RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2022/05/02/clean-energy-has-a-dirty-little-secret-n1593821

Clean energy has a dirty little secret, just revealed by MIT science writing student Shel Evergreen: Its “unsustainable” appetite for minerals and the dirty ways they’re obtained.

From Evergreen’s report for Ars Technica:

In South America’s Atacama Desert, salt flats are dotted with shallow, turquoise-colored lithium brine pools. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, children chip at the ground for cobalt. In China, toxic chemicals leach neodymium from the earth.

All that extraction “presents humanitarian, environmental, and logistical challenges,” she writes.

Scenes like those might already be familiar ground for those who aren’t wedded to the green fantasy of clean energy. But what you might not know is just how much worse things are going to have to get for Mother Earth if the Greens (no relation) are going to “save” her.

The International Energy Agency warned last year that “to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, overall mineral requirements would need to increase six-fold.”

“Those minerals have to come from somewhere, and that often involves harmful sourcing, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and limits on the mineral supply.”

It’s somehow news that we can’t put minerals that we don’t have into solar panels, electric car batteries, or wind turbines. It ought to be news — GIANT BOLD-TYPE HEADLINE news — that clean energy means increased carbon emissions.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-25-comedy-gold-how-to-relieve-your-climate-anxiety

Every day you read how the “climate crisis” is real, and rapidly getting worse. Humans burning fossil fuels to support out-of-control consumerism have brought the earth to the brink of disaster. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, and plagues of every sort are proliferating. Of course, you are feeling all the natural human reactions: fear, dread, not to mention overwhelming guilt at your own role in causing the crisis through the grave sin of enjoying your life. In short, you have entered the state known to the experts as “climate anxiety.”

The New York Times, as usual, was way out front on this issue. Back in July 2021 they published a long piece by Molly Peterson with the headline “How to Calm Your Climate Anxiety.” Subheadline: “Between wildfires, heat waves and hurricanes, we’re all feeling nervous about the future. But stewing or ignoring the problem won’t ease your burden.” Yes, if you are a writer for the New York Times you fully expect that among the readership it is accurate to say that “we’re all” feeling the climate anxiety. How could we not? Kindly, Molly, tell us how bad it is. Excerpts:

Evidence that climate change threatens mental health is mounting, according to a recent report from Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation. Higher temperatures are tied to depressive language and higher suicide rates. Fires, hurricanes and heat waves carry the risk of trauma and depression. . . . Young people especially report feeling debilitated by climate anxiety and being frustrated by older generations. “They try to understand, but they don’t,” said 16-year-old Adah Crandall, a climate and anti-freeway activist in Portland, Oregon. “I am scared for my future because of the inaction of adults in the past.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18469/wind-solar-power-us-economy

When President Biden and other advocates of wind and solar generation speak, they appear to believe that the challenge posed is just a matter of currently having too much fossil fuel generation and not enough wind and solar; and therefore, accomplishing the transition to “net zero” will be a simple matter of building sufficient wind and solar facilities and having those facilities replace the current ones that use the fossil fuels.

They are completely wrong about that.

The proposed transition to “net zero” via wind and solar power is not only not easy, but is a total fantasy. It likely cannot occur at all without dramatically undermining our economy, lifestyle and security, and it certainly cannot occur at anything remotely approaching reasonable cost. At some point, the ongoing forced transition… will crash and burn.

[I]t doesn’t matter whether you build a million wind turbines and solar panels, or a billion, or a trillion. On a calm night, they will still produce nothing, and will require full back-up from some other source.

If you propose a predominantly wind/solar electricity system, where fossil fuel back-up is banned, you must, repeat must, address the question of energy storage. Without fossil fuel back-up, and with nuclear and hydro constrained, storage is the only remaining option. How much will be needed? How much will it cost? How long will the energy need to remain in storage before it is used?

There should be highly-detailed engineering studies of how the transition can be accomplished…. But the opposite is the case. At the current time, the government is paying little to no significant attention to the energy storage problem. There is no detailed engineering plan of how to accomplish the transition. There are no detailed government-supported studies of how much storage will be needed, or of what technology can accomplish the job, or of cost.

It gets worse:…. Ken Gregory calculated the cost of such a system as well over $100 trillion, before even getting to the question of whether battery technology exists that can store such amounts of energy for months on end and then discharge the energy over additional months. And even at that enormous cost, that calculation only applied to current levels of electricity consumption…. For purposes of comparison, the entire U.S. GDP is currently around $22 trillion per year.

In other words: we have a hundred-trillion-or-so dollar effort that under presidential directive must be fully up and running by 2035, with everybody’s light and heat and everything else dependent on success, and not only don’t we have any feasibility study or demonstration project, but we haven’t started the basic research yet, and the building where the basic research is to be conducted won’t be ready until 2025.

Meanwhile the country heads down a government-directed and coerced path of massively building wind turbines and solar panels, while forcing the closure of fully-functioning power plants burning coal, oil and natural gas. It is only a question of time before somewhere the system ceases to work…. [I]t is easy to see how the consequences could be dire. Will millions be left without heat in the dead of winter, in which case many will likely die? Will a fully-electrified transportation system get knocked out, stranding millions without ability to get to work? Will our military capabilities get disabled and enable some sort of attack?

No sane, let alone competent, government would ever be headed down this path.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/how-much-has-earth-day-cost-us

“The cost of housing is higher, the cost of energy is higher, and people sit longer in traffic (emitting more pollutants) because of NEPA. Former President Donald Trump instituted new rules to help streamline the NEPA process. This week, President Joe Biden undid the reforms. This is just one more reason why, if Biden wants to know why the cost of energy is going up, he needs to look in the mirror.”

Rachel Carson died before the first Earth Day in 1970, but her book Silent Spring is widely acknowledged to have inspired the modern environmental movement that pushed for its creation. Carson did not actually call for an end to all use of the pesticide DDT, but the movement she spawned definitely caused the decline of DDT use in fighting malaria — a policy that has led to the deaths of millions worldwide.

Everyone benefits when scientists like Carson do the hard work of identifying substances that cause people harm. Unfortunately, activists often take this information too far, ignoring the benefits that many chemicals provide to humanity.

The most effective environmental laws, the 1963 Clean Air Act and the 1972 Clean Water Act, try to strike a balance between the harms caused by pollution and the benefits that potentially polluting activities provide. They try to limit human exposure to pollution through permitting processes and cost-benefit analyses that can ultimately be challenged in court.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-20-the-new-york-times-does-energy-storage

If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you know that the mythical transition to an energy future of pure “green” wind and solar electricity faces a gigantic problem of how to provide energy storage of the right type and in sufficient quantity. To make the electrical grid work, the wildly intermittent production of the wind and sun must somehow be turned into a smooth flow of electricity that matches customer demand minute by minute throughout the year. So far, that task has been fulfilled largely by natural gas back-up, which ramps up and down as the sun and wind ramp down and up. But now governments in the U.S., Europe, Canada and elsewhere say they will move to “net zero” carbon emission electricity by some time in the 2030s. Natural gas emits CO2, so “net zero” means that the natural gas must go. The alternative is energy storage of some sort.

Clearly, it is time to start figuring out how much energy storage we’re going to need, and of what type. Indeed, it is well past time to start figuring that out. If our government were even slightly competent, and also serious about “net zero” electricity by 2035, it would by this time have long since put together detailed feasibility and cost studies and demonstration projects showing exactly how this is going to work. Naturally, they don’t have any of that.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/02/offshore-headwinds/

Biden’s 18th-century solution to a 21st-century energy problem

Green-energy dogma is like an ocean liner — slow to change course and difficult to halt. In Europe, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has magnified the folly of Europe’s energy policies: Massive subsidies for wind and solar power coupled with bans on hydraulic fracturing (fracking), widespread shuttering of nuclear plants, and increased dependence on Russian natural gas have created a perfect energy-supply storm.

In the U.S., the Biden administration is using the Ukraine invasion as an excuse to double down on green-energy and electric-vehicle policies, while simultaneously conspiring to keep gasoline prices high and berating oil companies for not producing more. Only last fall, Democrats were berating oil companies to make them produce less.

To recount the full extent of the Biden administration’s ongoing energy follies would require a long and depressing book. But one particular facet typical of the administration’s green-energy fantasies warrants special attention: its proposal to install 30,000 megawatts (MW) of offshore wind turbines by 2030, and 110,000 MW by 2050. That’s equivalent to installing one 850-foot-tall, 14-megawatt turbine, the largest available, every 30 hours for the next 28 years.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/almost_50_years_ago_emsoylent_greenem_portrayed_a_grim_future_for_2022.html

In anticipation of Earth Day 2022, it is a good time to reflect on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the release of the eco-apocalypse movie Soylent Green:

It’s the year 2022. Cumulative effects of overpopulation, pollution, and “climate catastrophe” have caused severe worldwide shortages of food, water, and housing. Scientists confirm oceanographic reports saying the oceans are dying. The food chain is disrupted. Food is becoming scarce, and the temperature is so hot that heat waves have become year-round thanks to climate change aka “global warming.”

Homeless people are everywhere; only half the workforce is employed while the other half is barely making it. Many people are illiterate and few factories are producing new goods.

The homes of the elite are barricaded, with private security. Only the elite can afford air conditioning. Strawberries are now a delicacy at $75 a quart. The situation with food has gotten so bad that people are being harvested off the streets and “recycled protein” is being distributed to the population.

The movie Soylent Green was produced and filmed in 1972 and released in 1973. It is a futuristic tale of doom, describing life in the year 2022.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/19/earth-day-has-become-polluted-by-political-correctness-and-ignorance/

The first Earth Day celebration, a nationwide environmental teach-in, held in 1970, was the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who was interested in environmental issues. He recruited Rep. Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded liberal Republican congressman, to serve as his co-chair, and they enlisted Denis Hayes, a young activist, to be the national coordinator.

In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience, and most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

Sadly, today’s Earth Day shares something with the current zeitgeist: It reeks of wokeness and political correctness.

Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for environmental activists to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize for a “woke,” liberal agenda. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility.

Many of those stumping for Earth Day on April 22 this year will oppose environment-friendly advances in science and technology, such as agricultural biotechnology (“GMOs”), fracking, and nuclear power. A pervasive meta-message will be disdain for the capitalist system that provides the innovation needed for effective environmental protection and conservation. (It’s no coincidence that poor countries tend to be the most polluted.)

Ironically, the theme of this year’s event – “Invest In Our Planet. What Will You Do?” – includes a progressive wish list, including reducing your “foodprint.” For those unfamiliar with this neologism (as we were), a foodprint “measures the environmental impacts associated with the growing, producing, transporting, and storing of our food – from the natural resources consumed to the pollution produced to the greenhouse gases emitted.” Ready to give up meat, anyone?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_warmists_real_agenda.html

In the Monty Python sketch, “The Parrot,” a customer returns a parrot he had bought just 30 minutes before. Why? Because it is dead. The shopkeeper insists that the parrot is not dead but resting. Nothing the customer says can change the shopkeeper’s mind.

Our modern-day shopkeepers, the global warmists, insist a cataclysmic doom is our future unless we throw the entire world into a state of complete chaos.

There have been a number of studies on our side that show global warming is a hoax. Will the left do what we do, have a serious discussion of those studies? Absolutely not — they are not interested. 

If the hand of God were to deliver two stone tablets with 10 reasons why there is no global warming, would our global warmists listen? Never in a hundred years. The parrot is not dead.

The warmist’s messianic devotion to global warming is completely irrational. They won’t let any fact or reason get in the way of their blind assuredness. In the shopkeeper’s case, he didn’t want to give the money back. In our global warmists case, they are hiding their real agenda, global government.

Their logic is simple enough. How do you fight a global problem without global government? What is the biggest impediment to global government? The United States of America. Therefore, America must be destroyed.