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President Joe Biden repeatedly has called climate change an “existential threat,” worse than nuclear weapons.
Yet, Biden’s green energy mandates result in a greater U.S. demand for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric batteries from China, made by coal-fired power plants, increasing the emissions Biden criticizes at home.
The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that in the absence of reductions in carbon emissions, temperatures will rise by about 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
The idea that such a temperature change is worse than deaths from nuclear weapons is ludicrous. Over 200,000 people died in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after America dropped atomic bombs to end World War II.
Temperatures have varied for centuries. Climate models are not reliable and accurate enough to attribute global warming to human activities. The observed rate of global warming over the past 50 years has been weaker than that predicted by almost all computerized climate models.
Thirty-six computer models overpredicted surface air temperatures during the summer growing season. The models all showed warming well above what happened in reality, with the most extreme model producing seven times too much warming.
Increases in hurricane frequency are erroneously cited as an effect of warming. Although carbon dioxide emissions and temperature—both in America and globally—have increased over the latter parts of the 20th century, no meaningful increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes has been observed.
Hurricane damage has increased over time, but this outcome is largely due to increased incomes and wealth, and therefore creation of infrastructure, rather than more violent hurricanes.
For example, homes in Florida have risen by a factor of 12 since 1975, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. The same sort of hurricane that in 1975 destroyed a house worth $100,000 would now destroy a house worth $1.2 million.
Although some say increased CO2 levels are detrimental to human health and welfare, deaths are more likely to result from medical events triggered by the cold than by the heat.
A 2020 study by Dr. Whanhee Lee and others, published in The Lancet, showed that cold-related morbidity and mortality—strokes, heart attacks, blood clots, and other problems—result directly from the influence of cold temperatures on the body, which is unable to maintain sufficient core temperature to guarantee survival.
In addition, Environmental Protection Agency data shows that death rates are about 10% higher in winter, and January is the deadliest month of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
If Biden truly thought that climate change was an existential threat, he would try to lower global emissions through greater U.S. exports of natural gas. This would enable other countries to reduce emissions by substituting natural gas for coal, just as America has reduced carbon emissions by 1,000 million metric tons over the past 16 years.
In addition, Biden would try to expand emissions-free nuclear power if he thought climate change was a threat. He would make uranium mining easier, because uranium is a critical ingredient for nuclear power. Yet the president has taken swaths of land off the table for uranium development and made no attempt to solve the problem of nuclear waste.
Instead, Biden blocks a new liquid natural gas export terminal in Louisiana, which results in greater worldwide use of coal, increasing global carbon dioxide emissions. Europe already has been turning to coal to deal with energy shortages in the aftermath of Russia’s cutoff of natural gas.
New regulations at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency discourage companies from investing in natural gas and discourage banks from lending money to fund natural gas.
Regulations from the Department of Energy raise the cost of natural gas stoves, water heaters, and boilers.
Over the past 20 years, U.S. emissions of CO2 have declined by a billion metric tons as natural gas has been increasingly substituted for coal use in the generation of electricity. Over the same period, CO2 emissions in China have risen by 8.7 billion metric tons.
Biden’s repetition that climate change is an existential threat gives him an excuse to impose more regulations and sign into law subsidies for favored donors.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, now ambassador to Japan, said when he was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Biden is inventing the crisis and the waste is following.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Biden’s Hypocrisy on Climate Change Painfully Obvious appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Every year at this time, when hurricane season rolls around, corporate media start pumping out headlines linking the severity of hurricanes to climate change. But is there causation or correlation? And if changes in the climate do affect hurricanes, is it in the way climate activists claim?
Climatologist David Legates says, “[If] we have colder periods, we will get more hurricane activity. If we have warmer periods, the hurricane activity tends to drop off.”
Legates serves as a visiting fellow for the Science Advisory Committee in the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, and is a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware. He is also the co-author of the book “Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism.”
Legates joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss what connection does exist between hurricanes and a changing climate.
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript:
Virginia Allen: It’s my privilege today to welcome back to the Daily Signal Podcast, climate expert and Professor David Legates. Thank you so much for being back with us.
David Legates: It’s a pleasure to be back. Thank you.
Allen: Well, I’m excited to talk about hurricane season and climate change. I was looking at some of the big headlines because it always feels like this time of year we start hearing a lot in the news about the connection between climate change and hurricanes. Hurricane season technically starts at the beginning of June, runs through November. So this was a headline from NPR last March. They say “Sequential Hurricanes Are Becoming More Common Because of Climate Change. A CNN headline from April in 2022 reads “The Climate Crisis is Supercharging Rainfall in Hurricanes, Scientists Report. NBC News just recently ran a headline, “Category 6? Climate Boosted Hurricanes Pushed Scientists to Rethink Classifications.”
Professor Ligates are hurricanes over the past five to 10 years more severe than hurricanes were maybe 50 or 100 years ago?
Legates: Of course they are because these sites could never tell you anything that can’t be true. See, when you say more severe, we can parse that in a variety of ways. We can say there’s more hurricanes happening.
We can say that the hurricanes that happen are becoming more intense. We can say that the hurricanes that are happening are actually becoming larger and more powerful overall. Or we can say that they’re making landfall more often than not. And after all, landfall, hurricane is the worst case scenario. If a big hurricane stays out in the Atlantic, that’s only a good thing unless you’re a shipper. So we can look through each one of these in steps and I’ll give you some slides that you can see.
This [the below image] is by Ryan Maue. He and I worked at NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] together. He was the NOAA’s chief scientist and he’s put this together from data from NOAA. And if you look at from 1971 when we really started to be able to see things by satellites, because a lot of the Central Atlantic was missing, if you will, when we didn’t have satellites to see out there on a regular basis, ships tend not to want to sail through tropical storms and hurricanes.
As you can imagine, if you look at that record, you see lots of variability over the years, but you see no long-term trend either in tropical storms or hurricanes. So we can’t really say that over the last 50 years that there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of tropical storms or hurricanes or has there been a drastic decrease. It looks just like there’s lots of variability, which we call year to year. Some years we get hit and some years we don’t. And so there’s no change there.
Well, maybe the ones that are occurring are becoming more intense. So we can also look at what we call major hurricanes. These are hurricanes with wind speeds that exceed a hundred knots. And when we look at that compared to all hurricanes, again, we see lots of variability but no long-term trend.
And in fact, if we look at the record closely, about a year or so ago, we were at an all-time low in terms of major hurricanes on the planet, which is kind of interesting if you are told constantly we’re seeing more of these are becoming bigger, you would expect more major hurricanes, not much less. The third argument is, well, maybe we have the same number and the same intensity, but they’re getting bigger in size, hence they’ve got more energy. And we measure that through something called the accumulated cyclone energy index or ACE index.
And what that does is just takes all the energy of all the storms based upon their size and their wind speed, averages them together, comes up with an index, and we look at time changes. And if you look at that from, again, from about 1972 to present over about 50 years, you see lots of variability. You see the mid nineties had lots of ACE, if you will. There was a lot of energy. It peaked again in the mid aughts or whatever we call those and peaks again in the late teens. But there is no long-term trend. It goes up and down and up and down and up and down, but never trends in either direction.
The final one that I postulated was maybe we’re seeing more land falling hurricanes. And the interesting thing is this is the first signal we actually see it’s data from Roger Pike Jr.
Looking at total North Atlantic and Western Pacific Hurricane Landfalls from 1945 to 1921. And when you look at total hurricane landfalls, they’re actually decreasing, which says in a sense that hurricanes are staying away from the coast more.
There is a lot of activity of landfall in hurricanes in the 1950s and early 1960s, which was an active period. But there’s your trend, and so if you have anything you want to write home about, it’s that landfall hurricanes are decreasing in intensity or decreasing in number over the last 50 years, which is quite opposite to what you saw on CNN and New York Times and Washington Post, all those.
Allen: So we’re seeing a decrease in the number that are making landfall?
Legates: Yes, it is less that are making landfall, which should be a good thing to write home about. I know news likes to say, let’s pick on the bad stuff. If it bleeds, it leads, but this is a good news to write home about that if there’s something in that signal, it’s a good signal.
Allen: That is a good signal. Now, we have spoken before on this podcast about how there’s natural cycles on the planet of warming and cooling. Do those cycles affect hurricanes?
Legates: Actually, they do. There’s been a number of studies done.
I think there was a study in 2001 by boost that looked at, looked at, yeah, land falling hurricanes going back to 1600. And in particular what that group found was from 1600 to 2000 in New England. This is Peterson, Massachusetts, Providence, Rhode Island area that from that 400 year period, the most active period was the 19th century. And I’ll ask the question rhetorically, what was the coldest period between 1600 and 2000? And the answer of course is the 19th century. Same research was done by Kerry Mock at the University of South Carolina. He did tropical cyclones impacting Charleston from 1778 to 1998.
The most active period in Charleston was the 19th century, which happened to be the coldest. And then a colleague of mine at LSU Kalu did some research in southern China, and he wrote remarkably, the two periods of typhoon strikes in Guangdong coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China. So the take home message here is that essentially if we have colder periods, we will get more hurricane activity.
If we have warmer periods, the hurricane activity tends to drop off. The next question you’re going to ask me is why does that happen?
Allen: Why does it happen? And the message that we hear from the media is the opposite. They say, because the planet is getting warmer, we’re seeing more hurricanes. But you say the opposite is true.
Legates: It’s exactly the opposite. Very good question.
So what happens is why do we get a hurricane? Essentially we have what we call an equator to pole temperature gradient. The equator is warm, the poles are cold, and so therefore we need to move energy from the equator to pole. We do that in three ways. We do that through the motion of the atmosphere. So we get westerlies for example, which is why our storms tend to move across the United States from west to east. We get easterlies in the tropics and easterlies in the polar region.
Second is we get oceanic circulation, so we get what are called gyres or circular types of circulation that exist in the oceans. And the third is by moving what we call latent heat, which is just a fancy way of saying evaporate water store energy, move it somewhere else, condense that moisture, get the energy back.
And hurricanes are very useful at doing that. They pick up a lot of water and a lot of energy from the tropics. They move forward and they drop it off. So the stronger the pole trade or temperature gradating you have, the more conflict you’re going to get and the more need there is to move energy forward. I often ask what drives the tornadoes?
For example, in the spring, the answer is you’ve got really cold dry air coming out of Canada and it’s colliding with really warm, moist air in the Gulf of Mexico. And so when you get these two contrasts come together, you get a lot of storminess. Imagine a world where the pole and the equator are exactly the same temperature. If they’re at exactly the same temperature, you’re not going to get that contrast. You’re not going to get the storminess, you’re not going to get hurricanes at all because there’s no reason to produce them there.
Storminess is going to be much reduced. So the argument is a warmer world would be a less stormy world because in a warmer world you warm the tropics but not much. It’s already very warm and you’ve got a lot of water. Water takes a lot of energy to warm, and so you get very little warming in the tropics, but you get lots of warming in the polar regions, the polar regions are drier, so you don’t have lots of water.
The polar regions are colder, so it’s easier to warm the temperature. Polar regions are covered with ice. You melt that ice, you release land underneath that’s darker. You absorb more energy cause more rising temperature. You have sea ice up there that covers the surface keeping literally the warmer water from the colder air, sea ice melts. You get more energy coming up from the ocean. There’s a variety of other reasons, but when the world warms the pole warms more than the equator, so the equator to pole temperature gradient decreases, you get less need for the severe storms and that includes hurricanes.
Allen: Are those temperatures the primary thing that scientists and climatologists are looking at when they’re predicting if it’s going to be a severe hurricane season or not? Or are there other factors that they’re looking at as well?
Legates: There’s other factors. The primary factor is to whether we’re heading into an El Nino event or a La Nino event, those are events where you’ve got a large pool of water in the Central Pacific Ocean that changes temperature for a variety of reasons. It could be because the ocean circulation changes, which changes the atmosphere.
It could be because the atmosphere changes driving circulation in the ocean. I’ve even seen arguments of subterranean magma flows affecting the ocean, which in turn affects the atmosphere.
The idea though is that climate is a mix of all of the above. And so what happens is, even though we’re talking way out in the Central Pacific Ocean, that can set up atmospheric circulation patterns that affect the formation of hurricanes, particularly even in the Atlantic Ocean Basin. So it’s what we call teleconnections that something happening halfway across the planet actually can affect something over here on the East coast.
Allen: What about this season? Do you know what we’re looking at as far as hurricane season this year?
Legates: What we’re looking at this year in particular is a very active season. National Oceanic and atmospheric administration through the National Weather Service produces a forecast. Colorado State University produces forecast as well. Colorado State’s forecast is for 11 named storms.
What we mean by a named storm is a storm that becomes a tropical storm reaches speeds of at least I think it’s 35 mile an hour, and therefore gets a name as opposed to just a number that they’re likely to become 11 named storms as hurricanes. Five forecasts become major hurricanes, which are category three with sustained wind speeds of 111 mile an hour or greater, and a fairly high, what we call accumulated cyclone energy index.
So it’s looking to be a fairly active season. The two things you really want to look for is warm water, which we almost always have enough of to create some, but it’s also wind shear is why the first prerogative is an La Nina event because La Nina tends to cut down on the wind shear.
If you think of a hurricane, it’s like a chimney. You start the rising motion and you want it to go all the way straight up to get it to form. If you’ve got what’s called a lot of wind shear, this is winds moving at different directions and different speeds at different elevations in the atmosphere.
As this chimney starts to form, it literally gets ripped apart, so winds, shear cuts back onto hurricane formation. And so even though you’ve got lots of warm water around, you may not get many hurricanes because of wind shear. This year, the wind shear is supposed to be low, which allows the formation of these towers, and therefore we expect more hurricanes.
Allen: I was talking to one of my colleagues here at The Daily Signal about this topic of what the press is saying about hurricane season and the connection that they claim connected to climate change. And one of the, that he was curious about is do we think that there is maybe more of a focus on the severity of hurricanes now simply because we have more infrastructure, so there is more to be destroyed than there was maybe 50 or a hundred years ago. Do you think that that’s part of it, that there’s maybe a heightened awareness of hurricanes simply because we have more houses, we have more businesses, we have more electrical lines now?
Legates: Exactly. More people living near the coast puts more people at risk. When you have a hurricane that makes a landfall, it’s always going to make top news, and that’s the perfect time to bring out the fact that hurricanes are related to climate change. And see, we told you all about climate change, and this is yet more proof.
I mean, one of the things I’ve been teaching at a university since 1988, I was at the University of Oklahoma, and then I went to LSU and the heart of hurricane landfall area, and there were two things that I said. One was that particularly along the East coast, it’s very difficult to get a hurricane to landfall in the Mid-Atlantic. The reason for that is it either makes landfall at Cape Hatteras because they tend to do that big sea motion where they’re coming in from the easterlies and then moving into Westerlies, so it’s like a big “C” in the ocean, letter “C,” but if you miss Hatteras, the next thing you’re likely to hit is Long Island.
So, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, they’re all sort of set back and set in, so they’re protected.
Doesn’t mean they can’t be hit, and at some point there will become a storm. It’ll go up the coast, it’ll become caught up in something happening in middle attitudes. It’ll make a left turn and come in, and of course, that storm was Hurricane Sandy. It did just that. Well, when that happens, aha, we’ve never seen this before. It’s a rare event. It must be climate change induced. Of course it wasn’t. It’s just the roll of the die, if you will. One of them is going to get caught up that way. It’s going to happen and it happens. I mean, the same thing I was talking about in Oklahoma regarding Southern Louisiana, that at some point there will be a storm. It’ll come in somewhere around Eastern New Orleans.
It’ll move up. It’ll be a past New Orleans, but its winds will be coming, wrapping around. It will hit Lake Pontchartrain. And Lake Pontchartrain, if you know anything about it, is a small shallow lake and it will be sloshed up quite a bit by the high winds and it will push up against the levees, and at some point those levees are going to give way and New Orleans is going to be flooded. But this is going to be a different flood because usually when we have coastal landfalls with the storm surge, the storm surge comes in, floods the land, the storm moves on, the surge pulls back out to sea, the land is exposed again, and you can start to rebuild.
New Orleans has been sinking over time through compaction of sediments and the building of these levees so that you never get flooding, you never get a replenishment of sediments, and they’ve all compacted over time.
New Orleans, much of it is below sea level since it’s below sea level. When the levees break, this water from Lake Pontchartrain is going to flood New Orleans, but there’s no way to get that water out. Usually rainfall is pumped out of town by a series of pumps in New Orleans, but they’re going to be underwater, so they won’t be functional, and that water’s not going to recede because it’s moved into low lying area.
So it’s just going to sit there and we’re going to have to come up with a way therefore to fix the levees so you can pump the water out so we can get back to normal, which is going to be anything but normal because the people’s lives are going to be disrupted, not just by the storm, but by the continuing aftermath. I said it would happen, and unfortunately it did not because it was a rare event, not because climate change caused it, because you knew from a physics standpoint, that’s what was going to happen at some point, and it happened sooner than later.
Allen: Is there anything that scientists, that climatologists know of that human beings can do to affect hurricanes and how severe they are? Or is this just completely out of our control as far as at least science has taken us so far.
People have always said, why don’t they just drop a nuclear bomb into one of these? You would blow it apart. And we would just, before it’s making landfall, and I’m thinking, OK, this person has no idea what a nuclear bomb does.
First of all, a storm of most magnitudes that you’re going to be willing to work against has far more energy than a nuclear bomb. Secondly, a nuclear bomb puts away a lot of fallout. The last thing you want is nuclear fallout being spread everywhere by a moving storm. Third, a nuclear bomb generally creates rising air motions, which only feeds the storm. It’s all in the wrong direction. It’s the last thing you want to do, but I get it. People want to say, we’ve got technology. We should be able to stop this. We should be able to come up with something to cause it to not happen. A warmer world might do that because as we’ve seen the coldest period of the last 400 years, the hurricanes were a little more intense. So maybe a warmer world is the best thing we could hope for.
Allen: Professor Legates, thank you.
Legates: Thank you. It was fun.
The post Fact Check: Is Climate Change Really Causing More Frequent or More Severe Hurricanes? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Hunter Biden receiving a felony conviction on three gun charges in Delaware allows the left to claim "no one is above the law," while distracting from the much more serious allegations against the first son— and his father.
The post Morris: Hunter Biden Gun Trial Verdict Will Be Used as Distraction from Biden Corruption appeared first on Breitbart.
Right wing parties performed best in the EU elections, with many new seats at the expense of hard-line greens and their liberal allies.
The post Paradigm Shift: Green Zealots, Liberals Biggest Losers in European Mega-Election appeared first on Breitbart.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Wednesday passed a resolution condemning Iran for banning nuclear inspectors and calling on the Iranian government to cooperate more fully with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
The post U.N. Nuclear Watchdog Condemns Iran for Banning Inspectors appeared first on Breitbart.
Hunter Biden smoked crack "every 20 minutes or so," his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Kestan, testified against him in the gun trial.
The post Hunter Biden Smoked Crack ‘Every 20 Minutes,’ Ex-Girlfriend Zoe Kestan Testifies appeared first on Breitbart.
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On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” White House Senior Adviser Amos Hochstein stated that the White House wants to lower energy prices and “we’re going to try to work to make sure that we
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On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” White House Senior Adviser Amos Hochstein stated that the Biden administration “made enormous progress to advance renewable energy in this country, to advance electric vehicles, but that’s not
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On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” White House Senior Adviser Amos Hochstein said that America is the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, but they don’t want to see that continue
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A confidential IAEA report found that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium reached 30 times the limit of the 2015 nuclear deal.
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During an interview aired on Monday’s broadcast of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) stated that the China tariffs announced by President Joe Biden will raise prices and harm the deployment of solar energy because “we need” Chinese
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The scheme could possibly hamstring a potential Trump administration from revitalizing the economy for American workers.
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Political leaders in Saudi Arabia are pressing the administration of leftist President Joe Biden to help the country develop a nuclear program as part of a larger "security" deal that may ultimately include a pathway to normalizing ties with Israel, Reuters reported on Monday.
The post Report: Saudis Wants Biden to Help Nuclearize Country as Part of Defense Deal appeared first on Breitbart.
Sustained Russian attacks on Ukraine's power grid have forced leaders of the war-ravaged country to institute nationwide rolling blackouts.
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Multiple bodies of the United Nations honored dead Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Monday, prompting outrage from Israel.
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On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Surveillance,” Bloomberg columnist, economist, President of Queens’ College, Allianz Chief Economic Adviser, and former Obama Global Development Council Chair Dr. Mohamed El-Erian stated that the “sustainable energy” transition has helped create “a world that’s subject
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The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) offered to share the nation's nuclear "expertise" with any country seeking to develop a nuclear program on Wednesday, the latest in a string of provocative comments by Iranian officials, including one claiming Tehran already has a nuclear bomb.
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China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday dismissed tariffs that the Biden administration threatened as a “farce."
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On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” U.S. Trade Representative Amb. Katherine Tai stated that “with respect to clean energy technology, we have seen that the market operating on its own cannot provide the boost, the turbocharge that’s required to
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The Foreign Ministry of Iran insisted in a briefing on Monday that the nation's terrorist regime would not pursue nuclear weapons development and would abide by international law on weapons of mass destructions (WMDs).
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American Experiment’s Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling tell you what you need to know to respond to ill-informed advocates for “green” energy. There is much more at the link, but here is an overview:
1. Renewables can’t survive on their own
The renewable energy industry is a subsidy-based industry, as wind and solar are largely dependent on lucrative state and federal subsidies. However, renewable advocates justify these perpetual subsidies by claiming thermal generators receive more subsidies than wind and solar. This assertion is not based on reality….
***
In 2022, wind and solar generators received three and eighteen times more subsidies per MWh, respectively, than natural gas, coal, and nuclear generators combined. Solar is the clear leader, receiving anywhere from $50 to $80 per MWh over the last five years, whereas wind is a distant second at $8 to $10 per MWh.
Poor solar energy! No matter how many billions the government pours down the solar rathole, no one has figured out a way to generate solar power after the sun goes down.
2. Renewables increase the cost of electricity
Renewable advocates often claim that the adoption of more wind and solar will lead to lower electricity costs, but the opposite is true. In a previous Substack, we wrote in detail about how utility companies with the largest rate increase requests in the country admit the energy transition is a major reason behind increasing electricity prices for families and businesses.
“Green” advocates fake the numbers for wind and solar by the simple expedient of only counting a fraction of their costs. This chart shows the actual cost of the various energy systems if all costs are included:
3. More wind and solar means more blackouts
Advocates of renewable energy also don’t want to account for one of the most damning facts about policies that favor wind and solar energy at the expense of dispatchable generators: that they have led to electricity blackouts in more than one region.
Greenies are full of bogus reasons why increased use of wind and solar are not to blame for blackouts, but they can’t answer the simple question: why is that we didn’t have blackouts before spending hundreds of billions on wind and solar, but now we do have blackouts?
Isaac and Mitch conclude:
Despite claiming to be ardent followers of “tHe ScIEncE,” wind and solar advocates live in their own universe of alternative facts that deny the basic physics and economics of the electric grid. Hopefully, this piece is useful for you the next time a wind or solar stan is arguing with you in the comments section.
One more “green” myth remains to be exploded: the claim that wind and solar are better for the environment than natural gas, nuclear and coal-fired electricity. That myth will be addressed in an upcoming report.
Robert Bryce is one of America’s foremost energy experts. At his Substack site, he describes his recent appearance before the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. The commissioners were glad to hear from Robert:
After I finished, about two dozen people (most of them were state regulators) came forward to say they appreciated my talk and that they’d never heard many of the points I’d made. One utility commissioner told me that the regulators who attend NARUC’s meetings are “not used to having anybody tell the whole story.” I also received several dozen emails from people who said NARUC had never had anyone like me give a speech.
Which is a truly scary reality. From whom are the commissioners accustomed to hearing? Financially self-interested left-wingers:
[A] few conference attendees took to Twitter to complain that I’d been allowed to speak at NARUC. One person in particular, a lawyer who works for Earthjustice, the San Francisco-based NGO that is funded by dark money, had a sphincter-puckered snit on Twitter, saying that I presented “nonsense.” Earthjustice had $151 million in revenue in 2023 and employs more than 200 lawyers in 15 U.S. cities. Another attendee, who works for San Francisco-based Energy Innovation LLC, which doesn’t reveal its donors, got his NARUC knickers in a twist. On Twitter, he claimed I provided so many “falsehoods” that he “couldn’t keep up.” It’s funny, though, that he didn’t name a single falsehood or refute even one of my points.
Typical. Leftists don’t argue, they censor.
What did Robert say that so frightened greenies? Follow the link above for the whole story, but I would highlight two points. First, increasing government-mandated reliance on expensive and ineffective wind and solar power is threatening the reliability of the electric grid:
On February 22, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) issued a report that put the danger facing America’s electric grid in stark terms. In an introduction, MISO’s CEO, John Bear, said, “There are immediate and serious challenges to the reliability of our region’s electric grid.” His remarks must be quoted at length:
The transition that is underway to get to a decarbonized end state is posing material, adverse challenges to electric reliability. A key risk is that many existing “dispatchable” resources that can be turned on and off and adjusted as needed are being replaced with weather-dependent resources such as wind and solar that have materially different characteristics and capabilities. While wind and solar produce needed clean energy, they lack certain key reliability attributes that are needed to keep the grid reliable every hour of the year. Although several emerging technologies may someday change that calculus, they are not yet proven at grid scale. Meanwhile, efforts to build new dispatchable resources face headwinds from government regulations and policies, as well as prevailing investment criteria for financing new energy projects. Until new technologies become viable, we will continue to need dispatchable resources for reliability purposes.
Second, perhaps the most extraordinary fact about energy is that the much-ballyhooed “transition” from fossil fuels to wind and solar simply isn’t happening, despite government mandates and massive subsidies. In fact, it is rapid growth in use of fossil fuels that powers the world’s economy:
There is much more at the link. The bottom line is that a transition from reliable and affordable fossil fuels to unreliable and prohibitively expensive weather-dependent sources of energy would be a human disaster, and therefore, it isn’t going to happen. Ever. Leftists may whine and gnash their teeth, and for now they may reap enormous amounts of ill-gotten money from “green” interests. But what they want, or more likely pretend to want, isn’t possible, and it won’t happen.
We have written a couple of times about biomass, which is a fancy term for burning wood. If you thought using wood fires for energy was out of date–it has been, actually, for a century and a half–you are behind the times. Wood burning is considered “green,” a wholly political concept, and therefore is heavily subsidized in Europe. Millions of trees in the U.S. and Canada suffer the consequences.
The latest from the United Kingdom:
Wood, the fuel that British industry thought it had left behind more than a century ago, is staging a comeback.
Powering the resurgence is Drax Group, owner of the controversial Drax power station that recently posted a 10-fold increase in its latest yearly profits.
Its plant in Yorkshire, Britain’s largest and most controversial power station, generated around 6pc of the country’s electricity in 2023 by burning 6.4 million tonnes of wood. In context, it is the equivalent of 27 million trees.
27 million trees! The same Telegraph article points out that the New Forest only has 46 million trees, less than two years’ worth. So where does the wood come from?
Last year alone Drax imported 4.6 million tonnes of wood from the US and another 760,000 tonnes from Canada, with further deliveries coming from Brazil, Latvia and Russia.
You might think that cutting down trees in the southern U.S., thus preventing them from absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere–do they still teach junior high kids about photosynthesis?–shipping them to Europe on diesel-powered ships, and then burning them, releasing carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2, must be the dumbest possible way of generating electricity. And, while it is appallingly stupid, and not “green” in any coherent sense, it is arguably not as dumb as wind and solar:
[Drax chief executive Will Gardiner says], “We have created a business which plays an essential role in supporting energy security, providing dispatchable, renewable power for millions of homes and businesses, particularly during periods of peak demand when there is low wind and solar power.”
Yes: burning wood on an industrial scale is idiotic, but at least it works in the dark and when the wind isn’t blowing.
Finally, why does such a foolish way of generating electricity exist? Mandates and subsidies, of course:
Sir Peter’s reference to cost relates to the taxpayer subsidies that Drax receives for producing green energy, which amounted to £617m in 2022 and £587m in 2023.
Meanwhile, China is humming along with more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants, and more coming on line constantly.
People around the world are increasingly realizing that “green” energy is actually black–as in blackouts. Thus, in today’s Telegraph: “The UK is much closer to blackouts than anyone dares to admit.”
We are heading for a big electricity crunch as it is. Whoever wins the general election, the next government will be committed to decarbonising the National Grid – by 2035 in the case of the Conservatives and by 2030 in the case of Labour. That means either closing all the gas power stations or fitting them with carbon capture and storage technology – which does not yet exist on scale in Britain and whose costs are likely to be massive. At the same time every single one of our existing nuclear power stations is currently due to reach the end of its life by 2035. If Hinkley C is delayed much beyond its latest estimated completion, we could end up with no nuclear at all.
That could leave us trying to power the country pretty much with intermittent wind and solar energy alone – and this at a time when politicians want millions more of us to be driving electric cars and heating our homes with heat pumps, thus substantially increasing demand. How will we keep the lights on? One struggles to find satisfactory explanation from the National Grid ESO, which is trusted with this task.
Britain is not alone in that regard. It is extraordinary that no one in any country has actually tried, seriously, to figure out how to power a modern economy with intermittent and absurdly expensive wind and solar power. We are simply cruising toward disaster with inept and even senile politicians at the helm.
It has produced a vision for a winter’s day in 2035 which foresees massive amounts of energy being stored in the form of green hydrogen produced via the electrolysis of water – a technology which may not be ready by then.
Or may not be ready, ever. I’ve been hearing about miraculous hydrogen energy for decades.
It also sees Britain importing around a quarter of its electricity. What happens if the countries we import it from are also short of renewable energy, it doesn’t say.
That is what happened a year or so ago when Duke Energy’s customers suffered a blackout. Duke’s plan included importing electricity from other states when the wind didn’t blow and it was dark out. But–surprise!–the wind wasn’t blowing in nearby states, either.
But now we get to the real plan, to the extent there is one:
But another large part of the picture seems to be “demand flexibility” – a polite term for rationing energy through smart meters, jacking up the price whenever supply is short. No wonder the Government seems keener than ever to force smart meters on us.
A “smart meter” is one that will adjust the temperature in your house, or otherwise reduce your use of electricity, when the utility can’t produce enough electricity to meet demand. In other words, the plan is for us to get poorer through electricity rationing.
This is Great Britain, but you could say the exact same thing about the U.S. or most other Western countries.
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