Dutch farmers back Wilders as centrist nightmares come true - "Geert Wilders is everything European centrists loathe. Now, the far-right Dutch firebrand is winning over the farmers Brussels has spent decades trying to placate... a constant voice has been backing him to become one of the most extreme right-wing leaders in Europe's postwar history: the head of the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) party, Caroline van der Plas... Her party has become a key channel for rural discontent since its 2019 formation, even coming first in provincial elections in March 2023. Beyond the Netherlands, farmer protests have spread across in Europe in recent months, including to Brussels where on Monday tractor-driving agriculturalists clashed with police and left mounds of tires burning on the streets of the European Quarter. Meanwhile, amid angry scenes at a Paris agricultural fair on Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron vented about the “political manipulation” of farmer concerns; the remarks were seen as aimed at the far-right National Rally. Macron and other centrists fear farmers in their countries will also be tempted by far-right promises to fight EU green laws. Seeking to prevent traditionally conservative rural areas from backing the far right in June's EU election, center-right parties have swung back hard against new environmental policies in recent months. Animus toward the EU's green policies form the basis of the deal between the BBB and PVV. In particular they have targeted a plan by the current caretaker Dutch government to reduce cattle numbers and force farmers to sell their farms to meet pollution targets. "There is great despair within the sector," said van der Plas. "There is almost no financial space left within farms."... Both Wilders and van der Plas have said they would scrap the pollution reduction plan, even though political opponents and experts say ignoring the EU’s nitrogen limits would be illegal... “Luckily, we have international agreements,” Dutch climate minister Rob Jetten said in an interview with POLITICO. “European policies that narrow the opportunity for a Geert Wilders government to fully stop climate action.”"
If you oppose globalism, you must be "far right". Time to abolish voting to save "democracy"
Gad Saad on X - "Please watch. The Deputy PM of Canada is questioning whether capitalism and democracy are still viable systems when dealing with climate change. If you are going to save the trees, you need an authoritarian regime that tells you what you can eat, how you should dress, how many kids you can have because carbon emissions."
Wide Awake Media on X - ""Does capitalist democracy still work?" Deputy PM of Canada and WEF Board of Trustees member, Chrystia Freeland, takes aim at the concept of democracy, in the name of tackling "climate change". "Our shrinking glaciers, and our warming oceans, are asking us wordlessly but emphatically, if democratic societies can rise to the existential challenge of climate change.""
Why elites love to obsess about climate change so much
Meme - "I'm here interviewing Planet Earth today. Hi there!"
"Hello"
"Apparently you've been Greening a lot recently. How come?"
"Yes, it's all this extra CO2"
"CO2?! But, but that's bad surely?"
"No! It's food for all my veg! I love CO2!"
"CUT! CUT! WE CAN'T USE THIS!! #@!?"
"But I thought you wanted a greener planet..."
Scientists secretly believe we're all going to die soon - retired professor - "We're all going to die - that's a fact. But even Millennials should be preparing to meet their maker, if American scientist Guy McPherson is to be believed. The retired biology and ecology professor says runaway climate change is going to kill us all by the year 2026. And if we somehow make it off the planet before then, unlike the inhabitants of the starliner Axiom in apocalyptic Pixar classic WALL-E, we might not be able come back... In late 2016, he appeared on Three's Paul Henry to say humanity would be wiped out in 10 years. He's sticking by that timetable - even suggesting he might have overestimated how long we have left. "For most of us, we'll be going sooner than that 2026 timeline I presented a couple of years ago."... Prof McPherson says other scientists agree with him - they're just too scared to say so."
From 2018
Climate Change—Assessing the Worst Case Scenario - "At the extreme, worst-case or precautionary thinking is analogous to Pascal’s wager and subject to similar objections. If we should pull out all the stops to prevent climate catastrophe no matter how improbable it might be, why not some other, equally improbable disaster? As long we have finite resources to devote to preventing disasters and a virtually unlimited ability to imagine them, this creates impossible dilemmas. Fortunately, there has been some realistic exploration of worst cases among climate scientists and others recently. They can supplement the IPCC reports which, though far from perfect, have the advantage (at their best) of summarizing the available evidence, avoiding the “single study syndrome.” Alarmist claims come in two flavors: one vague and ambiguous, the other exaggerated and misleading... just about any negative prediction can be amplified by imagining that it will cause “social breakdown” and trigger conflict, even war. This has long been common among environmental alarmists. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 predictions were particularly grim, even suggesting global nuclear war. Few actual climate scientists would go to that level of doomsaying. But the tendency to fantasize about societal impacts is evident. One recent study suggests that sea level may (in the worst case) rise up to 2 meters by 2100... A “very senior member” (scientist? bureaucrat?) of the IPCC is supposed to have claimed that exposed populations in low-lying nations “will die.” Bjørn Lomborg’s dissection of this claim is instructive. First, he points out that they will not stay and drown. This is so self-evident that you may wonder how both the “very senior member” and the scientist quoting him can believe they will. Nor is it even likely that they will have to move. Lomborg points out that the study in question concludes that adaptation is feasible and that the actual number of displaced individuals will be far lower (around 300,000 or less). Still, let us for a moment indulge the notion that all those people will have to move in the 80 years left until 2100. Will it cause “social breakdown on scales that are pretty unimaginable”? Looking back at the past 80 years, we can see that at least 150 million people were permanently displaced. So although 187 million certainly represents enormous disruption, it is hardly unimaginable, having basically happened before. One currently fashionable worst-case scenario is from a recent scientific publication discussing a “Hothouse Earth” scenario. Climate scientist Richard Betts points out that much of the coverage of this study has exaggerated the alarm... the question “what is the worst case?”—unless it’s purely academic—has to come with a time frame. We cannot even begin to imagine what technology and society will be like thousands of years from now. In fact, do we even have knowledge that could enable us to help our descendants much past 2100? Similarly, should—or even could—our ancestors have done anything to prevent today’s problems? Michael Crichton explored this question in 2003:
'Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?'...
the other currently popular worst-case narrative. It is based on the IPCC’s scenario known as RCP 8.5... RCP 8.5 assumes a departure from multiple current trends. It appears to require a “return to coal,” which is contrary to forecasts, and even more contrary to the most recent trends... Much alarmist material is premised on the idea that climate change has already caused all sorts of extreme weather hazards to grow significantly. By extrapolation into the future, this feeds apocalyptic visions of weather gone berserk. But contrary to what the media tend to report, this notion has very little empirical support. Roger Pielke Jr has treated this subject in detail in his book The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change:
'The analysis of twenty-two disaster loss studies shows that economic losses from various weather-related natural hazards, such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods, and small-scale weather events such as wildfires and hailstorms, have increased around the globe. The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change.'...
much of alarmist thinking can be described as reducing the future to climate: reasoning as if nothing else will happen except climate change, thus discounting economic growth, technological development and adaptation to changing environmental conditions. If we also ignore the fact that climate change will also have beneficial effects, there is no way the future could be anything but worse than the present. By contrast, the IPCC expects the current trends of economic growth and falling mortality to continue. In fact, the negative economic impacts of climate change are expected to be small compared to overall economic growth... for the time being, I see no justification for describing climate change in terms of “crisis,” “emergency,” “catastrophe,” or “existential threat” rather than simply “threat,” “challenge,” or “problem.” At the very least, anyone claiming that millions of people are going to die, or that civilization will collapse, should be required to specify which impacts of climate change are going to cause this and how."
Drake Landing, a solar energy community south of Calgary, loses its sizzle as system starts to fail - "Drake Landing, once the leading solar heating community of its kind in North America, may have to rely on fossil fuels as the aging system is breaking down and may be too expensive or impossible to fix. The 52 homeowners in the small, tight-knit community in Okotoks, south of Calgary, at one point welcomed guests from around the world to show off the groundbreaking technology. The international visitors wanted to see first-hand how energy from the hot summer sun could be collected and stored and then released in a harsh Canadian winter to heat the community's houses. By all accounts, Drake Landing, established in 2006, exceeded the expectations and objectives set by the project's financial backers — which included the provincial and federal governments. Showcase a large-scale, seasonal, solar storage system capable of supplying over 90 per cent of the space heating requirements in a residential community? Check. Reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional houses? Check. Create a model that could represent the future of sustainable residential heating systems? Check. Win multiple national and international building, environment and sustainability awards? Check. Check. But now, the system is starting to fail, and it could be decommissioned — it's one outcome the community faces... Corboy said the company has been working hard over the past year and a half to find "affordable and reliable solutions to the growing system performance issues." He said this includes trying to find parts and experts to service the 20-year-old technology. He said a number of components have reached their end of life, including the air handler unit, the solar collectors, custom-made fittings that connect the entire system together and other unnamed replacement parts... Corboy said decommissioning would not mean the project was a failure. "It's important to note that we do not see this project as a failure at all. At the time, this system was revolutionary and caught attention from around the world. Much has been learned because of this community," he said. It's disappointing for some of the owners who expected to get at least 25-30 years out of the groundbreaking system... It was well-known among the owners that the system put in place in Okotoks was groundbreaking — that it had the potential to represent the future of sustainable residential heating."
Too bad climate change hystericists won't learn the right lessons
Meme - "Me In 2050 patiently waiting for the electric cop car's battery to die *car chase*"
Trudeau will force a business case for EVs whether we like it or not - "“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is the oldest rule of investment diversification. Really shrewd investors go one step further and don’t put all their baskets on the same truck... Do you get the sense that the federal government is practising even naive, eggs-in-different-baskets diversification regarding its favoured industrial policy? Or that it has any inkling that the future can surprise? Or is the government, as it would appear to be, all-in on batteries and electric vehicles? Lately, it’s as if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, finding himself of a morning in a mid-sized Ontario or Quebec town, looks around (as one could imagine, in another era, Louis XIV looking around) and says, “This is a fine looking place with, in our opinion, all the makings for an electric vehicle/battery manufactory. Here, my good people, is several billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. Take it and build such a factory.”... These days Canada’s GDP is running at almost $3 trillion a year; the $43.6 billion Ottawa is spending on just the first three big EV/battery deals is about 1.5 per cent of GDP. That’s real money with real consequences. Especially when the government backs it up with rules and prohibitions. The prime minister, who has no background in business, is nevertheless fond of talking about “the business case” for things. There is no business case for exporting liquefied natural gas (though it’s an established thing), he told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who came asking for help just after Russia invaded Ukraine. But there is a business case, apparently, for exporting hydrogen (though it’s not yet an established thing). Whether there’s a business case for electric vehicles is a question that most of the rest of the world currently seems to be asking. If you’re the head of a car company that has made big bets on EVs, you must be seriously worried that demand for them is falling. You may even be scaling back production because dealer lots are filling up with unsold cars. But in Canada, there is no such self-doubt. Doubt be damned, the government powers ahead. First there’s the torrent of money it is pouring into the industry. And then there’s the banning of competing technologies: no new gasoline-powered cars after 2035, no matter how wonderfully efficient this technology, now well into its second century, has become. Plus a hard cap on oil and gas emissions, which pretty much means a hard cap on oil and gas output. Economists would say: tax carbon at a price reflecting the damage it does and then see what happens. If there’s an energy transition, fine. If there’s no energy transition, that means the damage done by burning carbon-based fuels is less than the benefit they produce. But this government says: There must be a transition. We insist on a transition. And to make sure it happens we need to get businesses to stop teetering and fall off the fence into the transition. So we create the business case by forcing the issue with subsidies firms can’t say no to and rules that knock any competition out of business."
Thread by @BjornLomborg on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Gasoline, not electric cars: Two-thirds of American's want their next car to be fossil fuel driven, with just 6% battery-electric Deloitte new 2024 Global Automotive Consumer Study Key trend: "Slowing EV (electric car) momentum"
Electric cars: Consumers worry They worry about charging time, range anxiety, cost, battery safety, and availability of charging infrastructure
We're being told that electric cars will take over the US But Biden's Energy Information Administration estimates that by 2050, 84% of all cars will still run on fossil fuels
We're being told that electric cars are just about to take over But remember, most governments (except Norway) can't afford to lavishly subsidize all these cars Biden's EIA estimates that by 2050, most cars globally will still run on fossil fuels"
The environmental costs of EV batteries that politicians don't tend to talk about - ""The rules are non-existent," said Mark Winfield, a professor at York University in Toronto and co-chair of the school's Sustainable Energy Initiative. "There is nothing as we talk to agencies on both sides of the border, the federal, provincial, state levels... Winfield said the fact there is no public policy on the disposal of EV batteries is concerning because a number of the chemicals and components used to make EV batteries, such as cadmium, arsenic and nickel, are listed as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) and simply can't be thrown into a landfill... The environmental costs of a greener future in transportation don't stop at dead batteries. If the country carries through on its plan to build a home-grown supply chain for the critical minerals needed to make EV batteries, it could mean the development of a vast tract of unspoiled nature in Ontario's north... "There happens to be tremendous interest in the critical mineral potential in the Ring of Fire region to fuel the electric vehicle revolution," Moore told CBC News. The region happens to be in the middle of an environmentally significant area called the Hudson's Bay Lowlands. "We're talking about a huge wetland," said Dayna Scott, a professor with the Osgoode Law School at York University and the school's research chair in environmental law and justice in the green economy. "The largest intact boreal forest remaining in the world and also a massive carbon storehouse." In the Hudson's Bay Lowlands, there are an estimated 35 billion tonnes of carbon, with the area acting as a major stopover for billions of migratory birds and is home to wolverines, caribou and lake sturgeon — all considered endangered or species at risk by the federal government. For years, Scott has studied the social, environmental and legal implications of bringing development to the Hudson's Bay Lowlands, and its effect on the rights and interests of remote Indigenous communities there... While it's impossible to tell who's right, Scott said governments need buy-in from every First Nation in the Treaty 9 area or any development would be open to litigation — some rarely mentioned at news conferences or funding announcements about the upcoming switch to Canadian-made EV batteries. "A lot of people who are interested in buying an electric vehicle don't want to see themselves as caught up in an ongoing process of Indigenous dispossession," Scott said. "If people did have to confront at what cost we are going to get these minerals, do we want to do it over Indigenous People's objections? "I think that would give a lot of people in southern Ontario pause, probably.""
Energy company pulls the plug on two major offshore wind projects on East Coast - "Danish wind developer Orsted is halting the development of two massive New Jersey offshore wind projects due to cascading economic pressures, including skyrocketing interest rates and a supply chain crunch – two factors that have dogged wind energy projects up and down the East Coast. The decision is ominous news for a nascent sector that could play a key role in solving the climate crisis, and one that is still trying to find its wings in the US, even as other major economies steam forward. It also deals a blow to President Joe Biden’s clean energy goals, which hinge in part on the massive potential for electricity generated from offshore wind."
How ignorant. They don't know that wind is the future!
NDP leader not saying if ‘fair’ carbon price includes levy on gasoline - "Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh did not answer on Monday when asked by reporters whether his party’s climate policy would include a carbon price on gasoline after saying he wants a more "fair" deal for working people... Singh was asked at least nine times by reporters if his vision of a fairer plan includes a carbon price on gasoline. Singh did not clearly answer. When pressed by reporters, Singh said to look at the NDP’s voting record on the issue... NDP environment critic Laurel Collins said that the Liberals are treating the carbon price as the “be-all-end-all” of climate policy. At a Thursday speech at the Broadbent Progress Summit, Singh said that they cannot rely on free market mechanisms like the carbon price to be the main driver in combatting climate change, adding that the impacts of it are also drivers of affordability challenges. Singh included issues like drought driving up food prices and the high cost of fixing infrastructure like bridges and roads after floods in his speech."
Climate change hysteria is about making life harder and more expensive, after all
We are told that a carbon tax is the most efficient and effective way of reducing emissions, but left wingers are not satisfied by it and keep pushing for more to be done. So much for that
When climate change hysteria drives up food prices, consumers will not notice the incremental effect of droughts. Or they'll blame higher food prices on climate change rather than the policies supposedly fighting it
Economists' letter misses the point about the carbon tax revolt - "An open letter is circulating online among my economist colleagues aiming to promote sound thinking on carbon taxes... it’s conspicuously selective in its focus, to the point of ignoring the main problems with Canadian climate policy as a whole. There’s a massive pile of boulders blocking the road to efficient policy, including: clean fuel regulations, the oil-and-gas-sector emissions cap, the electricity sector coal phase-out, strict energy efficiency rules for new and existing buildings, new performance mandates for natural gas-fired generation plants, the regulatory blockade against liquified natural gas export facilities, new motor vehicle fuel economy standards, caps on fertilizer use on farms, provincial ethanol production subsidies, electric vehicle mandates and subsidies, provincial renewable electricity mandates, grid-scale battery storage experiments, the Green Infrastructure Fund, carbon capture and underground storage mandates and subsidies for electric buses and emergency vehicles in Canadian cities, new aviation and rail sector emission limits, and many more. Not one of these occasioned a letter of protest from Canadian economists... To my well-meaning colleagues I say: the pile of regulatory boulders long ago made the economic case for carbon pricing irrelevant. Layering a carbon tax on top of current and planned command-and-control regulations does not yield an efficient outcome, it just raises the overall cost to consumers. Which is why I can’t get excited about and certainly won’t sign the carbon-pricing letter. That’s not where the heavy lifting is needed. My colleagues object to exaggerated claims about the cost of carbon taxes. Fair enough. But far worse are exaggerated claims about both the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the economic opportunities associated with the so-called “energy transition.” Exaggeration about the benefits of emission reduction is traceable to poor-quality academic research, such as continued use of climate models known to have large, persistent warming biases and of the RCP8.5 emissions scenario, long since shown in the academic literature to be grossly exaggerated. But a lot of it is simply groundless rhetoric. Climate activists, politicians and journalists have spent years blaming Canadians’ fossil fuel use for every bad weather event that comes along and shutting down rational debate with polemical cudgels such as “climate emergency” declarations. Again, none of this occasioned a cautionary letter from economists. There’s another big issue on which the letter was silent. Suppose we did clear all the regulatory boulders along with the carbon-pricing-costs-too-much twig. How high should the carbon tax be? A few of the letter’s signatories are former students of mine so I expect they remember the formula for an optimal emissions tax in the presence of an existing tax system. If not, they can take their copy of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy by Prof. McKitrick off the shelf, blow off the thick layer of dust and look it up. Or they can consult any of the half-dozen or so journal articles published since the 1970s that derive it. But I suspect most of the other signatories have never seen the formula and don’t even know it exists. To be technical for a moment, the optimal carbon tax rate varies inversely with the marginal cost of the overall tax system. The higher the tax burden — and with our heavy reliance on income taxes our burden is high — the costlier it is at the margin to provide any public good, including emissions reductions. Economists call this a “second-best problem”: inefficiencies in one place, like the tax system, cause inefficiencies in other policy areas, yielding in this case a higher optimal level of emissions and a lower optimal carbon tax rate. Based on reasonable estimates of the social cost of carbon and the marginal costs of our tax system, our carbon price is already high enough. In fact, it may well be too high. I say this as one of the only Canadian economists who has published on all aspects of the question. Believing in mainstream climate science and economics, as I do, does not oblige you to dismiss public complaints that the carbon tax is too costly. Which raises my final point: the age of mass academic letter-writing has long since passed. Academia has become too politically one-sided. Universities don’t get to spend years filling their ranks with staff drawn from one side of the political spectrum and then expect to be viewed as neutral arbiters of public policy issues. The more signatories there are on a letter like this, the less impact it will have. People nowadays will make up their own minds, thank you very much, and a well-argued essay by an individual willing to stand alone may even carry more weight. Online conversations today are about rising living costs, stagnant real wages and deindustrialization. Even if carbon pricing isn’t the main cause of all this, climate policy is playing a growing role and people can be excused for lumping it all together. The public would welcome insight from economists about how to deal with these challenges. A mass letter enthusing about carbon taxes doesn’t provide it."
Opinion: The carbon tax is almost dead, and NDP leaders are helping to kill it - The Globe and Mail - "Mr. Singh will be following in the footsteps of Mr. Kinew, who cancelled a provincial gas tax shortly after becoming Manitoba’s new NDP Premier."
After the carbon tax, axe Ottawa's tree plan - "the carbon tax had no measurable impact on GHG emissions, for several good reasons. First came the March 2020 COVID-19 lockdown that knocked five per cent off Canada’s GDP and sent millions of workers home. Then the world price of oil, fuelled by loose monetary policy and government debt, doubled to $100 a barrel by 2022... As the price of gasoline jumped to between $1.50 and $2 a litre, Canada’s gasoline consumption dropped 15 per cent in 2020. The carbon tax pennies were proportionately insignificant (see graph). Now it may be that the total impact of all climate policies drove down emissions more significantly than the economic slowdown and the oil price turmoil, but the reports issued by the Canadian Climate Institute (successor to the Ecofiscal Commission) are short on plausible evidence. Explain the modelling, please... Now we turn to the Trudeau government’s 2019 2 Billion Trees program (known as 2BT), another climate effort that lacks supporting economic logic and/or modelling. At an announced cost of $3 billion, the objective of 2BT is to produce billions of seeds, find land and plant two billion carbon-absorbing trees over the next decade. Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson claims the 2BT mission is a “significant step forward in Canada’s approach to tackle the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.” But even the CBC has taken to exposing the many uncertainties buried in the babbling brooks of Wilkinson’s promotional jargon. In an Easter weekend special on CBC Radio’s The House with Catherine Cullen, titled “The real dirt on the Liberals’ two-billion-tree pledge,” a CBC crew interviewed experts and arborists and visited facilities where seeds are grown and baby trees are planted. The result is a documentary that exposed the improbability of the project. All guests argued that more trees are good for Canada, good for biodiversity and as shades and air filters in cities. But everyone cast doubt on the impact and viability of the plan. The project will require the unprecedented production of billions of seeds in special facilities before planting as seedlings until they are ready for transfer to the wild — assuming enough land can be found across the country. Will planting two billion trees help Canada achieve GHG targets? “The flat answer is no,” said Akaash Maharaj, policy director with Nature Canada. He cited a study that found the government had “miscalculated” and that the program will actually be a “net emitter” of carbon until 2031. Another problem is funding. A nursery manager said the plan needs long-term financial commitment from Ottawa, sort of like the EV industry. Only $3 billion won’t get the job done. He said trees take years to grow from seeds to seedling to plantable saplings that will survive. The tree industry, like the electric vehicle industry, needs to know that once it ramps up production, the demand and the subsidies will keep flowing for years to come."
