In February 2021, millions of Texans lost power, and the state’s grid came within four or five minutes of a total failure that would have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.
Y2Kyoto: Coming Soon To A Canada Near You
Robert Bryce: The Deindustrialization Of Europe In Five Charts
Germany is once again, the “sick man of Europe.” But it’s not just Germany. All across Europe, industrial capacity is shrinking. Last month, Tata Steel announced it would close its last two blast furnaces in Britain by the end of this year, a move that will result “in the loss of up to 2,800 jobs at its Port Talbot steelworks in Wales.”
In January 2023, Slovalco announced it was permanently closing its aluminum smelters in Slovakia after 70 years of operation. The company, Slovakia’s biggest electricity consumer, said it was shuttering its smelters due to high power costs.
Europe drove itself into the ditch. Bad policy decisions, including net-zero delusions, the headlong rush to alt-energy, aggressive decarbonization mandates, and the strategic blunder of relying on Russian natural gas that’s no longer available, are driving the deindustrialization. How bad is it? Mario Loyola, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, wrote a sharp January 28 article in The Hill about Europe’s meltdown. According to European Commission data, industrial output in Europe “plummeted 5.8% in the 12 months ending November 2023,” he wrote. “Capital goods production was down nearly 8.7%. Investment in plants and equipment has plummeted.”
The result of all that lousy policy: staggering increases in electricity prices. Loyola notes that European electricity prices “have settled at triple their pre-pandemic levels.” Energy analyst Rupert Darwall recently reported that large businesses in Britain now pay up to five times more for juice than in 2004.
Y2Kyoto: Fart Joke
It’s an oldie, but a goodie.
Y2Kyoto: Schadenfrozen
Schnell! Schnell! Zey must build more wind farms!
Amid the flickering of flares and torches, many of the 1,600 people losing their jobs stood stone-faced as the glowing metal of the plant’s last product — a steel pipe — was smoothed to a perfect cylinder on a rolling mill. The ceremony ended a 124-year run that began in the heyday of German industrialization and weathered two world wars, but couldn’t survive the aftermath of the energy crisis. […]
The underpinnings of Germany’s industrial machine have fallen like dominoes. The US is drifting away from Europe and is seeking to compete with its transatlantic allies for climate investment. China is becoming a bigger rival and is no longer an insatiable buyer of German goods. The final blow for some heavy manufacturers was the end of huge volumes of cheap Russian natural gas.
Enjoy the decline.
You Will Live In Pods, Eat Bugs, Own Nothing And You Will Like It
The peasants are revolting: Al Gore made a fortune after losing to George W when he set up a green investment firm now worth $36BN that pays him $2m a month… as he warns about ‘rain bombs’ and ‘boiling oceans.’
Related: Don’t ever stop bitching about it.
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Maldives
If sea level rise is ongoing and inexorable, then all else equal, the areal extent of global land areas should be shrinking, especially in low-lying continental areas and among tropical islands. Indeed that is the message that NASA is telling children, warning of the disappearance of large parts of the coastline, as shown below, with large parts of Florida and Louisiana succumbing to the seas.
Sea levels around the world of course are rising and expected to continue to rise throughout the 21st century and beyond. However, from 1985 to 2015 — a period when global sea levels increased by about 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches) — the areal extent of global coastal land increased by almost 34,000 square kilometers (about 13k square miles), or about the size of Belgium home to more than 11 million people.
If the notion of landification seems paradoxical or contrary to what you’ve read in the media, don’t worry, you won’t be not alone.
Y2Kyoto: Tomorrow’s Headlines Today
Pyromania Disorders: The Repercussions of Climate Change
Surely you jest!
Y2Kyoto: Below Net Zero
Y2Kyoto: Dry Ice
Y2Kyoto: Schadenfrozen
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
From a thread by Bjorn Lomberg:Super-expensive but ineffective climate policies mean De-industrialization with small climate benefit […] On current trends, Germany will reach 0% fossil fuels in the year 2473, nearly half a millennium from now
In related No Business Case geopolitical developments: China regains title as world’s biggest LNG importer. And that demand growth isn’t expected to slowdown anytime soon
Y2Kyoto: Disappointment Abounds
As this year draws to a close…
…it is worth noting that over the last 12 months — and contrary to predictions and headlines, including claims about “the warmest year ever” — polar bears have not been reported dying, starving, or eating each other in large numbers, or relentlessly attacking people. On top of that, summer sea ice coverage in the Arctic has stalled for the last 17 years, not melted out in a death spiral of rotten ice.
But take heart! All is not lost!
h/t PaulHarveyPageTwo, roaddog
Y2Kyoto: Follow The Science
Into the void;
A new study by a team of mostly San Francisco Bay Area scientists that found human-caused climate warming has increased the frequency of extremely fast-spreading California wildfires has come into question from the unlikeliest of critics—its own lead author.
Patrick T. Brown, climate team co-director at the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley and a visiting research professor at San Jose State University, said his Aug. 30 paper in the prestigious British journal Nature is scientifically sound and “advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior.”
But Brown this week dropped a bomb on the journal—as well as his study’s co-authors who are staunchly defending the team’s work. In an online article, blog post and social media posts, Brown said he “left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published,” causing almost as much of a stir as the alarming findings themselves.
Brown wrote that the study didn’t look at poor forest management and other factors that are just as, if not more, important to fire behavior because “I knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.” He added such bias in climate science “misinforms the public” and “makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
Y2Kyoto: Money To Burn
Robert Lyman (Financial Post);
The International Energy Agency, in its reports on energy financing, breaks down global energy investment into investment in fossil fuels, on the one hand, and in “clean energy,” on the other. In 2023, estimated investment in “clean energy” will be close to $2.2 trillion (in C$). That is an almost unimaginable amount of money, made only slightly less daunting when portrayed as $6 billion per day. […]
What has been the result of these gargantuan expenditures? The effects of current investments in electrical energy infrastructure won’t be fully apparent for some time, but we should be able to see the effects of spending that has been rising for more than 20 years. To find out, I consulted the authoritative Statistical Review of World Energy 2023, published by the Energy Institute, the successor to British Petroleum as the producer of the Statistical Review. It works closely with KPMG to produce the report.
The share of the world’s primary energy consumption produced by renewable energy has essentially doubled since 2015, from about 3.5 to seven per cent of the world total. Yet, fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal), which accounted for 85 per cent of primary energy consumption in 2015, still accounted for 82 per cent in 2022. At that rate of reduction — three percentage points every seven years — we will not get to full decarbonization (i.e., zero use of fossil fuels) until well into the next century.
As usual, the news is buried in the opinion pages.
Related: Whoppers and moer whoppers in the WSJ
Y2Kyoto: End Of Oil
Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa
A major power grid operator that oversees electricity supplies across the mid-Atlantic repeated its warning that the looming shutdown of a coal-fired power plant in Baltimore will threaten the region’s grid reliability and may have devastating impacts on consumers.
In a follow-up letter obtained by FOX Business this week, PJM Interconnection warned the shutdown of the Brandon Shores coal power plant is slated to occur before replacement power sources can come online, resulting in “degraded grid reliability” for more than 1 million state consumers, including the entire city of Baltimore.
Now pay close attention, because this is where the math comes in.
PJM is preparing for significant impacts to the grid from additional demand that includes up to 7,500 MW of new data centers to be sited in Virginia and Maryland. This is combined with widespread effects from the deactivation of more than 11,000 MW of generation across the PJM footprint.
Read the whole thing.
Y2Kyoto: Oh, Suzanna!
It rained all night the day I left
The weather it was dry,
It was so warm I froze to death
Susanna don’t you cry.
Y2Kyoto: Shut Up And Eat Your Bugs
The United Nations (UN) climate summit, known as COP28, featured a Tuesday discussion on sustainable yachting.
The discussion centered on finding “a variety of technical solutions developed to make the yachting experience more responsible and sustainable,” according to its official COP28 website. The event, titled “Responsible Yachting. Today & Tomorrow,” was moderated by Nico Rosberg, a yacht-owning former race car driver, and organized by Sunreef Yacht, a company that builds custom yachts and luxury vessels.
The discussion also included “a conversation about electric, hybrid and hydrogen propulsion, battery technology, plant-based composites, bottom paints, modern photovoltaics, sustainable interior finishing, water management, energy management (and) air conditioning,” according to the event’s COP28 website.
Whathisname’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and the British remember what they used before candles.
People are being encouraged to make sure they have emergency supplies at home to help them cope in the event of extended power cut
People must buy battery-powered radios, torches and candles to boost their “personal resilience” in the event of a national crisis wiping out digital network or power supplies, the government has said.
Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, has given the first of what will be an annual update to MPs on the government’s national risk and resilience strategy.
Guidance to be issued next year will help people to prepare for different emergencies.
He said that members of the public needed to be more “personally resilient” as he suggested they have become too reliant on devices powered by the internet.
A new “resilience website” will contain advice on how people can ensure they are prepared for being left without power for the gadgets they rely on.
Y2Kyoto: Reality Bites
Anas Alhajji: As COP28 is being held in Dubai with the oil industry participating in such events for the first time, the oil industry wasted no time making its case. We decided to repost this article for everyone to read.
EOA’S MAIN TAKEAWAYS
1. Data indicates that future demand for oil and gas is UNDERESTIMATED, while demand destruction is HYPED.
2. Global energy demand is increasing, making decarbonization more difficult to achieve, and the process of replacing fossil fuels slower.
3. Despite massive spending on renewables in the last two decades, fossil fuels remain the dominant source of energy in the world, even in Europe.
4. Coal remains the dominant source of electricity in India and China.
5. Oil is rarely used in power generation in the OECD, China, and India. Doubling or tripling solar and wind energy sources will have a very limited impact on oil demand. However, the failure of renewable energy, and consequent power shortages, will have a significant impact on oil demand.
6. As LNG prices reached a record high in 2022, oil use in power generation increased. The level of substitution among various energy sources last year was unprecedented.
Y2Kyoto: Meanwhile, In Munich
Dubai or bust: Today’s Planetary Fever Update brought to you by the good folks of COP28.
(I see Robert Francisco beat me to it, but that’s ok)