freedom to go about her business as she sees fit.

Ms Golan, on the other hand, is denied such basic liberty. Her national heritage, her devotion to her homeland, marks her out as morally suspect. And thus she must hide. “Shame!”, protesters shouted, as if she were a modern-day witch deserving of a dunking.

It is tempting to see Greta’s conversion from the climate-change cult to the anti-Israel religion as just bandwagon-jumping.  Perhaps her saviour complex, her burning sense of virtue, just needs a new outlet. So, like others of her generation, she ditches climate and trans and all the rest and moves on to “Palestine solidarity”. That’s the issue on which you can really make moral waves these days.

But I think there’s something else going on, too. The truth is that climate activism and anti-Israel agitation are very comfy bedfellows. There are even some creepy commonalities between green agitation and Israel’s greatest ideological foe: radical Islam.

Both, at root, represent a disgust with modernity. Both the privileged
Western weepers over industrial society and the Islamist haters
of Israel share an aversion to the modern world,
to progress, to Enlightenment itself.

Hence we can even have a situation where Muslim activists who yell “Allahu Akbar” can be elected as councillors for the Green Party.

The upper-middle class recycling obsessive in Hampstead might seem a million miles from the bearded radical who publicly sings the praises of Allah – but they share an instinctive revulsion for capitalist society.

One sees it as a crime against Mother Nature,
the other as an affront to Muhammad.

To both sides, Israel is the pinnacle of the modernity they hate. A young, confident, entrepreneurial nation that rendered the desert a land of plenty? Boo. Hiss. Cast its people from our social circles.

So it makes sense that Greta has temporarily ditched Gaia for Gaza. For this crisis, too, furnishes her with an opportunity to advertise her pious rejection of the modern world.

 

Apocalypse Not

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Joakim Book shines considerable light into modern doomsday darkness, writing his AIER article Unlimited Growth, Forever.  Book exposes how fundamental human positive aspiration, proven by historical progress and innovation, has been perverted by those nowadays claiming to be progressive, when all they preach is hell and damnation.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

It is often said that only a madman — or economist — could believe that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. Resources are scarce and dwindling, we’re told. Day in and day out, we seem poised to use up some civilization-critical ingredient, or we might overuse materials to the point of our own downfall. 

The mindset that makes people believe that we’re perennially on the cusp of some disaster is on display everywhere from the big screen to the big assembly halls. It has been humanity’s plague since we first broke free of the Malthusian constraints that govern every non-human ecology. And never once do we seem to consider that maybe, just maybe, the madmen/economists know something the rest of us don’t. 

We’re routinely given hyperbolic predictions about our doom, and no matter whether those predictions come true, they’re renewed in the same or slightly altered form a few years later. In the meantime, individuals, businesses, workers, investors, tinkerers, and all the others that make up the world economy solve much of the “problem.”

Every popular scare of the past has been side-stepped, improved,
or solved, by one or another human effort, usually serendipitously
and rarely at all with well-meaning bureaucrats directing the process.  

New York University economist Paul Romer, whose work on economic growth rewarded him the Nobel Prize in 2018, explains that “non-economists have said that [his article] helped them understand why unlimited growth is possible in a world with finite resources.” He credits that conclusion to his work on the proliferation of ideas, which he condenses into the following two statements: 

    1. “we can share discoveries with others,” and 
    2. “there are incomprehensibly many discoveries yet to be found.”

The basic rationale is thus simple: “Although we live in a world of a limited number of atoms,” as Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley say in their masterful creation Superabundance, “there are virtually infinite ways to arrange those atoms. The possibilities for creating new value are thus immense.”

Economic growth itself, said University of Mississippi economist Josh Hendrickson in an interchange with The Guardian’s George Monbiot a few years ago, is about “finding more efficient uses of resources.” It’s about observing how market prices and the profit motive urge entrepreneurs and businesses to economize on production while producing more value for consumers. We can visibly see this in the products that technology has merged into one (smartphones displacing a dozen or more physical appliances), or the thinner cans or more efficient engines that innovation routinely delivers. 

Economists aren’t just playing word games when they say that growth can keep going forever. We can always make more stuff since the physical atoms under our command right now are far from all the physical atoms on our planet (or solar system). By growth, economists mean value-creation exchanged in the marketplace, a market that can change in the types of value we exchange, and the growing portion of our economies can involve fewer atoms than what came before.

“Resource” which the general public think of as physical collections of elements in the ground, economists define much more broadly. Nothing becomes a resource until the human mind makes it so, i.e., “there are no resources until we find them, identify their possible uses, and develop ways to obtain and process them” to quote Julian Simon, whose pioneering work in resource economics prompted Tupy and Pooley to launch their Superabundance project. 

The boundaries between dirt, mineral resource, and mineral reserve can therefore shift with technology, economic circumstances, or legal rules regarding their extraction — subject to the “degree of geological certainty” and “feasibility of economic recovery.”

My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

What’s even more incredible is that material abundance (how economically accessible certain minerals or agricultural products are) has historically speaking increased with population. Instead of individually starving when there are more humans on our supposedly finite planet, we seem to be collectively producing more, having better access to raw materials and the goods and services we produce with them. 

Take almost any foodstuff, meat or cereal, fruit or vegetable, for almost any country over any period and the numbers go up and to the right: For eight centuries (probably more), an English laborer has been able to afford more and more foodstuffs for their labor; yet there’s more food production today than at any point in the past.

The counterintuitive conclusion follows naturally from Romer’s work: More humans give us more chances for ideas that exponentially “make material progress possible.” Human society is dynamic, not zero-sum.

Illustration: oil. Thirteen years ago, Camilla Ruz for The Guardian enumerated six natural resource scares to pay attention to, of which oil was one. Dire predictions like these are a dime a dozen in the environmentalist world, and no matter how publicly or unequivocally they are disconfirmed by reality, they pop up with renewed vigor a few years later. At the time we had some 46 years’ worth of oil reserves left; that is, at the prices, consumption rate, and technology of 2011, humanity would run out of oil by the late 2050s. 

With a billion more people on the planet since then, having suitably burned some 386 billion barrels of oil in the intervening years, we now have… drumroll…48 years’ usage in global proven reserves; Humanity will now last until the 2070s before its (supposedly limited) reserves of oil run dry. Disaster avoided. 

The price system, profit-hungry entrepreneurs, and optimizing consumers are pretty good at remedying scarcities when they emerge. If there isn’t enough oil, gas, wheat, gold, nickel, or copper for current human processes, the (real) price of those commodities rise; extracting businesses dig deeper or explore further, and consumers substitute away from the expensive commodity, or we recycle the metals that forever remain with us into something new. Higher prices mean that lower-quality ores are now worth mining, more inaccessible sources and geologists’ best guesses for where we could find more worth exploring. The outcome over decades and centuries is that “prices of resources are declining because more people means more ideas, new inventions and innovations,” according to Tupy and Pooley.

That we do not run out is the powerful lesson of both the history of resources and the theory behind their economic uses: Our minds and the black box of nifty ways to improve the world aren’t limited. We don’t run out; We simply find more.

The recurring “we’re running out of X!” outrage therefore seems so peculiar, so out of touch with even a semblance of reality. 194 years ago, before having seen but a tiny fraction of the improvements humanity would make over the following decades and centuries, British historian and poet Thomas Babington (raised to the peerage as Lord Macaulay) wrote

though in every age everybody knows that up to his own time progressive improvement has been taking place, nobody seems to reckon on any improvement during the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point […] but so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.

He then ended his colloquy with the sentence that human progress-types know by heart:

“On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

That was a reasonable enough question in 1830,
and a terribly relevant one in 2024.

 

Wind Power for Beginners

Posted on by Ron Clutz

H/T maxyhoge

Robert Bryce explains the basics at his substack blog Build It, And The Wind Won’t Come.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Weather-dependent generation sources are…weather dependent:
Last year, despite adding 6.2 GW of new capacity,
U.S. wind production dropped by 2.1%.

Three years ago, in the wake of Winter Storm Uri, the alt-energy lobby and their many allies in the media made sure not to blame wind energy for the Texas blackouts. The American Clean Power Association (2021 revenue: $32.1 million) declared frozen wind turbines “did not cause the Texas power outages” because they were “not the primary cause of the blackouts. Most of the power that went offline was powered by gas or coal.”

Damaged wind turbines at the Punta Lima wind project, Naguabo, Puerto Rico, 2018. Photo: Wikipedia.

NPR parroted that line, claiming, “Blaming wind and solar is a political move.” The Texas Tribune said it was wrong to blame alt-energy after Winter Storm Uri because “wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.” The outlet also quoted one academic who said that natural gas was “failing in the most spectacular fashion right now.” Texas Tribune went on to explain, “Only 7% of ERCOT’s forecasted winter capacity, or 6 gigawatts, was expected to come from various wind power sources across the state.”

In other words, there was no reason to expect the 33 GW of wind capacity that Texas had to deliver because, you know, no one expected wind energy to produce much power. Expectations? Mr. October? Playoff Jamal? Who needs them?

But what happens when you build massive amounts of
wind energy capacity and it doesn’t deliver —
not for a day or a week, but for six months, or even an entire year?

That question is germane because, on Wednesday, the Energy Information Administration published a report showing that U.S. wind energy production declined by 2.1% last year. Even more shocking: that decline occurred even though the wind sector added 6.2 GW of new capacity!

A hat tip to fellow Substack writer Roger Pielke Jr., who pithily noted on Twitter yesterday, “Imagine if the U.S. built 6.2 GW new capacity in nuclear power plants and after starting them up, overall U.S. electricity generation went down. That’d be a problem, right?”

Um, yes. It would. And the EIA made that point in its usual dry language. “Generation from wind turbines decreased for the first time since the mid-1990s in 2023 despite the addition of 6.2 GW of new wind capacity last year,” the agency reported. The EIA also explained that the capacity factor for America’s wind energy fleet, also known as the average utilization rate, “fell to an eight-year low of 33.5%.” That compares to 35.9% capacity factor in 2022 which was the all-time high. The report continued, “Lower wind speeds than normal affected wind generation in 2023, especially during the first half of the year when wind generation dropped by 14% compared with the same period in 2022.”

Read that again. For half of last year, wind generation was down by a whopping 14% due to lower wind speeds. Imagine if that wind drought continued for an entire year. That’s certainly possible. Recall that last summer, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that U.S. generation capacity “is increasingly characterized as one that is sensitive to extreme, widespread, and long duration temperatures as well as wind and solar droughts.”

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, corporate investment in wind energy between 2004 and 2022 totaled some $278 billion. In addition, according to data from the Treasury Department, the U.S. government spent more than $30 billion on the production tax credit over that same period. Thus, over the last two decades, the U.S. has spent more than $300 billion building 150 GW of wind capacity that has gobbled up massive amounts of land, garnered enormous (and bitter) opposition from rural Americans, and hasn’t gotten more efficient over time.

Wednesday’s EIA report is a stark reminder that all of that generation capacity is subject to the vagaries of the wind. Imagine if the U.S. had spent that same $300 billion on a weather-resilient form of generation, like, say, nuclear power. That’s relevant because Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia came online on Monday. With that same $300 billion, the U.S. could have built 20, 30, or maybe even 40 GW of new nuclear reactors with a 92% capacity factor that wouldn’t rely on the whims of the wind. In addition, those dozens of reactors would have required a tiny fraction of the land now covered by thousands of viewshed-destroying, bat-and-bird-killing wind turbines.

If climate change means we will face more extreme weather in the years ahead — hotter, colder, and/or more severe temperatures for extended periods — it’s Total Bonkers CrazytownTM to make our electric grid dependent on the weather. But by lavishing staggering amounts of money on wind and solar energy, and in many cases, mandating wind and solar, that’s precisely what we are doing.

 

Bogus Math for Climate “Reparations”

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Paul Mueller does the analysis in his AIER article Climate “Reparations” Numbers Are Rigged.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Nobel Prize–winning economist Esther Duflo thinks rich countries should pay poor countries $500 billion in compensation each year for climate-change damages. It is our “moral debt.” She proposes an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich and an increase in the global minimum corporate tax rate to fund this $500 billion transfer.

You and I may be shocked by such a suggestion but don’t worry: “It’s really necessary. And it’s reasonable. It’s not that hard.” Only someone in an elite, progressive bubble could say something like that. Let’s check her reasoning.

Duflo claims that climate change creates costs, specifically through “excess” deaths due to excessive heat. Poorer countries from the global south near the equator will see more days of extreme heat, and so will see a disproportionate increase in excess deaths.

Other economists translated those deaths into an externality cost of $37 per ton of CO2. Multiply that by the roughly fourteen billion tons of CO2 emitted by the US and Europe and voila, wealthy countries generate $500 billion in externality costs per year.

She proposes paying for this by increasing the global minimum corporate tax rate from 15 percent to 18 percent and introducing an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich, which she defines as the 3000 richest billionaires. We can’t go into the many problems and obstacles to such funding mechanisms here — suffice it to say such ideas will be nearly impossible to implement.

But Duflo’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, besides missing the bigger picture, are so speculative as to require playing make-believe. Let’s play along for a moment to see why. We’ll start by reverse-engineering her $500 billion number into a measure of harm.

Regulatory agencies and insurance companies use the concepts of “statistical value of life” or the “statistical value of a life-year” to do cost-benefit analysis on risk and the monetary value of life. These concepts are slippery, however, and calculated in a variety of ways with a wide range of estimates.

To keep things simple, let’s assume that the value of one life-year is $200,000. The $500 billion number proposed by Duflo suggests that the cost imposed by wealthy countries burning fossil fuels is the loss of roughly 2.5 million life-year” in poor countries per year.  That sounds like a staggering number!

But what about the benefits that have accrued to developing
countries from activities that generate CO2 emissions?

Important advances in medicine, such as antibiotics and vaccines, were developed in modern industrialized countries. So, too, were refrigeration, cars, the internet, smart phones, radar; modern agricultural methods with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers; improvements in plumbing, building materials, manufacturing, and much more. “Polluting” activities in industrialized countries improved nutrition and safety around the world. These advances, and many others, significantly increased people’s life expectancies — especially in poor countries.

Surely the value of these improvements should weight the opposite side of the scale from the expected harm of climate change — especially since the crusade against fossil fuels and carbon emissions will assuredly slow economic growth and innovation. Let’s consider the case of India for a moment.

Life expectancy in India has basically doubled from about 35 years in 1950 to about 70 years in 2024. If you consider that India has just over a billion people living in it, modern technology developed by rich CO2-emitting countries has added 35 billion life-years in India alone. 

Translating life-years back into dollars, 35 billion life-years times $200,000 per life-year means that the benefits from greater life expectancy in India over the past 75 years is the equivalent of $7 quadrillion dollars — or in annualized terms, an annual benefit of about $93 trillion dollars. In other words, the benefits to India alone are over a hundred times larger than Duflo’s estimate of costs!

Nor is India cherry-picked. China has a similar story with life expectancy rising from 43.45 years to 77.64 years. Similar improvements in life expectancy occur across the global south.

Of course, one could argue that developed industrial countries are not solely responsible for increases in life expectancy around the world. But one could just as easily say the same about whether developed industrial countries are solely responsible for global CO2 emissions, climate change, or harm to people in the global south due to hotter weather. Connecting these two issues makes perfect philosophical sense, because the production of CO2 has historically been directly associated with increases in economic growth; which in turn is necessary for all the developments increasing longevity around the world.

Even if we massage the assumptions in Duflo’s favor, the results remain favorable to industrialization. Suppose western technology and industrial activities contribute 50 percent to improvements in life expectancy. That’s still a $46 trillion annualized benefit to India. Reduce the value of a statistical life-year to $100,000 — that’s still a $23 trillion/year benefit from industrialization in the west. Exclude India from the analysis and cut the population we focus on down to 500 million people — that’s still over $12 trillion/year in benefits. Reduce the improvement in life-expectancy by six years — that still leaves about $10 trillion/year in benefits.

So, even after making tons of assumptions to reduce their size,
the estimated benefits of industrialization are still about twenty
times larger than Duflo’s estimate of its costs. 

Worrying about hypothetical, indirect costs of CO2 emissions when it comes to human well-being is like scrounging for pennies while ignoring $100 bills lying on the sidewalk. Actually, it is worse than that. It is like lighting $100 bills on fire to help you search a dark alley for some pocket change of human welfare.

Economic development, driven largely by Adam Smith’s dictum “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” which includes strong private property rights and limited government intervention, has improved human living standards in unprecedented ways over the past 300 years. These remarkable improvements in human welfare are not limited to wealthy, developed economies but are enjoyed around the world. 

Duflo talks about the (external) costs of industrialization on certain countries without considering the truly massive (external) benefits of industrialization to those same countries.

If anything, with a proper accounting, developing countries owe rich countries gratitude for the benefits they have received from industrialization and the corresponding CO2 emissions.

 

 

Britain’s Royal Society Defies the Green Blob

Posted on by Ron Clutz

News comes from Financial Times that the prestigious scientific Royal Society is honoring it’s motto:  “Take Nobody’s Word For It” (translation of Latin phrase above.) Of course, a great many UK academics were outraged at the refusal to take for granted their claim that “Climate Science is Settled.” The article by Kenza Bryan is Royal Society and academics clash over influence of oil and gas industry.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Three-centuries-old institution rebuffs call to
declare fossil fuel companies culpable for global warming

A clash between Britain’s 363-year-old Royal Society and more than 2,000 UK academics has escalated over the national academy of scientists’ refusal to attribute the role of oil and gas companies in climate change.

The academics had expressed their concerns about the influence of fossil fuel companies on scientific research in a letter last year to the Royal Society, founded in 1660 as a fellowship that included the likes of Isaac Newton.

But the Royal Society has now rebuffed their request to issue an “unambiguous statement about the culpability of the fossil fuel industry in driving the climate crisis”.

Treasurer Jonathan Keating wrote in reply last week that it would “not be appropriate” to do so, as there was a need for “multiple actors” to engage with the complexity of the climate crisis.

The academics’ concerns about the influence of oil and gas companies extend to separate allegations that ties to BP were not disclosed by a Cambridge professor in a Royal Society policy briefing document produced by a working group that he chaired in 2022.

Professor Andy Woods held the title of head of the BP Institute, a research arm that it funds, which was renamed the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows by Cambridge last year. He also has the formal title of BP professor, a position endowed by the oil and gas company. These affiliations were not included in the reference in the document.

The Royal Society briefing document called for an “enormous and continued investment” into geological carbon capture and storage, a technology promoted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to keep expanding while storing the emissions.

A CO₂ storage adviser to BP and a director for CO₂ storage at the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate also contributed to the report. Woods’s expertise in geophysical fluid flows and the BP affiliation are listed elsewhere by the Royal Society in its fellowship directory. BP and Woods did not respond to a request for comment. The Royal Society said the document gave “clear affiliations” for contributors and that it publishes a wide range of research.

The tensions reflect the discord in academia about funding or
participation in research by oil and gas companies, as well as
rising activism on campuses among the student body and staff.

The Royal Society’s decision not to call out the industry was described as “moral cowardice” by James Dyke, earth system science professor at Exeter university.

Another signatory to the original letter, Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, said it was “mind-boggling” that a respected scientific organisation would not attribute the role of fossil fuel groups in climate change.

Student campaigners at Oxford university have also targeted the author of a set of green principles used by the university to help guide decisions on whether to invest in or receive grants from oil and gas companies.

Under freedom of information provisions, the student campaigners identified Myles Allen, the university’s head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics, as having had 18 meetings where a representative was present from one of the major oil and gas groups, including either BP, Shell, Exxon or Equinor.

Those meetings in 2021 and 2022 included five occasions organised by Shell, three of which focused on the oil and gas group’s strategy and climate scenarios, according to the freedom of information response.

Allen, who was head of the Oxford Net Zero research initiative until earlier this year, told the Financial Times he had used the meetings to highlight the need for fossil fuel companies to pay for carbon capture and storage technologies.

It is a solution to the reduction of future carbon dioxide emissions that he has long advocated. “We all have a duty to help the fossil fuel industry not make the problem worse but to fix it,” he said.

Oxford said its “partnerships and collaborations with industry” allow for research on pressing global issues, including climate-related ones.

The campaigners called on Oxford to conduct an independent assessment about its approach to fossil fuel sector donations and investment. Cambridge university in March temporarily stopped accepting grants and donations from the sector in response to similar concerns.