Posts

The true cost of renewable energy—astronomical if you include battery storage  

There is a huge and growing hole in the future of Britain’s electricity supply, with no explanation of how the gap will be filled.

By Ross Clark, The Spectator, Nov. 16, 2022

Having delivered his platitudes on climate change at Cop27, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak returns to a more pressing problem: how to keep Britain’s lights on this winter.

Last week it was revealed that the government has been wargaming a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ in which blackouts last up to a week. Whether those fears prove unfounded or not, there is a huge and growing hole in the future of Britain’s electricity supply, with little to explain how it will be filled.… Read more

If you can’t beat climate skeptics, censor them

U.S. alarmists hope to silence critics of anthropogenic warming and Net Zero plans as creators of ‘climate disinformation’

Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, OCT. 6, 2022

Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter, the hopeful view for online speech is that his rockets-and-flame-throwers heterodoxy might be an answer for what ails social media. He won’t have it easy. More than a dozen environmental outfits, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, have written to the big tech companies to blame them for “amplifying and perpetuating climate disinformation.”

What the letter asks for sounds modest, but the implication is clear. The Digital Services Act recently enacted by the European Union includes transparency rules, and the green groups want Silicon Valley “to commit to including climate disinformation as a separately acknowledged category in its reporting and content moderation policies in and outside of the EU.”… Read more

Why elites like Greta Thunberg hate capitalism

Free markets have lifted millions out of poverty, liberated women, and protected the environment. Why, then, are so many progressives against them?

By MIchael Shellenberger, Nov. 4, 2022

For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. But last Sunday, she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow “the whole capitalist system,” which she says is responsible for “imperialism, oppression, genocide… racist, oppressive extractionism.” Her talk echoed the World Economic Forum’s calls for a “Great Reset” away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. There is no “back to normal,” she said.… Read more

Open letter from Clintel to global leaders at COP27 in Egypt

UN’s climate measures, based on overheated computer models, are having an unprecedented negative impact on the world’s prosperity and well-being. It’s time for a rethink

By Global Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel), Amsterdam, Nov. 1, 2022

Your Excellencies:

By the year 2030, historians will wonder with amazement how it could happen that the UN in previous decades had proposed far-reaching climate-related measures that totally failed to arrest global warming, but instead would have the unintended consequence of an unprecedented negative impact on the world’s prosperity and well-being.

They will wonder why many people at that time unquestioningly believed in an “existential climate crisis.”… Read more

Taming the climate is far harder and much more expensive than getting people to the moon

Decarbonization is a project with no clear beginning or end and the costs will be stupendous

By Vaclav Smil, Sept. 29, 2022, IEEE Spectrum

IN HIS 1949 book The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle, an English philosopher, introduced the term “category mistake.” He gave the example of a visitor to the University of Oxford who sees colleges and a splendid library and then asks, “But where is the university?” The category mistake is obvious: A university is an institution, not a collection of buildings.

Today, no category mistake is perhaps more consequential than the all-too-common view of the global energy transition.… Read more

Only 13% of Canadians support Trudeau anti-oil and gas policies

A Leger poll of 1,535 Canadians found 72 per cent of respondents either “somewhat” or “strongly” supported “developing and exporting more oil and natural gas resources”. Needless to say, Canada’s Prime Minister is opposed

By Colin Craig, National Post, Oct. 26, 2022

Over the past decade, many European nations grew dependent on Russia for their oil and natural gas needs. The folly of this policy was revealed by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That is why, since February, many of those same European nations have been knocking desperately on Canada’s door seeking to purchase some of our enormous supplies of oil and gas resources.… Read more

After spending $3.8-trillion on renewables, U.S. use of fossil fuels down one percent

From a CNBC interview on Oct. 2, 2022, with Jeff Currie of investment firm Goldman Sachs

How much has green investment given us? Here’s a stat for you. At the end of last year [2021], overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption [in the United States]. Ten years ago, they were at 82.

So after all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about $3.8-trillion, let me repeat that, $3.8-trillion of investment in renewables, fossil fuel consumption fell from 82 to 81 percent of [the U.S.’s] overall energy consumption. The net of it is clearly we haven’t made any progress.… Read more

California is leading the way in creating a ‘green’ economy. It’s a disaster

Governor Gavin Newsom doubles down on green projects while state’s energy bills soar

Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21, 2022

California can barely keep the lights on as its climate policies bite the electric grid, but Gov. Gavin Newsom is undaunted. On Friday he signed no fewer than 40—count ’em 40—new climate bills to amp up California’s green-energy shock experiment.

Even as gasoline prices nationwide have fallen to an average $3.68 a gallon, Californians are still paying $5.45 a gallon. California’s electric rates are already more than double those in neighboring states. This is what happens when politicians try to eliminate fossil fuels with a Molotov cocktail of regulation, taxes, and renewable mandates and subsidies.… Read more

Don’t believe the hype about Antarctica’s melting glaciers

While the Antarctic ice losses seem stupendously large, the recent annual losses amount to 0.001% of the total ice and, if they continued at that rate, would raise sea level by only 3 inches over 100 years

By Steven Koonin, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 20, 2022

Alarming reports that the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking misrepresent the science under way to understand a very complex situation. Antarctica has been ice-covered for at least 30 million years. The ice sheet holds about 26.5 million gigatons of water (a gigaton is a billion metric tons, or about 2.2 trillion pounds). If it were to melt completely, sea levels would rise 190 feet.… Read more

Climate moralists’ fake virtue is creating misery for millions

From a column by Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 20, 2022

The left has always deemed itself morally superior—peace, love and understanding and all that. Conservative ideas and solutions are characterized as the product of self-interest, bigotry and greed. They might be grudgingly tolerated, but morally defensible in their own right? Never.

Take climate change. The obligation to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions has been established firmly as the ultimate moral imperative. If you oppose it you are condemning us literally to a future of hellfire—and doing so out of your own selfish desire to drive a big car or fly somewhere for a vacation.… Read more