The year is 2007 and the whole world is in the grip of global warming fear, the Anthropogenic Global Warming boondoggle has almost reached its high water mark and every slimy, self serving politician across the globe is scrambling to be Green.
What is perceived to be vote winning Green tokenism runs amok, so much so that in the UK opposition leader David Cameron has a small wind turbine installed on the side of his house so the whole world can be assured of his Green credentials. This was short lived display of Dave’s Green credentials as the builders put the turbine in the wrong place and breached the planning consent as Cameron’s home is in a conservation area, it is difficult not to laugh when a stunt blows up in a politicians face.
The problem faced by all those politicians that were conned by the junk science of the warming alarmists is how to distance themselves from something voters across the western world no longer buy in to, or even worry about anymore.
No politician is ever going to hold up their hand and say “I was wrong“, instead Green issues are quietly dropped from the Agenda and the heretical voices of the non believers in Climate Religion start to be heard.
In a major Cabinet reshuffle in preparation for the forthcoming General Election, Cameron has quietly culled the believers in Climate Religion from the Government, and as to be expected the UK Guardian is outraged:
The new set of Conservative environment and energy ministers announced on Tuesday bring a track record of opposing renewable energy, having fought against wind and solar farms, enthusiastically backed fracking and argued that green subsidies damage the economy.
Matthew Hancock the new energy minister, was one of the signatories to the letter sent to Cameron by 100 of his MPs demanding that Green taxation for bird choppers be slashed.
New energy minister, Matthew Hancock, signed a letter to David Cameron in 2012 demanding that subsidies for onshore wind farms were slashed.“I support renewable energy but we need to do it in a way that gives the most value for money and that does not destroy our natural environment,” he said at the time.
Hancock, who takes over from Michael Fallon, also opposed new turbines in his Suffolk constituency, arguing: “The visual and other impact of the proposed turbines is completely unacceptable in this attractive rural corner of Suffolk.”
New environment secretary Liz Truss, who once perpetrated the heinous crime of working for Shell has already said that renewables are too expensive and damage the economy.
New environment secretary and former Shell employee, Liz Truss, dismissed clean renewable energy as “extremely expensive” and said it was damaging the economy during an appearance on BBC Question Time last October.
“We do need to look at the green taxes because at the moment they are incentivising particular forms of energy that are extremely expensive,” she said. “I would like to see the rolling back of green taxes because it is wrong that we are implementing green taxes faster than other countries. We may be potentially exporting jobs out of the country as our energy is so expensive.”
As far back as 2009 Truss could see that Green subsidies caused energy poverty and loss of jobs:
In 2009, as deputy director of the free-market think-tank Reform, Truss said energy infrastructure in Britain was being damaged by politicians’ obsession with green technology: “Vast amounts of taxpayers’ money are being spent subsidising uneconomic activity,” she said. Research from the London School of Economics recently concluded that green policies were not harming economic growth.
No surprises that a left leaning organization like the LSE that believes in Man Made Global Warming would find that renewable energy subsidies were not harmful.
Truss it appears is an enthusiastic supporter of fracking:
Truss will have a key role in regulating the environmental safety of shale gas exploration and has said fracking would benefit people living nearby. “We need to make sure shale gas is being exploited in this country, which will benefit local communities,” she said on BBC Question Time.
There is room for cautious optimism that the circus is being taken back from the clowns, if Cameron is serious about the Green rollback in the UK then renaming the Department Of Energy and Climate Change, the Department of Energy as it once was, would go along way to show the nightmare of the Green insanity is nearly over.
Cuomo says ‘we don’t get tornadoes’ in NY, but we’ve had at least 417
Storm damage in Smithfield Governor Andrew Cuomo and Senator Dave Valesky look over the damage in the Smithfield area. Ellen M. Blalock | eblalock@syracuse.com
“We don’t get tornadoes in New York, right? Anyone will tell you that,” Cuomo said at a news conference July 8 in Smithfield, where the tornado struck. “Well, we do now.”
In fact, we always have.
Since the federal government started keeping a tally in 1950, New York has had at least 417 tornadoes. That’s an average of seven per year.
“For him to say we don’t get tornadoes in New York was incorrect,” said Scott Steiger, a SUNY Oswego meteorology professor. “He didn’t do his homework. Severe weather has happened in New York for a long time.”
Tornado in Madison CountyBarbara Watson of the National Weather Service says a tornado hit Madison County town of Smithfield on July 8, 2014. Four people were killed.
New York has averaged seven tornadoes a year since 1950. The number was about five a year before 1990, and has been about 10 per year since then.
The increase could be because more tornadoes are happening or simply that more are being reported.
“Are we seeing more events or are we just knowing more about the events that we didn’t know about before?” asked Bill Bunting, operations chief at the Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma. “I would say probably we don’t know, but a lot of it’s the reporting.”
Bunting said that smart phones and social media have made it easier for people to send evidence of tornadoes to researchers. The National Weather Service, for example,confirmed a tornado on Sunday after being sent pictures and video over Facebook.
“In my 29 years with the National Weather Service, it’s become a lot easier for us to become aware of events,” Bunting said.
Even if more tornadoes are hitting New York, it’s not clear that’s because of climate change. Tornadoes are caused by a complicated set of factors, including thunderstorms loaded with moisture, and wind shear in the upper atmosphere.
While climate change would be expected to increase the instability of those storms, Bunting said, it might also be expected to reduce wind shear.
“The evidence that looks into whether or not severe thunderstorms or tornadoes will increase in a warming world is inconclusive,” he said.
Because the numbers of tornadoes is relatively low in New York, and because so many can pop up at the same time, the statistics fluctuate widely from year to year. There were just four tornadoes in 2012, but 23 the year before.
Tornadoes are spawned from heavy thunderstorms that sweep across the region, so they tend to come in batches. The Smithfield tornado was the strongest of five that struck New York on July 8. On May 31, 1998, New York had 13 tornadoes.
New York’s tornadoes tend to be less intense and long-lasting than those on the plains. Tornadoes are rated on the Enhanced Fujita scale from zero to 5. New York tends to get storms from EF-0 to EF-2. The Smithfield tornado was at the top end of an EF-2, with wind speeds of 135 mph. The biggest one in New York this year was an EF-3, which hit May 23 in Warren County.
The last death from a tornado in New York before last week was September 2010, when one person was killed in Queens.
You can search our database for all New York tornadoes since 1950:
Search tips: – Want to see all the tornadoes? Hit search without entering any search terms. – If second search turns up nothing, make sure you cleared search terms in earlier search. – You can search for the county or community two ways: Either enter the county or the community name. Or you can use the dropdowns.
For those that have the mistaken belief that wind is green, clean, or in some way a noble venture, reality couldn’t be any further from the truth. There is nothing commendable about hiding the slaughter to millions of protected bird and bats each year.
Most of public is unaware of this because at industrial wind farms there is no transparency. With gag orders, high security, and studies being conducted by the industry’s own biologists, the public has no way of really knowing anything. Under these conditions information is filtered and the industry can report what they believe the public will accept.
Rigging Search Area Size
For decades I have been doing research and making astute wildlife observations. I have the expertise to see what others can not and when analyzing this industry’s studies, I see one sided environmental documents.
From my research and analysis I now have several thousand carcass distance records from turbine blade strikes. These records are from the years 1990 -2010 and none were taken from industry studies conducted with grossly undersized search areas. Search areas for these studies ranged from 50-105 meters from towers. The wind turbines I looked at ranged in size from 65 kW up to 1.5 MW.
Part of a White Tailed Sea Eagle – Courtesy Save The Eagles
These carcass distance records are from the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area, Montezuma Hills Wind Resource Area, Buena Vista wind project, Foote Rim Creek Rim Wind Project, Cedar Ridge Wind Farm, Forward Energy Center, and the Blue Sky Green Field wind project. From these carcass records it can be seen that most carcasses upon impact are launched beyond a turbines blade tip length away from towers. In fact this number is about 60% -70% depending on the study being looked at. This still does not take into consideration that search areas for most of these studies were too small for the size of turbine being studied. Several of the studies even mention this.
The average carcass distance from turbine towers recorded in these studies ranges from about 1 1/2 – 3 times the blade length of these turbines. Many of these turbines were only about 100 feet tall when including blades of about 8.5 meters in length. Hundreds of the other turbines I analyzed were about 300-400 feet at the tip of the rotor sweep.
But the industry has evolved and newer studies do not use larger search areas for their much larger turbines.
For the sake of comparison I will comment on some of the recent mortality studies that have been conducted by Stantec. The Stantec studies are important because in my opinion they represent the worst of the worst that this industry has to offer. In the last few years the average carcass distance reported by Stantec in their mortality studies at Wolfe Island, Kibby Mountain, Laurel Mountain, and Georgia Mountain in the Northeast, is about the same distance that was reported from the smallest 65-100 kw turbines at Altamont. But there are huge differences between the turbines studied by Stantec and these smallest turbines. The turbines they write reports for are 40-50 times larger. They reach 250-350 feet higher into the sky, they have blades that reach out 50 meters or more in all directions, and their deadly blade tip speeds are much faster.
All of these factors are important in mortality studies because they contribute to greater blade impact force, more carcass drift from the higher altitudes, and impact points much further out from turbine towers. In one case the blade tip impact points were as much as 47 meters further away (56 total) from turbine towers. Add into the equation that some of these the turbines are located on ridge lines and the carcasses thrown towards the downward slopes will to drift even further.
White Tailed Sea Eagle Corpse stuck in a tree – Courtesy Save The Eagles
Yet every one of these Stantec’s mortality studies defies the Laws of Motion and Gravity because the industry’s own data proves that any carcass hit by a turbine blade has a much better than 50/50 odds or 1 out of 2 chance of this carcass landing at a distance beyond a turbines blade length.
For the hundreds of carcasses reported in the Stantec studies, only a handful have been reported past the turbine blade length and the average carcass distance disclosed is about half the distance of the turbine blade length. The odds of this reported carcass distribution to have actually occurred around these huge turbines is so high that it can not be calculated. In other words the numbers are impossible.
In years to come college math and physics classes will have fun analyzing all this. They can apply different wind speeds, acceleration, and points of impact to the wind turbine carcasses distance equation. The combinations are endless but one thing is certain they will understand that most of the carcasses being smacked with 200 mph blade tip speed will fly beyond a turbine’s blade length.
Below is an image of data taken from a 3 year study showing the carcasses distribution for 505 carcasses found in the Montezuma Wind Resource Area. The turbines are 1.5 MW and the search methodology used search areas of 105 meters from towers. The carcasses distance data was reliable for the point I am making but the study still had severe flaws that underreported mortality estimates. When looking at this data readers will see that I have added some notes.
Rigging the Data
The industry is using many tricks and manipulations to make carcasses disappear from around their turbines. None of this is scientific and I see differences in nearly every study I look at. The changes in their studies are predicated on how much mortality needs to be hidden. The most recent wind industry studies are the most appalling and this is because with the industry’s huge turbines they need far more carcasses to vanish.
From the previous information I have provided it should be quite obvious that the industry studies are unreliable because search areas are far too small. But there is much more. So much more that I can not put everything in this article or even ten articles. I have chosen to expose some of the manipulation of search plots and touch on the manipulation of carcass data.
In the image below it is fairly self-explanatory and easy to understand. The industry instead of using round search areas and thoroughly searching them has come up with a devious method to hide carcass data, the square search plot. It can be any size they choose but generally an area 120 – 160 meters on all sides. It may not even be square and the turbine may or may not be centered in the plot. The square search plot is used to give the illusion of a much bigger search area while avoiding the majority of carcasses expected to land within the designated searchable area around the turbine.
Not only are these square plots far too small, the data collected from these plots is easily manipulated. These plots may be fully searched but in most cases they are not and “proportions of area searched” are developed for the wind industry’s contrived mortality formulas. I have seen proportion of area searched for the furthest point declared at 100 percent as in the Maple Ridge Wind Farm study. But what the report is not putting in the formulas is that they only searched 100 percent of the area out to the furthest corner of the plot, the carcasses, the data, and the mortality from the full the declared annulus was avoided.
In the calculation of the proportion area searched, carcasses found at the furthest points can boost the numbers dramatically. In the image below I show how these carcasses when found and properly calculated can really boost the reported mortality with very small overall search areas.
This information was taken from a mortality study conducted in Wisconsin at the Cedar Ridge wind farm. I took the actual area searched and made corrections for the reported carcasses in relation to the proportion of the area actually searched.
From looking at just the search area data, 18 turbines are killing approximately 1100 birds per year and this does not take into consideration that the search areas should have been 150-175 meters from towers. It also does not taken into consideration searcher efficiency and other factors that boost the mortality numbers. This project has 41 turbines and the actual yearly fatality to birds and bats is many thousands.
For these 18 turbines in 2010 they reported an estimate of 216 bird fatalities.
This study did show that the majority of carcasses land past the turbine blades but how the data collected was processed, hid thousands of birds and bats being killed at this site. They not only used the square search plot ploy but they barely even looked around these turbines. They also discarded important carcasses by labelling them as “incidental”.
Remains of Two Peregrine Falcons killed by Spanish Wind – Courtesy Save the Eagles
In any wind industry study if carcasses are labeled “incidental” it is a major red flag that the study is critically flawed. The word “incidental” is trump card exclusion for wind industry studies. All the carcasses shown in the square plot image are considered incidentals by the industry even though they are finding them dead or crippled on a regular basis.
Honest studies would suggest moving the search areas out to locate and include them in the data.
A high percentage of the raptors found during wind industry studies are dismissed as being incidental. Even the study that produced the data in the first image dismissed golden eagles found as far away as 200 meters because they were found beyond the 105 meter search areas.
Since 2004 Altamont Pass has been excluding dozens of golden eagles from their mortality estimates killed by turbines because they have been placed in the incidental category. How do these most of these dead eagles get placed in the incidental category? Wind personnel go around and pick them up along with other dead raptors ahead of the people doing “standardized surveys”.
An honest survey would never allow any wind personnel to touch a carcass but this takes place at every wind farm.
Immature Bald eagle – Courtesy Save the Eagles
What I have pointed out is just a taste of what it is like to read through a wind industry study. It is a dreadful journey, but it must be done to save species from what is coming from this industry. The tricks may change from study to study but the end product is still the same, most of the wind turbine mortality is being hidden. For the wind industry there is no standardized research methodology and they make it up as they go along. The only thing I see in wind industry studies that is truly standardized is a very clear pattern of these studies being rigged to hide mortality.
All of this is allowed to take place because the industry has been handed voluntary regulations from the upper levels of our government agencies. It is time for everyone to take note and to start asking the hard questions because these turbines are contributing to species extinction faster than any other source of energy.
Jim Wiegand is an independent wildlife expert with decades of field observations and analytical work. He is vice president of the US region of Save the Eagles International, an organization devoted to researching, protecting and preserving avian species threatened by human encroachment and development.
(Image at top of Page: Golden eagle =Беркут (Aquila chrysaetos) Source=http://www.flickr.com/photos/chuckthephotographer/2391751046/; Author=Chuck Abbe, cc-by-2.0, Courtesy Wikipedia)
Now that the dust has settled on the Supreme Court’s 2014 session, we can look at the decisions and conclude that the Administration received a serious smack down. Two big cases got most of the news coverage: Hobby Lobby and the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) recess appointments. In both cases, the Administration lost. At the core of both is the issue of the Administration’s overreach.
Within the cases the Supreme Court heard, one had to do with energy—and it, too, offered a rebuke.
You likely haven’t heard about Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG) v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—and may think you don’t care. But with the session over, UARG v. EPA makes clear the Court’s trend to trim overreach.
ginamc3The UARG v. EPA decision came down on June 23. None of the major news networks covered it. Reviews of the 2014 cases, since the end of the session, haven’t mentioned it either. The decision was mixed—with both sides claiming victory. Looking closely, there is cause for optimism from all who question the president’s authority to rewrite laws.
A portion of the UARG v. EPA case was about the EPA’s “Tailoring Rule” in which it “tailored” a statutory provision in the Clean Air Act—designed to regulate traditional pollutants such as particulate matter—to make it work for CO2. In effect, the EPA wanted to rewrite the law to achieve its goals. The decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia for the majority, stated:
“Were we to recognize the authority claimed by EPA in the Tailoring Rule, we would deal a severe blow to the Constitution’s separation of powers… The power of executing laws…does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice.”
Had the EPA gotten everything it wanted, it could have regulated hundreds of thousands of new sources of CO2—in addition to the already regulated major industrial sources of pollutants. These new sources would include office buildings and stores that do not emit other pollutants—but that do, for example, through the use of natural gas for heating, emit 250 tons or more of CO2 a year.
The Supreme Court did allow the EPA to regulate CO2 emissions from sources that already require permits due to other pollutants—and therefore allowed the EPA and environmentalists pushing for increased CO2 reductions to claim victory because the decision reaffirmed the EPA does have the authority to regulate CO2 emissions. However, at the same time, the decision restricted the EPA’s expansion of authority. Reflecting the mixed decision, the Washington Post said the decision was: “simultaneously very significant and somewhat inconsequential.”
It is the “very significant” portion of the decision that is noteworthy in light of the new rules the EPA announced on June 2.
Currently, the Clean Air Act is the only vehicle available to the Administration to regulate CO2 from power plant and factory emissions. However, the proposed rules that will severely restrict allowable CO2 emissions from existing power plants, resulting in the closure of hundreds of coal-fueled power plants, bear some similarities to what the Supreme Court just invalidated: both involve an expansive interpretation of the Clean Air Act.
It is widely believed that the proposed CO2 regulations for existing power plants will face legal challenges.
Tom Wood, a partner at Stoel Rives LLP who specializes in air quality and hazardous waste permitting and compliance, explains: “Although the EPA’s coalplant3Section 111 (d) proposals cannot be legally challenged until they are finalized and enacted, such challenges are a certainty.” With that in mind, the UARG v. EPA decision sets an important precedent. “Ultimately,” Wood says, “the Supreme Court decision seems to give more ammunition to those who want to challenge an expansive view of 111 (d).” Wood sees it as a rebuke to the EPA—a warning that in the coming legal battles, the agency should not presume that its efforts will have the Supreme Court’s backing.
In his review of the UARG v. EPA decision, Nathan Richardson, a Resident Scholar at Resources For the Future, says: “In strict legal terms, this decision has no effect on EPA’s plans to regulate new or existing power plants with performance standards. … However, if EPA is looking for something to worry about, it can find it in this line from Scalia:”
When an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate “a significant portion of the American economy” . . . we typically greet its announcement with a measure of skepticism. We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign an agency decisions of vast “economic and political significance.”
Cato’s Andrew Grossman adds: “The Court’s decision may be a prelude of more to come. Since the Obama Administration issued its first round of greenhouse gas regulations, it has become even more aggressive in wielding executive power so as to circumvent the need to work with Congress on legislation. That includes … new regulations for greenhouse gas emissions by power plants …that go beyond traditional plant-level controls to include regulation of electricity usage and demand—that is, to convert EPA into a nationwide electricity regulator.” Grossman suggests: “this won’t be the last court decision throwing out Obama Administration actions as incompatible with the law.”
Philip A. Wallach, a Brookings fellow in Governance Studies, agrees. He called the UARG v. EPA case “something of a sideshow,” and sees “the main event” as EPA’s power plant emissions controls, which have “much higher practical stakes.”
The UARG v. EPA decision is especially important when added to the more widely known Hobby Lobby and NLRB cases, which are aptly summed up in the statement by the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers’ General Counsel Rich Moskowitz: “We are pleased that the Court has placed appropriate limits on EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. By doing so, the Court makes clear that an agency cannot rewrite the law to advance its political goals.”
Justice Scalia’s opinion invites Congress to “speak clearly” on agency authority. It is now up to our elected representatives to rise to the occasion and pass legislation that leaves “decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance’” in its hands alone. Such action could rein in many agency abuses including the heavy-handed application of the Endangered Species Act and public lands management.
It would seem that the UARG v. EPA decision—while “somewhat inconsequential”—is, in fact, “very significant.” With this decision the Supreme Court has outlined the first legislation of the new, reformatted, post-2014 election, Congress.
“Being crazy isn’t enough”: Wind energy’s fantasy in green Curt Devlin 12 July, 2014
“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” cautioned Mark Twain. Miles Grant heeded Twain’s famous advice in his recent opinion about global climate change and wind opposition. Grant brims with evangelical fervor when he argues that wind power is necessary for averting climate change.
The problem with the argument is it assumes facts that don’t exist. Wind turbines do not reduce CO2 emission, they increase it. In 2013, the U.S. spent some $80B subsidizing wind power, but CO2 only increased. In proportion to their economies, other industrialized nations around the world have invested far more heavily in wind energy than the U.S., but carbon emissions still go up.
Coal supplies roughly 60% of the energy to the world’s power grids, and all industrial turbines must be connected to a grid. Grid operators maintain an instantaneous balance between energy supply and demand. When turbines are spinning, coal generators are ramped down to balance the grid, a process known as “curtailment.” When turbines stop spinning, coal plants are ramped up, called “cycling” — a procedure that can take hours, since coal plants ramp up slowly.
The problem with cycling is that even the most efficient coal plants produce much greater CO2 emissions when they are not running at peak efficiency. This means that wind farms connected to coal grids virtually ensure increased CO2 emissions — not to mention increased particulate air pollution, a dirty little secret the “wind” lobby wants you to know.
Grant mentioned the people who have to breathe the pollutants being belched out of the Brayton Point coal plant, but forgets to mention that connecting wind turbines to the same grid will make matters worse. The misguided demonstrators who marched into Fairhaven last year to support the turbines, clearly didn’t understand this danger. The people being harmed by pollution from this coal plant should be doing everything to prevent further turbines from being connected to the same grid.
People like Grant, who look at wind power through green-tinted glasses, are quick to argue that at least coal is not being burned when turbines generate power. Unfortunately, this too falls apart under careful scrutiny. The U.S. has become an exporter of its coal surplus. The principal consumer of our surplus is China. When the Chinese burn our coal, however, their plants don’t have to comply with EPA standards. As a result of these dirty coal plants, some industrialized cities in China now have pollution so bad that the air is unbreathable for days on end.
At least we can all agree on one thing; the climate is global, so we’re all inhaling some of this pollution.
Here are some other facts the green evangelists don’t want you to know. Every living plant growing in huge swaths of land is literally razed to the ground every time a wind turbine goes up. It isn’t just the ten acres needed for the site that get turned into a moonscape. Broad fire lanes and paved roads are often cut across ridges and mountain tops to accommodate the huge vehicles needed to build, service, and maintain these leviathans. The forest habitat is virtually hacked to ribbons, so it can no longer support the complex, balanced ecology of flora and fauna. (Take a look at the wind farms in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine with Google Earth to see the true extent of environmental destruction cause by industrial turbines.)
Another impact that Mr. Green Eggs & Ham won’t mention is the economic one. In the U.K., wind power has driven the cost of retail electricity so high that a new class of poverty has emerged. More and more people are slipping below the poverty line, because they can no longer afford the high cost of electricity produced by turbines. In the global economy, the worst impact is placed on those who are already languishing in poverty.
In proportion to its economy, Germany has invested more in wind than any other industrialized nation. Once the powerhouse of the E.U., its economy has been decimated by its gamble on the roulette wheel of wind. According to government-paid researchers, the wind energy misadventure known as the Energiewende (energy transformation) has damaged the German economy so badly that Germans are bringing ten new coal generators online, with more on the way.
Princeton, MA, one of the earliest adopters of wind power in Massachusetts, has now reported a loss of $6 million, and has the highest electric rates in the Commonwealth.
Though the cost of wind energy is hidden by federal subsidies paid for with your tax dollars, a kilowatt of energy from a land-based turbine costs three times more to produce than conventional generators; and from offshore turbines, three times more than that, again. If Cape Wind is ever built in Nantucket Sound, carbon emissions will continue to rise and Massachusetts will have the highest electric rates in the U.S.
By far the greatest cost of all is the human one. There is no benefit to wind power sufficient to justify the damage to human health and well-being they cause. Wind turbine sites are ecological dead zones. The best science we have offers clear evidence that virtually everyone exposed to the pulsed volleys of infrasound produced by industrial wind turbines will begin to suffer from cognitive impairment or cardiovascular disease. Turbines are a silent killer.
“Lasciate onge speranza, voi ch’ingrate.” “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Dante’s inscription over the gates of Hell (“The Inferno”).
Contrary to green dogma, wind power doesn’t make sense, whether you believe global climate change is real or not. In the end, the fantasy-in-green doesn’t amount to even a good story. It’s but a fractured fairy tale, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Rupert Murdoch says investment in renewable energy, such a windfarms, cost Australia too much
Australia shouldn’t be building ‘windmills and all that rubbish’ to prevent global warning when the only outcomes would be perhaps the Maldives disappearing beneath the sea, according to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Speaking with Sky News, Mr Murdoch gave his frank assessment of the global warming phenomenon, conceding that because climate change was ‘inevitable’ houses should be built away from the shoreline.
The News Corp chairman said investment in renewable energy should end and there was probably little that could be done to save the island nation of the Maldives, considered one of the most at the most beautiful places on the planet.
In the same interview he also declared that Prime Minister Tony Abbott is an ‘admirable, honest, principled man’ who Australians should look up to.
Mr Murdoch was speaking with The Australian’s Editor-at-Large Paul Kelly – who quizzed him on the newspaper’s stance on historical and political issues and how the newspaper, which Murdoch owns, should ‘balance environmental concerns, climate change concerns’ and the need to maintain a competitive economy.
‘What’s the way Australia should approach this (climate change) issue?’
Murdoch said: ‘Well I think we should approach this with great skepticism.’
Rupert Murdoch said he had met with Prime Minister Tony Abbott three or four times describing him as an admirable honest and principled man.
Rupert Murdoch said Australia should build houses further in land and stop its investment in ‘windmills and all that rubbish’
‘If the sea level rises six inches, that’s a big deal in the world, the Maldives might disappear or something, but OK, we can’t mitigate that, we can’t stop it,’ he said.
‘We have to stop building vast houses on seashores … we can be the low-cost energy country in the world. We shouldn’t be building windmills and all that rubbish.’
‘The world has been changing for thousands and thousands of years. It’s just a lot more complicated because we are so much more advanced.’
He called on Australians to be skeptical about the science of climate change, and said because the nation basically contributes ‘nothing’ to the global warming compared to the rest of the world, there was very little Australia should be doing.
‘Climate change has been going on as long we have been here … things are happening, but how much are we doing, with emissions and so on? Well as far as Australia goes nothing in the overall picture.’
On Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Mr Murdoch said he had met him ‘three, four times, and the impression is that he is an admirable, honest, principled man and somebody that we really need as Prime Minister who we can all look up to and admire.’
‘However, how much does he understand free markets and what should be happening? I don’t know. Only time will tell. It’s too early to make a judgment on this government.’
He praised Australia for its entrepreneurial attitude, encouraging the country to work with its Asian neighbours, particularly China.
‘We have to come to terms with the Chinese and live with them,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe they are aggressive. I don’t believe they want to take us over.’
I’m used to working on very difficult problems, like the most complicated electronic circuitry on the planet.
This award was from the IBM/Motorola/Apple Power PC design team in Austin, Texas, which developed the brain of Macs and Playstations for many years.
Microprocessor designs have to be perfect. They can’t make any mistakes, ever. Modern designs contain billions of transistors, and every one of them has to work perfectly – all the time. The way you become a “Debug God” is by analyzing the design through many different approaches. Any single methodology is inadequate and doomed to failure, so I developed and utilized dozens of different methodologies to make sure that no bugs slipped through. During my 20 year career designing microprocessors, no silicon bug was ever found in any part of any design which I worked on.
By contrast, finding flaws with adjustments to the temperature record is like shooting fish in a barrel. The work being done would fail any reasonable high school science class. It is a complete joke, and doesn’t even vaguely resemble science.
The mistake people keep making is using the same broken methodology to verify the original broken methodology. In order to find problems, you need to analyze the data from many different angles.
No methodology is perfect, but a straight up average of raw temperatures is the simplest, cleanest and most effective way to spot trouble. It may be less precise than other methods, but exposes potential fundamental issues related to accuracy. Once you start gridding, adjusting and infilling, you can no longer see the forest for the trees – and you are lost.
Hunterston B nuclear power station will not be replaced when its lifespan expires Picture: Donald MacLeod
by BRIAN WILSON
The latest self-indulgent waste of taxpayers’ money to emerge from St Andrew’s House carries the portentous title Energy Regulation in an Independent Scotland, prepared by an “Expert Commission”.
The clue is in the title. However “expert” these people might be, they were not entrusted with their own agenda. They were not invited to advise on whether independence makes the slightest sense in the energy context. Their remit was restricted to the hypothesis of Scotland having voted to separate.
At that point, their response becomes comical in its evasion of hard questions. Essentially, their conclusion is that everything should carry on as at present because it is in Scotland’s interests that it should. The inconvenient fact that the UK government insists the exact opposite would happen is simply ignored.
As with the currency, there is to be no “plan B”. The rest of the UK will continue to buy Scotland’s electricity output, no matter what it costs. Full stop. There is no consideration of what Scotland would be left with if they declined to do so which, in the view of my own “expert commission” is a racing certainty.
Let’s look at the Scottish Government’s existing energy policy which can be summarised as follows:
1. They hate nuclear power and there will be no replacement for Hunterston B and Torness until hell freezes over.
2. They neither know nor care what will replace the base-load from Scotland’s four thermal power stations, all due to close within a decade, since that’s tomorrow’s problem.
3. The answer is that it will probably come from England via the inter-connector but with a bit of luck the hated Hunterston B and Torness will keep going long enough to avoid that embarrassment for a few years yet.
4. English consumers will continue to fund Scottish renewables, via open-ended subsidy and infrastructure costs, regardless of whether or not we are living in separate states.
5. Er… that’s it…
The central conclusion of the Expert Commission that it would be a jolly good idea to retain a single market in electricity within our small island need not have detained them long. Who could disagree? Certainly not the English generators who will be delighted to pump as much electricity as we want into Scotland as soon as we are daft enough to have put ourselves in the position of requiring it.
Even the Expert Commission summoned all its courage to note this prospect, buried on page 34 of the report: “Under current forecast scenarios of high renewable generation installation in Scotland and closure of current coal and nuclear generation, Scotland is likely, at time of low renewables availability, to import electricity from rUK in order to continue meeting demand.”
For the past half century, Scotland has been an exporter of electricity to the rest of the UK, due mainly to our nuclear stations. Last year, we exported more than a quarter of what was produced. The triumph of Nationalist policy will be to turn us into an importer. That matters less while we are part of the same state and market but would matter – and cost – a great deal if we were not.
While importing base-load from south of the new Border, we would try to sell them our renewables. But why should they buy them? On this point, the Expert Commission is magnificent in its vagueness, dancing round the essential point that there would be no requirement whatsoever for the UK government to subsidise Scottish renewables. This was confirmed recently by the European Court of Justice in a case involving Sweden and Finland.
“An independent Scotland’s ability to maintain course towards the renewable targets and aspirations set by the current Scottish Government,” chunters the report, “will hinge on clarity as early as possible regarding continuity of current and proposed market mechanisms….”. Ah, what we need is clarity! But what if the clarity is summed up as: “No thanks – and even if we wanted to subsidise expensive Scottish renewables, our voters wouldn’t stand for it now that you’ve chosen to walk away.”?
Answer comes there none, but even the Expert Commission acknowledges there might be limits to the costs which “rUK” would pay. So what is their masterly answer to this multi-billion pound dilemma? Rest easy for the Expert Commission has sagely decreed: “These are questions which a robust agreement and strategic energy partnership between Scottish and rUK Governments will need to define”. Loosely translated, that means: “We’re sorry, we haven’t a clue”.
Casting around for precedent, the Expert Commission alights improbably on Ireland where there is a cross-border electricity market. But crucially, as they neglect to point out, there is no shared regime on subsidising renewables. All the Irish example does is confirm that Scotland would be left with a surplus of renewable energy – mostly from onshore wind farms – but without the subsidy base which currently sustains it.
I heard Alex Salmond sound-biting about Scotland as an exporter of electricity – shameless as ever, given that the surplus comes from nuclear – while England is “facing black-outs”. Ipse, they would continue to buy power from Scotland, he asserted. Well, they might buy power – they just wouldn’t subsidise our renewables, which is all we will have to sell.
England and Wales already import more power from mainland Europe than from Scotland. By 2020, the inter-connector between the UK and Europe will have doubled capacity. They will not need electricity from Scotland. Neither, according to National Grid’s evidence to the DECC Select Committee, do they need a low-carbon contribution since the biggest renewable energy projects now happening are offshore wind farms in the shallower waters of the south.
It is a pity that the Expert Commission did not break free of its shackles in order to tell the truth, which is (a) there is not the slightest reason to believe that UK Continuing would force its consumers to subsidise expensive Scottish renewables; (b) the only hope for the Scottish renewables industry is to remain part of the UK market, with subsidy to match; and (c) Scotland desperately needs a balanced energy policy rather than daft over-reliance on renewables.
I doubt if any member of the Expert Commission would disagree with a word of that. They should say so.
Incidentally, in the real world yesterday, Ofgem approved a £1.2 billion subsea link between Caithness and Moray. Anyone fancy funding that kind of investment, multiplied many times over, from within Scotland alone?
When it comes to assessing the costs, risks and benefits of environmental policy Bjørn Lomborg has always tried to provide balanced, detailed analysis supported by facts and evidence. The economic choices we make – about allocating scarce resources to unlimited wants – should – as Lomborg consistently points out – be made taking into account all of the costs weighed against properly measured benefits (see our post here).
Bjørn Lomborg has become one of the most high profile critics of insanely expensive and utterly pointless renewable energy policies across the globe (see our posts here and here).
Bjørn’s back – in this piece extracted from The Australian.
Gas is greenest in the short term (truncated) The Australian Bjørn Lomborg 12-13 July 2014
… We often hear how the EU has managed to cut its emissions by 16 per cent since 1990. But this is true only if we ignore the implicit emissions from the increasing imports from China and elsewhere. The EU has simply shifted part of its emissions abroad, so the total emissions have been slightly increasing. The EU is committed to cutting carbon emissions by 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. This will, according to an averaging of all the available energy-economic models, cost $US280bn a year. By the end of the century (after a total cost of more than $US20 trillion), this will reduce the projected temperature increase by a mere 0.05C.
Although renewables such as solar and wind are sold almost universally as the panacea to global warming, the world has been trying to get away from renewables for the past 200 years. In 1971, 40 per cent of China’s energy came from renewables. Since then, explosive economic growth has brought solar and wind to a trifling 0.23 per cent of its energy production. By contrast, Africa gets 50 per cent of its energy from renewables and remains poor.
The overwhelming part of biomass — essentially wood and dung — has remained constant since 1971. It is the cause of up to 4.3 million global deaths from indoor air pollution. Hydro has stayed constant at about 2 per cent and geothermal at 0.5 per cent. The only real change has been the dramatic introduction of CO2-free nuclear energy in the early 70s, going from powering less than 0.5 per cent to almost 7 per cent. It has fallen somewhat out of favour, reducing its proportion to just 5 per cent.
Despite the other 81 per cent composed of fossil fuels, almost the only thing anyone talks about is the smallest sliver: the increase in solar photovoltaic, thermal, wind, tidal, wave and ocean power, which today makes up just less than 0.5 per cent.
The price for these renewables is significant. The annual investment is estimated at $US359bn, mostly for solar and wind, which the IEA estimates are subsidised for about $US60bn more than they’re worth. The net effect of one year of subsidised solar and wind is to postpone global warming by little more than one day by the end of the century.
Renewables are likely much more expensive than their direct subsidies for two reasons. First, solar and wind need back-up power for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. This means building almost an entire parallel, but only partially used, fossil-fuel infrastructure to handle peak energy demands. These costs are presently not attributed to renewables. Second, higher energy costs mean lower economic growth. That is why the EU’s 20 per cent renewable target will have a cost almost 10 times higher than the direct subsidies.
This is why Brookings Institute recently found that to cut CO2, it is by far the cheapest to replace coal with gas, as gas is cheap and emits less than half the CO2 per kilowatt hour. Wind and especially solar leave us worse off, even with a very high carbon tax.
And that is why it is terrible when well-intentioned people suggest powering the Third World with renewables. A new paper from the Centre for Global Development puts it clearly. If we want to help electrify the world for $US10bn, we can use it on gas and lift 90 million people out of poverty. If we use the $US10bn on renewables, we will help only 20 million people, leaving the rest in darkness and poverty.
It is not surprising that Brookings suggests we should replace coal with gas in the rich world and the Centre for Global Development that we should get gas to the poor world. Because the US is showing what gas can do.
Look at the dramatic reduction in US emissions since 2008. This shows that there is one other solution to CO2 apart from wars and recessions: fracking, a new technology to get gas out of the ground cheaper and more plentifully.
In the past six years, about 20 per cent of US coal electricity has been replaced by cheaper gas, leading to a substantial CO2 reduction. Of course, not all the US reduction is due to cheaper gas, as there was also a recession and more wind power.
The most detailed study to date indicates that gas has cut about 300Mt of the annual US CO2 emissions. Compare this to the fact all the wind turbines and solar panels in the world reduce CO2 emissions at a maximum by 275 Mt. In other words, the US shale gas revolution, by itself, has reduced global emissions more than all the well-intentioned solar and wind in the world.
To compare it with President Barack Obama’s recent plan to reduce coal-fired power plants, in the past six years fracking has achieved about two-thirds of the total reduction Obama’s plan is contemplating the next 16 years.
Moreover, fracking is not costing money but saving the US consumer $US125bn annually in cheaper energy prices. Since cheaper energy also increases economic growth, the total economic benefits are estimated at $US283bn annually, creating 2.1 million new jobs.
Fracking has local environmental issues, but these can all be addressed with good regulation. Unlike the ever costlier renewable subsidies that sooner or later will hit the iron law, fracking works because it not only cuts CO2 but makes gas cheaper, improves the economy and create unsubsidised jobs. The long-term solution to climate change is to invest much more in green energy innovation. As long as green energy is much more expensive than fossil fuels, it will always remain a niche, subsidised by rich countries to feel good. If innovation can make future green energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels everyone will switch. Economic models show that green energy R&D is by far the best long-term climate policy.
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