Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "The climate alarmists never fail to use each significant weather event as proof of the coming climate apocalypse. While you’re reading the latest after the Tennessee Tornado, here is a chart of F5 tornadoes since 1954. Notice that they have declined over time and we’ve just been through a period of 8 years without an F5."
Facebook - "Despite the breathless climate reporting, global heat deaths by 2050 will still be much lower than current cold deaths This according to WHO's estimates of additional heat deaths from climate warming"
Facebook - "Contrary to breathless climate reporting: EU forests are burning *less* (not more) Burned area halved for EU Southern States 1980-2019 (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, ~90%) Trend down for Rest EU (even though many w/only recent data)"
The electric vehicle charging industry is doing everything except making money - "President Joe Biden’s plan to wean U.S. drivers off fossil fuels requires massive investment in public charging stations to power the electric-car revolution. So far, none of the companies that deploy the equipment has figured out how to make a profit. The dilemma boils down to demand, and there’s a certain chicken-and-egg quality to it. Most electric-vehicle drivers charge their cars at home, so many public charging stations get little use. But lots of people still driving gasoline-powered cars won’t consider going electric until they see charging stations widely deployed, for fear that they will run out of juice on the road. Speculators are piling into the industry, convinced that boom times are around the corner, while short sellers and other skeptics warn that some of these companies will go belly-up long before they figure out how to make money. Biden’s plan to spend US$15 billion to help create 500,000 more public stations by 2030 is feeding the optimism, with investors flocking to EV charging companies since his election. The risk is that the early movers will get badly burned, potentially souring capital markets on the industry for years to come... A decade into its existence, the industry is still hunting for a winning business model... Fuelling cars and trucks has always been a low-margin business, with gasoline stations making much of their money from selling snacks, coffee and cigarettes. The business is even tougher when it comes to EVs... The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that 80 per cent of EV charging happens at home. Another vexing issue is the nature of using parking spots to double as charging locations. If a customer pulls into a space in her apartment complex at 9 p.m. and hooks up to buy a few dollars’ worth of electricity, more often than not, she’ll leave her car there until going to work the next day. No one else can use that charger for the next 10 hours, regardless of when her car is done charging. Then there is the relatively small number of vehicles involved. Americans bought 259,000 new electric cars last year, a record according to BloombergNEF, but it’s still just 2 per cent of total car and truck sales. And of those new EVs, 79 per cent were made by Tesla Inc., which has its own branded network of “superchargers” that can’t be used by any other electric car."
Facebook - "Driving an electric car 650km (400 miles) in 12 hours. needs 2 stops to recharge. and she's freezing the whole way to save battery. Just one German reporter's story"
Bjorn Lomborg: The electric car won’t get us very far - "Electric cars will achieve only tiny emissions savings at a very high price... Electric cars are certainly fun, but almost everywhere cost more across their lifetime than their gasoline counterparts. That is why large subsidies are needed. And consumers are still anxious because of the short range and long recharging times. Despite the U.S. handing out up to US$10,000 for each electric car, less than 0.5 per cent of its cars are battery-electric. Almost all the support goes to the rich. And 90 per cent of electric-car owners also have a fossil-fuel car that they drive farther. Indeed, electric vehicles are mostly a “second car” used for shorter trips and virtue signalling. If you subsidize electric cars enough, people will buy them. Almost 10 per cent of all Norway’s passenger cars are now electric because of incredibly generous policies that waive most costs, from taxes to tolls, parking and congestion. Over its lifetime, a US$30,000 car might receive benefits worth more than US$26,000 . But this approach is unsustainable for most nations. Even super-rich Norway is starting to worry, as it loses more than a billion dollars every year from exempt drivers. Though technological innovation will eventually make electric cars economical even without subsidies, concerns over range and slow recharging will remain. That is why most scientific prognoses show that electric cars will increase in sales but not take over the world. A new study shows that by 2030, just 13 per cent of new cars will be battery-electric. Governments that ban new fossil-fuel cars would essentially be forbidding 87 per cent of consumers from buying the cars they want. It is hard to imagine that could be politically viable. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2030, if all countries live up to their promises, the world will have 140 million electric cars on the road, about seven per cent of the global vehicle fleet. Yet, this would not make a significant impact on emissions — for two reasons. First, electric cars require large batteries, which are often produced in China using coal power . According to the IEA, just producing the battery for an electric car can emit almost as much as a quarter of the greenhouse gases that a gasoline car emits across its entire lifetime. Second, the electric car is recharged on electricity that almost everywhere is significantly fossil fuel based (though, in fairness, Quebec is an exception, with its almost entirely hydro-produced electricity). Together, these two factors mean that, over its first 60,000 kilometres, a long-range electric car will emit more CO₂ than a gas car. Having a second electric car for short trips could actually mean higher overall emissions. Comparing electric with gasoline cars, the International Energy Agency estimates the electric car will save six tons of CO₂ over its lifetime, assuming global average electricity emissions. Even if the electric car has short range and its battery is made in Europe mostly using renewable energy, its savings will be at most 10 tons. President-elect Biden wants to restore the full electric car tax credit , which means he will essentially pay US$7,500 to reduce emissions by at most 10 tons. Yet, he can get U.S. power producers to cut 10 tons for just US$60. What he plans to spend on electric-car subsidies could cut 125 times more CO₂ if he spent the money directly on emission reductions. If the whole world follows through and gets to 140 million electric cars by 2030, the IEA estimates that will reduce emissions by just 190 million tonnes of CO₂ — a mere 0.4 per cent of global emissions. In the words of Fatih Birol , head of IEA, “If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong.”... there is a much better and simpler solution. Again according to the IEA, hybrid cars, such as the Toyota Prius, save about the same amount of CO₂ as electric cars over their lifetime. Moreover, they are already competitive with gasoline-driven cars — even without subsidies. And, crucially, they have none of the electric car downsides, with no need for new infrastructure, no range anxiety and quick refill."
Allegra Stratton is right about electric cars - "Saying out loud what many people already think about electric cars, Boris Johnson’s climate spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton, has received a lot of green flak. Despite a prominent role in pursuing the Government’s green agenda, she admitted this week that she’s not yet willing to trade in her old diesel car for a sparkling new electric. Like many using the UK’s roads, for her a car is not just a virtue-signalling accessory only to be wheeled out for the odd short journey. She uses her car to visit relatives all round the country and, with small children, is understandably reluctant to volunteer for long recharging breaks... Edmund King, president of the AA, for example, said that on these long trips, the driver ought to take a break anyway, which could easily be combined with a 20-minute recharging stop. The reality is that such rapid recharging is rare and can take as long as four hours. Nor is it always convenient to have our rest breaks dictated by our battery level. Until the range of electric cars is significantly improved, fossil fuel cars will be far preferable for long journeys for most people. To convince sceptical consumers, governments across the world are showering prospective buyers with subsidies. Given the high up-front cost of buying an electric car, these subsidies are likely to end up in the pockets of the wealthy for whom this experiment is proving extremely beneficial. All of this has achieved only reluctant sales. In Germany, for example, the subsidy has now been jacked up above €10,000 for a full-electric car, yet these vehicles still account for only one sale in 10."
How can you charge an electric vehicle if you park on the street? - "One in three U.S. housing units does not have a garage, according to the 2019 American Housing Survey, and many of those households do not have their own parking spots. As gas stations slowly yield to electric chargers, the ratio of fueling nozzles to vehicles is plummeting, with some studies suggesting we’ll need as many as one charger for every two electric vehicles... In Los Angeles County, a study by the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, or LACI, estimates the need for 84,000 public and workplace chargers as soon as 2028—about five times as many gas pumps as exist today, says Cole Roberts, who leads the North American energy business for the consultancy ARUP. Roberts worked with LACI on a tool, Charge4All, to identify good places to install curbside chargers. Why so many chargers? Because right now juicing up an electric vehicle is slow. To understand the multidimensional infrastructural problem that is electric vehicle charging, it helps to recall that there are three types of EV chargers. The first, Level 1, is like plugging into a conventional household outlet and might replenish your battery by just a few miles each hour. The second, Level 2, can give a full charge overnight. The third, also known as “fast chargers,” can deliver a full charge in less than an hour. There’s a correlation between speed and cost. Each fast charger costs upward of $50,000 and, depending on the required utility work, can wind up being much more. Reliance on fast charging would put Los Angeles on the hook for billions of dollars in chargers just in the next decade. (Other factors to consider include charger utilization rates, durability, utility grids, variable energy costs … it’s complicated.)... a viral photo showed a car charging in downtown Los Angeles with a black power cord hung waist-high across a freshly painted bike lane. At $15,000 a pop, that’s not a mistake you want to make every day."
With Its Power Grid Under Pressure, California Asks Residents to Avoid Charging Electric Vehicles - "the California Independent System Operator (ISO) told residents several times to voluntarily conserve energy, including asking them on social media to stop charging their electric vehicles (EVs) during peak usage times. The operator also warned users to “[avoid] use of large appliances and turning off extra lights.”... It comes as the federal government and certain state governments—including California’s—have pushed to convert their respective fleets to electric vehicles. President Joe Biden, who was seen in May in a photo-op driving an electric version of the Ford 150, earlier this year issued an executive order and promised some $174 billion into the electric vehicles market. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, last fall announced he would set 2035 as a target date for ending the sale of petroleum-powered vehicles in the state... critics have suggested that if there are too many electric vehicles in use, it could potentially put a strain on state power grids and utilities... Matthew Moniot, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, noted if the state also increasingly relies on solar and wind power, that could pose an even more daunting challenge for power grid operators. Speaking to Newsweek, he said that less energy is produced overnight—when many electric vehicle owners charge their cars—by solar and wind."
Sustainability means renewable energy which means brownouts: "In 2019, California's in-state electricity net generation from all renewable resources combined, including generation from hydroelectric power and from small-scale, customer-sited solar generation, was greater than that of any other state"
Electric Cars Have One Problem: They Keep Lighting People’s Houses on Fire - "When EVs do catch fire, the flames can be extremely challenging to put out, as several high-profile crashes involving Teslas have vividly demonstrated... the potential for disaster is there. After all, a car battery is one massive store of potential energy ready to be unleashed."
Shock, horror! COP26 has an electric car problem | The Spectator - "If absurdity were a source of renewable energy, the COP26 climate change summit might achieve its aim of saving the planet... there’s not enough places to power the luxury electric cars needed to ferry delegates around the city... a lack of charging points means the fleet now has to be re-charged by cooking oil-powered generators... Between 20,000 to 25,000 satraps, apparatchiks and flunkies will descend on the city for COP26. There are just not enough beds to accommodate them all. Wily Glaswegians, bless them, are cashing in: the Charing Cross Hotel is charging £3,818 for the first three nights of COP. Entrepreneurial home owners, meanwhile, are renting out their properties for between roughly £400 and £600 a night for a two bedroom house. Mr S hears that even UK ministers are struggling to get rooms anywhere near the city, such is the demand. If the organisers can’t even foresee a hotel shortage, how can they be expected to achieve Net Zero? And it’s not just officials. Steerpike understands that BBC staff going to COP have been told they can only ride in electric taxis rather than petrol-powered vehicles. To add insult to injury, the Beeb’s finest have been told that if their hotel doesn't have recycling facilities, they must dispose their waste into the correct recycling bins themselves. Given Glasgow council is currently embroiled in a stand off with its bin-men, will anyone even be there to empty them?"
Tesla owner blows up his Model S with dynamite over $22,000 battery replacement - "A Tesla Model S owner in Finland decided to blow up his electric car with dynamite after it needed a battery replacement, which Tesla said was going to cost $22,000. There’s not a lot of information about how much an electric car, or especially Tesla vehicle, battery replacement costs. It’s a hard question to answer since the vast majority of Tesla battery replacements have been done under warranty. Early on, Tesla offered eight-year unlimited mileage powertrain warranties for Model S and Model X... We recently reported on a case where a Model S owner was told by Tesla that he needed a $22,500 battery replacement. That wasn’t really an option since it’s basically equivalent to the value of the vehicle. Fortunately, the owner managed to find a third-party repair shop the fix the battery pack for a fraction of the cost – though the fix is somewhat controversial in the Tesla repair community."
Imagine electric vehicles in bad weather - " Imagine being stuck on a frigid night inside your car, like those stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia in a 48-mile backup for nearly a 24-hour standstill because of snow. Imagine being trapped in an frozen electric car with a long dead battery! Even with the great California year-round weather, the states’ EV user’s experiences do not bode well for projected EV sales in America...
1. The limited usage of the EV’s of about 5,000 miles per year is a reflection that the EV is a second vehicle, for those that can afford them, and not the family workhorse vehicle.
2. The primary owners of EV’s are the highly educated and financially well off, and not representative of the majority.
3. EV owner incomes rank among the highest in the country which may be a reflection of home owners that have easier access to charging their EV from their multi-car garages, or for those folks living in new apartments that may have access to more convenient EV charging capabilities. Most car owners park in the street.
4. According to ValuePenguin insurance, because electric vehicles cost more outright and are more expensive to repair, the average car insurance for an electric vehicle is about 23 percent more expensive than the cost for the equivalent combustion model.
5. The ethnicity of Tesla owner’s skews toward Caucasians, at 87 percent. Owners who identify with Hispanic ethnicity make up 8 percent of Tesla owners, leaving 5 percent to other ethnicities.
6. From that limited elite ownership group, there is a growing percentage of those California EV users that are switching back to gasoline cars, which is sending a message that may further deflate EV growth projections...
Imagine Florida with a hurricane coming toward Miami. The Governor orders an evacuation. All cars head north. They all need to be charged in Jacksonville. How does that work? If all cars were electric, and were caught up in a three-hour traffic jam with dead batteries, then what? Not to mention that there is virtually no heating or air conditioning in an electric vehicle because of high battery consumption.
If you get stuck on the road all night, no battery, no heating, no windshield wipers, no radio, no GPS (all these drain the batteries), all you can do is try calling 911 to take women and children to safety. But they cannot come to help you because all roads are blocked, and they will probably require all police cars will be electric also. When the roads become unblocked no one can move! Their batteries are dead.
How do you charge thousands of cars in the traffic jam? Same problem during summer vacation departures with miles of traffic jams. There would be virtually no air conditioning in an electric vehicle. It would drain the batteries quickly. Where is this electricity going to come from? Today’s grid barely handles users’ needs.
Frigid driving conditions: Did you know that 17 percent of car crashes in the United States happen in winter conditions? EV batteries must work harder in the cold, which is why they drain quickly in extreme temperatures. Low temperatures, such as 40 degrees or below, can decrease the driving range for EVs by 40 percent."
The Future with Zero-Emission Electric Vehicles - "a recent study by the Anderson Economic Group concluded that refuelling in the U.S. costs US$8.58-US$12.60 per 100 miles driven for a range of gasoline-powered vehicles, while recharging costs US$12.95-US$15.52 per 100 miles driven for comparable EVs. Going by these data, driving a typical 10,000 miles per year would increase the annual cost of motoring by about US$350. While noticeable, most car owners would probably consider this bearable. But this assumes stable electricity prices for the long term. More likely, power costs will climb significantly in response to increased demand associated with a burgeoning EV fleet and the ongoing government-driven shift to less efficient and more expensive “green” energy sources. The shift to EVs will clearly entail significant new costs for car owners and those who depend on them. Assuming that a typical EV will last 10-12 years, the changeover will cost the average Canadian car buyer at least $2,000 per year more than they would spend to replace a normal car. A home charging station will come on top of that. As will the added cost of charging their EV – already at least Cdn$500 more per year than gasoline or diesel, and set to climb. All-in, the additional costs are likely to be $4,000 or more per year. (For a family that needs two vehicles, that would be $8,000+ annually.) ... If Canada’s 25 million gasoline-powered cars and light trucks were replaced with EVs drawing an average government subsidy of $10,000 per vehicle, the cost to taxpayers would total some $250 billion – plus billions more as early adopters began replacing their first EVs. That is obviously unsustainable, and here too, something will need to give... the Government of Canada collects about $5 billion per year in excise taxes on gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel, as well as approximately $1.6 billion per year in GST on gasoline and diesel. Provincial governments together collect approximately $8 billion per year from similar excise taxes... The federal government is already running record deficits, so it is highly questionable whether it can continue to subsidize EVs and the required infrastructure changes at the current rate... Last summer’s heat wave stretched the capacity of electric grids in some parts of Canada, suggesting there is little remaining margin. Electric generation will have to increase significantly to charge 25 million EVs in Canada. Where might that increased capacity come from?... replacing the energy output of a single 100-megawatt natural gas-fuelled power plant requires a minimum of twenty 170-metre-tall windmills, together occupying 26 square kilometres of land. By way of comparison, the province of Alberta uses on the order of 10,000 megawatts of electricity at any given time, and this will increase sharply if EVs proliferate as planned... There is also the question of recharging stations... annual lithium production was only about 82,000 tonnes in 2020, enough to power about 8 million new EVs worldwide. Moreover, much of that is used for industrial applications and for batteries in smartphones and other devices... Canada has about 530,000 tonnes of economically viable lithium and currently produces none. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government is encouraging the opening of a lithium mine in northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire, but the plan is facing opposition from First Nations and has yet to undergo environmental assessments. Lithium is a soft metal, found especially in South America. The current top producers are Australia, Chile, China and Argentina. It is highly reactive and inflammable and presents serious environmental concerns. Its production requires large amounts of water (500,000 gallons per tonne of lithium) and releases a variety of toxic chemicals into the environment. Of course, since Canada produces no lithium at present, there is no environmental concern here. All of that has been offshored... Environmental activists often give the impression that life in the green economy will be much like our current life except for a much smaller carbon footprint and a cleaner environment. The far more likely reality is that in the “green” economy envisioned for only a couple of decades from now, most of us will have to get about on foot, on bicycles and on public transit. Extensive travel, whether international or just road trips within Canada, will likely be reserved for the very wealthy. The rest will travel as we have mostly been doing during the pandemic – virtually – on electronic devices powered by lithium batteries."
Electric cars to get more expensive as battery costs soar - "The cost of lithium battery cells is rising for the first time after years of decline, with strained lithium supplies adding to rising prices of other cell materials."
Electric cars: What will happen to all the dead batteries? - ""In 10 to 15 years when there are large numbers coming to the end of their life, it's going to be very important that we have a recycling industry," he points out. While most EV components are much the same as those of conventional cars, the big difference is the battery. While traditional lead-acid batteries are widely recycled, the same can't be said for the lithium-ion versions used in electric cars. EV batteries are larger and heavier than those in regular cars and are made up of several hundred individual lithium-ion cells, all of which need dismantling. They contain hazardous materials, and have an inconvenient tendency to explode if disassembled incorrectly."
Failure to recycle dead car batteries could cancel out benefits of electric vehicles
EDITORIAL: High energy prices part of climate plan | Toronto Sun - "high energy prices are not a failure of federal government policies, they are the deliberate and intended result of them. Their purpose is to discourage consumer spending by raising the cost of living so that consumers buy and consume fewer goods and services, leading to the generation of fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Right now, that process is on steroids because of a number of factors cited above that are occurring simultaneously, in addition to rising carbon taxes. But make no mistake. This isn’t temporary. It’s only the beginning"
We must go honest to 'go green' - "To be sure, producing and burning coal and oil have significant environmental impacts. But what goes unmentioned are the extensive benefits of affordable, reliable energy provided by coal and oil to make cheap electricity, power cars and underpin a modern economy. The ironic kicker is that economic wealth allows a nation to regulate and clean up the environment: its air, soil, water and emissions. Coal and oil are not green, but the wealth they create cleans up the environment. And, only wealthy nations such as the U.S., U.K. and Germany have been able to afford to begin to transition beyond coal for power generation. The global reality faced by the Biden administration is that poorer economies represent about two-thirds of the world’s population and they have a growing energy appetite. Just as the U.S. and Western Europe did, China is building an eye-watering number of coal plants to power its expanding share of global manufacturing. China now burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. Notwithstanding silly emissions pledges, China has no plans for reducing coal. They can’t afford to. The reality is that only economic wealth will allow China and other emerging economies to begin to transition away from coal and clean up the environment. So why not just switch from dirty coal and oil to clean and renewable solar and wind? Two reasons: They are not renewable and they are not clean. Sure, during non-cloudy days and windy times, the wind and the sun can be captured and turned into electricity. But because the amount of energy is not “dense,” it takes scads of land and collectors — solar panels and wind turbines — to capture it. It also takes oodles of batteries to back up intermittent solar and wind so that everything keeps running uninterrupted. There is also replacement. The panels, turbines and batteries wear out after 10 to 20 years, and the metals, chemicals and toxic materials required to make them must be constantly mined, manufactured and disposed of in landfills. Coupled with some carbon dioxide emissions associated with those processes, solar and wind are neither renewable nor clean. To add to it, contrary to popular spin, solar and wind are not cheaper than coal or natural gas. The reported lower cost is misleading because it represents the cost of electricity at the generation source, the so-called levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), not the actual cost to the consumer. Intermittent solar and wind require almost 100 percent redundant and expensive backup power from natural gas plants or batteries to be reliable, which makes them more expensive to the consumer. That is partly why people in California and Germany pay much more for electricity. This higher cost is both regressive and inequitable to lower-income people. China controls 50 to 70 percent of global lithium, cobalt and polysilicon and is aggressively acquiring other mined materials to make batteries, turbines and solar panels. As we move to electric vehicles (EVs), we are essentially shifting control of transportation fuels from OPEC to China. Is that more secure? Mining practices for EV metals are known to violate human rights, especially those of children. Do we want to promote that?... The Biden administration, as a proponent of science, has a chance to represent the complex social, legal, political, economic and, yes, scientific challenges of energy"
Climate Policy Is a Money-Making Opportunity for the Elite - "“The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity,” says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. “What the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is: There’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new [green] jobs,” chimes in presidential climate envoy John Kerry. Fink concedes that the economy remains “highly dependent” on fossil fuels. He also asserts that BlackRock is “carbon neutral today in our own operations.” It’s a claim open to challenge. “If a company or individual says to me they are net-zero, I know it is complete crap,” tweeted Glen Peters, research director of the Oslo-based Center for International Climate Research. Peters was taking to task former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who had claimed that investments in renewable energy offset emissions from fossil-fuel investments. Carney quickly backed down, but the spat reveals the fissure in the climate movement that first became visible with Michael Moore’s 2020 movie Planet of the Humans, which pitted true believers on one side against those positioning themselves to reap profits from the climate money pouring into decarbonization... In normal times, before the Climate Emergency, it would be up to financiers and investors to ask the tough, unsentimental questions, such as: What’s the return on investment? How long is the payback period? But not when it comes to climate change. In its 2018 1.5℃ Special Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declined to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the net-zero target. The target, the IPCC declared, implies “risk assessments and value judgments” – as if this nullified the need to assess whether the benefits of net-zero outweigh the costs. At the end of his Reith lecture, Carney was asked by historian Niall Ferguson if he’d read Bjorn Lomborg’s most recent book, False Alarm. Lomborg calculates that each $1 spent on cutting greenhouse gas emissions yields only 11 cents of future climate benefits. With trillions being spent on climate change, this estimate implies that a colossal burden is being placed on the current generation – especially those who can least afford to bear it – for little climate gain. Ignorance is no defense; nonetheless, Carney tried it. No, he hadn’t read Lomborg’s book, Carney answered Ferguson. He dismissed Lomborg’s as a “classic economic approach,” though he offered no data or evidence to show why Lomborg was wrong... All too predictably, Carney indulges his own taste for the apocalyptic. “We won’t have a financial system if we don’t have a planet,” he said in his Reith lecture. Last month, he made a 30-year forecast of annual climate deaths equalling total Covid-19 deaths by 2050 – the international deadline for net-zero – unless action is taken. Still, this is progress, of a sort. The Toronto climate conference, 33 years ago, compared the effects of climate change to nuclear war. How did that forecast work out? Carney uses his position to advocate mandatory climate disclosures for all large companies and argues that they should develop and publish plans to transition to net-zero. “What gets measured gets managed,” he says. At the same time, Carney is involved in setting up a carbon offset market – a market worth $50 billion to $100 billion a year, he anticipates. Like Glen Peters, Carney knows that corporate claims of net-zero are “crap,” but he expresses this awareness in the circumlocutory language of the central banker that he once was. Companies will be looking to reduce emissions, he says, “but for a period of time, they will also need the ‘net’ in net-zero, and they can only get that from a credible global market.” Having forced companies into emissions disclosures and net-zero plans, Carney then offers them a get-out-of-jail card – in effect, a toll on economic activity, paid by everyone, that will line the pockets of the green financial oligarchy. For climate true believers, however, offset markets are a sham and no substitute for genuine emissions cuts"
The Risks of Communicating Extreme Climate Forecasts - " In a new paper published in the International Journal of Global Warming, Carnegie Mellon University’s David Rode and Paul Fischbeck argue that making such forecasts can be counterproductive. “Truly apocalyptic forecasts can only ever be observed in their failure—that is the world did not end as predicted,” says Rode, adjunct research faculty with the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, “and observing a string of repeated apocalyptic forecast failures can undermine the public’s trust in the underlying science.” Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020. Fischbeck noted, “from a forecasting perspective, the ‘problem’ is not only that all of the expired forecasts were wrong, but also that so many of them never admitted to any uncertainty about the date. About 43% of the forecasts in our dataset made no mention of uncertainty.” In some cases, the forecasters were both explicit and certain. For example, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and British environmental activist Prince Charles are serial failed forecasters, repeatedly expressing high degrees of certainty about apocalyptic climate events... The researchers noted that the average time horizon before a climate apocalypse for the 11 predictions made prior to 2000 was 22 years, while for the 68 predictions made after 2000, the average time horizon was 21 years. Despite the passage of time, little has changed—across a half a century of forecasts; the apocalypse is always about 20 years out. Fischbeck continued, “It’s like the boy who repeatedly cried wolf. If I observe many successive forecast failures, I may be unwilling to take future forecasts seriously. That’s a problem for climate science, say Rode and Fischbeck... scientists, due to their training, tend to make more cautious statements and more often include references to uncertainty. Rode and Fischbeck found that while 81% of the forecasts made by scientists referenced uncertainty, less than half of the forecasts made by non-scientists did... scientists must take extraordinary caution in communicating events of great consequence. When it comes to climate change, the authors advise “thinking small.” That is, focusing on making predictions that are less grandiose and shorter in term. “If you want people to believe big predictions, you first need to convince them that you can make little predictions”"
So much for "following the science". Yet climate change hystericists keep claiming the scientists were and are right
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises
Apocalypse now? Communicating extreme forecasts
The world is ending. The world has always been ending. The world will always be ending
List of Climate-Related Apocalyptic Predictions
Dataset used for the above. Notably, there're lots of predictions of doom coming from scientists, many of which haven't come to pass. So saying that we must listen to the scientists isn't a convincing cope either
The lurking threat to solar power’s growth | MIT Technology Review - "A few lonely academics have been warning for years that solar power faces a fundamental challenge that could halt the industry’s breakneck growth. Simply put: the more solar you add to the grid, the less valuable it becomes. The problem is that solar panels generate lots of electricity in the middle of sunny days, frequently more than what’s required, driving down prices—sometimes even into negative territory. Unlike a natural gas plant, solar plant operators can’t easily throttle electricity up and down as needed, or space generation out through the day, night and dark winter. It’s available when it’s available, which is when the sun is shining. And that’s when all the other solar plants are cranking out electricity at maximum levels as well... Wholesale prices are basically the amount that utilities pay power plants for the electricity they deliver to households and businesses. They shift throughout the day and year, edging back up for solar operators during the mornings, afternoons and other times when there isn’t excess supply. But as more solar plants come online, the periods of excess supply that drive down those costs will become more frequent and more pronounced... It could become difficult to convince developers and investors to continue building ever more solar plants if they stand to make less money or even lose it... So far, heavy solar subsidies and the rapidly declining cost of solar power has offset the falling value of solar in California. So long as it gets ever cheaper to build and operate solar power plants, value deflation is less of a problem. But it’s likely to get harder and harder to pull off that trick, as the state’s share of solar generation continues to climb. If the cost declines for building and installing solar panels tapers off, California’s solar deflation could pull ahead in the race against falling costs as soon as 2022 and climb upward from there, the report finds. At that point, wholesale pricing would be below the subsidized costs of solar in California, undermining the pure economic rationale for building more plants... study after study finds that storage and system costs rise sharply once renewables provide the vast majority of electricity on the grid."
Of course lots of communists on Twitter (on the original MIT thread) and a Facebook group I'm in were unwilling and/or unable to understand the problem of intermittency, even though all their objections were addressed in the post. To some, the problem was "capitalism" (what else?) Of course if you nationalise all energy infrastructure you "solve" the problem since the costs are now hidden
The Meme Policeman - Posts | Facebook - "Every time with these “pro-science” outfits, it’s trust the science as long as it agrees with their agenda. This Green New Deal meme completely strawmans the MIT tweet, as it was actually a part of a longer thread and article where scientists make a solid point about the pitfalls of solar... It has nothing to do with “monopolizing the sun,” that’s a total strawman. It has to do with the reality (aka science) of how solar and economics work. People don’t want a bunch of electricity midday and none at night, they want it on demand throughout the day, and solar doesn’t deliver that."
