More from Ryan Hall.
Y2Kyoto: “Those who rule data will rule the entire world.”
Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son famously said “Those who rule data will rule the entire world.” He was talking about computer chips but might as well have been referring to integrated assessment models (IAMs) used in climate science and policy.1
A new paper — van de Ven et al. 2024 or vdV24 — analyzes thousands of climate scenarios produced by IAM modeling groups over the past three decades as the basis for three recent IPCC reports (AR5 2013/2014, SR1.5 2018, AR6 2021/2022). Today I summarize the significance of the data collected by vdV24 for understanding important biases in climate research.
Specifically, the new paper provides insight into how Europe — with less than 10% of global population and about 15% of global GDP — has come to quietly dominate climate science and policy. It turns out that IAMs are an incredibly important base of soft power. Let’s have a look.
Y2Kyoto: Going Green Coal
Will Wade, for Bloomberg;
Something strange is happening with utilities.
For decades, electricity usage in the US has been mostly flat. Even with more people starting to use more power for more things, much of that has been offset as buildings, factories and appliances become more efficient.
But suddenly that’s changing, and the industry isn’t ready. Big tech companies need lots of electricity, for data centers and especially for artificial intelligence. Homes are using more electricity for heating and cooling. Factories need more electricity to shift away from fossil fuels.
And when faced with this sudden increase of load on the power grid, utilities are going to rely heavily on natural gas, and even coal.
“It will be a struggle to meet load growth,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a Washington-based research company that’s been tracking this trend. He expects US demand to for electricity to climb almost 16% over the next five years, more than triple his estimate from a year ago. Utilities are expecting customers to need as much as 128 gigawatts of new capacity in 2029.
That’s really going to disrupt the green transition. Power providers that have made pledges to cut back or eliminate carbon emissions are now starting to reverse course. Duke Energy Corp. plans to extend the life of its largest coal-fired power plant, which would push aside its goal to exit coal by 2035. Duke has said that its resource plans are not final decisions and are revised regularly.
FirstEnergy also will operate a pair of coal plants, stepping back from an earlier pledge to stop using the fuel by 2030. And energy companies in the US are planning new gas plants at the fastest pace in years.
And all of that is before Donald Trump returns to the White House next month. The president-elect is well-known for his support of fossil fuels and his skepticism of climate policies.
Y2Kyoto: Blunder Down Under
Via Doomberg;
If there is a place on Earth where wind and solar technologies should work, it is Australia. The country’s vast coastline and diverse geography bestow nearly ideal conditions for wind energy turbines, and the sun shines brightly and consistently. According to a detailed country-by-country analysis by the World Bank Group, Australia ranks near the top in global solar potential, and some of its largest commercial solar farms can achieve capacity factors in excess of 40%—roughly four times Germany’s average annual performance. By further comparison, similar facilities in the US average about 25%. […]
Alas, as sure as night follows day, wherever renewable sources of electricity penetrate a grid to any meaningful extent, skyrocketing prices and electricity shortages are sure to follow. No country — not even Australia — holds veto power over the laws of physics.
Sky News documentary (1hr): The shocking truth of the renewable energy push
Y2Kyoto: The Mann Season
Y2Kyoto: Grüner Neuer Deal
Recently announced jobs cuts in Germany. This is just the top of the iceberg. Also each job eliminated at a large company triggers job cuts at various suppliers.
As none of Germany‘s structural issues is being addressed, more job cuts still to come. pic.twitter.com/x6X5xbsTyE
— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) November 25, 2024
Y2Kyoto: Shut Up, They Argued
Everything old is blue again.
This week I was invited by a colleague to try out the BSky app as an alternative to X/Twitter. They told me that it is far more welcoming for discussion about energy and climate. Sure, I thought, I’ll give it a try.
I actively posted there for a bit and learned that climate activists have created a Bsky climate “blocklist” that focuses on me and anyone who mentions me — Matt Yglesias of Slow Boring and Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute are also on it. The blocklist prevents those on it from seeing the posts of those who join and creates a disincentive for anyone to mention those on the list, lest they get added to it. This is not a new strategy for some climate scientists and journalists.
People are free to create their social media echo chambers however they like, of course, but one detail is worth mentioning — One person promoting the block list is one of the lead scientists of the U.S. National Climate Assessment. That degree of intolerance among those selected to represent the climate science community is a problem for climate science and politics.
Y2Kyoto: Beginning Of The End
Trump’s remarks about energy during the campaign were unmistakable. When he quipped about wanting to be dictator for a day it was to close the border and “drill, drill, drill.” When asked how he would reduce the cost of living he said he would rapidly expand energy production with a target of cutting energy costs by at least 50 per cent. And on election night he said again: the United States has the oil, the liquid gold, and is going to use it.
Soon U.S. climate policy will no longer be a thing. The Biden administration delivered extravagant green energy subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act. They were easy to bring in and will be just as easy for Trump to eliminate, especially the ones targeted at Democratic special interest groups. Trump 2.0 will not settle for merely stalling on new climate action; it’s more likely to try to dismantle the entire climate bureaucracy.
In 2016 Trump did not understand how Washington could thwart a president’s plans. But he learned many hard lessons merely trying to survive lawfare, resistance and open insubordination. It took three years for him to install people in senior positions in the climate area who could begin to push back against the vast regulatory machine. But at that late stage they had neither time nor capacity to get much done.
This term should be different. Trump’s team has spent years developing legal and regulatory strategies to bring full executive authority back to the Oval Office so it can execute plans quickly and efficiently. His top priority is hydrocarbon development and his team is in no mood for compromise. As for climate, Trump recently remarked “Who the hell cares?”
That’s the reality. Now our own policy-makers must decide what to ask of Canadians in terms of shouldering the costs of climate policies.
Y2Kyoto: I Miss Florida
1982. CBS News with Dan Rather details the catastrophes soon to be caused by climate change. 😂
Hopefully you don’t live in Florida, it could disappear any day now. pic.twitter.com/H6zarlCJDH
— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 31, 2024
And so soon after the Little Miami Ice Age.
Y2Kyoto: Suppose you ran a multi-billion$ scam and suppose you worked at the World Bank
Bungling World Bank bureaucrats lost track of at least $24 billion bankrolling the battle against climate change, according to a bombshell report by a left-leaning charity group.
An investigation by Oxfam revealed “poor record-keeping practices” by the DC-based international lender that resulted in anywhere between $24 billion and $41 billion in misplaced funds.
The agency’s audit showed “a lack of traceable spending” over the past seven years — partly because of an oddball accounting practice in which the bank accounts for its climate financing at the time of a project’s approval rather than at the time of project completion, according to the report released last week.
[…] A World Bank insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested the figure for the missing money “could be twice or 10 times more.”
“All the figures are routinely made up,” the source said. “Nobody has a clue about who spends what.”
Y2Kyoto: Damned If They Do
Companies that have paid to source agricultural produce that complies with the European Union’s anti-deforestation law would lose out if the EU decides to delay implementing the legislation by a year, industry groups and traders said.
Deforestation is the second largest source of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change after the burning of fossil fuels, according to the European Commission. The EU had planned to ban the import of commodities from suppliers unable to prove their goods were not linked to deforestation.
The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) would have impacted imports of cocoa, coffee, cattle, soy, oil palm, timber, rubber and related products such as chocolate and leather.
It was scheduled to come into effect Dec. 30, but the EU Commission recently proposed a 12-month delay, under pressure from industries and governments who said it would cause supply chain disruptions, exclude poor, small-scale farmers from the EU market and drive up the cost of basic foodstuffs because many farmers and suppliers were not ready to comply.
The EU’s vegoil and oilmeal group Fediol said its members, which include trading giants such as Cargill and food processors such as AAK, will suffer losses from a delay after paying premiums to secure raw materials that comply with the law.
“It’s a financial loss they are making by having been ready on time,” Fediol director general Nathalie Lecocq said.
Cocoa processors and chocolate makers face the same scenario with traders saying they had sold deforestation free beans to them at a premium of up to six per cent.
The premium will now likely fall to zero because consumers won’t be willing to pay more for cocoa that complies with a law that has been pushed back.
Related: Trudeau’s Anti-Growth Agenda Chokes the Life Out of Local Economies
Y2Kyoto: “These results contradict the previously published work”
A new paper is just out claiming that climate change is increasing the damage associated with U.S. hurricanes:
“US hurricane damage, normalized for changes of inflation, population, and wealth, increases approximately 1% per year. For 1900–2022, 1% per year is equivalent to a factor of >3 increase, substantially but not entirely, attributable to climate change.”As they say — Big if true.
Alas, it is not true.Stop me if you’ve heard this before — some researchers found a fake Excel “dataset” online and decided to use it in a peer reviewed paper, favoring the fake dataset over data in the peer reviewed literature of known provenance and subject to decades of scrutiny.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Because it’s a scam and voters are catching on.
The future of the clean energy transition is cloudy. It’s well-known that there are disagreements—wide disagreements—between Republicans and Democrats about our energy future. But less well-known is the bedrock of public opinion on America’s energy supply, the importance of a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, and the general salience of the climate change issue.
Findings from a new YouGov survey indicate that most voters’ views differ quite a bit from those of rapid energy transition advocates. These views constitute an ineluctable reality that any transition, on any timetable, will have to deal with. At the same time there is political opportunity here to better align policy priorities with voter preferences.
Y2Kyoto: Our Fevered Planet
Via @zerohedge – A funny thing happened as the WaPo tried to map out half a billion years of global temperatures and the “disaster of global warming”
Y2Kyoto: End Of Coal
Y2Kyoto: And The Grift Goes On
When the planet won’t follow your models, model a new planet.
Our new paper published in WIRES Climate Change questions the logic and the opportunity costs of building a digital replica of the planet — inclusive of its human population. These-much hyped projects — such as Destination Earth in Europe (DestinE), and similar initiatives in the US and elsewhere — are rapidly being implemented with no serious discussion or debate of how these efforts look through the lenses of system ecology, sociology and political sciences. Better and more equitable use can be made of scarce research resources.[…]
Models exist in a state of exception, having appropriated the academic prestige of mathematics and physics while at the same time escaping the critical gaze of philosophers and social scientists, including to some extent that of the sociologists of quantification. We reached this conclusion by comparing work on mathematical models with what sociologists say about quantification in statistics, economics, algorithms and artificial intelligence.
According to our analysis, modellers have acquired a central position at the heart of the climate change discussion, and make use of this privileged state to increase their political standing and funding, putting themselves at the helm of the climate change narratives and making climate change itself into an all-encompassing meta-narrative, subsuming all ailments of humans and their planet, inclusive of wars, authoritarianism, migrations, and various forms of aggression to planetary ecosystems.
The project of digital twins represents the pinnacle of this movement.
Y2Kyoto: The Planet Has A Crayon
Y2Kyoto: South Africa Waves Hello
There’s an old joke about weaning the dog off food by reducing his ration by a kibble each day, until one day, he didn’t need food at all.
As summer heat strikes, the US grid increasingly relies on a kind of invisible weapon — the “virtual power plant” — to prevent blackouts.
Each VPP brings together large numbers of homes and businesses whose owners have agreed to use less electricity when needed — or even send some of their own back to the grid — in exchange for a financial incentive.
Participants just have to let the operators take control of their usage to balance supply and demand when the system’s under stress, usually by setting the thermostat a few degrees higher or tapping electric vehicles and on-site batteries.
Pool enough customers, and it makes a big difference. Energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie says the VPPs already deployed or under development in the US will be able to save as much juice as 33 nuclear reactors can produce.
Y2Kyoto: Californicated
California is looking to rapidly shift away from fossil fuels and make its grid more resilient, but these efforts show the other side of the greening of the grid—power generation costs may be plunging, but transmission and distribution costs are rising, leading to higher spending from utilities.
These increased expenditures are passed on to consumers by the investor-owned utilities Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric. As a result, electricity bills in California have risen so much in recent years that in some places, the power bill exceeds the cost of rent, The Wall Street Journal reports in a featured article.
The surge in bills has been “untenable,” according to the consumer advocate’s office at California’s utilities regulator.
In its latest 2024 Q2 Electric Rates Report last month, the Public Advocates Office tracked residential electric rate changes across Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), and Southern California Edison (SCE) service territories through July 1, 2024.
The report found that over the last few years, California’s electric bills are generally rising due to higher electricity use from things such as air conditioning, and higher overall electricity prices.
Since January 2014, residential average rates for the PG&E service area have jumped by 110%, those of SCE have surged by 90%, and SDG&E rates have soared by 82%.
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Polar Ice Caps
Per a new study, more than 2200 historical aerial photos of a 2000 km stretch of ice in East Antarctica have been recently uncovered. The rare images reveal what the glaciers in this region looked like in 1937.
Interestingly, the photos show all these East Antarctic glaciers have remained stable, thickened, gained mass, and/or increased in elevation over the last 85 years, with much of the growth and mass gains occurring since 1985.
There has been no warming in this region since the 1950s. This suggests that “global warming” plays a minimal role in ice thickness changes.