Climate Change > Paris's clever cooling system; Sahara getting hammered with rain, hundreds die

 

Paris's plan to ditch ACs and expand

urban cooling system

By:Valérie DEKIMPE|Alexandra RENARD

Around the world, record-shattering temperatures are feeding demand for air conditioning. 135 million individual ACs are sold every year, a figure set to triple by 2050 according to the International Energy Agency. 

This rush to cool air could in turn become a major driver of electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. 

In Paris, a little-known network of underground water pipes aims to cool down buildings, without resorting to polluting AC units. 

Before climate alarmists claim that global warming is causing flooding in the Sahara Desert, it has yet to be proven. It is certainly possible as an El Nino like effect in the Atlantic is causing the deluge, although Chad's Met. service say it is something that happens every 5 or 10 years. 

Floods in Chad have killed hundreds of people and affected 1.5 million, UN says

Every single one of Chad's provinces have been hit by intense floods brought on by severe rainfall that have left 341 dead and affected a total of 1.5 million inhabitants since July, the UN said on Monday. 

By:NEWS WIRES

Weeks of severe flooding in Chad have left 341 people dead and some 1.5 million affected since July, the United Nations said Monday.

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the flooding had hit all of the country's 23 provinces.

It cited government data which said some 164,000 houses had been destroyed and almost 70,000 heads of cattle lost with 259,000 hectares (640,000 acres) of fields ruined.

The government has yet to publish a breakdown of the damage wrought by the deluge which has broken over the nation of some 16 million.

Last week, 14 students and their teacher died when a school collapsed after torrential rains battered the province of Ouaddai in the semi-arid east.

By mid-August, at least 54 people had lost their lives in flooding in Tibesti province, in Chad's desert far north.

Typically, "rainfall hardly reaches 200 mm per year" in the mountainous region, but severe rainfall does occur "every five or 10 years", according to Idriss Abdallah Hassan, director of meteorological observation and forecasting at Chad's National Meteorological Agency.

The UN warned last week of the impact of "torrential rains and severe flooding" in the region generally, particularly in Chad, while urging immediate action and funding to tackle the climate crisis.

More than 700,000 people have been affected by severe flooding in South Sudan, according to a September 5 OCHA tally.

This summer has been the hottest ever recorded globally with a slew of record temperatures, heatwaves, drought and severe flooding.

Climate alarmists make a big deal out of the fact that Lake Chad is a fraction of the size it used to be. I suspect that argument will quickly disappear.

(AFP) 

Global Warming > An Expert's Perspective on IPCC's unscientific methods and conclusions

 Emminent Climatologist concludes IPCC is unscientific

James Melville 

Dr Judith Curry is a climatologist & ex-chair of the School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. She has questioned the IPCC & net zero. She’s been vilified for doing so. Science is not settled. It must always be debatable.

Dr Curry's position that the planet is warming but that we do not know how much of the warming is due to anthropogenic activity or natural cycles, for instance, solar activity and cosmic rays, and our inability to accurately assess historical temperatures is exactly what I have been saying for nearly 40 years. Her position on the IPCC and others interference (read corruption) of the science lines up with my position for at leat 15 years. Consequently, I have no choice but to believe she is absolutely correct in what she says.

Global Warming > Hottest 5 Years ever, predicted for 2023-2027 - WMO

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According to NASA, the global temperature for the past two years (2021,2022) have been well above long-term normals, although cooler than 5 of the previous 6 years. This was thanks to La Nina, that cold-hearted witch. She has gone back into hiding again as her warm-blooded brother, El Nino enters the stage.

This means warmer temperatures for the rest of this year and probably, at least part of next year, but perhaps all of next year into 2025.

Scientists have yet to make a connection between El Nino and La Nina and anthropogenic global warming, and there may not be one. But temperatures are increasing globally even though some of us have grave concerns about climate sciences, and so, with each El Nino, hot temperature records will be broken.

We have one more hope for reducing temperatures on the earth and that is a decrease in sunspot activity. Sunspot activity curves are expected to drop around 2030 according to very long-term patterns. Henrik Svensmark explains his theory: - Basically, his theory is that cosmic rays cause ions in the atmosphere which eventually contribute to cloud formation. Sunspot activity acts as an umbrella reducing the cosmic rays that reach the earth, thereby reducing cloud cover, resulting in warming temperatures. Periods of minimum sunspot activity correlate well with reduced cosmic rays and temperatures. 

Minor cycles have an 11-year period which means sunspot activity should be high in the mid-twenties. But by 2030-2031 we should be well into low activity cycles in both the short-term and the long. If it doesn't cool down by then, we are in big trouble!

The coldest periods in history are associated with minimum sunspot activity. 

Next five years will be hottest ever, likely to exceed 1.5C target, UN warns

Issued on: 17/05/2023 - 14:43

A forest burns during a wildfire near Altura, eastern Spain, on August 19, 2022. Spain has officially entered a period of a long-term drought owing to high temperatures and low rainfall over the past three years and likely faces another year of heatwaves and forest fires, the country’s weather agency Aemet said Friday March 17, 2023. © Alberto Saiz, AP

Text by: NEWS WIRES

Video by: FRANCE 24

3 min

It is near-certain that 2023-2027 will be the warmest five-year period ever recorded, the United Nations warned Wednesday as greenhouse gases and El Nino combine to send temperatures soaring.

Global temperatures are soon set to exceed the more ambitious target set out in the Paris climate accords, with a two-thirds chance that one of the next five years will do so, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said.

The hottest eight years ever recorded were all between 2015 and 2022 -- but temperatures are forecast to increase further as climate change accelerates.

“There is a 98-percent likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record,” the WMO said.

The 2015 Paris Agreement saw countries agree to cap global warming at “well below” two degrees Celsius above average levels measured between 1850 and 1900 -- and 1.5C if possible.

The global mean temperature in 2022 was 1.15C above the 1850-1900 average.

I suspect there is a lot of imagination that went into developing a global temperature profile for between 1850-1900. In the vast country of Canada, we probably had a dozen stations measuring temperatures with low-quality equipment at the end of that period, and perhaps 3 or 4 at the beginning.

The WMO said there was a 66 percent chance that annual global surface temperatures will exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for at least one of the years 2023-2027, with a range of 1.1C to 1.8C forecasted for each of those five years. 

‘Uncharted territory’

While this does not mean that the world will permanently exceed the Paris benchmark, “WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency”, said the agency’s chief Petteri Taalas.

“A warming El Nino is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory.

“This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. We need to be prepared.”

El Nino is the large-scale warming of surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. The weather phenomenon normally occurs every two to seven years.

Conditions oscillate between El Nino and its opposite La Nina, with neutral conditions in between.

The WMO said earlier this month that the chances of El Nino developing were 60 percent by the end of July and 80 percent by the end of September.

Typically, El Nino increases global temperatures in the year after it develops—which in this cycle would be 2024.

Despite the cooling influence of La Nina conditions over much of the past three years, the warmest eight years on record have all been from 2015 onwards, with 2016 the hottest.

Heat gets trapped in the atmosphere by so-called greenhouse gases, which are at a record high.

The three major greenhouses gases are carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

Temperatures rising since 1960s

Global land and sea mean near-surface temperatures have increased since the 1960s.

The chances of temperatures temporarily exceeding 1.5C above the 1850-1990 average have risen steadily since 2015, a year when they were considered close to zero.

Britain’s Met Office national weather service is the WMO’s lead centre on yearly to 10-yearly climate predictions.

While there is a 66 percent chance that one year between 2023 and 2027 will exceed the 1.5C threshold, there is now a 32 percent chance that the entire five-year mean will do so, the Met Office said.

“Global mean temperatures are predicted to continue increasing, moving us away further and further away from the climate we are used to,” said Met Office expert scientist Leon Hermanson.

Temperatures in 2023 are likely to be higher than the 1991-2020 average in almost all regions except for Alaska, South Africa, South Asia and parts of Australia, the WMO said.

Parts of the South Pacific Ocean are likely to be cooler than average.

(AFP)

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Climate Change > Lies my climate industrial complex scientist told me

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‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math

A wind farm outside of Palm Springs, Calif., on May 26, 2018. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Having been to Palm Springs several times, I can tell you that there are always several windmills

that are not operating at any one time.

By Naveen Athrappully

March 27, 2023, Updated: March 28, 2023

Epoch Times

Wind power has been historically and scientifically unreliable, claims an Oxford University mathematician and physicist, with his calculations revealing the government to be pursuing a “bluster of windfarm politics” while discarding numerical evidence.

After the decision to cut down on fossil fuels was made at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the “instinctive reaction” around the world was to embrace renewables, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison, who is also a researcher at CERN, said in a 2023 paper (pdf).

Allison noted that because solar power is “extremely weak,” it was inadequate to “sustain even a small global population with an acceptable standard of living” before the Industrial Revolution.

“Today, modern technology is deployed to harvest these weak sources of energy. Vast ‘farms’ that monopolise the natural environment are built, to the detriment of other creatures. Developments are made regardless of the damage wrought. Hydro-electric schemes, enormous turbines and square miles of solar panels are constructed, despite being unreliable and ineffective; even unnecessary,” Allison said in the report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

“In particular, the generation of electricity by wind tells a disappointing story. The political enthusiasm and the investor hype are not supported by the evidence, even for offshore wind, which can be deployed out of sight of the infamous My Back Yard,” he wrote. “What does such evidence actually say?”

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, wind power generated more than 9 percent of the net total of the country’s energy in 2021 and is the largest source of renewable power in the country. Over 70,000 turbines generate enough power to serve the equivalent of 43 million American homes, the department says.

There are 120,000 jobs related to wind energy in the United States, the Energy Department says, and it’s one of the fastest-growing jobs in the country.

That all sounds very good, but is it true, or a bunch of BS?

The Evidence

Allison explained that wind energy is measured based on the amount of moving air and the speed of the air as it reaches the area swept by the turbine blades.

The scientist calculated that, at 100 percent efficiency, if the wind blows at 10 meters per second (about 22 mph), the power is 600 watts per square meter. Hence, to deliver 3,200 million watts, the same output as Hinkley Point C—a planned zero-carbon nuclear power station in England—there would need to be 5.5 million square meters of turbine swept area.

“That should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and to other environmentalists,” Allison wrote.

The actual performance of the technology is much worse than the calculations made based on 100 percent efficiency, he said.

“Because the power carried by the wind depends on the third power of the wind speed, if the wind drops to half speed, the power available drops by a factor of 8,” he said. “Almost worse, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up 8 times, and as a result the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection.”

One would suspect that they would overheat and burst into flames.

Allison noted that fluctuations are considerable as he pointed to a WindEurope Report that showed the installed nominal generating capacity across the European Union and United Kingdom on a daily basis was 236 gigawatts (GW). However, the highest output in 2021 registered at 103 GW on March 26 of that year.

The unreliability extends to offshore windfarms as well. Batteries used to store power are also severely restricted by current technology. In spite of such evidence, the government keeps ignoring the numbers, said Allison.

“With general energy shortages, the war in Europe, high prices and the likelihood of failures in electricity supply, many popular scientific presumptions underlying energy policy should be questioned. Wind power fails on every count,” he concluded.

A tired or failed windmill must be removed and buried. These are monstrously large machines that will require an extraordinary amount of land to bury, unless they are thrown into the sea. Who thinks that is a good idea?

Failing Turbines, Carbon Dioxide Demonization

Wind turbines across the United States have been failing more frequently in recent times, triggering concerns about additional costs resulting from such failures as well as their impact on power projects. Offshore windfarms, deployed in the name of environmentalism, are now seen as disastrous for ocean life.

Malfunctions in wind turbines range from small issues, like some key components becoming faulty, to full-blown collapses.

According to a 2022 paper published by Wallace Manheimer in the Journal of Sustainable Development, even as modern society depends on reliable sources of energy, the “climate industrial complex”—a powerful lobby of politicians, scientists, and media—pushes climate-related falsehoods into the popular perspective.

“It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison. Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis,” said Manheimer, a retired U.S. Naval Research Laboratory scientist.

“Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today,” he wrote. “During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide level have been all over the place with no correlation between them.”

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Climate Change - Oil and gas Crisis in the UK has British Petroleum laughing all the way to the bank

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In a year when Britain and Europe struggle through a gas and oil crisis, blamed on the proxy war in Ukraine, British Petroleum was rolling in unheard-of profits. So much so that it is easing back on alternative investments and raising gas and oil investments. 
Have you ever doubted that war is almost entirely about profits for major global players?

BP to up investment into oil and gas as profits double

By Paul Godfrey

BP reported a net profit of $27.7 billion Tuesday, more than double the $12.8 billion it made in 2021.

File photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI | License Photo

Feb. 7 (UPI) -- British oil giant BP has switched tracks on its carbon emissions strategy, announcing plans Thursday that it will now invest $8 billion into new oil and gas production over the next seven years -- the same as it will spend on bioenergy, EV charging and hydrogen and renewable power.

The move is part of a plan to boost the group's before-tax earnings to as much as $56 billion in 2030 and comes as BP posted a $27.7 billion net profit for 2022, more than double its 2021 profit.

The target is now to lower its emissions by 20% to 30% by the end of this decade, a big drop from the 35% to 40% the company announced when it unveiled its net-zero by 2050 goal three years ago, the first of the global oil giants to do so.

Environmental groups, British opposition lawmakers and union leaders said the plan was a major curtailment of BP's climate goals that would have been delivered by reducing oil and gas production, alleging that it was driven by the massive profits from surging energy prices over the past year caused by Russia's war on Ukraine.

"In amongst colossal profits, BP cuts back 2030 climate ambition by about a third. Any suggestion these high profits are being channeled into clean energy is claptrap,'' Greepeace's chief scientist Doug Parr tweeted.

"It's yet another day of enormous profits at an energy giant, the windfalls of war, coming directly out of the pockets of the British people,'' Ed Miliband, Labor's shadow climate change and net zero secretary, wrote on Twitter.

"What is so outrageous is that as fossil fuel companies rake in these enormous sums, Rishi Sunak still refuses to bring in a proper windfall tax that would make them pay their fair share."

Urging the government to increase windfall taxes on the oil and gas giants, Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Nowak, said: "As millions struggle to heat their homes and put food on the table, BP are laughing all the way to the bank.''

He added that families struggling with the cost-of-living crisis were being treated like "cash machines."

The country's existing Energy Profits Levy introduced in May, which was increased from 25% to 35% in January and extended through March 2028, is expected to bring $40 billion into the treasury.

It applies to profits earned in Britain on oil and gas extraction activities only, with an exemption for profits plowed back into renewable energy infrastructure.

BP CEO Bernard Looney said he "would not be surprised" if the company had to pay more than $3 billion in taxes in Britain but did not provide any alternatives to the windfall taxk.

"Our role is to invest, our role is to pay our taxes ... and our role is to return our value to our shareholders who happen to be millions of people, not faceless institutions," Looney told The Guardian.

ExxonMobil posted a $55.7 billion profit for 2022 last week, while Shell and Chevron reported profits of $39.9 billion and $36.5 billion respectively.

Good grief! How is it that Brits and Europeans put up with this madness? Such astonishing greed shows how little global corporations care about climate change, war, or the gas and oil crisis. The wealth transfer from ordinary people to wealthy oligarchs is astonishing.

Climate Change > Von Der Leyen's absurd prediction; Rush to EVs may be big mistake

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European Commission president says it will slash greenhouse gases

by 55% in next 8 years

She said while her home country, Germany, is scrambling to replace windmills with dirty coal mines.

By Clyde Hughes

   

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks during the 2022 United Nations Climate Change 

Conference (COP27), in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on Tuesday. Photo by Khaled Elfiqi/EPA-EFE

Nov. 8 (UPI) -- European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the COP 27 summit in Egypt on Tuesday called for member nations to jointly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by the end of the decade to avoid climate change's "highway to hell."

In an effort to quicken the rollout renewals, which she called REPowerEU, she said the effort would not only cut its reliance of Russian fossil fuels but can take advantage of already available resources.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the day earlier that the world was "on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator."

"Let us not take the highway to hell; let us earn the clean ticket to heaven," Leyen said. "The European Union's additional renewable capacity is set to more than double this year, up to 50 gigawatts.

"And if we accelerate and if we scale up -- and that is our plan -- we can, in the next year, meet a new all-time record of over 100 gigawatts of additional renewable capacity. Because we know that every kilowatt-hour of electricity that we generate from renewable sources -- like solar and wind, and green hydrogen -- is not only good for our climate but also good for our independence and our security of supply."

Maria Niera, the World Health Organization's director of public health and environment said the connection between climate change and health is already noticeable.

"The price of not taking decisions to fight climate change is paid by our lungs when you breathe polluted air, and many other organ," Niera said. "I think health will be the final motivation that has been missing from the 26 previous COPS. I don't see what else can be.

"If they take the right decisions, our health will gain. If they take the wrong decisions, our health will lose."

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame echoed the sentiments of many poor African countries on Tuesday, pointing out they contribute the least to global warming but continued to pay the high price for its results.

"The most valuable contribution that developed countries can make is to reduce their emissions faster while investing in Africa to build sustainable, green power," Kagame said. "Questioning whether Africa is ready to make use of climate finance should not be used as an excuse to justify inaction."

Rush to electric vehicles may be an expensive mistake, say climate strategists

Move to replace fossil fuel fleet with EVs is essential, but there are things to do first

Don Pittis · CBC News · 

Posted: Dec 12, 2022 1:30 AM ET | 

An electric Canoo LV (Lifestyle Vehicle) at a factory in Livonia, Mich., last month. Quirky new designs can make EVs

attractive items of conspicuous consumption for those who can afford them. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)

With their futuristic designs and new technology, electric vehicles are the seductive consumer-friendly face of the energy transition.

As first incarnated by Tesla, the EV is increasingly seen as sleeker, slicker, faster and more stylish than traditional internal combustion engine cars and trucks that burn those dirty fossil fuels blamed for disrupting weather patterns and killing off species. 

For people with money and a conscience, EVs are doubly satisfying. They allow the affluent to indulge in the time-honoured pleasures of conspicuous consumption while at the same time saving the planet.

Not so fast

But for those who have looked more deeply at how the world can escape its dependence on oil and gas, the rush to replace existing gas guzzlers with a new fleet of clean, silent battery-powered personal transport leaves them uneasy.

Many, including John Lorinc, last month's winner of the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy for his book Dream States, worry that the dash to go electric has not been well thought out. 

The potential result? Unsustainable costs and unnecessary damage to the environment.

"It's a really important evolution of technology to get away from internal combustion engines, so that part is necessary," said Lorinc in a recent phone interview. But he said the change comes with many caveats, including the fact that a lot of the world's electricity is still made using fossil fuels. 

Even though they are electric, larger trucks and SUVs like this Rivian R1T mean they are not environmentally

friendly to manufacture, and their large batteries make them heavier and harder on roads, say urban planners.

(Nathan Frandino/Reuters)

"Electric vehicles are large engineered objects that require a lot of metal, they require a lot of components that are shipped all over the place," he said. "There's a lot of mining and processing of minerals required to make the components, so it's not an environmental panacea by any stretch of the imagination."

Ottawa's critical mineral strategy calls for faster project approvals

People who study what they call the energy transition — the move away from releasing hundreds of millions of years worth of carbon trapped deep underground into the atmosphere and, instead, move toward renewable energy sources — insist it must be done strategically. Like Lorinc, they say that while getting all fossil fuel vehicles off the road is essential, it is far from the first step to saving the planet.

Lorinc's new book, a study of the complexity of attempts to building green "smart cities," is stuffed with information and written in an accessible, sometimes humorous style — "What city wouldn't want to be 'smart'?" —  and delves into the thorny problem of urban transportation.

'Horrendously inefficient'

Illustrated with real examples, the chapter "The Quagmire of Mobility Tech," relates how cities have struggled with uncontrolled market forces competing for limited urban space and limited funding. 

Lorinc describes how innovations such as early, inexpensive ride-hailing apps like Uber drove people away from public transit, helping to plug up downtown streets. In one case, he describes how Innisfil, Ont., a small town north of Toronto, experimented with switching away from costly bus services to ride-hailing apps — and how the idea became so popular it blew the municipal budget.

And there's research on how electric self-driving cars could one day transform cities, Lorinc writes, but in a way that just might be flawed. 

"EVs are here to save the car industry, not the planet, that is crystal clear," said outspoken urban planning advocate Jason Slaughter in a recent email conversation. "Electric cars use batteries instead of gasoline, but they are still a horrendously inefficient way to move people around, especially in crowded cities."

Canada’s first full-scale auto plant for electric vehicles has gone into production, bringing promise of new jobs to an industry that’s slipped in dominance in recent years.

A strong advocate of public transportation on his YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, Slaughter insists that in order to make cities people-friendly instead of being dominated by cars, public transportation has to be both comfortable and easy to use.

Slaughter's adopted home, the Netherlands, is one of the most advanced in making its cities walkable and bikeable, thus discouraging the domination of cars. Lorinc, too, describes Dutch urban centres as among those closest to becoming true smart cities.

And there are signs the trend toward fewer urban cars is growing. Last week San Jose, Calif., became the largest U.S. city to abandon parking minimums — the traditional requirement that urban development had to have a certain number of parking spaces. Also last week Paris announced it was paying car drivers to switch to electric bikes.

Outside of financial incentives, there are other ways to entice people to get out from behind the wheel — make the alternatives the easiest option. 

One person and a yogurt

"Using a vehicle to move a person and a quart of yogurt is energy inefficient," said Kate Daley, a climate and energy specialist who works in Waterloo region, referring to the drive many suburban Canadians must make just to pick up an essential ingredient from the nearest shop.

Her community's climate strategy has been to make walking, biking and public transit convenient enough that residents don't have to drive, whether in a fossil fuel burner or an EV. She notes that the move toward large SUVs has already been hard on road surfaces, and the additional load caused by batteries makes the damage worse.

But most important, said Daley, is that a successful energy transition must be done strategically. As those working on fuel switching for heating Canadian homes have noted in the past, one of the advantages of fossil fuels and why we remain addicted to them is that they remain an incredible bargain.

Switching from gas to electric for high-use vehicles including taxis, delivery trucks and car-share vehicles

would have a bigger impact on the climate than trading in a car that is seldom used. (Don Pittis/CBC News)

"The reason we want to use less energy first is because if we don't reduce our energy use, [fossil fuel energy is] really expensive to replace," said Daley.

As a Vancouver green building planner has told me in the past, insulating and sealing up homes can cut energy use by 90 per cent, meaning the cost of alternative energy sources becomes less important. 

Daley said the three stages of energy transition, which applies equally to EVs is that "we need to use less energy, we need to use clean energy and we need to generate local clean energy."

Who goes first?
Recently, Canada celebrated the opening of a General Motors factory in Ingersoll, Ont., to build electric delivery vehicles, and according to Colleen Kaiser, low carbon transportation expert with the Ottawa-based Smart Prosperity Institute, they may be on the right track.

"We really want the oldest [fossil fuel] cars off the road ... and we want the ones that drive the most," said Kaiser. "So we can think about taxi kind of vehicles, whether it's an Uber or a traditional taxi, any kind of fleet vehicles."

Effectively, she said, any car or truck that is on the road many hours a day, including buses, delivery vehicles, travelling sales reps, long-distance commuters, car shares such as Communauto or Zipcars, should be the ones to electrify first. 

She agrees that changing the "built urban form of our communities" may be the most important way to reduce total car use, but she said that takes a long time. "That is why we have to start now."

Electric rickshaws are a constant on the streets of New Delhi, often fighting for space outside busy areas, 

but they are a vast improvement on the previous generation of motors that created choking fumes.

(Salimah Shivji/CBC)

"We definitely don't want to replace all the gasoline cars one-for-one with electric vehicles," said Kaiser. "We have an opportunity with the transition to not just repeat the same patterns of the past with a different energy source." 

Kaiser said she thinks that may come with a generational change. Already, young people are more likely to live downtown, take transit more often and are less likely to drive a car. But for the many Canadians who live in rural or suburban areas that may not be possible.

"We're going to have to have electric vehicles because not everyone is going to use some alternative mode of transport," she said.

As Lorinc has noted, the consumer-friendly side of buying and driving a flashy electric car needs to be backed up by many more expensive steps. Those included developing green power sources, transforming our ability to get electricity to where it is needed with "smart grids," building systems for storage and the business of finding, extracting and processing essential battery minerals. That's a lot less sexy and a lot more complicated than picking out a new car.

But as Lorinc observes in Dream States, "Anyone who fails to acknowledge that everything is complicated, simply isn't paying attention."

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Climate Change > Biden in full-reverse - Trudeau full speed ahead; Germany to trade wind farm for dirty coal mine

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Green Biden scrambles to boost American oil production after OPEC cuts

OCT 7, 2022 11:00 AM 

BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

Jihad Watch

Yet another blow to America: OPEC is cutting oil production by two million barrels per day, leaving White House with little option but to walk back its green agenda, following swift denunciations of OPEC for being “shortsighted,” making “a mistake,” supporting Russia, and being self-serving (as if the Biden administration isn’t).

In pursuit of the green agenda, the wrecking-ball Biden administration cancelled the Keystone Pipeline; suspended any new oil and gas leasing and drilling permits for federal land and water; was notoriously anti-fracking; and now, in the face of the OPEC announcement, Biden is running the other way. In sheer desperation, the Biden administration is now “exploring avenues through Congress to respond to the production cut while working to further boost domestic production”; yet again exposing the administration’s inherent shortsightedness. Germany isn’t far behind, now finding itself in such a deep hole that it is turning to the dirtiest option for energy to offset its energy crisis: coal. How much more can it possibly take for populations to wake up and see the globalist agenda for what it is?

White House blasts Opec saying it is ‘aligning with Russia’

after oil production cut announcement

by Joe Bowen, 

Independent, October 5, 2022:

“Opec’s decision to cut productions quotas is short-sighted, while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” said Ms Jeane-Pierre.

“It’s clear that Opec+ is aligning with Russia with today’s announcement,” she added to reporters.

Ms Jean-Pierre did not go as far as to call it a “hostile act” following a question from a reporter, but reiterated that it was a mistake and on its face made in Opec’s own self-interest.

Isn't that what OPEC is for?

The White House also announced in a separate, longer statement released to journalists that it would be exploring avenues through Congress to respond to the production cut while working to further boost domestic production.

“The President is also calling on U.S. energy companies to keep bringing pump prices down by closing the historically large gap between wholesale and retail gas prices — so that American consumers are paying less at the pump,” read that statement from economic adviser Brian Deese and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

And, why would they do that? When was the last time you heard the phrase - Good Corporate Citizen?

“In light of today’s action, the Biden Administration will also consult with Congress on additional tools and authorities to reduce Opec’s control over energy prices,” they continued.

Of course, the best tool for keeping OPEC prices down was Russia. But America and Europe have nullified that effect through their own stupidity of being propagandized by NATO.

Trudeau had the opportunity to provide Germany with relatively clean natural gas but declined for the sake of global warming. It's not that Trudeau is not a hypocrite; it's that he is just that stupid. Germany will now use coal this winter and probably next, resulting in enormous contributions to the CO2 levels in the global atmosphere. Meanwhile, Canada sinks deeper and deeper into debt while much of our oil and gas remain in the ground.

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Germany, as part of NATO, is helping to drag out the war in Ukraine. The longer the war, the more money goes into the pockets of weapons manufacturers of NATO countries. This appears to be far more important than saving the planet from global warming.

Energy Company Begins Demolishing Wind Farm, Makes Room for Coal Mine

 By George Upper, Western Journal

 November 3, 2022 at 6:06am

A German company is mothballing eight wind turbines, which will make room for expanding a nearby lignite coal mining operation.

RWE is also re-activating three coal-fueled power plants, one of which had been scheduled to be permanently shut down last month, according to the company and government sources.

The German Bundeskabinett, or Federal Cabinet, authorized energy company RWE to re-open the coal plants to help offset lowered energy imports caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Fox News.

“We realize this comes across as paradoxical,” RWE spokesperson Guido Steffen told The Guardian. “But that is as matters stand.”

After complaints from climate activists, some German government officials protested the dismantling of the wind farm.

“In the current situation, all potential for the use of renewable energy should be exhausted as much as possible and existing turbines should be in operation for as long as possible,” a spokesperson for North-Rhine Westphalia’s ministry for economic and energy affairs said. “We don’t currently see any necessity to dismantle the wind power plant by the L12 [road] near the Garzweiler surface mine.”

The windmills, however, have been slated to be removed beginning this year since they were first constructed in 2001.

Does that mean the lifespan of a windmill is just over 20 years?

“One of the turbines was dismantled last week to make way for the mine’s expansion, with two others to be taken down in the first and last quarter of next year, said a spokesperson for WPD, which manages a portion of the wind park,” The Guardian reported. “A spokesperson for Energiekontor, which built and runs the rest of the windfarm, said a time limit to its operational permit meant it expected to have to dismantle the five remaining turbines by the end of 2023.”

According to the report, each of the 20-year-old windmills generates only about 1 megawatt of electricity hourly, about one-sixth of the electricity produced by more modern wind turbines.

 

In contrast, the lignite-fueled power plants will generate about 300 megawatts each, the company said. Lignite coal, it should be noted, isn’t even very efficient source of energy, as far as fossil fuels go.

Environmental activists consider lignite, sometimes called brown coal, to be the “most polluting and health-harming form of coal,” according to a 2018 “HEAL Briefing” from the Health and Environmental Alliance, which describes itself as “the leading European not-for-profit organisation addressing how the natural and built environments affect health in the European Union (EU) and beyond.”

This is in part because lignite’s low carbon content and higher water content requires more of it to be burned to obtain the same amount of energy than would be produced by burning a smaller amount of higher-quality “hard coal.”

Dirty coal can be mined through strip mining as seen in the image at the top of this story. Hard coal, which is much cleaner and more efficient, has to be dug out from deep inside mountains. It is, therefore, more expensive and time-consuming.

“Originally, it was planned that the three reserve power plant units affected would be permanently shut down on September 30, 2022, and September 30, 2023, respectively,” RWE said in September.

“With their deployment, they contribute to strengthening the security of supply in Germany during the energy crisis and to saving natural gas in electricity generation,” the company added.

Reducing natural gas consumption is key to avoiding a “gas emergency,” Klaus Mueller, head of Germany’s national energy network regulator, said last month.

“We will hardly be able to avoid a gas emergency in winter without at least 20% savings in the private, commercial and industrial sectors,” Mueller said, according to The Associated Press. “The situation can become very serious if we do not significantly reduce our gas consumption.”

Germany has also elected to keep open three nuclear power plants through at least mid-April, another move by German leaders that has angered Green Party politicians, according to the BBC.

Climate Change > Sacrificing health and wealth for immeasurably little difference in Climate Change - Haarlem Ad Ban, EV cars

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For an agricultural country, this is equivalent to Canada refusing to export its oil and gas - Spectacular stupidity!

Dutch city 1st in world to ban meat advertisements

as climate change measure

By Clyde Hughes

   

The ban, which is believed to be a first for any city, was driven by studies that say meat production and consumption

are a significant contributor to climate change. File Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI | License Photo

Sept. 6 (UPI) -- A Dutch city has become the first in the world to ban advertisements for meat as part of a plan to reduce greenhouse gases and fight climate change.

The city, Haarlem, banned the advertisements in public spaces in an effort to drive down meat consumption, and thereby reduce carbon emissions.

The Amsterdam suburb, which has a population of 160,000 people, said the ban will start in 2024.

The move is a response to recent studies that suggest global food production and consumption, particularly meat, accounts for about one-third of climate-warming greenhouse gases.

"We are not about what people are baking and roasting in their own kitchen; if people wanted to continue eating meat, fine," Ziggy Klazes, a councilor of the Groen Links Party and author of the legislation, said according to The Guardian.

"We can't tell people there's a climate crisis and encourage them to buy products that are part of the cause. Of course, there are a lot of people who find the decision outrageous and patronizing, but there are also a lot of people who think it's fine."

Klazes said she would love to see similar bans across the Netherlands, including possibly a national prohibition on the advertisements.

The ban was supported by the Christian Democrats Party, despite party leader Wopke Hoekstra's siding with some farmers who are against the measure.

The legislation could face immediate legal challenges. Herman Broring, a Dutch law professor, said the ban could infringe on free speech laws.

Of course, this will make virtually no difference in the global temperature. It is liable to lower the quality of protein ingested by Haarlemites, and affect the agricultural industry in the Netherlands.

Haarlem, NL

“We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better.

But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars?

Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones?

In reality, electric cars are only sometimes and somewhat better than the alternatives, they’re often much costlier, and they aren’t necessarily all that much cleaner. Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.

EV fleet - still functional vehicles except the batteries are dead and are not worth replacing.

The climate effect of our electric-car efforts in the 2020s will be trivial. If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime.

The minerals required for those batteries also present an ethical problem, as many are mined in areas with dismal human-rights records. Most cobalt, for instance, is dug out in Congo, where child labor is not uncommon, specifically in mining. There are security risks too, given that mineral processing is concentrated in China.

Increased demand for already-prized minerals is likely to drive up the price of electric cars significantly. The International Energy Agency projects that if electric cars became as prevalent as they would have to be for the world to reach net zero by 2050, the annual total demand for lithium for automobile batteries alone that year would be almost 28 times as much as current annual global lithium production. The material prices for batteries this year are more than three times what they were in 2021, and electricity isn’t getting cheaper either.

Even if rising costs weren’t an issue, electric cars wouldn’t be much of a bargain. Proponents argue that though they’re more expensive to purchase, electric cars are cheaper to drive. But a new report from a U.S. Energy Department laboratory found that even in 2025 the agency’s default electric car’s total lifetime cost will be 9% higher than a gasoline car’s, and the study relied on the very generous assumption that electric cars are driven as much as regular ones. In reality, electric cars are driven less than half as much, which means they’re much costlier per mile.

In part, this is because electric cars are often a luxury item. Two-thirds of the households in the U.S. that own one have incomes exceeding $100,000 a year. For 9 in 10 of electric-vehicle-owning households, it’s only a second car. They also have a gasoline-powered car—usually a bigger one, such as an SUV, pickup truck or minivan—that they use for long trips, given its longer range. And it takes additional costs to make electric cars convenient—such as installing a charger in your garage. Those who can’t afford it, or who don’t have a garage, will have to spend a lot more time at commercial chargers than it takes to fill up a car with gasoline.

This is all why electric cars still require such massive subsidies to sell. Norway is the only country where most new cars are electric, and that took wiping the sales and registration tax on these vehicles—worth $25,160 a car—on top of other tax breaks such as reduced tolls. Even so, only 12.6% of all Norwegian cars on the road are electric. The country has the wealth to pay for them partly because of its oil revenue, and the trade is dubious: To cut one ton of CO2 emissions through the subsidization of electric cars, Norway has to sell 100 barrels of oil, which emit 40 tons of CO2.

Needless to say, other countries’ car stocks aren’t likely to be anywhere close to 100% electric anytime soon. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that barring new legislation only about 17% of all new U.S. cars will be electric by 2050, which translates to 13% of the total American car stock. As consumers continue to vote with their wallets against electric cars, it is hard to imagine places like California continuing to demand that they can purchase only electric ones.

Electric vehicles will take over the market only if innovation makes them actually better and cheaper than gasoline-powered cars. Politicians are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and keeping consumers from the cars they want for virtually no climate benefit.” 

—Bjorn Lomborg

—Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

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