Forbes Calls BS on the latest Climate Economics Doomsday Prediction

A new study claims that loss of productivity because of climate change could result in a 19% reduction in the world economy by 2049. Despite the number being significantly higher than previous studies, the authors claim their numbers are conservative and could be as high 29% of the global GDP. Climate activists were quick to latch onto the study, calling for more aggressive measures to prevent climate change and fund mitigation efforts.

The study, The economic commitment of climate change, was published in Nature on April 17 by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, also known as PIK, a non-profit organization funded by the German government.

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While I am not an economist, in my opinion the data seems flawed. According to a study published by NOAA in January 2024, the average temperature has risen 2° F since 1850. In that same period, the global GDP increased from $1.73 trillion to $134.08 trillion. If we accept the climate projection models used in the study, it dismisses the resiliency of human nature and our ability to overcome economic challenges.

The abstract of the study;

The economic commitment of climate change

Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann & Leonie Wenz

Abstract

Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons1,2,3,4,5,6. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,8. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity. Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits. The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0

Spot on Jon McGowan – it’s near impossible to produce a scary projection without making some pretty questionable assumptions. From the study above;

… Following a well-developed literature2,3,19, these projections do not aim to provide a prediction of future economic growth. Instead, they are a projection of the exogenous impact of future climate conditions on the economy relative to the baselines specified by socio-economic projections, based on the plausibly causal relationships inferred by the empirical models and assuming ceteris paribus. Other exogenous factors relevant for the prediction of economic output are purposefully assumed constant. …

Holding as many variables as possible static, while changing only those variables you want to study, is a time honoured method of analysing complex systems.

But as the authors admit, their study is not realistic. My understanding of the study is they are attempting to abstract the impact say more extreme weather would have on the economy, if nobody attempted to mitigate these problems, say by building better drainage and water management systems to manage floods, and bigger reservoirs to maintain agricultural output during severe droughts.

As Forbes author Jon McGowan rightly points out, there are good reasons to doubt the real world applicability of the predictions of the study, even if we pretend their admittedly unrealistic assumptions are realistic.

Why would the next 0.5C of warming be so much worse than the previous 0.5C of warming?

There is no historical evidence which suggests the next 0.5C of warming, if it occurs, would be any worse than what we have already experienced. There is no evidence extreme weather is getting worse, despite the predictions of climate models which were used as the basis of the study quoted above.

In fact there are good reasons to believe additional warming might produce a better climate for humans.

Global warming is not evenly distributed across the world. Polar amplification is the observed strong tendency for global warming to be pushed away from the equator to where it is actually needed.

If global warming continues, by 2049 there is a very good chance there will be more viable agricultural land available for our use, not less. Canadian Geographic admitted in 2020 that global warming is opening millions of square kilometres of new agricultural land, and will continue to do so if the world continues to warm.

I’m personally pleased Jon McGowan and Forbes published this rare criticism of alarmist global warming tropes. Let’s hope more news outlets and authors find the courage in future to question the steady stream of increasingly exaggerated and implausible claims of how doomed we all are.

https://climaterealism.com/2024/05/forbes-calls-bs-on-the-latest-climate-economics-doomsday-prediction/

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Saving Climate From the Greens

“It’s like we were an idiot country,” the late Dwayne Andreas, longtime CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., once told me, referring to some systematically self-defeating policy out of Washington.

He raised a question of enduring interest. Why does government persist in demonstrably failed and foolish efforts? It took billions of dollars in subsidies from carmakers and federal taxpayers to get early adopters to buy electric vehicles, so it’s pretty clear car buyers aren’t that keen on EVs. They’ll put one in the garage if the price is right, but the right price is thousands less per vehicle than it costs to build them.

And remember why we sold ourselves this bill of goods: to reduce emissions. It was always nonsense. When Congress launched its first Obama-era climate subsidies, it funded a study by the Nobel-winning climate economist William Nordhaus, who concluded that alternative energy handouts are a “poor tool” for fighting emissions, with negligible effect even before accounting for the inevitable “international spillovers”—i.e., consumers globally using more fossil fuels because the U.S. spends insane billions to subsidize its consumers to use less.

A widely heralded paper by Princeton economists showed subsidizing green energy globally at best would have a “minuscule” effect on emissions.

Even Biden officials will say as much off the record. Yet look at the Washington Post’s recent contortions to let readers know the administration’s proclaimed U.S. “climate goals” are meaningless when the U.S. simultaneously exports large amounts of hydrocarbons and imports emissions-intensive manufactured goods. The Post could apparently publish these caveats only by attributing them to “big oil” lobbyists.

Or take the room where New York Times editors craft sentences to mislead readers. They say about Joe Biden’s EV policy: “Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.”

Notice how this conflates U.S. car emissions with total transportation emissions, then U.S. emissions with global emissions, to hide that the president’s policy would only reduce emissions by 0.2%, and then only if we ignore those pesky international spillovers.

Do no harm, the most cited advice of the Hippocratic Oath, is also a pungent observation on human nature. People want to be seen helping even when they aren’t. Much self-interested mischief is advanced under the guise of helping.

In search of relief, meet Chris Wright, CEO of the fracking services provider Liberty Energy, testifying Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee.

He’s suing over an impertinent SEC rule on corporate climate disclosure, but his real goal, he tells me, is to seek progress against a “ridiculously naive” climate and energy debate, dominated by the cant phrases that prevail in the media.

“Clean energy,” as Americans increasingly understand, is a two-word phrase for the extremely dirty industrial business of delivering a consumer a car with no emissions at the tailpipe or electricity manufactured without the help of a fossil-fuel power plant.

“Energy transition” describes a nonexistent, mythic phenomenon found nowhere in the data. Wind, solar and biomass have always existed. All forms of energy consumption are going up, but oil, gas and coal still carry the load and no policy will alter this, especially as China embraces EVs to cut reliance on imported oil in favor of domestic coal.

“Decarbonization,” likewise, is a polysyllabic prettifier for sending gas-fired U.S. and German heavy industry to China to run on coal, with twice the emissions.

I’ve borrowed the term “sophisticated state failure” for the energy suicide of the West. Though not a fan, I told readers during the long election night of 2016: “Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his candidacy represents a chance to dismiss a very particular elite about whom it could be said, borrowing from Cromwell, ‘For any good you have been doing . . . in the name of God, go!’”

I was referring to the green-energy elite.

Mr. Wright’s company provides fracking to North American oil and gas producers in ways that reduce their total effect on the environment. His real passion, though, has been carbon-free nuclear ever since his undergraduate days at MIT. He endorses the estimates of the U.N. climate panel, which weighs dozens of computer models, none of which seem to get the climate exactly right. If so, the coming century will see 1 or 2 degrees Celsius more warming and 8 to 17 inches of sea-level rise.

If you believe no cost is too great to avoid this outcome, please stop exhaling. Otherwise, you’ve already accepted that some things are worse than CO2 emissions.

Welcome to humanity, points out Mr. Wright, which by its actions has shown that its adaptations won’t come at the expense of affordable energy that helps solve real problems for eight billion humans.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/opinion-saving-climate-from-the-greens/ar-BB1llIhA

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Former Auto Exec Exposes ‘Colossal Mistake’ In America’s EV Push

According to Experian data, as of the third quarter of 2023, only one percent of all registered vehicles in the U.S. are electric.

Former Big Three automotive executive Bob Lutz explained why the EV push isn’t resonating with buyers or suppliers to Fox News Digital.

“The idea of EVs, gradually, adoption over time, with ever longer battery range, ever quicker recharge time, so that over the next couple of decades, EVs take a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, that’s fine. But trying to get it done overnight was a colossal mistake, and it just plain is not going to work,” Lutz said.

Keeping in mind that the EV debate has become a “politically charged” subject, Lutz argued that legitimate pros exist in terms of driving an electric car, but there seems to be more cons in today’s market.

“We’ve had 125 years to perfect the internal combustion engine, and we’ve had roughly 15 years so far on doing modern electric vehicles with modern batteries,” Lutz said. “Electric vehicles are fun, they drive well, they’re silent, they’re fast.”

EVs also have fewer moving parts, their brake systems are more durable and, overall, it’s intelligent technology, according to Lutz, but they’re expensive and unreliable when it comes to charging.

An energy report released last October by the Texas Public Policy Foundation concluded that EVs would cost tens of thousands of dollars more if not for generous taxpayer-funded incentives: the average model year 2021 EV would cost approximately $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without the staggering $22 billion in taxpayer-funded handouts that the government provides to electric car manufacturers and owners.

Additionally, as of December, only eight EV chargers were reportedly being built with funds from President Biden’s infrastructure law that earmarked $7.5 billion for 500,000 chargers nationwide.

“Tesla and many other electric vehicles nowadays, as far as design, road behavior and so forth, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just that the American public is stubborn, and they happen to like gasoline engines,” Lutz said. “It’s just a question of convenience and infrastructure.”

Just over one year ago, Toyota’s president and chairman was forced to resign after telling the Wall Street Journal that he questioned whether the push for the auto industry to phase out gas-powered vehicles was the right decision.

“Turns out he was right,” the former Big Three exec reacted. “So all we’re seeing is that everybody is pulling back on their EV programs. And both Jim Farley of Ford and I believe Mary Barra of General Motors have said: we have to admit, we were all consumed in this wave of EV euphoria, and we all thought it was going to happen much faster than it actually did.”

“But they’re flexible. They’re still making predominantly internal combustion engines. So, as long as production facilities are still there for internal combustion vehicles, which they manifestly are, they’ll still keep producing gasoline-powered Explorers and Equinox,” Lutz expanded, “despite the government’s best efforts to make these things go away as fast as possible, which is not going to happen.”

The former exec also made the distinction that a liberal, environmentally focused crowd is “pushing the heck out of” EVs, while conservatives typically “reject” EVs as another example of government control.

“A lot of it’s become like Second Amendment gun rights, you know, ‘Nobody is going to take my gasoline powered pickup truck away from me, and they’ll have to come and get it at the same time that they pry my shotgun out of my cold, dead hands,’” Lutz said.

“One of the reasons why EV sales are down is because center-right conservative America is beginning to see them as a political statement, that if you buy an EV, it kind of means that you’re siding with the Biden administration on their environmental and social policies,” he emphasized. “And many Americans don’t want to do that.”

Pointing to a “long-term positive trend,” the self-deemed “father” of the first extended range EV believes the solution includes segmented improvements when it comes to mileage and charging supply over the next 10 years.

He also advised current and future executives and CEOs to use their resources and look ahead three to four years to consumer demands, but admitted “nobody is very good at that.”

https://principia-scientific.com/former-auto-exec-exposes-colossal-mistake-in-americas-ev-push/

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What The Media Fails To Tell You About Coral Bleaching

Jennifer Marohasy

There was significant coral bleaching this last summer. It was remarkable at the Keppel Islands

But because scientists have been falsely calling it every year, this important fact is likely to be lost to our collective memory.

It is also a problem when my colleagues deny this bleaching.

If we deny when there is bleaching, and claim bleaching when there is none – it is impossible to know the cycles and their causes.

Last Sunday morning, at Secret Cove, I watched the turtle come out from under a stand of stark white coral – bleached coral – and swim towards me.

The turtle was not bothered by me and seemed oblivious to all the coral bleaching.

The creatures under-the-water last Sunday morning, they seem oblivious to the colour of the coral that was mostly stark white, some healthy chocolate brown (replete with symbiotic zooxanthellae/good microalgae), and some brown from infestations of macro algae smothering the corals.

To my eye, the fish and other creatures seemed randomly distributed, which is to say they could be found across the reef irrespective of the colour of the coral.

It was not at all how the BBC have described coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef – they have recently been using the terms ‘ghostly white’, ‘spooky white’, ‘like a graveyard’. These journalists are clueless (CLICK HERE).

Secret Cove a week ago was badly bleached – and it was teeming with life. But to know this, it is necessary to get under the water.

A big shout out to Jenn and the rest of the crew at Keppel Dive on Great Keppel Island (CLICK HERE). Thank you for the opportunity to dive so many coral reefs last weekend – thank you for your care and for finding the Epaulette shark at Secret Cove.

To know that many of the stark white corals are still alive it is necessary to observe them up close. For example, the brain coral (perhaps a Lobophyllia sp. or Caulastrea sp.) did look ‘ghostly white’ from a few metres away.

But up close – after I reset my camera to take a macro – you can see that the polyps are still very much intact, that the polyps have a carpet-like texture concealing separate corallites.

Secret Cove fringes Great Keppel Island, reportedly with some of the worst of the coral bleaching, considering the entire Great Barrier Reef this last summer.

The BBC also mentioned ocean acidification and high temperatures – unprecedented they claim. Again, they are just making stuff up.

I’ve noticed that the journalists and the scientists, from all sides of the political divides, increasingly just add to the established narratives rather than checking the data, or even visiting a coral reef.

This makes me an outlier – relevant only because you are reading me. (For sure the institutions and sometimes even my colleagues and even social media want me cancelled so be sure to subscribe at my website for weekly e-news: CLICK HERE)

It is the case that our oceans are not acidic, not at all. I wrote about this in a chapter for ‘Climate Change, The Facts’ back in 2017

As for the water temperatures, this last summer was hot, but not exceptionally so.

I write this, not with reference to the wholly contrived coloured maps they show you on the nightly news often for the whole Earth and always showing continuous increase (as though there is never winter), but rather with reference to more reliable location specific temperature data for the Keppel Islands.

For example, considering Australian Institute of Marine Science data for Square Rocks, and Bureau of Meteorology data for Rosslyn Bay, we can see that there is still a strong seasonal component to the temperature data and that this last summer temperatures were well within the expected seasonal cycle.

So, what caused the coral bleaching this last summer that has been so severe, particularly at the southern Great Barrier Reef, and particularly at the Keppel Islands?

The Moon has a particular influence on sea levels.

We see this not just in the daily and monthly cycles, but the Moon also causes the less well understood 18.6-year declination cycle.

The Moon takes a month to complete a revolution around the Earth. But it doesn’t follow the same path, moving above the Earth’s equator for two weeks and below the equator for two weeks of each month.

The distance above and below the equator changes with this 18.6 year cycle.

This is because as the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees relative to the Sun causing the seasons, the Moon is tilted at 5 degrees relative to the Earth, and every 18.6 years, the angle between the Moon’s orbit and Earth’s equator reaches a maximum that is the sum of Earth’s equatorial tilt (23°27′) and the Moon’s orbital inclination (5°09′) to the ecliptic.

This is called major lunar standstill, and I define it as occurring when the distance that the Moon travels south is more than 28 degrees south each month.

While we may intuitively expect larger sea tides as the Moon approaches its maximum declination considering this 18.6-year cycle, because the gravitational forcing of the Moon is less well aligned with the gravitational forcing of the Sun on the Earth at this time, we see on average lower sea tides at least in the data for the nearby Rosslyn Bay gauge for the last few months.

I suspect that the bleaching at the Keppel Islands this last summer can be blamed on the Moon; specifically that the lower tides caused by Maximum Lunar Declination combined with a short period of clear skies and no winds caused the water to stay continuously warm for a longer period than usual, in a way that was catastrophic.

That is my hypothesis.

The popular claim, the consensus claim consistent with anthropogenic global warming theory that the atmosphere replete with ‘greenhouse gases’ has been warming the ocean is not credible, at least not considering the location specific data for Square Rocks between North Keppel Island and Great Keppel Island.

The available Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) data shows that the water is consistently warmer than the air above it. As the water is consistently warmer than the air, it is not logical to suggest that the air is warming the water.

https://principia-scientific.com/what-the-media-fails-to-tell-you-about-coral-bleaching/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Offshore Wind Is Gearing up to Bulldoze the Ocean

The Biden Administration has recently produced a wave of plans and regulatory actions aimed at building a monstrous amount of destructive offshore wind. No environmental impact assessment is included.

Time scales range from tomorrow to 2050. Here is a quick look at some of it, starting with the Grand Plan.

“Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Offshore Wind” is the grandiose title of the Energy Department’s version of Biden’s vision. Their basic idea is that having successfully traversed the unexpected cost crisis, offshore wind is ready to take off.

They point out that even though costs quickly jumped an average of 65%, the boom market is unchanged. The coastal States are raring to go with huge offshore wind targets and laws. In short, it is a seller’s market. Cost is no object.

They note that State mandates and targets already exceed the Biden goal of 100,000 MW by 2050. But why stop there? They say that Net Zero requires an incredible 250,000 MW of offshore wind. At 15 MW a turbine, this is just under 17,000 monster towers.

The word “environmental” occurs frequently in this 62-page grand vision but it is always about environmental justice. The cumulatively destructive environmental impacts of lining our coast with towers and cables are ignored apparently not worth mentioning. Neither is cost.

Next comes transmission, where we have “AN ACTION PLAN FOR OFFSHORE WIND TRANSMISSION DEVELOPMENT IN THE U.S. ATLANTIC REGION“. While the Pathways plan covers the US, this one is just about the Atlantic because that is where the big action is now.

This 110-pager is from the Energy Department and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is actually building the offshore wind monster.

The basic idea is simple. Instead of bringing the juice ashore individually from each giant wind facility, we will build a massive high-voltage grid in the ocean. This way, we can move the energy up and down the coast from wherever it is generated to where it is needed.

In the Plan, there are actually three backbone grids: northern, central, and southern, but this detail need not concern us. There is, of course, a huge network of feeder lines connecting the backbones to the legion of individual giant generation facilities.

Given the incredibly huge generation numbers in the Liftoff Plan, this is a very big grid indeed. It is a DC grid, so I guess the juice gets turned into AC onshore, where it then ties to the suitably beefed-up land grid. Beefing that up is another huge unknown cost.

There are many issues with this grand design, including legal and policy ones, and many of these are mentioned. How this ocean-going grid ties into State utility law is an interesting example.

Environmental impacts are only addressed as a research topic, not as a potential problem, except for floating wind, where some big problems are mentioned in passing. The feel-good idea of minimizing impact occurs frequently, but what those impacts might be is not said.

As is typical for BOEM, they talk about monitoring a good bit. Their approach to environmental impact is let’s build it and see what happens as though extinction of the North Atlantic Right Whale was reversible. The concept of cumulative impacts is not addressed.

Cost allocation is a major economic topic, but there is nothing whatever on what this underwater monstrosity might cost.

Returning to today, several things have happened. First, BOEM has announced a lot of new lease sales over the next five years (the Biden II years?). These run from Maine to Oregon, fixed and floating, with five scheduled for this year alone.

Some are in new places, while others are in already crowded areas like the New York Bight. As always, there is no cumulative environmental impact analysis. It’s like BOEM never heard of that, even though the law clearly calls for it when piling on the projects.

More ominously, there are new regulations governing the permitting of offshore wind projects. The developers love these new rules, which tells us they are not designed for environmental protection. This is from the BOEM press release:

“”The final modernization rule will streamline the permitting process and reduce regulatory barriers for developers. It will also lead to greater collaboration between federal, state, and local stakeholders, ensuring that offshore wind projects are developed in a sustainable and responsible manner,” said Anne Reynolds, the American Clean Power Association Vice President for Offshore Wind.”

The primary “regulatory barrier” is environmental impact analysis. The new rules require agencies to rush these, which means glossing over them with no time for serious analysis.

Today’s actions may seem small, but given the long-term Plans, they are anything but. It is all part of a huge rush to do something enormously expensive and environmentally destructive for which there is no need whatsoever.

This offshore bulldozer must be stopped before it is too late.

https://heartland.org/opinion/offshore-wind-is-gearing-up-to-bulldoze-the-ocean/

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The High Price of Climate Alarm

It is with no small amount of pleasure that I found a media outlet acknowledging President Joe Biden’s energy and climate policies have increased American’s energy costs. The Dallas Express, a local online alternative news outlet, published a story titled “Energy Prices 30% Higher Under Biden Admin.” Unlike so much of the mainstream media, The Dallas Express didn’t expend ink trying to explain how consumers really don’t realize that the economy and their lives are better despite the higher prices, or that the costs Biden and company have added to peoples’ power bills are justified as a means of fighting climate change. Rather, the Express took a Joe Friday, “just the facts” approach, explaining:

Energy prices in the United States are wreaking havoc on budget-sensitive households, making it harder for families to save money or get ahead financially.

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, Americans’ electricity bills have skyrocketed nearly 30%, or 13 times faster than in the previous seven years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest consumer price index data.

Despite the Federal Reserve holding interest rates steady since July 2023, inflation continues to pose a problem for policymakers and households.

“There is no improvement here, we’re moving in the wrong direction,” said Bankrate chief financial analyst Greg McBride in an interview with Fox Business. “The usual trouble spots persist—shelter, motor vehicle insurance, maintenance, repairs, and service costs. Add electricity to that list, up 0.9% in March and 5% over the past year.”

Part of the reason for the surge in energy prices is due to the push to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power plants with renewable subsidies and green-energy mandates.

Of course, The Heartland Institute has been on top of this story since Biden took office. We produced Energy at a Glance Documents in 2021 and 2022 detailing the Biden policies that have resulted in higher electricity, heating, and transportation fuel prices, and how much they went up. By our calculation, after less than 2 full years in office, Biden’s climate and energy policies hare increased average household energy costs by more than $2,300.

Interviewed for an Environment & Climate News story covering the lingering high prices energy prices in 2023, Gary Stone, executive vice president of engineering at Five States Energy, said:

The Biden administration has been a continually growing disaster for the domestic oil and gas industry. Using the ‘New Green Deal’ as a basis, they have halted or delayed drilling on federal lands, attempted to restrict drilling because of allegedly endangered species, cancelled pipelines, and restricted exports of crude and processed gas liquids.

While international oil politics, production, and pricing still control a significant portion of the market, there is no doubt the policies of the Biden regime have had a huge impact on prices.” Gas prices, for instance, were far lower under the Trump administration, crude oil prices were about $30 (per barrel) lower, and gasoline was around $2 per gallon less than now, all of which immediately rose under Biden.

Instead of encouraging domestic production as Trump did, the current regime is now implementing onerous methane-emission regulations and taxes that some sources estimate will result in the abandonment of as much as 30 percent of domestic wells and greatly increase the operating costs, and reduce the life, of the remaining producers. The Biden administration will serve the ‘green gods’ even if it bankrupts much of a major industry and greatly reduces the energy available to the country.

Of course those are just the direct energy costs to drivers, businesses, renters, and homeowners, not accounting for the ripple effect higher energy prices have on energy-intensive goods like food production and delivery, chemical production, and manufacturing.

Other rarely accounted for costs of Biden’s climate obsession—one not shared by the American public, according to recent polls—stem from government spending on Biden’s climate and energy policies. The costs of these programs are borne by taxpayers and future generations who will inherit the costs Biden’s energy policies are adding to the nation’s annual deficits and long-term debt.

How much are we talking about? Well, in early April 2024, the Biden administration granted outright more than $20 billion to unaccountable climate, finance, and community activist NGOs to promote green energy adoption across the country.

Author and energy analyst Robert Bryce has calculated that the subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar power alone have ballooned from an estimated $19.9 billion in 2015 to commitments of more than $425 billion by 2033, based on newly installed, approved, and anticipated wind and solar construction.

And, in December 2023, at a conference in Dubai, Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about the administration’s commitment to spend more than $1 trillion fighting climate change—less than the country spent on Social Security in 2023, but more than we spent on defense. This is likely an underestimate as past estimates of spending on these programs have repeatedly proven to be.

Government spending and regulations are a drag on the economy, basically a hidden tax, spending money on goods and services that consumers likely wouldn’t have freely chosen to spend their own money, or companies invested in, or banks financed, in a marketplace not directed by federal mandates or influenced by federal incentives: replacing market assessments of how to balance the concerns of climate change, energy security, and economic progress with spending decisions dictated by political overlords, their crony-capitalist allies, and climate scolds.

Any way you measure it, the price tag on Biden’s climate program on the American economy and its people is quite high and growing.

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/05/climate-change-weekly-505-the-high-price-of-climate-alarm/

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BBC Uses Bad Science To Promote ‘Climate-Induced’ Extreme Weather

A recent BBC article, titled “How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods,” claims that climate change is linked to four types of extreme weather, specifically that it causes extreme rainfall, worse heatwaves, longer droughts, and more wildfires. [emphasis, links added]

Widely available data proves these claims are false.

The “evidence” given by the BBC is not evidence at all, as it eschews real-world measurements, [preferring] model outputs and predictions from a single climate activist organization.

The first section of the BBC’s report is dedicated to the idea that climate change causes more extreme rainfall.

The BBC presents a very simplistic vision of how the precipitation is related to average temperature, claiming that warmer air can hold more moisture, and therefore heavier rainfall. While the basic physics here is accurate, the atmosphere is more complex than that in reality.

For this section, they [didn’t rely on] available data, even from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shows no evidence of the increasing intensity of rainfall, but rather the BBC solely referenced counterfactual modeling produced by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.

Climate Realism very recently explained why, contrary to the BBC’s insistence, attribution modeling is not evidence for climate change’s impact on flooding like that which was recently seen in Dubai.

In that same post, I pointed out that the IPCC does not admit to finding any evidence of climate change’s impact on heavy precipitation. (See figure below)

The next section in BBC’s report is no better. This time, the BBC writes “the distribution of daily temperatures shifts to warmer levels, making hotter days more likely and more intense.”

As evidence, they point to a recent heatwave in Mali and the Sahel region of Africa… and WWA’s analysis that concluded it could not have happened without “human-caused climate change.”

Again, WWA’s claims aren’t evidence. Many parts of the Sahel region frequently meet temperature maximums on average above 40°C – usually in April – which is what the recent heatwave brought.

There is no way to claim that such heat never happened before industrialization. This is pure speculation on the part of WWA and the BBC, lacking any facts or peer-reviewed research to back up their claim.

Once again, this exact claim was refuted in an earlier Climate Realism post, “Wrong, BBC and Reuters, No Evidence Proves West African Heatwave Is Unprecedented.”

Longer droughts, the BBC admits, are harder to link to climate change, but they attempt to do it anyway, asserting that recent short-term droughts in East Africa and the Amazon rainforests were caused by human-induced climate change.

The BBC once again relies only on the WWA’s say-so to support its claims, which, once again, are false.

Focusing on the Amazon rainforest, real-world data do not show that the Amazon is becoming more prone to drought because of climate change.

Myriad factors contribute to recent droughts, such as human causes like deforestation and increased agriculture putting strain on water supplies.

No research or data ties climate change to Amazonian droughts.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts points out that recent studies, including a paper from 2023, show that even worse droughts occurred in 1865 when the planet was cooler, and “several other years in the historical record were as bad or worse than the drought being experienced today.” (See figure below)

The final section again relies on WWA studies, this time promoting the idea that climate change is making the weather conditions needed for wildfires more likely, and claims that extreme wildfires are projected to become worse and more frequent in the future.

This is easy to refute, as data show that wildfire damage is becoming far less expansive.

NASA tracks the total acreage burned by wildfires since 2003. Their data show a steep downward trend in acreage burned—so, a decline in wildfires, not an increase. (See figure below)

Data from the European Space Agency display the same downward wildfire trend.

This is despite an increase in industry, deforestation, warming, and human encroachment on fire-prone areas, around the globe.

The BBC’s confidence in their assertions is utterly unfounded, and it is telling that they refuse to cite any historical data, instead relying exclusively on projections from WWA’s attribution models, which Climate Realism has refuted using historical data and present trends repeatedly here and here, for example, in addition to the articles cited above.

Reality paints a far friendlier picture of the climate and recent climate trends than does the BBC. Instead of attempting to frighten readers, the BBC ought to consider telling the truth.

https://principia-scientific.com/bbc-uses-bad-science-to-promote-climate-induced-extreme-weather/

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Wrong, Mainstream Media, Climate Change Isn’t Spreading Malaria to New Places

Editor’s Note: The media seems to have gotten their marching orders. Multiple news outlets, including The Guardian, The Daily Express, and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, among others, published stories on the same day saying malaria and other mosquito borne diseases are on the rise in unusual locations due to climate change. We at Climate Realism have refuted similar claims multiple times in the past, here, here, and here, for instance. As detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the vast body of scientific literature refutes the recent mainstream media claims that climate change is likely to exacerbate the spread of mosquito borne diseases. Studies from Africa, to England and Wales, to North and South America, to Thailand and beyond refute any link between climate change and the spread of malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases.

In this post guest analyst, Eric Worrall, uses classic literature, historical accounts, and scientific studies to show that malaria has historically been common in non-tropical areas, like Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, until modern societies learned to suppress them with medical and pesticide interventions. If such diseases become make a comeback in the future, it will not be because the climate has changed, making it new areas suddenly more conducive to malaria bearing mosquitos, but rather because we are no longer using the interventions which defeated such diseases in these regions and countries in the recent past.

Guest Essay by Eric Worrall

Famous British playwright William Shakespeare wrote about endemic Malaria in Britain in the 1500s. Malaria was the scourge of Scandinavia and Russia right up until the 20th century. But this has not stopped greens falsely claiming Malaria is a disease of warm climates.

Mosquito-borne diseases spreading in Europe due to climate crisis, says expert

Illnesses such as dengue and malaria to reach unaffected parts of northern Europe, America, Asia and Australia, conference to hear

Helena Horton Environment reporter Thu 25 Apr 2024 14.00 AEST

Mosquito-borne diseases are spreading across the globe, and particularly in Europe, due to climate breakdown, an expert has said.

The insects spread illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, the prevalences of which have hugely increased over the past 80 years as global heating has given them the warmer, more humid conditions they thrive in.

Prof Rachel Lowe who leads the global health resilience group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, has warned that mosquito-borne disease outbreaks are set to spread across currently unaffected parts of northern Europe, Asia, North America and Australia over the next few decades.

…

“Global warming due to climate change means that the disease vectors that carry and spread malaria and dengue [fever] can find a home in more regions, with outbreaks occurring in areas where people are likely to be immunologically naive and public health systems unprepared,” Lowe said.

“The stark reality is that longer hot seasons will enlarge the seasonal window for the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and favour increasingly frequent outbreaks that are increasingly complex to deal with.”

Studying Shakespeare is, or was until recently, a staple of British education. So why do people swallow the mistruth that Malaria is a tropical disease? Why doesn’t everyone know about Shakespeare’s references to Malaria?

The reason is back in Shakespeare’s day, they called Malaria something else. Shakespeare’s 16th century word for fevers like Malaria and Dengue was “Ague“

Sixteen references in Shakespeare’s plays – Ague was an important factor in people’s lives in Britain in the 1500s.

Ague was a changer of battles, a metaphor for fear or a sign of divine punishment, a disease which caused a burning fever with shaking, pale skin (anaemia) and weight loss, a disease whose worst phases left people bedridden, a disease which was stronger during Spring, when mosquitoes become active: “the sun in March, This praise doth nourish agues“.

Ague was Malaria.

The point is Malaria infection was prevalent enough to be referenced sixteen times by Shakespeare, during the Little Ice Age, during the period frost fairs were held on the River Thames, which froze solid enough in winter for people to walk around on the ice. Malaria is not a tropical disease.

The American CDC also provides evidence that tropical weather is not the main driver of Malaria;

From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age

Paul Reiter

Author affiliation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Abstract

Present global temperatures are in a warming phase that began 200 to 300 years ago. Some climate models suggest that human activities may have exacerbated this phase by raising the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Discussions of the potential effects of the weather include predictions that malaria will emerge from the tropics and become established in Europe and North America. The complex ecology and transmission dynamics of the disease, as well as accounts of its early history, refute such predictions. Until the second half of the 20th century, malaria was endemic and widespread in many temperate regions, with major epidemics as far north as the Arctic Circle. From 1564 to the 1730s—the coldest period of the Little Ice Age—malaria was an important cause of illness and death in several parts of England. Transmission began to decline only in the 19th century, when the present warming trend was well under way. The history of the disease in England underscores the role of factors other than temperature in malaria transmission.

https://climaterealism.com/2024/05/wrong-mainstream-media-climate-change-isnt-spreading-malaria-to-new-places

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Can we really avoid “forever chemicals”?

The prologed agonizing over PFAS chemicals is based on the claim that they are harmful to your health but the link that they give in "Salon" below in support of that claim says only that they "MAY BE" harmful to your health.

https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-health-and-environmental-risks-pfas

And the reason for that caution is that many studies have shown that PFAS are NOT harmful to humans in the concentrations likely to be encountered. The evils of PFAS have become as much of a religion as the evils of climate change. Proof not needed. Not even probability is needed


It’s no secret that many of our favorite foods contain an array of chemicals that can lead to serious health risks.

This month, Consumer Reports — the watchdog group that’s currently urging the Department of Agriculture to remove Lunchables from the National School Lunch Program — found that pesticide contamination was rampant in several produce items, both conventional and organic. Pesticides, the group said, “posed significant risks” in 20% of the foods they examined, including bell peppers, blueberries, green beans, potatoes, and strawberries. Green beans, in particular, contained residues of a pesticide that is prohibited from being used on the vegetable for over a decade. And imported produce, namely some from Mexico, was likely to carry especially high levels of pesticide residues.

In addition to pesticides, there’s been growing concerns about PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances. Dubbed “forever chemicals,” PFAS are a group of synthetic chemical compounds that have been used in industry and consumer products since the 1940s because of their ability to resist grease, oil, water, and heat. Although the chemicals are useful in food packaging and cookware, they are harmful to human health and our environment. PFAS take at least a century to break down in the human body, and even longer in the environment. Prolonged exposure and consumption of PFAS also contributes to a higher risk of cancer, autoimmune disease, thyroid problems and other health issues.

Unfortunately, PFAS are widespread in our foods — specifically some produce items, packaged foods and seafood — and even our drinking water. Today, more than 97% of the national population has PFAS in their bodies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To make matters worse, human exposure to PFAS has become increasingly difficult to assess with the creation of new substances in recent years. PFAS are almost impossible to avoid, many experts have said. Further research into the chemicals — both new and existing — is also ongoing.

In 2020, CR tested 47 bottled waters, including 35 noncarbonated and 12 carbonated ones, for four heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury) along with 30 PFAS chemicals. Most of the noncarbonated beverages had detectable levels of PFAS, but only two brands — Tourmaline Spring and Deer Park — exceeded the 1 part per trillion health guideline set by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Both brands later refuted the findings: Tourmaline Spring said PFAS levels in its bottle water are below the levels set by the International Bottled Water Association, while Nestlé, which owns Deer Park, claimed a recent test on its brand of water revealed “undetectable levels” of PFAS.

Many of the carbonated beverages CR tested contained measurable amounts of PFAS. Perrier Natural Sparkling Mineral Water, La Croix Natural Sparkling Water, Canada Dry Lemon Lime Sparkling Seltzer Water, Poland Spring Zesty Lime Sparkling Water, Bubly Blackberry Sparkling Water, Polar Natural Seltzer Water, and Topo Chico Natural Mineral Water all had PFAS levels higher than 1 part per trillion.

Outside of bottled waters, PFAS have also plagued sports drinks. Prime Hydration, the contentious energy drink brand founded by internet personalities Logan Paul and KSI, was named in a 2023 class action lawsuit claiming the brand’s drinks contain PFAS. The suit, filed in the Northern District of California, alleged that the amount of PFAS found within Prime Hydration during independent testing was “three times the (EPA's) recommended lifetime health advisory for drinking water.” It also accused the brand of fraudulently marketing its drinks as healthy.

A motion to dismiss hearing was heard on April 18. In it, Prime Hydration argued that the plaintiff failed to allege “cognizable injury” along with “facts showing a concrete (and) imminent threat of future harm.”

Paul responded to the lawsuit in a three-minute-long TikTok video posted Wednesday.

“First off, anyone can sue anyone at any time that does not make the lawsuit true,” he said. “And in this case, it is not... one person conducted a random study and has provided zero evidence to substantiate any of their claims.”

"This ain't a rinky-dink operation. We use the top bottle manufacturers in the United States. All your favorite beverage brands... use these companies. If the product is served in plastic, they make a bottle for them.”

Paul claimed that Prime “follows Title 21 for the code of regulations for (polyethylene terephthalate) and all other types of bottles.” According to the U.S. Code, Title 21 “made it unlawful to manufacture adulterated or misbranded foods or drugs in Territories or District of Columbia and provided [a] penalty for violations.” Many national beverage companies use polyethylene terephthalate (PET) because it is a recyclable, “clear, durable and versatile” plastic, according to the American Beverage Association.

Measures to limit PFAS pollution are slowly being issued as of recently. On April 10, the Biden-Harris Administration announced the first-ever national, legally enforceable drinking water standard that would protect communities from exposure to PFAS. That being said, the new regulations don’t apply to all public drinking water systems in the US and will take several years to go into full effect.

In the meantime, consumers can limit their intake of PFAS by testing their tap water with a home test kit obtained from a certified lab or through a local environmental agency, like EWG’s tap water database. It’s important to note that boiling or sanitizing water won’t rid it of “forever chemicals.” But using certain faucet filters and even a countertop filter and water pitcher filter certainly will.

As for how to reduce exposure of PFAS in food and home products, the PFAS-REACH (Research, Education, and Action for Community Health) project, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, offered guidance on their official website. A few notable tips include looking for the ingredient polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) or other “fluoro” ingredients on product labels, avoiding nonstick cookware and boycotting takeout containers.

https://www.salon.com/2024/05/04/can-you-actually-avoid-forever-chemicals-in-your-diet/

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Britain’s climate action plan unlawful, high court rules

The UK government’s climate action plan is unlawful, the high court has ruled, as there is not enough evidence that there are sufficient policies in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, will now be expected to draw up a revised plan within 12 months. This must ensure that the UK achieves its legally binding carbon budgets and its pledge to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030, both of which the government is off track to meet.

The environmental charities Friends of the Earth and ClientEarth took joint legal action with the Good Law Project against the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) over its decision to approve the carbon budget delivery plan (CBDP) in March 2023.

In a ruling on Friday, Mr Justice Sheldon upheld four of the five grounds of the groups’ legal challenge, stating that the decision by the former energy security and net zero secretary Grant Shapps was “simply not justified by the evidence”.

He said: “If, as I have found, the secretary of state did make his decision on the assumption that each of the proposals and policies would be delivered in full, then the secretary of state’s decision was taken on the basis of a mistaken understanding of the true factual position.”

The judge agreed with ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth that the secretary of state was given “incomplete” information about the likelihood that proposed policies would achieve their intended emissions cuts. This breached section 13 of the Climate Change Act, which requires the secretary of state to adopt plans and proposals that they consider will enable upcoming carbon budgets to be delivered.

Sheldon also agreed with the environment groups that the central assumption that all the department’s policies would achieve 100% of their intended emissions cuts was wrong. The judge said the secretary of state had acted irrationally, and on the basis of an incorrect understanding of the facts.

This comes after the Guardian revealed the government would be allowing oil and gas drilling under offshore wind turbines, a decision criticised by climate experts as “deeply irresponsible”.

The CBDP outlines how the UK will achieve targets set out in the sixth carbon budget, which runs until 2037, as part of wider efforts to reach net zero by 2050. Those emissions targets were set after a 2022 ruling that Britain had breached legislation designed to help reach the 2015 Paris agreement goal of containing temperatures within 1.5C (2.7F) of pre-industrial levels.

The Climate Change Committee’s assessment last year was that the government only had credible policies in place for less than 20% of the emissions cuts needed to meet the sixth carbon budget.

The lawyer for Friends of the Earth, Katie de Kauwe, said: “This is another embarrassing defeat for the government and its reckless and inadequate climate plans. We’ve all been badly let down by a government that’s failed, not once but twice, to deliver a climate plan that ensures both our legally binding national targets and our international commitment to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030 are met.

“We urgently need a credible and lawful new action plan that puts our climate goals back on track and ensures we all benefit from a fair transition to a sustainable future. Meeting our domestic and international carbon reduction targets must be a top priority for whichever party wins the next general election.”

Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, said: “This is a new low even for this clown show of a government that has totally failed on energy and climate for 14 years. Their plan has now been found unlawful twice – once might have been dismissed as carelessness, twice shows they are incapable of delivering for this country.

“The British people are paying the price for their failure in higher bills, exposed to the dictators like [Vladimir] Putin who control fossil fuel markets. Only Labour can tackle the climate crisis in a way that cuts bills for families, makes Britain energy independent, and tackles the climate crisis.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, said: “Once again the government’s climate plan has been ruled unlawful. When dealing with the climate emergency, simply ‘hoping for the best’ and putting your faith in unproven technologies and vague policies is not good enough – we need concrete plans and investments and there is no time to lose. The government must now go back to the drawing board and urgently pull together a credible plan to put the UK back on track to delivering our climate commitments.”

John Barrett, professor in energy and climate policy at the University of Leeds, said: “The UK government has failed to describe a credible pathway for the UK to achieve its legally binding climate commitments. This is despite overwhelming evidence from the Climate Change Committee and university researchers on the various options available to the government. Many of these options also deliver numerous co-benefits such as warmer homes, cheaper bills, more energy security, better air quality, more jobs and a healthier society. It is time for the UK government to take climate change seriously and tell us how they are going to achieve their own targets.”

A DESNZ spokesperson said: “The UK can be hugely proud of its record on climate change. Not only are we the first major economy to reach halfway to net zero, we have also set out more detail than any other G20 country on how we will reach our ambitious carbon budgets. The claims in this case were largely about process and the judgment contains no criticism of the detailed plans we have in place. We do not believe a court case about process represents the best way of driving progress towards our shared goal of reaching net zero.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/03/britain-climate-action-plan-unlawful-high-court

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Replacing coal with wind and solar requires massive storage

In a summary of a recent peer-reviewed paper, the principal author stated that an electric grid predominantly powered by intermittent renewables such as wind and solar would require storage approximately equal to 25% of annual generation to be reliable. Other studies have reported similar results.

US coal powerplants produced approximately 700,000 GWH of electricity in 2023. The Administration has announced a goal of eliminating coal generation by 2030. Achieving this goal would require installation of approximately 270 GW of wind and solar rating plate capacity generation, depending on the percentages of wind and solar generation.

Based on the Fekete paper, the US would also require a total of approximately 175,000 GWH of additional electricity storage as the result of the elimination of coal power plants. The primary battery storage system currently being installed for grid level storage is the Tesla Megapack, which stores 19.3 MWH deliverable at a rate of 4.9 MW over a 4-hour period. Utilizing Tesla Megapacks to support the intermittent wind and solar generation installed to replace US coal powerplants would require 9,067.357 units at a current installed cost of $8,128,870 per unit, for a total installed cost of $74 trillion.

Research suggests that battery life can be extended by operating the batteries between 20% and 80% of full charge. Grid scale batteries would be expected to operate below 20% of full charge very rarely, so the lower limit can essentially be ignored. However, limiting the batteries to a maximum charge of 80%, while maintaining necessary electricity storage would require increasing the installed battery capacity by 25%, at an installed cost of approximately $18 trillion, increasing the total battery system installed cost to approximately $92 trillion. (Note: These costs do not include the land required for installation or the cost of grid connection.)

The US currently has an electricity storage deficit of approximately 140,000 GWH. Fossil fueled generation currently provides support for the existing wind and solar generation in the absence of this storage and there is growing concern regarding grid capacity margins during peak demand periods. Therefore, as coal powerplants are decommissioned, it would be essential that the current storage deficit be eliminated as well as installing the additional storage required to support the intermittent generating capacity which would provide the generation previously provided by the coal powerplants. This would require the installation of approximately 18 million Tesla Megapacks (or equivalent). Currently, production capacity does not exist to meet this demand over the next 6 years.

Also, as coal power plants are decommissioned, there will be a growing need for long-duration storage to support the grid through seasonal variation in both wind and solar generation. The only current long-duration systems are pumped hydro facilities. However, it is unlikely that significant additional pumped hydro capacity will be installed in the US because of geographic limitations and public resistance.

https://edreid.substack.com/p/no-coal-storage

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Game meat company to begin hunting deer in South Australian forests amid criticism of aerial culling

Sounds overdue to me

A game meat company will begin hunting deer in South Australian forests this month, which the owner says is more environmentally friendly and less cruel than the state government's preferred culling method.

Macro Meats Australia's contract with forestry companies to work towards eradicating deer in their plantations is also a rebuke to recreational hunters, who would prefer for some deer to remain so they can continue their enjoying sport.

The company is based in Adelaide and mostly focuses on exporting kangaroo meat.

Managing director Ray Borda has been critical of the state government's aerial deer culling program, which involves the use of shotguns to kill deer from helicopters and leaves the carcasses to rot on the ground.

Forestry companies want the deer eradicated because of the damage they to do trees.

Mr Borda said professionals shooting deer for meat was the best solution, because the meat could be sold for a profit rather than attracting scavengers or emitting methane when it rotted.

"Environmentally, and even animal welfare-wise, the professional industry is always looked upon as the best and cheapest way to handle these overabundant animals," Mr Borda said.

The hunters employed by Macro Meats will be in the South East next week to plan for the cull.

Professional deer hunters aim to shoot deer in the head to prevent damaging the meat in the animal's body.

Mr Borda, who is also the chair of the Australia Wild Game Industry Council, says this is better than aerial culling, when most deer die after being shot in the heart or lungs.

"The poor old deer — it's not their fault that there's too many of them," he said.

"So what we try to do is, we try to do it humanely, and then we're creating jobs."

Limestone Coast Landscape Board general manager Steve Bourne said aerial culling was an "effective and efficient means of removing large numbers of feral deer from the landscape in a humane way".

"Meat harvesting is a tool we have used — 2,100 feral deer have been processed for human consumption in the last three years," he said.

"In closed canopy pine forests, ground shooting can be a more effective means of removing feral deer."

The RSPCA has raised concerns that shooters targeting feral deer from helicopters using shotguns may not be able to tell whether the animals they shoot are dead or not.

But a Flinders University study found all the deer that researchers cut open after an aerial cull had been fatally shot in the lungs or heart.

A CSIRO study found aerial culling was extremely effective at controlling deer populations compared with ground shooting, with up to 94 animals killed per hour during aerial culling.

The SA government plans to eradicate all feral deer in the state by 2032, mostly through aerial culling, but also shooting on the ground.

It estimates there are about 40,000 feral deer in South Australia, mostly in the state's south-east, but also on the Fleurieu Peninsula and in the Adelaide Hills.

Deer compete with native wildlife and livestock for grass.

They damage trees and contribute to erosion and road crashes.

The government estimated farm productivity losses of $36 million last year, which would rise to $242m by 2031 if the deer population was not controlled.

Amateur hunters, many of whom travel to SA from Victoria, say they contribute to SA's economy.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-01/macro-meats-to-begin-hunting-deer-in-forests/103786220

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Why climate change ISN'T going to end the world and why we need to stop obsessing about net-zero, according to Cambridge University professor

Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.

Humanity is not teetering on a cliff's edge, he says, at risk of imminent catastrophe if we don't reach net-zero carbon emissions by a certain date.

And he has made it his mission to call out the people who claim we are.

In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn't Everything, Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.

Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, dubs this ideology 'climatism,' and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world's ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.

The problem, he said, is this narrow focus takes attention away from other important moral, ethical, and political objectives - like helping people in the developing world rise out of poverty.

DailyMail.com spoke with Hulme about why he thinks climatism is a problem, how it should be balanced out, and what keeps him hopeful about the future of humanity.

As with other 'isms' - like cubism or romanticism - ideologies provide a way of thinking about things, explained Hulme.

'They're like spectacles that help us to make sense of the world, according to a predefined framework or structure,' he said

To be clear, Hulme does not claim that all ideologies are wrong.

'We all need ideologies, and we all have them - whether you're a Marxist or a nationalist, you're likely to hold an ideology of some form or other,' he added.

As Hulme sees it, many journalists, advocates, and casual observers of climate change have become devotees of climatism, inaccurately attributing many events that happen in the world as being caused by climate change.

He gives the examples of a fire, flood, or damaging hurricane.

'No matter how complex a particular causal chain might be, it's a very convenient shorthand to say, 'Oh, well, this was caused by climate change,'' Hulme said.

'It's a very shallow and simplistic way, I would argue, to try to describe events that are happening in the world.'

Researchers have shown that warming oceans do lead to more frequent and more severe storms: Twice as many cyclones now become category 4 or 5 as they did in the 1970s, scientists have found, and Atlantic storms are three times as likely to become hurricanes.

Hulme doesn't argue that the effects of climate change are not happening, though, just that stopping climate change won't stop disasters from happening altogether.

'Fundamentally, we're going to have to deal with hurricanes, and we're not going to deal with them just by cutting our carbon emissions,' he said.

The solutions, he argues, will include better forecasting, better early warning systems, better emergency plans, and better infrastructure.

'There are all sorts of things that we can do to minimize the risks and dangers of hurricanes, that are way more effective in the short term than trying to cut our carbon emissions,' said Hulme.

The danger of climatism, he pointed out, is that it leads people down a false chain of events: If all of these things happening in the world are caused by climate change, then all we have to do is stop climate change, and all the other things will stop themselves.

'So whether it's Putin's war, or whether it's the Hamas-Israel conflict in Gaza, whether it is a hurricane hitting Miami - if all of these things are caused by climate change, let's get rid of climate change,' said Hulme.

'And that clearly is a very inadequate way of thinking about the complexities of most of the problems we we face in the world today.'

This distorted thinking can make people forget about other important concerns, he argues.

As an example, Hulme points to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 17 areas that the world's governments have identified as top priorities for humanity.

The SDGs include building peace and justice, eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, and ensuring clean sanitation and water for billions of people on the planet.

'These are really important goals, and the danger is if we obsess about just climate change, if we think that climate change holds the key to wellbeing and a better future, we take attention away from interventions that will make progress on the sustainable development goals,' he said.

As an example, Hulme points to Western European governments that are not willing to put money into the transition away from open wood burning cookers in many rural villages in the global south, which cause very high mortality levels, particularly amongst women and children.

'Liquid petroleum gas (LPG) is much cleaner, much more efficient, much easier for women and girls to get access to,' he said. 'But in the name of climate change, well, we can't put money into LPG transition, because that's a fossil fuel.'

Others are coming around to see things his way, though.

'LPG for clean cooking can and should be permitted as a transitional fuel to save lives in the short-term until we can provide universal access to alternative low-emissions clean cooking systems,' experts from the World Bank and Columbia University wrote in March.

A number of benchmarks should have been met by 2020, according to climate scientists in 2016: Renewable energy - mainly wind and solar - should have made up at least 30 percent of the world's electricity supply, and no additional coal-fired power plants should have been approved after that date.

If society were to put climate change priorities into their proper proportions then, Hulme said it would still be on the list.

It just wouldn't be the only item on the list, and it wouldn't be at the top.

'There's 17 SDGs, and two of them are related to climate. So that begins to rebalance, or re-proportion, the amount of effort and attention we might wish to pay,' said Hulme.

Beyond these mixed up priorities, Hulme also takes issue with what he sees as an obsession with deadlines: 'There's this idea of the ticking clock counting down to Ground Zero - we've only got five years, 10 years, two years - however long different commentators put the deadline.'

He calls this line of thinking 'deadline-ism,' a sort of sub-ideology of climatism, and he says he finds it unhelpful.

'It's like holding a gun to your head and saying, 'You've only got three seconds to make a decision.'

And under those circumstances, most human beings would not make a very good decision,' he said.

Perhaps even worse, it has the potential to undermine the gravity of the true threat posed by climate change.

One danger of deadlines can be that they cultivate a sense of fatalism: 'Well, if we've only got three more years, clearly we're not going to solve it in three years time. So what the heck, let's give up,' Hulme said.

The other danger is cynicism: The average person sees deadlines come and go, but the world is still here, and as far as most people can tell, climate disaster has not befallen us.

'We've had many of these supposedly decisive years, said Hulme. 'And you know, it's not surprising that people may become somewhat cynical or fatigued by this type of rhetoric.'

Hulme's critics have argued that he is over-egging the pudding - that his picture of climatism as a rampant and harmful ideology is overstated or inaccurate.

'[Hulme's] claim that mainstream climate policy pays no attention to social and economic context and to non-climate priorities is simply not credible,' wrote development economist Simon Maxwell in his review of Climate Change Isn't Everything.

'It is certainly true that the climate and development worlds have in the past run on parallel and poorly connected tracks. That was probably true in the 2000s,' Maxwell wrote. 'But today? The literature is awash with references to climate compatible development, climate-smart development, climate-resilient development, just transition, and many other formulations of the same kind.'

Hulme disputed the idea that he is over-egging the pudding on climatism - after all, the whole basis of his argument is that climatists are the ones making a bigger deal out of it than they should be.

'I'm quite happy to have an argument or discussion about whether I'm over-egging the pudding, as opposed to the people who I think are over-egging the pudding,' he said, pointing to his deep experience in the field.

'I've been observing concerns about how climate change is talked about, framed, and reacted to in public for many, many years.'

And this public framing has led to a phenomenon called 'eco-anxiety,' which Hulme said he sees among his students at Cambridge University

'They have absorbed these claims of tipping points, and they take these things literally, and feel that there is no future for them because the climate is going to go out of control,' he said. 'They feel that it will be too late, and everything will collapse.'

As an educator of young adults, and as someone who has studied climate change over a 40-year career, Hulme sees a pastoral dimension to his role.

'I see people unnecessarily going down a spiral of despair and hopelessness that I find deeply concerning and worrying,' he said.

Part of what makes this so unfortunate is that he still sees many reasons to feel hopeful about the future.

Chief among them, the irrepressible ingenuity and spirit of humans and their social formations.

'Despite what I've just said about mental health and eco-anxieties, the vast majority of humans have this irrepressible spirit,' Hulme said.

He emphasized that the risks associated with climate change are important things to attend to.

'We do need smart climate policies, whether it's mitigation or adaptation,' he said.

'We need energy transitions away from carbon-emitting energy sources, and that energy transition is going to come through innovation. It's going to come through smart people doing smart things more efficiently, with the human ingenuity and creativity that we've been granted, making use of the material resources that the planet offers.'

In the end, it's faith in humanity that Hulme holds on to.

But he's a realist, too.

'For good or ill, through the last 200 years of human development, we've set in motion this resetting of the climate system, and we're not going to eliminate that any time soon,' he said. 'We've got to accept the fact that there is going to be residual climate change for a long, long time to come.'

Bad things are going to happen, Hulme acknowledged, and the climate will continue to change. But smart mitigations can shave off some of the worst excesses of that changing climate.

'That doesn't mean we give up,' he said. 'It's never too late to do the right thing. There is no cliff edge, after which we all fall down.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13347247/climatism-dangerous-obsession-climate-change-Mike-Hulme.html

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Researchers Find Arctic Region Was Warmer ~10,000 Years Ago Than Today

The European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE presents its latest climate video on its YouTube channel

Examined today is a paper appearing in the journal Nature Communications titled: “Seasonal sea-ice in the Arctic’s last ice area during the Early Holocene.”

The authors looked at sea ice in the region of the Lincoln Sea, bordering northern Greenland and Canada, which “will be the final stronghold of perennial Arctic sea ice in a warming climate.”

According to the paper, “Modelling studies suggest a transition from perennial to seasonal sea ice during the Early Holocene, a period of elevated global temperatures around 10,000 years ago.”

The researchers have found “marine proxy evidence for the disappearance of perennial sea ice in the southern Lincoln Sea during the Early Holocene, which suggests a widespread transition to seasonal sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.”

“Seasonal sea-ice conditions were tightly coupled to regional atmospheric temperatures,” the authors stated.

https://principia-scientific.com/researchers-find-arctic-region-was-warmer-10000-years-ago-than-today/

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Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can't Be Controlled

NASA claimed that “Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and “human activity is the principal cause.” Others proposed spending trillions of dollars to control the climate. But are we humans responsible for climate change? And what can we do about it?

“The climate of planet Earth has never stopped changing since the Earth’s genesis, sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely,” says Patrick Moore in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. “Hoping for a ‘perfect stable climate’ is as futile as hoping the weather will be the same and pleasant, every day of the year, forever.”

In other words, climate change is normal and natural, and you can forget about controlling it.

For instance, a major influence of weather and climate are solar cycles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field over periods of eight to 14 years. They release varying amounts of energy and produce dark sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The effects of solar cycles on Earth vary, with some regions warming more than 1°C and others cooling.

Climatic changes occur as a result of variations in the interaction of solar energy with Earth’s ozone layer, which influences ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. These, in turn, affect the speed of west-to-east wind flows and the stability of the polar vortex. Whether the polar vortex remains stable and close to the Arctic or dips southward determines whether winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are severe or mild.

In addition to solar cycles, there are three Milankovitch cycles that range in length from 26,000 to 100,000 years. They include the eccentricity, or shape, of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Small fluctuations in the orbit’s shape influence the length of seasons. For example, when the orbit is more like an oval than a circle, Northern Hemisphere summers are longer than winters and springs are longer than autumns.

The Milankovitch cycles also involve obliquity, or the angle that Earth’s axis is tilted. The tilt is why there are seasons, and the greater the Earth’s tilt, the more extreme the seasons. Larger tilt angles can cause the melting and retreat of glaciers and ice sheets, as each hemisphere receives more solar radiation during summer and less during winter.

Finally, the rotating Earth, like a toy top, wobbles slightly on its axis. Known as precession, this third Milankovitch cycle causes seasonal contrasts to be more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other.

Moving from outer space to Earth, ocean and wind currents also affect the climate.

For instance, during normal conditions in the Pacific Ocean, trade winds blow from east to west along the Equator, pushing warm surface waters from South America towards Asia. During El Niño, the trade winds weaken and the warm water reverses direction, moving eastward to the American West Coast. Other times, during La Niña, the trade winds become stronger than usual, and more warm water is blown towards Asia. In the United States and Canada, these phenomena cause some regions to become warmer, colder, wetter, or drier than usual.

In addition to El Niño and La Niña, there is also the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is driven by low air pressure in the North Atlantic Ocean, near Greenland and Iceland (known as the sub-polar low or Icelandic low), and high air pressure in the central North Atlantic Ocean (known as the subtropical high or Azores High). The relative strength of these regions of low and high atmospheric pressures affects the climate in the Eastern United States and Canada and in Europe, affecting both temperatures and precipitation.

Similarly, Hadley cells are the reason Earth has equatorial rainforests that are bounded by deserts to the north and south. Because the Sun warms Earth the most at the Equator, air on either side of the Equator is cooler and denser. As a result, cool air blows towards the Equator as the warm, less dense equatorial air rises and cools, releasing moisture as rain and creating lush vegetation. The rising, drier air reaches the stratosphere blowing north and south to settle in regions made arid by lack of atmospheric moisture.

These and other phenomena influencing our climate are well beyond the control of humans.

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2024/03/30/climate_change_is_normal_and_natural_and_cant_be_controlled_1021250.html

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California’s Perpetual Drought Is Manmade and Intentional

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) last week released its next five-year plan for the State Water Project—Update 2023. After years of meetings, California’s premier water agency has decided to focus on “three intersecting themes: addressing climate urgency, strengthening watershed resilience, and achieving equity in water management.”

Water supplies for California’s 40 million people and the planet’s most productive agriculture have third- to fifth-level priority.

There is nothing new here, except to publicly admit to betraying the public trust. Really?

Over several decades, the public has been deceived into voting for water bonds that have little new water in them—phony promises to build new water storage and aqueducts. About 12 percent of bond funds are spent on new water storage. The rest of the bond funds have been squandered on scores of local and special-interest environmental projects, e.g., tearing down four Klamath-area dams—killing fish to save them—and opposing substantial new water projects, e.g., raising Shasta Dam and building Auburn Dam.

Further, by California law, water must be equitably distributed, pumped “equally”—half to human beings (if you count agriculture) and half to fish (the water-short Pacific Ocean, 187 quadrillion gallons). During the big rains of 2024, about 90 percent of the water was flushed to the Pacific through the gills of perhaps a half dozen delta smelt.

Farmers call it a manmade drought.

The politicos halted humans “taking” water, “diverting” it, from fish. Under the U.S. Constitution, the taking of private property requires just compensation—not mass confiscation. Water rights are a complex species of property.

“Our findings show that atmospheric river activity exceeds what has occurred since instrumental record keeping began,” said Clarke Knight, a U.S. Geological Survey research geographer.

Still, DWR scheduled 2024 meetings of the Drought Resilience Interagency & Partners (DRIP) Collaborative for April, July, and October.

The DRIP fantasy continues despite a deluge of 2024 water from two winters of giant “rivers in the sky” dumping excesses of water and creating massive floods and landslides.

Recent massive atmospheric rivers, Ark events, are small compared to ancient monster storms that occurred long before human beings had any impact whatsoever on climate, let alone weather.

Despite plentiful rainfall, DWR continued to limit pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Central Valley agriculture to 30–40 percent to protect native fish. Nonnative bass are likely the greatest dangers to native fish. DWR insisted that its ability to move water south has been “impacted by the presence of threatened and endangered fish species.”

Those water districts’ contractors, paying the full cost of State Water Project (SWP) water, thought otherwise.

Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors, stated: “While we are glad to see this modest allocation, it is still far below the amount of water we need. There is a lot of water in the system, California reservoirs are full, and runoff from snowpack melt is still to come. Even in a good water year, moving water effectively and efficiently under the current regime is difficult.”

California’s drought fixation is entirely manmade. In the past, in wet years, the waters of the Sacramento River, greater than the mighty Colorado, turned the Central Valley into an inland sea.

For over a century, California visionaries followed the lead of the Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Romans, and Nabataeans as well as the Aztecs before them. C.R. Rockwood, William Mulholland, Michael O’Shaughnessy, Gov. Pat Brown, and Gov. Ronald Reagan built dams and aqueducts to store and distribute water and to provide flood protection and hydroelectricity “too cheap to meter.”

As I have said before, California wastes tens of billions of dollars’ worth (at a conservative $100–$200 an acre-foot) of precious fresh water to save handfuls of delta smelt and “restore” salmon runs where salmon never ran before.

As I’ve also mentioned before, tyrannical water police order city folk, who use only 8 percent of California’s water, to drink recycled toilet water and to live on 55 gallons a day. The serfs may bathe every other Saturday whether they need it or not. California demands that its residents take a water conservation pledge: And to the utopia for which it stands. Neighbors turn neighbors in for “wasting” water, not to mention life, liberty, and property.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/californias-perpetual-drought-is-manmade-and-intentional-5640514

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Here’s How Green Groups Get Their Agendas Implemented in the Administrative State, Bypassing Congress

Most Americans may not have heard of the Department of the Interior, but this powerful administrative agency oversees more than one-fifth of America’s land area and much of its mineral and ocean resources. The Left’s dark money network has wielded influence at this massive agency to undermine oil and gas production and advance less reliable wind energy.

Radical environmental groups such as the Sierra Club have sought to force Interior to restrict the approval process for oil and gas projects and to mark certain areas of the Gulf of Mexico off-limits for oil and gas leases.

Interior under President Joe Biden has used a process called “sue-and-settle” to foist such regulations on the American people without the approval of Congress.

Blocking Oil, Boosting Wind

In 2020, the Sierra Club and other groups, represented by the environmentalist law firm Earthjustice, sued two agencies of the Department of Commerce (yes, not Interior) under the Endangered Species Act, seeking to force restrictions on oil and gas in the name of protecting wildlife. In 2023, the Sierra Club and its allies reached a settlement with the agencies. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), an Interior Department agency that had not been a party to the lawsuit, released new rules restricting oil and gas leases in the Gulf, ostensibly to protect endangered Rice’s whales.

I say “ostensibly” because, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher explained in The Hill, those restrictions do not apply to the thousands of vessels engaged in fishing, construction of offshore wind energy facilities, or other activities in the area. As Zycher wrote, it seems BOEM considers it “unacceptable for an oil tanker to cause the death of a Rice’s whale, but if another vessel kills it, then it’s just the cost of doing business.”

Earthjustice celebrated the BOEM rules alongside the settlement.

In another case, the Sierra Club and other groups petitioned BOEM to “end a routine practice of fast-tracking approval for offshore oil and gas projects” in the Gulf of Mexico. Two months later, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a new five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Haaland bragged that Interior had planned for “the smallest number of oil and gas lease sales in history”—a maximum of three.

America’s largest fossil fuel industry association, the American Petroleum Institute, sued Interior to block the plan, warning that it puts American consumers at risk and threatens U.S. energy security.

On April 24, the Sierra Club praised new rules from Interior laying out the five-year schedule for offshore wind leasing. While Interior restricts oil and gas to three lease sales in the Gulf, it plans for 12 offshore wind auctions in federal waters between 2024 and 2028. In praising the plan, Sierra Club Legislative Director Xavier Boatright pledged to continue “collaborating with the Biden administration” on these issues.

Oil is cheaper and more reliable than wind energy. In 2022, petroleum accounted for 31% of U.S. energy production, while wind energy accounted for only 3.8% of it. Wind energy also involves harvesting rare earth minerals through strip mining, an intensive process with toxic byproducts. Yet Interior is investing in wind and turning away from oil, largely for ideological reasons.

Of course, the Left’s dark money network may also have something to do with those priorities.

The Left’s Dark Money Network

While Democrats have been obsessed with the Republican-leaning Koch brothers, a New York Times analysis shows that the Left’s dark money network spent more than comparable conservative groups. The left-wing Arabella Advisors and the Tides Foundation set up nonprofits to allow donors to pour money into specific projects, without disclosing what the money does.

The Arabella network group Sixteen Thirty Fund poured $3.6 million into the Sierra Club from 2014 to 2022, according to IRS records. Tides Advocacy, the 501(c)4 lobbying arm of the left-wing dark money Tides Foundation, gave the group nearly $1 million between 2018 and 2021.

The National Wildlife Federation

Meanwhile, the National Wildlife Federation, an environmentalist group that promoted Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” received nearly $1 million via Arabella nonprofits. The federation’s former employees now hold positions of power at Interior.

Four-year federation staffer Tracy Stone-Manning is now the director at the Bureau of Land Management. She notoriously sent a threatening letter to the National Forest Service in 1989 on behalf of eco-terrorists who spiked trees to cause physical harm to loggers. She later said she does “not condone tree-spiking or terrorism of any kind.”

Laura Daniel-Davis, who worked at Interior under President Barack Obama before joining the federation for three years, is now the second in command at Interior. She’s only in an acting role, however, because the Senate would not confirm her. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., opposed her for valuing the Left’s “radical climate agenda” ahead of Alaska’s energy production.

The National Wildlife Federation also takes credit for “climate-smart conservation,” a project it claims it developed with its “federal agency partners,” such as the National Park Service.

The federation’s close ties to Interior shouldn’t come as a surprise. A 2009 inspector general’s report found that staff at the Bureau of Land Management had worked so closely with the group that they may have violated the law. NWF staff wrote and edited official BLM materials. Much of this activity took place under President George W. Bush.

Pueblo Action Alliance

Haaland’s own daughter, 29-year-old Somah Haaland, has been heavily involved with the Pueblo Action Alliance, a radical left-wing group with ties to the Cuban government. In October 2021, the alliance helped lead a coalition of organizations known as “Build Back Fossil Free,” which rioted at the Interior Department, injuring Interior staffers.

As House Republicans wrote in a letter to Haaland, the alliance advocates “for the dismantling of America’s economic and political system and believe America is irredeemable because there is no ‘opportunity to reform a system that isn’t founded on good morals or values.’”

The alliance’s website states that it aims to “build international solidarity with the indigenous global struggle,” which “includes standing in solidarity with our Palestinian relatives by upholding their demands for ‘a permanent ceasefire, an end to the siege and illegal occupation in Gaza, and no more US/CANADIAN/UK military aid to Israel.”

Secretary Haaland appears in a video the alliance released. The video, narrated by her daughter, demands a moratorium on oil leases around New Mexico’s Chaco Cultural National Historical Park. In June 2023, Haaland shut down oil and gas opportunities in that area. The moratorium will cost the Navajo Nation, a rival tribe in the region that lobbied in favor of oil and gas development, $194 million over the next two decades, according to the Western Energy Alliance.

Ties between Haaland and the alliance, whose parent organization (the Southwest Organizing Project) received more than $1.3 million from Arabella network nonprofits, have raised ethics concerns. Haaland responded to those concerns by stating, “I believe that a reasonable person with knowledge of those facts would not question my impartiality.”

‘Derogatory Terms’

Finally, Interior recently convened a committee to reevaluate place names to remove “derogatory terms.” That seems noble, but Secretary Haaland named a divisive figure to the committee.

Kimberly A. Probolus had previously worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to help with its project shaming officials into removing all public symbols of the Confederacy. The Tides Foundation sent the SPLC more than $1 million between 2018 and 2022. In a meeting of the Interior committee, she noted this previous work, expressing her gratitude for the chance to “continue to work toward racial and social justice” with Interior.

The SPLC, which has lobbied Interior on “historic designations,” praised Haaland for including Probolus, suggesting the committee use SPLC resources on symbols of hate.

“No one should have to visit a national park whose name is rooted in legacies of hate and white supremacy,” the SPLC’s Lecia Brooks said.

Yet the SPLC is far from a reliable arbiter of hate. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the center is notorious for putting mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside KKK chapters, scaring donors into ponying up cash.

If Interior wants to avoid being “derogatory,” it shouldn’t rely on the SPLC.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/30/how-lefts-dark-money-network-influences-department-interior/

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Despite Plenty of Pitfalls, Biden Doubles Down on Off Shore Wind Farms

In general, the Biden administration favors top-down, centralized economic planning rather than allowing the miracle that is the “invisible hand” of the free market system to drive the U.S. economy forward.

Consider the automobile industry for example. Do most Americans want to purchase electric vehicles as of now? Nope.

Yet that has not stopped Biden and company from doing virtually everything in their power, including heavy-handed mandates and billions of dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies, in order to force Americans into eventually having no choice other than an electric vehicle.

The same strategy has also been applied to several types of appliances, including gas stoves, furnaces, washing machines, etc.

Make no mistake, the Biden administration’s penchant for micromanaging consumer choices and exerting command-and-control economic edicts extends far beyond these realms.

A strikingly similar trend applies to the Biden administration’s energy policy posture, at large. The Biden administration, in its infinite wisdom, has determined that fossil fuel-based energy is bad. So, it has gone to extreme lengths to cripple domestic fossil fuel extraction and production because it has decided that so-called green energy is the wave of the future.

This is not breaking news. On repeated occasions, especially during his 2020 campaign, Biden promised to “end fossil fuels.” Moreover, on day one of his term, he nixed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada to the United States.

Instead of allowing American companies and consumers to decide what type of energy source they prefer to power their homes and businesses, the Biden administration has put its giant thumb on the scale in favor of supposedly environmentally friendly wind and solar.

Just to show how all-in the Biden team is on so-called renewable energy, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland recently announced a new “Five-Year Plan” regarding off shore wind farms.

Apparently, the irony of the “Five-Year Plan,” which has been an age-old instrument of socialist regimes over the past century, did not resonate with the geniuses behind this latest green energy proclamation.

According to Haaland, “The Biden-Harris administration, led by our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, has built an offshore wind industry from the ground up after years of delay from the previous Administration. As we look toward the future, this new leasing schedule will support the types of renewable energy projects needed to lower consumer costs, combat climate change, create jobs to support families, and ensure economic opportunities are accessible to all communities.”

There are several problems with Haaland’s plan, which “includes 12 potential offshore wind energy lease sales … in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, and the waters offshore of the U.S. territories in the next five years.”

First and foremost, counter to Haaland’s claim, off shore wind farms do not lower consumer costs. As Bloomberg notes, “The levelized cost of electricity of a subsidized US offshore wind project has increased to $114.20 per megawatt-hour in 2023, up almost 50% from 2021 levels in nominal terms.”

Moreover, according to Barron’s, “At least eight multinational companies in three states have quietly started to back out of wind contracts, or ask to renegotiate deals in ways that will pass more costs to consumers.” “Returns on offshore wind are becoming more and more challenged,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan told Barron’s.

Second, there is absolutely zero evidence that massive off shore wind farms will combat “climate change.” And, as is becoming more apparent, huge off shore wind farms that have been built or are being built along the Atlantic Coast have caused widespread havoc on marine life, including a major spike in whale deaths. What’s more, the components necessary to build off shore wind turbines cause environmental degradation and the gargantuan turbine blades have a short shelf-life and are environmentally toxic.

Third, several states along the East Coast have made it crystal clear that they want nothing to do with off shore wind farms. From Maine to Florida, many states have banned these eye-sores due to myriad reasons, principally over the concern that they will blunt tourism and hinder recreational activities in the areas where they are built.

In spite of these head winds, the Biden administration is moving forward at breakneck speed to force its off-shore wind farm agenda upon the states and the American people. This is the very essence of “Bidenomics,” using the force of the federal government to micromanage economic decisions in a one-size-fits-all approach. However, history shows that this method of governance and economic planning is doomed to fail because it is literally impossible for a bunch of bureaucrats to decide what is best for more than 350 million Americans with very different life circumstances, preferences, and objectives.

https://heartland.org/opinion/despite-plenty-of-pitfalls-biden-doubles-down-on-off-shore-wind-farms/

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Wrong Again, Biden, Climate Change Realists Are Working to Save the American People From a ‘Very Dangerous Future’

President Joe Biden was out on the stump making an Earth Day speech in Virginia on April 22, and as Fox News reports he was blaming humans for climate change, and the “devastating toll,” he claimed it was wreaking across the nation. He also said anyone who denies this is endangering peoples’ lives. Biden is wrong. Data refutes claims that the weather extremes are worsening amid the modest warming of the past half century. Also those who “believe the science,” as Democrats constantly admonish people to do, know this fact and are trying to prevent climate policies that pose a bigger threat to human welfare than climate change itself.

The Fox News article, “Biden warns climate change deniers are ‘condemning’ Americans to ‘dangerous future’ during Earth Day event,” quotes Biden saying:

But folks, despite the overwhelming devastation in red and blue states, there’s still those who deny climate is in crisis. My MAGA Republican friends don’t seem to think it’s a crisis ….I’m not going to go into it now, but I’m not making it up. It’s real. Just listen to what they say. Anyone in or out of government who willfully denies the impacts of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future, and the world, I might add.

Biden’s mistargeted harangue came shortly after he went through a litany of recent damaging extreme-weather events which he blamed on climate change, including recent wildfires, hurricanes, and floods.

However, a single year’s weather is not climate, which is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as a 30-year trend in weather for a location. And, as discussed in numerous Climate Realism posts, data shows no increasing trend of hurricanes, wildfires, or floods. Nor is there evidence that any of these three types of natural disasters have become more severe or stronger amid the recent slight warming. In fact, what the data for hurricanes shows that there has been a modest decline in tropical cyclone frequency during the recent period of warming and significant decline in global wildfires. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent assessment report confirms these facts. That’s the science. Biden should believe it.

The President evidently fails to grasp the fact that because climate change isn’t making severe weather more frequent or more powerful, it can’t be causing more harm to people.

Indeed, the data clearly show that fewer people are dying as a result of extreme weather events or extreme temperatures than at any time in history—deaths have declined dramatically even as the Earth has modestly warmed.

While the harm from climate change is declining, by comparison Biden’s climate policies are wreaking havoc with the U.S. economy and peoples lives, jacking up food and energy prices and making it hard for average American’s to get by.

Biden’s pointing his finger at climate realists, who try to publicize these facts, shows him to be nothing more than a befuddled shill for his misguided, tremendously expensive climate policies, pandering to the radical progressive wing of his party, who want to end capitalism and America’s constitutional republic in favor of an oligarchy or kleptocracy, run by political elites. If Biden can’t speak accurately concerning what the science actually shows about climate change, perhaps he should, in the words of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “remain silent.”

https://climaterealism.com/2024/04/wrong-again-biden-climate-change-realists-are-working-to-save-the-american-people-from-a-very-dangerous-future/

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Australian State government in talks to extend life of coal-fired power station for up to four years

Coal, wonderful coal

Australia’s biggest coal power station may stay open for four more years, with the NSW government working on the safety net solution to head off the threat of blackouts hitting the state’s electricity users.

The NSW state Labor government and Origin have been locked in talks over the future of the Eraring coal power station for months after an independent expert urged an extension. While The Australian understands an agreement remains unconfirmed – an extension guaranteeing an extension of two years, with an option for Origin to extend the lifespan by a further two years.

Minister for Climate Change and Energy Penny Sharpe did not comment on the timescale of the extension, but confirmed no deal had yet been reached.

“The NSW Government is engaging with Origin on its plans for Eraring Power Station and will not comment while the process is ongoing,” said Ms Sharpe.

An Origin spokeswoman declined to comment on details of the negotiations, but pointed to comments in the company’s quarterly report published on Tuesday.

“We remain in discussion with the NSW government on the closure date for the Eraring Power Station,” the company said.

While sources stressed a deal could yet collapse, there has been widespread acceptance that a deal would be done – though talks have dragged on for months – amid dire warnings should Eraring shutter as scheduled from 2025.

The Australian Energy Markets Operator last year warned NSW risked unreliable electricity supplies from 2025. Market executives have also warned allowing the state’s largest source of electricity – typically producing about a quarter of NSW’s electricity would stoke prices for households and businesses, already buckling under high interest rates and soaring inflation.

But opponents to extending Eraring said NSW could have adequately replaced the lost generation, and the closure would have been a signal for would-be renewable energy developers to rapidly accelerate work.

Environmental voters are unlikely to welcome taxpayers underwriting Eraring, though the full details of a risk sharing mechanism may not be revealed.

Such a deal has been used by Victoria in the past, as the state Labor government struck deals with AGL Energy and EnergyAustralia to keep the state’s two largest coal power stations open.

EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn will close in 2028, while AGL’s Loy Yang A will shutter in 2035 – giving the state enough time to bring online sufficient quantities of renewable energy. The terms of both deals remain a closely guarded secret, but they are a guiding principle for any extension of Eraring.

Eraring has in recent years been losing money. A rapid rise in rooftop solar has seen wholesale prices plunge to zero or below during sunny days, which explains why Origin in 2022 announced the retirement of the coal-fired power station in August 2025 – some seven years earlier than initially expected.

But Eraring’s fortunes changed in 2023 when the coal cap allowed Origin to recoup costs above $120 a tonne for coal, which returned the generator to profitability.

The scheme will end in June, and Origin is facing higher costs for coal that will dent the financial returns of Eraring without an unexpected move in Australia’s wholesale electricity market.

Should it return to a loss-making entity, a risk-sharing agreement with the NSW government would likely see the taxpayer compensate Origin beyond 2025.

Such a scheme would be politically sensitive to the Labor government, which has won favour with large swathes of the electorate with its commitment to renewable energy.

Moving to curtail political hostility, the Labor government is talking tough – insisting it will not be held hostage.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/nsw-and-origin-in-talks-to-extend-eraring-for-up-to-four-years/news-story/e28cd6ac0746fba39cc5858556a3d8d1

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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