I am surprised that nobody noticed the severe shortage of NG and electricity, during the recent cold spell.
To my way of thinking, if an unexpected cold spell; could cause such a shortage of NG and electricity then why are the car manufacturers ramping up expected EV sales, if the same requirement for electricity will be more than a cold spell. How much electricity will 100,000 EV's entering the market every yr require?? Doesn't anybody know that electricity sourced from solar and wind towers is in very short supply??? Will we use NG, Nuclear and coal to produce electricity and hope nobody notices or thinks this is a better way with a smaller carbon foot print. What fools if these people actually believe their own propaganda
I think there are 2 million cars on the road today, in the USA. Assuming it takes 20 yrs for an ICE car to become junk, that is a replacement factor of 100,000 EV's every yr. until we have 2 million EV's. Can some body tell me where the energy will come from to power 2 million EV's
If a cold spell can cause NG to shut down non essential end users and electric Co's to search for electricity from neighbour states at any price, then the supply of energy must be in short supply. Elon Musk has told us a battery can not be built to store energy from solar and/or wind for the time when power from such facilities is not available. Ca could not stop rolling black outs this past summer. Do you think CA will suddenly build more solar and wind towers??? or will continued rolling black outs become the new normal???
Has anybody done the calculation of the amount of solar panels and wind towers to supply the nations energy requirements, even assuming a method to store energy becomes possible
We are told EV's will be the future with some states mandating all new cars will be EV in a short time frame
Does anybody think an alternative energy source will happen in the same short time frame
Assuming the goal of killing the Pipeline was an effort to reduce the carbon foot print, has anybody done the calculations of the carbon foot print to move oil by truck and rail???
I suspect some home owners will be surprised at the cost to source electricity during the cold spell.
If anybody can explain to me how the nation will suddenly be able to meet the energy requirements with wind, solar or alternate sources then please tell me your secret
I think Ca. has mandated no new ICE cars after 5 yrs allowed into the state or purchased within the state
I don't think the car manufacturers are all that stupid but this rush to EV with no proven source of additional energy seems to be a faulty business model
Can anybody tell me where we will find this sudden increase of energy to power all the anticipated EV applications that we are told will come and very shortly in many instances.
I for one will wait and watch this grand experiment with green energy and the trillions of wasted money to source an energy supply which is impossible but the left has enough control to cause us great harm
IMHO it will cause us extremely costly energy that ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of green energy
Does anybody disagree with my thoughts???
Wayne,
You hit the nail on the head...........had a bullseye when it comes to the farce of trying to replace, cheap, reliable, abundant, dense/high powered and readily available fossil fuels with diffuse/low powered, unreliable and not practical in many regions, solar and wind.
Some great points here too:
This one is for you Mike
8 responses |
Started by madmechanic - Feb. 6, 2021, 2:06 p.m.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/09/bidens-climate-fix-is-fantastically-expensive-and-perfectly-useless/
Across the world, politicians are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies. President Biden has promised to spend $500 billion each year on climate — about 13 percent of the entire federal revenue. The European Union will spend 25 percent of its budget on climate.
Most rich countries now promise to go carbon-neutral by mid-century. Shockingly, only one country has made a serious, independent estimate of the cost: New Zealand found it would optimistically cost 16 percent of its GDP by then, equivalent to the entire current New Zealand budget.
The equivalent cost for the US and the EU would be more than $5 trillion. Each and every year. That is more than the entire US federal budget, or more than the EU governments spend across all budgets for education, recreation, housing, environment, economic affairs, police, courts, defense and health.
Tellingly, the European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans recently admitted that climate policies would be so costly, it would be a “matter of survival for our industry” without huge, protective border taxes.
Climate change is a real, manmade problem. But its impacts are much lower than breathless climate reporting would suggest. The UN Climate Panel finds that if we do nothing, the total impact of climate in the 2070s will be equivalent to reducing incomes by 0.2-2 percent. Given that by then, each person is expected to be 363 percent as rich as today, climate change means we will “only” be 356 percent as rich. Not the end of the world.
Climate policies could end up hurting much more by dramatically cutting growth. For rich countries, lower growth means higher risks of protests and political breakdown. This isn’t surprising. If you live in a burgeoning economy, you know that you and your children will be much better off in the coming years. Hence, you are more forgiving of the present.
Yet politicians obsessively focus on climate. Growth-killing “fixes” would delight a few job-secure academics, but they would lead to tragic outcomes of stagnation, strife and discord for ordinary people.
Most voters aren’t willing to pay for these extravagant climate policies. While Biden proposes spending the equivalent of $1,500 per American per year, a recent Washington Post survey showed that more than half the population was unwilling to pay even $24.
And for what? If all the rich countries in the world were to cut their carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and for the rest of the century, the effort would make an almost unnoticeable reduction in temperatures by 2100.
This is because more than three-quarters of the global emissions in the rest of this century will come from Asia, Africa and Latin America. These nations are determined to lift their populations out of poverty and ensure broad development using plentiful energy, mostly from cheap fossil fuels.
The last 30 years of climate policy have delivered high costs and rising emissions. The only reliable ways to cut emissions have been recessions and the COVID-19 lockdowns, both of which are unpalatable. Expecting nations to stop using cheap energy won’t succeed. We need innovation.
Take the terrible air pollution in Los Angeles in the 1950s. It wasn’t fixed by naïvely asking people to stop driving cars. Instead, it was fixed through innovation — the catalytic converter allowed people to drive further yet pollute little. We need to invest in research to make green energy much cheaper: from better solar, wind and batteries to cheaper fission, fusion and carbon capture.
We should spend tens of billions to innovate the price of green energy below fossil fuels. Spending trillions on enormous and premature emissions cuts is an unsustainable and ineffective First World approach.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet.“
Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s famous axiom is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It’s an even a worse thing to manufacture.
Although Joe Biden obviously disagrees. Creating an unwarranted sense of drama and urgency around climate change is central to his approach — to catalyze action unsupported by the facts or common sense.
In announcing his climate and energy team the other day, the president-elect declared climate change a crisis requiring a “unified national response.” Going even further, he called it “an existential threat of our time,” a frankly preposterous claim if taken literally, or even seriously.
To maintain that increasing global temperatures are a threat to human existence itself entails believing that human beings — an endlessly adaptive species that has drastically increased its own life span over the last century — will be snuffed out if the planet gets a few degrees hotter.
If the worst comes, and sea levels rise significantly, we won’t move away from the coasts and find better ways to control flooding. If summers get much hotter in places unaccustomed to it, we won’t invest more in air conditioning. If droughts markedly increase, we won’t husband our water resources more intelligently. If some areas become uninhabitable, we won’t leave for more hospitable climes.
No, a humanity that is wealthier and more technologically proficient than ever will be content to expose itself to the worst depredations of nature that it has done so much to master over the last millennium.
This is a laughable account of how the world works. The globe has been getting warmer for decades now, with no adverse effects on human population or longevity. Heck, even polar bears, once held out as the pitiable victims of global warming, aren’t being driven to extinction.
In a climate speech during the campaign a few months ago, Biden relied on the tried-and-true alarmist tack of attributing every adverse weather event to global warming.
The flooding in the Midwest was an artifact of climate change, he suggested. Never mind that, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, the United Nations isn’t sure that whether flooding overall is getting more or less frequent.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Biden also blamed drought in the Midwest on climate change, even though, according to Lomborg, the federal government’s National Climate Assessment says “drought has decreased over much of the continental United States in association with long-term increases in precipitation.”
Of course, Biden maintained that California wildfires have been caused by the upward trend in the global temperature, and they are probably a factor. Still, as Lomborg notes, the amount of land that is burning around the globe has fallen sharply since the late 19th century in response to changing human behavior (e.g., more cultivation of the land).
Finally, Biden cited Hurricane Laura, the Category Four storm that made landfall in Louisiana, as yet more climate-driven extreme weather. The studies do show more storm activity in the Atlantic, Lomborg writes, although not necessarily from climate change. Meanwhile, there’s no global trend in tropical cyclones.
Biden spoke of “a feeling of dread and anxiety” over climate change, but this isn’t a sentiment that, to the extent it exists at all, he wants to address or assuage. Instead, he seeks to stoke it, and if that requires frankly distorting the scientific consensus to paint catastrophic scenarios, so be it.
There is no doubt that human activity contributes to climate change. It is a long-term challenge that we should seek to understand better and prepare to address through adaption and innovation should the worst come decades from now.
But that isn’t enough for Biden. He doesn’t want to get us thinking about climate change, but rather to suspend all rational thought about the issue — especially about the downsides of costly measures to crimp the US economy in the name of saving the planet.
In short, he needs a crisis atmosphere, the facts and science be damned.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/how-climate-change-alarmists-are-actually-damaging-the-planet/
“You’ll die of old age, I’ll die of climate change,” reads a typical poster held by teenagers in climate rallies across the world. The media, activists and even politicians are unabashedly indulging in climate alarmism, stoking the fears of millions.
Books on the impending implosion of civilization due to climate change line shelves in bookstores across the world. Media outlets have changed the name of climate change, calling it the “climate emergency” or even “climate breakdown.” The cover of Time magazine tells us: “Be worried. Be very worried.”
Unsurprisingly, this causes most of us to brood about a future that we’re being told will be calamitous. Children are growing up terrified, with six in ten American teenagers now afraid of climate change. The scaremongering has reached such a crescendo that now half the world’s population really believes climate change will likely end the human race.
This alarmism is not only false but morally unjust. It leads us to make poor decisions based on fear, when the world not only has gotten better, but will be even better over the century.
Remember that the world today is much better in almost every measurable way. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 32. Today, it has more than doubled to 72. The disparity in health between the rich and poor has reduced, the world is much more literate, child labor has been dropping and we are living in one of the most peaceful times in history. Indoor air pollution, previously the biggest environmental killer, has halved since 1990. Four out of five people were extremely poor in 1900 and today — despite the intense impact of the coronavirus — less than one in five is.
The UN Climate Panel’s middle-of-the-road estimate for the end of the century is that we will be even better off. There will be virtually no one left in extreme poverty, everyone will be much better educated, and the average income per person in the world will be 450 percent of what it is today. Yet, because climate is a real challenge, it will leave us less well off. Based on three decades of studies, the UN and the world’s only Nobel climate economist estimate global warming will reduce the 21st century welfare increase from 450 percent to “only” 434 percent of today’s income.
Clearly, this is a problem. But a 3.6 percent reduction by the end of the century is not an existential threat. Resorting to panic and hysteria is unlikely to help. Indeed, one of the UN Climate Panel authors warned against this: “We risk turning off the public with extremist talk that is not carefully supported by the science.”
How is it possible that the media’s portrayal of the impacts of climate change are so vastly removed from reality? Because simple, moderating factors are left out. Last year, a paper generated lots of headlines and clicks claiming that future sea-level rise would flood 187 million people.
But it was spectacularly misleading. It had to assume no one would adapt over the next 80 years. Actually, the research showed that as people obviously adapt, just 0.3 million people will have to move. The scary number is 600 times too large.
This trumped-up rhetoric leads us to make unrealistic promises. We have mostly failed our climate promises for the last thirty years, and we are poised to fail our Paris climate promises by 2030 as well. It also leads nations to make exorbitantly expensive promises of carbon neutrality by 2050, something that will be more costly than permanent coronavirus shutdowns. Only New Zealand has asked for an independent assessment of the cost of its climate policy. It will cost 16 percent of its GDP each and every year by 2050, making it more costly than the entire New Zealand public expenditures for education, health, environment, police, defense, social protection, etc.
Spending 16 percent of a nation’s income to solve a smaller part of a 3.6 percent problem is bad policy. Moreover, it is unlikely to happen. We need smarter solutions.
Climate economic studies convincingly show that one of the best investments to fix climate in the medium run is to invest heavily in green R&D. Because research is cheap, we can explore many avenues, from better renewables and battery storage, to carbon capture and fusion, fission, carbon-neutral oil-producing algae, and more. If we can innovate on the price of green energy down below that of fossil fuels, everyone will switch — not just well-meaning rich people, but also most Chinese, Indians and Africans. The models show that each dollar invested in green energy R&D will avoid eleven dollars of climate damage.
It’s imperative that we shift our focus to such smart efforts — efforts that have been shown throughout history to work. We should tackle climate smartly, and also make sure that a monomaniacal focus on climate change doesn’t crowd out urgent investments in the many other, crucially important issues of health, education, jobs and nutrition.
Adapted from Bjorn Lomborg’s book, “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet” (Basic Books), out Tuesday.
https://nypost.com/2021/01/15/joe-bidens-climate-change-plans-will-burn-billions/
Joe Biden will rejoin the Paris climate agreement soon after being inaugurated as president of the United States. Climate change, according to Biden, is “an existential threat” to the nation, and to combat it, he proposes to spend $500 billion each year on climate policies — the equivalent of $1,500 per person.
Let’s get real. Climate is a man-made problem. But Biden’s climate alarmism is almost entirely wrong. Asking people to spend $1,500 every year is unsustainable when surveys show a majority is unwilling to spend even $24 per year on climate. And policies like Paris will fix little at a high cost. Biden is right to highlight the problem, but he needs a smarter way forward.
The climate alarm is poorly founded.
Take hurricanes. Last year, you undoubtedly heard that climate change made hurricanes “record-setting.” Actually, 2020 was above average in the North Atlantic partly because of the natural La Niña phenomenon, and only record-setting in that satellites could spot more storms.
When measured by total hurricane-damage potential, the 2020 North Atlantic was not even in the top 10. And almost everywhere else on the planet, hurricanes were far below average. Globally, 2020 ranked as one of the weakest hurricane years in the 40-year satellite record.
We think 2020 was big on hurricanes because we read carefully curated stories about where and when they hit, but we don’t see stories about the many more places where they don’t hit.
The UN Climate Panel, the gold standard of climate science, tells us that the total impact of climate change in the 2070s will be equivalent to an average income reduction of 0.2 to 2 percent. Which means that humans as a whole will be only a fraction less prosperous in a much richer world than they would be without climate change.
Rejoining the Paris agreement will solve very little at a high cost. By the UN’s estimates, if all nations live up to all their promises, they will reduce global temperature by less than 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
And Paris is costly, because it forces economies to use less or more expensive energy. Across many studies, the drag to the economies is estimated at between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in lost GDP every year after 2030.
Yes, green spending will predictably increase green jobs. But because subsidies will be paid by higher taxes on the rest of the economy, an equal number of jobs will disappear elsewhere.
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson excitedly talks about 5 million new green jobs, while his advisers now warn him that 10 million other jobs could be at risk.
For Americans, President Barack Obama’s Paris promises carried a price tag of nearly $200 billion a year. But Biden has vowed to go much further, with a promise of net-zero by 2050. There is only one nation that has done an independent cost estimate of net-zero, namely New Zealand. The Kiwis found the average best-case cost is 16 percent of GDP, or a US cost of more than $5 trillion a year by mid-century.
These figures are unsustainable. Moreover, the US and other developed countries can achieve very little on their own. Imagine if Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries stopped all their emissions today and never bounced back. This would be utterly devastating economically yet would reduce global warming by the end of the century by less than 0.8 degrees.
That’s because three-quarters of this century’s emissions will come from the rest of the world, especially China, India, Africa and Latin America. Developing nations are unlikely to accept slower economic growth to address a 2 percent problem 50 years from now.
There is a smarter way: investing a lot more in green-energy research and development. As Bill Gates says, “We’re short about two dozen great innovations” to fix climate. If we could innovate the price of green energy below fossil fuels, everyone would switch, eventually fixing climate change.
The policies would be cheaper and much more likely to be implemented. Fortunately, R&D is one of Biden’s promises, and he will have a much easier time with Congress if he makes it his focus.
2 million customers affected by rolling black outs
NG used to generate electricity is frozen at many well heads
If NG is not green then all green energy becomes even more impossible
Power Co's searching for electric supplies find asking price of 9000.00/MWH vs normal 25.00/MWH
Some electric bills will be a shock to customers
If Biden wants Green energy then what will he do. If the electricity to power the future EV world is not available, then no amount of a bidding war will produce electricity
I think by some reading, the public really believes we will be using more EV in the future
Nobody has stopped to consider where this electric energy will come from
Some have offered to pay as much as 7x's the current rental value for space out in farm land to build solar farms
The state's power grid operator said the blackouts will last at least through Monday morning.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/15/rolling-blackouts-texas/
metmike: This was totally preventable and long predicted by metmike and other sources. We are getting a glimpse into the future of life in American without coal and fossil fuels.....until something better than solar and wind in available.
It couldn't be dumber to replace fossil fuels with........something that can't replace fossil fuels.
Last year:
State has struggled to keep lights on during heat wave that has exposed its difficulties matching power demand with supply
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/01/19/the_power_grids_are_not_ok_657067.html
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/01/19/the_power_grids_are_not_ok_657067.html
By Conor Bernstein
January 19, 2021
Despite ongoing insistence that the fuel security, balance and reliability offered by coal can be easily replaced, mounting evidence points to just the opposite.
In states and grids across the U.S., blackouts, near-misses and troubling warnings have become all too common. California suffered rolling blackouts this summer, Texas has stumbled from one near-miss and capacity crisis to another, and grid operators with territory stretching from the Midwest to New England warn of mounting fuel security crises. The pivot away from baseload power is creating the same challenges overseas. Britain’s grid is dancing with the threat of blackouts and Japan simply can’t keep up with demand.
The very saddest part of this is that its doing nothing to save the planet from the fake climate crisis. NOTHING.
metmike is a practicing environmentalist that believes in aggresively addressing/managing the many LEGIT environmental problems that humans are causing on the planet . Also, I believe in developing new energy sources that must be better than wind and solar to replace fossil fuels.
1. There is no climate crisis/emergency. We are having a climate optimum based on all authentic measures of science. However, there are numerous, very serious environmental problems that need immediate attention but are getting ignored.
The real environmental crisis's/insects dying-dead zones-aquifers drying up-plastics in the ocean-landfills/trash(metmike is a PRACTICING environmentalist): April 2019
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/27498/
2. Even if there was a climate crisis, this would not be doing much good, while doing much, much more harm.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It would be like an elite athlete in the best shape/health of their life going for an annual check up to their family doctor, Dr. Greta. All tests show everything is optimal. Authentic medical science indicates that this person is in wonderful shape.
Dr. Greta: I am extremely alarmed at what I find. You have a wart on your left hand. Did you know that warts are a virus?
Healthy patient: No I didn't know that
Dr. Greta: Did you know that warts can spread and virus's can kill people?
Healthy patient: Yes, I knew that but this is just 1 wart, it's no big deal.
Dr. Greta: You think it's no big deal but I represent the scientists and doctors. Time magazine gave me their doctor of the year award too. I am telling you its a really, really big deal. This will kill you. In fact, it's already causing widespread organ failure and cancers all over your body that just are not showing up in any of the medical tests yet. You will be dead pretty soon unless you do exactly what I tell you.
Healthy but getting scared patient: Oh my! I had no idea this was going on. What is your advice.
Dr. Greta: First of all, we need to eliminate the wart. The quickest way to do that is to amputate that arm ASAP.
Scared Patient: But I need that arm, I am left handed!
Dr. Greta: Do you want to live or not?
Very scared patient: Ok, OK, what else do I need to do?
Dr. Greta: You need to stop eating protein and stop all those vitamins in your diet. Virus's like nutrients. If you give your body nutrients, it will feed the virus's and they will grow and kill you!
Very VERY scared patient: Wow, I had no idea. So I will die unless I do exactly what you say?
Dr. Greta: Yes, you will die if you don't do exactly as I say. Repeat after me "I will die, unless I do exactly as Dr. Greta says" "I will die, unless I do exactly as Dr. Greta says"
Very, VERY , VERY scared patient: Can I get a 2nd opinion on my condition, first?
Dr. Greta: Absolutely not. I represent the science and doctors. Anybody that disagrees with me is a Denier. You can't believe anything they say, especially not their data and test results. Believe only me. repeat after me: "I will die unless I do exactly as Dr. Greta says"
Petrified patient: "I will die unless I do exactly as Dr. Greta says!" "I will die unless I do exactly as Dr. Greta says!"
Dr. Greta: Great! Now what we need you to do next is to get everybody that you know to come here to be my patient so that I can save their lives too!