“Watermelons”, as James Delingpole so aptly describes them, Green on the Outside, & Red on the Inside!

September 22, 2014September 22, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Communists coming out of the Green Closet.

Image source: Oliver Darcy/TheBlaze

Christopher Monckton is presently in Australia. Previously he has said: (link – WUWT)

So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they’d captured it. Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.

Patrick Moore who will soon visit Australia, co-founder of Greenpeace, left the Green Movement when it was infiltrated by communists: (link)

The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas.

Further:

Progressives are very resilient, so when Soviet communism finally collapsed after 70 years of world wide tyranny, progressives and liberal Democrats pushed the existential green movement to the forefront, which was in reality the same old exhausted red communism in a new disguise.

The “Green” Movement tried to disguise their “Red” Socialist/Communist ideas, however, now they are coming out of the closet.

The New York “Climate” March, as reported by the Blaze had socialists elements spread through it. (link)

Dozens of signs denouncing capitalism were spotted at the demonstration, often held by self-proclaimed socialists.
“Capitalism is destroying the planet,” a sticker on one woman’s shirt read, “We need revolution, nothing less.”

Image source: Oliver Darcy/TheBlaze

Members of the Socialists Workers Party also manned a table, passing out flyers attempting to make “the case for ecosocialism.”

Famous Climate Alarmists Frequently Resort to Blatant Lies to Create Fear!

September 20, 2014 / 1957chev / 3 Comments

Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth May, Naomi Klein: Climate handmaids fail—to tell the truth

Perpetuating the massive deception of a planetary climate emergency

It goes without saying that most rational people with a reasonable amount of common sense worry about pollution and want to keep our environment healthy and habitable. So why do the radical environmentalists and the man-made climate change/anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmist crowd choose to outright lie about the problems facing us?

The UN’s IPCC, the extreme-green groups, the mainstream media, the UN-dependent scientists, academia, and politicians are all perpetuating the massive deception of the unproven hypothesis of man-made climate change/anthropogenic global warming, and use it as supposed evidence of a cataclysmic global emergency demanding extreme measures and the surrender of our rights, freedoms, and money.

The AGW movement, a quasi-religious, political, ideological one, is supported by many celebrity acolytes who, by virtue of being famous people, garner huge publicity for the cause whenever they parrot the climate change dogma. This high-minded entertainment fodder has ripple effects that are far from trivial. Mindless celebrity regurgitation of the man-made climate change/AGW catechism, in the seeming absence on their part of any serious effort to study the issues, has grave consequences that affect people, the environment, the economy, wildlife, human rights, and democracy. The celebrity flag-waving on behalf of the AGW movement also serves to exacerbate the corruption of science and the scientific method for political purposes. That’s when things get dangerous and evil. Michael Crichtonexplained:

“When we allow science to become political then we are lost. We will enter the internet version of the Dark Ages, an era of stifling fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better.”

Celebrated author and poet Margaret Atwood has over half a million Twitter followers; Elizabeth May is an MP and the leader of the Green Party of Canada; Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and bestselling author. The three of them enjoy extensive national and international media exposure and public speaking opportunities. They are high-profile Canadians who have earned fame, honours, public respect and trust. They choose to voice their opinions on the subject of man-made climate change/AGW, a matter of public interest, on a variety of public platforms.

That being the case, shouldn’t the moral onus be on them to get at all the facts before they presume to preach to the people? Don’t they have an ethical duty to do their best to tell the truth if they want to try to influence public opinion and policy with their lecturing, moralizing, castigating, laying blame, and telling us how to live?

Atwood, May, and Klein appear to believe that the unproven hypothesis of made-made climate change/AGW is a fact beyond doubt. They tend to ascribe any and all weather events to AGW, even though the five standard global datasets (GISS, HadCRUT4, UAH, RSS, NCDC, comprising two satellite and three terrestrial datasets) that measure global warming have not recorded any increase for the last 18 years. Apparently, Atwood, May, and Klein are not aware of this 18-year-long development, or if they are, they choose not to mention it—because if they did, their doom-and-gloom exhortations would fall flat. They don’t explain that climate changes all the time, always has, always will—it’s natural.

The three celebrities demonize “carbon” and carry on about our “carbon footprint” and “carbon credits” and “carbon pollution” but never explain what they mean by “carbon.” They don’t seem to know, or choose not to acknowledge, that the “carbon” involved in the climate change debate is carbon dioxide (CO2), a harmless, invisible trace gas (constituting 0.04% of the atmosphere), vital to life on earth. Carbon dioxide is plant food—not a pollutant. And since they don’t mention that there hasn’t been any warming for 18 years, they also don’t tell you that during that time, the levels of carbon dioxide (allegedly the cause of global warming) have gone up. That’s a rather inconvenient fact if you want to demonize CO2 as the driver of man-made global warming/climate change!

Margaret Atwood: Hell on earth, a scary scenario

Last November, Margaret Atwood published an odd article on climate change in Huffington Post, in which she asserted:

“Conditions around the world are being altered much faster than was formerly predicted…It’s a scary scenario, and we’re largely unprepared.”

If, by “formerly predicted,” Atwood is referring to the dire prognostications of the UN’s IPCC faulty climate models, the truth is that every single one of them has actually turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Undeterred, Atwood doubles down and fast forwards the occurrence of the predicted conditions (she does not specify what they are) that have failed to materialize, providing no sources for her claims. The truth is that whatever weather and climate events have occurred within the last decade and a half cannot be blamed on AGW, because there hasn’t been any warming for 18 years and counting.

In the same article, Atwood makes a bizarre, not to mention irresponsible and naive suggestion. In reference to absorption of excess rainfall, she opines that “In cities, depaving could help.” (What? Would she advocate “depaving” and turning her hometown Toronto into Muddy Yorkagain?) Atwood obviously does not seem to know (or care?) that a major source of particulate pollution is unpaved roads!

Margaret Atwood regularly tweets about things related to “climate change,” by which she means man-made climate change. For example, in one tweet she asserts that climate change is partly “at root of Toledo water pollution.” In another, she urges her 529,000 Twitter followers to sign and re-tweet a petition to phase out “carbon pollution to zero,” lest “climate change accelerate beyond our control, threatening our survival.” She is also joiningDavid Suzuki’s Blue Dot tour (she’s an honourary member of the board of the David Suzuki Foundation), designed to “see every Canadian’s right to live in a healthy environment legally recognized” (emphasis added—sounds reasonable, but you can be sure that whatever “legally” really means, it will probably entail “depaving,” along with edicts, diktats, and intrusive, Big Brother smart-controls on how you may live your life).

Margaret Atwood is a President of the Rare Bird Club of BirdLife International and she has tweeted about saving vultures from poisoning, and spoken out about protecting Amherst Island (and Ostrander Point) in Ontario from industrial wind turbines:

“I was horrified to hear of the proposal to blanket Amherst Island with wind turbines…The need to reduce our carbon footprint is widely known, but the destruction of rare natural habitat and species is not the way to do it. Amherst Island is the wrong place for a windfarm. It is a very wrong place.”

Of course, as anyone who has taken a good look at the wind energy industry knows, there is no right place for the useless satanic white windmills, whichkill birds and bats in catastrophic numbers wherever they are located. Why doesn’t Atwood tell the whole truth about how all industrial wind turbines brutally slice and dice any avian creatures that get in their way (ironically while actually adding to CO2 emissions)? What kind of activist bird lover is she? And doesn’t she see all the other devastating environmental, social, and economic evils the monster machines represent? (Talk about “depaving”! Each industrial wind turbine requires an 800-ton concrete platform, and that is just the beginning of howun-green those useless, eco-dirty things really are.)

The terrible irony is that Margaret Atwood has written novels about dystopian worlds, and that with her AGW activism she seems to be helping to create a real one. She says her novels are “speculative fiction” about worlds that “could really happen.“ Atwood has written that speculative fiction can:

“…explore proposed changes in social organisation, by showing what they might actually be like for those living within them. Thus, the utopia and the dystopia, which have proved over and over again that we have a better idea about how to make hell on earth than we do about how to make heaven.”

But Atwood seems unable to recognize that the man-made climate change movement, in which she is a celebrity activist, and the AGW ideology for which she is a high-profile advocate, have been deliberately conceived and engineered as the phoney rationale for a dystopian UN objective (“hell on earth”), as outlined in its master plan for world governance, Agenda 21. This plan would curtail, if not eliminate, not only our democratic rights but also our country’s very sovereignty; it’s a plan to inventory and control everything and everyone on the planet. And this plan not only “could really happen”—it really is happening right now; in fact, it began to be slowly, stealthily implemented more than 20 years ago.

That is the real “scary scenario.”

Margaret Atwood and all the other AGW celebrity acolytes seem to be completely oblivious to the big picture as they go about aiding and abetting the greatest scientific deception of our time. Atwood has written: “There’s a new term, cli-fi (for climate fiction, a play on sci-fi), that’s being used to describe books in which an altered climate is part of the plot.” With her high-profile AGW activism she is helping to perpetuate the real-life AGW climate fiction—a fiction that in Ontario has already cost billions of dollars in the name of green energy, diverted attention and resources from genuine, urgent problems facing us, inflicted untold suffering on people, stalled the economy, blighted the environment, killed wildlife.

Those are real “hell on earth” consequences.

Elizabeth May: Giving voice to nonsense

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, claims:

“The Green party is the only party that bases its policies on evidence. That is why we may take positions ahead of the “group-think” curve…We have been consistent about climate policies, while other parties treat the greatest threat to our children’s future as a passing fad.”

If May’s claim about her party’s evidence-based policies is true, and she sees it as her job “to communicate the science,” why hasn’t she admitted that the evidence and science show that there has not been any global warming for 18 years? It appears that May is “consistent about climate policies” to the extent that she consistently and mindlessly (as in “group-think”) repeats false, long-ago debunked predictions (“greatest threat to our children’s future”), while apparently failing to understand, or deliberately ignoring, the latest scientific findings.

In an April interview on CBC TV, Canada’s national broadcaster, Elizabeth May lauds the IPCC, which is actually a political body masquerading as a scientific one, for part three of its Fifth Assessment Report:

“It’s science, it’s evidence, it’s not someone’s opinion…based on evidence, based on science, these aren’t a group of people who get together and look in a crystal ball…this is scientific warnings that are based on what is happening now.”

As we have mentioned, all of the climate model predictions the IPCC uses to formulate its reports for policy makers—predictions which are actually nothing more than opinions, the equivalent of looking into a crystal ball—have failed. None of the climate models have agreed with the observed data, i.e. the hard scientific evidence.

Does May not know this, or is she deliberately obfuscating the truth? Either way, it doesn’t make her look good. And by “what is happening now,” does she mean that the “serious threat,” with which she tries to scare Canadians, and “the risk for security, the risks of failed states, the risk of a collapse of civilization” are actually unfolding now, at a time when global warming, supposedly the cause of all the doom-and-gloom, has not happened for 18 years? If there hasn’t been any global warming for almost two decades, how can whatever is “happening now” have been caused by it? May’s rhetoric, misinformation, and apocalypse-mongering are deeply irresponsible, reckless, and harmful.

In the interview (see it to believe it), and in what seems like a breezily sanctimonious, arrogant, holier-than-thou tone, Elizabeth May goes on to make the astonishing statement that “99.5% of the scientists who know the issue” agree that climate change is man-made. This claim has been debunked many times over (and just like Pinocchio’s nose, the original phoney statistic of 97% seems to get bigger every time someone cites it). And yet, here is Elizabeth May on national television telling viewers something that is simply not true. Perhaps she thinks she’s in good company because everyone from President Obama down with a vested interest in maintaining the fiction continues to make the same bogus claim. Needless to say, and as usual, the CBC interviewer, in this case Peter Mansbridge—probably because he isn’t informed but given his position certainly ought to be—doesn’t challenge her on the untruth.

And it gets worse. May says that the “denier industry was invented by the fossil fuel industry lobby.” She seems to be proud of her knowledge of “the science,” as she calls it:

“I learned the climate science when I was a senior policy advisor for the Minister of the Environment in the 1980s. We were looking at all the science that was coming in from all around the world, and it was before anyone had “invented”* the idea that there was doubt. The “invention”* of doubt was a product of the fossil fuel lobby that decided after the Earth Summit and after the Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed…then they decided, oh oh, this could cut into profits, we’d better invent doubt…”

*[May employs air quotes.]

What’s astonishing here is May’s smug, self-satisfied conviction that the doubt could only have been manufactured by an avaricious, manipulative fossil fuel industry bogeyman, and not perhaps have come out of the rigorous research of honest climate scientists, (as, for example, Canadian Dr. Tim Ball), who adhere to the scientific method in which healthy, questioning, intelligent scepticism plays an indispensable role. And, if she really does know “the science” as she claims, why is she not telling the truth that there are sound scientific findings out there that invalidate the AGW hypothesis?

May also displays an unbelievably patronizing attitude about people who question the fiction that she promotes:

“So when I talk to people who aren’t convinced, I’m very respectful because I understand that a lot of good people have gotten one little bit of information that seems plausible and have allowed that to morph into their head into some level of large-scale doubt about the science. If we had a lobby that wanted to deny the laws of gravity and the media decided to give them equal voice…that’s the level of the science debate. We shouldn’t be giving voice to nonsense.”

Wow! Look at the poor saps who have that one little “plausible” thing morph into a huge, doubtful balloon in their heads! Let’s censor the ones who let it fester and want to talk to the media about it! Who is actually being granted a national platform and given voice to nonsense here? The irony is that the mainstream media, including our taxpayer-funded national broadcaster the CBC, have given scant, if any voice to the fine scientists and other experts who have not been corrupted into toeing the party line of man-made climate change.

Elizabeth May is a national political figure who holds herself out to be an expert who knows “the science,” but seems to be getting away with disseminating serious misinformation, with the CBC’s vaunted Peter Mansbridge uttering nary a peep of a challenge. This is a national disgrace. Pity the young people, because as she indicates in the interview, she speaks to (indoctrinates?) them in places where they are a captive audience, as she puts it, and they are forced to listen to her nonsensical, apocalyptic view of their future.

Naomi Klein: A death sentence for the planet

In the media and in her latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein does a good job as an AGW alarmist, with what some might even say is histrionic fear mongering. A sampling:

“…keep warming below catastrophic levels,” “…this crisis continues to be existentially terrifying,” “…in the midst of a climate emergency,” “…we’re on a four-to-six-degree temperature trajectory. To be in decade zero, and out of time,” “…a clear and present danger to civilization, “…a death sentence for the planet,” “…a weapon of mass destruction,” “…the road we’re on…will lead us to a greater brutality..to a world of a kind of disaster apartheid I think we caught a glimpse of with Hurricane Katrina.”

When it comes to the climate, Klein also seems to have a problem understanding or telling the truth. She claims to have “immersed myself in the science and politics of climate change.” But she doesn’t appear to be interested in facts: “It’s that I don’t want quibbling about the science. This is how a lot of the debate gets derailed. I don’t want to be derailed with quibbles about how many hurricanes there were in 2012.” (Could that be because, inconveniently, statistics show that there have been a lot less hurricanes and other extreme weather events than the AGW believers claim to be the consequences of man-made climate change?) In a recentCBC radio interview, she quotes Michael Mann, “the famed climate scientist” of the Hockey Stick debacle who employed statistical tricks to produce a misleading graph of global warming history—the graph was used extensively as a propaganda tool to fuel the man-made global warming hype. Perhaps Klein doesn’t know that two Canadian researchers exposed the manipulations:

What they found was that 99% of the time you could process random data using Mann’s techniques and it would generate a Hockey Stick shape. This meant that Mann’s claim that the Hockey Stick graph represented an accurate reconstruction of the past climate was in tatters.

Given Klein’s Jewish heritage, it’s hard to understand how she can use the odious term “deniers,” with its terrible allusion to the Holocaust, when referring to the learned climate scientists and others who have demonstrated that the scientific data do not support the hypothesis of man-made global warming/climate change: “We focus too much on climate deniers,” she says. The use of this nasty ad hominem label has led to outrageous excesses, such as a sickening ad for the upcoming climate march in New York City, wherein it’s implied that respected scientists, other experts, and ordinary people who think for themselves and who happen not to agree that the scientific data support the unproven hypothesis of man-made climate change are tolerant of genocide.

Klein advocates “deep changes to our political and economic system.” She says, “Core inequalities need to be tackled through redistribution of wealth and technology” and bemoans that we seem to be “incapable of responding collectively to an existential crisis and incapable of acting collectively for a greater good.” The socialist/communist plan of action she’s apparently advocating appears to be in line with the UN’s Agenda 21 objectives, which Canadian Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (now resident of communist China when he’s not being fêted in Toronto by celebrity and former Canadian governor-general Adrienne Clarkson as “a true Canadian gem” who “invented the environment”) took a lead in formulating when he said:

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

That would be a real death sentence for the planet.

The grave consequences of celebrities thinking that star power doesn’t need the truth

Of course, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth May, and Naomi Klein aren’t the only Canadian celebrities chastising us for not “believing in” the religion of man-made climate change or doing enough about it. There are many others, including the publicly-lionized David Suzuki, another pseudo-expert on climate science whose shocking and appalling lack of knowledge on the subject was exposed to world-wide ridicule on Australian national television last September. (Watch the video or read the transcript here.)

Do any of the celebrities ever stop to think about the damage they cause by failing to do their homework and study the issues before recklessly and irresponsibly taking their uninformed opinions on the road?

Do they have any inkling that what they say, write, tweet, or sing in public forums may help to bring about and sustain, for example, the miserable realities of trying to live amidst industrial wind turbines which have been forced on rural residents as a direct result of the deception of man-made climate change posing a planetary emergency, thus supposedly necessitating special, draconian, democratic-rights-robbing legislation which gives the wind industry unprecedented rights to despoil prime farmland, expropriate land, kill wildlife, adversely affect people’s health, destabilize the electrical grid, fracture communities, devalue property, and allows it to enjoy 20-year guaranteed, significantly above-market returns on investment, courtesy of the taxpayers?

People are suffering badly for a big, celebrity-enabled lie, and losing their rights, their jobs, their homes, their communities, their environment, their way of life, their money.

Celebrity acolytes and advocates of man-made climate change, with their hysterical exaggerations, outrageous fear mongering, blatant misinformation, and bald-faced untruths have to take a good look at themselves and their role in the terrible consequences of helping to propagate the greatest scientific deception of all time.

Even Scientists Do Not All Agree on Climate Change – It is NOT Settled!

September 20, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Sept. 19, 2014 12:19 p.m. ET

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The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Mitch Dobrowner

The idea that “Climate science is settled” runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.

My training as a computational physicist—together with a 40-year career of scientific research, advising and management in academia, government and the private sector—has afforded me an extended, up-close perspective on climate science. Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know, and don’t know, about climate. I have come to appreciate the daunting scientific challenge of answering the questions that policy makers and the public are asking.

The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.

Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, “How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?” Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.

But—here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.

Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

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Scientists measure the sea level of the Ross Sea in Antarctica. National Geographic/Getty Images

But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.

Beyond these observational challenges are those posed by the complex computer models used to project future climate. These massive programs attempt to describe the dynamics and interactions of the various components of the Earth system—the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the ice and the biosphere of living things. While some parts of the models rely on well-tested physical laws, other parts involve technically informed estimation. Computer modeling of complex systems is as much an art as a science.

For instance, global climate models describe the Earth on a grid that is currently limited by computer capabilities to a resolution of no finer than 60 miles. (The distance from New York City to Washington, D.C., is thus covered by only four grid cells.) But processes such as cloud formation, turbulence and rain all happen on much smaller scales. These critical processes then appear in the model only through adjustable assumptions that specify, for example, how the average cloud cover depends on a grid box’s average temperature and humidity. In a given model, dozens of such assumptions must be adjusted (“tuned,” in the jargon of modelers) to reproduce both current observations and imperfectly known historical records.

We often hear that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn’t a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences. Since 1990, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has periodically surveyed the state of climate science. Each successive report from that endeavor, with contributions from thousands of scientists around the world, has come to be seen as the definitive assessment of climate science at the time of its issue.

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There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. Pictured, an estuary in Patgonia. Gallery Stock

For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth’s climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:

• The models differ in their descriptions of the past century’s global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere’s energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate’s inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.

• Although the Earth’s average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.

Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.

• The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.

• The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that “hot spot” has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.

• Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.

• A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.

These and many other open questions are in fact described in the IPCC research reports, although a detailed and knowledgeable reading is sometimes required to discern them. They are not “minor” issues to be “cleaned up” by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections. Work to resolve these shortcomings in climate models should be among the top priorities for climate research.

Yet a public official reading only the IPCC’s “Summary for Policy Makers” would gain little sense of the extent or implications of these deficiencies. These are fundamental challenges to our understanding of human impacts on the climate, and they should not be dismissed with the mantra that “climate science is settled.”

While the past two decades have seen progress in climate science, the field is not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it. This decidedly unsettled state highlights what should be obvious: Understanding climate, at the level of detail relevant to human influences, is a very, very difficult problem.

We can and should take steps to make climate projections more useful over time. An international commitment to a sustained global climate observation system would generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations. And increasingly powerful computers can allow a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models, finer model grids and more sophisticated descriptions of the processes that occur within them. The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.

A transparent rigor would also be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, “red team” reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method. But because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.

Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” (or is a “hoax”) demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.

Society’s choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.

But climate strategies beyond such “no regrets” efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.

Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about “believing” or “denying” the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity’s deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.

Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.

Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP,BP.LN +0.42% where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

Germany’s Largest Newspaper, Gets Clued in About the Climate Scam!

September 18, 2014 / 1957chev / 2 Comments

“Self-Inflicted Apocalypse Fascination”! Germany’s Leading Daily Fed Up With End-Of-World Scenarios, Climate Catastrophe!

By P Gosselin on 17. September 2014

Germany’s major media takes a landmark step, one could argue.

At their Die kalte Sonne site, geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning and chemist Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt point out a recent article appearing in Germany’s no. 1 daily by circulation (2.5 million), Bild. Apparently the Axel Springer publication is getting fed up with all the global warming catastrophe nonsense.

Note that Bild is the world’s 6th largest newspaper.
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Bild daily has had enough of the climatic end of the world “Apocalypse? No!”
By Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt

Bild daily has had enough of the constant screaming of alarm, and expressed it in very clear terms on September 11, 2014:

World refuses to end: Apocalypse? No!

Ozone hole, bird flu, Mayan curse or El Niño: How occupational pessimists, esoteric eggheads, astro-kooks and eco-freaks constantly want to talk us into the end of the world.

For 30 years we feared the ozone hole that had exposed us without protection to insidious UV rays: Until Wednesday. Then all of a sudden the UN announced: The ozone layer is well on its way to regeneration. This was not the first time that creepy end-of-world scenarios turned out to be a mix of fear-mongering and self-inflicted apocalypse fascination, […]

4. Climate change is melting the poles

Hardly anything in science is more at loggerheads than the question of to what extent man causes climate change. It’s an undisputed fact that the amount of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ in the air has risen strongly since industrialization, recently at a record level, and also the rise in global mean temperature (currently globally at 0.13°C per decade). But on the other hand the warnings of the dramatic melting of the poles and horror flooding of the poor Pacific islands have proven to be exaggerated. Currently the sea level is rising 3.2 mm per year. And the melting at the poles? Last summer the sea ice area in the Arctic compared to a year earlier rose 60%. 20 ships had to be rescued by ice breakers.”

Read the entire article at bild.de.

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Adding to Vahrenholt’s and Lünings piece, in its article Bild brings up 8 once claimed end-of-world scenarios that never came true: 1) acid rain/forest die-off, 2) Mayan Calendar, 3) 2014/2015 El Niño, 4) poles melting/climate change, 5) bird flu, 6) Nostradamus, 7) 1910 Haley’s Comet, and 8) nuclear inferno.

Bild sarcastically ends the part about the climate catastrophe with a photo of a semi-submerged Brandenburg Gate with the caption:

The Brandenburg Gate has remained completely spared by the ‘worst environmental catastrophe since Chernobyl’.”

Glad to see Bild is taking this step when it comes to the kooky climate catastrophe. It served them well, but now they are moving on.

– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2014/09/17/self-inflicted-apocalypse-fascination-germanys-leading-daily-fed-up-with-end-of-world-scenarios-climate-catastrophe/#sthash.mMSRDIdP.dpuf

Wind Turbine Troubles…..They’re Definitely NOT Safe!

September 17, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

The scandal of UK’s death-trap wind turbines: A turbine built for 115mph winds felled in 50mph gusts. Dozens more affected by cost-cutting. Why residents living in their shadow demand to know – are they safe?

Health and Safety Executive release reports on collapsed wind turbines
Causes were manufacturing faults and basic installation mistakes
Campaigners believe the risk of turbines collapsing will continue to grow

By SIMON TRUMP FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

PUBLISHED: 22:36 GMT, 13 September 2014

It was just before midnight on a winter’s night last year. Outside in the gusting January wind it was freezing, but Bill Jarvis was sitting by the fire with his wife Annie and a few relatives in their cottage on the North Devon moors.

And that’s when they heard it: a tremendous ‘crack’, louder than a thunderclap.

‘We rushed outside wondering what on earth had happened,’ recalls Bill. ‘We thought perhaps a plane had crashed it was such a loud noise. ‘We couldn’t see flames or anything burning, even though we peered out in the direction it had come from. There was nothing else though, no more noise or aftershocks.’

Collapsed: The turbine that fell at East Ash Farm, Bradworthy had been installed with the wrong configuration of nuts at its base, upsetting its balance

Deafeningly loud it might have been, but what the Jarvis family had heard – as they were to discover the following morning – had taken place at Bradworthy, a mile away. It was the noise of a 115ft-high wind turbine crashing to the ground.

‘It’s pretty terrifying stuff,’ says Mr Jarvis. ‘I’m no fan of the things and this has just added to my worries. Just think what could have happened. It sends a shiver down your spine.’

He is not the only one feeling nervous about the march of the giant metal windmills across the British landscape.

This week, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) produced two reports – one into the catastrophic failure of the Bradworthy turbine and another into the collapse of a turbine in the next county, Cornwall, just three nights later.

And its conclusions are not merely unsettling, but have frightening implications for wind turbines and their safety right across the country.

Man down: The wind turbine at Winsdon Farm, North Petherwin, Cornwall, fell due to a fault with the components, resulting in a failure in the foundation rods concreted into its base

The turbines in Devon and Cornwall came down when the wind was blowing at barely 50mph, despite the fact that they are supposed to withstand blasts of just over 115mph.

And, as the HSE concluded, the causes were manufacturing faults and basic mistakes in the way they were installed. The errors have already been replicated elsewhere in the country, as the two reports make clear, and could affect dozens – if not hundreds – more of the giant towers.

It is hardly encouraging to learn that the HSE reports were not published in a normal sense, but were available only on request.

They have come to light now only through Freedom of Information (FoI) requests lodged by a number of concerned residents.

Dr Philip Bratby, from CPRE Devon, believes the risk of collapse will continue to grow as long as the wind industry is allowed to operate behind a wall of secrecy.

A retired physicist, who formerly worked in nuclear energy, he says: ‘Safety standards in my line of work were paramount. We constantly monitored, tested and maintained equipment but this does not seem the case with turbines.

‘These two failures were catastrophic. The towers came crashing down with great force from a great height.

‘It was only down to luck it happened in the night and no people or animals were injured or killed.

‘The wind industry is very secretive about everything it does. It won’t publicise any definitive information about accidents so it is impossible to make an independent assessment of the risks.’

Dr Bratby lives at Rackenford, high on the edge of Exmoor, where there has also been a proliferation of turbines.

‘I am not convinced that we are learning from the bad experiences and feeding those lessons back into the education of designers and constructors because the industry is growing so rapidly,’ he says.

‘The size of these turbines seems to keep on increasing and I believe the dangers will increase accordingly. The bigger the turbine that fails, the bigger the potential for disaster and death.’

Turbine towers are supposedly secured by lowering them on to a series of foundation rods that emerge vertically from a concrete foundation.

These are levelled by the adjustment of bottom nuts below a flange at the base and then fixed with another set of nuts above the base.

Campaigners believe the risk of turbines collapsing will continue to grow as long as the wind industry is allowed to operate behind a wall of secrecy

All the exposed metal, including the rods and the nuts, is then encased in grout which protects it and spreads the stresses from any movement in the turbine.

Yet as these groundbreaking HSE reports show, not only were some of the parts faulty, two different sets of sub-contractors made the same basic – possibly cost-cutting – errors. And the result was that the metal monsters were not secure at all.

In the incident at East Ash Farm, Bradworthy, on January 27, 2013 – the one heard by Mr Jarvis – an E3120 model, made by Canadian-based Endurance, was found to have been installed with the wrong configuration of nuts at its base.

This upset the ‘loadings’, or balance, of the tower. The implication is that it wasn’t level. To compound the problem, the contractors who installed it had failed to use structural-grade grout to seal the rods and bolts from the worst of the weather and had used a ‘cosmetic’ compound instead.

The HSE reports reveal that the same faulty configuration of nuts had been to blame at Wattlesborough, near Shrewsbury in Shropshire, the previous year when another E3120 collapsed.

To date, Endurance has erected 300 of the E3120s throughout the United Kingdom.

The UK arm of the company says it has inspected all of them and carried out urgent repairs on 29 of the towers.

A different type of turbine fell at Winsdon Farm, North Petherwin, Cornwall, on January 30. This was a G133, manufactured by Gaia-Wind, originally a Danish firm.

This time there was a fault with the components, resulting in a failure in the foundation rods concreted into its base. But again, it had been badly installed with a lack of grout. As the HSE inspector concluded, there was ‘a lack of resilience to the fatigue loading within the securing arrangement… and poor fatigue strength in the securing components’.

The collapse of another G133 turbine at Otley, near Leeds, in April 2013 occurred in identical circumstances. Again, the securing rods were substandard. Once again, they had not been properly grouted in place.

As Dr Bratby points out, the footings and securings, which are difficult to inspect when encased in concrete and grout, are critical because they are subject to such huge and varying forces.

‘Over time they clearly degrade to the point of failure,’ he says. ‘We should be asking ourselves whether we are at a tipping point as the first-generation technology is exposed and compromised.’

Green energy: Wind turbines and windfarms provide a renewable alternative

Dr Bratby is frustrated at the lack of risk assessments undertaken when looking at sites.

He says: ‘I accept that the dangers from wind turbines located on farms without public access and remote from public rights of way are probably acceptable.

‘That is not always the case. They have been located close to roads and railways, at workplaces, in schools, hospitals and parks without any formal assessment of the dangers. I think that is unacceptable.’

His views are shared by fellow campaigner Alan Dransfield, from Exeter, who helped to mastermind the FoI application.

‘These reports took the best part of a year and several thousand pounds to compile, and the HSE decided to investigate because of the extensive media coverage and widespread public concern,’ Mr Dransfield says.

‘I’m delighted they did because look what they’ve found. Without doubt there is an urgent need for a more proactive stance with regard to the wind-turbine industry. It clearly can’t police itself.’

Taken together, there are 380 E3120 and GI33 towers. Of these, four are known to have collapsed, while repairs were necessary in 39 others to prevent potential further collapses.

Meanwhile, an as yet undisclosed number have further problems with the way they are bolted down, according to the HSE, and need repairing as soon as possible.

Revealing as they are, however, the two new reports deal with only a small minority of British turbines: there are 6,500 of differing design and manufacture across the country, and when it comes to problems with collapse or faulty installation, the public is wholly in the dark.

Figures from Caithness Windfarm Information Forum, a wind-turbine monitoring website, show that structural failure is the third most common major fault, behind blade failure and fire.

It has recorded an average of 149 accidents worldwide every year between 2009 and 2013 but believes this to be the ‘tip of the iceberg’ as it relies on scanning the internet for reports of such incidents.

‘The trend is as expected – as more turbines are built, more accidents occur,’ says a spokesman. ‘The numbers will continue upwards until the HSE helps force significant change.

‘In particular, the public should be protected by declaring a minimum safe distance between new turbine developments and occupied houses and buildings.’

However, Chris Streatfeild, director of health and safety with Renewable UK, the industry trade association, believes that any fears of wind power are unfounded and the risks minimal and acceptable.

‘Manufacturers, installers and owners work hard to ensure that they meet extremely stringent health and safety standards,’ he says.

‘There’s a rigorous process, verified by independent bodies, to ensure strict installation standards and safe siting. That’s why problems are so rare.’

He adds: ‘When incidents do occur, it’s important to learn from them and implement any lessons fully and promptly. Any serious incident has to be reported to the HSE and we work closely with them to ensure high standards are maintained.

‘To put this into its proper context, no member of the public has ever been injured by a wind turbine. It’s unfortunate a handful of anti-wind campaigners are choosing to indulge in scaremongering.

‘Climate change is a real and pressing issue. When it comes to generating clean electricity, onshore wind is the most cost-effective way so we should be making the most of it.’

Meanwhile, at North Petherwin, the fallen wind turbine has now been resurrected. Indeed, landowner and Liberal Democrat councillor Adam Paynter has installed a second one alongside it. Mr Paynter declined to comment when contacted by The Mail on Sunday.

At Bradworthy, farmers Des and Vera Ludwell were also staying quiet about their windmill. A new turbine stands in the position of its collapsed predecessor, about 50 yards from the road. A second one is even closer, leaving little safety margin.

Councillor David Tomlin revealed there are 50 turbines within a six-mile radius of Bradworthy, a quiet market town, and a further 20 have been approved.

‘We are not anti-wind power as such,’ he says. ‘But there is a visual intrusion and residents who live close to turbines report a constant whooshing noise from blades. Most importantly, can we still be certain they are safe?

‘What happened here and in Cornwall and analysed in detail in these two reports should be a wake- up call. Perhaps we should halt the erection of further turbines pending an investigation of the industry as a whole.’

An earlier version of this article said the HSE reports had been published in redacted form. We would like to make clear this was incorrect and the full reports have been available.

Dictatorial Governments Bound to Get Backlash! Listen When We Say NO!!

September 15, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

NIMBYs are not the problem

Ontario’s failure to develop broader support for building wind and other renewable energy projects stems from a lack of local democracy.

Stewart FastPolicy Options, September 2014

The sweeping changes to Ontario’s renewable energy policy regime in the past few years have spawned a highly charged public debate. Much of the controversy focuses on the public payments offered to wind and solar developers, and there has been an accompanying backlash from dissenting neighbours and other critics against the proliferation of turbines and solar panels in rural areas. But that noisy clash obscures a deeper and more dangerous tendency in the province’s approach to new energy projects: an approval framework that sees the public as inherently selfish, prone to irrational opposition and incapable of considering the greater public interest. This policy approach reflects the bureaucracy’s mistrust of the ability of the Ontario public to make wise energy choices.

The belief that individual selfishness prevails over a sense of the common good inhibits good energy policy and is unhealthy for the province’s democracy. It springs from a conviction of the power of NIMBYism. NIMBY, of course, is the catchy acronym coined in the 1980s for the “not in my backyard” phenomenon that expresses individuals’ desire to protect their own turf from new building or development, despite broad societal agreement that the development is necessary. The concept holds that while most citizens might agree on the need for a new road, landfill, prison or wind generator, few want to live next to one.

Framed this way, the NIMBY question is a variation of the free-rider problem in economic theory: how to avoid everyone freely benefiting from a service without paying their share. Traditionally, this has been dealt with by having a planning authority compel or compensate citizens to host these facilities for the greater good. But recently there has been a growing acknowledgement of the public’s readiness to appreciate trade-offs and participate more fully in planning decisions. Public policy practitioners and researchers alike recognize that decisions about where to build new developments are messy and highly political, and frequently involve trade-offs and multiple changes to original plans. If conflict is to be minimized and decisions given greater legitimacy, the public must be involved in the process.

Unfortunately, Ontario’s approach to building wind generators and other renewable energy projects has ignored this tenet. Instead of more public participation, there has been less. In 2009, a dozen pieces of legislation were amended to create uniform provincial standards, streamlining the patchwork of local rules that had grown up around the province’s first wind projects on matters such as setbacks (the distance a facility must be from dwellings, roads, rivers and other places that need protection), noise bylaws and community benefit arrangements. Any requirement for lower-tier government approval was erased and a stringent legal test was put in place in case of appeals against wind project approvals. The approach was designed in the conviction that Ontario’s citizens were not to be trusted, and that anyone opposing wind energy was simply in the grip of NIMBYism.

This is a flawed premise. As early as 2000, Dutch researcher Maarten Wolsink showed that only a small minority of people living next to proposed and existing wind farms fit the classic profile of a NIMBY. Research published in 2013 by Jamie Baxter and colleagues from the University of Western Ontario showed a similar phenomenon. In a study that surveyed Ontario communities with and without turbines, they showed that only 9 percent of residents fit the NIMBY profile. Instead, their research revealed that Ontarians are much more likely to either oppose the installation of wind turbines altogether (not in anybody’s backyard, or NIABY) or, if they favour renewables, agree to have them built in their communities (yes in my backyard, or YIMBY).

My research into public attitudes to renewable energy projects backs this up. I have looked at the process for approving wind projects both before and after the rule changes to the 2009 Ontario Green Energy Act, and I found that the YIMBY constituency is effectively sidelined by the lack of a process for discussing and debating projects at the local level, including the failure to require municipal authority approval for projects.

The lack of a process to involve citizens in decisions means supporters of renewable energy development projects have less incentive – and little opportunity – to influence project approval.

The lack of a process to involve citizens in decisions at the local level means those who support new renewable energy development projects have less incentive — and little opportunity — to meaningfully influence project approval. The feeling among YIMBYs is that the province is the only authority that matters under the current rules, so why engage in potentially unpleasant arguments and debates with neighbours? Furthermore, as Trent University’s Stephen Hill and James Knott point out in their 2010 article in the journal Renewable Energy Law and Policy, local planners are sidelined from the process of approving new renewable energy projects, removing a vital cog in lending legitimacy to projects. Local planners are the skilled and trusted actors normally designated to shepherd controversial developments to completion.

Yes, requiring local approval and getting local politicians and planners onside takes time. And the need for deeper support at the local level may mean that some projects with excellent technical and economic foundations may not get built. But in the long run, trust and social licence are assets that need to be nurtured during this transition to a greater reliance on green energy. Wind, solar and other renewables are a type of resource that is different from more centralized energy systems like nuclear and coal power plants. Wind and solar resources are disparate and spread out across communities and landscapes. The change to a low-carbon energy system thus involves new actors and new winners and losers. Ontario needs to implement more, not fewer, meaningful opportunities for local residents to impact project decisions.

A high rate of project appeals in Ontario is associated with another policy problem: poor communication of the health risks involved in wind power generation. The potential for producing serious harm to human health is one of only two bases for appeals under the Ontario legislation (the other is serious and irreversible harm to plant and animal life). Fear of ill-health effects has become a mantra of the wind opposition movement in the province. Testimonials of negative health impacts are thus raised in the adversarial setting of a legal process, instead of in a more open environment where the health issues could be discussed openly by citizens and experts alike. The health discourse has become polarized, with wind developers on one side labelling the alleged ill-health impacts as “quack science” while critics raise the spectre of alarming risks to public health if wind turbines are built. This turns legitimate discussion of health risks into fevered tribal warfare.

It is not even clear that Ontario’s streamlined approval regime has provided the stable environment for investment in wind energy that was a primary goal of the legislation. In reaction to an absence of democratic process, local protests against what is seen as provincial heavy-handedness have grown into a well-organized and effective anti-wind movement. Industry watchers note that every single wind project approved under the new Ontario rules has been appealed. The legal delays forced the province earlier this year to extend the contractual deadlines for approved power projects to account for these delays. By comparison, Quebec has had far fewer appeals for roughly the same production level of installed wind projects.

One reason for Quebec’s lower level of community conflict over wind power generation may lie with the province’s ability to successfully establish a sense of community ownership of some wind projects. There is wide agreement among experts that wind energy success in jurisdictions like Germany and Denmark is partially due to high levels of community ownership of projects. Hydro-Québec has signed agreements for a dozen wind projects in which community interests have a 50 percent ownership stake. These ownership groups include regional municipal governments and First Nations. The arrangements vary, but typically wind revenue is returned to general coffers or earmarked to a special fund.

Ontario’s framework for supporting community ownership of wind projects, on the other hand, has been an utter failure. Instead of setting aside a guaranteed portion of the province’s wind power purchases to come from projects with community ownership as was done in Quebec, Ontario offered to pay a premium price for a particular type of community ownership arrangement. Local renewable energy co-ops first had to be established, and then these entities had to partner with developers with at least a 15 percent ownership stake in order to capture the premium price. Five years after the law was passed, no wind projects with co-op ownership have emerged in the province.

Policy-makers should have recognized the lack of uptake in Ontario earlier and experimented with different options, such as lower percentage thresholds for the premium. A more equitable sharing of the financial benefits from wind projects is part of the answer to host-community conflicts. Typically, only the wind company and a select number of landowners with turbines on their properties receive compensation for the energy produced. Other models such as the community ownership arrangements in Quebec or compensation for all landowners in close proximity to turbines could help. The more actors that are receiving even modest financial benefits to offset the costs of having a wind project in their backyard, the better.

Thankfully, there are signs that the province is getting the message that it cannot override local democracy if its orchestrated transition to greater renewable energy use is to succeed. Earlier this year, provincial civil servants were directed to revamp community engagement requirements for large wind procurement contracts. Early proposals are that wind development companies would have to show community involvement through equity interest or an agreement to comply with local site control processes.

However, the that reality is that there is a legacy of dozens of wind projects approved under the old rules that have yet to be built and will continue to create unnecessary community conflict for years to come. One area in which to monitor the Wynne government’s commitment to more -citizen involvement is a planned move to more decentralized energy planning. This would see regional-level input into selecting a mix of energy sources appropriate to the energy needs of regions.

The litmus test is who gets invited to participate and agrees to join in these deliberations. Will it be only energy utilities and government departments, or will community groups and landowners also be involved? To truly succeed, policy-makers must realize that not all citizens are selfish NIMBYs. If the transition to renewables is to work by consent, people must be consulted at a local level. The diktat approach is destined to fail.

Stewart Fast is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography and the Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy, Queen’s University.

European Union Finally “Gets It”….The Faux-Green Scam, is Nothing But a Money-Grab!

September 15, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

When can we expect the same sanity from the Liberals, in Canada, especially Ontario? They are ruining our manufacturing sector, with their outrageous energy prices! Families can no longer afford their electricity bills. It has to STOP!

EU Dismantles Its Climate Commission Amid Economic Struggles

European Union leaders announced they will be consolidating energy and environmental goals under a new commissioner, effectively axing the intergovernmental groups’ climate arm as green policies are making it harder for citizens to pay their power bills.

Former Spanish agriculture and environment minister Miguel Arias Canete was tapped by the EU Commission to take over a consolidated energy and climate office. Canete will be replacing Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard and Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger in what is seen as a huge blow to Europe’s global warming efforts.

“The EU is signalling a historical shift away from its green priority towards a new focus on economic recovery, competitiveness and energy cost,” Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“This policy shift has been in the making for the last two years, but only now has Europe new leaders who are no longer obsessed with climate change,” said Peiser, who is based in the UK.

The change in EU energy and climate leadership was partly spurred by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, which has put Europe’s natural gas supplies at risk. The Ukraine crisis also sparked calls for Europe to drill for its oil and gas using hydraulic fracturing and begin importing more energy from allies, like the U.S.

Europeans are also being burdened by rising energy bills from domestic green policies and EU rules that effectively mandate higher cost electricity generation from renewables, like wind and solar power. The UK, in particular has seen numerous power plants close down and is even considering WWII-style energy rationing to keep the lights and heat on this winter.

Canete preside over the drafting of new energy rules after the EU hashes out cap-and-trade reform and green energy targets in October. The former Spanish official will also have to balance Europe’s energy needs against pressures from interest groups and the United Nations to enter into a legally binding global climate treaty.

Environmentalists have expressed concerns that the EU Commission is abandoning too many of its environmental goals, especially by getting rid of its independent climate arm. Activists have even accused Canete of being too cozy with fossil fuels companies.

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“The choice of a Climate and Energy Commissioner with well-known links to the fossil fuel industry raises issues of conflict of interest,” reads a letter to the EU Commission from Green10 — a coalition of environmental groups.

“The fact that sustainable development, resource efficiency and the green economy are not covered at all at Vice-President level implies a Commission that will be operating on the basis of an outdated paradigm of economic growth, one that benefits the industries and jobs of the past over those of the future, and detached from real world constraints and limits,” the coalition said in its letter.

“Canete is a surprising choice, given his connections to the oil industry,” Greenpeace’s managing director in the EU, Mahi Sideridou, told Bloomberg in an emailed statement. “To prove he is the right man for the job, he’ll have to resolve conflicts of interests and improve on his environmental record as a minister.”

Canete is a lawyer by training and worked for Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government from 2011 to 2014, reports Bloomberg. Canete was elected to EU Parliament in May 2014.

He has been described as “an acute politician” by analysts and could help make the EU’s fragmented energy and environmental goals more coherent and workable.

“His number one challenge will be to bring coherence into very fragmented policies, reflecting the commission’s recent proposal to put the [emissions trading system] back in the center of EU energy and climate policy,” Laurent Donceel, director at the consulting firm G+Europe, told Bloomberg.

Angus Taylor…..An Australian Hero! Putting Windweasels on Notice!

September 15, 2014September 15, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

The Wind Industry’s Worst Nightmare – Angus Taylor – says: time to kill the LRET

September 15, 2014 by stopthesethings

Member for Hume, Angus “the Enforcer” Taylor has taken the lead on behalf of the Coalition in Tony Abbott’s quest to bring the wind industry to its knees. While there’s been a lot of huff and puff emanating from Ian “Macca” Macfarlane and his faithful ward, young Gregory Hunt about saving the mandatory RET with magical “third ways”, STT says keep your eyes focused on Taylor and the PM.

To give you some idea of where Taylor is coming from – and where the wind industry is headed – here’s an interview he gave last week (9 September 2014) on Sky News (transcript follows).

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http://blob:https%3A//www.youtube.com/fe2546b4-a7de-461e-8946-528eaf70770e

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Graham Richardson: Angus Taylor is the member for Hume, and he’s in our Canberra studio. G’day Angus how are you?

Angus Taylor: G’day Graham.

Graham Richardson: Now I’ve got to say that if I was a minister, I’d be looking behind me and saying there’s a Rhodes scholar on the backbench, we can’t have him there for long. I mean, you’d have to get, you’d have be promoted – I don’t see how they can keep a Rhodes scholar on the backbench.

Alan Jones: He is a patient man, he’s a farmer’s son. He’s a patient man. Angus, just explain to us would you, in layman’s language, what is the Renewable Energy Target.

Angus Taylor: Alan, it’s a scheme designed to increase the level of renewable electricity in Australia. And the way it works in practice is it gives big subsidies to renewable projects and it builds those subsidies into our electricity prices ….

Alan Jones: Sorry to interrupt you – go even simpler – the Renewable, Angus, a renewable project – just explain what a renewable project is.

Angus Taylor: Well, so there are two schemes, the large scale scheme, which is essentially wind – there is a bit of hydro in there but no new hydro. So that’s the large-scale scheme and that is the majority of it. That’s about 90% of the total. And then there is the small scale scheme which is largely rooftop solar. So they’re the two schemes, and we pay for those big subsidies in our electricity prices, in our bills – they’re not transparent.

Alan Jones: And that energy is infinitely dearer to produce than coal-fired power so isn’t it fair to say that without massive subsidies, these outfits couldn’t survive. Now if the government is not going to give money to the motor vehicle industry, and it’s not going to give money to SPC Ardmona, why is it giving billions of dollars to Qatari owned wind turbines?

Angus Taylor: Well that’s a good question. I mean we’ve just had a review of this, led by Dick Warburton, and what the review concluded was that these are expensive schemes, very expensive schemes, but as importantly they’re very expensive ways to reduce carbon emissions. They did come to different conclusions on solar and the large-scale, the wind subsidies, and what we know is rooftop solar in remote areas can be economic, but large-scale wind it’s very clear that it’s not economic on any grounds.

Graham Richardson: If it is not economic, tell me how uneconomic is it? How much dearer? You know, is it 50%, is it 80% dearer than coal-fired power? How much?

Angus Taylor: Well, put it in perspective. A wind project to get investment will probably need a price somewhere in their long-term contract of somewhere close to $100. And we’re buying electricity now, wholesale electricity at about $30 a megawatt hour. So say three times is a good rule of thumb … What we also know is the cost of reducing carbon emissions this way – it’s something like $60-70 and of course the carbon tax was far less that and we think still way too high.

Alan Jones: Let’s just go … just go to where our viewers are involved in all of this. Let me just ask you a simple question, right, I’m a big Qatari investor, because I know that Australians are suckers, we know the Australian government is just shelling out money, now I come from Qatar and I want to build wind turbines and I’ve found this farmer, Angus Taylor in Goulburn and he’s got this a big hill out there – and I think this would be a good place to build wind turbines, so go to Angus Taylor and I say to him I want to put 70 wind turbines on your property. Just basically rule of thumb, how much would you expect to get from me, the big Qatari Guru, how much would you expect to get from me per wind turbine? And I want 70 of them on your farm.

Angus Taylor: You’d get about 10 to 12 thousand dollars so if you going to have

Alan Jones: So I kick in $700,000 to you, that’s right. So I build the 70 wind turbines. Enter the taxpayer. So I’m from Qatar, I’m a big wind power man, what’s the taxpayer going to fork out to me in order that I so-called ‘produce’ this wind power?

Angus Taylor: Look on average you’d expect it to be about $400,000 per year, per turbine.

Alan Jones: For 30 years.

Angus Taylor: In fact in the next few years – yes for 30 years (GR Wow). 400,000 per turbine.

Alan Jones: Start again

Angus Taylor: So if you had 70 turbines, that’s $28 million a year.

Alan Jones: 28 million on his farm – on his farm – 28 million – so the people watching you – say it again – I’m a Qatari I’m not even an Australian – $28 million a year for one farm. How the hell can this be sustainable?

Angus Taylor: For 70 turbines – and of course we are all paying for that in our electricity bills that’s how it’s coming through.

Graham Richardson: Can I ask you Angus – at the moment what is the energy target and how close have we got to it?

Angus Taylor: Right so the energy target is supposed to be 20% of total demand. It’s turning out that it is way above that. The unit is 41 terawatt hours – but what’s important is we’re overshooting the 20% target by a long way. Now the problem with that, the problem with that is from here on in, we would have to build a Snowy Mountains Scheme every year for the next 5 years to reach the target. That’s a Snowy Mountain every year, for the next 5 years to reach the target. And the target will take us well over the 20% mark. The reason it’s going to take us way over the 20% mark, which was the original target, we were originally set ourselves a target of 20%, the reason we’re going way over is that electricity demand has actually been going backwards in Australia and the expectation was it would keep growing. So we’ve got this very high target, huge amount of renewable capacity to be built to reach it, and it’s going to take us way over what we originally expected to do.

Alan Jones: And Angus isn’t t fair to say that written into the budget there is an expenditure figure of $17 billion – 17 thousand million dollars, to build between 700 and 10,000 of these. Now can I just ask this? If the Abbott Government is not going to give money to SPC Ardmona, and if it’s not going to give money to the car industry – and out there is tax payer land they say, nor should they, why the hell are we subsidising Chinese and Qatari wind farmers jacking up the price of energy, pushing manufacturing out of business? Why are we doing it?

Angus Taylor: Well, look this is the good question. We are paying these massive subsidies out in our electricity bills we are going way over the target we originally set ourselves and really what this is becoming now is just industry assistance, it’s becoming industry assistance and primarily for the wind industry.

Alan Jones: It’s industry welfare on steroids.

Graham Richardson: How much investment goes into it? How much private investment goes into it?

Angus Taylor: Well look, you know, it depends on what’s being built Graham but it is a big number, 17 billion is probably not a bad number to go with, which is the number that Alan mentioned earlier. So there’s a lot of investment- but remember what’s happening here – it’s not creating jobs, we’re actually taking jobs away from other places. In fact, Deloitte tells us that we’re actually going to lose in total 5000 jobs as a result of this – now we gain some in one place and lose them in the other, but the net, we are going to lose 5000 jobs and the reason for that is that it is inefficient investment – we are actually replacing electricity generation we don’t need to replace because demand is going backwards, not forwards. So this is costing us a lot.

Alan Jones: Yes, it is costing us. Isn’t it valid to say – and it may be an oversimplification, you can either have a manufacturing industry, or a Renewable Energy Target – you can’t have both.

Angus Taylor: Well, the other part of this, of course, is if it’s pushing electricity prices up, and in the next 5 years it’s likely to push them up quite a lot, if it’s pushing electricity prices up, not only is that hurting households, it’s hurting businesses in exactly the same way that the Carbon tax was hurting businesses. There’s no difference. It’s pushing up electricity prices and that’s hurting all of us.

Alan Jones: But you said …

Angus Taylor: We’ve gone from being a low cost energy country to a high cost energy country and this is continuing to be one of the contributors. So if all of this was for a good purpose, if it was a cheap way to reduce carbon emissions, depending on your view on whether that’s a good thing to do, then you might be able to justify it. But it’s not and the Review Panel told us that very clearly.

Alan Jones: Terry McCrann, the very experienced economist said many many years ago, if you want to de-carbonise the Australian economy, your writing yourself a national suicide note. Now here we are forcing manufacturing overseas, forcing jobs, Deloitte said that, up to 6000 jobs. Now at what point do we say to Macfarlane, you said it in the party room, Macfarlane is the Energy Minister, he said this week, there’d be no changes, there’ll be no changes, we’ll make no changes that damage or end the Renewable Energy Target. This is the Energy Minister. You’ve got a Rhode scholar here saying – hang on – this is an inefficient use of resources, this is welfare on steroids and you’ve got the Minister – don’t ask me what I think of that bloke – but you’ve got this Minister saying the exact opposite. What is the party room saying about this?

Angus Taylor: Look, there’s clearly some concerns about solar in the party room, but the overwhelming view of the party room has always been that we have got to contain electricity prices. There’s no question about that. I think, to be fair to the Minister, in the last 48 hours he’s made it very clear that he’s concerned about the rise in electricity prices we’re likely to see in the next few years. He’s made that very clear. You know, look if there’s one cause that we took to the last election, aside from stopping the boats, it was that we needed to contain electricity price increases. That was a view that the party room held…

Graham Richardson: But the argument was … Angus , the trouble is you ran the argument about the Carbon tax being the cause and it was only a small part of the cause, so you actually didn’t really tell the truth about the Carbon tax, because I think it was about 9% and everybody tried to make it sound like it was a great deal more.

Angus Taylor: Well, 10% on someone’s electricity bill Graham is a big number for the average Australian and remember the people who are hit hardest here are those are least well off, and energy-intensive businesses which have been the core of Australia’s strength over the years. So 10% impact on electricity bills, and we are seeing that come off now, now that the Carbon tax is gone, that’s a big deal, it’s a big deal for your average Australian and it’s a big deal for Australian businesses.

Graham Richardson: If we dropped these massive subsidies, which by the way are far greater than I’d ever believed, what would be the effect on electricity prices then?

Angus Taylor: Well look, it depends but it will be 3-5% over the next few years, but the real problem is this, over the next 5 years, we are not likely to reach the target that was set. We’re not likely to reach it. Now when that happens, the price of these subsidies, they’re caught up in these certificates, the price of those certificates, which goes into your electricity bills, will go sky rocketing.

Alan Jones: Correct.

Angus Taylor: And this is the worry – and to be fair to the Minister – he has voiced this concern in the last 48 hours – the real worry is that the sky rocketing price of these subsidies because we can’t get enough of this large scale renewable capacity coming on, the wind turbines, we can’t get them on fast enough, the cost of this scheme is going to go right up in the next few years. And that’s the real concern and it’s a concern that I think the Labor party should share too, I mean they know. You only have to go door knocking in the less well off parts of my electorate or in any other electorate, to know that electricity prices and cost of living are right at the top of the list – so anything that’s pushing that up they’re concerned about.

Alan Jones: But manufacturing is moving offshore. Jobs are being lost all over the place. Deloitte said that. But you talked at the beginning of this program Graham ‘what’s this bloke doing on the back bench?’ What kind of an Energy Minister would he make? You’re being very charitable to Macfarlane – I will tell you what Macfarlane said about the Renewable Energy Target. These are his exact words. ‘Anything the government does, will not effect any existing investment in renewable energy’. ‘Any existing investment’. I mean, is this bloke off his head? Manufacturing is closing down, jobs are being lost people out there can’t turn on their electric blanket because of the escalating cost of electricity and there should be a comprehensive movement by the Abbott government to reverse all of that.

Angus Taylor: Look the concern the Minister voiced there is that people have invested to this point in good faith and we should respect investments they’ve made in good faith. I think what he has also said in the last 48 hours is the real issue is here is do we want more of this investment, accelerating over the next 5 years and costing us all a great deal and I think that is the real concern – I mean, do we want to just keep going – and do we want to miss this target.

Alan Jones: But the real concern, just finally, Angus, isn’t the real concern if there is no money for Holden in the car industry, and no money for SPC Ardmona, why are there billions and billions of dollars for this industry?

Angus Taylor: I think that’s a good question. I think unfortunately a lot of these schemes set out with the best of intentions and end up being industry assistance, industry pork-barrelling on steroids, as you say, and that’s the concern here. And it’s why there is a legitimate debate – a very legitimate debate in my view, about scaling it back. The Review Panel has said to us that that’s its preferred option. It gave us 2 options on the large scale, on the wind subsidies, and you know, I have made no secret of the fact that I think that we should scale it back. I think, as I say, to be fair to the Minister, he knows that if we don’t scale it back, we have a very serious risk of big increases in electricity prices and escalating subsidies.

Graham Richardson: I’ve really got to say we have to leave it here. Now I am not concerned about being fair to the Minister. If the Minister is fair dinkum, then he’ll do something about it, and he will do it quickly. Because this is a debacle. And it is just something that you can’t wait. You can’t sit and look at it. It’s got to be addressed immediately. And I don’t understand why he doesn’t. I can’t get it. But we have got to leave it there. Well go on have one last word, very quickly…

Angus Taylor: I was just going say we need the Labor party to help us, we’ve got to get this through the Senate. Either the Labor party or the cross-benchers have got to help us as it needs legislative change so it is incredibly important.

Graham Richardson: Well we will see what we can do.

Alan Jones: good on you Angus

Graham Richardson: I don’t actually hold out a great deal of hope on that front – but I will see what I can do because I think you are right.

Alan Jones: Hope of the side – this bloke.

Graham Richardson: Certainly is – as I said if I was a Minister looking behind, I’d be on my toes. Angus Taylor, a pleasure to have you on the show. I hope to talk to you again soon.

Alan Jones: Thanks Angus.

Angus Taylor: Thanks Graham.

Wind Power….Nothing More Than “Novelty” Energy!

September 14, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Terry McCrann: The Answer to Our Energy Future Ain’t Wind Power

September 14, 2014 by stopthesethings

Answer ain’t blowing in the wind
Terry McCrann
The Australian
13 September 2014

IT’S doubtful that those who have attacked Dick Warburton’s review of the Renewable Energy Target have actually read even the executive summary, other than through a misty film of increasingly foam-flecked rage or rising horror at the prospect of the cookie jar being snatched from their grasp.

His review has been falsely and very deliberately mischaracterised as a work of climate scepticism. In short, he doesn’t believe in climate change and so he wants to ditch or fundamentally undermine the last substantive policy standing between us and climate catastrophe, to say nothing of impoverishing the climate main-chancers.

As the review noted, about $9.4 billion — of NPV (net present value) subsidies had already flowed to those renewable energy main-chancers — to stress: my word, not his. But more than double that, about $22bn, was up for grabs over the rest of the scheme.

Again, that was in NPV terms; the actual dollars-of-the-day out to 2030 would be much, much greater. Any wonder a primeval scream of pain burst from those renewable main-chancers.

It’s much easier to slime the author to avoid engaging with the substance of the review’s analysis even more particularly than its argument and recommendations.

Perhaps even more importantly, it was critical to head off any risk of the mainstream media engaging with the report other than to similarly, instinctively and with both ignorance and malice aforethought, slime it.

In fact, and in simple terms, the Warburton Report is a meticulous forensic assessment of the RET on its own terms. It accepts the policy desire to promote (so-called, my word again) renewable energy and merely analyses the effectiveness, cost and alternatives.

It also does so in the context of the investments that have been made or are committed. Someone driven solely by climate scepticism would not have made the recommendations that Warburton did. He very deliberately carved a path between wasting more money and the obligation to investors who acted on legislated policy of both the Howard and Rudd-Gillard governments.

This produced his two alternatives. The first was to let the RET continue to 2030, to honour all existing and, importantly, committed investment, but to close it to new entrants. This would, as he noted, “provide investors in existing renewable generation with continued access to certificates so as to avoid substantial asset value loss and retain the CO2-emissions reductions that have been achieved so far.”

The second was to move the RET in line with growth in demand for electricity, allocating to renewables 50 per cent of that growth.

Again, as Warburton said: “This would protect investors in existing renewable generators and would support additional renewable generation when demand is growing.”

The core problem is that the supposedly 20 per cent (of power generation) RET has grown to somewhere between a 26-30 per cent RET.

When the Rudd government set a specific number of 41,000 GWh that had to be supplied by renewable energy in 2020, it was expected to equate to 20 per cent of total electricity output (and demand) in that year.

In fact, it’s going to be closer to 30 per cent because power demand has been falling — essentially because of soaring power prices. The falling demand has included the deliberate closure of big consumers like aluminium smelters, as a consequence of a mix of factors including power price.

Now the pro-RET advocates have seen this as a wonderful win-win, ahem, windfall. We get more clean (sic) power and so less “dirty” power, and more dollars to boot. What’s to complain about?

They’ve also been able to seize on the argument that as more and more of our power comes from mandatory renewables this will arguably cut prices to consumers.

But as Warburton points out — to further enrage the believers and main-chancers — this is a shell game. It’s only because it creates excess supply and mainstream — I would use the word, real — power generators have to compete for their declining share of the market.

Those lower prices would be simply unsustainable. If you produce 30 per cent of your power from very high-cost wind, ultimately the price to the consumer would have to be higher. Along the way generators would close, investors — in coal and gas — plants would lose money (yet another “windfall” gain!) and then the survivors would raise their prices to necessary levels.

That points to a simple question: if reducing uneconomic wind would be unfair to investors in that sector — essentially accepted by Warburton; surely force-feeding future renewable investment and so forcing the closure of other existing power generation would be unfair to their investors?

The other element is the sheer impossibility of installing enough wind capacity to meet the 41,000GWh. In their usual dishonesty with key numbers, renewable advocates roll hydro into renewable capacity, to suggest the target isn’t that onerous.

There is about 12GW of installed “renewable” capacity in Australia. But less than one-third of that is wind, most of the rest is hydro.

As Energy Australia explained in a submission to Warburton, we would need to install 10GW of new capacity to be able to produce. 41,000GWh. A little short of doubling installed “renewable” capacity and doing so in just six years would be daunting enough.

But as most of it would have to be wind — it’s hard to know which is worse to a Green: coal or hydro power? — this means we would have to install something like 250 per cent of the existing entire wind capacity that we have today, and do so in six years!

This is simply impossible. It would also be sheer and utter madness. And if we needed any reassurance on that, in a heaven-sent coincidence, last week Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute graced our shores.

In a presentation to the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne midweek, Bryce utterly shredded wind as a realistic source of power, far more effectively than those wind turbines shred birds on the odd occasions when they turn.

Former journalist Tony Thomas provides an excellent detailed exposition of what Bryce had to say at the Quadrant website.

One reference from Bryce was especially telling: the way our nearest and most important neighbour Indonesia has increased its use of coal-fired power generation.

We all know — or should know — about China and its voracious appetite for our coal. But since 1985, according to Bryce, Indonesia has increased its coal usage by 5000 per cent. “Between 1990 and 2010, about 100 million Indonesians gained access to electricity — coal provided more than half of that growth.

As a consequence, Indonesia’s per-capita GDP rose by 442 per cent. Life expectancy increased by eight years. Infant mortality fell by 45 per cent. Child malnutrition fell by 65 per cent. Illiteracy declined by 77 per cent

“Countries with cheap, abundant, reliable supplies of electricity can grow their economies and educate their citizens. They can build their manufacturing bases and export goods.

“The countries that lack electricity can’t. Period. Full stop,” Bryce noted.

The rest of his analysis was majestic in its substance and powerful in its ineluctable conclusion. The energy of today is coal; but so also is the future.

Wind is both a fantasy and a wasteful indulgence. With apologies to Bob Dylan, the answer is not blowing …
The Australian

STT covered Robert Bryce’s brilliant lecture in this post. We think it should be compulsory viewing for anything that walks upright, has opposable thumbs and doesn’t swing from trees. But don’t take our word for it, why not hear it from Terry McCrann, who gave the vote of thanks to Robert for his remarkable speech:

****

Whether Onshore, or Offshore, Wind turbines are More Trouble than They’re Worth!

September 14, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

FLAGSHIP GERMAN OFFSHORE WIND FARM PROJECT HUMILIATED BY TECHNICAL FAULTS

by DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDS 12 Sep 2014 248POST A COMMENT

Germany’s flagship Bard 1 offshore wind farm has been described as “a faulty total system” as technical problems continue to plague the project, casting major doubts on the feasibility of large scale offshore projects.

The wind farm was officially turned on in August last year but was shut down again almost immediately due to technical difficulties that have still not been resolved – and now lawyers are getting involved.

The wind farm comprises 80 5MW turbines situated 100 km off the north German coastline. The difficulty facing engineers is how to get the electricity generated back to shore. So far, every attempt to turn on the turbines has resulted in overloaded and “gently smouldering” offshore converter stations.

Built at a cost of hundreds of millions and costing between €1 and €2 million a day to service, the project is estimated to have cost €340 million in lost power generation over the last year alone. And if the problems with the technology are deemed not to be the fault of the operator, German taxpayers will be on the hook for the running and repair costs, thanks to the German Energy Act 2012.

Understandably, the project’s investors are becoming increasingly nervous, which is why lawyers are now scrambling to pin the blame elsewhere. According to the German magazine Speigel “everything has turned to the question of who is responsible for the fiasco – and the costs.”

Inevitably, the fiasco has brought into question the feasibility of the entire green energy industry. The Bard 1 project was designed to be the global leader in offshore wind design: a model for everyone else to follow. That it doesn’t work has already cast doubt on other projects. Energy company Trianel are concerned that their ‘Windpark Borkum’, Germany’s second largest major offshore project, will now not work when it comes online next month. And they have already shelved plans for a further 200MW offshore project until the technology can be proven.

Germany already has amongst the highest energy bills in the world, not helped by the EU’s commitment to carbon reduction measures at the behest of an increasingly hystericalclimate change industry, and the rest of Europe fares no better. British and European climate change policies already add an extra ten percent to British householders’ energy bills, at a time when fuel poverty affects one in four people.

Offshore wind is often seen as the acceptable face of green energy. Earlier this year Conservative minister Michael Fallon announced that the party was planning to scrap subsidies for onshore wind farms, but they remain fully committed to offshore projects.

Opening the 175 turbine, 630MW capacity London Array wind farm, the world’s largest to date, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said “This is a great day for Britain and a big win for renewable energy. London Array shows you can build large scale renewable energy projects right here in Britain. This is because when it comes to clean energy, the UK has one of the clearest investment climates globally.”

His support gives the lead for the rest of his party, with Conservatives of all ranks lining up to get behind offshore wind power.

In July, planning permission was granted by the government for a 175 turbine wind farm off the historic south coast of England, which will be seen from the newly created South Downs national park and tourist spots such as Beachy Head. The Rampion project will cost £2 billion to construct, and is expected to be handed £200 million a year in taxpayer subsidies. The local Conservative candidate for Lewes constituency, which runs along the affected coastline, wrote to her local paper to underline her support for the project, saying “I supported this scheme and actually voted for it as a local councillor when it was first proposed a few years ago. I was therefore delighted when the Conservative led Government approved the scheme earlier this year.

“The Rampion Wind farm will bring a much needed energy supply for the country but it will also be a huge boost to the local economy and that is why I voted for it in 2010 and why I still support it now.”

Likewise, Conservative MP Therese Coffey, whose Suffolk Coastal constituency is likely to be affected by a vast offshore wind farm project, has also written in support of offshore wind. An article on her website reads “Therese has welcomed the announcement from the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills that an Offshore Wind Investment Organisation to boost levels of inward investment and to further stimulate jobs in the UK offshore wind industry, will be set up.

“Therese said: “The creation of the Offshore Wind Investment Organisation will help bring enormous economic benefit to our shores, supporting skilled jobs. … The formation of this industry-led partnership will boost the positive benefits that the offshore wind sector can bring to the UK economy”.”

However, with the Bild 1 turbines are already being tagged “white elephants in the North Sea” by sources such as the Economist, and with costs mounting and no end in sight, the question being asked, in Germany at least, is “Is the wind boom over before it even really began?”

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FLAGSHIP GERMAN OFFSHORE WIND FARM PROJECT HUMILIATED BY TECHNICAL FAULTS

Germany’s flagship Bard 1 offshore wind farm has been described as “a faulty total system” as technical problems continue to plague the project, casting major doubts on the feasibility of large scale offshore projects.