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Taxing a basic molecule of life on Earth was never going to be easy.
Leaked paper exposes EU abuse of climate loophole
EXCLUSIVE/ European Union countries exploited loopholes in United Nations forestry rules to pocket carbon credits worth €600 million and the equivalent of global-warming emissions from 114 million cars.
That’s slightly more cars than exist in Germany, France and Italy combined.
You will not believe, governments overstated their logging targets then claimed credits for the forests they didn’t cut down, and the EU paid them for it.
Just saving the world, one lie at a time.
The document said that leaving the loophole open risked 133 million tonnes of unearned carbon credits falling into governments hands.
133 million tonnes is worth €665 million at today’s carbon price and is equivalent to 127 million cars on the road.
It’s a market based on intentions instead of a product. What could possibly go wrong?
9.4 out of 10 based on 78 ratings
After the 2009 peak of Copenhagen-fever and ClimateGate, media coverage dropped precipitously. Then there’s been a kind of dead cat bounce as the extreme voodoo climate meme was pumped and every hot afternoon became a front page headline. But media interest has plummeted — and in a US election year. To some extent this was coming as the crowd was tired of the hottest year after the hottest year, the tipping points came and went, the apocalypse didn’t happen but the fatigue did. But there is more to that crash that just weariness. Looks like Trump just killed climate news…
See Grist: Major TV Networks spent just 50 minutes on climate change combined last year…
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Climate broadcast coverage was already over the peak before the election year, but the crushing collapse in a “hottest ever massive El Nino year” says a lot. Trumps mockery of the topic was something the media news broadcasters couldn’t handle. It wasn’t a case of Any News Is Good News as the cliche goes, if Trump or the Deplorables had been given any real airtime the whole rent-seeking fantasy gravy train would have run off the rails.
The Boy Who Cried Warming had […]
Righto. It’s time to blame climate change for causing British voters to vote against German rule of Britain. Back when the climate was ideal, the Brits would’ve been fine with that.
Instead, even though the world has not warmed for 80% of the history of the EU, the EU is breaking up because of climate change.
It’s not like Al Gore to draw conclusions from a long nebulous chain of dubious reasoning, but here’s how it goes: Coal gives off CO2, which causes droughts according to models that don’t work, and that made Syrians migrate. Everyone got unhappy and voted for Brexit.
Climate change helped cause Brexit, says Al Gore
Brexit was caused in part by climate change, former US Vice-President Al Gore has said, warning that extreme weather is creating political instability “the world will find extremely difficult to deal with”.
Really, it’s all about coal, cars and plastic bags. If the EU had only put in more wind farms, the UK would have voted to stay in.
If it weren’t for a lack of rain in the middle east, the British Isles would want to leave decisions about immigration, fishing and light bulbs to their friends […]
Last days before Hazelwood shuts down.
Robert Gottleibsen in The Australian a couple of days ago has investigated our energy crisis, and discovered our old centralized grid design is quite likely to fall over next summer in an incredibly expensive way. It’s nice that he did some research and even talked to engineers:
The looming crisis is much worse than I expected. Three state governments, Victoria NSW and South Australia, have vandalised our total energy system. The Premiers of each state clearly had no idea what they were doing and did not sit down with top engineers outside the government advisers to work out the best way to achieve their objectives — whether that be an increase in renewables or gas restrictions.
He warns that it is potentially criminal:
I have been alerted that in the 1995 Federal Criminal Code under Section 137.1 in Chapter 7 there is a section entitled ‘Good administration of government’.
Me? I remain a cynic (not that I’m a lawyer). The legislation has been there since 1995, threatens 12 months in prison for “misleading information”. It can’t be this simple.
Still it would be good if politicians were scared into doing […]
The 12th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-12) will take place on Thursday and Friday, March 23–24 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, DC, thanks to the Heartland Institute. Watch and hear the scientists, economists, engineers, and policy experts who persuaded President Donald Trump that man-made global warming is not a crisis, and therefore Barack Obama’s war on fossil fuels must be ended.
WATCH LIVE STARTING AT 8:00 AM (ET) ON THURSDAY, MARCH 23
More information below…
8.4 out of 10 based on 24 ratings […]
Three days to go: The Hazelwood shut down begins
The situation in Australia right now:
The total fossil fuel output compared to total wind power generation, NEM, Australian electricity market, 21 March 2017
One old coal plant makes more electricity than all the wind farms
Guest Post by TonyfromOZ and Jo Nova
I’ve been watching the output of all eight generators at Hazelwood closely all month and comparing it to the total wind farm generation across the National Electricity Market (NEM). The old warhorse is a remarkable engineering and economic success.
I’ve kept a total of the power output each day from midnight to midnight and a running cumulative total. So far, the running total output from Hazelwood has always stayed ahead of the total from wind farms. So this 53 year old coal fired plant that is being shut down next week has produced more energy than the 43 wind plants on the National Energy Market. Even if we could store the energy from the wind farms, it still doesn’t add up to the same as one very ancient coal plant. The shut down starts in three days time on Friday March 24th.
Over […]
After years of struggle to conceive, plus tortured introspection about the effect her baby might have on future storms, Sophie Lewis, climate scientist, announces conception in the most convoluted way:
And then, just as senselessly as our grief began, it ended. For no particular reason, the expected bad baby news never arrived and now the complexity of having an imagined child will become a concrete ethical entanglement.
Exactly. And many a climate model operates with all the same clarity and insight.
But sincere congratulations to Sophie Lewis. We hope her good news brings her years of joy.
We also pray she escapes the climate bubble soon. Because by golly, she’s in deep.
Lewis reveals the paroxysms of irreconcilable guilt — where the evolutionary drive conflicts with the climate religion:
Older climate scientists speak widely about their worries for their grandchildren and the world they have provided them. While such concerns must weigh on older minds, younger climate scientists’ future concerns require active deliberation. Should we have children? And if we do, how do we raise them in a world of change and inequity? Can I reconcile my care and concern for the future with such an […]
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7.8 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
Once upon a time governments bragged about how much they spent on “climate change”. Every Climate Quiz or tin-pot-program to insulate a chicken-run was wrapped under the Climate Action banner so that politicians could claim they were saving the world. Nowadays voters have voted for the guy who called it a hoax, and the funding’s gone underground because he was going to boast about how much climate funding he’d cut.
When I wrote Climate Money in 2009, a lot of the spending was already documented, under the Climate Change Science Program or by the GAO. How times have changed.
To Protect Climate Money, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find
President Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies — in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.
Climate change is so important that no one even estimates what the government spends on it:
The last time the Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies had climate-related activities, and calculated $77 […]
Turnbull announces beefing up the Snowy Mountains Hydro. Weatherill gets grumpy. Insults exchanged.
Things are so serious that suddenly the Feds are unveiling a new solution to fix the blackouts and “load shedding”. http://a.msn.com/01/en-au/BBybbQL?ocid=se
As Bob FJ writes: see Canberra Times and note the eye-contact avoidance etcetera twixt Weatherill and Frydenberg.
h/t To Bob FJ
9.3 out of 10 based on 49 ratings
The Milgram Experiment. Image Wikimedia.
The chilling Milgram experiments have been replicated, and yet again, 9 out of 10 are willing to inflict electric shocks and pain on another person. In these infamous experiments the power of a white lab coat was enough to get more than half the participants (26 out of 40) to deliver a fatal shock (the participants didn’t realize the shock was faked, and the victim an actor).
This willingness to obey authority is both a great strength of humanity when authority is worthy and yet leads to the darkest abyss when it is not.
By nature, we are largely empathetic creatures: most people really don’t want to cause pain, they get quite upset themselves in the process. Yet many people will override this inbuilt ethical wiring if a person in a position of authority insist they do. It’s time we talked about ways to train people to resist. There is hope as outlined below in a different study from last year.
Conducting the Milgram experiment in Poland, psychologists show people still obey
Press Release: The title is direct, “Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?” and the answer, according to the […]
South Australia (SA) is planning to build a new gas fossil fuel plant for $550 million because it has too much competitive and “cost efficient” free energy. There are fears this will not only push up electricity prices in the state but in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania too. (Bravo, SA). In order to build a new fossil fuel plant with Greens permission they spend $360m on the new gas plant, and then offered $150m more to appease the angry renewables spirits. It is said to be needed to encourage investment. Obviously no sane investor would spend money on renewables for purely economic reasons.
Meanwhile Elon Musk offered to fix the states problems in just 100 days or “it’s free” and with only $33million for a 100MWh battery farm. The offer has triggered a bun fight between Musk and local companies who say they can do even better.
But in the long run, SA wants to go “100% renewable”. Below Paul Miskelly and Tom Quirk calculate that for SA to truly do that, it would need about 270GWh of batteries to cover the peak use. This would require 7.5 million tonnes of lead acid batteries and cost 60 – 90 billion […]
Don’t mention the climate — unskeptical conservatives give away some of their best weapons
The local Liberals (conservatives) got smashed on the weekend in the Western Australian election. Polls predicted it, but instead of a Trump-surprise, Colin Barnett’s team got a nasty shock instead — wiped out. There was no “hidden vote” waiting there because the local Liberals are just another brand of The Establishment. There is nothing politically brave about them.
In WA climate was a non-issue, yet pandering to the religion still cost conservatives. One of the main election messages was about the privatisation of “Western Power” (Electricity supplier). This strange spectacle unfolded where McGowan, the leader who’d suggested the ridiculous 50% renewables target was thumping Barnett’s campaign with messages of fear about rising electricity prices after the privatization. Barnett didn’t hit back — No one seemed to notice the incongruity of Mr Renewables accusing someone else of making electricity expensive.
There are many reasons the WA Libs crashed (read some here). But the “climate” policy hole gets forgotten. Colin Barnett was unarmed, unskeptically accepting the unaudited foreign committee reports. In 2014, when semi-skeptical-Abbott was PM, the premier of a state that lives off mining and energy wasn’t […]
Australia’s “leading climate scientists” can’t predict the climate but they are very good PR operatives. Here in Perth we’ve had a cool year — for the last twelve months it’s been nearly a whole degree cooler than the average for the last 20 years. But last weekend in Perth, news stories told us we’d had an “autumn stinker” and wait for it, we might get Perth’s second hottest first eight days of March. Call that a HFEDOM record and write in the Guinness Book of records. It’s a permutation “record” almost as important as the longest distance run by a man holding a table in his teeth. Except it’s not even a record, it’s a news story about a record that “might happen”, but didn’t.
Let’s name Neil Bennett (BOM) and Will Steffen (ANU) as the Propaganda-in-Chiefs dumping meaningless climate-trivia on the people in order to generate FEAR and screw more money from the public.
Straight from the New Climate PRAVDA Manual:
Invent contrived trivial permutations in order to use the word “record” Don’t bother waiting for real data, use forecasts If record includes the word “cool”, “cooler”, or “cold”, send to trash. When wrong, crickets.
Click to enlarge, […]
8.3 out of 10 based on 40 ratings
The The Climate Institute is a private think tank set up in 2005. It got about $2m a year back in the heyday of climate panic. Today Planet Earth is still about to collapse, but it’s not important enough for the team to keep working without a salary. Amazing what someone, who really believes in what they do, can achieve with 1% of what they had.
No more propaganda surveys from them then:
Climate Institute announces closure, citing lack of funding to continue
After a decade of climate advocacy work, climate change research organisation the Climate Institute has announced it will be closing in late June.
The non-profit’s survival has until now been dependent on donations, and it has cited a lack of funding as the reason for its closure.
Best known for its Climate of the Nation reports, the organisation also helped, among other things, expand the renewable energy target in 2008.
The Climate Institute could be relied upon to pay for trite motherhood style surveys to score meaningless headlines about how 110% of Australian believe we have a climate.
My past posts:
Climate Institute Poll finds we are all […]
Love it! (Sing ’til you cry).
Welcome darkness my good friend
it’s good to meet you once again
Because the power grids are stressing,
that’s the reason for load shedding…
— Shrish Viyas Hargoon h/t Lance.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 89 ratings
The whole NCSE march on April 22nd is devoted to a strawman:
The National Center for Science Education was one of the first organizations to endorse the march, and we are encouraging our members to take part. Why? Because we believe that the marches will be a powerful and positive reminder that there is something that virtually everyone agrees on: the value and importance of science.
There is no public debate saying science is not important. It simply does not exist. So why march? According to Ann Reid, biologist, science is important for farming, water quality, and beer-making. No kidding. Load up the strawmen.
Rage On: March for the trite!
“Science is for Everyone” (except scientists who disagree with government propaganda):
And that’s where the March for Science fits in. On April 22, 2017, people all over the world will be gathering together to celebrate science, and to declare that science belongs to everyone. NCSE will be there.
Obviously the real subtext are controversial topics (why else does anyone march?) Guess which branch of establishment science is the one hardest hit by the Trump presidency:
At the National Center for Science Education, we know […]
News is out that diesel cars which don’t comply with pollution standards will be banned from some roads in Germany on “high pollution” days. Depending on how often those bad news for diesel industry and owners. How useless is a car that you can’t drive when you need it? Stuttgart is being called the “Beijing” of Germany for air pollution. Residents are suing the Mayor for “bodily harm”. The same thing happened in Oslo — governments told people to buy diesel to reduce carbon pollution, but they are now banning diesel cars on some roads on some days too.
This may apply to as many as 90% of diesels on German roads. Sales of diesels fell by 10% last month. The pain level in this depends on how often those high-pollution days are. See the current Stuttgart air-quality monitoring — it’s OK today, but if I read this air pollution road map from 2008 correctly, it suggests some roads are over the safe limit 60, 80, even 180 days a year. In 2014 fine particulate matter exceeded safe limits on 64 days a year.
Corruption always has a price but in this case the owners of diesels are paying for […]
Looks like the halo is fading. Today-Tonight is a current affairs show in Australia. Today a few more Australians discovered that free energy is not just expensive but creates its own kind of pollution.
This hardly a surprise for anyone who can spell cost-benefit, but it’s healthy to see the prime-time media in Australia doing something other than singing the Clean-Green advertising jingle.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
8.8 out of 10 based on 98 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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