Where is the Investment Money Going in Response to the Left's Irrational Energy Plans?

Today's Wall St. Journal has an article summarizing a study by the Atlas Public Policy and Utah State University on where the announced investments in the Left's energy policy are to be made.  The Atlas Public Policy group is strongly in favor of the Left's "green" energy policies and is not an Ayn Rand-inspired effort.  Companies plan to spend $170 billion on projects in response and supposedly create 200,000 new industrial jobs.  Most of these projects and jobs are to be in Republican states.  New York, Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico will get a decent share among the Democrat states, but mostly the investment will go to Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.  The battleground states of Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan get a great share of the investment money.  The top investment states from most to less are:  Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana, South Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, and Arizona.  Not one of these states is a solid Democrat state.

The announced projects are to make car batteries, electric vehicles, low-emission buses, solar equipment, electrical grid supplies, wind turbines, recycling, mine for critical materials, hydrogen electrolyzers, and carbon dioxide sequestration.  Companies are choosing to make most of their investments in Republican states because of lower labor and living costs, lower taxes, more dependable and affordable supplies of electricity, and fewer restrictions on land use.

Republicans and the residents of these states should not rejoice in this investment overmuch.  Most of the investment is malinvestment.  It is not in response to real human need and enrichment.  It is mostly built upon the fable that oil, gas, and coal use will cause catastrophic man-made global warming.  That hypothesis has failed scientifically, though it has become powerful in building special interest groups.  More and more people are having doubts about it.  In fact, the most reliable data we have in the USA on the direction of the temperature change is that we are in a very moderate cooling stage since 1895.  I am referring to the rural weather station data before it is manipulated into a false substantial warming trend, as explained in my article The Fake Climate Record using data provided by Tony Heller.

Many of these projects are going to fail.  The money invested in them will be lost.  The people hired will learn skills for which there will be no market when they lose their jobs.  People will own homes they cannot afford to leave because they cannot sell them in the ghost town that will be left behind when the bubble of "green" energy bursts.  Schools and the many service and goods-selling businesses built to serve the workers on these wet-sand projects will be sunk and abandoned.  There will be many a tragedy.  Much of the investment money would otherwise have gone to the same areas to perform productive work.  The people who took dead-end jobs could have taken jobs that were fulfilling real needs and wants.  Many good Republicans will be left holding the bag.  The Democrats will just tell them coldly to study computer coding as Hilary told the West Virginia coal miners to do.

Before the Progressives can transform America, they must destroy America.  Sowing chaos and creating a state of nihilism is their thing.  Destroying our private sector affordable and reliable energy supply is essential for making Americans more dependent upon government and more willing to do as they are told by their elitist betters.  In many ways, those elitists will take us back to the Middle Ages so they can exercise unquestioned authority.  In their ideal world, the politicians will be the aristocracy and the bureaucrats will be the clerics of the church.  The rest of us will be serfs.

The Manhattan Contrarian Notes the Insanity of New York Electric Power Mandates

The Manhattan Contrarian provides a rational evaluation of the mandates of New York on carbon-based fuel power inputs to its electric grid.

The state of New York mandated in 2018 that 70% of the electricity used in the state must come from renewables by 2030.  How is the progress going on that?  Based on data presented in the article, in 2023 the total renewable electricity output grew from 24.1% in 2019 to 25.8% in 2023.  At this rate of annual increase, by 2030 the renewable share will be 37.7%.  Nuclear power output shrank because the state forced the closure of two nuclear power plants.  Nuclear power is not renewable, but it is non-carbon fuel.  Carbon-based fuel conversion to electric power grew from 33.1% to 41.6% from 2019 to 2023.  Yes, far from being reduced, carbon-based fuel increased its share by 8.5%, while renewables increased by only 1.7%!  These percentages ignore the source of imported electricity, which was 14.4% in 2019 and 14.5% in 2023.

Francis Menton notes that the only way to make wind, solar, and other non-hydro renewable energy increase to the mandated 70% level is to use these intermittent sources to create hydrogen gas.  There is no reasonable possibility that battery storage will be feasible at the required power levels.  What might it cost to convert renewable electricity into hydrogen gas?  The United Kingdom just started a large-scale program to produce hydrogen gas, whose combustion creates dihydrogen monoxide.  For $306, hydrogen gas with the ability to produce 1 MWh of electricity will be provided to the United Kingdom.  Natural gas that produces 1 MWh of electricity is available in NYC at a cost of $11.32.  As the Manhattan Contrarian notes, this implies a greater base electric energy cost of a factor of 27.  That factor of 27 does not even include the cost of storing vast amounts of hydrogen gas, pipelines to transport it, and power plants to burn it.

Rational people cannot help but declare the New York state 70% electricity from renewables mandate absurdly impractical.  As I have pointed out numerous times, there is no problem with continuing to use inexpensive and reliable carbon-based fuels.  Nonetheless, environmental fanatics with their baseless fear-driven fantasies, continue to demand the destruction of our civilization as a small price for their "saving" the planet.  We should just recognize them as Nihilists. 

Phillip Pilkington: The green-energy bubble is about to burst — and thanks to Biden, taxpayers will suffer

Phillip Pilkington has written an admirably rational evaluation of the IRA, the fragility of the renewable energy industry, and the horrible consequences for the American people. I recommend reading his NY Post opinion article entitled The green-energy bubble is about to burst -- and thanks to Biden, taxpayers will suffer.

This calamity is perpetrated based on the failed hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming. That hypothesis has made prediction after prediction that failed actual observation. By the scientific method, this means the hypothesis is itself false.

This is not surprising, since the physics behind the argument is wrong. Additions of CO2 to the atmosphere do not provide added warming at present levels of CO2, since its cooling effects are about equal to the warming effects at the present CO2 concentrations. Almost everyone ignores the cooling effects. Modest warming would actually be good. Added atmospheric CO2 is highly beneficial to plant growth and therefore to all animal life, including humans.

How can so many scientists and economists get so much wrong? But they sure have. Note that contrary to claims, there is no real consensus. Only warming projections get published, but even those projections do not agree well with one another. This is not consensus. This is confusion. It is proof of ignorance.

The myth (and phony math) of 'green' jobs -- by Duggan Flanakin of CFACT

Governments are killing real jobs and conning us about ‘millions of good green jobs’

 
“Fool me once,” Stephen King wrote, “shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.” His adage certainly applies to the myth (and fake math) of green jobs.
 
During the 2020 election campaign, Joe Biden asserted that more than 3 million Americans are already “employed in the clean energy economy.” He then boasted that, “if executed strategically, our response to climate change can create more than 10 million well-paying jobs in the United States that will grow a stronger, more inclusive middle class … and not just in cities along the coasts.”
 
That would make Joe twice as boastful as his former boss, who promised the 2009 $787 billion stimulus package would create “over five million” green jobs. Four years later, the Brookings Institution reported that, “of the nearly 2.7 million ‘green jobs’ [the Obama-Biden Administration] identifies, most were bus drivers, sewage workers and other types of work that don’t fit the ‘green jobs of the future’” description.
 
Energy analyst David Blackmon later reported that Obama’s own Department of Labor acknowledged the initial failure to launch. DOL’s September 2011 report, “Recovery Act: Slow pace placing workers into jobs jeopardizes employment goals of the Green Jobs Program,” noted that only a third of the allocated funding had been spent; a fifth of the “degrees” and “certifications” went to people with a single day of training; and half of the “graduates” had five or fewer days of training. Just 2% of program participants held their jobs for at least six months.
 
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted oil industry lobbyists as holding “green” jobs! The septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry had 33 times more “green” jobs than solar electric utilities. The BLS had to admit in a June 2012 report, “Green Technologies and Practices – August 2011,” that they could identify only 854,700 “green” jobs, including janitors and cleaners.
 
What a sham! Shame on them for trying to con us.
 
David Kreutzer pointed out in a Heritage Foundation report that steel workers had the most “green” industrial jobs. Why? Most U.S. steel is recycled scrap, and some steel gets used in making wind turbines. The next largest groups were bus drivers, waste collectors and used-merchandise store employees – followed finally by engineering and architectural services. The much hated nuclear industry accounted for over 80% of the 44,000 “green” electric utility jobs. There were five times as many “green” jobs in social advocacy (environmentalist group lobbyists) as in renewable electric power.
 
Ah, but that was then – and this is now, you say. Right.  
 
In January, the Associated Press reported on “Biden’s fuzzy math” regarding his claim of creating 1 million new auto industry jobs – even if he actually replaces the 650,000-government vehicle fleet with electric cars and installs 500,000 new EV charging stations – all at taxpayer expense. Theoretically, a huge government buying program will lower EV costs, and the myriad of charging stations will lessen fears of being stuck in a hurricane evacuation in a vehicle you cannot quickly gas up. Theoretically.
 
But hold on! Every electric vehicle job will likely come at the expense of a gasoline-engine vehicle job, and every EV charging station will diminish jobs in pipeline, refining, gasoline retail, gasoline delivery, and other sectors. The AP story adds that industry analysts and the United Auto Workers union agree that EV manufacturing will likely mean fewer automotive jobs. One reason is that EVs have far fewer parts and are simpler to build, thus require fewer workers, and often just need a new $6,000 battery module. Another is that battery manufacturing is easily automated. But that is hardly the whole story.
 
Back in 2019, while losing over a fifth of its U.S. market share of sales over a 3-year period, General Motors admitted it already employed more non-union auto workers in China than union workers in the USA. The harsh reality is that there are 10 times more electric vehicle battery manufacturing facilities in Asia than in all of North America. Maybe Jinping Joe Biden is talking about the number of Chinese “green” jobs. Especially child and near-slave labor in China’s mines and processing plants.
 
Other fact checkers have also found Biden Administration green jobs claims are “mostly false.”
 
Electric vehicles are just part of the Green New Biden Deal. Surrendering our economy to the Paris climate accords and its draconian environmental restraints is another. Abandoning oil, gas and coal – and very likely nuclear energy – and all the jobs those industries create is a third. Mr. Biden is merely following Germany and other European Union countries down the primrose path to economic suicide.
 
According to Deutsche Bank, climate policy regulation of Germany’s automotive sector is triggering “the biggest structural break in the industry in decades.” A bank report explains that strict carbon dioxide limits for new passenger cars in the EU for 2021 and 2030 are forcing manufacturers to prematurely switch to higher cost electric vehicles. The resultant price increases, the bank predicts, will have a very negative effect on future employment in the Germany auto industry.
 
One reason is that the EU’s CO2 limits for passenger cars and subsidies for electric vehicles are “extremely inefficient [expensive] and hardly effective instruments” to achieve emission reduction in the transport sector. While government incentives and mandates may push people toward buying government-favored vehicles, radical climate and energy policies decrease investment in energy-intensive sectors such as metals and chemicals. This will further increase the cost of new German cars.
 
Despite the push for green energy and electric vehicles, the German Trade Union Association reports that the number of “green” jobs in the German renewables sector had fallen from 300,000 in 2011 to just 150,000 in 2018. Many of these lost jobs were due to the collapse of Germany’s solar power industry, as companies were forced out of business by Chinese manufacturers that undercut German prices – and had much easier access to raw materials.
 
The track record for American renewable industry jobs vis-à-vis Chinese competition has mimicked the German experience. A primary reason is China’s near-monopoly on rare-earth metals essential for the Green revolution. Despite these realities, Biden “climate envoy” John Kerry recently said displaced American oil and gas workers can simply and easily go to work making solar panels.
 
Energy economist Tilak Doshi agrees the West’s fascination with renewables-only de-carbonization, and ultimately de-industrialization, is a recipe for economic suicide. He notes that Germany’s “green” world involves behemoth wind turbines with blades made of petroleum-based, fiberglass-reinforced resins; motors built with iron and rare earths extracted, processed and smelted using fossil fuels; concrete that also requires fossil fuels; and factories run on coal and natural gas. Solar panels have the same pedigree.
 
The turbines and panels are installed in forests, grasslands, farmlands and coastal areas, where they destroy scenic vistas and wildlife habitats. Turbine blades kill endangered birds and bats.
 
The result of this save-the-planet zeal? Germany has a burgeoning 17% poverty rate, thanks largely to its shutdown of reliable nuclear and fossil fuel power plants and the resultant skyrocketing electricity prices for homes, factories, businesses and hospitals over the past 15 years.
 
Back in the USA, California operates the world’s fifth largest economy by importing most of its crude oil from overseas (despite massive in-state reserves) and a third of its electricity from other states (also for political expediency). As a result, Californians now pay 60% more than the national average for residential, commercial and industrial electricity, while enduring frequent rolling blackouts due to pricey weather-dependent energy and pathetic forest management. People and industries are fleeing the state.
 
And Team Biden-Harris (Harris-Biden?) wants to turn the rest of the United States into California!
 
Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
 

Joe Biden's Infrastructure and Green Energy Jobs Will Force You to Join a Union

Joe Biden gave a talk to a few union workers in Eire, Pennsylvania today.  He spoke about the many jobs he was going to create as our next President.  His plan is simple and very simple-minded.  He will force us to spend huge amounts of money on "green energy."  This will create jobs.  He will spend huge amounts of money building government schools.  This will create jobs.  He will make college educations free, which will create jobs.  He will provide people up to $15,000 as down-payments on new homes.  This will create jobs.  He promises that these jobs will all require union wages.

He could also replace all the bulldozers with shovels and claim he was creating jobs.

Jobs that last are those that increase the productivity of people and raise our standard of living.  So-called "Green Energy" jobs that replace inexpensive, dependable, and in the modern era, clean, coal, oil, and natural gas energy with expensive, intermittent wind and solar energy, do not increase productivity and do not raise our standard of living.  As I have proven over and over, coal, oil, and natural gas energy are not bringing on catastrophic man-made global warming.  That hypothesis has failed to live up to its constant and determined hype by those who are always looking for an excuse to increase the power of governments in the micromanagement of our lives.  "Green energy" has only managed to increase the cost of energy to date and to make our power grids more vulnerable to blackouts.  By raising energy costs, it has reduced employment throughout our economy in all businesses that use electric power.  These reductions tend to be diffuse and hard to point at, but any requirement that raises the cost of doing business has to result in fewer jobs.

Having realized he might lose some states if he maintains his pledge of a few months ago to end fracking, Biden now claims he absolutely will not end fracking.  Though he will rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and eventually end the use of all hydrocarbon fuels, which does sound like the end of fracking to any rational thinker.  His current stance is that he will not allow it on federal lands and since he is largely against allowing pipelines to be built, he will limit its ability to get to markets.  Clearly, Biden cannot be trusted on the fracking issue.

What our education system needs is an infusion of the freedom to choose.  We do not need more government-run schools.  Government-run schools tend to become as well-managed as the Departments of Motor Vehicles, the Veterans Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Postal Service, or Fannie Mae.  We need better teachers.  We need more teachers who are not from the bottom quarter of college graduates.  We need better education curricula.  We need students to learn real history and economics -- not the hysterical fables the socialist left teaches.  We need to teach students to do math and to write coherently on serious subjects.  We need to encourage rational thought -- not simply promote stream of consciousness and to perpetuate childish feelings.

The government and most other schools too are in the hands of the socialist left, which is not surprising given that the vast majority of the educational establishment is in the hands of government.  As long as its center of gravity is the government, the thinking of education professionals will be dominated by those who want a never-ending increase in the power of government.  There is no surprise that those who want this are always seeking justifications such as group identity politics infused with critical race theory, peak resource production, claims that businesses only want to crush their customers, and predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming.  One has to scare the people into accepting being forced to comply with evermore mandates.

Jobs building more government schools will displace jobs in the private sector devoted to the goods and services individuals choose of their own free will.  It will ultimately take resources away from addressing the real needs of an educational system that would actually prepare students to become productive workers and freedom-maintaining citizens.  Those needs are best met by allowing the education system to become a vital part of the private sector.  Biden and the Democrats want at all costs to prevent that from happening.  The government-run school teachers unions are their strongest supporters.  

Accept a free college education and you are absolutely accepting a curriculum of propaganda approved by the government.  I should not have to say more to a freedom-loving individual.  Furthermore, that which is free, is not valued.  Free college educations will surely become an education in how to party.  Imagine what students will learn about binge drinking, drug use, and promiscuous sex.  All taxpayers should be delighted with the prospect of working hard in their jobs and giving a larger fraction of their pay up so more students can be educated in how they are mostly racist monsters (so-called whites), male chauvinists (all males), mean-hearted and selfish suppressors of the people (all who have above average income or wealth and are in the private sector), or Gaia rapists (all who use the resources of the Earth).  Nonetheless, private sector employers are expected to hire the partying experts and the private-sector business haters the free colleges will produce.  This is Biden's planned future.

New home down-payments up to $15,000:  In a fantasy world in which government can make anything and everything free without hurting everyone, why not?  Sure free education, free homes, free meals, free health care, free jobs  -- in exchange for our votes.  Actually, Biden claims all his freebies will only come from those making more than $400,000 a year, whatever that means.  This comes on the heals of massive, unnecessary business shutdowns in the Covid-19 scare and huge government relief bills that have run up our national debt already to otherworldly levels.  All of this has to be paid for and it will come out of our hides in the future loss of many other values we might have chosen as individuals.  This socialist free lunch is a fantasy with a deep and fearsome bite.

Those jobs Biden promises are promised to be good Union jobs.  Yes, he promised the union leaders he was talking to that he would ensure that the jobs he would create would be union jobs.  Most Americans do not want to be forced to join a union.  I, as an employer, do not want to be forced to share my management judgment with union leaders, almost all of whom are Mafia or Communists and none of whom are suitable partners in my business.  Your future with Biden and his socialist Democrat Party hosts is one of forced union dues and rules or the sharing of the management of your business with corrupt, inept union leaders.

With Biden as President, I see a future in we are all much more subject to the use of government force to make us do the bidding of the Socialist Democratic Party elitists.  Far more often, they will tell you which of your values you will be allowed to pursue and far more often they will take the resources from you that would have allowed you to pursue your own chosen values.  They will use those resources to pursue their values, which will often be designed to hurt you.  If you think that the people, who want the kind of power that characterizes the elite of the Socialist Democrat Party, care about you as an individual, you are incredibly gullible.

Government has a monopoly on the use of force.  This makes government the most dangerous institution we have to live with in our society.  When government takes on functions beyond those of protecting our freedom to exercise our many and broad individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, it necessarily starts choosing who it is going to hurt.  Its justification for hurting some is always couched in terms of helping others.  Most people accept that because they do not understand that the free market private sector is where relationships are based on mutual benefits, not one side wins and one side loses.  When government takes on massive numbers of functions, there are vast numbers of losers and some winners.  The winners are those who make a profession of cozying up to the government elite.  This is why the suburbs of Washington, DC are among the very richest in the nation.  The losers are most Americans, few of whom have any idea how much they have lost.

Climate lunacy takes center stage in Poland by Paul Driessen

IPCC Poland conference presents fictional climate chaos and fake renewable energy salvation 

The unwritten rule seems to be that each successive climate report and news release must be more scarifying than any predecessors, especially during the run-up to international conferences.

Thus Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report 15 claims governments worldwide must make “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” spend $40 trillion by 2035 on renewable energy, and impose carbon taxes that climb to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2030. Or temperatures could climb another 1 degree F (0.5 C) and bring utter cataclysm to human civilization and our planet.

Not to be outdone, the 1,700-page 2018 US National Climate Assessment wailed that failure to eliminate fossil fuels and roll back American industry and living standards would send global temperatures soaring 15 degrees F by 2100! Chaos and food shortages would ensue; US economic growth would plummet.

The hyperbole continues in Katowice, Poland – where 30,000 activists and bureaucrats (and a few scientists) are meeting to finalize regulations to implement the 2015 Paris climate treaty and compel wealthy nations to give trillions of dollars in “adaptation, mitigation and compensation” money to poor countries that have been “victimized” by climate change, even as the rich nations de-industrialize.

All of this certainly plays well with those who orchestrated these reports and programs, are ideologically opposed to fossil fuels, or get paid to advance climate chaos and renewable energy narratives. However, a very different response among other audiences is increasingly evident around the world.

People look out their windows and realize the “unprecedented climate and weather chaos” isn’t actually happening, is little different from what they and previous generations experienced, and cannot possibly be attributed solely to fossil fuel use. They know the sun and other powerful natural forces have driven frequent climate changes throughout history, and play equally important roles today.

They understand that the scary headlines are the product of “scenarios” conjured up by computer models that blame climate change on greenhouse gases. They see the boy who cried “fifty 20-foot-tall wolves” far too often. They don’t buy the notion that today’s incredibly wealthy, high-tech, energy-rich societies are somehow less able to deal with climate change than those that lived through the Little Ice Age, for example. They typically put climate change at the bottom of any list of pressing concerns.

More and more people understand that fossil fuels provide 80% of US and global energy – and are essential to lifting billions more people out of crushing poverty. They see Asian and African countries building thousands of new coal- and gas-fired electrical generating plants, and making and driving millions of new cars. They know even Germany and Japan are burning more coal, as they realize that wind and solar subsidies and facilities raise energy costs, kill jobs and hurt poor families the most.

People resent being scammed and get angry when they realize their taxes and energy payments often line the pockets of climate activists, scientists, bureaucrats, politicians, and wind, solar and biofuel cronies.

Above all, a growing number see the proposed solutions as far worse than the wildly exaggerated and even fabricated climate disasters. They won’t tolerate having their livelihoods and living standards disrupted or destroyed by carbon taxes, even higher energy prices or fossil fuel bans – especially when the antipathy toward those fuels is combined with plans to terminate nuclear and even hydroelectric power.

In recent weeks, millions of mostly poor, working class and rural French citizens have joined the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement, protesting and even rioting against President Macron’s proposed carbon tax hikes on their driving and living standards. Even a French police union has sided with the protesters. A shaken Macron finally postponed the tax for six months, then scrapped the plan entirely.

The protests are the first serious backlash against international eco-imperialism. They won’t be the last.

In Africa alone, twice as many people as live in the USA still do not have electricity, or have it only rarely and unpredictably. Can you imagine your life without electricity? And yet they are told by the EU, environmentalists, the World Bank and others that they must restrict their ambitions to what is possible with wind, solar and biofuel energy. Would you accept such carbon colonialism? Can actual, real-world climate risks possibly be worse than the horrid poverty, deprivation and disease that afflicts them now?

The World Bank recently said it would kindly give poor countries $200 billion during its FY2021-25 cycle, for “adaptation and resilience” in the face of manmade climate change. But still nothing for fossil fuel or nuclear power. The White House should read it the riot act, especially if US money is involved.

Poor countries don’t need climate cash. They need to develop: energy, infrastructure, factories, jobs, health, living standards. They need to do what rich countries did to become rich – not what (some) rich countries are doing (or at least saying) now that they are rich. Thankfully, many are doing exactly that.

Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity, motor fuels and factory power creates its own prosperity; its own ability to improve roads, hospitals, schools, homes and so on; its own “drop dead money” to tell carbon colonialists to take a hike. “Green” energy is insufficient, unsustainable and ecologically harmful.

With America likely being joined soon by Brazil in rejecting the Paris climate trap, poor nations are on firm ground. Ontario (Canada), Poland. Australia, China, India and other countries have also rejected carbon taxes and coal use restrictions. The Paris deal is fast becoming a climate Potemkin Village.

But what about that National Climate Assessment? Wasn’t that a Trump White House document? It certainly needed some adult supervision, to ride herd on the 1,000 Deep State scientists and bureaucrats who prepared it. However, the White House let them prove how loony climate alarmism has become.

Indeed, as Nick Loris, Roger Pielke, Jr. and other experts have pointed out, the NCA was based on absurd assumptions (eg, vastly increased coal use and no energy technology advances over the next 70 years) and a ridiculous worst-case global temperature increase of 15 degrees F by 2100. That’s twice as high as even the IPCC’s worst-case projections, and far worse than Garbage In-Garbage Out climate models are predicting. It’s more than 15 times the total warming our Earth has experienced since 1820!

The NCA is also based on rampant cherry-picking of data, to wildly inflate climate risks; an almost total failure to factor in the incalculable benefits of fossil fuels; and a refusal to consider the plant-fertilizing benefits of more atmospheric carbon dioxide. It just depicts the CO2 we exhale solely as a dangerous climate-changing pollutant. The NCA also ignored the fact that actual observations show no increases in drought, no increases in the frequency or magnitude of floods, no trends in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. It didn’t mention the 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall.

Just as egregious, the Deep State NCA claimed continued fossil fuel use would hit the United States with $500 billion in annual climate related costs by 2090. That’s more than twice the percentage lost during the Great Depression. It’s 10% of the US economy in 1971. Even with modest economic growth, it’s likely to be a trivial 0.6% of America’s GDP in 2090. The NCA bogeyman is a little stuffed bear.

But based on IPCC and NCA fear mongering, America and the world are supposed to keep their fossil fuels in the ground – including what the US Geological Survey says is the “largest continuous oil and gas resource potential ever assessed!!” Over 46 billion barrels of oil, 280 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids in just part of the Texas-New Mexico Permian Basin.

No one denies that the climate changes, or even that human activities have some effects on climate and weather. But there is no real-world evidence that human CO2 emissions have replaced the sun and other natural forces; that another degree of warming would be cataclysmic; or that humans can control climate changes and weather events by tweaking the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Want some facts and common sense? See what CFACT and Heartland have been saying in Poland, and read books by Dr Roy Spencer, Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and others. They’ll be a breath of fresh air.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of books, studies and articles on energy, climate change, the environment and human rights. 

My Comments:

Dr. Roy Spencer and Anthony Watts are luke-warmers who believe that CO2 causes less warming than the alarmists say it does and that the warming is less than catastrophic.  They both hold the consensus view of thermal radiation, which is seriously in error.  Dr. Roy Spencer engages in discussions with great patience, but some critical physics he just does not understand.  Anthony Watts has called me nasty names because I advocate that the temperature increases caused by additional CO2 in the atmosphere are insignificant and much lower than than what he thinks they will be.  Despite their limitations, however, both of these men have played major roles in opposing the excesses of the global warming alarmists.  So be nice to them.

I am a supporter of and donor to the Heartland Institute and CFACT.

Revisiting wind turbine impacts by Paul Driessen

Erroneous recent calculation highlights need to assess renewable energy sustainability claims

It’s amazing, though hardly surprising, how quickly some used Hurricane Harvey’s devastation to claim that fossil fuel emissions are driving catastrophic climate change and weather. Their proffered solution, of course, is to replace those fuels with “clean, sustainable, renewable” energy.

I’ve criticized this supposed solution many times, on multiple grounds. Unfortunately, a hasty numerical calculation for a recent column was way off base, and readers properly chastised me for the error. I just blew it, using megawatts instead of megawatt-hours to derive the number of wind turbines … and amount of land … it would take to replace the world’s 2016 electricity entirely with wind energy.

My conclusion that it would require 830 million turbines and twice the land area of North America was thus off by embarrassing amounts. However, my reviewers offered many “correct” numbers.

Their turbine totals ranged from 2 million to 4, 10 and 12 million; their acreage figures from 0.5 to 40, 60 and even 247 per turbine. Total acreage for all the turbines ranged from the size of France or Texas – to half of North America. Energy scholar Cork Hayden graciously provided analytical aid.

Bottom line: Assumptions are key – about turbine size; number, location and extent of good wind sites; ability to actually erect turbines on those sites; wind turbine capacity factor, in average hours per day of electricity generation; duration and quality of wind power per year, especially as turbines proliferate into increasingly poor wind areas; and power generation needed to charge huge battery arrays to ensure reliable electricity during multiple windless days (2, 7, 14 or more) when turbines provide no power.

Another variable, of course, is the amount of electricity that is to be replaced by wind. In 2016, the world used 25 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electrical energy, generated by fossil fuel, hydroelectric and nuclear power stations, with minor contributions from wood (biomass) and trivial amounts of wind and solar. Year-round average power generation was 2.85 million megawatts (MW) or 2.85 terawatts (TW) – compared to zero generation in 1881.

Electricity makes our industries, jobs, travel, communication, living standards, health and safety possible, and demand will certainly grow as more nations electrify, and more vehicles are battery-powered. 

Here are my fundamental assumptions: Wind turbines replace 100% of today’s 2.85 TW global electricity generation, by some future date – as many activists and politicians insist we must (and can) do. Turbines are all 1.8-MW nameplate power. Average turbine capacity factor gradually falls from 33% to 16.5% as the best wind sites are utilized, and much poorer sites must be developed.

(In the USA many of the best wind sites are off the Washington-to-California and Maine-to-Georgia coastlines, and in the Great Lakes, where water depths and powerful local opposition would make it impossible to install many turbines. Onshore turbine size is limited by the size of blades that can be hauled by trucks on winding roads. The same situation would likely apply around most of the globe.)

Further assumptions: One-third of turbine output powers society; two-thirds charge batteries that provide power for 48 of every 72 hours that wind is not blowing. And winds always cooperate with that scheme – always arriving just in the nick of time, as batteries are depleted, and never disappearing for more than two days, even during sweltering summers or frigid winters when demand soars but winds disappear.

Of course, most of these assumptions exist only in the realm of fairies, pixie dust, green energy utopia and easy number crunching. They are meant to initiate important analyses and debates that climate alarmists, renewable energy proponents, legislators and policy makers have never conducted.

Using these assumptions, generating 25 billion megawatt-hours would require 1.6 million 1.8-MW turbines functioning at full 1.8-MW capacity in strong winds, all day, every day, with no worries about storage. If they operate only eight hours a day (33% engineered capacity), we just use electricity when it’s available, instead of when we need it. But that’s terribly inconvenient and disruptive.

So we employ the Dr. Hayden system, instead. We erect 4.8 million turbines that operate steadily for eight hours, sending one-third of their electricity to the grid and two-thirds to batteries. That would yield 8 hours of direct power while the wind is blowing (33% capacity factor) – and let us draw power from the batteries for the next 16 hours, until the wind regularly picks up again. “I love magic,” he says.

That clearly won’t work. We really need at least 48 hours of storage – and thus three times as many turbines, under a similar arrangement, but providing more flexibility, to recognize unpredictable wind patterns and the likelihood of two windless days in a row. We’re up to 14.4 million 1.8-MW turbines.

Want a bigger safety net? To assure against seven windless days? 50 million turbines should do it.

But then we’re really into the mediocre wind sites. Capacity plummets to 16.5% or so. Perhaps 100 million turbines will do the trick. Pray that lulls last no more than a week. Or send the army to those intransigent, unpatriotic coastal communities, and forcibly install turbines in their super windy areas.

That would also ensure that electricity generation is close to our big urban centers – hence shorter transmission lines, and less cement, steel, copper, et cetera to build the power lines. It’s a win-win situation, except for those who have to look at or live next to turbines and transmission lines, of course.

How much land are we talking about, to generate 25 billion megawatt-hours of global annual electricity? Assuming top quality wind sites, at 5 kilowatts per acre (average output per land area for any turbine at the windiest locations), onshore turbines operating 24/7/365 would require some 570 million acres.

That’s 25% of the United States – or 30% of the Lower 48 US states. It’s almost all the land in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona combined!

Change the assumptions – change the numbers. To store electricity for windless days, total power generation (and thus turbine numbers and land acreage) begins to skyrocket. For 48 hours of backup, triple the power generation; that’s the entire Lower 48. For a full week of backup, add in Canada.

Let’s not forget the transmission lines and batteries. They also need land (and raw materials).

How many batteries? Storing 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity – to provide power for 48 windless hours for a US city of 700,000 people – would require 480,000 of Tesla’s new 100-kWh lithium-ion battery packs. Backing up 2.85 TW for just two windless days would require 1.4 trillion Tesla units! And this assumes the batteries are charged and discharged with 100% efficiency.

Just imagine the land, raw materials, mining, manufacturing and energy that would be needed to make all those batteries (and replace them every few years). As energy and technology analyst Mark Mills has noted, all the world’s existing lithium battery factories combined manufacture only a tiny fraction of that.

I’m sure the world’s battery makers would be more than happy to take our hard-earned taxpayer and consumer cash to build more factories and make all those batteries – to save us from dangerous climate change that is no longer governed by the sun and other powerful natural forces.

Let’s get real. It’s time to stop playing with pixie dust and renewable energy utopia schemes. Time to open our schools and legislatures to actual thinking about energy, sustainability, climate change and what makes our jobs, health and living standards possible. Time for full-bore studies and legislative hearings on all these issues – in the USA, UK, EU and everywhere else.

Sustainability and renewable energy claims are too grounded in ideology, magic and politics. Wind and solar energy forecasts ignore the need to find and mine vast new metal and mineral deposits – and open US lands that are now off limits, unless we want to import all our wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. They assume land use impacts don’t really exist if they are in other people’s backyards.

Worse, too often anyone trying to raise these inconvenient truths is shouted down, silenced, ignored. That has to stop. The stakes are too high for ideology and pixie dust to drive fundamental public policies.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.

Comments by Charles:  

Howard "Cork" Hayden, Prof. Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut, is the publisher of The Energy Advocate, a monthly newsletter promoting energy and technology published in Pueblo, CO. I have a subscription to this valuable newsletter.

One has to conclude that wind power is not really sustainable power.  Neither is solar power for similar reasons.  What many anti-fossil fuel and anti-nuclear power factions want is that most people, usually not including themselves, will use much less power.  Wind and solar and other non-market power sources are advanced simply for the reason that they will increase the cost of power and decrease the convenience of its use.  This is a means of rationing power and is especially effective to ration its use by lower income people.  The false hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming is used as a ruse to justify this energy rationing.

I searched for images of wind farms and easily found many images made with great artistry to make the images beautiful.  Here is a more prosaic image of a wind farm in West Virginia where critics of coal love to bemoan the damage coal mining does to the countryside.  In their minds wind farms do no such damage until someone proposes putting such a wind farm in their neighborhood.

My Reply to "Sustainability is an Economic Boon Not a Liability"

Richard Matthews posted Sustainability is an Economic Boon Not a Liability at the Green Market Oracle.  Here is my comment in response:

There is no scientific consensus that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is correct. Most scientists who do say they believe in catastrophic man-made global warming cannot offer a clear explanation of the scientific theory that claim is based on.  Those who offer a theory very often disagree with one another.  Then there are many scientists who see the hypothesis as false, though many of them believe that carbon dioxide does cause some warming, which may be regarded as beneficial, not catastrophic.  Then there are still other scientists, including myself, who understand that the effects of carbon dioxide on the surface temperature are many, all of them very small, and more of them cooling effects than warming effects.  The net result is that CO2 has an insignificant effect. This is why the effect of CO2 has not been measurable to date.

There are many benefits to conserving energy.  Those real benefits are best achieved by people individually choosing them, not by government mandates and subsidies.  Real benefits will be pursued in the free market.  It is only harmful energy policies that need to be imposed by government.

The EPA ruling that CO2 is a pollutant is scientifically unsupported.  Its claims that mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants was a real danger were also without scientific justification.  Years of mercury precipitation data have failed to show any downwind mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants that can be seen above the dominant natural sources of mercury in the USA.  If mercury is such a hazard, there are huge swathes of land in the southern American West and Great Plains states that have to be evacuated due to natural sources of mercury.  Yet even in those areas of relatively high natural mercury contamination in the USA, there is no epidemiological evidence of harm to people.

The last sentence in blue was not in the original comment.

Environmentalist Insurance Policies by Paul Driessen

Environmentalist insurance policies

Intellectual ammo for holiday party responses to claims that you need meteorite insurance

Paul Driessen

Many liberals went into denial, outrage and riot mode after November 8. Now they’re having meltdown over President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees with climate and environmental responsibilities:

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry at Energy, Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt for EPA, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at State, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke at Interior. As Department of Agriculture secretary and multiple assistant, deputy assistant and other senior level positions are filled, the meltdown will likely raise sea levels by several feet.

It’s even worse than “white supremacists” and “Russian hackers” rigging and stealing the election. Having these people at the helm will be an “existential threat to the planet,” say meltdowners.

A typical over-the-top reaction came from an aptly named spokesperson for radical pressure groups and five-alarm climate scientists that feed at the trough of taxpayer and tax-exempt foundation funding “This is the wealthiest, most corporate, most climate-denying cabinet in history,” snorted Kiernan Suckling, director of the anti-development Center for Biological Diversity.

After eight years of anti-fossil-fuel, anti-growth, anti-job, anti-blue-collar policies – and the Left’s fervent wish for eight more years under Hillary Clinton – any Trumpian shift is bound to look that way to them.

So we’re likely to get a bellyful of bombast from like-minded (or ill-informed) office and neighborhood partygoers, especially if they’re too much imbued with holiday spirits. At the risk of offending those who do not share an NRA perspective on gun control (stance, grip, sight alignment, trigger control), here’s a little intellectual ammunition that conservatives may find helpful during those “spirited” discussions.

The United States needs to reduce taxes and regulations that have hobbled energy development and job creation – threatening to put federal bureaucrats firmly in control of our states, communities, livelihoods and living standards. However, as I noted recently, these essential, long overdue changes will come with no reduction in air, water or overall environmental quality standards that ensure our health and welfare. They will address rogue agency actions that actually impair our living standards, health and wellbeing.

Indeed, nearly all these autocratic government actions are based on some variation of the infamous “precautionary principle.” This infinitely malleable pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical activists) that they could be harmful, even if no cause-effect link can be proven.

Even worse, the bogus principle looks only at often-inflated risks from using chemicals, energy systems or other technologies that activists or regulators dislike – never at the risks of not using them; never at risks that could be reduced or eliminated by using them. Sustainability “guidelines” are very similar.

Just as perversely, if the Powers that Wannabe like a technology, they ignore or actively suppress any harmful impacts. For instance, since wind turbines can supposedly replace fossil fuels, they ignore bird and bat deaths, human health damage from infrasound, and the fact that essential metals are mined and processed under horrendous conditions by men, women and children in African and Asian countries.

Those environmental, health, human rights, and child labor violations are far away (literally not in their backyards), and thus can be conveniently ignored.

So can the poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death perpetrated and perpetuated by extremist groups that campaign tirelessly to shut down industries in developed nation communities – and prevent the poorest nations on Earth from gaining access to modern technologies that improve and save lives.

Eco-extremists claim they can save lives by preventing higher temperatures, rising seas, and more storms, droughts and crop failures due to “dangerous manmade climate change” decades from now. So they block fossil fuel power plants that provide reliable, affordable energy for modern homes, hospitals, schools and factories that improve health and living standards – and end up killing millions right now, year after year.

Climate change has been real throughout history. Sometimes beneficial (moderately warm, with ample rainfall), sometimes destructive (decades-long droughts or cold spells, glacial epochs with mile-thick ice sheets crushing entire continents), it is driven by solar, cosmic ray, oceanic and other powerful natural forces that humans cannot control. Carbon dioxide may play a role, but only a minor one, and rising atmospheric CO2 levels make crops, grasslands and forests grow faster and better.

The “unprecedented” manmade climate cataclysms that Al Gore and Barack Obama promised are not happening. For example, we were supposed to get more frequent, powerful and destructive storms; instead, a record 11 years have passed without one category 3-5 hurricane making landfall in the USA. 

To attack fracking and natural gas use, bureaucrats claim methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – but won’t admit that it is 1/235th as prevalent in Earth’s atmosphere (0.00017%), and at least 1/600,000th as prevalent as water vapor (1-4%), the most important GHG.

Their “social cost of carbon” schemes assign ever-higher monetary impacts to every climate and weather problem they can possibly attribute to using carbon-based fuels – but totally ignore the enormous and undeniable benefits of utilizing oil, natural gas and coal that still provide 82% of US and global energy.

They’re convinced their anti-energy diktats will “save the planet,” by shutting down US power plants and factories, despite vastly greater emissions from China, India and a hundred other nations that are rapidly expanding their fossil fuel use, to lift billions more people out of abject poverty, disease and malnutrition.

The same anti-technology activists and bureaucrats also detest biotechnology and genetically modified crops that require less water and can battle insect predators with a tiny fraction of the insecticides required for conventional grains and vegetables. They equally despise another GM marvel, Golden Rice, which prevents Vitamin A Deficiency that blinds and kills hundreds of thousands of children every year.

Instead of applauding the reduced blindness, malnutrition, starvation and death these crops can bring, precautionary and sustainability extremists obsess about imaginary risks of eating them, allowing more millions to die unnecessarily, year after year. It’s not their kids, after all. Why should they be concerned?

The same callous, phony ethics prevail on the disease front. Eco-activists support bed nets – but not insecticide spraying to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and certainly not DDT, the most powerful, longest-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Sprayed once every six months on the walls of mud or cinderblock houses, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do come in, so they don’t bite, and kills any that land. 

But radical ideologues focus on trivial, irrelevant side effects that “some researchers say could be linked” to DDT use – and let 600,000 parents and children die excruciating deaths every year from malaria.

Every one of these anti-technology, “precautionary” attitudes is the environmentalist equivalent of protecting American kids from powerful chemicals, fatigue, nausea, hair loss, and increased risk of illness and infection – by banning chemotherapy drugs, and just letting the little cancer patients die.

They are the equivalent of requiring you to carry a $10,000-a-year insurance policy that covers you only if you are killed by a meteorite – or by a raptor or tyrannosaur. At least meteorite risks are real, if extremely remote.

Raptors and T rexes exist only in our imaginations, special effects computers and movie theaters – much like the manmade climate chaos and other precautionary extremism that come from computer models and PR hype, and drive too many of our policies, laws and regulations.

Have fun at your holiday parties. This season promises to be even more animated than most.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.