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Renewables

Welcome to Renewable Energy Australia, Where Businesses are Paid to Shut Down

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

h/t JoNova – Australia’s increasingly precarious green energy grid is forcing curbs on economic activity, with plans to pay energy intensive businesses to shut down during periods of high demand, to minimise the political risk of voters noticing what a mess their electricity supply is.

Electricity users will get paid to cut energy use under historic new market reform

By Stephen Long Posted Yesterday, updated Yesterday

Electricity consumers will be paid for reducing their power demands under a radical change to the market that will be introduced next year.

Key points:

  • ‘Wholesale demand response’ will come into effect in October 2021, allowing large electricity users to be paid for reducing demand
  • Big energy generators and retailers had wanted to delay the change, citing the COVID-19 crisis
  • Some advocacy groups want to extend the scheme to households and small businesses

The historic rule change announced on Thursday will allow what’s known as “wholesale demand response” — where the wholesale market can pay users for cutting electricity consumption, rather than paying electricity generators to increase supply, when the system is under strain.

The shift, which will begin in October 2021, has been adopted by the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) despite opposition from big energy generators and retailers, who were using the COVID-19 crisis to pressure for delaying the rule changes.

The commission has described the change as “an important reform to the NEM (National Electricity Market)”.

It argues it will reduce electricity prices for consumers and improve reliability on the network, by allowing demand response to compete with “peaking” electricity generators that typically receive very high prices for supplying additional electricity during times of heavy demand.

…

The rule changes are a major victory for a coalition of community and environment groups that fought for the shift to demand response — the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, the Australia Institute and the Total Environment Centre.

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“Big energy users like factories and farms will be able to earn money by saving energy during heatwaves and at other times when electricity prices are high,” the Australia Institute’s energy lead Dan Cass said.

…

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-11/customers-paid-for-reducing-electricity-demand-radical-change/12343790

Earning money for shutting down factories and farms and not producing anything – what could possibly go wrong?

The goal of going full renewable is impractical, maybe impossible. A study in 2019 identified the cost of going renewable is an expansion of mining and industry, with increases in industrial activity around 35 – 105% (and in the case of lithium an eyewatering 2700%) just to satisfy existing energy needs.

When you add in the need to increase energy to supply all that additional mining and industry, the upper end of that estimate is likely a runaway equation, in which renewable infrastructure can never catch up with the energy demands of new industry and mining required to build and maintain renewable infrastructure – especially if everything has to shut down and stop producing whenever weather conditions are unfavourable.

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French Banking Regulator Urges Greater Risk Weightings for Fossil Fuel

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Another attempt to starve fossil fuel projects of banking services.

Threat from climate change to financial stability bigger than Covid-19

Report urges capital requirement rules for banks lending to fossil fuel groups to be tightened

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Growth Will Be A Thing Of The Past If Businesses Choose ‘Net Zero’

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By Rupert Darwall – Re4-Blogged From GWPF

Investors more obsessed with climate than investor returns, who bully corporations into adopting net-zero business strategies, are doing more than destroying shareholder value. They are destroying the capitalist growth machine.

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Virginia Passes Bill to Achieve 100% Carbon-Free Power by 2045

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Re-Blogged From Reuters

The Virginia Legislature passed a bill on Friday that puts the state on a path to 100% clean energy by 2045 as part of the commonwealth’s effort to reduce its impact on climate change.

Virginia Senate Bill 851 requires the state to get all its electricity from carbon free sources like renewables and nuclear. It still requires a signature from the governor, who has advanced a similar plan through executive order.

The legislation would also allow fossil plants to operate if they install carbon capture and storage technologies.

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Michael Shellenberger’s Smack-Down of Alarmism

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By David Middleton – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Why Climate Alarmism Hurts Us All

Michael Shellenberger

I write about energy and the environment.

In July of this year, one of Lauren Jeffrey’s science teachers made an off-hand comment about how climate change could be apocalyptic. Jeffrey is 17 years old and attends high school in Milton Keynes, a city of 230,000 people about 50 miles northwest of London.

“I did research on it and spent two months feeling quite anxious,” she told me. “I would hear young people around me talk about it and they were convinced that the world was going to end and they were going to die.”

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #393

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The Week That Was: January 4, 2020, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race[’s] experience from the past. I see it that way.” – Richard Feynman (1966)

Number of the Week: 14°F – 28°F (8°C – 16°C) Change

Science Is Dynamic, Not Static: As articulated by Richard Feynman, the scientific method is an on-going process of trial and error correction. It is not imposed by any organization or political power. It is a process of evaluating various concepts, ideas, guesses. If the guesses agree with physical evidence, obtained by experiments and / or observations, then they are tentatively accepted. If the guesses do not agree with the physical evidence, then they are changed or discarded. Failure to do so leads to poor science.

Elaborate models always include many assumptions, and computational models produce sets of numerical calculations. For elaborate models, it can be impossible for third parties to evaluate the internal logic, including the validity of the assumptions. Thus, the ability to describe and predict is usually the key for evaluating complex models, such as climate models. For several decades, the US climate models have not been able to correctly describe the atmospheric temperature trends. Thus, there is no logical reason to assume these models can predict changes in trends far into the future. In the formation of government policies, they should be dismissed as having no importance.

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Subsidizing The Epocalypse

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From WUWT

I take as my subject for this post a claim made over at Forbes Magazine, viz:

I saw that and said “Whaaaa”? My urban legend detector light started flashing bright red at that claim that we’re on the primrose path to the epocalypse.

Me, I always want to go the actual study instead of the media interpretation. In this case, the underlying study is by the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. It uses a most unusual definition of “subsidy”. Normally, subsidies are divided into direct and indirect subsidies.

A direct subsidy is money given to a producer or consumer. It’s actual cash.

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No Plan B for Planet A

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By Paul Driessen – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Replacing fossil fuels with “renewable” energy would devastate the only planet we’ve got

Environmentalists and Green New Deal proponents like to say we must take care of the Earth, because “There is no Planet B.” Above all, they insist, we must eliminate fossil fuels, which they say are causing climate change worse than the all-natural ice ages, Medieval Warm Period or anything else in history.

Their Plan A is simple: No fossil fuels. Keep them in the ground. More than a few Democrat presidential aspirants have said they would begin implementing that diktat their very first day in the White House.

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California Pathway 2045 Part 2

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By Rud Istvan – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Part One provided a high level overview of SoCalEd’s silly version of the Green New Deal. This second guest post flies strafing low and slow over point one of five of SoCalEd’s net neutral carbon 2045 plan—decarbonized grid electricity.

There are two pathways to decarbonized grid electricity: nuclear, or renewables. SoCalEd did not advocate nuclear. In a sense, that is good, because building out Gen 3 nuclear (like the now grossly over budget Voglte 3 and 4 units in Georgia) is an exercise in futility. The rational answer is to use the time that fracked natural gas and CCGT gives to experiment with the several Gen 4 nuclear concepts at proof of concept/experimental scale, pick one (or more) winners, and roll out 4G nuclear engineering winner(s) in future decades. Several realistic 4G options are discussed (with footnotes) in my ‘Going Nuclear’ essay in ebook Blowing Smoke.

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Massive subsidies & government dictated use drives renewables – absent these they’re ignored

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By Larry Hamlin – Re-Blogged From WUWT

The EIA IEO 2019 report shows that end use energy sectors including industrial, residential, commercial and transportation made little use of renewable energy in 2018 with that trend forecast to continue through year 2050.

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The end use energy sectors accounted for about 60% of total global energy use in 2018.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #365

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By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Brought to You by Swww.SEPP.org

Quote of the Week: ‘for the purpose of promoting scientific inquiry’ — Cambridge Philosophical Society – See Article # 2

Number of the Week: 2.34 mmb/d

0.04% NOT 0.4%: Last week’s TWTW contained a significant typo, which was caught by a number of readers. The current concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is approximately 0.04%, not 0.4% as erroneously stated. This is based on measurements made at Mauna Loa, an observatory at 3402 m, or 11,200 feet above sea level on the island of Hawaii (the Big Island). The actual average for May was 414.7 parts per million (ppm). It declines as the summer season takes hold in the Northern Hemisphere and plants use photosynthesis to create food and oxygen from CO2 and water. In May 2018, the average was 411.2 ppm. TWTW appreciates those who corrected the typo and regrets any confusion the typo may have caused.

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Hundreds Of US Localities Are Resisting The Spread Of Green Energy

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Michael Bastasch From The Daily Caller – Re-Blogged From WUWT

  • U.S. cities and states have risen up against the spread of solar panels and wind turbines.
  • One expert says at least 225 government entities across the U.S. have put up barriers to renewable energy development.
  • Those supporting renewables rely on the “vacant-land myth” to push their green agenda, the expert said.

From New York to California, localities have taken action to stymie solar and wind energy projects to preserve their way of life, according to Manhattan Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce.

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New York Times Pushes Nuclear Power as the Solution to Climate Change

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

In the face of the utter failure of large investments in renewables to deliver CO2 reductions, greens are increasingly embracing nuclear power as the solution to climate change.

Nuclear Power Can Save the World

Expanding the technology is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the economy.

By Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker
Drs. Goldstein and Qvist are the authors of “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.” Dr. Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard.

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Renewables are Not Taking Over the World

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By Bjørn Lomborg – Re-Blogged From WUWT

We’re constantly being told how renewables are close to taking over the world.

We’re told they are so cheap they’ll undercut fossil fuels and reign supreme pretty soon.

That would be nice. If they were cheaper, they could cut our soaring electricity bills. With cheap and abundant power, they would push development for the world’s poorest. And it would, of course, fix climate change.

Unfortunately, it is also mostly an illusion. Renewables are not likely to take over the world anytime soon.

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No New Natural Gas Hookups in New York’s Westchester County

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By Reuters – Re-Blogged From Yahoo

New York energy company Consolidated Edison Inc said on Friday it still plans to impose a moratorium on new natural gas service in parts of Westchester County after March 15 despite a $250 million plan by the state to reduce energy usage.

“The moratorium will still go into effect after March 15,” Con Edison spokesman Allan Drury said, noting the company needs to stop hooking up new gas customers to avoid compromising gas system reliability because of limited space on existing interstate pipelines into the region.

Westchester County is north of New York City.

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The Crisis of Europe’s Green Energy Agenda

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By Benny Peiser, GWPF – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Presentation at the De-Greening Day, Amsterdam 7 March 2019

The EU’s green energy policies have

* increased energy prices significantly

* reduced competitiveness of European industries

* failed to solve the technological Achilles’ heel of intermittent renewables

* increased energy insecurity and dependence on Russian energy imports

* increased division between Western Europe and Central & Eastern Europe

* given rise to widespread public discontent and the rise of populist parties opposed to the green energy agenda

Here is a link to the complete presentation.   Worth a read and spreading around~ctm

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Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet

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By Michael Shellenberger – Re-Blogged From Quillette

When I was a boy, my parents would sometimes take my sister and me camping in the desert. A lot of people think deserts are empty, but my parents taught us to see the wildlife all around us, including hawks, eagles, and tortoises.

After college, I moved to California to work on environmental campaigns. I helped save the state’s last ancient redwood forest and blocked a proposed radioactive waste repository set for the desert.

In 2002, shortly after I turned 30, I decided I wanted to dedicate myself to addressing climate change. I was worried that global warming would end up destroying many of the natural environments that people had worked so hard to protect.

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100 Percent Renewable Cities

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Cincinnati, aptly the home of the Flying Pig Marathon, and formerly known as Porkopolis, has been the 100th city to fight climate change by pledging to be powered 100% by renewable energy. Chances of success are likely to be high, according to the mayor. As a former Cincy resident who knows the climate for wind and solar, I say, in a pig’s eye. BTW if you’ve never had it, and want to try something truly unique, try this Cincinnati Chili mix.  – Anthony

By Steve Goreham – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Mayors in more than 100 US cities have announced plans to transition their electrical power systems to 100 percent renewable by 2050. They propose replacement of traditional coal, natural gas, and nuclear generating stations with wind, solar, and wood-fired stations. But none of these mayors has a plausible idea of how to meet their commitment.

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Renewables and Climate Policy Are On A Collision Course

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By John Constable – Re-Blogged From GWPF

Those advocating climate change mitigation policy have hitherto wagered everything on the success of renewable energy technologies. The steadily accumulating data on energy and emissions over the period of intense policy commitment suggests that this gamble has not been successful. Pragmatic environmentalists will be asking whether sentimental attachment to wind and solar is standing in the way of an effective emissions reduction trajectory.

For almost as long as there has been a climate policy, emissions reduction has been seen as dependent on the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Policies supporting this outcome are ubiquitous in the developed and developing world; markets have been coerced globally, with varying degrees of severity it is true, but with extraordinary force in the OECD states, and particularly in the European Union. The net result of several decades of such measures has been negligible. Consider, for example the global total primary energy mix since 1971, as recorded in the International Energy Agency datasets, the most recent discussion of which has just been published in the World Energy Outlook (2018):

Figure 1: Global Total Primary Energy Supply: 1971–2015. Source: Redrawn by the author from International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2017 and 2018. IEA Notes: 1. World includes international aviation and international marine bunkers. 2. Peat and oil shale are aggregated with coal. 3. “Other” Includes geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat and other.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #346

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Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Influence of Greenhouse Gases: The past two TWTWs discussed that when liquid water changes phases and turns into a gas, water vapor, it absorbs heat energy, which is not measured by temperature. By convention, the energy is called latent heat. Most, but not all, of the idealized process takes place in the tropics or what was once labeled the Torrid Zone, lying between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. In the idealized model, solar energy transports the water vapor to the top of the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere) where the water vapor condenses into rain, or freezes into ice, releasing the latent heat.

This idealized process, which TWTW called the weather engine, apparently accounted for a major amplification of the greenhouse gas effect emphasized by climate modelers discussed in the 1979 Charney Report. The speculated impact is called the “hot spot” and is common to global climate models. As TWTW previously discussed, 40 years of comprehensive atmospheric temperature trends and 60 years of more narrow weather balloon temperature measurements by separate instruments do not reveal an unusual rate of warming at the speculated (hypothesized) region. Thus, the prediction fails and one should no longer assume the speculated warming exists.

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Are California’s Solar and Wind Projects at Risk in PG&E Bankruptcy?

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By  – Re-Blogged From WUWT

PG&E has asked a bankruptcy judge for the authority to nullify billions of dollars in contracts with solar and wind farms.

California has the most far-reaching renewable energy laws in United States.

But with the bankruptcy filing Tuesday by the state’s biggest electric utility, PG&E, major questions are arising about whether California will be able to meet its ambitious targets for solar, wind and other types of green electricity in the years ahead.

The NextEra Energy wind turbines are seen from this drone view along Flynn Road North near Altamont Pass in Livermore, Calif.,

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Texas Town’s Environmental Narcissism

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By Chuck DeVore – Re-Blogged From For News

Political leaders in a college town in central Texas won wide praise from former Vice President Al Gore and the larger Green Movement when they decided to go “100 percent renewable” seven years ago. Now, however, they are on the defensive over electricity costs that have their residents paying more than $1,000 per household in higher electricity charges over the last four years.

That’s right – $1,219 per household in higher electricity costs for the 71,000 residents of Georgetown, Texas, all thanks to the decision of its Republican mayor, Dale Ross, to launch a bold plan to shift the city’s municipal utility to 100 percent renewable power in 2012 when he was on the city council.

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Green Electricity Grid Collapses During Aussie Heatwave

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

South Australia’s green politicians recently demolished their last coal plant.

Record heat blackouts: Tens of thousands without power across South Australia and Victoria

By Gemma Bath
Lexie Jeuniewic
Nick Pearson
2:03am Jan 25, 2019

Tens of thousands were last night sweltering through a blackout on one of the hottest days in history after power was cut across large areas of South Australia and Victoria.

There were 76 outages across Adelaide, affecting more than 28,000 customers during the hottest day in the city’s history.

In Victoria, about 5800 properties were without power on an “oppressive” night of hot and humid weather.

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Failure of UK Renewable Energy Policy

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Re-Blogged From WUWT

A new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation finds that consumers are paying far too much for the emissions reductions delivered by renewable energy. The report, linked here, by Dr Capell Aris, is the result of extensive energy system modelling, and reports the costs, greenhouse gas emissions and grid security delivered by the current grid and by a series of counterfactual energy systems. As Dr Aris explains:

“The dash for gas of the 1990s delivered lower carbon dioxide emissions and lower costs. If we had simply continued, we could now be enjoying electricity prices 30-40% lower than today, with similar carbon dioxide emissions, and vastly better grid security. Consumers are grossly overpaying for a very unreliable system.”

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Of Discount Rates and Candy-Canes

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By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley -Re-Blogged From WUWT

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,

Of cabbages and kings,

And why the sea is boiling hot,

And whether pigs have wings.”

Lewis Carroll, Aliciae per speculum transitus

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The Snow Job in Poland

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By Craig Rucker – Re-Blogged From WUWT

IPCC climate confab seeks to stampede the world into adopting destructive energy policies

Any blizzards that blanket Poland this winter can’t compare to the massive snow job climate campaigners are trying to pull off.

Some 30,000 politicians, activists, computer modelers, bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists, renewable energy sellers and a few scientists are in Katowice, Poland December 2-14, for another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference. Four issues will dominate the agenda.

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Hoodwinking Hoosiers in the Name of Renewables

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By James Taylor – Re-Blogged From American Spectator

Indiana utility seeks 12 percent rate hike to shut down coal power.

Under a renewable energy proposal from Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO), Indiana consumers would face a 12 percent electricity rate hike, which will cost the average household more than $100 per year in additional electricity costs. NIPSCO is justifying its renewable power rate hike by asserting renewable power saves consumers money, but there’s absolutely no truth to these claims.

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Brown-to-Green Report: “G20 Nations Still Led by Fossil Fuel Industry”… Because Fossil Fuels Are Good for People

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By David Middleton – Re-Blogged From WUWT

G20 nations still led by fossil fuel industry, climate report finds

Coal, oil and gas subsidies risking rise in global temperatures to 3.2C, well beyond agreed Paris goal

Jonathan Watts, Wed 14 Nov 2018

Climate action is way off course in all but one of the world’s 20 biggest economies, according to a report that shows politicians are paying more heed to the fossil fuel industry than to advice from scientists.

Among the G20 nations 15 reported a rise in emissions last year, according to the most comprehensive stock-take to date of progress towards the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

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Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From WUWT

The fifth volume in the Climate Change Reconsidered series, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), is undergoing final peer review. It was publicly presented on December 4, 2018 in Katowice, Poland — the host city of the 24th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 24) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

From the press release:

“Each year the verdict becomes stronger and clearer that the scientific evidence debunks global warming alarmism. While the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties frantically searches for reasons to justify its continued existence, The Heartland Institute is proud to present the science that debunks U.N. alarmism.

“We will also be presenting examples of real-world evidence contradicting important U.N. climate claims. We will be delivering the truth that the only thing ‘settled’ about the global warming debate is that U.N. climate reports have little credibility. Skeptics present a far better scientific case.”

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Energy Initiative Goes Down in Flames in Arizona Also

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From WUWT

A renewable energy initiative was rejected by Arizona voters Tuesday, dealing a major blow to environmental activists who hoped to increase the state’s development of wind and solar resources.

Proposition 127, a renewable energy initiative in Arizona, lost handily Tuesday, according to ABC Arizona, citing The Associated Press. The proposal was widely expected to go down in flames heading into Election Day.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #334

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Brought to You by www.SEPP.org, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

By Ken Haapala, President

Importance of Clouds: MIT Sloan Professor of Meteorology emeritus Richard Lindzen wrote TWTW stating that, in the past weeks, TWTW may have underemphasized the importance of clouds and overemphasized water vapor in their roles of causing climate change. Perhaps TWTW did because the role of El Niños in influencing atmospheric temperatures trends can easily be seen by looking at a graph of the entire record since December 1978. El Niños put a lot of water vapor into the air and temperatures peak quickly, then fall slowly as the moisture drops out. The influence is particularly strong in the Arctic, where there is little water vapor in the atmosphere. But the El Niño influence is not strong in the dry Antarctic, for reasons not clear.

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100 Percent Renewables—Poor Policy for Ratepayers

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By Steve Goreham – Re-Blogged From Master Resource

Two states and more than 80 cities and counties have now announced a goal of receiving 100 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. Wind, solar, and biofuels are proposed to replace electricity from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. But evidence is mounting that 100 percent renewables is poor policy for US households and businesses.

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GE Slashes Dividend to 1 Penny, Reveals Deeper SEC Probe

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By Thomson Reuters – Re-Blogged From Newsmax

General Electric Co. slashed its quarterly dividend to a penny a share, promised to restructure its power unit and said it faced a deeper accounting probe as new Chief Executive Larry Culp took his first steps to revive the struggling conglomerate.

GE said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice had expanded ongoing investigations to include a $22-billion writedown of goodwill from GE’s power division, which GE reported on Tuesday.

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The Costs and Fallibility of UK Weather Dependent Renewables

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By Ed Hoskins – Re-Blogged From WUWT
The Weather Dependent Renewables industry has deluded itself, its Green politcal supporters and defrauded the public at large, by not admitting to the detrimental impact of the massive capacity and thus performance / cost differentials between Weather Dependent Renewables and reliable fossil fuel or nuclear power generation.

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Global Solar Power Installations Will Crash 24% in 2018

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

h/t James Delingpole – This is a bad year for renewable energy.

Goldman Sachs Puts a Grim Number on Solar Slump for This Year

By Chris Martin
20 July 2018

Anyone following clean energy knew this could be a tough year for solar. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. just put a grim number on how bad.

The pace of global installations will contract by 24 percent in 2018, Goldman analysts led by Brian Lee said in a research note late Wednesday. That’s far more dire than the 3 percent decline forecast by Bloomberg NEF in the bleakest of three scenarios outlined in a report earlier this month. Credit Suisse Group AG is forecasting a 17 percent contraction.

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Coal Power Has the Same Energy Share it Had 20 Years Ago

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

A couple of days ago, we noted that this year’s edition of BP’s annual Statistical Review of World Energy report on global energy use is out, and it contains one of the most telling charts about the failure of the climate crusade’s “war on coal” ever presented.

Most of the lamestream media coverage has focused on this particular chart from the BP report,  which shows coal having a small uptick in 2017 after several years of decline. Doesn’t look like much, does it? Just a blip. Nothing for the enviro-faithful to worry about, the net trend is still down, right? They are blaming president Trump for it.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #317

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Brought to You by www.SEPP.org The Science and Environmental Policy Project

By Ken Haapala, President

Hollow Models? The long writing career of British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell covered a period of marked change in science. The term natural philosophy was giving way to the term physical science and extensive divisions were occurring into branches such as physics, chemistry, etc. Already, it had been shown that long-held beliefs needed continuing empirical verification. For example, European philosophers long held the view that knowledge can be logically deduced from generally held beliefs, or propositions, such as: all swans are white; if it is a swan, it is white. This logical view was broken when the premise was falsified with the discovery of black swans in Australia in 1697. The occurrence has been used to demonstrate that logic alone is not sufficient to demonstrate a proposition has meaning in the physical world (truth). [Stock market investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb developed an investment (speculation) strategy based on unlikely events, which has different meaning.]

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Fund Managers Predict the Decline of Oil, But We’ve Heard This Before

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By Steve Goreham – Re-Blogged From Washington Examiner

World fund managers predict a fall in the value of oil companies. According to a survey published last month in the United Kingdom, climate change risks will force a lower valuation of oil company stock prices within the next five years. But despite many predictions of demise over the last 50 years, global consumption of hydrocarbon energy continues to grow.
The sun begins to rise behind a pump jack and oil storage tanks near Williston, N.D.
The sun begins to rise behind a pump jack and oil storage tanks near Williston, N.D.
(AP Photo/Eric Gay)

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Court Case to Force Shell to “Reinvest” More in Renewables

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Shell’s long term policy of cultivating green friends seems to have come unstuck, with a “Friends of the Earth” lawsuit which insists that Shell re-investing 5% of their profits in renewables simply isn’t good enough.

Shell threatened with legal action over climate change contributions

Shell Oil

Shell Oil. By Catherine Hammond (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Interest Rate Rises will Trigger Renewable Business Collapses

usissuescom Energy Policy, Foreign Policy, Monetary Policy , , , , , ,

By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

h/t Willie Soon – the President of Spanish Energy Giant Iberdrola has suggested interest rate rises will wipe out large numbers of highly leveraged “unskilled” renewables businesses.

Iberdrola chief says global renewable sector facing Enron-style endgame

Ignacio Sánchez Galán, Presidente de Iberdrola

Ignacio Sánchez Galán, Presidente de Iberdrola. By Pabloherreros (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons


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Climate Policy Refugees

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

h/t JoNova – News has emerged that a high level delegation from Pennsylvania quietly visited Australia this month, offering hard pressed Aussie businesses relocation packages and asylum from Australia’s insane green energy policies.

EAPI represents the average commodity price of retail electricity paid by Australian businesses based on a Standard Retail Contract (commences in 6-months and operates for 2½ years).

EAPI represents the average commodity price of retail electricity paid by Australian businesses based on a Standard Retail Contract (commences in 6-months and operates for 2½ years). Source Energy Action

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Oil Paradigm Shift Dead Ahead

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By Spock – Re-Blogged From http://www.Silver-Phoenix500.com

Global Macro Thesis: Copper, Copper, Copper

The Chinese are holding their next national congress assembly from 18th October. This is a major event where macro policy for China is agreed and implemented. On the agenda will be the electrification of national road transport, with a plan to be all electric by 2050. This will achieve two objectives: Reduce pollution in the major cities and to be the global leader in the electric vehicle (EV) technology, and associated technologies. The Chinese are also building the infrastructure around the concept, including a huge electric grid upgrade across the country over the next 10 years, to cope with the additional load.

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Extreme Poverty USA: The True Cost of Climate Madness

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

While various US governments continue to waste unimaginable sums of public money on pointless climate schemes, real problems ranging from third world poverty in Alabama to an explosion of the skid row population of Los Angeles are being allowed to fester.

Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama

Hookworm infection affects 430 million people worldwide, causing iron deficiency, impaired cognitive development, and stunting in children.

Never Go Full California

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By David Archibald – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

It used to be said that Australia was usually 5 years behind the US in adopting new trends; in turn the US was led by what happened in California. The beauty of that was that California’s taxpayers would pay for experiments in public policy and the rest of us could pick and choose from what worked. Unfortunately Australia is now in the lead in self-inflicted wounds resulting from faith-based public policy. One Australian state, South Australia, now has the dubious distinction of the world’s highest power prices. Four months from now, South Australia hits its peak summertime power consumption for which the grid operator projects there is simply insufficient supply … at any price. And this is in a country with plenty of coal reserves – 200 billion tonnes of lignite in the adjoining state of Victoria as well as all the black coal deposits scattered around the country.

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There is No Such Thing as Affordable Renewable Energy

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com
Awareness is slowly permeating through the media that renewables inevitably lead to higher electricity prices – and that the Australian energy grid is in deep trouble. But this awareness is too little, too late, to save what is left of what was once one of the cheapest electricity grids in the world.
EAPI represents the average commodity price of retail electricity paid by Australian businesses based on a Standard Retail Contract (commences in 6-months and operates for 2½ years).

EAPI represents the average commodity price of retail electricity paid by Australian businesses based on a Standard Retail Contract (commences in 6-months and operates for 2½ years). Source Energy Action

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #271

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By Ken Haapala, President,The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

What Did Trump Learn? President Trump just returned from a meeting with the G-7, a group of industrialized nations. According to reports, some of the leaders of the G-7 countries tried to convince Trump of the need to commit to the Paris Agreement limiting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and he did not do so. Speculation abounds on what he will do in the coming weeks regarding the Agreement. He had stated he would announce a decision after the G-7 meeting.

Those advocating the Paris Agreement have never offered physical evidence that CO2 emissions are the primary cause of global warming / climate change. They just assumed it. So did the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other political bodies such as the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), with a budget of about $2.5 billion per year. It will be interesting to see if mere assumptions, accompanied by great publicity, will be good enough for President Trump to commit to a program that may cause massive damage to the US economy.

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