RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/can-ukraine-kill-climate-change/

All apocalyptic movements end in failure, but often only after they have wreaked untold damage on the societies that believe in them. That’s the takeaway from Richard Landes’s Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, which explores the appeal of these movements over the centuries, their chief characteristics, and how they take over societies and eventually run out of steam.

Global warming, for all its scientific veneer, has the basic characteristics of an apocalyptic movement: there is a prophecy of impending doom, a demand for repentance and societal self-sacrifice (in this case, giving up the fossil fuels upon which industrial society depends), and a sense of urgency that if action is not taken immediately, it will be too late. In the end, if the required sacrifices are made, there is an idyllic future. In this case, it’s a green new world, powered by sun and wind. Since its emergence in the 1980s, the global warming apocalypse has shown remarkable resilience, emerging stronger than ever from a near-death experience in November 2009 when leaked emails between top climate scientists exposed their shenanigans in suppressing scientific dissent and deleting data.

What probably saved the movement was that the West’s political elite had by then committed themselves. At the beginning of 2009, global warming had scored its most important convert: President Barack Obama. The hacked emails became news just before 40,000 delegates, including over 100 heads of state, Obama among them, converged on Copenhagen for the 15th annual UN climate conference.

In 2018, the movement obtained a major public relations boost when Greta Thunberg launched an international children’s crusade. President Donald Trump took the United States on a brief time out, but even while still on the campaign trail, now-President Joe Biden promised, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels.” At the 2021 UN climate conference in Glasgow, Biden showed up from Rome in an 85-car emissions-spewing cavalcade. This time, along with the unusually huge number of delegates — including 27 from Palau (total population: 18,000) — he was one of 120 heads of state. Today, the movement would seem by most measures to be at its peak, riding what Landes would call its “cresting wave.” Yet, it is possible that the crisis in Ukraine may mark the beginning of its end.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/600203-the-sec-tries-its-hand-at-climate-policy

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) remit includes ensuring candor, honesty and transparency in what public companies tell investors. Yet it will spend the next few weeks and months trying to fool us into believing that its new 510-page proposal on mandatory climate disclosure is solely about protecting investors and has nothing to do with climate policy or achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

No one should be fooled.

Materiality is the governing principle of corporate disclosure requirements. In 2010, the SEC issued 29 pages of guidance on climate-change disclosures. With respect to what is now called climate-transition risk, the guidance requires that companies “should consider specific risks they may face as a result of climate change legislation or regulations and avoid generic risk factor disclosure that could apply to any company.”

This common-sense approach is now being superseded by an SEC-specified climate-risk reporting and accounting framework that will run in parallel with traditional financial reporting requirements, with its own verification and attestation regime necessitating the employment of legions of climate consultants.

At the heart of the SEC’s new climate-disclosure regime is quantification of a company’s greenhouse gas emissions, at three levels: those emitted directly as a result of its own operations (Scope 1); those emitted from generating the electricity it consumes (Scope 2); and those emitted by its suppliers and customers (Scope 3). “Greenhouse gas emissions in many respects resemble financial statement disclosures,” writes Commissioner Allison Herren Lee, who, as the SEC’s acting chair in March 2021, initiated the process that led to the current proposal. Such disclosures, she claims, provide “critically important insights into a company’s operations.”

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=e79d572f7c

If you are even a semi-regular reader of this blog, you know about the energy storage problem that is inherent in the effort to eliminate dispatchable fossil fuels from the electricity generation system and replace them with wind and solar. As discussed here many times, other than with nuclear power, the storage problem is the critical issue that must be addressed if there is ever going to be “net zero” electricity generation, let alone a “net zero” economy based on all energy usage having been electrified. For a sample of my prior posts on this subject just in the last few months, go here, here and here.

The problems of trying to provide enough storage to back up a fully wind and solar system without fossil fuels are so huge and so costly that you would think that everyone pushing the “net zero” agenda would be completely focused on these issues. And given that the issues are quite obvious, you would think that such people would be well down the curve with feasibility studies, cost studies, and demonstration projects to make their case on how their plans could be accomplished. Remarkably, that is not the case at all. Instead, if you read about the plans and proposals in various quarters for “net zero” in some short period of years, you quickly realize that the people pushing this agenda have no clue. No clue whatsoever.

Today, I am going to look at discussions of the storage situation coming out of three jurisdictions with ambitious “net zero” plans: California, Australia and New York. First a very brief summary of the problem. It is (or certainly should be) obvious that wind and solar generators have substantial periods when they generate nothing (e.g., calm nights), and other times when they generate far less than users demand. Get out a spreadsheet to do some calculations based on actual historical patterns of usage and generation from wind and solar sources, and you will find that to have a fully wind/solar generation system and make it through a year without a catastrophic failure, you will need approximately a three-times overbuild (based on rated capacity) of the wind/solar system, plus storage for something in the range of 24 – 30 days of average usage. For these purposes “usage” at any given moment is measured in gigawatts, but usage for some period of time is measured in gigawatt hours, not gigawatts. California’s average electricity usage for 2020 was about 31 GW; Australia’s was about 26 GW ; and New York’s was about 18 GW.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/renewable-failure-john-stossel/

The “Greens” promise renewables, solar and wind power, will replace fossil fuels. After all, the wind and sun are free, and they don’t pollute!

Oops.

Now countries that embraced renewables are so desperate for power that they eagerly import coal, the worst polluter of all!

Do they apologize? No. Greens never apologize.

Germany was a leader in renewable energy, so confident in solar and wind power that they closed half their nuclear plants.

Oops.

That leaves Germans so short of power that Germans are now desperate to buy fossil fuels from Russia. Even worse, pollution-wise, high pollution coal now tops wind as Germany’s biggest electricity source. That’s really disgusting.

Then, even after putting all that soot in the air, Germans pay more than triple what Americans pay for electricity.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/23/climate-change-is-about-control-stupid-not-the-environment/

The apocalyptic talk about climate change is nothing more than a diversion tactic by the government, the radical Left, and their mainstream press. The many laws, the trillions in federal appropriations and tax credits, and the unworkable proposals to address climate change will not slow the rise of the oceans or heal the planet.

Lobbying for more climate regulation is to enhance the power of the authoritarian state, not protect the environment.

The radical Left has the world obsessing over whether we have 10, 20 or 50 years before the eve of destruction. The hysteria gives the government the excuse it needs for more controls over the energy we use, the products we purchase, the homes we live in, the food we eat, and since the pandemic when we can leave our homes. However, the data supporting the climate studies are rarely made public so that scientists can test the reproducibility of the studies.

Citizens of the United States already live under a legal framework that contains over 3,000 separate criminal offenses in 50 titles of the U.S. Code, 23,000 pages of federal law, over 200,000 regulations, and almost daily Executive Orders that usually limit those actions deemed objectionable to the kakistocracy.

Additionally, the government has in reserve 136 emergency laws allowing it to assume control over industrial production, communications and banking, and most aspects of commerce. Most of these emergency laws are effective when the president declares them effective.

“Predictions of apocalyptic events that would result in the extinction of humanity, a collapse of civilization, or the destruction of the planet have been made since at least the beginning of the Common Era.” So far, the planet still exists. George Orwell noted, “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their wishes, and the grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/22/net-zero-and-esg-are-worsening-the-energy-crisis-and-weakening-the-west/

The West’s capital is being deployed to create an artificial shortage of oil and gas produced domestically and reward non-Western oil and gas producers such as Russia and Iran with higher prices.

The day after Joe Biden announced that the United States would ban imports of Russian oil and gas, a group of 11 powerful European investment funds that includes Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, outlined plans to force Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second largest bank, to cut its lending to oil and gas companies. The juxtaposition of these two events dramatizes the fundamental disunity of the West. At the same time as the Biden Administration is sanctioning Russian oil and gas producers, Western investors are sanctioning Western ones. Under the banner of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing, the West’s capital is being deployed to create an artificial shortage of oil and gas produced domestically  and reward non-Western oil and gas producers such as Russia and Iran with higher prices. In doing so, the West is undermining its own security interests.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy markets were already extremely tight. In the past, high oil and gas prices stimulated a supply-side response leading to increased output and to prices falling back. This relationship has broken down. According to analysts at JP Morgan, capital spending by S&P Global 1200 energy companies peaked in 2015 at just over $400 billion and shrank to around $120 billion last year—less than half its previous trough of $250 billion in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, even though global demand is now around 15 percent higher than it was then.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-3-19-what-our-betters-have-in-mind-for-us-in-the-era-of-fossil-fuel-suppression

As you undoubtedly know, back in January 2021 newly-inaugurated President Biden ordered the entire federal bureaucracy into full-battle mode in the crusade to suppress production and use of fossil fuels, aka “carbon emissions” (or maybe “climate pollution”). From Biden’s January 27, 2021 Executive Order (“Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad”):

It is the policy of my Administration to organize and deploy the full capacity of its agencies to combat the climate crisis to implement a Government-wide approach that reduces climate pollution in every sector of the economy. . . .

And thus we have every federal agency, under orders from the boss, whether or not its statutory mission has anything to do with “climate,” diligently devising schemes to outdo the other agencies in the fossil fuel suppression game. It’s not just EPA scheming to force closure of perfectly good power plants, but also Interior imposing a “moratorium” on oil and gas leasing on federal lands and offshore; and FERC putting out new standards of review to make it impossible for any new gas pipeline to get approved; and the Department of Energy imposing costly new efficiency standards on mobil homes; and even the Federal Reserve promising to make life difficult for banks that lend to fossil fuel producers; and the SEC imposing new and costly “climate” disclosure requirements on issuers; and on and on.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/03/17/net-zero_and_esg_are_worsening_the_energy_crisis__and_weakening_the_west_822337.html

The day after President Biden announced that the United States would ban imports of Russian oil and gas, a group of eleven powerful European investment funds that includes Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, outlined plans to force Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second largest bank, to cut its lending to oil and gas companies. The juxtaposition of these two events dramatizes the fundamental disunity of the West. At the same time as the Biden administration is sanctioning Russian oil and gas producers, Western investors are sanctioning Western ones. Under the banner of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing, the West’s capital is being deployed to create an artificial shortage of oil and gas produced by its companies and reward non-Western oil and gas producers such as Russia and Iran with higher prices. In doing so, the West is undermining its own security interests.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy markets were already extremely tight. In the past, high oil and gas prices stimulated a supply-side response leading to increased output and to prices falling back. This relationship has broken down. According to analysts at JP Morgan, capital spending by S&P Global 1200 energy companies peaked in 2015 at just over $400 billion and shrank to around $120 billion last year – less than half its previous trough of $250 billion in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, even though global demand is now around 15% higher than it was then.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/04/04/bidens-low-energy-policy/#slide-1

The long-term danger in the president’s antipathy to fossil fuels.

Gas prices are high. Voters are upset. And Republicans want to blame Joe Biden’s energy policy.

It might be smart politics to do so, but it’s not exactly honest. Joe Biden has been in office only a little over a year, and he hasn’t undone decades of American energy progress. Oil production has risen on his watch, and depending on the week, we are still a net exporter of crude oil and other petroleum products.

That doesn’t mean Biden’s energy policy is any good. On the contrary, it should be opposed at every turn because it would make today’s anomalous situation the norm for years to come.

First, let’s dispel some myths about so-called energy independence. After a steady decline in net imports that began around 2006, the U.S. became a net ex­porter of crude oil and other petroleum products for the first time ever the week of November 30, 2018.

The United States has never been a net exporter of crude oil alone, and it has never really been all that close to being one. The week of April 10, 2020, saw U.S. net exports of crude and other petroleum products reach their highest level on record, at over 2 million barrels per day. That week, the U.S. imported over 2 million barrels per day of crude oil on net but exported over 4 million barrels per day of other petroleum products on net.

The reason for that is America’s re­fineries. There are 126 oil refineries in the U.S. and only about 700 in the entire world. Companies from around the globe send their crude oil to American refineries, which counts as crude-oil importation to the U.S. Then the refined products get shipped around the world, which counts as other-petroleum-product exportation.