Natural gas and propane serve as excellent low-cost fuels for heating and cooking. Last year, natural gas usage grew faster than renewables in the United States. But advocates of green energy policies would eliminate gas for heating and cooking.
According to the US Department of Energy, since 2007, US consumption of natural gas increased by 31 percent, rising from 23 to 30 percent of US primary energy consumption. Gas displaced coal as the preferred fuel for electrical power plants. This is the primary reason why US carbon dioxide emissions fell 13 percent, the most of any major nation. Environmental groups call for society to “electrify everything.” Their plan would eliminate all forms of hydrocarbon combustion, such as gasoline- and diesel-fueled vehicles, and natural gas and propane used for heating and cooking. These would be replaced by plug-in electric vehicles, heat pumps, and electric stoves, grills, and water heaters. Green energy advocates want us to use electric appliances that run off the grid, increasingly powered by wind and solar energy, rather than natural gas and coal.
But the trends appear to be going the other way. Last year, from 2017 to 2018, renewable energy sources only increased from 8.6 to 8.7 percent of US energy consumption. Between those two years, natural gas consumption rose from 28.7 to 30.6 percent of US energy needs.
US residents like their gas appliances. Natural gas furnaces tend to be lower cost than heat pumps for homes in northern states. Burners on gas stoves boil water faster than stoves that use electric coils. Propane provides excellent low-cost energy for rural locations not connected to the gas line network. And we all like our propane barbeque grills.
Since people prefer gas appliances, the green movement must resort to bans to force people to eliminate hydrocarbons. In July, Berkeley, California became the first US city to ban natural
gas appliances in new single- and multi-family homes. Since then, the California cities of Menlo Park, San Jose, and Santa Monica also enacted bans. Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Seattle, and other cities are considering natural gas bans.
Nations and cities in Europe plan to ban cars using internal combustion engines and diesel fueled-vehicles. Green energy policies require coercion. This electrification trend is demanded in the name of fears about human-caused global warming. But there isn’t the slightest evidence that bans on hydrocarbon fuels and vehicles, if enacted, will have a measureable effect on global temperatures.
Consumers, maybe it’s time to push back against foolish environmental policies before you lose your gas appliances.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business, and public policy and author of the book Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.
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Modern transportation—a miracle under attack
Exclusive: Steve Goreham stresses impact of attempt to ban petroleum-fueled vehicles
By Steve Goreham
Modern transportation is amazing. Each day, millions of people fly, drive or are transported across our world for business, pleasure or to see distant family members. These trips, which are powered by petroleum-based fuels, were all but impossible a century ago. But today, many of our leaders call for elimination of hydrocarbon-fueled transportation.
Between 1840 and 1860, more than 250,000 people traveled by wagon train from Independence, Missouri, to the West Coast on the Oregon Trail. Horses and oxen carried the settlers on this 2,000-mile, six-month journey. Disease, attacks by Native Americans and run-overs by wagons claimed the lives of more than 15,000 travelers. Today, a family can make this same journey in a few days in the safety of their air-conditioned van.
Throughout most of history, traded goods were carried by camel, wagon and sailboat. Although world trade increased throughout most of human history, the value of global exports in 1900 was only about $10 billion in today’s dollars.
Since 1900, world merchandise trade skyrocketed to $19.7 trillion per year in 2018, a gain of almost 2,000 times. Each day, trucks, trains, ships and planes transport more than 100 million tons of freight. Petroleum fuel powers more than 90 percent of this cargo.
Trains belching smoke typified early hydrocarbon-fueled transportation. But over the last 50 years, humanity has all but eliminated dangerous pollutants from vehicle exhaust. Environmental Protection Agency data show that U.S. vehicles now emit 99 percent less common pollutants (carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particles) than the vehicles of 1970.
The only remaining emissions from most engines are water vapor and carbon dioxide. But carbon dioxide (CO2), a harmless, odorless, invisible gas people exhale and plants use in photosynthesis, has been demonized.
Last week, 200 celebrities attended a Google-sponsored climate change conference near Palermo on the island of Sicily in Italy. Movie stars, business executives and royalty traveled by private jet, yacht, helicopter and limousine to this exotic location to discuss how humans are destroying the climate.
Dozens of articles criticized the hypocrisy of the extravagant travel by these elites and the large release of CO2 emissions. But aviation fuel powers 99 percent of commercial air travel and almost all of the other vehicles, leaving no practical alternatives.
Zach Wichter declared that air travel is now “going electric” in a New York Times article last month. But the only example he could cite was a plan for an experimental hybrid aircraft to be deployed in Hawaii that burns aviation fuel as the primary propulsion with batteries as a backup.
Jet fuel has a specific energy of 43 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg). The best lithium-ion batteries deliver a specific energy of only about 0.9 MJ/kg. Electric engines are more efficient, but jet fuel engines still have an energy advantage of almost 20 times compared to batteries.
Gasoline and diesel-powered automobiles are a modern miracle taken for granted. The average family of four can travel 400 miles in comfort on a $50 fill up. Internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles also hold a 20-times energy density advantage over batteries. This is energy available to power SUVs and small trucks, a growing share of demand in the US, China and much of the world.
Plug-in battery vehicles suffer from the weaknesses of high cost, short driving range, small carrying capacity, a lack of charging stations and expensive battery packs that must be replaced during the vehicle life. And who wants to wait 30 minutes for a recharge, even if one can find a charging station?
Yet governments now plan to force people to buy electric cars and even to ban traditional cars. Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Scotland and several other nations recently announced intentions to ban ICE vehicles during the next two decades. Battery electric vehicle sales are growing, but still captured only about 1.5 percent of world markets in 2018.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg announced that she will take a sailboat to the next world climate conference in Santiago, Chile, in December 2019. Her decision not to take an aircraft may save CO2 emissions, but will turn a one-day trip into two weeks of travel each direction.
Electric utilities across the world are now required by laws to urge customers not to use electricity, the product they produce. If climate fears continue, look for airlines and cruise ship companies to be required to urge consumers not to use their services as well.
As Cardinal George Pell of Australia remarked, “Sometimes the very learned and clever can be brilliantly foolish, especially when seized by an apparently good cause.”
Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business and public policy and author of the book “Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.”
Also see Americans being Misled by the climate change cabal of Cook, Oreskes, Lewandowsky and Maibach by David Middleton here. See more on Oreskes here and many more here.
Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
See how CEI, AIE and Mark Perry UMich and Carpe Diem showed the alarmist/media record is perfect (100% wrong) in the 50 major claims made since 1950 here.
Here is another example of one that should be, of course jumped on by house democrats all too anxious to impose a Green New Deal.
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WE COULD HAVE A HUGE PERMAFROST PROBLEM:
A new report - published Monday in the scientific journal Nature - finds melting permafrost in the Arctic could actually be putting more carbon into the air than it is storing as a carbon sink. And the accelerated melting of that frozen ground in the winter could lead to an additional 27 billion tons of carbon emissions through 2100, equal to the emissions from 260 million cars each year.
What’s more is those numbers aren’t yet accounted for in global carbon budgets at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and elsewhere.
‘There are a lot of surprises that are happening in the Arctic,” Dr. Sue Natali, a researcher with the Woods Hole Research Center (an environmental advocacy group not to be confused with the more credible Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution or WHOI) and an author on the study, told lawmakers in an on-the-record briefing Monday with fellow researcher Jennifer Watts.
“I was working in the Arctic this summer and it was 90 degrees Fahrenheit” Natali added. “The ground was cracking, literally places where you foot was falling through the ground.”
The briefing, hosted by Democratic climate and environment subcommittee chairman Paul Tonko and select climate committee chairwoman Kathy Castor, allowed a rare glimpse into interactions between policymakers and researchers that typically happen behind closed doors.
“The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that we must make dramatic greenhouse gas reductions as soon as possible,” Tonko said, introducing the briefing.
But translating the science into policy is difficult: Scientists and policymakers in many ways speak different languages about ambition, uncertainty, and political will. There’s not much Natali and Watts could tell Tonko and Castor beyond U.S. climate policy needs to be more aggressive.
“I think we need to ramp up ambition and there’s really no other way,” Natali said. “Sooner is better. Today’s better than tomorrow. Ten years ago would have been even better.”
Tonko said the new science helps make the case for House Energy and Commerce Democrats’ push toward a 2050 goal of a 100% net-zero carbon economy. The committee Democrats announced that vision in June.
The researchers, though, also urged policymakers to fund more long-term climate research. That’s the only way to get rid of scientific uncertainty, Watts said.
“Data is messy, but the more observations that agree, the more model simulations that agree, that gives us more confidence in what we are seeing,” she added.
Reducing scientific uncertainty also means policymakers would be better prepared and less money would be spent trying to avoid the worst effects of climate change, Natali said.
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Dr. Don Easterbrook, a geologist and author and a real expert commented:
There are several major objections to their permafrost opinions about climate:
1. CO2 does not cause significant climate change--the evidence is conclusive (see Easterbrook, 2019). It doesn’t matter how much CO2 is released from permafrost.
2. Historic records show that Arctic temperatures follow the global trend. Temps were higher in the 1930s than at present. Temps recently have been cooler, not warmer.
3. We just entered a Grand Solar Minimum. This has happened 6 times in the last 1000 years and every time resulted in severe cooling. We’re likely to see more, rather than less, permafrost for the next several decades.
Dr. Craig Idso of CO2 Science and Lead author of the voluminous NIPCC series added:
A number of studies refute the initial contention when you include longer timeframes. Upon initial warming, more CO2 is released from melting permafrost. However, upon continued warming, plants begin to grow and sequester carbon. After a handful of years or so, the amount of carbon stored from the new vegetative growth offsets the initial CO2 that was released. This is a non-problem.
Inside Sources (10/21/19) column: “The cost of the Green New Deal may hit consumers too hard to make it through the U.S. Congress, even if Democrats sweep the 2020 elections. But get ready for federal litigation racking up legal bills for taxpayers. On Wednesday, a U.S. House Oversight subcommittee will host a hearing, “Examining the Oil Industry’s Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change.” A hearing like this featuring “Squad” members U.S. Reps. Ayana Pressley and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez - fresh off the latter’s endorsement of Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders - should make for quite a show....But this week’s hearing will also advance another strategy being pursued by green extremists, one already responsible for costly legal bills to taxpayers across the country. Based on the hearing’s witnesses, it appears that if Democrats win the White House, they will push forward with partisan climate litigation targeting energy companies, prosecuted by the federal government and paid for by taxpayers.”
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The Climate Strikers Are Completely Unhinged
If you’ve ever spent much time in New York, you know that it can be weather-challenged: very hot in the summer, and very cold in the winter. But September is almost always a month of near-perfect temperatures, and this year has been no exception. Nevertheless, the so-called “Climate Strike” movement chose last Friday, September 20, as the date for their big day of demonstrations.
The high temperature was an ideal 77 deg F (25 deg C). Estimates of the number of protesters that turned out range (according to the New York Times) from 60,000 (NY Police Dept.) to 250,000 (organizers). The message of the speakers was, of course, that we are in the midst of a climate crisis that must be addressed immediately by drastic and coercive government action. It seems that the organizers and leaders of the demonstrations, let alone a goodly number of the participants, have turned themselves purple with anger over unverifiable predictions of barely-perceptible future temperature increases. From the Times:
Rarely, if ever, has the modern world witnessed a youth movement so large and wide, spanning across societies rich and poor, tied together by a common if inchoate sense of rage.
Let me assemble some of the words that were used by these people. I suppose that they somehow think that this kind of rhetoric might be convincing to the normal people who were just trying to enjoy a beautiful late summer day. Is any of it persuasive to you?
From the ubiquitous teen-ager Greta Thunberg, quoted in Time:
“This is an emergency. Our house is on fire… We will do everything in our power to stop this crisis from getting worse.... Why should we study for a future that is being taken away from us. That is being sold for profit. Everywhere I have been the situation is more or less same. The people in power, their beautiful words are the same.... The number of politicians and celebrities who want to take selfies with us are the same. The empty promises are the same. The lies are the same, and the inaction is the same.”
If that is not crazy enough for you, try these lines, also attributed to Thunberg (although I seriously doubt that she wrote them), appearing in a “Climate Resistance Handbook” put out in advance of the event by 350.org:
I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. Around the year 2030, we will be in a position where we set an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.
And let’s not focus all of our attention on the wild-eyed Ms. Thunberg. How about something from another speaker at the New York event, Vic Barrett? That’s the Vic Barrett previously best known as one of the plaintiffs in the litigation dubbed by the Manhattan Contrarian as the “Stupidest Litigation in the Country,” namely the case from Oregon seeking to have the federal courts declare a “constitutional right” to a “stable climate,” and then use that declaration to enjoin all production and use of fossil fuels. Here are some of the words of Ms. Barrett (video at the link):
We are being pushed from the lands that we settled, the lands that my family has inhabited for generations. That land will be under water in a few decades if we continue on the path we are on. . . . My future is being stolen from me. . . . Everything that I am is slipping into the sea. . . . My people face extinction. Indigenous lands all over our planet are being flooded, poisoned and destroyed.
Yes, we are to feel “panic""over our impending “extinction.” Supposedly, this is the conclusion of “science.” Really? Meanwhile, here’s a new source of relevant data that I have not previously highlighted at this site. NOAA has a special and relatively new U.S.-only surface temperature series, called USCRN (US Climate Reference Network) based on only 114 of its very best ground thermometers, with state-of-the-art equipment and pristine siting, relatively evenly spaced around the country. By contrast to the other series from NOAA and NASA, this one has no “homogenization” adjustment thrown in by the climate activists in the bowels of the agencies. The series only goes back to 2005. Here’s what it shows:
No warming at all. By the way, did you notice those very warm months in 2006 and 2012, with temperatures some 4 degrees above normal for the entire U.S.? Neither did anybody else. So why again is a projected 2 or 3 degree temperature increase something to panic about? And, if you believe the business about greenhouse gas emissions controlling the climate, shouldn’t we be seeing a nice steady year-by-year increase in temperatures as CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increases? You do find that in the NOAA and NASA adjusted series - but all of the increase is in the adjustments. Here, in a series that consists only of raw data from pristine stations, there is no increase.
Finally, for today’s entertainment, check out this report from Climate Change Dispatch on the climate strike demonstrations that took place in Washington, DC. Those demonstrations featured massive blocking of traffic at multiple locations, plus dumpster fires, in addition to gratuitous travel by car and plane by thousands of people. In other words, it couldn’t be more obvious that these people don’t care at all about the amount of carbon emissions they cause. From Climate Change Dispatch:
Thanks to these brave warriors fighting for their precious Mother Earth, thousands of cars are spewing tons of exhaust into the air that wouldn’t have if these enviro-crybabies had real jobs. Here’s an official rundown of all the traffic that’s been blocked.
Somebody here has become completely detached from reality, and I don’t think it’s me.
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See 120 years of failed climate catastrophe forecasts here. and an updated Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions here.
Remember all the scary headlines after a warm week in July in Alaska (after storms removed ice early from Bering Sea (which had a record high ice cover in 2012)… don’t expect to see this in the enviro media.
Cordova, AK - Lowest September Temperature on record
September 22, 2019 by Robert Felix
Coldest September temp in at least 110 years, maybe more. Not just for the day, but for the entire month.
Intense Arctic cold descended into southern Alaska last week, setting a new all-time monthly Lowest Minimum Temperature.
According NOAA, the mercury plunged to -11.7 C (11 F) at Cordova Airport on Thursday, Sept 12, annihilating the previous record low of -6.7 C (20 F) set back in 1972.
This is the coldest temperature for the month of September ever recorded at the station since it began operating in 1909. Cordova Airport sits at an elevation of 9.4 m (31 ft)
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The AP headlined after July: Alaska’s average temperature in July was 58.1 degrees (14.5 Celsius). That’s 5.4 degrees F (3 Celsius) above average and 0.8 degrees (0.4 Celsius) higher than the previous warmest month of July 2004, NOAA said. They opined the worse is yet to come.
Here is a plot of Anchorage July temperatures. Note the spike and warming starting in 2013.
What was never really covered except on places like Weatherbell and WUWT was the incredible cold in January 2012, when it was warm in the lower 48. Note how Anchorage was more the 14F below normal in January 2012!
Anchorage set an all-time snow record of 134.5 inches;, topping the old record of 132.6 inches set in 1954-1955. In nearby Valdez, an amazing 437.9 inches fell, 114 inches (35%) above normal.
With the cold came deep sea ice - a record for the Bering Sea.
Note this past winter saw a dip below normal as strong north Pacific storms drove the ice out to sea. The lack of sea ice helped sea temperatures warm and favor the warmth on land - reaching 90F in July in Anchorage.
The environmental or funding chasing scientists and media play ambulance chasers - with every extreme a sign of a demise of life as we know it maybe even in a dozen years. When inconvenient weather occurs like record cold and snow or record low areal coverage of drought they either ignore it or blame it on man-made climate change. They have made it an non-falsifiable hypothesis - whether it is hot or cold, wet or dry, stormy or not - we are to blame. And as MIT’s Jonathan Gruber told the media, the public is ‘stupid’ and will believe what we say with the help of the all too compliant media. That is the philosophy of the elitists and globalists. They have indoctrinated our young people to poison the well for the future.
Jack Webb in Dragnet long ago explained how indoctrination and even technology may have corrupted thinking of many of our younger generation.
Celebrities, politicians, and leaders across the globe are divided on the dangers of climate change and the best ways to address the problems arising from it.
In light of the vast differences, it would be wise for any observer to understand the finer details of the climate debate, the origins of claims, and the history of it, before they begin to trust these voices.
Given man’s high proclivity to bias, it is necessary to inspect the climate issue through the lenses of currently prevalent biases. Sackett in his 1979 paper defined bias as “any process at any stage of inference which tends to produce results or conclusions that differ systematically from the truth.”
The climate change issue, like any other issue of public interest, has been subject to numerous biases. Here are just a few and why they have misled us in a big way.
Confirmation Bias: The act of referencing only an opinion or evidence that fuels one’s pre-existing view, while dismissing any contrary evidence or opinion - no matter how valid.
This bias became very evident during the past two decades, when the computer climate models used by climate scientists failed dramatically in their climate forecasts. Biased scientists and politicians completely ignore the failure.
Almost all of the current policy discourse in climate change is entirely dependent on these faulty models. Instead of admitting a grand failure in their predictions, the scientists and political leaders continue to use these faulty forecasts for policy decisions.
There are people with confirmation bias in the other end of spectrum as well. Also known as climate deniers, they deny climate change entirely. They don’t believe in the gradual yet safe warming that has been scientifically proven to be prevalent since the 18th century.
Groupthink Bias or Bandwagon Effect: For the sake of avoiding conflict, people may agree upon a given perspective without critical evaluation. The society as a whole may agree upon theories that deviate from the truth.
This is the biggest of all biases to haunt the climate change issue and has proved to be the biggest hurdle for the progress of climate sciences.
Just as in the days of Galileo, we have swathes of academic and political institutions that suppress critical assessment of their dominant doomsday perspective. Groupthink bias has provided the fodder for their attitude to suppress dissenting voices.
A classic fallout of this bias is the recent school strike by children across the globe. None of the children have graduate level education in climate sciences, and they merely chose to adopt the groupthink mentality without critically evaluating the issue at hand - a task for which they lack the adequate factual knowledge and theoretical understanding anyway. Some children did try to question the whole school strike movement, but they were quickly reprimanded and put to silence.
The Bias of Clustering Illusion: This bias occurs when we look innately for patterns in random data, eventually making conclusions based on a small sample set or pattern, rather than assessing them in context with the entire data.
A denier is likely to pick short-term cooling patterns and use them as reasons to say that the world is not warming. Likewise, a climate alarmist is prone to exaggerate short-term warming patterns and incorrectly use them as evidence for dangerous warming.
Unfortunately, clustering bias has become very common in the climate debate.
The short-term warming in 2016 - caused by the El Nino weather pattern - was considered an indicator of extreme long-term warming by the alarmists, and the mainstream media eventually promoted it as a sign of climate doomsday.
However, in reality, the 2016 warming occurred in the midst of a 20-year period (1999-2019) when the rate of warming slowed down globally and was even acknowledged by top climate scientists.
The alarmists are guilty of the clustering bias not just during the El Nino of 2016, but throughout the past few years when they cherry picked many such short-term weather patterns and deliberately termed them signs of climate apocalypse.
For example, the alarmist misinterpretation about the dangers of Arctic sea ice melting falls under the clustering bias. Yes, the Arctic has been melting ever since the end of Little Ice Age in the 17th century, but the historical climate data - for the past 10,000 years, the Holocene climate period -indicate that Arctic ice is at one of its highest levels.
Also falling in the clustering bias is the alarmist interpretation of the role of carbon dioxide in the modern warming period. During 1979-1999, the correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration levels and rising global temperature led alarmists to conclude that CO2 emission from human activity was causing the warming.
However, a look at historical data suggests that CO2 concentrations are not the primary drivers of global temperature and that there are a host of other natural factors that affect the temperature. Besides, the current warming trend began well before the industrial era, when emissions from human activity were insignificant.
Satellite temperature data (December 1978 to June 2019) show that global temperature levels have failed to rise to the levels that they had during the super El Nino of 2016.
In fact, 2016 recorded the highest departure from the satellite temperature averages since 1998. The global temperatures recorded a warming anomaly of 1.33F in April 1998 and never showed such a high degree of departure until February of 2016, when the El Nino caused a warming anomaly of 1.55.
The highest temperature departures during 2017 and 2018 were lower than 2016, despite the total atmospheric CO2 concentration increasing by every year.
It categorically proves that CO2 is not the primary driver of temperature, a fact that can be identified and confirmed by assessing the historical climate records as well.
The bias list continues, but let me just stop here and conclude that without critical evaluation of claims made about our climate, we are likely to be victims of these biases (both deliberate and unintentional ones).
Yes, the world is warming, but not at an unprecedented rate, and there is no scientific evidence to conclude that climate change in the coming years will be dangerous for our society or the environment.
The real climate crisis is the one where billions across the world have been misled about the current and past state of our world’s climate.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Bangalore, India.
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