How to tackle challenges like climate change and inequality at the World Bank
Good luck on poverty now that they're pivoting to climate change. But climate change hysteria keeps people poor, so that's by design
Down with eco-censorship - "Michael Shellenberger, a lifelong climate activist and Time magazine ‘Hero of the Environment’, this week issued an ‘apology’ for 30 years of climate alarmism... Shellenberger’s apology was initially published in Forbes, where he is a regular contributor on energy and environmental matters. But on the same day, Forbes censored the article without explanation."
Environmentalism: a racist ideology - "In the 1970s, Ehrlich and colleagues proposed a formula known as IPAT, stating that Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. In other words, they believe that policymakers have three levers for combating environmental problems: reducing population and / or affluence and / or technology. Today’s greens have not transcended this rubric. ‘High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low’, argues Monbiot: ‘Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people.’ Poor people do not consume so much, you see. Science! If it is racist to tell black people not to breed, it is surely racist to tell black people they cannot be wealthy. Rejection of population control might well sound principled, but it is not in itself a rejection of the neo-Malthusian formulation. The IPAT, to its believers, is an expression of fundamental relationships, not a menu – greens who adhere to any part of it can in reality no more pick and choose than a Catholic can worship the Father and the Son but not the Holy Spirit. Monbiot may not wish to slow population growth. But he does wish to make us all live in ecological austerity. We are talking here about what greens claim are the systems and structures of society. They claim that the system which produces climate change is racist. But what is revealed by a closer look at society’s tangible structures and systems is that it is environmentalism – not environmental degradation – that has been imposed on the poor. Green NGOs run riot in the developing world. Many, such as the World Wildlife Fund, are implicated in the murder, torture, rape and violent eviction of the world’s poorest people. Where is Monbiot’s condemnation of the WWF? Greens do not even consider the possibility of these wretched souls of the developing world one day having their own shopping malls, domestic appliances, SUVs or intercontinental holidays. In ruling out the possibility of the poor becoming wealthy, environmentalism rules out the poor becoming a political force who might be able to speak for themselves. Some climate activists have rebranded climate change as ‘climate justice’, in an attempt to marshall the lives of the world’s poor in their mission. ‘We can change our lifestyles, we can move’, says one self-styled ‘climate communicator’. But the poor cannot, of course: ‘Within countries and between continents, it’s people of colour and it’s indigenous people that bear the brunt of environmental destruction’, he adds. But life in close dependence on ‘nature’ – poverty, to give it its real name – has always been precarious. Indeed, it is not climate change that is the real worry here – it’s poverty. Economic participation and wealth are what allow people to weather what nature might throw at them. And it is this wealth which greens are determined to deny to the world’s poor... Despite green attempts to keep people in their places, there are far fewer people now living on the edges of global society than before. Contrary to Greta, Ehrlich and Monbiot’s understanding, diseases of poverty are on their way to being eliminated... One problem we face is that so many ‘development’ agencies are dominated by environmentalist anti-development thinking. The boast of the World Bank’s ‘sustainability’ agenda, for example, is epitomised by this video, in which a family in Tanzania is ‘liberated’ from the necessity of buying or collecting firewood for cooking. Instead, wife, mother and housekeeper, Judith, must collect animal shit to put into a vat, which then produces gas the family can use for cooking. It’s not even shit generated by an industrial process. It’s shit from someone’s backyard. If this strikes you as an improvement, and as a mark of success by a global political institution in abolishing poverty, you need to ‘check your privilege’... Meanwhile, the World Bank and other global political and financial institutions, on the instructions of the United Nations, green billionaires and their pet NGOs, have withdrawn financial support for fossil-fuel-fired power stations for developing economies. Energy infrastructure, which has in recent decades proved essential to the rapid development seen in China and India, is being explicitly denied to the people who need it most. Their desire for a better life is not ‘sustainable’, you see. And yet it is micro-aggressions, not macroeconomics, which trouble today’s anti-racist radicals. For all the talk of ‘systems’ and ‘structures’, it is ‘symbols’ which preoccupy them. As activists tear down statues of history’s racists, it is the present that they ignore."
Climate protesters around the world are calling for an end to fossils fuels as Earth heats up - "In one strike in Quezon City in the Philippines, activists lay in front of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in protest, and held signs demanding fossil fuels — from coal to natural gas — be phased out. Outside the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources office in Jakarta, Indonesia, protesters held signs calling for end to dirty fuels and greenwashing as police officers looked on."
So much for Asia being immune to liberal virtue signalling
This ban on petrol and diesel cars makes no sense - "Perhaps the most likely outcome of banning sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles is that demand for second-hand vehicles will go up. We could end up like Cubans, nursing venerable old cars for years, way beyond their intended lifespans. All this to satisfy just one element of the drive to get to Net Zero. (Never mind replacing all gas boilers and all the other policies already mooted.) It will take a Herculean effort to transform transport and energy supply like this by 2050, especially with an important crunch point in just 15 years. Enormous sums of money will be spent, along with all that organisational and intellectual effort, just to make our lives about the same as they are now, just low-carbon. Ministers can’t even put a figure on how much this will all cost or if it is feasible. No wonder the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders called the policy ‘a date without a plan’. And all this from a government that still can’t implement something as comparatively easy as Universal Credit – the Tories’ flagship welfare policy that was supposed to be rolled out by 2017. HS2 and the third Heathrow runway are also struggling to get off the ground. Why should we trust that the same people can revolutionise the transport network? I will always be the first to celebrate ambitious new infrastructure and technological optimism. But the ban on petrol and diesel cars seems quixotic and pointless. When electric vehicles are finally better than petrol or diesel – as hopefully they will be soon – drivers will vote with their feet and switch. When people are ready to pay for charging points, there will be money to invest in new infrastructure. Until then, this is a horribly expensive and needless policy."
EVs cause twice the road damage of petrol vehicles, study reveals - "Electric vehicles (EVs) cause twice as much stress on roads compared to petrol vehicles, potentially worsening the pothole crisis in the UK, according to a study."
Those who hate SUVs and pickup trucks want to ban them because they're heavier so they damage roads and are more lethal in accidents. So...
GUNTER: Governments crazy for electric vehicles, but at what cost? - "I spoke with one of the largest auto dealers in the country last week. His customers just don’t want EVs, so he has taken to parking his unsold electric pickups around the boundaries of his lot to discourage thieves from going after the catalytic converters in the ICEs parked in the middle... It could be, though, that rich consumers who can afford an EV as a second or third vehicle for puttering around town, may have bought as many EVs as they want. Now carmakers are finding it hard to attract middle-class buyers. Here’s another little barrier to keep in mind. We looked at having the electrical panel in our home upgraded to handle a fast charger should we ever have to succumb to the federal mandate that only EVs may be sold as of 2035. Far from the $800 to $1,200 the federal Liberals claim it will cost homeowners, we were quoted $17,000. For that, we couldn’t have a fast charger, either, just an overnight charger. And even upgraded our wiring (which is typical for most Canadian homes) wouldn’t be enough to handle both a car charger and the air conditioning, so on hot summer nights we’d have to choose one or the other... The PBO says the federal and Ontario governments have promised the two automakers a total of $28.2 billion in subsidies. And that’s on top of the subsidies these governments are offering consumers to buy EVs and the money governments have promised to help homeowners install charging stations at home... “The break-even timeline for the $28.2 billion in production subsidies … is estimated to be 20 years, significantly longer than the governments’ estimate of a payback within five years.”... that will only happen if EVs sales are as high as the Trudeau government projects, which won’t happen either."
Auto Execs Are Coming Clean: EVs Aren't Working - "With signs of growing inventory and slowing sales, auto industry executives admitted this week that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term. Several C-Suite leaders at some of the biggest carmakers voiced fresh unease about the electric car market's growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk. Among those hand-wringing is GM's Mary Barra, historically one of the automotive industry's most bullish CEOs on the future of electric vehicles. GM has been an early-mover in the electric car market, selling the Chevrolet Bolt for seven years and making bold claims about a fully electric future for the company long before its competitors got on board... the next wave of buyers focus on cost, infrastructure challenges, and lifestyle barriers to adopting."
Toyota Chairman Says People Are Finally Seeing the Reality About EVs - WSJ - "“People are finally seeing reality,” Toyoda said Wednesday, speaking in his capacity as the head of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association... “There are many ways to climb the mountain that is achieving carbon neutrality,” Toyoda told a small group of reporters at the Japan Mobility Show, formerly the Tokyo Motor Show, which is opening this week for the first time in four years. From Tesla to Ford Motor , automakers in recent months have been issuing warnings about a sudden slowdown in consumer demand for EVs, which are generally more expensive than traditional gasoline-powered cars and need to be recharged regularly, posing challenges for some drivers. Higher interest rates are making them more unaffordable for many buyers, and despite increasing discounts on plug-in models, unsold inventory is starting to stack up at dealerships. The pullback in buyer interest is a worrisome sign for an industry that is sinking billions of dollars in new factories and battery-making facilities and is facing tougher regulations on tailpipe emissions globally... Japanese automakers, most prominently Toyota, have been more vocal than their Western peers about the challenges EVs face in the near term, including high costs, resource crunches and limited charging infrastructure."
Meme - "Buttigieg: Families who buy electric vehicles "never have to worry about gas prices again""
"Pennsylvania residents could see electricity prices rise as much as 50 percent this winter"
Area twice size of UK needed to feed world's pets - "An area double the size of the UK is used to produce dry pet food for cats and dogs each year, a study shows. Analysis of the carbon footprint of pet food production also revealed that the industry emits more greenhouse gasses each year than countries such as Mozambique and the Philippines. The University-led project is the first to assess the global environmental impact of pet food production."
Time to ban pet ownership!
Ottawa should learn from energy pain in California and Texas - "The transition away from traditional energy sources to renewables in both of these massive states, however, has coincided with a marked deterioration in their electric systems. The number of interruptions in California’s power supply increased from 12 reported failures in 2012 to 42 in 2021. Texas went from 12 reported failures to 91 during the same time period. California narrowly avoided massive blackouts this past summer and calls for energy conservation are becoming more common in Texas. Why are Texas and California experiencing power failures? Simply put, greater reliance on “intermittent” power sources such as wind and solar require adequate back-up from other sources of energy including natural gas. Why? Because the wind does not always blow enough to generate wind power and the sun does not always shine enough to animate solar panels. The problem is that many states, including California and Texas, have not invested sufficiently in these back-up sources of power, reducing the reliability of energy. In 2021, the Texas winter was unusually cold and fuelled a surge in electricity demand to heat homes and businesses. But wind turbines were frozen, halving the wind-energy generation and leaving the state with insufficient power to meet electricity demand. Similarly, in the unusually hot summer of 2022 when many Texans demanded electricity for air conditioning, wind power declined to just 2 per cent of its capacity due to the lack of wind. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas—which operates Texas's electrical grid—recently called for more conservation as an unexpectedly cloudy weather period blocked direct sunlight from solar panels, reducing their capacity to produce power. In other words, renewable energy is susceptible to fluctuating weather patterns and is therefore not always available. At the same time, Texas and California have slowed the growth of conventional energy such as gas-fired plants and in some cases actually scuttled capacity altogether. In Texas, natural gas production slowed from an average growth of 9.1 per cent between 2017 and 2020 to 5.7 per cent in 2021, mainly due to a lack of infrastructure in the Permian Basin, a major oil and natural gas producing part of the region. Moreover, a lack of new investment in additional transmission lines and related infrastructure prevents Texas from importing electricity from other states or even Canada when needed. Similarly, in recent years the state government in California has rejected a record number of permits for fracking, decreasing the production of natural gas from 236 billion cubic feet in 2015—the year California first allowed fracking—to 140 billion cubic feet in 2021, a reduced production of 40.6 per cent. California also shut down the San Onofre nuclear power plant and plans to shutter the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and other natural gas plants that power the electric grid, which will result in more frequent power outages in the state in coming years."
Clearly they need even more renewables
Meme - "This wind powered cargo ship is set to change the way we ship the goods across oceans. The model is very practical and is looking at a possible launch in 2024."
"Wind powered ships!? What a time to be alive!"
"we really are in the future"
Wind Power Write-Downs Cast Shadow Over Industry Outlook
Weird. Everyone knows that renewables are the future and they're now the cheapest form of power. It must be the evil fossil fuel lobby at work!
Facebook - "Hilarious: New Republic wants us to spend it all on climate Apparently, villainous to ask about price or question if climate policies smart because then consensus breaks down"
"Asking 'but how will you pay for it?'" makes you a bad person
The Lockdown’s Lessons for Climate Activism - WSJ - "It’s an unprecedented and impressive drop in emissions—by far the biggest year-to-year reduction since World War II. Unfortunately, it will have almost no discernible impact on climate change. Glen Peters, the research director at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway, estimates that by 2100, this year’s enormous reduction will bring down global temperatures by less than one five-hundredth of a degree Fahrenheit. This is because, of course, the reduction will only last for this year and has come at immense economic and human costs... As this unexpected and painful experiment with radical emission cuts suggests, the popular idea that changing our patterns of consumption will have a meaningful effect on climate change is not realistic. People still have to eat, to heat and to travel, and the familiar pleasures that so many in the West enjoy remain aspirations for the billions of people who make do with much less. Sadly, the vast majority of the actions that individuals can take in the service of reducing emissions—and certainly all of those that are achievable without entirely disrupting everyday life—make little practical difference. That’s true even if all of us do them. The U.K.’s former chief climate scientist, the late David MacKay, once wrote of carbon-cutting efforts: “Don’t be distracted by the myth that ‘every little bit helps.’ If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.” Why is that the case? In the first place, the cuts are typically small—from, say, unplugging a phone charger or turning off the lights. And when they are more significant, they save us money, producing what behavioral economists call the “rebound effect”: When we save some cash by being more energy efficient, we spend the savings elsewhere, often in ways that lead to other emissions. The most comprehensive study on this phenomenon was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production in 2018. Researchers looked at a large number of different ways for individuals to cut emissions in Norway. They estimated not only the initial reduction in emissions but also how emissions would increase because of spending the saved money on other things. Cutting food waste, for instance, lowers emissions but also reduces our grocery bill. The researchers found that the extra money would likely be spent on other goods and services whose carbon footprint canceled out the entire emissions reduction. Carpooling made more of a difference, with the cost savings only leading to 32% of the emissions reduction being lost. Sometimes, however, the rebound effect leaves us worse off overall. Someone who walks instead of taking the train, which doesn’t emit much carbon dioxide, saves a lot of money and uses it on other more carbon-intensive things. Across a wide range of activities, the study estimated that 59% of the emissions savings from “virtuous” behavior are lost to the rebound effect. Another problem with restricting our behavior for environmental reasons is that, as in many areas of life, when we do something “good,” we allow ourselves to do something “bad” as a reward. This tendency is known as “moral licensing.” A 2015 study published in the journal Social Influence found that people who have just donated to an environmental charity were less likely to behave in environmentally friendly ways afterward, likely because they felt they had now “done their bit.” A study presented to the Annual Conference of the Agricultural Economics Society in 2012 analyzed British shopping behavior and found that the more consumers purchase energy-saving lightbulbs, use eco-bags or reuse their own bags, the more likely their weekly shopping is to contain red meat and bottled water, whose carbon footprints are sizable... Achieving global “net zero” emissions in three decades, as a growing number of activists and politicians advocate, would require the equivalent of a series of ongoing and ever-tightening lockdowns until 2050... William Nordhaus of Yale, who in 2018 was awarded the first Nobel Prize for work in climate economics, has tabulated all of the estimates of climate-related economic damages from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and peer-reviewed studies to determine the total impact of different levels of global temperature increases. He found that, by 2050, the net negative impact of unmitigated climate change—that is, with current emissions trends unabated—is equivalent to losing about 1% of global GDP every year. By 2100 the loss will be about 4% of global GDP a year. For comparison, what would it cost to reach net-zero by 2050, through cutting emissions and mandating new energy sources? So far, only one country, New Zealand, has commissioned an independent estimate. It turns out the optimistic cost is a whopping 16% of GDP each year by 2050. That projected figure exceeds what New Zealand spends today on social security, welfare, health, education, police, courts, defense, environment and every other part of government combined. As this simple comparison suggests, suffering a 16% loss of GDP to reduce a problem estimated to cost 1% or even 4% of GDP is a bad way to help. That is especially true for the many parts of the world that are still in the early stages of economic development and desperately need growth to improve the lives of their impoverished populations... Currently the U.S. and other rich countries spend very little on green innovation and waste trillions on inefficient feel-good policies like boosting this or that favored behavior or technology, from electric cars and solar panels to biofuels."
Climate change hysteria is about moral purity and virtue signalling, not making infirmed choices
The Left now has a demonic new aim: to make poor people poorer - "We are living through the most startling political realignment in more than 100 years. Never since the advent of modern socialism in the early 20th century has the Left openly advocated making ordinary people poorer, thereby leaving those on the Right to defend the spread of mass prosperity. The debate (if this tendentious chorus of unanimity can be called a debate) on net zero has entirely shifted the ground on which modern political discourse has been based. This role-reversal is especially clear in the features that were once most characteristic of Left-wing and Right-wing allegiance: it is the radical young who now tend to be most adamant that the freedoms and comforts that come with widespread disposable wealth should be prohibited, while the traditionally conservative older generation is left to fight for what used to be the Left-liberal doctrine that higher income and the independence it brings should be spread as widely as possible. Where organised protest movements in the past have been inspired by the idea that the masses were too poor, now they promote the idea that most ordinary people are too rich. Such a strange reversal of political poles might just have been a bizarre, rather perverse, fashion if it had been confined to the more extreme, exhibitionistic ends of the divide. But in fact the transformation of the Left into a movement which energetically seeks to make ordinary people poorer, colder, less well fed and less mobile inevitably has ramifications across the entire democratic spectrum. This is because the fundamental tenets of Left-liberal belief – that the state should be responsible for equality, wealth distribution and social welfare – are now universally accepted in advanced democracies... Until very recently, there was no respectable voice calling for an end to the spread of prosperity to the developing world, as well as in the advanced nations. Now it is not just the juvenile Left making this extraordinary demand. Politicians of the centre-Right who had adopted pretty much wholesale the doctrine of social justice – which is to say, everybody having an equal chance for economic self-determination and a materially comfortable life – find themselves having to justify penalising ordinary people for heating their homes or for travelling beyond their own neighbourhoods. The consequences for those populations in the short term are carefully elided with fuzzy rhetoric and unsustainable government subsidy. Somehow a vague dream world is created in which the immediate deprivations become just a transitory stage leading to a utopian paradise in which all these apparently insoluble problems will be resolved. Even if this is feasible – the ultimate carbon-free heaven in which energy is supplied without sin – it is a very long way away. Nobody is venturing any figures for what the cost – in misery, financial privation, hypothermia, lack of mobility and choice – is going to be to those who will endure the first experimental stages. In truth, most of the radical permanent solutions are in their infancy and many of them involve practices that the Left would once have regarded as unacceptable like the exploitative mining of minerals in developing countries. Finding practical policies for mitigating the effects of climate change is the rational way forward, but that scarcely satisfies the demonic crisis demands which most Western political establishments have embraced."
