RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/20/green-utopia-not/

BOSTON (Jan. 1, 2037) – My New Year’s resolution is to remember the bright side of the efforts to reduce climate change over the past 15 years. It won’t be easy. I just got my electric vehicle (EV) back after 12 days. A big accident in a snowstorm had snarled traffic on I-95 and caused most of the cars to run out of charge. It took dozens of tow trucks working round the clock to get all the cars back to their owners. But I can’t drive all that much anyway because the frigid winter temperatures have reduced my EV’s range by 40%. And with the cost of electricity for charging so high, I pine for what it cost in the old days to fill up my car with gas.

The power outages last year were also trying. When my neighbors got their third EV, it blew our local transformer and with the equipment backlogs, it took almost a week to get power back. All my food spoiled, and, in order to preserve my car’s charge, I had to drastically limit my travel to the necessities. I couldn’t cook because gas is no longer permitted in our town, and I had to convert to all-electric at huge expense. Cold showers weren’t fun either.

I had wanted to get a battery backup for my home, but the price had risen tenfold because almost all the battery manufacturing capacity was diverted to EV’s to comply with state and federal mandates. I am really worried about how I will pay for new batteries for my EV, given the absurd prices nowadays. I will end up paying twice as much as I did seven years ago for the entire car! Even my electric utility could not get enough batteries to allow their wind and solar plants to store energy for nights and calm or overcast periods. I really hate those rolling blackouts. Also, I do feel a little guilty about the scarred landscapes out West where the mines to extract lithium and rare earth elements have proliferated like weeds. But I suppose that is their contribution to fighting climate change.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/the-environmental-left-is-its-own-worst-enemy/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=third

Another clean-electricity project fails because of local environmentalists.

S enator Sheldon Whitehouse has staked his legacy on the persecution of “climate deniers.” It’s a cause for which he seems ideally suited: He is the sort of person who would have been perfectly comfortable persecuting heretics during the Spanish Inquisition.

Senator Whitehouse thinks that our collective failure to do anything serious about the climate crisis is the fault of the diabolical Koch brothers and the conservative think tanks that do their demonic bidding. In fact, the senator has only himself and his environmentalist allies to blame for the daunting obstacles facing any clean-energy transition.

Consider the latest calamity to befall the Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission project, which grid operators hoped would carry electricity from Iowa to Wisconsin. Like hundreds of other clean-electricity projects, this one has faced a Homeric odyssey of trials and tribulations through federal red tape and local opposition — chiefly from left-wing environmentalists with precisely the same ideological priors as Senator Whitehouse. Now, just as the project had finally obtained all the permits needed for completion, a federal district court in Wisconsin quashed the permits, almost certainly killing the project.

As Energywire explains, the high-voltage line was approved by grid operators a decade ago to run from western Iowa to southern Wisconsin. The whole purpose of the project, which would be up to 125 miles long, is to make significant new solar and wind power available to the regional electricity grid.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_global_warming_question_that_can_change_peoples_minds.html

Late last year, I got into a discussion with a fellow who was quite sold on the idea that man’s activities were warming the Earth. While not a hardcore ideologue, it was apparent the gentleman had accepted the climate change narrative presented by mainstream media and believed we truly were imperiling the planet. I didn’t say much to him initially, as we were engaged in some recreation, but later on I resurrected the topic and told him I just wanted to pose one question.

“What is the ideal average temperature of the Earth”? I asked.

It was clear he was without an answer, so I explained my rationale. “If we don’t know what the Earth’s ideal average temperature is,” I stated, “how can we know if a given type of climate change — whether naturally occurring or induced by man — is good or bad? After all, we can’t then know whether it’s bringing us closer to or moving us further away from that ideal temperature.”

It was as if a little light bulb had lit up in his head, and he said, “You know, that’s a good question!”

I haven’t seen the man since, as we were just two ships passing in the night, and I don’t know how his thinking has evolved (or regressed) between then and now. I do know, however, that someone who’d seemed so confident and perhaps even unbending in his position had his mind opened with one simple question and a 20-second explanation.

Of course, part of the question’s beauty is that no one can answer it. There is no “ideal” average Earth temperature, only a range within which it must remain for life as we know it to exist. At the spectrum’s lower end, polar creatures proliferate; at its higher end, tropical animals do (though warmer temperatures do breed more life, which is why the tropics boast 10 times as many species as does the Arctic. Moreover, crop yields increase when CO2 levels are higher).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-regulatory-burden-for-every-room-of-your-house-energy-efficiency-standards-household-dishwasher-furnace-natural-gas-11642719043?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Skyrocketing inflation, empty store shelves, rising crime and endless Covid restrictions have been grabbing headlines, but lesser-noticed regulatory mischief from the Biden administration may prove just as bad. The president’s bureaucrats are working on enough annoying regulations to affect every room in your house:

• The kitchen. The Trump administration took steps to fix the Energy Department’s efficiency standards for dishwashers that had the unintended consequence of increasing the time to clean a load of dishes from an hour or less in older models to well over two in new ones. But now the Biden DOE is in the process of reinstating these time-wasting and unpopular rules.

• The bathroom. In one of several agency measures that limit freedom of choice, the DOE has tightened water-use limits for certain types of showers. In addition, for those who prefer incandescent light bulbs surrounding their bathroom mirror (or anywhere else), the DOE is targeting these bulbs with energy-efficiency standards likely to boost their price to $7 each, leaving LEDs as the only viable option.

• The laundry room. Washing machines have been hit with multiple rounds of energy and water-efficiency regulations that have compromised performance and even forced some owners to buy and use special products to eliminate the stink that accumulates in the new models. Compliant dryers, like the new dishwashers, take longer to do the job. But rather than consider consumer-friendly improvements to existing standards, the Biden DOE is working to make them more stringent.

• The basement. Your next new furnace may be significantly more expensive, thanks to regulatory changes percolating through the Biden DOE bureaucracy. Furnaces are currently available in natural-gas or electric versions, but the DOE is all-in on the war against gas, which environmentalists hate because it’s a fossil fuel and thus a contributor to climate change. The agency has initiated steps toward new efficiency regulations that would skew the market toward electric versions, a costlier option.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/seattle-power-company-sued-for-violating-the-rights-of-fish/?utm

I have been warning the green warriors that “nature rights” will someday come back to bite reneweable energy projects. For example, electricity-generating windmills kill millions of birds and bats. If these animals have the “inalienable right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve,” and if anyone can sue to enforce the rights of nature as nature-rights laws tend to provide, then lawsuits to shut down the windmills for violating birds’ rights is only a matter of time.

Seattle City Light is now under that very threat because of the electricity-generating dams it operates. Only instead of birds suing, it is fish — salmon to be specific. In a case brought by Native Americans, a court is being asked to declare that the rights of the fish are being violated under a nature rights legal theory. From the KUOW story:

Salmon can’t go to court, but the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe says the fish at the heart of its and other Northwest tribal cultures should have legal rights.

The tribe has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Tsuladxʷ in Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Court to assert those rights in the tribe’s traditional territory in Washington’s North Cascades. “These rights include, but are not limited to, the right to pure water and freshwater habitat; the right to a healthy climate system and a natural environment free from human-caused global warming impacts and emissions,” the suit states.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=7d68230f86

For several years now, advocates of “decarbonizing” our energy system, along with promoters of wind and solar energy, have claimed that the cost of electricity from the wind and sun was dropping rapidly and either already was, or soon would be, less than the cost of generating the same electricity from fossil fuels. These claims are generally based on a metric called the “Levelized Cost of Energy,” which is designed to seem sophisticated to the uninitiated, but in the real world is completely misleading because it omits the largest costs of a system where most generation comes from intermittent sources. The large omitted costs are those for storage (batteries) and transmission. But as we now careen recklessly down the road to zero emissions, how much will these omitted costs really amount to?

A guy named Ken Gregory has recently (December 20, 2021, updated January 10, 2022) come out with a Report at a Canadian website called Friends of Science with the title “The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.” A somewhat abbreviated version of Gregory’s Report has also appeared at Watts Up With That here. Gregory provides a tentative number for the additional storage costs that could be necessary for full electrification of the United States system, with all current fossil fuel generation replaced by wind and solar. That number is $433 trillion. Since the current U.S. annual GDP is about $21 trillion, you will recognize that the $433 trillion represents more than 20 times full U.S. annual GDP. In the post I will give some reasons why Gregory may even be underestimating what the cost would ultimately prove to be.

First, some background. A huge and, I would submit, obvious engineering issue that permeates the question of powering an electrical grid with only intermittent sources is how to assure that there is always sufficient electricity available to meet demand at every minute throughout the year. Somebody needs to carefully study actual generation from wind and sun hour by hour (maybe even minute by minute) throughout a year, and then calculate exactly how much storage it’s going to take to get through all the sun and wind droughts that occur during what could be long periods of calm, overcast, hot, cold and nights. This kind of work does not involve sophisticated mathematics, but it does involve detailed effort to create an appropriate spreadsheet and find and carefully input reams of publicly available data. To their incredible shame, none of the genius planet saviors who are imposing decarbonization on us ever undertake this task, and for that matter they have never even admitted it is an issue, as far as I have been able to determine. Take a look, for example, at New York’s Climate Action Scoping Plan, or California’s AB32 Climate Change Scoping Plan, or for that matter any of the regulations and Executive Orders coming out of the federal government, and you just never find any mention of this subject.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/climate_authoritarians_and_the_lessons_of_history.html

To their own peril as well as everyone else, climate alarmists are increasingly embracing authoritarianism.

A rump group of the environmental movement has always been wedded to authoritarianism. Going back to the beginnings of the environmental movement, Progressive-era politicians such as President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the newly created U.S. Forest Service, believed democracy and markets were both ill-suited to manage natural resources. Progressives believed natural resources should be controlled, developed, and conserved by elite scientific managers and bureaucrats unbeholden to the wishes of the public.

Later, as detailed by Alston Chase in his powerful book In a Dark Wood, many Nazis were at least in part inspired by an expansive vision of environmental purity.

Although few if any progressives were full-on misanthropes, there have always been some of these within the environmental movement, pushing for increasingly extreme actions in defense of the environment and against human use of natural resources. The misanthropic wing of the movement has referred to humanity as “a cancer,” “a virus,” and “a parasite,” with some openly hoping for a killer virus to come along and wipe out most of humanity. Eco-philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the term deep ecology, said the ideal human population on Earth is 200 million, and he called for policies and personal actions to achieve that goal as soon as possible. Others have estimated the “optimal” human population as 1.5 to two billion people and claimed this justifies population engineering, including both “active” and “passive” means to get there.

 Now even the academic literature is embracing climate authoritarianism as the world’s allegedly last best hope to avert supposedly apocalyptic climate change.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/tyranny_in_the_name_of_climate_change.html

A recent paper published by Cambridge University Press titled “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change” is raising serious and worrisome questions about the role of academia in our national political debate on climate change.

The paper was written by Ross Mittiga, who self-describes as an “assistant professor of political theory at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, specializing in climate ethics.” He also labels himself an “environmentalist, vegan, and occasional gadfly.”

Mittiga’s paper explicitly argues society must prioritize climate action over democratic principles and adopt an authoritarian government if society fails to politically act on climate change. Or, in the words of the political left: “my way or the highway.”

This is disturbing because it completely ignores the will of the people to self-govern, favoring a totalitarian approach in order to tackle what Mittiag deems a “climate crisis.”

Key points of the paper in the abstract:

Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature — which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights — would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means.