Destroyed Solar Panels In Hailstorm Will End Up In Landfills Because Recycling Isn’t Economical - "Even if solar panels aren’t destroyed by weather events, they gradually stop producing much electricity and reach the end of their lives in 20 to 30 years... While renewable energy proponents are pinning their hopes on recycling to deal with this coming deluge of e-waste from dead solar panels, only about 10% of them are recycled, and only a small portion of any single panel provides recoverable minerals. B.F. Randall, who has a background in project development and finance, told Cowboy State Daily that a lot of people are under the impression that recycling a solar panel means you make a new solar panel. “A solar panel has very little mineral content relative to the volume of the panel,” Randall said. “So, it's just not something that can be recycled in that sense.” The polysilicon in solar panels cannot be recycled at all, he said. It takes 3 to 5 tons of polysilicon to produce 1 megawatt worth of solar panels. To make it, they take silicon dioxide and mix it with carbon, which is most often derived from coal. However, it’s possible to use wood or graphite. The mixture is dropped in a furnace at about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, which means it takes large amounts of constant energy to produce the heat needed for the process. For every ton of polysilicon produced, 3-4 tons of silicon tetrachloride, a highly toxic compound, also are produced. As solar panels reach the end of their useful lives, most of that polysilicon will need to be disposed of in landfills. “Polysilicon … can’t ever be recycled back into polysilicon. If it’s fake cycled into sand it would be absolutely toxic,” Randall said. It is possible to recover aluminum and copper from a panel's frame and junction box. The Grist, a publication of a pro-renewable nonprofit, reported that a recycled panel will produce about $3 in recovered aluminum, copper and glass, which after transportation costs will cost between $12 and $25 to get. The same panel tossed into a landfill will cost less than a buck. There is also a small amount of silver to recover from the panel that’s worth less than the cost to recover it. As Randall explains in a Substack article, solar panels contain about 60 grams of silver paste. Each panel only has a tiny amount, but the industry altogether consumes 9% of all silver produced in the world. If that solar paste were refined silver, it would be worth $6 — but it’s not refined. Randall said in an interview that the paste contains contaminants that have diluted that refined silver. “You can’t recover the silver. It doesn’t work that way,” he said. So long as the cost to recover minerals from the solar panels exceeds the value produced, the best way to deal with destroyed or exhausted solar panels is to throw them away, like is done with most wind turbine blades. Some nonprofits are shipping dead panels to developing countries where the weak amount of electricity they produce still has some benefit to people who have no access to other sources of power. The European Union is trying to address the problem by requiring manufacturers to finance end-of-life collection and recycling, which will increase the cost of the panels."
U.S. Is World’s Largest Oil and Natural Gas Producer—Despite Biden’s Energy-Constraining Policies - "It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary the American energy boom has been since its onset in the late 2000s. In less than a decade, the U.S. went from projections of energy shortages to being the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world... The implications of this are very positive for Americans and our friends and allies around the world. Americans’ average total energy costs fell by 5% from 2018 to 2019, and per capita energy costs decreased in every state except California. Thanks to robust domestic energy production, Americans today are more protected when global energy prices go up... U.S. energy providers have also filled the gap for Europe, which has been caught dangerously flat-footed and import-reliant on Russia after years of policy choices to curtail their own energy production... This tremendous level of energy production is happening because it’s being done on private and state lands—and despite the Biden administration’s anti-energy posture. Over the last year, President Joe Biden has directed federal regulatory agencies to implement policies that have severely constrained the energy resources that meet 79% of Americans’ total energy needs and fuel over 90% of transportation in the U.S. In other words, policies that are in direct conflict with the interests and well-being of the American people... The White House has advocated sapping the American economy of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax favors and spending hundreds of billions more on a narrow set of politically preferred, unproven energy technologies that the administration presumes are the solution to global warming. In reality, this isn’t pro-growth innovation policy. It’s not even climate policy. This is old-fashioned political cronyism. As Europe has experienced, such a foolhardy approach comes with incredible financial costs to taxpayers, political vulnerabilities, and deep concerns about the reliability and stability of the energy supply. It’s also not based in reality: Such a command-and-control approach has not worked in the past, and it’s likely not to work in the future. This is especially true given that Biden’s own Energy Information Administration projects no scenario in which global demand for oil and natural gas does not increase through at least 2050. In regions of the world where bad actors like Russia use energy as a weapon, the benefits of American-produced energy extend far beyond the economic gains. Unlike Russia, American energy companies are not a mere extension of the government. They offer more choice through transparent, competitive, and reliable energy resources, markets, and contracts. America’s economic freedom has created this environment and it is one of its greatest selling points."
When you want to make your country and your allies weaker
Were Biden's Claims at COP26 Climate Change Summit Accurate? - "Tubb: The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment of climate science reports no discernible global trends for hurricanes, winter storms, floods, tornadoes, or thunderstorms, while it did report trends in heat waves, heavy precipitation, and some kinds of drought. And as a percent of global gross domestic product, damages from natural disasters have actually declined since 1990. Cost isn’t inconsequential, but at the end of the day, what matters in a disaster is peoples’ lives. Deaths from climate-related disasters have decreased 96% over the last century, which I think has everything to do with widespread economic freedom, growth, and access to energy to help us be more resilient in the age-old battle against natural disaster. In other words, poverty makes us more vulnerable to the whims of climate. Certainly our perception of natural disasters around the world and the human suffering they inflict has increased with a 24/7 news cycle. And we all know that crisis is currency for politicians and the media. Often the goal of statements like the president’s is to alarm people and create urgency for action, as if the time where thinking and debate was over—to use an oversimplified discussion of science as a bludgeon to demand political conformity and a shield for avoiding accountability for the costs of policy choices. I think there’s a lot more debate yet to be had about climate science, the nature and pace of warming, and the modeling and tools we use to understand our incredibly complex climate. But at a minimum, there ought to be robust debate over climate policies. That’s exactly what the left wants to shut down by leveraging urgency.
The Daily Signal: Biden said that the high energy prices we are seeing is a reason to recommit to “clean energy goals,” so we aren’t “overly reliant on one source of power to power our economies and our communities.” Are we seeing high energy prices because we haven’t committed to clean energy?
Tubb: California is an instructive example—no one would accuse California of being lukewarm on aggressive climate policy. The state is banning the sale of gasoline-powered cars and even lawn equipment. I don’t think it’s played out well for them. They have some of the highest gasoline prices in the country. They are the largest importer of electricity in the U.S. and their grid reliability monitor has been firing warning shots for several years now that reliability is strained. According to the Energy Information Administration, between 2018 and 2019, average energy costs fell 5% and Americans’ per capita energy costs decreased—in every state except California. It’s also amazing to me how those arguments are recycled over the years to justify central planning. In the 1970s, the oil crisis was used to justify disastrous government price controls. In the mid-2000s, a projected looming energy supply crisis was used to justify cronyist energy subsidies and central planning policies like the Renewable Fuel Standard—both of which have failed. President Barack Obama told Americans we couldn’t drill our way to lower gasoline prices, and now Biden is telling Americans they shall not—all to justify command and control energy policy. The Biden administration’s climate policy seeks to completely and rapidly transform the energy sector (and with it the American economy) into its own image, and in ways that have huge negative implications for both the size and scope of the federal government in Americans’ lives. I think we’re seeing some of the reverberations now... Ironically, the president has made several calls to oil-producing nations to increase production in the face of increasing energy prices. To adapt an idea from political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. and journalist Robert Bryce, Biden is having to come to terms with the “iron law of energy”—people will do whatever it takes to get the energy they need... we’re so used to having reliable energy that we take it for granted... Biden’s goal will moderate global temperatures by 0.04 Celsius by the end of the century, according to The Heritage Foundation’s modeling, using the assumptions the Environmental Protection Agency and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make about future warming. Special Climate Envoy John Kerry even acknowledges eliminating all U.S. greenhouse emissions will have no meaningful impact on global temperatures. And back in the Obama administration, then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy (who is now the White House national climate adviser orchestrating the administration’s climate policies) could not tell Congress how the Clean Power Plan would impact global temperatures—only that it was “an investment opportunity.” As I see it, it’s not reasonable or laudable to push policies that have real costs to American families and businesses and further erode the American system of limited, representative government for no environmental benefit... To be clear—the problem isn’t green energy technologies, which should be allowed to compete as some of the many options Americans have for energy. The problem is cronyist policies that are patently unfair and burden the taxpayer. But another concern is the perhaps less obvious legislation by way of regulation being done across the Biden administration in the name of climate policy. It’s not an overstatement to say that regulatory actions under the Biden administration are seeking to reengineer the American economic system away from free enterprise (queue the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor) and to crush federalism by exporting California’s climate policy experiment through federal regulatory standards (queue the EPA, Department of Energy, Department of Interior)... it’s mostly due to hydraulic fracking making natural gas abundant and affordable that carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector have fallen 33% since 2005."
Can we trust the climate scientists? - "There’s a problem with writing about science — any science — which is that scientists are human like the rest of us. They are not perfect disembodied truth-seeking agents but ordinary, flawed humans navigating social, professional and economic incentive structures. Most notably, scientists, like people, are social. If they exist in a social or professional circle that believes X, it is hard to say not-X; if they have professed to believe Y, they won’t want to look silly and admit not-Y. It might even be hard to get research funded or published if it isn’t in line with what the wider group believes. All this makes it very hard, as an outsider, to assess some scientific claims... Koonin came to public attention a few years ago, after he wrote a controversial opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined “Climate science is not settled”. It was a response to what he considered the widely held opinion among policymakers and the wider public that, in fact, climate science is settled. His particular concern was that we can’t yet accurately predict what the future climate shifts will be... despite “the mainstream narrative among the media and policymakers”, it is hard to be sure that the climate has changed in meaningful ways due to human influence... climate models are highly uncertain and struggle to successfully predict the past, let alone the future, so we shouldn’t trust confident claims about the climate future. And if we do accept the IPCC’s predictions, they aren’t of imminent catastrophe. Instead, they point to slow change which humanity can easily adapt to, and, broadly speaking, to humanity continuing to prosper... there is basically nothing we can do about it anyway, partly because carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for so long, but mainly because the developing world is developing fast, and using ever more carbon to do so, and actually that’s a good thing. These are — according to Koonin — all, by and large, only what the IPCC assessment reports and other major climate analyses say. The public conversation, which he says is full of doom and apocalypse and unwarranted certainty, has become unconnected from the state of the actual science. And he blames scientists — and policymakers, the media and the public — for that disconnection... Realistically, we’re not going to be able to stop India — or China, or Brazil, or Mexico, or any of the other middle-income countries — from developing, and development at the moment means carbon. More importantly: we don’t want them to stop developing. Richer countries have healthier, longer-lived citizens and are better able to cope with a changing climate. Even huge, swingeing cuts to Western emissions — politically unrealistic — would only go some way to offsetting the inevitable growth in the developing world. Those cuts may be worth doing, but there are limits to how much good they can do... the reviewer is not attacking Koonin’s argument at its strongest point. In fact, none of them seem to: they just want to dismiss the book. They attack Koonin’s credibility and credentials, his temperament. They say he was only hired by the Obama Energy Department because of his contrarian views; they call him a “climate denier”, which seems de trop since he accepts most of the central claims of the climate consensus. The response felt more like a circling of the wagons than a serious effort to counter a serious argument. After all, it is unpleasant to hear reasons why you might be wrong about something: cognitive dissonance is painful... The reviews, which make so little effort to engage with the substance of the arguments, do not reassure me that climate science is a uniquely groupthink-free discipline... According to Koonin, one senior climate scientist told him “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don’t dare say that in public.”... But if the Catholic Church was able to stomach someone advocating for the Devil, then climate science should be able to stomach one doing it for the sceptics. And in the meantime, this book does an acceptable job."
Even the Catholic Church, which liberals love to hate, is more open to diverse opinions than them
Long‐term variability and trends in meteorological droughts in Western Europe (1851–2018) - Vicente‐Serrano - 2021 - International Journal of Climatology - "We analysed long-term variability and trends in meteorological droughts across Western Europe using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). Precipitation data from 199 stations spanning the period 1851–2018 were employed, following homogenisation, to derive SPI-3 and SPI-12 series for each station, together with indices on drought duration and severity. Results reveal a general absence of statistically significant long-term trends in the study domain, with the exception of significant trends at some stations, generally covering short periods. The largest decreasing trends in SPI-3 (i.e., increasing drought conditions) were found for summer in the British and Irish Isles. In general, drought episodes experienced in the last two or three decades have precedents during the last 170·years, emphasizing the importance of long records for assessing change. The main characteristic of drought variability in Western Europe is its strong spatial diversity, with regions exhibiting a homogeneous temporal evolution. Notably, the temporal variability of drought in Western Europe is more dominant than long-term trends. This suggests that long-term drought trends cannot be confirmed in Western Europe using precipitation records alone. This study provides a long-term regional assessment of drought variability in Western Europe, which can contribute to better understanding of regional climate change during the past two centuries."
Damn climate change denier!
No Evidence That Climate Change Is Making Droughts Any Worse - "The hullabaloo in the mainstream media about the current drought in Europe, which has been exacerbated by the continent’s fourth heat wave this summer, has only amplified the voices of those who insist that climate change is worsening droughts around the world. Yet an examination of the historical record quickly confirms that severe droughts have been a feature of the earth’s climate for millennia – a fact corroborated by several recent research studies, which I described in a recent report. The figure below shows a reconstruction of the drought pattern in central Europe from 1000 to 2012, using tree rings as a proxy, with observational data from 1901 to 2018 superimposed. The width and color of tree rings constitute a record of past climate, including droughts. Black in the figure depicts the PDSI or Palmer Drought Severity Index that measures both dryness (negative values) and wetness (positive values); red denotes the so-called self-calibrated PDSI (scPDSI); and the blue line is the 31-year mean."
He has a whole series
A global-scale investigation of trends in annual maximum streamflow - "This study investigates the presence of trends in annual maximum daily streamflow data from the Global Runoff Data Centre database, which holds records of 9213 stations across the globe. The records were divided into three reference datasets representing different compromises between spatial coverage and minimum record length, followed by further filtering based on continent, Köppen-Weiger climate classification, presence of dams, forest cover changes and catchment size. Trends were evaluated using the Mann-Kendall nonparametric trend test at the 10% significance level, combined with a field significance test. The analysis found substantial differences between reference datasets in terms of the specific stations that exhibited significant increasing or decreasing trends, showing the need for careful construction of statistical methods. The results were more consistent at the continental scale, with decreasing trends for a large number of stations in western North America and the data-covered regions of Australia, and increasing trends in parts of Europe, eastern North America, parts of South America and southern Africa. Interestingly, neither the presence of dams nor changes in forest cover had a large effect on the trend results, but the catchment size was important, as catchments exhibiting increasing (decreasing) trends tended to be smaller (larger). Finally, there were more stations with significant decreasing trends than significant increasing trends across all the datasets analysed, indicating that limited evidence exists for the hypothesis that flood hazard is increasing when averaged across the data-covered regions of the globe."
More climate change denial
Rising sea levels may build, rather than destroy, coral reef islands - "Low-lying coral reef islands are typically less than three metres above sea level, making them highly vulnerable to rising sea levels associated with climate change. However, research has found new evidence that the Maldives -- the world's lowest country -- formed when sea levels were higher than they are today."
Too bad for the "climate change refugees"
The Science Museum must resist the patronising nonsense of climate-change activists - "Climate-change activists have called for a boycott of the Science Museum in London, and its new exhibition, Our Future Planet. The boycott has nothing to do with the exhibition itself – centred on climate change, it features soil respiration equipment and information about carbon capture – rather the funding behind it. Last week, the Science Museum announced that one of the major sponsors would be the oil and gas company Shell... Defending the spirit of intellectual inquiry that every museum should have at its heart, the director Sir Ian Blatchford replied to the criticism by urging people to “come and visit this timely show and make up your own mind”... There has always been something intensely bourgeois about this “dirty money” obsession. Culture Unstained, an organisation campaigning “to end fossil-fuel sponsorship of culture” in Britain, say they are committed to “decarbonising and decolonising cultural spaces”. Yet the ideal of cultural spaces that are free from taint or stain – Monbiot compared the Science Museum to Lady Macbeth – is, in practice, inherently elitist. State funding for museums, libraries and collective educational spaces is declining rapidly; organisations have to take their money where they can get it. Otherwise, our public institutions will become the preserve of those wealthy enough to pay the inflated ticket prices. (The Science Museum’s exhibitions, including Our Future Planet, remain free, but not all big-ticket shows have that luxury. At the nearby V&A, admission in the first week of their forthcoming Alice show will set you back £20.) In any case, do Culture Unstained or Extinction Rebellion or any other organisation believe their cash comes guilt-free? Last week, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which funds Culture Unstained, announced that its own historical capital derived in part from slavery, colonialism and apartheid. The irony is obvious, but it’s hard to blame them either: for whom, after centuries of capitalism, would this not be true? At what point does any money become “clean”? There seems to be very little understanding from the Greens of how wealth and power historically work: they just see it, and want it excised. But it may be naïve to expect these activists to want to grasp the bigger picture. After all, Extinction Rebellion have boasted that they only need 3.5 per cent of the population behind them to achieve their aims. Defending the principle that museums should be democratic and open spaces comes second to the performative activism that will get them there. Some museums are on the brink of collapse after a year of closures, thanks to the pandemic – and most sensible people, I suspect, would tell Blatchford and other leading curators to take the dirty money and run, if it means keeping the doors open. In any case, campaigners argue that Shell’s presence will influence the exhibition’s “narrative”, but Our Future Planet is hardly a paean to oil and gas: among its highlights will be the latest in “air-capture technology”, and the scientist Klaus Lackner’s carbon-capturing “mechanical tree”. Many an arts organisation will tell you how much they prefer corporate funding to fighting over the same small Government pots. The corporations clearly want a bit of free advertising, but more often than not, they’ll let you get on with it. And even if fundraising in a penny-pinching climate weren’t an issue, the real reason why Green groups and commentators are up in arms isn’t their fear of fossil fuels: it’s their disbelief that we ordinary punters can make independent judgements about an issue such as climate change – yes, even after we’ve seen the Shell logo on the brochure. In a letter to the museum, activists claimed they were “outraged to discover placards from the London climate strikes in the Shell-sponsored exhibition”. Surely they should be excited at the possibility of thousands of kids looking at their political propaganda? The problem for Green activists isn’t Shell at all: it’s their hostility to the idea that fostering debate, discussion and an open mind is the right way to approach key policy areas such as the environment... The V&A’s first director, Henry Cole, described the purpose of a museum well: to be “a school-room for everyone”. For all their bleating about “listening to the science”, the censorious desire to control the narrative reveals how little faith today’s eco-warriors have in what a “scientific” outlook really is."
Of course, when it comes to their own hypocrisy, activists don't care, and just post the "We Should Improve Society Somewhat" meme
Biden's climate alarmism will do more harm than good - "Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that climate change along with other environmental concerns could cause a worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Today, almost every catastrophe is blamed on global warming, and we are being told that we must radically change the entire world until 2030 to avoid the apocalypse. Such irresponsible exaggerations are destroying our ability to make sensible decisions for the future. The much-discussed 2030 deadline to fix climate change relies on an arbitrary policy, and the claim of apocalypse is vastly exaggerated... The Paris Agreement which President Biden just rejoined has been marketed as the solution to climate yet it will accomplish almost nothing. In a best-case scenario, it will achieve just 1 per cent of what political leaders hope to attain. The Paris Agreement is also phenomenally expensive, costing around a trillion every year by 2030. The cost would vastly outweigh the benefit to the extent that each dollar spent will avoid just 11 cents of global climate damage. But there is another cost to excessively focusing on the climate problem in a world full of problems. Covid-19 showed us how worrying mostly about climate leaves us poorly prepared for all the other global challenges. The World Health Organization itself had repeatedly emphasized throughout the last decade how climate is one of the world’s leading health challenges, which is perhaps one of the reasons the group seemed to be blindsided by Covid. When Biden’s National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy warns us that climate is the “most significant public health challenge of our time” that ignores much bigger health problems. The leading causes of death in the US are cardiovascular disease and cancer. The world’s poor battle with much greater challenges like starvation, poverty, dying from easily curable diseases and lack of education. And these challenges have solutions where each dollar can help much more. We could do phenomenally much better at much lower cost helping children out of malnutrition or improving learning in schools. We could address most of the world’s top issues with a fraction of what we’re spending on climate."
Neo-colonialism has gone green - "Back in the 1980s, global institutions, like the IMF, provided financial aid to developing countries on the condition that they changed their economic policies, reduced inflation, devalued their currencies, and so on. These so-called structural-adjustment programmes (SAP) imposed imperial-style diktats on the way that these heavily indebted countries were allowed to develop. They forced them to restrain internal demand, shift production according to the priorities of external markets and impose policies that would provide a handsome return to the aid-giver. In recent years, global leaders and institutions have changed tack. They no longer tell subservient nations how they should develop. Instead, they nudge developing countries to consider whether they want to develop at all. In the name of the environment, they are encouraging developing countries to stay where they are, undisturbed by anything as alien as economic progress. This is not a surprise. In Western circles, the idea of ‘development’ has long been portrayed as a bad thing. Writing in Open Democracy, the authors of ‘Development’ is Colonialism in Disguise argue: ‘The South emulates the North, captivated by its dazzling lifestyles in a seemingly unstoppable course that brings ever more social and environmental problems. Seven decades after the concept of “development” erupted on to the scene, the entire world is mired in “maldevelopment”.’... The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs is even encouraging underdeveloped nations to move beyond GDP as a measure of success. To do this, it is encouraging the use of the concept of ‘natural capital’ as a measure of a nation’s developmental status. This means that decrepit infrastructure and low productivity can be balanced against the amount of forest cover and carbon sinks a nation has. So Malawi may have no economy to speak of, but it has a magisterial coastline, unspoiled landscape, wildlife and ecosystems. All of these, the UN argues, must be factored into a nation’s economic accounts. In this way, the lunatic logic of environmentalism decides that the poorest non-developing countries are really very rich indeed."
Sabine Hossenfelder on X - "Everyone who thinks the world could just stop using fossil fuels on the snap of a finger should have a look at this chart. More than 80% of the world's energy supply presently comes from oil, gas, and coal, and that number has barely changed in the past decade. Of course we will eventually phase out fossil fuels, simply because the supply is finite. No matter how hard you dig, there's only so much of the stuff. But at present, the life of pretty much everyone on this planet depends in one way or another on fossil fuels. In case you live in a fancy new "zero emissions" house, well, first of all congrats on being in the 0.001% of the world population who can afford that, and second, try to figure out how many of the supply chains for building that house would break down without fossil fuels. If we were to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow without also subsidizing fossil fuels, much of the world economy would collapse because most of the key industries would go bankrupt basically overnight. (I think we should still put a price on carbon because it's the right default, but then we'll need to find a way to ease the transition.) This is why it's become so hard to solve this problem. It would have been easy enough 50 years ago to put a price on carbon dioxide, switch to nuclear, and with further improvements in solar to more of that. But we've missed that bus. I want to emphasize again because people keep misunderstanding this, I am not a fan of fossil fuels. If it were up to me, I'd plaster the world with nuclear power plants tomorrow and would take great pleasure in seeing oil companies falter and die. I am merely saying this is a difficult problem to solve, and the reason it's difficult is not technological, it's mostly economical. That said, let me stress again that I think the extensions of the electric grid necessary to support the transition to renewables are an underappreciated problem. Without the grid, nothing else is going to work."
W70881 on X - "Took over 100 yrs to build the entire world represented in that graph, all the industries + infrastructure that depends heavily on it. The idea that it can be rebuilt in 10 years, or even 20 or 30 is totally delusional no matter how many fly-by-night green scams are thrown at it"
