Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian
The Manhattan Contrarian site has now 30 posts on The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All-Time. Go to the link and find them on the right column. I usually post a small section of a post and link to the rest, but this is too important given the battle over Ukraine. BTW snow and cold will enter the picture in the next week. Winter weather has impacted past world wars including one when Napolean attacked Russia.
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For a long time I have thought that the public in Western countries would wake up to the absurdity of fossil fuel suppression when the price of energy to the consumer rose high enough. And to a substantial degree that has begun to happen.
But the cost of fossil fuel suppression is not merely a modest degradation in our comfortable lifestyles and impoverishment of the poor. As the situation in Ukraine is now demonstrating, fossil fuel suppression in the U.S., Europe and other Western countries also entails significant empowerment of our most significant geopolitical adversaries, and poses major risks to world security, and even to our national security.
The coming of the Biden administration a year ago brought a full-on government war on the fossil fuel industries: cancellation of pipelines; ending of leasing of mineral rights on government lands and offshore; an order that all government agencies work by regulation to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity generation by 2035; threats by bank regulators against banks that lend to the fossil fuel industries; initiatives by the SEC to make it more difficult and costly for industries to use fossil fuels; dozens of initiatives in places like the Department of Energy and Interior Department to block projects using fossil fuels or make them more difficult or costly; and much, much more.
As should have surprised no one, prices of fossil fuels responded by rising dramatically. Prices of crude oil have gone from a range of about $40-60 per barrel during the Trump years to close to $100 per barrel today. U.S. natural gas prices that averaged about $3/MMBtu during the Trump years are now about $4.50 (having spiked over $6 in late 2021). In Europe, where almost all fracking has been suppressed by governments out of supposed concern for the environment, the most recent price for natural gas imports is close to $30/MMBtu
Certainly, a direct impact of these rising prices has been increased costs to the consumer: increased electricity bills, increased home heating bills, increased costs for gasoline for automobiles. For example the average price of regular gasoline at the pump in the U.S. has gone from about $2.25 in January 2021 to about $3.60 today.
But equally important is the degree to which these dramatic rises in energy prices benefit all the worst actors on the world state, starting with Russia. Russia is largely dependent on energy production and exports to the West for its government budget. A year ago, with energy prices in the toilet, Vladimir Putin was basically broke. Today, with energy prices having almost doubled, he is relatively flush. And suddenly we have an invasion of Ukraine, basically financed by Western countries that have suppressed their own production of oil and gas and thus must buy the stuff from Russia.
So why, you might ask, don’t the Western countries just cut off imports from Russia and leave Putin high and dry? The simple answer is that the Western countries have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in wind and solar energy that don’t work and don’t provide the energy needed; so if these countries want to keep their electrical grid running, they need to buy natural gas, which principally comes from Russia.
Consider Germany. Germany adopted its “Energiewende” back in 2010, and fancies itself leading the world to the great clean renewable energy future. Germany’s peak electricity usage is about 90 GW. To supply that, it has built some 65 GW of wind power capacity, and almost 60 GW of solar power capacity. So that’s a total of about 125 GW of generation capacity right there, against peak usage of about 90 GW. Sounds like they have plenty of power from the wind and sun alone to take care of all their needs.
But of course wind and solar don’t work that way. Here in the winter, we have the times of cloudy days, calm winds, and long nights. Here is a chart from Agora Energiewende of German’s electricity generation and consumption for the past few days:
It looks like just after the sun set today the wind and sun together were generating less than 5 GW out of that supposed “capacity” of 125 GW. Usage was about 50 GW at the time. Oh, and Germany is also phasing out its nuclear reactors. So aside from those tiny amounts of hydro and “biomass” at the bottom of the chart, that leaves coal, oil and natural gas; or alternatively, a blackout. From Time, today:
Th[e] glaring omission in Biden’s sanctions package could be the consequence of a promise to the countries of Europe, cowering in fear as their dependency on Russian gas renders them impotent to fight back against Russia’s invasion. This is not unreasonable. Germany especially will suffer if Russian gas imports are blocked; Europe imports 40% of its natural gas from Russia, but for Germany it is up to 50%, on top of 45% dependency on Russian coal and 34% on Russian oil. Meanwhile, Germany is continuing to phase out nuclear, making it more reliant on Russian energy imports.
And of course the U.S. can’t supply these European energy needs because the Biden Administration is intentionally suppressing natural gas production here.
Is it time for a little energy realism from the Biden people? Here are the remarks from Climate Envoy John Kerry a couple of days ago as Russia’s Ukraine invasion got underway:
“But it could have a profound negative impact on the climate obviously. You have a war and obviously you’re going to have massive emissions consequences to the war. But equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus, you’re going to lose certainly big country attention because they will be diverted and I think it could have a damaging impact...”
It’s almost impossible to fathom how idiotic and clueless this guy is. And I don’t necessarily mean just to pick on Kerry. It’s all of them, not the least Biden himself.
But I would certainly hope that the American public is starting to figure this out.
Benjamin Santer, a long-time climate scientist who has worked at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for nearly 30 years, has begun briefing federal judges on climate attribution science to help them understand how experts can trace greenhouse gases from their source and determine how they exacerbate adverse events.
Such identification of potential liability is crucial as state and local governments and other parties pursue various nuisance cases against large oil companies over their contributions to climate change.
Santer participated in a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) workshop in February that involved a handful of scientists and federal judges, “and the purpose was to address how attribution science would be best used in a court of law.
See ‘A history of Dr. Ben Santer and his IPCC “trick” by Dr, Timothy Ball here.
Santer was appointed the convening Lead-author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Report titled “Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.” In that position, Santer created the first clear example of the IPCC manipulation of science for a political agenda. He used his position to establish the headline that humans were a factor in global warming by altering the meaning of what was agreed by the committee as a whole at the draft meeting in Madrid.
Agreed comments
1. “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in Greenhouse gases.”
2. “While some of the pattern-base discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part of climate change observed to man-made causes.”
3. “Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”
4. “While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification.”
Santer’s replacements
1. “There is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcing by greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol… from the geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change… These results point toward a human influence on global climate.”
2. “The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate.”
As Avery and Singer noted in 2006,
“Santer single-handedly reversed the ‘climate science’ of the whole IPCC report and with it the global warming political process! The ‘discernible human influence’ supposedly revealed by the IPCC has been cited thousands of times since in media around the world and has been the ‘stopper’ in millions of debates among nonscientists.”
See how the report cherry picked the period that temperatures were displayed to provide an illusion of warming when the data really showed cooling.
See also ‘Prejudiced Authors, Prejudiced Findings’ by John McLean here
See the UK experience that Santer and his partners in crime in the media and universities and IPCC won’t tell you about Wind Power Economics - Rhetoric and Reality by Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics with the School of Economics, University of Edinburgh at the Renewable Energy Foundation in a webinar.
See how data shows the GHS models are failing with most of the warming natural and any human influence UHI related.
Comparisons with ocean observed temperatures show the model bias is significant.
Chip Ford’s CLT Commentary
To everyone’s surprise and to the delight of many, yesterday Gov. Baker dropped his obsession with his multi-state Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI) vanity project. We who have been vehemently opposing it for over two years couldn’t help but high-five each other long-distance and celebrate an unexpected early victory.
We’d just submitted to town clerks around the state all the signatures sheets our volunteers had collected since September for a ballot question to block TCI by the deadline on Wednesday, only the day before. That was the day after the governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, dropped his support for TCI. Gov. Baker followed the day after our delivery.
Whether or not the petition had any influence on their decisions, we’re still looking to go ahead with the ballot question if we’ve qualified with enough signatures to move forward. Just because a politician says something today doesn’t mean he’ll say the same thing tomorrow. And there’s no telling what a new governor and administration will do.
From the beginning of the early opposition to TCI over two years ago, Paul Craney’s strategy and that of Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance was to invite and recruit other aligned opposition groups (such as CLT) and public policy think tanks from the effected 14 states to coordinate and work together, build our own “multi-state” opposition coalition to take on Gov. Baker’s “multi-state compact.” The goal was to delay and prevent reaching the critical mass of states that Gov. Baker deemed necessary for TCI to succeed. Though the governor’s goal line shifted as more states rejected TCI, in the end there was only Massachusetts and tiny Rhode Island left standing, alone. Gov. Charlie Baker finally pulled the plug on the Bay State’s lonely participation in “Baker’s Boondoggle” yesterday.
Our opposition coalition ally in Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity, issued a news release today:
Providence, RI - On Thursday, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker followed the surrender to reality by Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont earlier this week by publicly divorcing themselves from the Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI) gas tax. The rejection of TCI by the powerful two New England Governors leaves Rhode Island as the only state among the original 14 states that is still considering imposing a crushing fuel tax on motorists.
Despite the rejection by Baker, a founding member and primary driver of this plan to systematically restrict the supply of gasoline, Ocean State Governor Dan McKee and Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi are still on record as supporting the TCI gasoline cap-and-trade scheme.
“It’s time for the Governor and Speaker to throw in the towel and admit defeat. In no reality-based scenario could any politician support a unilateral major gas tax hike in the coming election year, especially given the historically high gas prices that we are already seeing due to misguided energy policies advanced by climate alarmists,” suggested Mike Stenhouse, CEO for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity. “The defeat of TCI is a tremendous victory for the 14-state #NoTCItax coalition we are part of, which has been fighting against this job-killing initiative for many years.”
Again thank you to all those who collected signatures to hopefully put stopping TCI on the 2022 ballot. If its threat alone didn’t change minds of its former backers, it still might provide a backstop if the situation changes.
The Beacon Hill Institute had analyzed the TCI here:
THE NORTHEAST PETRI-DISH - MASSACHUSETTS CASE STUDY
Massachusetts lawmakers have been aggressive in enacting policies they believe to combat climate change. Policymakers passed the Global Warming Solutions Act and joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative intending to reduce the state’s GHG emissions. As a result you can see Massachusetts ranks all the other lower 48 states in the cost of electricity according to the EIA (176.6% of the average of the lower 48 states). Right up there with Massachusetts are all the other northeast RGGI states and not surprisingly California. Connecticut is #1 now with 187.6%.
For Massachusetts this is before the introduction of the Transportation Climate Initiative or TCI, the next big over the cliff proposed effort to kill fossil fuels
The Beacon Hill Institute for Public Policy Research produced a very detailed report Transportation Climate Initiative: Its Economic Impacts on Massachusetts
They write “The Transportation and Climate Initiative of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States (TCI) describes itself as “a regional collaboration of 12 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia that seeks to improve transportation, develop the clean energy economy and reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector.” Massachusetts is a participating state.
The founding document for the TCI is a “Declaration of Intent,” issued in 2010 and signed by transportation and environmental officials in 11 states. The declaration states that the purpose of the TCI is “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, minimize our transportation system’s reliance on high-carbon fuels, promote sustainable growth, address the challenges of vehicle-miles traveled and help build the green energy economy.”
The Initiative is “facilitated” by the Georgetown Climate Center, which worked closely with the Obama administration in its to design and implement climate change (fossil fuel elimination) policies.
BHI examined three scenarios - plans for 20%, 22% and 25% reductions of CO2 emissions from gasoline and diesel vehicles.
The midpoint TCI analysis for the period 2022-2026 for a 22% reduction of gasoline and diesel emissions would lead to a total loss of 36,533 jobs with increased energy cost per household of $3,037 in Massachusetts.
The Green New Deal presented the ideal radical left desires to change life as we know it. It is more likely change will continue to be incremental. And these studies show, the actions are not supported by real data and honest science, and the pain will be significant.
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“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up somewhere else.” Yogi Berra