Category: Y2Kyoto

Y2Kyoto: Risky Business

The “Amazing Tale” of How Three Billionaires Plunged the World into Climate Catastrophism

It is a tale of how three wealthy men bankrolled a project to promote an extreme scenario to guarantee that the economic impact of climate change they projected into the future would be “eye-poppingly large”.

It will also not be a surprise to learn that the billionaire green activist Michael Bloomberg has played a key role over the last decade in lifting this implausible pathway to underserved prominence. Notes Pielke: “It’s a story of privilege and conceit – the privilege in American democracy that accompanies being mindbogglingly wealthy, and the conceit that climate policies can best be pursued by corrupting the scientific literature on climate change.”

In 2012, three wealthy men, Bloomberg, hedge fund manager Tom Steyer and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson chipped in $500,000 each to fund a project “making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world”. An early funded report was part-titled ‘Risky Business’ and it focused on RCP8.5 “as the pathway closest to a business-as-usual trajectory”. The pathway was said to be “closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming”.

Y2Kyoto: Xi See What You Did There

More Chinese Communism can Save Us from Climate Change

Anyone who is curious why China is building wind and solar AND coal, the answer is they are building wind turbines because Xi Jinping told them to build wind turbines.

In 2021, Xi wanted to pimp China’s emissions record in time for the next COP conference, so he issued strict district level energy quotas, demanded more wind turbines and solar, and ordered a transition to renewables.

The order for quotas was obeyed, but Xi forgot to tell everyone to reduce their energy use, to ensure the quotas lasted until the end of the year. As a result, China burned through their quotas and ran out of energy by July 2021, and much of the Chinese economy shut down for a few weeks while people waited for new orders from the Communist Central Committee.

The central committee did the only thing possible, but it took time for news of the crisis to filter through the communist bureaucracy and for a decision to be made – they relaxed the coal quotas.

h/t PaulHarveyPageTwo

Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa

Bloomberg;

Using crops to make diesel involves an inherent trade-off between the fuel’s climate-friendly benefits and preserving enough supplies to keep food prices in check.

Finding the balance can be tricky. That’s the challenge facing California as it debates a potential revamp of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

The frenzy to cash in on credits for lower emissions has triggered a surge in renewable diesel, with state supplies reaching records every quarter since 2020.

The escalation has led environmentalists to call for a limit on crop-based fuels, arguing it’s necessary to ensure the program doesn’t worsen hunger. The biofuel is often made from soybean oil, a staple for cooking.

“California is diverting soybean oil from food markets into its fuel market, and that’s surprising and troubling,” said Jeremy Martin, a senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists who studies the impacts of fuel policy.

And there’s a weird domino effect of using soy oil to make renewable diesel, which some critics say blunts the climate benefits.

As more soy oil goes into diesel, demand climbs for palm oil, a controversial commodity. The European Union wants to phase out its use in fuel production to curb deforestation.

California’s regulatory board recently postponed a March 21 hearing on the fuel standard.

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: 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.

Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Maldives

Landification;

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.

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