Legal Newsline reports the string of climate lawfare defeats in their article Fifth judge agrees with Big Oil, dismisses another climate change case.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

TRENTON, N.J. (Legal Newsline) – A New Jersey state court judge refuses to be the one who sets international energy standards and has thrown out a climate change lawsuit brought by the state.

Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s case is one of dozens around the country making state law claims under consumer protection and public nuisance laws, and Mercer County Superior Court judge Douglas Hurd on Feb. 5 tossed it out of court.

Hurd becomes the fifth state court judge to grant motions to dismiss by companies like Chevron and Exxon, targeted by private lawyers who earned contingency fee contracts from government officials. Platkin hired lawyers at Sher Edling for his 200-page 2022 lawsuit.

“This court’s decision is reliant upon and consistent with both federal and state courts across the country that have rejected the availability of state tort law in the climate change context,” Judge Hurd wrote.

“This court agrees that the logic and reasoning of those decisions compel dismissal of claims seeking damages by transboundary emissions.”

Hurd joins two state judges in Maryland, one in Delaware and one in New York in throwing out this type of case. His is the third dismissal since the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the issue, which kept Honolulu’s case going past the motion-to-dismiss stage.

The cases allege consumers would not have burned as many fossil fuels
as they did had companies been more forthright about their effects.

The litigation started with a battle over where the cases should be heard. Defendants wanted them in federal court to bolster their defense, and that strategy resulted in federal judges in California and New York granting motions to dismiss. The Second Circuit affirmed the New York dismissal.

But the Supreme Court ultimately ruled the lawsuits belonged in various state courts because plaintiff lawyers had crafted their cases to make state law claims under consumer protection statutes and for public nuisance.

At issue is whether state court judges should have the power to essentially impact the international energy market. Twenty Republican state attorneys general argued the Hawaii case involves questions of interstate and international law that can only be decided by Congress or in federal courts.

Judge Brown, in the Baltimore case, said the litigation goes beyond the limits of Maryland law, or whatever states other cases are filed in. Most municipalities and states that have filed suit are near oceans, though Boulder, Colo., has also sued.

Theodore Boutrous of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher represents Chevron
says the New Jersey decision joins a “nearly unanimous consensus.”

These types of claims are precluded and preempted by federal law and must be dismissed under clear U.S. Supreme Court precedent. As the Court rightly held, ‘the leading and most persuasive case supporting dismissal is the Second Circuit decision in City of New York. There, the federal appeals court rejected the availability of state tort law in the climate change context.’”

Hurd says the fundamental principles of federalism in the U.S. Constitution show that state law cannot operate in areas of uniquely federal interests.

“The Hawai’i Supreme Court’s decision in City & County of Honolulu v. Sunoco is not persuasive to this court because it does not address this critical point,” he wrote.

“And that point being that ‘state law does not suddenly become presumptively competent to address issues that demand a unified federal standard simply because Congress saw fit to displace a federal court-made standard with a legislative one,'” he added, citing the New York decision.

Summary

So, after several years of waging war in the courtroom without racking up even a single victory, and with a Congress and White House that have expressed a sincere desire to do the things that could actually tackle climate change, why are the proponents of litigation continuing to waste taxpayer resources in this vain effort so a few trial lawyers can hopefully become very rich while accomplishing precisely nothing on climate change?

 

John Shanahan is a founder and editor of All About Energy and wrote a brief article for an audience of high school students and others ill or uninformed about climate science.  That website also provides many realistic articles about both energy and climate science. Excepts in italics with my bolds and added images.

High school students understand climate change science.

John Shanahan

November 6, 2024

Occam’s Razor is an idea first postulated in the 14th Century. Many scientists quote it: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

KEY POINTS

High school students can understand climate change if they first comprehend a few simple ideas.

1) We study everything that causes Earth’s climate to change, not just infrared radiation leaving Earth’s surfaces and interacting with CO2.

2) Energy is the ability to do work: Do you have a lot of energy? Are you on a school sports team or do you work for the school newspaper? Which takes more energy? Except for nuclear fission and fusion where matter is converted to energy, energy is always conserved. Energy can be converted from one form to another: from sunlight to chemical or electrical energy, from electrical energy to potential energy when an elevator goes up, from electrical energy to light when the stadium lights go on, from chemical energy to kinetic energy when you drive a car or ride a bike. Energy is very important in life.

3) Power is how fast energy can be delivered. A jet engine delivers more energy than the air coming out of an open-party balloon and does it faster. You need lots of power to pull a mile-long freight train. You need very little power to operate your smartphone.

4) Work is the total use of energy. On your utility bill, work is shown as kilowatt-hours. You pay so many cents per kilowatt-hour. For most of history, people had to do work themselves. For the last two hundred years coal, oil, and natural gas have done most of the work and provided thousands of by-products so we can have better lives. Nuclear power will have to do a lot of work in the future. What other major source of energy is there?

5) Once work is done, that energy is conserved but can’t do that same amount of work again. Only lower-quality energy is available. There are no perpetual motion machines.

6) Weather events are work. Sunshine is energy. The climate is an average of weather over a long time. To understand Earth’s climate change, you must understand how weather happens all over the globe and how it changes with time: hour by hour, with the seasons, over very long periods of time across ice ages and in between ice ages. You must explain all the systems: motion of the atmosphere and oceans, heat transfer from the equator to the poles and from the surface of the oceans and land to the top of the atmosphere, delivery of ocean water to the land, and other things.

7) To understand all issues of climate change, it is necessary to study both Radiative Transfer and Heat Transport. Climate change alarmists and some non-alarmists only study Radiative Transfer (infrared radiation from the surface of the land and oceans interacting with greenhouse gasses on the way to the Top of the Atmosphere). They don’t go into Heat Transport phenomena of air and ocean currents, water changes from ice to liquid to vapor and cloud formation, water transport to land, etc. They don’t explain Work related to the weather. You need millions of large power plants to do the work the sun does for free. They don’t analyze those details.

8) In order to understand climate and climate change we must explain all three things: energy, work, and power. To study “climate change” using global averages for sunlight and infrared radiation energy and spectrum analyses for interaction with greenhouse gasses and not explain work and power of actual weather events is not a complete study of climate change. By not explaining work and power in weather, they are implying that any combination of work and power is acceptable. IT IS NOT! Which combination of work and power is involved with climate change is not addressed. This is insufficient. You would never buy a car just knowing the size of the gas tank (how much energy you have) and not learn about the power of the engine to get up hills and pass trucks. You would want to know how much work you could do with the car – the number of miles you could drive it. Only study radiation and CO2 for climate change? No! Be smart when buying a car and when deciding what climate change policies to support

Photos of real weather, not just graphics of average global sunlight and infrared radiation:

Weather is a collection of many real events in Earth’s atmosphere. It varies tremendously from place to place, during the day, the season, during years of droughts, years of floods, in ice ages, in between ice ages, and in transitions to ice ages.

Climate is a global average of weather over 30 years or more. A change of an average of anything can never tell how the collection of real things is changing. Thus most studies of climate change can’t tell how the weather will change. Vast sums of “research” money are being squandered to do the impossible in order to force Europe and North America to stop using fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the weather in most of the world is within the range of past history. Globally, only Mother Nature runs the show. Locally, humans have some influence by how they change land use from wilderness to agriculture and ranching, and how they build buildings, streets, and parking lots in place of wilderness. In cities, it is called the Heat Island Effect.

But on the whole, life on Earth is beautiful and wonderful. Humans have almost no control over the weather. Man-made global warming is a disgraceful hoax.

Fitz Roy Peak in Argentina in autumn

Mt Fuji in Japan in spring

Footnote: See also

Antidote for Radiation Myopia

 

 

 

 

David Polansky is an American living in Canada (as am I) and expresses very clearly the frustration I share with him.  His National Post article is Neither Canadian nor U.S. media understand America. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The great novelist Saul Bellow once wrote: “I have developed a certain sympathy with Canada. It’s no easy thing to share a border with the USA. Canada’s chief entertainment — it has no choice — is to watch (from a gorgeous setting) what happens in our country. The disaster is that there is no other show.”

Unfortunately, despite countless hours of American media consumption,
many Canadians understand their neighbor surprisingly poorly.

The latest program to capture attention here, as elsewhere, was of course the U.S. general election, which Donald Trump won for a second time, much to the consternation of the pundit class in particular.

Now, my own life has taken the inverse trajectory of Bellow’s, having been born in the United States and subsequently moved to Canada, and I have reflected over the years upon both the differences between the two countries, and how each appears to the other. And a recurring theme I’ve noticed is the particular way that Canadian political commentators consistently misapprehend their southern neighbor.

Part of the reason for this goes beyond ordinary errors of judgment. The commentariat class here heavily derives its understanding of American political developments from its U.S counterparts in the media complex and is thus twice removed from political reality when those same counterparts prove deficient in anticipating and accounting for events.

Many decades ago, the literary scholar Lionel Trilling described conservatism as merely “a series of irritable mental gestures.” Something like this could be applied to many of the reactions to Trump’s presidential victory this week — particularly those which aim their ire not just at Trump or his inner circle, but at Americans in general.

And this last line of criticism is particularly appealing to Canadian pundits, as it affords them the opportunity to indulge in a passive-aggressive form of nationalist preening (“oh, the Americans are at it again”) otherwise rarely available to them.

Meanwhile, the incessant reliance of pundits on “fascism” and “populism” as explanations for Trump’s continued success have proven emotionally satisfying at the cost of real analysis, as it prevents people from recognizing the democratic nature of Trump’s appeal. It has also led these critics to disregard the ways in which ordinary democracy is perfectly capable of procuring undesirable outcomes on its own.

It is not particularly helpful to blame election outcomes on oligarchy when Trump handily won the popular vote as well as the electoral vote, nor can the by-now instinctive reference to racial supremacism and bigotry account for his unprecedented gains among non-white voters of nearly all backgrounds.

Acknowledging these realities hardly requires endorsing him; none of this means that political observers are obliged to like or admire Trump. But it does mean that they cannot in good faith blame his political success on extra or anti-democratic factors. It is only the false belief that all desirable things must go together, such that democracy cannot be democracy if it produces unwelcome outcomes, that leads people to think this way.

Finally, it must be said that what Machiavelli would call “tumults”— that is tempestuous democratic political commotion — have long been a feature of the U.S. political landscape; and while not wholly positive, these have also contributed in complex ways to that country’s unique dynamism. That this aspect of American political life is not entirely to Canadian tastes is perfectly understandable (nor are Canadians alone in this regard), but it is a consistent mistake that outsiders make in pathologizing political tendencies that lie outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior in one’s own country. That these same dynamics are not much-loved (or well understood) by America’s own media and academic elites is yet another filter that obscures clear-sighted observation from across the border.

Meanwhile, the worst thing Canadians could do now is treat American politics as a foil for their own situation at home. For, within Canada itself, we will likely see an impulse to react to events in the United States not simply as matters of concern for foreign policy, but as though they required a domestic political response. This would be a mistake, partly because Trump is, of course, not a Canadian political figure, nor is there such a thing as “Trumpism” here in any meaningful sense. But also, because Canada presently faces serious political and economic challenges of its own, none of which are causally related to developments within the United States, despite their proximity. Indeed, at a time when Canada’s economy is performing worse than Italy’s or Spain’s, there will likely be strong incentives for pundits and politicians to fight pretend culture wars against phantom American threats as a distraction from the difficult and serious business of actually governing.

This impulse should be resisted at all costs. But if past is precedent, the Great American Show, broadcast in every household in blazing 4k resolution, will continue to overwhelm attempts at sober and reasoned consideration of real political issues at hand.

 

Joe Oliver explains at National Post We’re at a climate policy turning-point.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  Much as the term “tipping-point” is overused regarding physical and natural systems, it is relevant to socio-political systems.  Oliver’s article was written before the US election vote between two candidates with completely opposite climate/energy positions.  It was a few days after an important vote in energy rich Alberta affirming the vital role of hydrocarbons. [See Alberta: “CO2 Gas of Life, Not Pollutant!” Media Outrage Ensues]

Across Europe and North America, voters are increasingly skeptical
of climate alarmism and worried about the high cost of net-zero policies

Climate alarmism is facing daunting scientific, economic and political challenges to its credibility with the public and its influence on government policy in Europe, the United States and Canada. It may finally have reached an historic turning point.

The public is constantly warned about a dangerous surge in warming since the late 1970s due to increased man-made GHG emissions. But a recent peer-reviewed article by five academicians with expertise in oceanography, mathematics and statistics contradicts that conventional wisdom. They find no statistically significant change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s — even though emissions have risen 121 per cent since then, from 24 billion metric tonnes in 1970 to 53 billion in 2023.

They are not alone. John F. Clauser, 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, is one of 1,960 scientists and professionals from around the world, including 146 Canadians, who have signed the Clintel World Climate Declaration, whose central message is that there is no climate emergency.

These results pose two basic challenges to the core beliefs of climate alarmists.

♦  If warming has not accelerated in the past half century, where is the crisis? And,
♦  If a doubling of GHG emissions is supposed to directly impact temperatures, why have temperatures not shot up?

The latter question also applies to the 1970’s, when go-to experts and the mainstream media were hyperventilating about a return to an Ice Age, though GHG emissions had doubled in the previous 30 years.

Meanwhile, European economic growth has stalled, in large part due to the high cost of energy, which makes industry uncompetitive and drives energy-dependent companies to the United States. Germany, now the sick man of Europe, is de-industrializing, a direct result of former chancellor Angela Merkel’s reckless abandonment of nuclear energy and her country’s consequent reliance on Russian gas. The German automotive sector is also in crisis, the loser in a failed bet on EVs.

Tellingly, the issue of climate change has been virtually absent
from the American presidential campaign, even though the
two candidates have opposing views on the subject.

Donald Trump has made some headway condemning Kamala Harris for senseless green policies that damage the economy and hurt American workers. The one climate issue that has been high-profile is fracking. In a dramatic reversal from her position in 2019, Harris now supports it, which is important in Pennsylvania, a state crucial to her election chances. If she wins, she will back subsidies for renewables and discourage fossil fuel development. If Trump wins, it will be “Drill, baby, drill,” a rejection of climate alarmism and a retreat from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, all of which would reverberate globally.

Although most Canadians claim to be concerned about global warming, it is no longer high on their priority list and they were never prepared to pay much to deal with it, in any case. Axing Ottawa’s key climate policy, the carbon tax, has become a powerful vote-winner for Conservatives across the country. Ontario Minister of Energy and Electrification Stephen Lecce has come out in favour of every source of energy to produce electricity, including nuclear for base load and natural gas to back up wind and solar. Without gas, the province would suffer from brownouts and blackouts, ballooning costs and an uncompetitive industrial sector.

Despite all this, Canadian politicians are not yet ready to acknowledge publicly three increasingly evident realities that contradict climate orthodoxy:

• • Net zero is unattainable without devastating economic and social costs — and may be unattainable, period.
  • Canada cannot on its own make a discernible difference to the global climate. And, therefore,
  • Climate policies are mainly an extremely expensive form of virtue-signaling.

The federal Liberals, blinded by catastrophism and the appeal of big-government solutions, will not retreat from their crushingly costly climate program. But they almost certainly will be gone within a year, though their death throes seem interminable. A new Conservative government should focus on adaptation and research, which are effective and affordable ways to deal with extreme weather and moderately rising temperatures.

Though the signs are encouraging it is still too early to be sure we have reached peak climate alarmism. But the time is coming when common sense and rationality re-emerge — first gradually and then probably suddenly. One day we will look back with deep regret and wonder how collective madness captured the Western world and caused it to sacrifice hundreds of trillions of dollars to a false idol.

 

Stephen Barrett reports on ruminations from technically challenged overlords in his Spectator Australia article by way of John Ray’s blog The chattering climate class and their war on coal. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Climate Chattering Class is now telling each other:
No Such Thing as Baseload Electrical Power.

Electricity is slippery stuff, in that it can be difficult to properly grasp what it is or how to quantify it.  We can blame the school system. Teachers who were taught social politics at University must somehow teach mathematics and physics.

There is a reason for everything in the world and that reason usually comes down to physics until politics gets mixed in. This is a problem. In politics, the same big lie can be repeated many times, as loudly as possible, until people accept it as truth or give up trying to argue the toss.

Readers will be familiar with the nameplate rating on wind farms and solar plants. It lists the rated output under ideal circumstances, measured in watts. If a heater has 1,000W we all understand it is telling us the output at one instant in time. Consumption is a different thing and is measured in watts/hour. Reversing this, we can understand we are seeing a generator’s nameplate watts as the size of the generator and watt hours as how much it provides.

An interesting idea making its way around the energy conversation
at present is that there is no such thing as baseload energy.

The lie is perpetrated by the political system which is, at present, intending to destroy the concept (and existence) of baseload energy. Baseload is created by heavy generators that operate all day, every day, and are typically cheap. The disadvantage of this structure is that baseload plants usually take time to reach full production. Then, they need to run for extended periods of time to be economically viable. Coal and nuclear are the only two types feasible for most of the Australian market.

Gas and diesel plants can provide electricity but they are expensive when operated in this way. Peaking power is where gas comes to the fore. It can be fired up quickly and make electricity rapidly. This is ideal for peaks when people come home from their day and want heating or cooling and to cook. Gas can cover this surge very happily. Diesel is lovely stuff and great in remote locations where there is no access to the grid or if the grid fails. It might not be pretty, but it delivers when needed.

In the whole clean grid argument, those words should be enshrined…
‘When it is needed.’

Coal, nuclear, gas, and diesel will deliver when needed. Reliability has been ignored by the chattering classes who have created the current disaster of high prices and brownouts that continue to destroy various industries.

Perhaps that is the whole point of ‘renewable’ energy.  I put that in quotes because the best figures I can find are that they only return seven-tenths of the power used to build them.

Every wind tower is a hallmark to coal-fired power being able to carry inefficient freeloaders. Freeloaders because renewable technologies can never produce energy when it is needed, only when it wishes.Solar and wind dump themselves on the energy market, making it impossible for reliable supplies to remain economic. If they had to obey the same bidding rules, they would never survive.

Let’s compare the costs of wind, solar, and nuclear. To do this we can look at the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, Topaz Solar Farm, and Barakah Nuclear Power Plant.

We can skittle the first anti-nuclear claim about taking too long to build. Barakah was completed within eight years. The global average for modern nuclear plant construction (globally) is between seven and eight years. Sadly in Australia we have a less than helpful public service that thrives on inefficiency that might drag out this timeline.

The nameplate ratings on these plants were 845MW for Shepherds Flat, 550MW for Topaz and 5,600MW for Barakah. Nuclear can appear expensive if you compare build cost against the nameplate rating but not markedly. Shepherds Flat cost $2 billion, Topaz $2.5 billion, and Barakah $24.4 billion. Comparing build cost to nameplate rating, Shepherds Flat Wind cost 42 cents/MW, Topaz Solar 22 cents/MW, and Barakah Nuclear 23 cents/MW.

Looking at the size per dollar, nuclear is almost as good as solar and better than wind. The issue already demonstrated is not size as much as provision. That nameplate value is giving you one second of use. One second later, you are going to need that much again. This means the Watt/Hrs is crucial.

This is where wind and solar fail massively. The watts produced are not as important as the Watt Hours provided to the market. Assuming a generous 25-year life span for Shepherds Flat, 30 years for Topaz, and a mean-spirited 60 years for Barakah (when it is likely to still be running 100 years after it started), I calculated the GWh per annum compared to the Build Price over the life of the project. That is Build Price divided by annual GWh times lifespan.

Shepherds Flat was $40,000, Topaz $75,000 and Barakah $9,300.

On this measure, nuclear is significantly cheaper, but the price of firming wind and solar is not added to their totals. So that you can have power on those hot still days of summer when the wind doesn’t blow or the cold nights of winter when the sun is not shining you will need either nuclear or coal to provide you with the electricity you need.

We can discuss batteries some other time, but the new super battery has been coming about as long as perpetual motion and flying cars. Lithium ion batteries are old tech that has been developed to a point of maturity where there is little left to squeeze out of them and without mountains we are not going to get enough pumped hydro no matter how economically bad that model is.

If I magically had the power I would build more coal-fired stations, only because nuclear will need time to be made legal and that cannot be predicted. Nuclear however beats wind and solar to bits as far as costs and output and reliability are concerned.

From Daily Sceptic The Real ‘Climate Change Deniers’ Are Those Who Deny the Climate Changed Before We Started Burning Fossil Fuels, Says Geologist.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

“We need to be resilient”

As a geologist, Wielicki undoubtedly has a better-than-average understanding of how our planet has evolved in the first place, and how its climate has been in a constant state of flux. Today’s climate science, however, links climate change primarily to the increasing amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, especially its anthropogenic component. Scientists who doubt or dispute this are labelled climate deniers. Wielicki points out that we know very well from Earth’s relatively recent history that major climate changes, such as the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 950-1250) or the subsequent Little Ice Age (ca. 14th to mid-19th century, precise timing depending on the location), occurred without any significant change in the proportion of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

“If there’s anything that I argue, it’s that we need to be resilient. We should stop pretending that if we changed or lowered our emissions the climate would stop changing. That’s the true denial of climate right there,” Wielicki says. “What we need to accept is that regardless of the CO₂ in the atmosphere, we are going to have climate change and those shifts could occur over timescales of decades or centuries, and we should be prepared.

And being prepared means we need access to cheap, reliable energy.

But the world is moving in the opposite direction under the leadership of today’s political leaders. One of the main objectives is to fight CO₂ emissions and to do so by phasing out fossil fuels, among other measures. However, according to Wielicki, the planners have not quite thought everything through. First of all, wind and solar power are unreliable substitutes because they can only be produced when the conditions are right, i.e., when the wind blows and the sun shines. In addition, they need constant support from the taxpayer, because when they can be produced, i.e., sold as energy to the grid, the price of electricity on the market will be low since there is a lot of it at that particular time. So in order for investors to build up these capacities, they need price guarantees from governments or taxpayer support. And on top of that, you still need to additionally build up controllable capacity to ensure that electricity is always available.

Wielicki also says that we need to understand that fossil fuels are not just liquids that we put in our cars at the petrol station but are essential to many aspects of our lives. “About four billion people on the planet are being fed off of agricultural crops that are being fertilised with synthetic fertilizers that are being created from fossil fuels. So you can’t just look at one side of a picture,” Wielicki explains, adding that the increases in atmospheric CO₂ levels have actually also increased yields.

In addition, Wielicki says, it is worth thinking that we need to replace many of today’s fossil-fuel-based materials in everyday use, such as plastics, lubricants, oils, chemicals, etc., with new ones if we really want to phase out fossil fuels. “We have to ask what are the benefits that fossil fuels have given the society? And then let’s weigh that against the possible detrimental effects that these climate models argue will happen, but haven’t happened in the observable data yet,” he says.

The rise of the new green colonialism

Programmed into this whole Western orientation towards CO₂ reduction, Wielicki says, is hypocrisy on several levels. For a start, it’s worth recognising that by reducing CO₂ emissions in Europe or North America, we have effectively decided that we do not produce the goods we need here, but will produce them elsewhere in the world. “We pat ourselves on the back and say: look, we’ve lowered our CO₂ emissions by this much! But all we’ve done is essentially offshored that industry to China and India, They do it dirtier. They have no regard for things like environmental policy. And so the global CO₂ is going up faster than ever,” Wielicki notes.

While the big Asian countries are ramping up the use of coal to satisfy their energy appetite, many African countries don’t have a similar option. According to Wielicki, this is directly linked to the UN’s policy of not wanting these countries to increase their use of fossil fuels. This means, for example, that farm work that is done elsewhere by tractor still has to be done by many Africans with their hands. A large proportion of Africans also have little or no access to electricity. Food is cooked indoors on open fires, burning dung and wood.

The resulting smoke leads to respiratory illnesses and many people die as a result. All this could be easily avoided, according to Wielicki, by giving them access to propane bottles and gas cookers. “It might make them breathe easier at night. It might make their health better. But it’s going to increase the atmospheric CO2, and that is something we can’t have. These poor people must suffer and live in poverty because we need to save the planet. It’s so hypocritical,” Wielicki says.

What’s more, according to Wielicki, our hypocrisy lies in the fact that at the same time, we want to mine the minerals we need for our own energy transition, such as cobalt, in that very same Africa. “We’re switching to very mineral and energy intensive technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles. And we’re taking all of these raw materials from Africa,” he says. “I think this is going to be, probably, the legacy of this green revolution. I call it the new green colonialism. It’s unfortunately going to keep hundreds of millions of poor people in developing nations in poverty for decades longer than they ever needed to be,” Wielicki adds.

A reminder that first there was Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) which purported to estimate future costs of damages from CO2 emissions. Now there is Social Costs of Green House Gases (SC-GHG) which ups the ante by adding purported damages from methane (CH4) and Nitrogen oxides (N2O). At the end of this post are references describing this sordid history.

Remember also the regulators game.  Regulations by far outnumber laws passed by congress, and they impose costs upon businesses and consumers of the targeted industries.  Instigating agencies justify their rules by claiming greater savings from preventing future damages.  So the higher the damages estimates the more intensive and expensive can be the regulations.

Mark Krebs provides a recent example of this in his Master Resource article Heat Pump Subsidies: Never Enough.  It reports on various machinations by the Biden/Harris regime to spend all the money they can on decarbonizing projects before their term ends.  As Biden himself said after terminating his re-election campaign:  We should have named the Inflation Reduction Act what it really was, the Green New Deal.

The article includes this quote from Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) regarding SCC (with my bolds):

Junk Science Behind Federal Appliance Regs About to Get Junkier

The Biden-Harris administration has embarked on a wave of anti-consumer home appliance regulations over the last several years. Each was justified in part by overblown claims of climate change benefits. And now, the Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed using a new methodology that would further inflate these hypothetical benefits to justify even worse regulations in the years ahead.

DOE is in the process of creating new energy use limits for stoves, dishwashers, furnaces, washing machines, water heaters, ceiling fans, refrigerators, and more. The agency always asserts that consumers experience net gains from these regulations, but CEI has filed comments highly critical of these rosy assumptions. In reality, such rules often raise the up-front costs of appliances more than is likely to be earned back in the form of energy savings. Some rules also compromise appliance choice, performance, and reliability.

But DOE’s fictitious consumer benefits are only part of the problem. CEI has also taken issue with the agency’s assertions that these regulations deliver quantifiable climate change benefits. For example, DOE’s costly 2023 final rule for residential furnaces was estimated by the agency to provide $16.2 billion worth of such benefits.

The agency arrives at this figure by calculating the reduced energy use attributable to the efficiency standards and then estimating the amount of greenhouse gas emissions avoided as a result – mostly carbon dioxide emitted to produce electricity at coal or natural gas-fired power plants. Then it multiplies the tons of emissions avoided by the calculated per unit dollar cost to society of such emissions.

Until now, DOE has relied upon the 2021 Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (IWG 2021). IWG 2021 provides the agency with the per ton Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (SC-GHG) values.

Relying on IWG 2021 was bad enough, but in its most recent proposed rule for commercial refrigeration equipment DOE is switching to an updated 2023 version of SC-GHG provided by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The new methodology takes several already-dubious assumptions in IWG 2021 and stretches them further. For one category of commercial refrigeration equipment covered in the proposed rule, DOE calculates the climate benefits of $48-$320 million dollars under IWG 2021 but a whopping $564-$1,713 million under the new way. That’s around 5-10 times higher.

How Did They Weaponize SC-GHG?

Briefly recapping, the Obama WH activist bean counters pushed numbers around and came up with $51 per ton of CO2 emitted. Then Trump WH said more realistic interest rates give an SCC of $1 per ton CO2.  Then Biden/Harris came into power with a deluge of Excutive Orders (EO), including one that reset SCC at 51$  Maybe you recall scenes like this from early 2021:

That prompted ten states to file for an injunction against Biden’s EO 13990 which was granted by the federal District Court of Louisiana February 2022.  Manhattan Contrarian commented at the time (my bolds):

On taking office, the Trump administration took steps to neutralize the SCC, so that not much has been heard from it for a while. But Biden’s EO 13990 caused the Obama-era version to get re-instated. The Biden people claim that they are working on further tweaks to the regulations, but meanwhile a large group of Republican-led states went ahead and commenced litigation.

With a regulatory initiative obviously intended to force a gigantic transformation of the economy without statutory basis, the Biden people defended against the Complaint using every shuck and jive and technicality known to man. The SCC rules were not “final” because the administration was still working on a few more tweaks (and then a few more, and then a few more); the state plaintiffs lacked “standing” because the harm was to citizens rather than the state itself; and so forth. The court was having none of it.

The heart of the court’s decision is its determination that the SCC falls under the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine,” under which the bureaucracy cannot on its own authority impose “new obligations of vast economic and political significance” unless Congress “speaks clearly.” The states had identified some 83 pending projects involving something in the range of $447 and $561 billion dollars as affected by the SCC rule. That impressed the court as easily within the concept of “major questions.”

However in March 2022 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the injunction, and in May 2022 the Supreme Court refused a request by plaintiff states to block EO 13990.

From Technical Support Document: Social Cost of Carbon, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide 2021

The first table was the same one produced by Obama WH.  Note that at 5% discount rate, CO2 goes from $14 to $32 in 2050.  Obama era regulations presumed the 3% rate which results in $51 up to $85. Note the astronomical numbers for CH4 $1500 per ton up to $3100.  And N2O starts at $18,000 to $33,000.  Hide your cows and fertilizers!.  But that was not expensive enough for Team Biden/Harris .

From the EPA Report on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases: Estimates Incorporating Recent Scientific Advances 2023

So no more 5% rate, and the middle scale is 2% rather than 2.5%.  That starts at $190 per ton of CO2 up to $310 by 2050 and $410 in 2080.  CH4 on the same basis is $1600 to $4200 in 2050 up to $6800 by 2080.  Of course a ton of N2O is unaffordable at $54,000 up to $130,000.

In other words, this regime can regulate the hell out of appliance manufacturers and agricultural operations, among others, justified by such numbers. It started with gas stoves, but won’t end there.

Will anyone put a stop to them?

Regarding Social Costs of GHGs

Blatant Hypocrisy re. Social Cost of Carbon

Six Reasons to Rescind Social Cost of Carbon

SBC: Social Benefits of Carbon

 

Gordon Hughes explains the analogy in his Real Clear Energy article Offshore Trojan Horses.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In July, the U.S. Department of Interior greenlighted large offshore wind farms in New Jersey and Maryland. Once the financial agreements are in place, New Jersey’s Atlantic Shores and Maryland’s MarWin and Momentum will join the two large wind farms in New York approved in June. These projects will receive huge, multibillion-dollar subsidies from the federal government and electricity ratepayers. What benefits will New Jersey and Maryland enjoy from this flood of money?   

To answer this question, it is best to recall the classic warning of the Trojan Horse legend,  “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”—in other words, the hidden dangers of accepting something that seems too good to be true. New York State ignored that warning when it agreed to pay very high prices for the electricity to be supplied from its new offshore wind farms—Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind—located off the coast of Long Island.

In announcing the final agreements, New York Governor Kathy Hochul triumphantly claimed that the new projects would create more than 800 jobs during the construction phase and deliver more than $6 billion in economic benefits for the state over 25 years. 

Rather less emphasis was given to the fact that New York will pay an average price of over $150 per MWh (megawatt hour) for the electricity generated by Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind.That’s more than four times the average wholesale price of electricity in New York during 2023–24, $36 per MWh. The total annual premium over the wholesale market price for the power from these wind farms will be about $520 million per year at 2024 prices. Over 25 years, New York ratepayers will be paying about $13 billion for alleged benefits of $6 billion.

That is not all. Thanks to tax credits, U.S. taxpayers will cover at least 40% of the costs of constructing the wind farms. At a minimum cost of $5.5 million per MW (million watts) of capacity, the total federal subsidy for New York’s two wind farms will be at least $3.8 billion.

What about jobs and other economic benefits?  A study prepared for Equinor, the owner of Empire Wind 1, and submitted to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) claimed that it would directly generate 180 annual jobs in New York during the six-year construction phase. The study estimated another 60 annual jobs due to the indirect employment effect, i.e., extra employment in the supply chain for the project. 

A more reasonable estimate for the two projects together would be 515 annual jobs, not 800. The total contribution to New York State’s gross value added (the equivalent of GDP at the state level) during the construction of both projects would be less than $450 million, based on the report submitted to BOEM. Similar calculations for annual operating and maintenance (O&M) costs suggest an annual contribution of about $24 million to gross value-added or about $600 million over 25 years.

Rather than the benefits of $6 billion over 25 years touted by Governor Hochul, a realistic assessment would be closer to $1.1 billion at 2024 prices. In any event, residents will be paying a cumulative premium of $13 billion for  the electricity these projects will generate. 

Moreover, the additional jobs claimed for the project are concentrated heavily in the final year of construction—and the largest share (47%) consists of professional services. Overwhelmingly, these are jobs for people who would otherwise be working on other assignments.

The economic benefits of the two offshore wind farms are much lower than claimed by the governor and the jobs are, in large part, temporary assignments for professional services staff. Promoting business for consulting firms may be considered a desirable outcome by Ms. Hochul. Still, the very high financial burden will be borne by almost the entire population of the state.

Stepping back from the New York projects, the Biden administration’s overall goal is to reach a target of 30 GW (billion watts) of offshore electricity generation capacity by 2030 or shortly thereafter. That is equivalent to 17 times the capacity of the combined Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind projects. Detailed costs and financial arrangements vary, but the figures above suggest that the recurring premium paid by electricity ratepayers in states with offshore wind farms will be about $9 billion per year. The benefits of new job creation and incomes from capital and O&M expenditures are likely to be less than $800 million per year. 

In addition to the very large subsidies paid for from ultra-high electricity bills, federal taxpayers will contribute about $65 billion via tax credits if the Biden administration’s offshore wind target is met. While the subsidies for individual projects may not seem outrageous, the commitment of money to subsidize offshore generation is about $870 for every member of the country’s population. This may be spread over 25 years, but it is a huge liability for one very small element of U.S. programs to support renewable energy. 

PS  And it’s doubtul how many wind turbines will last 25 years

The Short Lives of Wind Turbines

Friends of Science published US Climate Election Squares Off as Net Zero Falters Despite NATO Climate Activism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.