DOT Invests $100 Mil to Help Disadvantaged Communities by Fixing Broken EV Chargers thumbnail

DOT Invests $100 Mil to Help Disadvantaged Communities by Fixing Broken EV Chargers

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By Judicial Watch

Besides subsidizing the electric vehicle (EV) industry with a staggering $15.5 billion, the Biden administration is investing an additional $100 million in federal funding to prioritize the repair and replacement of EV charging stations throughout the U.S. The venture will “ensure disadvantaged communities benefit from upgraded charging infrastructure,” according to the Department of Transportation (DOT), which is doling out the money. The costly EV charger project is part of the administration’s Justice40 Initiative which requires 40% of all federal government investments to flow to “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened with pollution.” The president signed an executive order within days of taking office to allocate unprecedented public funds to poor minority communities in the name of environmental justice.

The multi-million-dollar EV charger restoration project will operate under a Justice40 initiative known as National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program that provides states with money to strategically deploy charging stations and establish an interconnected network to facilitate data collection, access and reliability. “The Biden-Harris Administration has set a goal of building a convenient, affordable, reliable, equitable, and Made-in-America electric vehicle (EV) charging network along the Nation’s highways and within our communities,” according to the grant announcement issued this month by the DOT. Because it is a Justice40 program the feds will use a White House Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool to track how assisted chargers aid needy communities. “Recipients of awards under this program can also use the tool to ensure disadvantaged communities benefit from upgraded charging infrastructure,” the grant document states, adding that “the tool can be used to help prioritize and sequence projects to maximize benefits to disadvantaged communities.”

The White House launched the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool in response to the president’s January 2021 order to tackle the “climate crisis at home and abroad.” The directive includes an extensive section dedicated to securing environmental justice for disadvantaged, historically marginalized and overburdened communities, by among other things, creating a White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council consisting of top government leaders. The heads of key federal agencies—including the attorney general, secretaries of defense, labor, transportation and energy—were essentially ordered to address environmental justice in minority and low-income populations. “Agencies shall make achieving environmental justice part of their missions by developing programs, policies, and activities to address the disproportionately high and adverse human health, environmental, climate-related and other cumulative impacts on disadvantaged communities, as well as the accompanying economic challenges of such impacts,” according to Biden’s order.

It is not clear what the EV ownership rate is in marginalized or overburdened communities or the demand for chargers because the government has failed to provide that information. However, the administration does reveal that as of this month, 6,261 public charging ports out of 151,506 nationwide were identified as being temporarily unavailable. California has the largest number (1,707) of broken chargers followed by New York (541), Texas (379), Florida (356) and Massachusetts (265). The objective of the administration’s $100 million investment is to enhance and maintain the reliability of the charging network by focusing on the repair or replacement of existing chargers that are currently non-operational, a goal it asserts “will be aligned with the Biden-Harris Administration’s Justice40 Initiative.” The connection is not fully explained.

Just weeks before the charger allotment the administration announced that, as part of the president’s Investing in America agenda, the Department of Energy is disbursing $15.5 billion to “support a strong and just transition to electric vehicles.” The money will focus on “retooling existing factories for the transition to electric vehicles,” according to the agency. Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s energy secretary, claims the funding shows that the president “understands that building the cars of the future also necessitates helping the communities challenged by the transition away from the internal combustion engine.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak Speaks Sense on Net Zero thumbnail

VIDEO: UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak Speaks Sense on Net Zero

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By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was denounced before he’d uttered a word on net zero ahead of his short remarks on Wednesday.

WATCH: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Net Zero press conference

Lord Deben, the recently departed chair of the statutory Climate Change Committee, took to the airwaves to accuse the government of stupidity. Lord Zac Goldsmith, son of the billionaire Sir James Goldsmith, who resigned from the government earlier this summer, said the prime minister had no mandate to change any net zero commitments and should call an immediate election.

As it turned out, Sunak’s remarks did not substantively change very much. “I’m absolutely committed to reaching Net Zero by 2050,” the prime minister insisted. True, the prime minister pledged that the government wouldn’t force families to rip out their gas-fired boilers and replace them with expensive heat pumps. And, he announced that the ban on sales of petrol and diesel cars would be pushed back to 2035, which former prime minister Boris Johnson had brought forward to 2030 in one of his periodic fits of climate jingoism. What Sunak didn’t say was whether the rising quota of electric vehicle (EV) mandates squeezing out sales of conventional vehicles would remain in place.

This, though, would be to miss what the prime minister had done: politically, everything has changed. “No one in politics has had the courage to look people in the eye and explain what that involves,” Sunak said of net zero. “That’s wrong – and it changes now.” He promised that his approach to net zero would be pragmatic, proportionate, and realistic.

Of course, net zero by 2050 is none of those things. It is ideological, disproportionate, and unachievable. So why the vehemence of the climate lobby’s attacks on Sunak? In their eyes, Sunak has committed the worst crime of all: he has broken the net zero omertà, which enforces a pact of silence on discussing the policy’s true costs. In public, net zero should only be spoken of as the growth opportunity of the century, something that’s good for the economy as well as the planet. That it might inflict cost and hardship must never be said.

Sunak has destroyed this silent agreement. He has made it possible for mainstream political discourse to mention possible downsides to net zero. In this respect, he’s been assisted by his opponent’s reaction. Labor could have closed the issue down by saying it would be counter-productive to bring forward the ban. Instead, Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer immediately pledged to reverse Sunak’s reversal of the 2030 ban on selling new petrol and diesel cars. With EV sale mandates still in place, there is very little before and after difference – except Sir Keir now owns the downsides of the net zero anti-car policy.

Commentary on EVs focuses on the user experience – the vehicles’ cost premium, for example, or problems such as range anxiety and the inconvenience of re-charging them compared to filling up with a tank of fuel. These issues make EVs either a luxury purchase for individuals or a tax-efficient purchase made by businesses on behalf of their employees. There’s been much less focus on the implications for the electrical grid of mass EV adoption. As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills discusses in a recent paper, “Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream,” transitioning automotive energy derived from molecules to electrons has enormous implications for the grid and local distribution networks.

It’s not solely about the relative costs of electricity versus liquid hydrocarbons. (Electricity is much more expensive before taxes, a net zero fiscal hole Labor also needs to address.) According to Mills, transporting a unit of electrical energy using wires and transformers is about 20-fold more expensive than transporting the same quantity of energy as oil in pipelines and tankers. When you fill up your tank with gasoline, the same amount of energy per second is going into your car as being generated by four 5-megawatt wind turbines. The electrical grid and local distribution networks are simply not designed to accommodate the enormous increase in electrical power required for mass EV adoption – and the faster the EV charger, the more power it needs.

Upgrading Britain’s electrical network for EVs will cost many tens of billions of pounds. Who pays? That’s now a question for Sir Keir and Labor to answer. Will electrical utilities discriminate between electricity used to charge an EV and boil a kettle? Some 55% of British households don’t own a car. Does Labor expect the 55% of non-car owners to subsidize the cost of grid and local network upgrades for the benefit of the small proportion of the 45% of car owners who have EVs? Labor’s green socialism inverts traditional socialism. It envisions less well-off community members subsidizing better-off EV owners through their electricity bills.

The prime minister can have had few illusions about the consequences of breaking with the climate consensus to speak of costs and downsides. The climate lobby is well-funded and deeply networked throughout politics and the media. It required courage and conviction for Sunak to have taken this step. Thanks to him, Britain’s climate policy debate will never be the same.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

Rupert Darwall

Rupert Darwall is a Senior Fellow at the RealClear Foundation.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Electric cars in Turin at the beginning of the 20th century thumbnail

Electric cars in Turin at the beginning of the 20th century

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By Wallace Bruschweiler

They were abandoned when the petrol engine triumphed on the market, noisier and more polluting but allowed you to travel greater distances in less time.

At a certain point the blue thinned out, a clear, precise landscape emerged. Hector found himself on the street of a city, driven by electric cars, at least a hundred years old.” This is how Paolo Aresi , author of science fiction novels, imagines a dystopian future. Yet, this is not fantasy, it is history. Electric cars older than a century exist and drove along the streets of Turin at the beginning of the twentieth century, driven by elegant ladies.

At that time, various workshops were making hybrid and electric-powered cars , technologies that seemed to adapt very well to urban roads but which were soon abandoned when the petrol engine triumphed on the market , noisier and more polluting but which allowed you to travel greater distances in less time.

Since the beginning of the 1860s, there has been talk of applying the first electric motors to wheeled vehicles. The reason is simple, at the time steam vehicles were bulky, expensive and heavy and few could afford a vehicle that required the use of three or four people. Furthermore, they risked colliding with horse-drawn carriages. Compared to the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, the electric engine appeared the most promising, for several reasons. Firstly, because it was a simple technology to use: all you had to do was press a button or pull a lever to activate it.

The internal combustion engine was more complicated, as Davide Lorenzone, curator of the National Automobile Museum , explains : “The ignition was not yet constant, they were noisy and sometimes they exploded. Even finding petrol was almost impossible. The only place where you could buy them was the pharmacy where they provided ten liter cans. There were no filling stations.” Instead, with the electric motor and charged batteries, you could travel the entire city.

An advertisement for an electric car from Turin from the early twentieth century announced that it could travel from 80 to 100 km on a single charge. They were lead batteries and the manufacturing companies gave them the possibility of recharging them in the factory or special panels were sold , which could be installed near homes or companies. As did the textile industrialist Napoleon Leumann who used only hybrid vehicles for his transport.

A major problem of early urban mobility was the noise of steam and combustion engines which frightened carriage horses. Otherwise, electric cars were silent and for this reason they were used as public transport when the first taxi service was born under the masses. Those cars were simple to drive, elegant to admire and looked perfect for the ladies. From a 1906 catalog of «Dora», the Alpignano company that produces electric cars and accumulators, we read: “Electric cars are the best suited for the city, because they do not require too heavy a mechanism for their construction, they are more streamlined and therefore more elegant, they parade silently , and they do not pollute the air with emanations of burnt oil and petrol, therefore rightly preferred by our ladies who can appear splendidly on them during public walks.”

Electric mobility was not only widespread in Piedmont, from the documents in the archive of the Turin Automobile Museum (where some ancient electric cars are on display) it emerges that in Manhattan already in 1910 there were 44 charging stations and some shopping centers even had car charging areas on the ground floor. People thus had the opportunity to charge their cars while doing errands and shopping. The green future of mobility seemed to be sealed, non-polluting and silent cars would make expanding urban centers more livable. Yet, in Turin almost all electric car manufacturers closed their doors between 1915 and 1916. The car manufacturing companies decided to bet all their cards on the petrol engine which had been perfected in the meantime. Engines that respond to the needs of modernity: faster, more performing and which allow you to travel long distances even outside urban centres, where roads increasingly suitable for cars are starting to spread. The internal combustion engine thus takes over and electric car manufacturing companies see no outlets for a technology that was considered obsolete at the time and which appears to us today as innovative.

Davide Lorenzone concludes: “At the beginning of the twentieth century, several factories were founded in Turin that produced electric vehicles and in the first decade of the last century those cars were widely sold. There were also hybrids with a second motor that recharged the battery while the vehicle moved. Nothing was invented, everything was already invented more than 100 years ago.”

AUTHOR

Dario Basile

Electric cars in Turin (computer translation)

©2023. Wallace Bruschweiler. All rights reserved.

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Unintended Consequences: The California Electric Truck Mandate thumbnail

Unintended Consequences: The California Electric Truck Mandate

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

If you own a trucking company that picks up shipments from California ports, you now have to deal with the consequences of a new law designed to reduce your carbon footprint.

Trucking is one of the vital ingredients in our infrastructure that virtually all parts of the economy rely on. About two-fifths of all containerized imports to the US come through one of California’s twelve commercial ports. According to a recent report in National Review, beginning January 1, any trucker doing “drayage” (the technical term for transporting stuff to or from a seaport) in California can only buy zero-emission vehicles, although they can hang on to their existing diesel fleet for a while.

Trucks don’t last forever, however, and evidently the court of wisdom otherwise known as the California legislature decided this was the best way to get truckers used to the additional coming mandate that in 2035, all trucks entering California seaports and intermodal rail yards (where the containers are loaded onto trains) must be zero-emission types.

The ostensible motivation for these laws is to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, of course. And careful analyses do show that over the lifetime of an electric vehicle, even if you include the fossil fuels used in the different types of manufacturing (electric versus internal-combustion) and in producing the electricity for the vehicle, less carbon dioxide results from using electric vehicles. That’s the intended consequence, and unless the law is later modified, it will be achieved.

But the devil is in the details, and some truckers interviewed about the mandate pointed out several unintended consequences that may follow from these laws. For one thing, the number of electric trucks in California will have to go from about 300, where it is today, to around 500,000, and some way will have to be found to charge all those trucks, and to keep them running farther than the alleged 60 miles that the California regulators said was the typical drayage daily mileage. A lot of truckers drive a lot farther than that every day, and if you add several hours a day to charge the trucks, it turns a normal workday into a 20-hour day.

And then there’s the cost. Even if you can find a zero-emission truck that will do the job, it will cost three or four times what a diesel vehicle costs. And one trucker asked what bank will finance such a purchase if you can’t show where you’re going to charge it and how you will work out a schedule that will let you stay in business.

So, if California doubles down on enforcement, we can anticipate something like a gradual strangling of commerce flowing through its ports as the few truckers who manage to jump through the hoops of regulation are all that’s left. And maybe that was what the lawmakers really wanted anyway. If the idealist dream of a zero-emission society were to come to pass in the next couple of years, millions would die of starvation and cold, and those few who are left would be reduced to living a life that would be familiar to a denizen of 1880.

At the very least, essentially shutting down 40% of containerized imports to the US would cause massive supply-chain disruptions that would make what happened during COVID look like a hiccup. If you say no one would let things get that bad, well, we did let things get that bad during COVID, and it can happen again.

I recently came across a true story that should become the paradigm cautionary tale for those who close their eyes to the unintended consequences of legislation.

In England in the mid-1800s, dogs were quite commonly used for transportation. Poor people who couldn’t afford a horse and wagon to carry their goods to market could nevertheless use a dog and a “dog-cart” (not to be confused with the horse-drawn carriage referred to in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales). But in 1841, the recently founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) successfully lobbied to pass a law prohibiting the use of dogs for transportation. In urging this measure, the SPCA cited a few highly publicized instances of cruelty to transport dogs, although it appears that many if not most of the dogs were well-treated. For good measure, a dog tax was also passed around the same time, further discouraging the use of dogs for business purposes.

I can’t be positive, but I suspect that the SPCA members were largely upper-class types who, if they thought ahead at all, imagined all the dogs formerly used for transport would revert to being beloved pets. Think again. According to Stanley Coren, a dog psychologist and historian, when the law took effect it led to something close to a dog holocaust:

“Dreadful massacres of dogs took place all over England when they could no longer legally be used for cartage but were now taxable. In Birmingham, more than a thousand were slaughtered, and similar carnage took place in Liverpool. In Cambridge, the streets were littered with dead dogs. Because these bodies were becoming a health hazard, the high constable of Cambridge arranged a mass burial of four hundred dogs.”

So much for good intentions. The SPCA survived this debacle somehow, and so did the use of dogs for transportation in other parts of the world, but no longer in England.

No one can be certain of exactly what will happen if California enforces their zero-emission truck mandate. But they are meddling with a piece of infrastructure that is crucial to the entire US economy, and if the law has the unintended consequence of disrupting commerce in ways that harm millions of US citizens, those harms should be weighed against whatever essentially unmeasurable good that may eventually come a century or so after California’s greenhouse-gas emissions go down by a few percent as a result of this law. In my view, the law will do a lot more harm than good, and most of the California truckers think so too.

AUTHOR

KARL D. STEPHAN

Karl D. Stephan is a professor of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. This article has been republished, with permission, from his blog Engineering Ethics, which is a Mercator partner site. His ebook Ethical and Otherwise: Engineering In the Headlines is available in Kindle format and also in the iTunes store.

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Like Gulliver, tied down by thousands of of little strings, we lose our freedom one regulation at a time

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EDITORS NOTE: This MERCATOR column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Here’s the climate dissent you’re not hearing about because it’s muffled by society’s top institutions thumbnail

Here’s the climate dissent you’re not hearing about because it’s muffled by society’s top institutions

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

As the Biden administration and governments worldwide make massive commitments to rapidly decarbonise the global economy, the persistent effort to silence climate change sceptics is intensifying – and the critics keep pushing back.

This summer, the International Monetary Fund summarily cancelled a presentation by John Clauser, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who publicly disavows the existence of a climate “crisis.” The head of the nonprofit with which Clauser is affiliated, the CO2 Coalition, has said he and other members have been delisted from LinkedIn for their dissident views.

Meanwhile, a top academic journal retracted published research doubting a climate emergency after negative coverage in legacy media. The move was decried by another prominent climate dissenter, Roger Pielke Jr., as “one of the most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen” – criticism muffled because the academic says he has been blocked on Twitter (now X) by reporters on the climate beat.

The climate dissenters are pressing their case as President Biden, United Nations officials, and climate action advocates in media and academia argue that the “settled science” demands a wholesale societal transformation. That means halving US carbon emissions by 2035 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050 to stave off the “existential threat” of human-induced climate change.

In response last month, more than 1,600 scientists, among them two Nobel physics laureates, Clauser and Ivar Giaever of Norway, signed a declaration stating that there is no climate emergency, and that climate advocacy has devolved into mass hysteria. The sceptics say the radical transformation of entire societies is marching forth without a full debate, based on dubious scientific claims amplified by knee-jerk journalism.

Many of these climate sceptics reject the optimistic scenarios of economic prosperity promised by advocates of a net-zero world order. They say the global emissions-reduction targets are not achievable on such an accelerated timetable without lowering living standards and unleashing worldwide political unrest.

“What advocates of climate action are trying to do is scare the bejesus out of the public so they’ll think we need to [act] fast,” said Steven Koonin, author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

“You have to balance the certainties and uncertainties of the changing climate – the risks and hazards – against many other factors,” he adds.

These dissenters don’t all agree on all scientific questions and do not speak in a single voice. Clauser, for example, is a self-styled “climate denialist” who believes climate is regulated by clouds, while Pielke, a political scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Bjørn Lomborg, the former director of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute, acknowledge humans are affecting the climate but say there is sufficient time to adapt. The dissenters do, however, agree that the public and government officials are getting a one-sided, apocalyptic account that stokes fear, politicises science, misuses climate modelling, and shuts down debate.

They also say it is a troubling sign for scientific integrity that they are systematically sidelined and diminished by government funding agencies, foundation grant-makers, academic journals, and much of the media. Delving into their claims, RealClearInvestigations reviewed a sampling of their books, articles, and podcast interviews. This loose coalition of writers and thinkers acknowledges that the climate is warming, but they typically ascribe as much, if not more, influence to natural cycles and climate variability than to human activities, such as burning fossil fuel.

Follow the science

Among their arguments:

• There is no climate crisis or existential threat as expressed in catastrophic predictions by activists in the media and academia. As global temperatures gradually increase, human societies will need to make adjustments in the coming century, just as societies have adapted to earlier climate changes. By and large, humans cannot control the climate, which Pielke describes as “the fanciful idea that emissions are a disaster control knob.”

• Global temperatures are increasing incrementally, and have been for centuries, but the degree of human influence is uncertain or negligible. Climate sceptics themselves don’t agree on how much humans are contributing to global warming by burning fossil fuels, and how much is caused by natural variability from El Niño and other cycles that can take centuries to play out. “The real question is not whether the globe has warmed recently,” writes Koonin, “but rather to what extent this warming is being caused by humans.”

• Rapidly replacing fossil fuels with renewables and electricity by mid-century would be economically risky and may have a negligible effect on global warming. Some say mitigation decrees – such as phasing out the combustion engine and banning gas stoves – are not likely to prevent climate change because humans play a minor role in global climate trends. Others say mitigation is necessary but won’t happen without capable replacement technologies. It’s unrealistic, they say, to force societies to rely on intermittent energy from wind and solar, or wager the future on technologies that are still in experimental stages.

• The global political push to kill the fossil fuel industry to get to “net zero” and “carbon neutrality” by 2050, as advocated by the United Nations and the Biden administration, will erase millions of jobs and raise energy costs, leading to a prolonged economic depression and political instability. The result would be that developing regions will pay the highest price, while the biggest polluters (China and India) and hostile nations (like Russia and Iran) will simply ignore the net-zero mandate. This could be a case where the cure could be worse than the disease.

• Despite the common refrain in the media, there is no evidence that a gradually warming planet is affecting the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, storms, droughts, rainfall, or other weather events. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has expressed low confidence such weather events can be linked to human activities. Still, “it is a fertile field for cherry pickers,” notes Pielke.

• Extreme weather events, such as wildfires and flooding, are not claiming more human lives than previously. The human death toll is largely caused by cold weather, which accounts for eight times as many deaths as hot weather, and overall weather-related mortality has fallen by about 99 percent in the past century. “People are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before,” statistician and author Bjørn Lomborg has said.

• Climate science has been hijacked and politicised by activists, creating a culture of self-censorship that’s enforced by a code of silence that Koonin likens to the Mafia’s omerta. In her 2023 book, “Climate Uncertainty and Risk,” climatologist Judith Curry asks: “How many skeptical papers were not published by activist editorial boards? How many published papers have buried results in order to avoid highlighting findings that conflict with preferred narratives? I am aware of anecdotal examples of each of these actions, but the total number is unknowable.”

• Slogans such as “follow the science” and “scientific consensus” are misleading and disingenuous. There is no consensus on many key questions, such as the urgency to cease and desist burning fossil fuels, or the accuracy of computer modelling predictions of future global temperatures. The apparent consensus of imminent disaster is manufactured through peer pressure, intimidation, and research funding priorities, based on the conviction that “noble lies,” “consensus entrepreneurship,” and “stealth advocacy” are necessary to save humanity from itself. “One day, PhD dissertations will be written about our current moment of apocalyptic panic,” Pielke predicts.

• The warming of the planet is a complicated phenomenon that will cause some disruptions but will also bring benefits, particularly in agricultural yields and increased vegetation. Some climate sceptics, including the CO2 Coalition, say CO2 is not a pollutant – it is “plant food.”

Curry, the former Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, expresses a common theme among the climate refuseniks: that they are the sane, rational voices in a maelstrom of quasi-religious mania.

“In the 1500s, they used to drown witches in Europe because they blamed them for bad weather. You had the pagan people trying to appease the gods with sacrifices,” Curry said. “What we’re doing now is like a pseudoscientific version of that, and it’s no more effective than those other strategies.’

The climate change establishment occasionally concedes some of these points. No less an authority than the newly appointed head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has urged the climate community to cool its jets: “If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyses people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,” Jim Skea recently said to German media. “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees [centigrade]. It will, however, be a more dangerous world.”

In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee in June, Pielke said human-caused climate change is real and “poses significant risks to society and the environment.” But the science does not paint a dystopian, catastrophic scenario of imminent doom, he added.

“Today, there is general agreement that our current media environment and political discourse are rife with misinformation,” Pielke testified. “If there is just one sentence that you take from my testimony today, it is this: You are being misinformed.”

Doom and gloom

Still, the overwhelming impression conveyed is one of impending disaster, with the menace of global warming rhetorically upgraded in July by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to “global boiling.” Climate scientists announced in July that the planet is the hottest it’s been in 120,000 years, an old claim that gets recycled every few years. Meanwhile, three vice-chairs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of mass starvation, extinction, and disasters, saying that if the temperature rises 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels, “children under 12 will experience a fourfold increase in natural disasters in their lifetime, and up to 14 percent of all species assessed will likely face a very high risk of extinction.”

Many of these predictions are based on computer models and computer simulations that Pielke, Koonin, Curry, and others have decried as totally implausible. Koonin’s book suggests that some computer models may be “cooking the books” to achieve desired outcomes, while Pielke has decried faulty scenarios as “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the twenty-first  century thus far.” Curry writes in her book that the primary inadequacy of climate models is their limited ability to predict the kinds of natural climate fluctuations that cause ice ages and warming periods, and play out over decades, centuries, or even millennia.

Another critique is the use of computer models to correlate extreme weather events to multi-decade climate trends in an attempt to show that the weather was caused by climate, a branch of climate science called climate attribution studies. This type of research is used to bolster claims that the frequency and intensity of heat waves, floods, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events could not have happened without climate change. An example is research recently cited by the BBC in an article warning that if the global temperature rises another 0.9 centigrade, crippling heat waves that were once exceedingly rare will bake the world every two-to-five years.

One question looms: Does a warming climate contribute to heat records and heatwaves, such as those that were widely reported in July as the hottest month on record and taken as overwhelming proof that humans are overheating the planet? The United States experienced extreme heat waves in the 1930s, and the recent spikes are not without precedent, climate dissenters say. Pielke, however,  concedes that IPCC data signal that increases in heat extremes and heat waves are virtually certain, but he argues that the societal impacts will be manageable.

Koonin and Curry say that the global heat spikes in July were likely caused by a multiplicity of factors, including an underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic explosion last year that increased upper atmosphere water vapour by about 10 percent, a relevant fact because water vapour acts as a greenhouse gas. Another factor is the warming effect of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which has shifted to an active phase recently.

Koonin says that greenhouse gas emissions are a gradual trend on which weather anomalies play out, and while it’s tempting to confuse weather with climate, it would be a mistake to blame July’s heat waves on human influence.

“The anomaly is about as large as we’ve ever seen, but not unprecedented,” Koonin explained on a podcast. “Now, what the real question is, why did it spike so much? Nothing to do with CO2 – CO2 is … the base on which this phenomenon occurs.”

Climate dissent comes with the occupational hazard of being tarred as a propagandist and stooge for “Big Oil.” Pielke was one of seven academics investigated by a US Congressman in 2015 for allegedly failing to report funding from fossil fuel interests (He was cleared). A New York Times review of Lomborg’s 2020 book, “False Alarm,” described it as “mind pollution.”

Climate advocates see climate scepticism as so dangerous that Ben Santer, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, publicly cut ties with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory two years ago after the federal research facility invited Koonin to discuss his sceptical book, Unsettled. Santer, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, said allowing Koonin’s views to go unchallenged undermined the credibility and integrity of climate science research. For similar reasons, the IMF postponed Clauser’s July presentation so that it could be rescheduled as a debate.

Another critique: scientists arbitrarily forcing the facts to fit a prescribed catastrophic narrative, often by ignoring plausible alternative explanations and relevant factors. That’s what climate scientist Patrick Brown said he had to do to get published in the prestigious journal Nature, by attributing wildfires to climate change and ignoring other factors, like poor forest management and the startling fact that over 80 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans. Brown publicly confessed to this sleight-of-hand in a recent article in The Free Press.

“This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers,” Brown wrote. “When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula, my papers were rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets.”

These frustrations serve as a reminder that the world has entered what the United Nations and climate advocates call the make-or-break decade that will decide how much the Earth’s temperature will rise above pre-industrial levels. This decisive phase is “unfolding now and will intensify during the next several years,” according to Rice University researchers. “Accordingly, what happens between now and the late 2020s, in all likelihood, will fundamentally determine the failure or success of an accelerated energy transition.”

In response to this call for global action, political leaders in Europe and North America are vowing to reengineer their societies to run on wind, solar, and hydrogen. In this country, California is among a dozen states that have moved to ban the sale of new gasoline-engine cars in 2035, while states like Virginia and North Carolina have committed to carbon-free power girds by mid-century.

In the most detailed net-zero roadmap to date, the International Energy Agency in 2021 identified more than 400 milestones that would have to be met to achieve a net-zero planet by mid-century, including the immediate cessation of oil and gas exploration and drilling, and mandated austerity measures such as reducing highway speed limits, limiting temperature settings in private homes, and eating less meat.

In the IEA’s net zero scenario, global energy use will decline by 8 percent through energy efficiency even as the world’s population adds 2 billion people and the economy grows a whopping 40 percent. In this scenario, all the nations of the world – including China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia – would have to commit to a net-zero future, generating 14 million jobs to create a new energy infrastructure. Nearly half the slated emissions reductions will have to come from experimental technologies currently in demonstration or prototype stages, such as hydrogen, bioenergy, carbon capture, and modular nuclear reactors. Reading this bracing outlook, one could almost overlook the IEA’s caveat that relying on solar and wind for nearly 70 percent of electricity generation would cause retail electricity prices to increase by 50 percent on average and destroy 5 million jobs, of which “many are well paid, meaning structural changes can cause shocks for communities with impacts that persist over time.”

A critique of the IEA’s scenario issued this year by the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a think tank that specialises in oil, gas, and petroleum products, warned of “massive supply shocks” if oil supplies are artificially suppressed to meet arbitrary net zero targets. The report further stated that “if the world stays committed to net zero regardless of high costs – the recession will turn into an extended depression and ultimately impose radical negative changes upon modern civilization.” (Disclosure: The report was commissioned by the RealClearFoundation, the nonprofit parent of RealClearInvestigations.)

Already, societies have fallen behind their emissions reduction targets, and it’s widely understood that fast-tracking net zero is an unattainable goal. Transforming existing energy infrastructures within several decades would require installing the equivalent of the world’s largest solar farm every day, according to the International Energy Agency. Carbon-free energy accounts for only 18 percent of total global consumption, and fossil fuels are still increasing, according to a recent analysis.

The IEA reported this year that investments in oil exploration and drilling have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, while global coal demand reached an all-time high last year. Globally, nations are spending more on clean energy than on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are still vital to economic growth; for instance, the IEA noted that 40 gigawatts of new coal plants were approved in 2022, the highest figure since 2016, almost all of them in China.

“We live in this world of exaggerated promises and delusional pop science,” Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist and policy analyst, told The New York Times last year. “People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic.”

A government push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting back on livestock farming has led to public protests in the Netherlands, a conflict over resources that Time magazine predicts will spread elsewhere: “This may be just the beginning of much wider global unrest over agriculture. Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not just gradual reform, but a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system.”

Climate dissidents say what happened in the Netherlands is a foretaste of the political backlash that is inevitable when net-zero policies start becoming implemented and people have to travel across state lines to buy a gasoline-powered car.

“The urgency is the stupidest part of the whole thing – that we need to act now with all these made-up targets,” Curry said. “The transition risk is far greater than any conceivable climate or weather risk.”

To Koonin, these challenges indicate that the catastrophic climate narrative will collapse when put to the test of practicality and politics. The more sensible route, he said, is a slow-and-steady approach.

“There’s going to be a deep examination of science and the cost-benefit issues,” he said. “We will eventually do the right thing, but it’s going to take a decade or so.”

This article has been republished from RealClearInvestigations.

AUTHOR

JOHN MURAWSKI

Biden Regime Unleashes 50-Year Mining, Oil Drilling Ban Across Thousands of Acres in New Mexico thumbnail

Biden Regime Unleashes 50-Year Mining, Oil Drilling Ban Across Thousands of Acres in New Mexico

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By The Geller Report

Trump 2024. The only choice to save America.

Biden admin unleashes 50-year mining, oil drilling ban across thousands of acres in New Mexico

Biden admin says actions intended to protect wildlife and cultural resources in region

By: Thomas Catenacci, Fox News ,September 18, 2023:

Texas Public Policy Foundation VP Chuck DeVore reacts to Biden talking about the ‘climate crisis’ while surveying Florida’s Hurricane Idalia damage on ‘Fox & Friends.’

The Biden administration proposed to block of thousands of acres from future oil drilling or mining in northern New Mexico in an effort to protect Native American lands.

According to the Department of the Interior (DOI), the proposal would ban new mining claims and oil and gas development across more than 4,200 acres in Sandoval County, New Mexico, located north of Albuquerque. If finalized and implemented, the action would remain in place for up to 50 years.

“Today we’re responding to call from Tribes, elected leaders, and community members who want to see these public lands protected,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “We look forward to hearing more from the public to inform decisions about how activities, like gravel mining, may impact these lands, including the important cultural and natural resources.”

“We recognize the importance of the Placitas area, both for Tribal Nations and for the local community who visit and recreate in this area,” added Melanie Barnes, the state director of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) New Mexico office.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: Here’s the climate dissent you’re not hearing about because it’s muffled by society’ top institutions

RELATED TWEET:

I WILL TOTALLY OBLITERATE THE DEEP STATE!!! pic.twitter.com/IOKpU6rxL9

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) September 21, 2023

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Fear-Mongering UN Chief Wants $100B to Combat ‘Climate Chaos’ thumbnail

Fear-Mongering UN Chief Wants $100B to Combat ‘Climate Chaos’

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By Discover The Networks

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres opened the annual U.N. General Assembly debate on Tuesday – where over 100 heads of government are expected to speak – demanding $100 billion from “developed countries” to fight allegedly deadly “climate chaos.”

“No more dirty production. No more fake solutions. No more bankrolling climate denial,” he declared.

Guterres’ call for countries to invest $100 billion in “developing country climate action” and another unspecified amount in the U.N.’s “Green Climate Fund” follows the publication of a report last week revealing that his organization’s claims to carbon neutrality are largely fraudulent, based on a system known as “carbon credits” where the U.N. pays off allegedly “green” projects to offset its own emissions.

Many of those projects, non-profit news agencies Mongabay and the New Humanitarian found, are of dubious value to combating climate change and some actively hurt their local environments.

U.N. agencies emit pollution “roughly equal to the annual emissions of 1.5 million gasoline-powered cars,” the agencies found.

Guterres nonetheless portrayed the UN as a leader in the fight against “climate chaos,” a phrase he used repeatedly throughout his speech, and which the fear-mongering globalist called “the most immediate threat to our future.”

Global Warming / Climate Change

In May 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent,” he added. Three days earlier, President Obama tweeted that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” What is the basis of these claims?…

To learn more about Climate Change, click here.

RELATED ARTICLE: Pope to Bill Clinton: Let’s Work Together to Stop ‘Ecological Catastrophe’

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Keep Virginia’s lights on! CFACT submission on natural gas generating plants thumbnail

Keep Virginia’s lights on! CFACT submission on natural gas generating plants

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By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Wind and solar are wholly inadequate for Virginia’s energy needs.  CFACT makes plain the hard math that explains Virginia’s need to generate abundant, efficient electricity.

To: Virginia State Corporation Commission
Re: PUR-2023-00066
From: Craig Rucker, President
CFACT
1717 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Suite 1025
Washington, D.C. 20006
202-559-9036
Via SCC comment portal

Comments of CFACT regarding Dominion Energy’s 2023 IRP and their need for additional gas fired generating capacity during the 15 year planning period

Introduction

In their latest IRP, Dominion Energy argues that they will need to add some gas-fired generating capacity during their 15-year planning period. We support this expansion. Several lengthy comments have been filed in opposition to their proposal. We believe they are misguided. In actuality, Dominion must not just add what they propose, but add considerably more gas-fired capacity to their operations. This is because the amount of battery storage the company will need to reliably make their proposed renewable energy expansion possible is far greater than they currently have planned.

The economics are clear. The required storage is prohibitively expensive. Thus, gas-fired backup is a better alternative as it is far less costly. Moreover, given the much higher capacity factor and low cost of gas-fired capacity, it would be more cost effective to use fewer renewables. This is especially true of the offshore wind capacity, which is a serious threat to whales and other marine life. Offshore wind should not be built.

These issues are discussed briefly below. Additional analysis by Dominion is called for to address them properly.

Grossly inadequate storage

Dominion’s preferred option, Option B, calls for 2,370 MW of battery storage in the planning period. MW are the battery discharge rate, not the storage capacity. Assuming these are standard 4-hour batteries, the storage capacity is 9,480 Mwh.

This is an extremely small amount of storage, nowhere near enough to back up the proposed increase in renewables. A simple analysis makes this clear. Figure 1.1.1 projects an increase in DOM Zone summer peak of over 10,000 MW.

Dominion will likely see load increases of 5,000 or more, possibly often. This load is supposed to be met using renewables and batteries. This isn’t likely to happen. Consider the simple case of a 12-hour night with low wind fulfilling that load. The storage requirement is 60,000 MWh, over six times the proposed storage capacity. Even if the batteries had a 10-hour capacity, they would not come close to meeting the need.

Even worse, this simple case is far from worst likely to occur. Multiple cloudy, hot and cold days with low wind are common in Virginia. Detailed historical analysis will be needed to correctly estimate the likely maximum required storage capacity, and it will certainly be in the hundreds of thousands of MWh.

Even assuming huge battery price reductions, this much storage would be prohibitively expensive. Gas-fired backup power is a better option.

Dominion has indicated it plans to meet some of this need with imported energy. But, all the neighboring utilities are pursuing a similar dependence on renewables. The spatial extent of protracted low wind cloudiness with high load is often very large, including all the states near Virginia. Therefore, it is very likely that energy will not be available to import during these episodes. In fact, Dominion made this very point in its 2022 IRP Update. A much better path than relying on out-of-state electricity will be for the company to expand its gas-fired generating capacity.


Low projections of load growth

Dominion says the large projected load growth in the IRP is mostly due to new data centers rather than the electrification of other energy uses. However, the load growth from electrification will also be very large under present policies. A great deal of gas-fired generation will be required to meet this additional load.

The reality is complex, but if we keep it simple enough, one can readily see the stark general picture.

To begin with, consider electrification of gasoline usage, most of which is for cars and light trucks. According to EIA, Virginia’s estimated 2021 gasoline consumption is around 440 trillion Btu. The conversion is 3,412,000 btu = 1 MWh. So that is about 130 million MWh in gasoline energy. Also, in 2021 Virginia’s electric power generation is 93.5 million MWh. Thus, the gasoline energy is 1.4 times the total power generation. If it takes this much energy to power cars and light trucks in the Old Dominion, then it becomes necessary to build a new generation capacity that is almost one and a half times the Commonwealth’s present generation to make the transition. We have seen no plan that even begins to address this issue seriously.

Of course, a real analysis, which Dominion should do, would get very technical. For example, car engines are only around 40% efficient. One might argue that only 40% of that 130 million MWh, or 52 million, is needed to run the electric version. That is still well over half of the present generation. But the electric power and electric car system is also far from 100% efficient. There are line losses, storage losses, motor losses, etc. But the bottom line holds true: if 52 million MWh has to be used, then a lot more has to be generated. And this is just with respect to gasoline. The present policy goal is to electrify as much fossil fuel use as possible. Natural gas use is huge. EIA says Virginia’s 2021 consumption was about 700 trillion Btu or almost twice as much as gasoline, and many gas uses are efficient. Distillate oil, including diesel and heating oil, is roughly another 200 trillion Btu. Even coal is around 70 trillion Btu.

Therefore, widespread electrification could easily double the load increase from that projected for the planning period in the IRP. Many new gas-fired generation will be needed to meet that load. Dominion needs to include this case in its IRP.

Offshore wind is expensive, redundant, and environmentally destructive

Instead of building new gas-fired generating capacity to backup renewables, it will be far more cost-effective to use gas as a primary energy source. Having gas capacity sit idle simply because the wind is blowing or the sun is shining for part of the day is redundant and expensive. Dominion should analyze this issue.

The case of offshore wind is particularly extreme. Dominion projects 3040 MW of new wind in all five options, mostly offshore, on top of the 2,600 or so MW already in process. The total cost is projected to exceed $8 billion per 1,000 MW or over $45 billion. This for a technology that seldom produces full power and sometimes produces none at all, including during periods of peak load.

Moreover, the projected cost of offshore wind projects has increased dramatically in recent months, on the order of 50% at this point. It is likely that the IRP needs to be redone to take such huge increases into account.

In addition to this exorbitant cost, offshore wind has been implicated in numerous whale deaths — including the extremely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. Strangely, the IRP does not include this issue.

IRP Appendix 5L is a five-page list of the many Environmental Regulations that Dominion is scrutinized under. On page 194, in a section called “Wildlife”, there are just three entries. These entries are all about the endangered Atlantic Sturgeon, threatened by hot water from nuclear power plants. There is no mention of the Marine Mammals Protection Act harassment authorizations, even though the present offshore wind construction and operation is waiting for one. They cannot start the offshore portion of the project without it. Also not mentioned are the crucial Environmental Impact Statement and BOEM approval of the project.

This is preposterous, as the threat to whales is clear. The project creates an intense noise wall that forces the whales to go around, either to the East or the West.

Immediately to the East lies the westernmost lane of the very busy coastal ship traffic. To the West lies the equally busy coastal barge traffic. Both are deadly to the species.

It seems the project was deliberately located where there is the least shipping traffic. This would make sense if it were not for the whales and other marine mammals. As it is the project closes  the low shipping corridor, which the whales undoubtedly use. Being hit by ships is the leading cause of death for whales, and the placement of wind turbines in these waters will facilitate more such collisions.

In summary

CFACT supports Dominion’s construction of new gas-fired power plants. The company will need a great deal of new gas-fired generating capacity to meet its vastly increased base load that is projected over the planning period. Many factors and drivers involved are not included in the present IRP, and Dominion needs to address them properly. In the meantime, however, given all these factors, it would seem building more gas-fired capacity is both a proper and responsible course to set.

AUTHOR

CFACT Ed

CFACT — We’re freedom people.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Lawsuit: ‘Green Greed’ Behind Lahaina Deaths thumbnail

Lawsuit: ‘Green Greed’ Behind Lahaina Deaths

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By Hawaii Free Press

News Release from Bottini & Bottini Inc. (bottinilaw.com)

On September 11, 2023, BOTTINI & BOTTINI, INC. and TAMASHIRO SOGI & BONNER filed the first lawsuit seeking to hold the Board of Directors of Hawaiian Electric liable for the tragic loss of life and property due to the Maui Fire on August 8, 2023.

The case — Rice v. Celeste A. Connors et al., Case No. 1CCV-23-0001181, is pending in Honolulu, Hawaii in the First Circuit court.

The new complaint alleges that between 2019 and 2022, Hawaiian Electric invested less than $245,000 on wildfire-specific projects on the island. Instead of spending necessary funds to prevent fires caused by its equipment, Hawaiian Electric instead spent millions of dollars towards efforts to achieve a 100 percent renewable energy goal, which earned the Company bonuses that the Company’s executives used to increase their own compensation. Defendant Seu, CEO of the Company, was paid 32 times the median compensation of all employees in 2022.

The members of Hawaiian Electric’s Board of Directors were also well aware of the need to adopt and implement a power-shutoff system, as San Diego Gas & Electric and PG&E had done years before, but failed to do so. Darren Pai, a spokesperson for Hawaiian Electric, admitted that the Company did not have a formal power shutoff plan at the time of the Maui fire. The complaint also alleges that the Defendants new about the connection between passing hurricanes and wildfires. In 2020, researchers from the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center established a causal relationship between fires on Maui and O‘ahu to winds from Hurricane Lane.

The complaint alleges that the Defendants breached their fiduciary duties by causing Hawaiian Electric to haul away fallen poles, power lines, transformers, conductors and other equipment from near a Lahaina substation starting around Aug. 12, 2023, before investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) arrived on scene. One of the attorneys for the shareholders, Addison Bonner of Tamashiro Sogi & Bonner, said: “The Defendants’ actions may have violated national guidelines on how utilities should handle and preserve evidence after a wildfire and deprived investigators the opportunity to view any poles or downed lines in an undisturbed condition before or after the fire started.”

Frank A. Bottini, of Bottini & Bottini, a co-counsel for the shareholders, said: “Rather than spend its customer’s money to improve infrastructure maintenance and safety, the Board of Directors of Hawaiian Electric funneled ratepayers’ money to boost their own profits and compensation. This pattern and practice of favoring profits over safety left Hawaiian Electric vulnerable to an increased risk of a catastrophic event such as the Maui fire, which was the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history and the deadliest U.S. fire in over a century.”

The complete complaint can be downloaded from the link below.

PDF: (2023-09-11) Conformed Verified Shareholder Derivative Complaint.pdf

SA: HEI board accused of skimping on safety

NOTE: If PUC finds HECO management negligent, ratepayers cannot be made to foot bill for rebuild.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Lahaina: “I will rebuild on my land”

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“How ’bout give the people their homes back.”

Rebuild? Give More Rights to Lahaina Property Owners

EDITORS NOTE: This Hawaii Free Press column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Plans To Target America’s Industrial Backbone With New Climate Crackdown: REPORT thumbnail

Biden Plans To Target America’s Industrial Backbone With New Climate Crackdown: REPORT

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By The Daily Caller

If President Joe Biden wins a second term, his administration aims to undertake even more climate initiatives that would target key industries, according to The New York Times.

Biden, in a potential second term, would target industries he views as heavily polluting, including steel mills, cement plants, factories and oil refineries, according to the NYT. The new green initiatives could threaten his chances in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, though, as steel and cement manufacturers in swing states who are often unionized could turn on him after hearing about his climate plans for their industry.

“If you are seen as imposing debilitating regulations on heavy industry that employs large numbers of people, you’re not only going to get a backlash from manufacturing, but labor as well,” David Axelrod, chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns, told the NYT. “How to do that without looking like you are stabbing these industries in the back, or in the front for that matter, is a real political challenge.”

Biden’s plan to go after industrial emissions involves subsidizing new technologies that he believes would cut down on factories’ carbon footprint, including wind and solar power to create green hydrogen to power steel mills and cement production methods that do not release carbon dioxide when heating limestone, according to the NYT. The second half of his plan involves imposing tariffs on steel, cement and aluminum based on their carbon emissions.

Since Day One, the Biden-Harris Administration has delivered on the most ambitious climate and conservation agenda in history.

This week, the Administration advanced that commitment with new actions to protect lands and wildlife in the Alaskan Arctic. pic.twitter.com/mMmarO2p8A

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 8, 2023

The Biden administration has already pledged $370 billion to climate initiatives through the $750 billion spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation includes a multitude of subsidies for domestic manufacturers of green energy technologies.

The move to place new restrictions on industry follows the president’s goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by the year 2050. Biden has pumped huge subsidies into the electric vehicle industry to meet this goal, aiming for half of all new cars to be electric by 2030.

In addition to electric vehicles, the president has also targeted power plants in an attempt to encourage greener energy sources like solar and wind power, creating new Environmental Protection Agency regulations that have yet to be finalized that would compel the phaseout of coal-fired power plants, according to the NYT. The Biden administration has also put restrictions on oil and gas production through tightening requirements related to methane emissions.

“Apparently skyrocketing gas and energy prices weren’t enough for Biden, he wants to raise the prices on building and infrastructure costs and put hard working Americans further into debt,” Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, told the NYT. “Biden will not be elected to a second term — American families can’t afford it.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

WILL KESSLER

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE:

DAVID BOSSIE: It’s Not Really Joe Biden On The Ballot Next Year. It’s Someone Much Worse

Kamala Harris Thinks Government Must Enforce Equal Outcomes – Also Known as Communism

The greatest threat to America’s power grid is not what you think

Reaching Aggressive 2050 Climate Targets Could Cost Nearly $75 Trillion, Analysis Finds

Texas ‘Stop 30×30’ Summit Opposes Biden’s ‘Radical’ Environmental Plan – Texas Scorecard

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden Wants to Shrink Marine Sanctuary That Protects Endangered Whales to Accommodate Wind Energy Factory Owned By Dem Donor thumbnail

Biden Wants to Shrink Marine Sanctuary That Protects Endangered Whales to Accommodate Wind Energy Factory Owned By Dem Donor

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By The Geller Report

In case you were still in the dark how evil and full of shit these Democrat environ-mentalists are……

The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary is a biodiversity hotspot, with a range of habitat types from coastal estuaries to deep sea canyons, and migratory paths frequented by marine mammals such as dolphins and whales.

The Democrats would burn it all down.

Just like mining for EV batteries (lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and graphite) destroys the environment. Solar panels and wind turbines never degrade – they are put in landfills where they will sit in eternity.

And inefficient offshore wind turbines are decimating the whale population and use tons of oil to operate and kill whales.

Biden Wants To Shrink Tribal Marine Sanctuary to Accommodate Wind Energy Factory Owned by Dem Donor

By: Susannah Luthi, Washington Free Beacon, September 12, 2023

President Joe Biden wants to shrink a Pacific Ocean marine sanctuary meant to protect endangered whales in order to accommodate offshore wind energy factories—one of them owned by a major Democratic donor.

The Biden administration late last month proposed cutting about 1,400 square miles of ocean and coastline from an Indian tribe’s proposed national marine sanctuary to make room for wind turbine infrastructure. One of these factories would belong to Invenergy, whose founder and CEO Michael Polsky has given more than $400,000 to Democrats since 2016. His company shelled out $2.4 million to lobby the White House, federal agencies, and Congress this year.

The proposal reflects a conflict between efforts to fight climate change and those to preserve natural habitats. The Biden administration’s proposal would benefit green energy companies and generate renewable energy, but environmental groups have sounded the alarm on such projects noting that they kill birds and whales—the very wildlife that the marine sanctuary seeks to preserve. The proposal also reflects the green energy industry’s status as a major player in the Democratic Party. Biden has invested billions of taxpayer dollars into renewable energy projects backed by liberal billionaires, enriching them in the process.

Polsky’s major contributions from the past several years include a total of $72,000 to the House Democrats’ campaign committee in 2020 and 2022, and $35,500 to the Democratic National Committee in 2016—the same year he poured $75,000 into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Polsky has also donated to Republicans and Invenergy’s political campaign committee, but of the roughly $500,000 he has contributed to political causes since 2016, more than $400,000 has gone to Democrats according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

While Polsky did not contribute to Biden’s presidential bid in 2020, Invenergy employees gave more than $120,000 to his campaign, federal contribution records show.

This isn’t the first time Democrats have rewarded Polsky’s energy companies. In 2016, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose campaign Polsky funded helped secure him a $1.2 billion natural gas plant, the Free Beacon reported at the time. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Invenergy received more than $20 million in taxpayer-funded grants.

The Northern Chumash tribal council first petitioned for a 7,600 square mile marine sanctuary in the region in 2015, years before the Biden administration announced it wanted massive offshore wind turbine development in the same vicinity. The wind turbines will be built just outside the sanctuary’s northwestern boundary.

The feds’ latest proposal to cut into the marine sanctuary would slash about 29 miles of coastline and a total of about 1,400 square miles from the preserve as it was originally conceived, the tribal council said. Its final boundaries will be determined after a public comment period that ends Oct. 25. Meanwhile, the Biden administration already awarded ocean leases to Invenergy and two other energy corporations late last year, although they haven’t started construction.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—which is in charge of creating the Chumash marine preserve—noted in proposing its alternative boundary to allow for industrial development that “certain concentrations of this infrastructure may not be compatible with a national marine sanctuary.”

The administration’s proposed revision must undergo public comment before being finalized. Regardless, the wind turbines could sabotage the preserve’s goals by killing off the whales, birds, and other marine life that it is supposed to protect. Environmentalists have warned that offshore wind factories on the East Coast may be killing whales—concerns that the Biden administration has condemned as “misinformation” even though more than 70 whales have died since December.

A spokesperson for the Department of Interior division overseeing the offshore wind development did not respond to questions about the turbines’ potential harm to whales but deferred to NOAA for queries about the sanctuary.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED TWEET:

Let’s talk about cobalt mining, Mehdi.

Children in the Congo earn less than $10 / USD a day mining cobalt for your precious EV batteries.

Windmills use tons of OIL to operate and kill whales.

Solar panels and wind turbines never degrade – they are put in landfills where… pic.twitter.com/7YZHESD7pv

— Sissy Cheek (@VikingQueen888) September 11, 2023

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Greatest Threat to Science is from Within thumbnail

The Greatest Threat to Science is from Within

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By John Droz, Jr.

A Progressive tips his hand about how they are trying to undermine Science.

One of Lincoln’s most powerful speeches is the Lyceum Address. The key message is that we should not be so worried about overseas enemies, as corruption from within is our most serious threat…

“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?– Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

I thought of this as I read the interview of one Stanford professor of another. The title is “How To Beat Bad Science.” If that wasn’t enticing enough for me, the person being interviewed (Dr. Jonathan Osborne) was identified as a “science education expert.”

I thought wow! Since I’m a K-12 science education expert, this should be right up my alley, in my lane, fit me like a glove, etc. However, it was a major disappointment.

Interesting note: At no time in the interview does Jonathan define “Bad Science!” Reading between the lines here, the implied definition is when scientists advocate anything that goes against government technical policies (like the net negative consequences for school children to wear masks for COVID-19 — e.g., here).

Ignoring the significant deficiency of the missing key definition, Jonathan says that for students to beat “bad science” they need to learn three skills: 1) be aware of conflicts of interest, 2) evaluate the source’s qualifications, and 3) more rigorously question those who go against consensus!

Point one would evidently be to look for one of the thousands of scientists who are funded by the fossil fuel industry — even though in 40+ years I have yet to find any.

Point two might be to ignore any evidence presented by a scientist, not a specialist — e.g., “only climatologists are qualified to evaluate the claims in climate science.” (This is to deceive the public, as real Scientists know that any Scientist can legitimately comment on the adherence to scientific principles by those in any field of Science.)

To reinforce the surprising third point he goes on to say that: The whole goal of science is consensus! OMG. Here I’ve been laboring for over four decades under the assumption that the goal of Science was: to give us a better understanding of our material existence. Now I find out that The whole goal of science is consensus!

I thought that politics was the field that focused on consensus, not Science. Maybe Jonathan wants us to equate real Science with political science. I’ve written about that problematic deception before (e.g., here), as it is a plague of our times.

It also occurs to me that if the objective of scientists is to agree with other scientists, how can we possibly make any societal progress? If scientists live and work in an echo chamber, nothing substantial will ever change. What sense does that make?

Further, I was always under the impression that the great scientists in history were outstanding because they looked at things differently — which almost always was against the current consensus. Apparently Jonathan does not understand that.

……….

As misguided as the above are due to what is said in that interview, arguably the worst parts are about what is not said. For example, there is not a word of advice for students to learn and apply the Scientific Method. It has been around in some form or other for some 4000 years — and used by people like Newton, Curie, Einstein, etc. Seems that if it was helpful for those giants of Science, it might be useful to K-12 students. But not a word in this interview is advocating the Scientific Method!

Why would Progressives hate the Scientific Method? Because almost every Progressive technical policy (e.g., industrial wind energy) that is subjected to the Scientific Method, fails. That left them two choices: a) advocate technical policies that are actually science-based, or b) get rid of the Scientific Method. They chose b.

Worse is the glaring omission of Critical Thinking. Why wouldn’t the top advice of an “expert science educator” start out with the importance of Critical Thinking? In fact, it could be argued that his first two points would be assumed subsets of a genuine Critical Thinker’s methodology.

But his third point is where the S hits the fan. Having a default position supporting consensus (i.e., conformity) is the exact opposite of Critical Thinking! In the subject area of Science, K-12 students are supposed to be taught to question everything — especially consensus!

Why are Progressives opposed to Critical Thinking? Because their worst fear is to have a citizenry of Critical Thinkers! They want compliant citizens who don’t ask questions, and who go along with whatever policies are proposed, regardless of their scientific sensibility. Think COVID-19 policies.

The more I thought about these two glaring omissions (the Scientific Method and Critical Thinking) the more it struck me that these exactly reflect the anti-Science mentality conveyed in the NGSS and its basis, the Framework, — now used by some 45 states in their K-12 education. (See my Education Report for more details.)

On a whim, I decided to check out a hunch I had, so I just looked up who were the Progressive authors of the Framework (which became the NGSS). Here they are.

Scroll down and — mirabile dictu —there is Jonathan Osborne! Who woulda thunk?

This should convey a VERY clear idea of the mentality of the select Progressive clique that wrote the K-12 Science Standards — again, now used in some 45 states!

Please read about my success in reversing some of that in North Carolina, plus a subsequent post about how committed citizens can do the same in their state…

PS — I emailed both of these co-conspirators and stated my primary objection. If I get anything of value back, I’ll post it here. So far zip, so don’t hold your breath!

©2023. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

Biden Energy Secretary’s EV Clown Show thumbnail

Biden Energy Secretary’s EV Clown Show

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By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Check out this unbelievable story at CFACT’s Climate Depot.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm thought a showboat electric car road trip would be great PR.  Wrong!

NPR (of all outlets) covered the mess that resulted, and our Marc Morano picked it up at the Depot:

Granholm approaches a charging station to charge the Cadillac Lyriq she was riding during a four-day road trip through the southeast early this summer. The electric vehicle had charging problems due to an “isolated hardware issue,” Cadillac says. But Granholm’s team encountered plenty of not-so-isolated problems too. … Not every vehicle in Granholm’s caravan was electric. The Secret Service, for instance, rode in large traditional SUVs. …

Her advance team realized there weren’t going to be enough plugs to go around. One of the station’s four chargers was broken, and others were occupied. So an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy. That did not go down well: a regular gas-powered car blocking the only free spot for a charger?

In fact, a family that was boxed out — on a sweltering day, with a baby in the vehicle — was so upset they decided to get the authorities involved: They called the police.”

So let’s get this straight.

Granholm’s luxury EV didn’t work right.  There weren’t enough chargers to go around, so they blocked one with a gas powered vehicle, denying a charge to a family with a baby on board who called the police on the Secretary of Energy!

It turns out that in Georgia it is perfectly legal to park an efficient gas-powered vehicle at an EV charging station, but this wasnt the PR the Biden Administration was looking for.

They sent some of their EV entourage down the road looking for slower chargers, and eventually found a place for the young family who’s battery was running out.

Fortunately none of the vehicles caught fire.

These are just a few of the issues that have left consumers rejecting electric vehicles in favor of less expensive, more efficient, long-range, quick fill-up gasoline vehicles.

Business Insider reports that, “New car inventory on dealer lots is sitting at about a 54 days’ supply, according to Cox Automotive. But for electric vehicles, that number is almost two times as much, with 92.2 days’ supply at dealerships —  up 343% from a year ago.”

Leaving consumers free to choose the vehicles of their choice, however, is not a consideration for the EV zealots in the Biden Administration, nor in California.

California even went so far as to issue a rule banning sales of gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035.

Secretary Granholm’s EV clown show gives us all a taste of the frustrations in store if the Left succeeds in forcing us to drive the cars they choose for us.

Assuming, of course, they allow us to have cars in the first place.

For nature and people too.

©2023. CFACT. All rights reserved.

DAVID BLACKMON: Every Problem With The Texas Grid Is Caused By Government Policy thumbnail

DAVID BLACKMON: Every Problem With The Texas Grid Is Caused By Government Policy

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By The Daily Caller

Grid managers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) were forced to move to stage 2 emergency measures Wednesday evening when record-high power demand threatened to overload the system as solar power declined with the setting sun and the state’s fleet of wind generation delivered lower-than-expected inputs. A check of ERCOT’s data at 7:29 CT, a few moments following its stage 2 emergency notice showed that thermal generation consisting of natural gas and coal-fired units was accounting for more than 82% of overall system generation.

The Daily Caller reported that Wednesday’s emergency, combined with forecasts of 100+ degree high temperatures across most of the state Thursday and Friday, led Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to issue an emergency order allowing ERCOT to exceed emissions limits to continue to input increased thermal inputs to preserve the integrity of the grid. While Granholm’s declaration is commendable, it is key to point out that the arbitrary emissions limits imposed by DOE on the Texas and other regional grids play a large role in creating the lack of grid stability in the first place.

There is no reason other than such irrational regulations why a state so incredibly rich in energy resources should ever experience capacity shortages on its power grid. The same holds true for every other regional grid across the nation. This is entirely a government-created situation. It’s a truth no one wants to discuss, though, so the conversations invariably go off on tangents that, while relevant, are not the actual cause of the problem.

A report in the Dallas Morning News from Thursday afternoon provides a great example. The headline reads “Texas power emergency hinged on stranded wind farm supplies.”  The report details an explanation by former ERCOT interim director Brad Jones that Wednesday’s emergency came about due to a single overloaded transmission line designed to transport electricity generated by South Texas wind farms to the Dallas/Fort Worth area in North Texas.

“The grid was facing the potential of congestion overload on the line coming from South Texas toward Dallas,” Jones said during an interview. “All the wind that was on in the south was struggling to get to Dallas to help meet demand. So right in the middle of this, ERCOT had to reduce generation in the south to prevent that line from being overloaded.”

Well, ok, that makes sense, as far as it goes. But nowhere in its report does the Morning News question why Texas must transmit power generated by wind farms sited hundreds of miles away to the DFW area, enduring a high percentage of line loss, when that market sits smack dab in the middle of the Barnett Shale, one of America’s biggest natural gas reserves. Wouldn’t it make more sense just to use that prodigious natural resource to generate electricity from power plants sited right in the region?

We should also ask why Texas has allowed those wind farms to be constructed right in the middle of the migratory pathways for hundreds of species of birds, creating an annual slaughter of untold thousands of them. Did the state have any real need for the power these wind farms generate outside of arbitrary targets set by state and federal governments? The answer to that question is clearly and unambiguously “no.”

The Texas grid is in no way unique here. The simple fact of the matter is that every problem related to stability and reliability of every power grid in this country has its germinating cause based in government targets, mandates, subsidies, and other policies. All these policies distort markets, create perverse incentives, and ignore what should be the main goal of any power grid, which is to protect and preserve the safety of the people in the service area.

But these are questions few in the media want to ask, because they don’t fit the prevailing narrative. And they are questions no one in government wants to answer, since honest answers to them invariably trace the causation back to their own policies and actions.

The inevitable outcome is a never-ending crisis that no one ever effectively addresses. None of this will get any better until this dynamic changes.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

DAVID BLACKMON

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Authorities Use Water Cannons On Eco-Activists, Detain Nearly 2,400

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden Regime Cancels Trump-Era Oil and Gas Leases in Alaska thumbnail

Biden Regime Cancels Trump-Era Oil and Gas Leases in Alaska

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By The Geller Report

The Democrats mean to kill the engine of America.

Biden canceled all of the Alaska drilling on Federal land. At the same time, he stopped allowing liquid natural gas from being transported by train.

That leaves the only mode of transportation by trucking. About 2 months ago the largest trucking company went out of business:

Yellow, one of the nation’s largest freight and trucking companies, announced it is shutting down, leading to one of the largest mass layoffs in recent history and potential shipping cost increases. The company is in bankruptcy just three years after getting a $700 million loan from taxpayers.

So that is going to create a massive supply chain issue of liquid natural gas which means your utility bills as well as the price of gas is going to skyrocket.

I want to make sure that you understand what is about to happen so you can prepare.

Biden canceled all of the Alaska drilling on Federal land. At the same time he stopped allowing liquid natural gas from being transported by train.

That leaves the only mode of transportation…

— Wendy Patterson (@wendyp4545) September 8, 2023

Biden cancels Trump-era oil and gas leases in Alaska: ‘Like a victim under this administration,’ governor says

Biden admin abruptly cancels several gas, oil leases in Alaska

Gov. Dunleavy blasts Biden: ‘2024 can’t come soon enough’

The governor of Alaska is accusing the president of violating the law after Biden’s administration pulled the plug on Trump-era oil leases.

“If he’s willing to break this law, surely there’s going to be others. And once again, Alaska right now feels like a victim under this administration. And the country is going to feel like a victim here if they haven’t already,” Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy said on “Kudlow” Thursday.

Alaska’s state agency is expected to challenge the decision in court, after Biden canceled several oil and gas leases issued in early 2021 to an Alaskan state economic development agency on Wednesday.

The Department of the Interior (DOI) rescinded the seven 10-year leases — spanning 365,775 acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) — held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) and supported by a wide range of stakeholders, including lawmakers and Native Alaskans. The leases were issued by the Trump administration in one of its final actions.

The Department of the Interior (DOI) rescinded the seven 10-year leases — spanning 365,775 acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) — held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) and supported by a wide range of stakeholders, including lawmakers and Native Alaskans. The leases were issued by the Trump administration in one of its final actions.

“This makes absolutely no sense from any perspective unless your goal is to drive up the cost of oil and gas so much that it makes certain renewables cheaper,” Dunleavy told host Larry Kudlow.
Mike Dunleavy on Alaska oil leases

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy said if Biden’s “willing” to break the state’s oil and gas laws, “surely there’s going to be others” the president violates, on “Kudlow” Thursday. (Fox News)

The DOI also issued a proposal to block off 13 million acres of land across the National Petroleum Reserve (NPR), an area in North Slope Borough, Alaska, set aside by Congress for resource development, and an additional 2.8 million of acres in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska, from oil and gas leasing.

“This is just two of 55 actions that the federal government under this administration is perpetrating against Alaska right now,” Dunleavy said, while adding that Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran are “laughing” at Biden’s energy policy.

“They’re laughing together at the United States of America,” the governor said. “I can’t find anywhere in, really the history of nation-states or empires, where they worked at hobbling themselves to such a degree that’s happening currently with this administration. So 2024 can’t come soon enough for most of us.”

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden killed oil and gas drilling in Alaska

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

DAVID BLACKMON: Energy Companies Want Nothing To Do With Biden’s Botched Offshore Wind Projects thumbnail

DAVID BLACKMON: Energy Companies Want Nothing To Do With Biden’s Botched Offshore Wind Projects

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By The Daily Caller

Is investor interest in committing billions of dollars to new offshore wind projects starting to wane in the United States? If the results of last week’s heavily-touted Biden administration lease sale in the Western Gulf of Mexico are any indication, that could be the case.

The auction resulted in a single tract of 102,480 acres offshore Louisiana attracting a winning bid $5.6 million from German wind company RWE. Two tracts offshore Texas that were also offered attracted no bids at all. That low bid level is a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars in bids received for leases off the northeast Atlantic coast in February, 2022.

Several factors could be at play in creating the lack of interest in this Gulf of Mexico sale, perhaps most prominent among them the fact that, since wind developers began conducting seismic testing for those Atlantic projects last fall, the dead carcasses of more than 60 baleen whales have washed up onto the beaches of New Jersey and New York. While the Biden regulators claim no cause-and-effect connection exists between the developments and whale deaths exists, a rising chorus of critics begs to disagree.

Former California gubernatorial candidate and climate activist Michael Shellenberger serves as executive producer of a new documentary released in August that claims to have scientifically established a direct connection. “The film documents surprisingly loud, high-decibel sonar emitted by wind industry vessels when measured with state-of-the-art hydrophones,” Shellenberger recently wrote at the New York Post. “And it shows that the wind industry’s increased boat traffic is correlated directly with specific whale deaths.”

The fisheries industry is also concerned about the negative impacts offshore wind development will have on its continued ability to conduct its business. Meghan Lapp, a spokesperson for The Center for Sustainable Fisheries, testified to a congressional hearing in May that the undersea cabling and other infrastructure of the wind developments will make it impossible for offshore wind and the fishing industry to co-exist. She also noted that the federal agency NOAA is failing to enforce its own regulations governing incidental takes of marine mammals as they relate to offshore wind in the same way the agency has consistently enforced them related to offshore oil and gas development.

RWE told reporters that the offshore Louisiana tract was attractive for several reasons. One such reason is the state’s strong existing coastal port and supply chain infrastructure, which together constitute one of the most key foundations of Louisiana’s economy.

Another is, of course, subsidies, invariably a crucial consideration for the rent-seeking wind industry. Unlike Texas, Louisiana has a state goal to install 5 GW of offshore wind infrastructure by 2035. One can only wonder if the state’s Republican-dominated legislature will allow that goal to stand once members are made fully aware of the likely negative impacts on Louisiana’s own robust fishing industry, which provides thousands of jobs to residents in the southern third of the state.

That is not to mention potential negative impacts on the Gulf of Mexico’s own populations of both sea mammals and wide variety of migratory birds. Every spring, from March through May, literally millions of migratory birds traverse the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, as the chart here compiled by Biden’s own Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) shows, the bird migration path known as the Mississippi Flyway flows directly through the very same area where RWE plans to construct its gigantic wind towers with blades longer than a football field.

In other slides from this same presentation, BOEM says that more than 2.1 billion birds from 395 separate species traverse the Gulf of Mexico each year. Importantly, a footnote for one of the slides reads “*This estimate only applies to nocturnal migrants with a northward trajectory, thus is a conservative estimate.”

You just cannot make this stuff up. You really can’t.

The question becomes whether the same Biden regulators who don’t appear to be properly enforcing regulations governing incidental taking of sea mammals will make any real effort to quantify the carnage when these mammoth wind blades become aviary Cuisinarts once the projects go active.

Could any or all of this help explain the extremely low investor interest in this particular lease sale? It sure seems possible.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

DAVID BLACKMON

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

RELATED ARTICLE: DAVID BLACKMON: Should We Believe The Media Hype Linking Hurricane Idalia To Climate Change?

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘ALL CARS ARE BAD’: Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Equity Advisers thumbnail

‘ALL CARS ARE BAD’: Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Equity Advisers

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By The Geller Report

Cars are racist.

‘ALL CARS ARE BAD’: Pete Buttigieg’s Equity Advisers Want You To Stop Driving

Transportation secretary’s equity committee aims to bring ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ to America’s infrastructure

By: Washington Free Beacon, September 1, 2023

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is appointing a group of “leading experts” to advise him on “transportation equity,” including several who argue that cars cause climate change and promote racism and therefore should be phased out. Buttigieg earlier this month appointed 24 new members to his Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity, an Obama-era body that Buttigieg is reviving after the Trump administration scrapped it. Included on the committee is Andrea Marpillero-Colomina, a “spatial policy scholar” who says “ALL CARS ARE BAD” given that they cause “a myriad of environmental issues and conditions.” Another Buttigieg appointee, self-described “transportation nerd” Veronica Davis, argued in an August essay that cars perpetuate “systemic racism” and are therefore “the problem” in America’s transportation system.

Buttigieg’s appointments—and his decision to revive the equity advisory committee—reflect the Biden administration’s whole-of-government emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. President Joe Biden shortly after taking office in 2021 issued an executive order that called on federal agencies to “pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all.” Under the order, agency heads must conduct an “equity assessment” to identify policies that create “systemic barriers” in minority communities.

The committee will advise Buttigieg on “promising practices to institutionalize equity into agency programs, policies, regulations, and activities” and plans to meet for the first time this fall, according to Buttigieg’s August announcement. Marpillero-Colomina told the Washington Free Beacon that she is not “advocating for a complete erasure” of cars but intends to push Buttigieg to move America away from its reliance on private motor vehicles.

“My interest in being on the [equity committee] is to raise the question and push the Department of Transportation to really think about: What are some equitable, environmentally sustainable, economically beneficial, and feasible alternatives to policy that is car-centric?” she said in an interview. “How can we reimagine streets to prioritize people instead of cars? How can we create streets that are inclusive of modes other than cars?”

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Greenhouse Gas Abatement that Makes Some Sense: Methane-Sniffing Drones thumbnail

Greenhouse Gas Abatement that Makes Some Sense: Methane-Sniffing Drones

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Bad old carbon dioxide is not the only gas that contributes to the earth’s net heat balance by trapping heat in the atmosphere. Another commonly used gas — methane, the chief constituent of natural gas — is more than 25 times as effective as CO₂ in trapping heat. Fortunately, methane’s lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter: about 12 years as opposed to the hundreds of years it takes for CO₂ to go away. So doing something about methane emissions promises to have much more of a near-term effect than anything we do with CO₂.

Enter Percepto, a company founded in Israel that recently moved to Austin, Texas, to market their services of sniffing out emissions of methane and 14 other gases using artificial intelligence (AI)-equipped drones. Their target market is refineries and petrochemical plants, where methane and other hydrocarbon gases can escape in leaks that can take days or weeks to find by technicians walking around with hand-held detectors.

Percepto’s system, as outlined in an article that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, consists of a drone equipped with a wavelength-selective camera. Most hydrocarbon gases emit and absorb characteristic infrared wavelengths, and a cleverly designed imaging spectrometer can present the user with a photograph showing a cloud of methane made as visible as a cloud of red smoke from a cherry bomb firework.

Finding and fixing such a leak is not only good safety practice. In 2024, the Biden administration will begin to implement the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, a combination of over a billion dollars of funding to pay for programs like Percepto’s, combined with steeply increasing fines for emitting methane and other greenhouse gases. Ariel Avitan, co-founder of Percepto, saw a business opportunity in providing large firms with a means of tracking leaks that is faster and more comprehensive than the older methods. So now, his firm is poised to help track down leaks and other sources of methane that have previously gone undetected.

Negligible effect

Percepto is to be congratulated for seeing a market niche and exploiting it. Methane itself is not a particularly valuable gas. When the cost of transporting it from a wellhead to the market exceeds what it can be sold for, producers typically flare it by burning it at the source. The government is coming down hard on flares, too, which may lead to other expensive issues, as even flares don’t burn 100 percent of the gas they consume.

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t waste or release any methane at all through oil and gas operations. But even if we had a magic wand to do that, it would decrease the world’s budget of methane release by only 14 percent.

According to the International Energy Agency in Paris, France, the most profligate source of methane emissions worldwide is a natural one. Methane is emitted in wetlands by natural decomposition, and unless we are willing to drain all the wetlands, there’s nothing we can do about the 32 percent that nature produces. The next largest source is agriculture, at 23 percent — think flatulent cows (there aren’t any other kind). Oil and gas come next at 14 percent, then coal operations and something labelled as “waste,” which probably means methane produced by landfills.

If anyone thinks that we’re going to stop global warming by fixing all our methane leaks, this means that there is a disappointment in store. But in the current state of climate rhetoric, few people are going to think beyond the one step that can be summarised as “Greenhouse gases bad — must stop at any cost.”

As I have mentioned elsewhere, the climate has slowly been warming and the ocean levels slowly rising (we’re talking millimetres here) since the early 1800s. And now that CO₂ levels have risen as much as they have, whatever effect that’s going to have on the climate will be with us for the next couple of hundred years, even if we stopped 100 percent of all human activity that emits CO₂, including breathing. And stopping the breath of the 8 billion or so humans on the planet is exactly what some “deep ecologists” would like us to do — the folks who regard humanity as some kind of evil infestation of an otherwise pristine Earth.

Stoking fears

The sensible thing to do — the thing that would let most of those 8 billion people enjoy some of the benefits of modern technology that we in the US have enjoyed for many decades — is to figure out how to adapt to the relatively minor and certainly gradual changes that global warming is going to make, while picking low-hanging fruit with regard to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. If there’s a six-foot hole in a dike in one place and a three-inch crack in another, the only reasonable thing to do is go after the six-foot hole first. And if you can more easily deal with the water over the dike than fix the dike, maybe that’s the best thing to do.

Unfortunately, the debate — or more accurately, accepted doctrine — about global warming has left such notions behind. Most world leaders and their cadres of experts have bought into the easily propagated notion that if we don’t do really drastic and painful things about greenhouse gas emissions right now, we’re all going to die horrible deaths as the globe imitates an egg in a frying pan.

The fact that highly reputable people such as Steven Koonin have shown this oversimplification to be mostly false has no effect on something that has become the mass-psychology equivalent of a kind of hypochondria. It’s like a patient that comes to a doctor with a pimple on his nose and says it’s cancer and he’s sure it’s going to kill him.

We would try to talk reason to such a person, but it’s easier than trying to talk sense to an international community that has bought into a severely distorted picture wholesale, and created huge institutional incentives to keep the delusion going.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad Percepto saw their opportunity and took it. People have a right to profit from laws that, however misconceived, do some incremental good. And it’s certainly a good thing to stop methane leaks, even if it costs millions of dollars to do so. But one can still question the reasoning behind the laws, and wonder whether succeeding generations (if there are any) will scratch their heads over the strange panic about climate change that we are currently enduring.

AUTHOR

KARL D. STEPHAN

Karl D. Stephan is a professor of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. This article has been republished, with permission, from his blog Engineering Ethics, which is a MercatorNet partner site. His eBook Ethical and Otherwise: Engineering In the Headlines is available in Kindle format and also in the iTunes store.

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Climate scientists and experts declare ‘there is no climate emergency’ thumbnail

Climate scientists and experts declare ‘there is no climate emergency’

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By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. In particular, scientists should emphasize that their modeling output is not the result of magic: computer models are human-made. What comes out is fully dependent on what theoreticians and programmers have put in: hypotheses, assumptions, relationships, parameterizations, stability constraints, etc. Unfortunately, in mainstream climate science most of this input is undeclared.

To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in.  This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. We should free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models. In future, climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science.

There is no climate emergency

A global network of over 1609 scientists and professionals has prepared this urgent message. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

Warming is far slower than predicted

The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models

Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.

CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.

Global warming has not increased natural disasters

There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.

Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities

There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.

Epilogue

The World Climate Declaration (WCD) has brought a large variety of competent scientists together from all over the world*. The considerable knowledge and experience of this group is indispensable in reaching a balanced, dispassionate and competent view of climate change.

From now onward the group is going to function as “Global Climate Intelligence Group”. The CLINTEL Group will give solicited and unsolicited advice on climate change and energy transition to governments and companies worldwide.

* It is not the number of experts but the quality of arguments that counts

World Climate Declaration plus all signatories in pdf

World Climate Declaration AMBASSADORS

NOBEL LAUREATE PROFESSOR JOHN F. CLAUSER / USA
NOBEL LAUREATE PROFESSOR IVAR GIAEVER NORWAY/USA
PROFESSOR GUUS BERKHOUT / THE NETHERLANDS
DR. CORNELIS LE PAIR / THE NETHERLANDS
PROFESSOR REYNALD DU BERGER / FRENCH SPEAKING CANADA
BARRY BRILL / NEW ZEALAND
VIV FORBES / AUSTRALIA
DR. PATRICK MOORE / ENGLISH SPEAKING CANADA
JENS MORTON HANSEN / DENMARK
PROFESSOR LÁSZIÓ SZARKA / HUNGARY
PROFESSOR SEOK SOON PARK / SOUTH KOREA
PROFESSOR JAN-ERIK SOLHEIM / NORWAY
STAVROS ALEXANDRIS / GREECE
FERDINAND MEEUS / DUTCH SPEAKING BELGIUM
PROFESSOR RICHARD LINDZEN / USA
HENRI A. MASSON / FRENCH SPEAKING BELGIUM
PROFESSOR INGEMAR NORDIN / SWEDEN
JIM O’BRIEN / REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
PROFESSOR IAN PLIMER / AUSTRALIA
DOUGLAS POLLOCK / CHILE
DR. BLANCA PARGA LANDA / SPAIN
PROFESSOR ALBERTO PRESTININZI / ITALY
PROFESSOR BENOÎT RITTAUD / FRANCE
DR. THIAGO MAIA / BRAZIL
PROFESSOR FRITZ VAHRENHOLT / GERMANY
THE VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY / UNITED KINGDOM
DUŠAN BIŽIĆ / CROATIA, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA, SERBIA AND MONTE NEGRO

Read the declaration at CLINTEL.org

Read the PDF version with list of signers

Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation that operates in the fields of climate change and climate policy. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok. CLINTEL’s main objective is to generate knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of climate change as well as the effects of climate policy.

CFACT Ed

CFACT — We’re freedom people.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

New Study Shoots Down Biden’s Claim that Transition to Green Energy will Create Jobs thumbnail

New Study Shoots Down Biden’s Claim that Transition to Green Energy will Create Jobs

/in , , , , /by

By The Geller Report

The grim reality is that the transition to green energy will be catastrophic for the economy, and if it is fully followed through, will reduce the United States to Third World status.

The Biden regime seems intent on making life as difficult as they possibly can for Americans, and aiding and enabling America’s foes in every way.

That’s what the green agenda will do: China, a much greater polluter than America ever was, will take the place of the U.S. in the global economy as we reduce ourselves to a backwater and former great power.

New Study Complicates Biden’s Claims That His Green Agenda Will Be Great For The Working Man

by Nick Pope, Daily Caller, August 21, 2023:

A recently-published study complicates President Joe Biden’s claims that his massive green agenda will allow for a “just transition” for blue-collar fossil fuel workers to land on their feet in his envisioned green economy.

Biden has routinely asserted that his anti-fossil fuel “Bidenomics” agenda will usher in a new green manufacturing and jobs boom in the U.S. However, the study, authored by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Wake Forest University and labor market analytics firm Lightcast, found that less than 1% of workers leaving fossil fuel-related jobs transition into green energy jobs, and that the supposed benefits of such a transition are unlikely to be evenly distributed across the country, geographically or socioeconomically.

“I came to office determined to move away from the trickle-down economics and to focus on the middle class.  Because I said when the middle class does well, everybody does well — everybody does well,” Biden said during a Wednesday speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, touting the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), his signature climate and healthcare bill, on its one-year anniversary.

“Folks, as I’ve said for a long time — for a long time: when I think climate, I think jobs,” Biden said in the speech. “Not a joke. When I think climate, I think jobs.  That’s the future.”…

While some states exhibit low rates of transition into green jobs, states like California have above average rates of green energy job adoption, the study asserted. To arrive at their findings, the authors analyzed 130 million online employment profiles, which represented about 300 million job-to-job transitions….

Read more.

AUTHOR

Atlas Shrugs

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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