Farmers Blockade EU Capital to Fight Fertiliser Restrictions - "Green policy obsessed European leaders are ignoring the implications of Sri Lanka’s organic farming food crisis... EU bureaucracies claim they do not support reducing livestock headcount, but I don’t believe them. Reduced livestock headcount would be an inevitable consequence of pursuing their stated goal of reduced fertiliser use. Intensive farming, including livestock farming, needs lots of fertiliser... European food inflation is already running at 16-18%, because of rising energy and fertiliser prices, and also likely because European farmers have to spend time attending protests against European attempts to ruin their businesses, instead of tending their farms and growing food... Declaring war on European farmers, at a time when food prices are rising out of control, because of climate targets and concerns about wilderness protection, is a recipe for disaster. The determination of Europe’s out of touch leaders to cling to their climate and wilderness protection goals, no matter what the consequences to the lives of ordinary European people, is undermining European food security."
When I Covered Climate Change for Reuters I Thought CO2 Was Certainly to Blame for Rising Temperatures. I Was Wrong - "If you wonder why much of the mainstream media seem united in accepting that the world will soon die unless humans don hair shirts, freeze in winter and walk instead of driving, you need to know about websites like Covering Climate Now (CCN). Reuters and some of the biggest names in the news like Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, CBS News, and ABC News have signed up to support CCN, which brags that it is an unbiased seeker after the truth. But this claim won’t last long if you peer behind the façade. CCN may claim to be fair and balanced, but it not only won’t tolerate criticism, it brandishes the unethical ‘denier’ weapon with its nasty holocaust denier echoes. This seeks to demonise those who disagree with it by savaging personalities and denying a hearing, rather than using debate to establish its case. CCN advises journalists to routinely add to stories about bad weather and flooding to suggest climate change is making these events more intense. This is not an established fact, as a simple routine check would show... The idea of a ‘climate crisis’ is not widely accepted, but partisans shout about it. It is a very vague claim and hard to define or prove. By Reuters standards shouldn’t this include a balancing view? Certainly, many people believe that there is such a crisis, but lots of people don’t. The idea climate change threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people worldwide is an assertion, not a fact. The involvement of Reuters in CCN seems to me to be in direct contradiction to three of its 10 Hallmarks of Reuters Journalism – Hold Accuracy Sacrosanct, Seek Fair Comment, Strive For Balance and Freedom From Bias... My Reuters credentials meant that I had easy access to the world’s finest climate scientists. To my amazement, none of these would say categorically that the link between CO2 and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact. Some said human production of CO2 was a probable cause, others that it might make some contribution; some said CO2 had no role at all. Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why. The sun’s radiation, which changes over time, was a favoured culprit. My reporting reflected the wide range of views, with Reuters typical “on the one hand this, on the other, that” style. But even then, the mainstream media seem to have run out of the energy required, and often lazily went along with the BBC’s faulty, opinionated thesis. It was too much trouble to make the point that the BBC’s conclusion was challenged by many impressive scientists. Fast forward 20 years and firm proof CO2 was warming the climate still hasn’t been established, but politics has taken over"
Eric Adams & Carbon Footprint: Yes, They’re Coming for Your Burgers - "“All food is not created equal,” New York City mayor Eric Adams inscrutably intoned this week. “The vast majority of food that is contributing to our emission crisis lies in meat and dairy products.” This indictment accompanied the mayor’s efforts to extirpate animal proteins from city-run facilities, where “meat is increasingly missing from the menu”... A recent essay in the New Republic by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg presents a perfect illustration of the backward causality typical of activists who insist that the only way to arrest catastrophic climate change is to limit the public’s protein intake but also insist that it’s madness to believe anyone wants to limit your protein intake... Your steak has been turned into a “culture-war issue” by the people who notice and, most importantly, resent this effort to impose new cultural standards on the public from above. The prosecutors of the culture war are the conservatives... Activists for whom meat consumption represents an assault on the Eden into which we were conceived often insist that the logical conclusions of their theology are fantastical inventions of their opponents... The Green New Deal’s explicit articulation of the problem posed by meat production and its implicit remedies for your heedless consumption of animal flesh wasn’t groundbreaking. It drew from a decade of activism dressed up as scientific inquiry. In 2018, the U.S. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insisted that “targeting the demand for meat and other livestock products” so as to reduce the amount of meat consumed in Western nations by 30 percent was a crucial environmentalist goal. Writing in the journal Nature, Oxford researcher Marco Springmann claimed that the world must give up 75 percent of its beef, 90 percent of its pork, and at least half the eggs it consumes if a global catastrophe is to be averted. “We are facing a growing epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases, and a climate change crisis, both of which are linked to high meat consumption,” Harvard University’s Nutrition Department chair Frank Hu claimed. Even Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg have been in on this game, alleging that Americans who continue to consume meat despite the availability of palatable alternatives are “difficult to distinguish from sadists.” But don’t you dare conclude that those who denounce this menacing and unnecessary pastime, which makes you into a burden on your neighbors and is destroying the planet for us all, want to curb your consumption habits. That would make you the crazy one... We’re confronted with the curious condition in which these activists evince a religious conviction in the righteousness of their crusade against meat, but those convictions dissolve into cowardice whenever their advocacy makes contact with a skeptical audience. Suddenly, these stalwart anti-meat crusaders transform into satirists, ruthlessly mocking those whose only offense is to notice their advocacy and evaluate it critically. In one narrow sense, advocates of a less filling future are correct to mock their critics for taking them seriously. They’re not serious people"
Literally "this is not happening, and it's good that it is"
Chuang Shyue Chou | Facebook - "Solar power panels produces DC current. And when it catches fire, it is extremely hard to put out because the solar power panels cannot be switched off. There are a few ways of containing the fire. The first is night. Wait for nightfall. As long as there is light, electricity will be generated. The second way is to cover the solar panels which is rather hard if you have a large roof full of them! The third way is through an Australian invention, the PVStop liquid which can be sprayed by host, drone, etc. The talk was given by the boss of PVStop. The local fire service (SCDF) has bought the PVStop fluid. Another thing to note is that solar panel fires produces extremely toxic particles which should be of no surprise. Here is a 2015 fire of an Apple datacentre with solar panels where the roof collapsed... There is a fourth way which I had forgotten, which is for the fire to burn the panel itself to the extent that very little electricity is produced!"
Solar panel fire season is all year round and it’s getting more intense in Australia - "A recent report rated Australia as one of the cheapest per kilowatt for solar PV, but it questioned our safety standards. Most solar systems sold in Australia use DC voltages that can pose a serious fire risk."
Half the World Faces Starvation Under Net Zero Policies, Say Two Top Climate Scientists - "Billions of people around the world face starvation if Net Zero policies ban the production of nitrogen fertiliser derived from fossil fuels. This is the stark warning from two top American scientists who say that eliminating fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides “will result in about half the world’s population not having enough food to eat”. They add that eliminating Net Zero fertiliser will create “worldwide starvation”. In a wide-ranging paper titled ‘Challenging ‘Net Zero’ with Science‘, Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen of Princeton and MIT respectively, along with geologist Gregory Wrightstone, state that Net Zero – the global movement to eliminate fossil fuels and its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases – to be “scientifically invalid and a threat to the lives of billions of people”. The battle over nitrogen fertiliser is being hard fought by green activists who argue for massive reductions in its use and more organic methods to be mandated. This can extend to fanaticism, as marked by the Guardian’s George Monbiot who argues for an end to dependence on farming. The ground for less choice and food is also being prepared in academia. Recently, three barking academics operating through the University of Leeds suggested World War II rationing could be an effective way to reduce carbon emissions. Also harking back to the days of spam and when spivs controlled parts of the supply chain was the actress Joanna Lumley, who has suggested a return to a points distribution system and a form of wartime rationing... any present or future Government actions that omit analysis of the disastrous consequences of reducing fossil fuels and CO2 to Net Zero for low income people, people worldwide, future generations and the United States, “is fatally flawed science and appalling government policy”. Happer and Lindzen state that they are career physicists who have specialised in radiation physics and dynamic heat transfer for decades. These are said to be integral to atmospheric climate science. In their opinion, all Net Zero regulations are scientifically invalid. In summary they state the science is based on fabricated data that omit figures that contradict their conclusions, for example, on extreme weather. In addition, climate models “do not work”, while IPCC findings are “government opinions, not science”. Furthermore the “extraordinary” social benefits of CO2 and fossil fuels are omitted, and any science that demonstrates there is no catastrophic risk of global warming is ignored. Numerous examples are supplied. The authors quote Professor Steven Koonin, a former Under-Secretary of Science for President Obama, as noting in his recent book Unsettled, that, “observations extending back over a century indicate that most types of extreme weather events don’t show any significant change”. Koonin is said to show “multiple egregious examples” of both fabricating data and omitting contradictory data on extreme weather in the U.S. Government Fourth Climate Science Special Report (CSSR) of 2017. The report claims that there were marked changes in temperature extremes across the U.S. The number of high temperature records set in the past two decades “far exceeds” the number of low temperature records, it claims... Koonin summaries the evidence on extreme temperatures by noting: “The annual number of high temperature records set shows no significant trend over the past century, nor over the past 40 years”. Happer and Lindzen observe a downward trend in high temperatures over nearly 100 years, while CO2 emissions have risen, and “respectfully suggest” that every agency analysing heat waves and high temperatures “has the scientific obligation to apply the scientific method to contradictory facts and avoid fabricating facts”. Koonin notes that the CSSR graph with its alarming heading is a “textbook example of fabricating data”. The CSSR chart does not provide temperature data but the “unusual ratio” of record highs to lows. It is “shockingly misleading”, he says. These things matter, concludes Koonin. The false notion of more frequent U.S. high temperatures is likely to “pollute” subsequent reports. It should also matter to those who proclaim the “unimpeachable authority of assessment reports”, including the media, which give voice to such misleading conclusions... Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary for Global Communications at the United Nations, told a World Economic Forum ‘disinformation’ seminar that “we own the science” around climate change. We think the world should know it, she continued, so we partnered with Google to ensure only UN results appear at the top. Happer and Lindzen quote the late Nobel physics laureate Richard Feynman who said: “No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles.” They add: “The legitimacy of scientific content is determined by the scientific method. None of the IPCC SPMs, models, scenarios and other findings asserting that dangerous climate warming is caused by CO2, greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel is valid science; they are merely the opinions of IPCC governments.”"
MP says Earth is 'overpopulated' and rich should be 'abolished' - "Claudia Webbe, who currently represents Leicester East and previously served as a cabinet member for energy, environment and transport, responded to the report on Twitter. She tweeted: ‘Earth is overpopulated; there are too many rich people. To solve the climate crisis; the rich must be abolished.'... Many have since remarked that Webbe is ‘calling for the abolishment of herself’ as she earns £81,000 a year plus expenses working as an MP. One person responded: ‘When are you redistributing your wealth? Your £80,000-a year-salary plus expenses firmly puts you in the top one per cent.’ Another Twitter user also jabbed: ‘I trust you will refuse your next pay raise?’ Webbe is currently suspended from the Labour Party as she has been accused of harassing a woman for more than two years. She denies the allegations and is set to face trial later this year. She was also met with criticism less than 10 days ago, when she tweeted a map of the Partition of Africa and said it had been ‘hidden from you all your life’. Many pointed out that the map is in most secondary school history textbooks... However, others said the MP was commenting on how the topic of colonisation in Africa is taught in schools. Ex-Labour Party member from York, Randall Northam, said: 'I was taught about that in the 50s. What I wasn’t taught was how freedom movements were brutally suppressed and how we ripped off the countries we colonised.’ Webbe was found guilty of breaching the MP’s code of conduct in February, because she continued to claim a councillor’s allowance, of £876.56-a-month, without declaring it. She has apologised for the breach and said she had failed to declare the money because of an overloaded workload during the coronavirus pandemic."
Those who obsess about how colonialism isn't taught in schools like to reference decades-old experience. They don't realise how detached from reality they are
Canada not scaling scale back on Chinese steel in new navy ships - "Canada-Chinese relations have been rocky for several years. In October 2022, Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre told MPs that China considered itself to be at war with the West and that Canada must rise to meet the challenge. But that hasn’t changed efforts to source equipment and steel from China for the Canadian navy and Canadian Coast Guard’s new Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships, or AOPS... Canadian producers continue to be undercut by countries with a history of unfair trade practices, Cobden said. In 2022 alone, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of steel came from countries with active anti-dumping cases against them. In addition, Canadian steel producers are actively trying to reduce climate emissions as well as facing a carbon tax as part of government efforts to fight climate change, but offshore steel producers don’t face the same rules and surcharges. As a result, domestic firms are losing market share to high carbon, offshore steel at an unprecedented rate, Cobden said. “Our view is that the government needs to ensure they are purchasing green steel. (Canadian firms) have some of the greenest steel.”"
Germany sinks into recession – as UK avoids one - "Soaring energy prices pushed Germany into recession this winter, fresh data shows, despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz ruling out the possibility earlier this year... A consistent driver of the contraction was the country’s key manufacturing sector, where a deepening downturn is casting doubt on the rebound many anticipate for the coming quarters."
Sadly, they will just double down on renewables and claim "everyone" "knows" that it's cheaper
Medicine Hat pulls plug on money-losing $13M solar power project - "The southern Alberta city of Medicine Hat is pulling the plug on a $13-million concentrated solar power facility after operating it for about five years. The project’s goal was to test whether the technology was a feasible way to employ the sun’s heat to replace some of the natural gas used to make steam at the city-owned power plant, said Coun. Phil Turnbull, chairman of the city’s utility committee. The answer, unfortunately, was no, as the project’s small and unreliable contribution to the community’s power needs didn’t justify the cost of maintaining its rows of mirrors and pipes through snowy winters and dusty summer days"
Against climate hypocrisy: why the IPCC needs its own net-zero target - "In April, I flew to Bangkok for the final meeting of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Cycle (AR6). My return flight to Stockholm emitted more carbon than any one person in the lowest-emitting 50% of the global population contributes in an entire year... The IPCC should aggressively limit its own emissions instead of requiring in-person sessions and the attendant long-haul flights. Although meetings contribute only a tiny fraction of total global emissions, improving accountability would have an outsized impact on the IPCC’s effectiveness, and would be a case study for robust, internationally coordinated mitigation. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that many IPCC meetings can be conducted fully remotely, and most climate researchers are in favour of virtual elements in conferences. This is in line with trends in the wider climate-science community: the World Climate Research Programme’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which helps to coordinate climate models, has proposed that it should lead by example and transition to net-zero emissions as fast as possible. But similar statements from the IPCC are notably absent. This irony does not go unnoticed across the political spectrum. Conservatives point to individual researchers’ emissions to justify lack of urgency or to validate their view that institutional decarbonization is impossible; progressives see a lack of effective action and a growing philosophical barrier between science and activism. Researchers’ individual actions resonate with the public: in one US study, support for carbon taxation increased by up to 60% when respondents were told that the researchers had made efforts to reduce their carbon footprints (S. Z. Attari et al. Clim. Change 154, 529–545; 2019). The in-person model also acts as a demographic and social filter. The need to spend extended time away from home can lead to gender bias: a survey of academic faculty members indicated that mothers are more than twice as likely as fathers to experience parenting stress as a result of attending conferences (see go.nature.com/3o9ds). In-person meetings also create barriers owing to difficulties obtaining visas. And requiring travel risks under-representing the generation that will experience the most severe climate impacts, because non-fliers, a growing fraction of scientists, are more likely to be younger... By taking aggressive action to reduce emissions during the next assessment cycle (which ends in 2030), the IPCC could be a test case for a better approach. It could first outline an objective and unbiased process for quantifying current emissions, then define and assess the risks of different pathways for complete decarbonization. The emissions associated with the IPCC process are not trivial, but they are manageable. The challenges mirror those of the wider mitigation problem: assessment of direct and indirect emissions, the need for fairness in the face of robust targets, the reliability of removal methods and the need for international agreement on how to verify them... Even failure to achieve targets would be useful, by highlighting real-world limitations in net-zero policy assumptions, which could then inform wider societal strategy. As the July elections for the next assessment cycle approach, IPCC members should remember that nobody is better placed to demonstrate how to eliminate emissions"
Germany Enters Recession: Europe's Largest Economy Is Breaking Down - Bloomberg - "Decades of flawed energy policy, the demise of combustion-engine cars and a sluggish transition to new technologies are converging to pose the most fundamental threat to the nation’s prosperity since reunification. But unlike in 1990, the political class lacks the leadership to tackle structural issues gnawing at the heart of the country’s competitiveness... While Berlin has shown a knack for overcoming crises in the past, the question now is whether it can pursue a sustained strategy. The prospect looks remote. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s make-shift coalition has reverted to petty infighting over everything from debt and spending to heat pumps and speed limits as soon as the risks of energy shortfalls eased. But the warning signals are getting hard to ignore... Germany finds itself ill-suited to sustainably serve the energy needs of its industrial base; overly dependent on old-school engineering; and lacking the political and commercial agility to pivot to faster-growing sectors. The array of structural challenges points to a cold awakening for the center of European power, which has become accustomed to uninterrupted affluence... The most pressing issue for Germany is getting its energy transition on track. Affordable power is a key precondition for industrial competitiveness, and even before the end of Russian gas supplies, Germany had some of the highest electricity costs in Europe. Failure to stabilize the situation could transform a trickle of manufacturers heading elsewhere into a stampede. Berlin is responding to concerns by seeking a cap on power prices for some energy-intensive industries like chemicals through 2030 — a plan that could cost taxpayers as much as €30 billion ($32 billion). But that would be a temporary patch, and shows Germany’s desperate situation in terms of supply. After shutting its last nuclear reactors this spring and pushing to phase out coal as soon as 2030, the country installed around 10 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity last year — half the pace it needs to hit climate targets. Scholz’s administration aims to hook up roughly 625 million solar panels and 19,000 wind turbines by 2030, but promises to accelerate the rollout to months from years have yet to bear fruit. Meanwhile, demand is expected to soar due to the electrification of everything from heating and transportation to steelmaking and heavy industry... The bitter reality is that resources for generating that much clean power are limited in Germany by its relatively small coastline and lack of sun. In response, the country is looking to build a vast infrastructure to import hydrogen from the likes of Australia, Canada and Saudi Arabia — banking on technology that hasn’t been tested at this scale. At the same time, Germany will need to speed the construction of high-voltage grids linking wind farms off the coasts in the north to power-hungry factories and cities further south. And there’s little in the way of storage to ensure the country can withstand disruptions... In a recent report, the OECD put the scale of the challenges in stark terms: “No major industrialized economy has ever had the very basis of its competitiveness and resilience so systematically challenged by changing social, environmental and regulatory pressures.”"
They will just double down and say this proves they need even more renewables since everyone "knows" that renewables are cheaper (because they only look at the cost per unit of installed capacity rather than system costs)
Meme - Dr Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman: "Someday, people will look back on this time and wonder why the fuck we didn't rise up against all these sociopathic billionaires and put them in prison or worse, and then get on with solving all the pressing problems we need to solve"
Many climate change activists are actually anti-capitalists whose underlying motivation isn't really combatting climate change
Benny Johnson on Twitter - "Climate cultists thought they had sabotaged another beautiful event — then the cameraman had his revenge. Wait for it 🎥 💥"
Berlin university canteens cut meat from menus to curb climate change - "Canteens at Berlin's universities will offer mainly vegan and vegetarian meals from next term as part of a push to make menus more climate-friendly. Students will be able to order meals from menus that are 68% vegan, 28% vegetarian and just 4% meat and fish from the start of October. On Mondays, there will be no meat dishes available at all, as canteens swap currywurst for salads... Meat is very common in many traditional German dishes, such as schnitzels, bratwurst and pork knuckles. However scientists say carbon emissions produced by the meat industry are contributing to climate change... Daniela Kummle of Studierendenwerk, a student support group, told the BBC there was an increasing demand for more meat-free dishes at their canteens. Ms Kummle cited the results of a 2019 student survey, which found that 14% of Berlin students said they were vegan, and a further 33% vegetarian."
Choice is bad. People must be forced. Meanwhile, those who can afford to not eat at the canteens...
If there were really increasing demand, why not let people choose what they want?
Jane Fonda blames 'white men,' 'racism' for climate change - "Jane Fonda issued a stark warning about climate change on Saturday while placing the blame on white men. “We’ve got about seven, eight years to cut ourselves in half of what we use of fossil fuels, and unfortunately, the people that have the least responsibility for it are hit the hardest — Global South, people on islands, poor people of color,” the “Book Club: The Next Chapter” actress said at the Cannes Film Festival. “It is a tragedy that we have to absolutely stop. We have to arrest and jail those men — they’re all men [behind this].” The two-time Oscar winner added that climate change would not be possible without racism or the patriarchy, in which “white men,” she said, are at the top... The 85-year-old actress has made headlines for her activism since the Vietnam War, when critics branded her “Hanoi Jane” for posing on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun that made it seem like she would shoot down US planes."
When climate change is just the latest excuse to push a liberal agenda (as they admit, when they claim that even if all the measures they are demanding don't work, they will "create a better world for nothing"
Why I’ve come to loathe this cartoon - "Many friends who are part of the sustainability movement love the cartoon ‘but what if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?’. I don’t. Basically, if you think climate denialists shouldn’t lie to get the world they want, and/or if you think we shouldn’t imply we’d lie to get what we want, then you shouldn’t use this cartoon... The cartoon is so widely used that it has its own wikipedia page. Joel Pett created it for USA Today in December of 2009, and says that he regularly gets asked by environmental groups to use it. The concept is simple, as Pett himself says: “I was thinking, you know, ‘It doesn’t matter if global warming were a hoax, if the scientists made it up, we still have to do all that shit.'” it is popular with environmentalists because it encapsulates a view which is dominant in the movement: creating all these green and social outcomes is inevitable, obvious and necessary. Not everyone thinks that or behaves that way. But many do, with the implication that ‘we are right, and everyone else will come round to us when they really think about it.’ But I think the premise of the cartoon — and the beliefs of many environmentalists that it expresses — are flawed in several ways...
Who are we to define what a better world is for everyone else? We think the list on the presentation slide is an obviously ‘better world’ (certainly I do), But other people have other values and preferences. Many people feel like they have had things imposed on them from powerful elites (there’s a reason why the Leave campaign slogan was ‘take back control’). This cartoon says “we environmentalists are happy to act as elites that just impose our version of a better world on you.”
Evidence matters. It is a sense that lefty tree huggers always say the world is ending that undermines people respecting the latest scientific evidence...
Most important: being willing to use a big hoax is an atrocious way to influence society. There is a history of using a Big Lie to manipulate populations, and it is a pretty terrible one. The idea is “the use of a lie so ‘colossal’ that no one would believe that someone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously'” is from…Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf...
the cartoon is saying that environmentalists would be willing to use a Big Lie to get what they want. If you’re happy with using a hoax to change the course of civilisation in the direction you prefer, then, for instance, you can’t criticise Trump for saying the recent US Presidential election was fixed. Or various American industrialists for being Merchants of Doubt on climate science, and so deliberately slowing change to prolong profitable but unsustainable status quo (what Alex Steffen calls ‘predatory delay‘). You might be thinking: but the environmentalists are acting for a better future for everyone, and those industrialists are just protecting themselves. Yes, there are differences of degree. But if you act as if ‘the ends justify the means’, then don’t be surprised if others do too. Other people believe they are acting for a better world, just a different one from yours. That’s what diversity means. If you value diversity — and most sustainability folk claim they do — then that needs to be demonstrated in your end goals and the means to achieve them... We won’t succeed if we feed a spectre of ecofascism."
