Category: Y2Kyoto

Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa

Via Hot Air;

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: Shut Up And Eat Your Bugs

Daily Caller;

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: They’re Not After Your Meat

Or your guns, nor your gas stoves…

The world’s most-developed nations will be told to curb their excessive appetite for meat as part of the first comprehensive plan to bring the global agrifood industry into line with the Paris climate agreement…

The guidance on meat is intended to send a clear message to governments. But politicians in richer nations typically shy away from policies aimed at influencing consumer behavior, especially where it involves cutting consumption of everyday items.

‘Livestock is politically sensitive, but we need to deal with sensitive issues to solve the problem,’ said Dhanush Dinesh, the founder of Clim-Eat, which works to accelerate climate action in food systems. ‘If we don’t tackle the livestock problem, we are not going to solve climate change. The key problem is overconsumption.’


India has by far the largest herd in the world with over 300 million head of cattle! Who is gonna tell them?

Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa

Bone chilling;

In bone-dry language, the report “Inquiry into Bulk-Power System Operations During December 2022 Winter Storm Elliott,” explains how the gas pipeline network in New York nearly failed last Christmas when temperatures plummeted during the bomb cyclone. Freeze-related production declines, combined with soaring demand from power plants, homes, and businesses, led to shortages of gas throughout the Northeast. The lack of gas, as well as mechanical and electrical issues, resulted in an “unprecedented” loss of electric generation capacity totaling some 90,000 megawatts. While the lack of electricity was dangerous, the possibility of a loss of pressure in the natural gas network should send a bone-chilling shiver through the sacroiliac of every politician and bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., New York and the Northeast.

The report explains that if the gas pipeline system had failed, the recovery process in New York City would have taken “months.” In addition, the property damage due to damaged water pipes in homes and buildings would likely have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

Left unsaid in the report is that the collapse of the gas grid during the period in which temperatures in New York City stayed below freezing would have caused a calamity unlike any other in U.S. history. The cold that lasted from December 23 to December 28 could have resulted in thousands, or even tens of thousands, of deaths. The damage from burst water pipes would have rendered untold numbers of residential and office buildings in New York City unusable.

Poverty Sucks

Quelle surprise that more and more Canadians are coming to the conclusion that changing the weather 200 years into the future is not worth a life of penury. Most of us at SDA came to that conclusion the moment carbon taxes were introduced, but it’s too bad it has taken this long for enough Canadians to realize that this was never a win/win proposition to begin with.

Now, when Canadians are asked to rank their top concerns, the top spot is a duel between “economy” and “cost of living” — with climate change lucky if it can crack the top five.

Carbon pricing was broadly popular when Trudeau took office; one survey had 56 per cent of Canadians supporting a price on emissions. As support has dwindled, it’s dropped in almost perfect tandem with the rate of Canadians actually paying the carbon tax.

This was most dramatic in Atlantic Canada, where good feelings on carbon pricing screeched to a halt on July 1 when it became the country’s last region added to the federal carbon pricing scheme.

Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa

If a frog is put suddenly into freezing water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then cooled slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be frozen to death.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump mocked the idea of powering our society on unreliable wind and solar power by joking, “Darling? Darling? Is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television.”

Now, wind and solar advocacy groups are advocating for this exact policy, but instead of being honest with the public about their desire to curb your electricity use when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, they use innocuous-sounding words like “demand response” and “load flexibility” to hide their true intentions from ordinary people.

For example, Fresh Energy, a wind and solar special interest group located in Minnesota, says the grid of the future will need to be balanced not by building enough reliable peaking power plants to make sure the lights stay on but by charging people more to disincentivize them from using power during times of peak demand and otherwise controlling or rationing power to keep wide scale blackouts from occurring.

Don’t expect sanity to intervene in Minnesota any time soon.

Y2Kyoto: Dry Is Wet

Roger Pielke Jr: We know that as climate changes, the impacts are getting worse. We’re seeing more and more flooding going on as a result.

Everybody knows this — it is conventional wisdom.

Not only is the conventional wisdom on flooding wrong, data show that flood impacts as measured by direct economic losses have actually decreased by about 90% since 1940 as a proportion of U.S. GDP. The United States is in fact more resilient to flooding than it has ever been. The reduction in flood impacts is an incredible story of success sitting out in plain sight that is completely ignored, in favor of stories that instead tell us that down is up.

The figure below shows U.S. annual flood damage as a proportion of GDP. In 1940 flood losses amounted to a 2023 equivalent of about $50 billion per year, and in 2022 they totaled about $5 billion, a reduction of over 90%.1

Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Poley Bears

Susan Crockford;

Last December, researchers vigorously promoted a possible 27% decline in Western Hudson Bay (WH) polar bear abundance but kept hidden the fact that adjacent Southern Hudson Bay (SH) numbers increased by 30% over the same period.

And surprise, surprise: the bombshell SH results call into question everything the ‘experts’ have been saying about polar bears in Hudson Bay for years.

I finally got a copy of the 2021 WH survey report from the Nunavut government, which was reported on by the media around the world in December 2022. The Nunavut government also sent along a copy of the 2021 SH report (helpfully asking, “would you also like the SH report?”), published at virtually the same time. The existence of a SH report was never mentioned by any of the media articles in December, even though it was referenced several times in the WH report, which suggests reporters never actually saw the WH report but were simply given a press release with approved talking points.

Go bump her tweet with a repost, if you’re so inclined.

The Sound Of Settled Science

How Could the IPCC Make an Error this Large?

Earlier this week I discussed the mystifying continued prioritization of the outdated and implausible RCP8.5 scenario by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in its scenarios expected to guide Dutch climate policies for the next decade. Since then I have heard from many friends and colleagues in the Netherlands offering a wide range of perspectives on what happened and what should happen next.

These exchanges have prompted me to summarize how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has treated climate scenarios in its most recent assessment reports. Today I document a major error made by the IPCC in its fifth assessment report (AR5) which has had profound consequences for climate research and policy in the decade since.

Settle in, this one is a doozy.

The Libranos: Business-As-Usual

Countersignal;

Documents reveal the Liberals’ Climate Change department paid the World Economic Forum (WEF) to produce a report that made an economic case for their environmental agenda, including the ever-increasing carbon tax.

In August 2019, the Environment and Climate Change (ECCC) department’s then-minister, Catherine McKenna, gave $493,937 of taxpayer dollars to the WEF to produce the report, as revealed in response to an Order Paper Question sent by Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis.

Specifically, the documents reveal the ECCC gave money “to enable [the WEF] to produce and disseminate a report that will establish the business and economic case for safeguarding nature.”

“This report will be directed at senior decision makers in governments and businesses who have the influence and ability to shift business-as-usual approach,” the ECCC stated. [Emphasis added]

In the report provided six months later, the WEF sourced papers favouring a carbon tax. It concluded its policy recommendations by stating, “What is required is bold policy ambition and decisive political leadership to signal that business-as-usual is no longer viable.” [Emphasis added]

In the report provided six months later, the WEF sourced papers favouring a carbon tax. It concluded its policy recommendations by stating, “What is required is bold policy ambition and decisive political leadership to signal that business-as-usual is no longer viable.” [Emphasis added]

The Sound Of Settled Science

Roger Pielke Jr;

In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising: [A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.

The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.

Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom…

Y2Kyoto: Nothing Left To Grift

As the money tree withers under inflation…

Speaking at a New York Times event, [Bill Gates] observed that heavy-handed policies won’t work: “If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.’”

As Gates noted, many of these people are in middle-income countries, like China and India, that are the biggest contributors to carbon emissions today and whose emissions (unlike those of the United States) have been growing.

He also rained on the greens’ apocalyptic parade, saying “no temperate country is going to become uninhabitable.”

And he cautioned against untested approaches like massive tree planting: “Are we the science people or are we the idiots? Which one do we want to be?”

Well, the climate policies the political system supports are mostly the ones likely to yield the most graft, and those the corporate world supports are mostly the ones involving massive government subsidies.

But it’s interesting to see Gates softening his tone; it feels as if climate outrage has passed its sell-by date.

“Public anger at the hidden costs of net zero energy policies”

Our old friend Eaun Mearns, in the Aberdeen Press and Journal;

Reading your letters pages in recent months, there seems to be significant anger within local populations at the implementation of Scottish and UK energy policies, and justifiably so. Here, I try to cast some light on the origins of that anger. In the recent past, sound electrical engineering design dictated that electricity generation centres were located close to the population centres where the electricity was to be consumed. This was because transmitting electricity through high voltage alternating current (AC) lines results in losses that had to be paid for by the consumer, and the lines themselves were expensive to build and scarred the landscape. In the recent past the driving motives of politicians, planners and industry was to optimise the service provided to constituents and consumers.

During the early days of “the transition” renewables initiatives were sold to the public based on the proposed benefits of distributed as opposed to centralised generation (coal, gas and nuclear) where members of the public were encouraged, via generous subsidies, to install roof top solar to generate their own electricity at home. If you were lucky enough to own a farm, then you could generate your own power using a small wind turbine. Honourable goals perhaps, where wealthy property owners could harvest subsidies that were paid for by the whole population, who on average were much less well-off.

What we now have instead are vast centralised wind and solar power stations distributed outside of population centres, and quite distant to the eventual market for the third-rate power that is being produced. This is the exact opposite of the original proposals for distributed power located within population centres. In January 2022, The Crown Estate Scotland alone, licensed 17 vast offshore wind projects amounting to 25GW peak power capacity that may deliver next to nothing when the wind does not blow. Some individual projects are rated at 3 GW. These individually represent the equivalent of 3 nuclear power stations located in the middle of the North Sea, fifty miles from shore and several hundred miles from the eventual market for this power that is likely to lie somewhere in the Midlands of England. What politicians, and members of the public need to understand, is that these giant power stations will need 25GW of dedicated power lines to connect them to their market – where are these power lines going to go and who is going to pay for them? The protest banners that now line the A90 are a mere shadow of what is planned for the future.

So, what about exports to Europe? The fantasy of local politicians is that Scotland will become some kind of renewable power house, exporting electricity to England and beyond. In 2010, the UK had 2.5 GW interconnector capacity with the rest of Europe. By 2021, this had grown to 7.5 GW. In that period, electricity exports to Europe were effectively flat. On the other hand, net electricity imports in 2010 were 2.7 TWh. By 2021 these had grown to 24.6 TWh (UK government statistics). A 3-fold increase in interconnector capacity has led to a 9-fold increase in net imports. The explanation is quite simple. The UK has closed down significant amounts of dispatchable coal and nuclear generating capacity creating supply vulnerability when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Conversely, there is a high degree of correlation in wind supply between the UK and Europe and this means that when the UK generates a surplus, Europe has a surplus too. The UK surplus has no market resulting in high constraint payments paid for by already hard-pressed consumers.

Yet another frailty of the current strategy is the need to maintain significant amounts of dispatchable generating capacity to cover supply when renewables fail. In effect, 20 GW of combined cycle gas turbines will have to be maintained to back up the 25 GW of proposed offshore wind. In addition, gas import facilities (pipelines and liquefied natural gas) will need to be maintained for occasional use. The high cost of maintaining backup supplies is normally ignored when the levelized cost of wind and solar power is reported. The proponents of the net zero strategy seem content to pile these costs on to hard pressed consumers while politicians seem content to blame the high cost of energy on Vladimir Putin.

I urge politicians in Holyrood and Westminster to suspend all new large-scale wind and solar developments and grid expansions until a comprehensive analysis and report on the real environmental and economic costs of current net-zero energy policy is presented to the public for scrutiny. This report must be based on sound thermodynamic and economic principles and not upon wishful thinking and net zero dogma that appears to underpin much of current energy policy.

Dr Euan Mearns
Aberdeen

(republished with permission)

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