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In one of the more pointless and inane “scientific” publications of the year, Brulle et al has added up climate lobbying dollars across the years and sectors, but missed the two largest sectors and blended friend and foe unto homogenised pap. Even Brulle admits that gas companies lobby for climate legislation, while coal companies lobby against it, yet Brulle still lumps them all into the archetypal ogre called “Fossil Fuels”. Let’s perpetuate a mindless stereotype, eh?
Was that an accident or an aim?
Thus and verily do “fossil fuels” predictably outspend environmental organisations:
“Unsurprisingly, sectors that could be negatively affected by bills limiting carbon emissions, such as the electrical utilities sector, fossil fuel companies and transportation corporations had the deepest pockets. Their lobbying efforts dwarfed those of environmental organizations, the renewable energy industry and volunteer groups.”
Fossil fuels didn’t just outspend enviromentalists, they might as well have been them. Shell leaned on World Bank to nobble the competition. It begged for Big-Green subsidies to sequester carbon and lobbied for carbon trading. BP committed to a low carbon world, and went so far as to join Greenpeace and lobby the BBC itself.
Gas companies benefit from climate change […]
Our understanding of the sun’s effect of Earth’s weather is so immature
Remarkably, some Japanese families kept weather record diaries in the 1700 and 1800s, and some for as long as 150 years. The connections they reveal are tantalizing but so incomplete. We are trying to fish out primitive signals from murky water. The Sun turns around on itself every 27 days, so these researchers are looking for repeating patterns in lightning that fit, but the poles of the sun spin slower than the equator and the sun spots can take their own time. Hence, it’s not a neat “27” days.
During periods of high solar activity, they found regular peaks in lightning activity with the right timing, from May to September when the cold Siberian air mass is not so influential.
Other studies we’ve discussed here have investigated long solar cycles on the 11 year or 200 year scales. But here, the researchers are thinking of day to day weather, and looking for a solar influence on timeframe that might improve weather forecasting. Obviously there is a long way to go. As for mechanisms they suspect that it’s the solar wind that is influential, but they don’t know, when […]
The idea of Pulling out of Paris is barely discussed in Australia. Tony Abbott made it a national discussion for five minutes last week, but apparently that’s all it takes, or even less. After 30 years of non-stop agitprop and years of bipartisan rah, rah, solemn “history in the making” cheer, the truth is Australian’s mostly don’t give a toss. All we had to do was ask them.
It’s a loaded question framesd as “if pulling out could result in lower electricity prices”… Purists may protest that this overstates the result. Not so. If we had any kind of rational national discussion it would be obvious to all that the “could” is a wishy washy misleading and loaded term — seeding the possibility that pulling out might not lower prices. If people knew that no nation on Earth with lots of unreliables also has cheap electricity, even more people would want to abandon Paris.
By more than two to one, people want cheaper power, not Paris points:
Almost two thirds, 63 per cent, of voters also claimed that cheaper power should be governments’ priority with only 24 per cent believing reducing emissions should take precedence.
NewsPoll, Australia […]
All gravy taps flow to Paris
Trump got the US out of Paris, but US taxpayers are still funding pointless climate-control deals.
The World Bank is supposed to be sorting out poverty. Instead it’s enriching the renewables industry, and keeping the poor stuck on unreliable low grade energy.
Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, but the US is spending billions to implement it
Tim Pearce, Daily Caller
The World Bank is spending millions in government funding from various countries, including the U.S., to implement climate mitigation strategies in line with an international agreement to fight climate change — the Paris climate accords.
No other country could sort out the World Bank as quickly as the US:
The U.S. is the World Bank’s largest supporter and shareholder owning 17 percent of organization’s shares. The next largest owner, Japan, owns just under 8 percent. Several bills moving through Congress would grant the World Bank, along with other Multilateral Development Banks, roughly $1.8 billion.
“Climate change is a threat to the core mission of the World Bank Group,” the World Bank’s 83 page Climate Change Action Plan for 2016-2020 states.
Leapfrog […]
Someone finally found a way to reduce electricity bills with solar and wind contracts
TORONTO — Ontario’s new Progressive Conservative government is cancelling 758 renewable energy contracts, in what it says is an effort to reduce electricity bills in the province.
Energy Minister Greg Rickford said the move will save provincial ratepayers $790 million — a figure industry officials dispute, saying it will just mean job losses for small business.
In a statement Friday, Rickford said the government plans to introduce legislation during its summer sitting that would protect hydro consumers from any costs incurred from the cancellation.
“For 15 years, Ontario families and businesses have been forced to pay inflated hydro prices so the government could spend on unnecessary and expensive energy schemes,” Rickford said. “Those days are over.”
Opponents complained that this would cost jobs. Obviously they forget the Green job multiplier: for every Green job lost 3 – 5 real jobs will be created.
Renewables fans said this will lead to big lawsuits and called it a war on science. What they did not say was how this was an opportunity missed because all these projects would be […]
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8.9 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
Last week only fringe loonies who were clinging to a dead technology were calling for a coal revival (mock mock mock). But now that the ACCC has spent months investigating and 400 pages reporting, they discovered that Tony Abbott and Craig Kelly and the Monash group were, hey, all right all along.
This is Turnbulls get-out-of-jail card, if he used it as an excuse to be sensible. He has in the past taken those cards and set fire to them. In a best case, he might, with arm twisted in a one-spare-seat-government, “build new coal” sometime in the far distant future, but whatever he does he won’t do anything other than minor hand waving about the Crony Green-Theft runaway train profits.
Turnbull weighs coal fix for energy wars
Simon Benson and Ben Packham, The Australian
A proposal for the federal government to financially guarantee the construction and operation of new dispatchable power generation, which could include clean coal-fired plants, is expected to be taken to cabinet with the backing of the Prime Minister.
Malcolm Turnbull yesterday confirmed he would seriously consider the key recommendation of a report by the competition watchdog to underwrite and […]
They’re running our largest Hydro Lake down
The large Hazelwood Coal Units closed a year ago, so the Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme has been working hard to fill the holes in the unreliable generation that replaced it. And they’ve been collecting tidy profits from earning RET certificates too.
What could possibly go wrong?
This — levels of Lake Eucumbene have fallen to 24%. This is the lowest since 2010. It’s not the lowest ever (so that’s alright then).
The rain will just fill it right up, unless there is an El Nino. Don’t look now… Odds are “above average”.
Who I say, who could have predicted this?!
Graham Lloyd, The Australian
Snowy Hydro’s biggest storage dam has fallen to less than 25 per cent capacity due to poor rains and high electricity generation following the closure of the Hazelwood coal power station in Victoria.
Lake Eucumbene is now at its lowest level since 2010 and on its way to a repeat of 2007 when electricity generation had to be stopped in favour of a heavily polluting fossil-fuel generator in Victoria.
The Hydro chief said they had been generating more to “take advantage of tight […]
The ACCC is a powerful body created to protect consumers in Australia. Now, after ten years of poor people being forced to pay for middle and upper class solar panels in a kind of semi-secret subsidy-tax, NOW, it says maybe it is time to stop?
Go ACCC.
Competition watchdog calls for solar subsidies to be axed
Ben Packham, Sam Buckingham-Jones, The Australian
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s electricity affordability report reveals the huge cost of environmental schemes across the National Energy Market, including the large-scale renewable energy target, the small-scale renewable energy scheme and solar feed-in tariffs.
The schemes add a combined $170 to household energy bills in South Australia, $155 in Tasmania, $109 in NSW, $93 in Victoria and $76 in Queensland.
The ACCC waffles some reasons:
The ACCC said the costs associated with the LRET were expected to fall significantly after 2020, and did not recommend any action to wind up the scheme before its 2030 end date. But it said the SRES, which cost $130 million in 2016-17, should be wound down and abolished by 2021, almost a decade ahead of schedule, to reduce costs for consumers.
[…]
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8.9 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
Scientists wondered whether climate change was affecting super high clouds that people rarely see and there is virtually no data on. So they used models which fail on clouds and water vapor only ten kilometers above the Earth and tried to predict what happened to both way up at 80 kilometers up and 150 years ago. They “found” (their phrase, not mine) the increase was man made. So once again, your car exhaust and dinner steak are to blame for changing these night-shining clouds.
How could it be any other way?
This is pure crystal ball science that starts with errors and ends with extrapolations. Researchers are fooling themselves using words like “results”, “indicator” and “significant” as if this was an actual experiment.
PUBLIC RELEASE: 2-JUL-2018
Climate change is making night-shining clouds more visible
AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
WASHINGTON — Increased water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere due to human activities is making shimmering high-altitude clouds more visible, a new study finds. The results suggest these strange but increasingly common clouds seen only on summer nights are an indicator of human-caused climate change, according to the study’s authors.
Noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds are […]
Everyone is talking about the NEG (National Energy Guarantee) which will supposedly attain the mythical trifecta of cheap, reliable, and planet cooling electricity. In terms of meeting our Paris “commitment” Tom Quirk wondered how we are doing in other sectors, like farms, cars, rubbish — and whether we had cut emissions there. Well, ho, ho, here’s that report. Thank you, Tom. Looks like a lot of cows and sheep will have to go. Still, we want to stop storms don’t we?
Key points: The NEG is not enough on its own to reduce Australian emissions from 608Mt to 444Mt. Most of our reductions so far have come from just two sectors: the electricity sector and from changes to land-clearing. We’ve “achieved” nothing in other sectors like agriculture, transport, waste and industry. Methane emissions from sheep and cattle amount to 60Mt. Trashing the live-export trade may help reduce
With enough bad luck, and poor management, plus some sacrificial lambs on the altar, we might be the only country on Earth that meets its Paris agreement. Rejoice.
This is assuming that our population stops growing and Australia blocks all immigration tomorrow. That’s right, Tom Quirk has not made any allowance for the […]
The Hockeystick graph rewrote history and was used to justify billions of dollars of expenditure. The people who created it were public servants dedicated to science and writing businesslike emails to each other — which is why they fought tooth and nail and with hundreds of thousands of dollars for 1,763 days to stop you reading them.
Marvel that after 1,000 years of working as thermometers, trees suddenly decalibrated in 1961 just as our national networks of adjistimongered-thermometers were established. See that red line rise…
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h/t Another Ian, Lance, WUWT
Press Release from FME Law July 3, 2018
Arizona Appellate Court Decides Hockey Stick Emails Must Be Released Despite the University’s Appeal.
One thousand seven hundred and sixty-three days ago, on behalf of its client, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, PLLC (FME Law) asked the University of Arizona to hand over public records that would expose to the world the genesis of what some consider the most influential scientific publication of that decade – the Mann-Bradley-Hughes temperature reconstruction that looks like a hockey stick.
The University refused. …
“This decision by the Appellate Court is much more […]
It’s about time
Thank goodness for Tony Abbott
Nine years ago the Australian Liberals were on the verge of splitting. Turnbull was about to give the Labor Party a free pass on the Emissions Trading Scheme and sell Australia out to the EU. Climategate broke (thank you FOIA) and the party rebelled and tossed out Turnbull. Now, after three elections where the people voted No to carbon taxes every time they could, we have an emissions trading scheme, a Renewable Energy Target, and one of the most crippling Paris targets of any nation. This is despite our rapidly growing population, huge distances and massive resources and the failure of almost every other nation to even achieve their Paris goals. We are The Global Patsy, obediently sacrificing competitive advantage, GDP, and lifestyle – all so Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull get invited to the right parties. Economic carnage in a glorious quest to make the weather nicer.
UPDATE: Time to pull out of Paris full speech
It has got to end. The NEG (The National Energy Guarantee) is a dog:
Turnbull is repeating mistakes says Abbott:
Simon Benson, The Australian
Delivering his most strident […]
Climate protestors put their best argument forward:
It’s taken thirty years and $100 billion in scientific research to get here.
They think they can stop droughts.
Now we know that the best thing about climate protestors is their cardboard.
Australians will surely now poke, Fun at each bare-bottomed bloke, Who sought coal-mining closure, By their rear end exposure, With each now the butt of a joke.
–Ruairi
I don’t think these guys realize the upper tropospheric hot spot is missing. They are going to feel pretty silly when they find out someone tricked them into standing naked in the main street of Melbourne.
As reported by EchonetDaily (whoever they are, they don’t appear to be a satirical site). This weekend in Melbourne …. sometime when it was very very dark and there were no pedestrians. (Or maybe it was photoshopped and they were never there at all?)
8.6 out of 10 based on 52 ratings […]
Some things just don’t belong at comment #1.
8.2 out of 10 based on 22 ratings
Coal is a dying industry, but luckily for the Australian economy, the rest of the world is not as smart as The Australian Greens and Labor Party and they are still buying it.
Coal is set to regain its spot as the nation’s biggest export earner amid higher prices and surging demand from Asia, sparking fresh calls from the Turnbull government for Labor to end its “war on coal”.
The Department of Industry, Innovation and Science figures show total coal exports are forecast to reach $58.1 billion in 2018-19, overtaking iron ore ($57.7bn) for the first time in almost a decade.
We’ve only got 300 years of these kind of coal profits to go.
The big question, do we open up more coal mines now and rake in the dough, or try to make the weather nicer in one thousand years time? Tricky…
Resources Minister Matthew Canavan said new export forecasts strengthened the investment case for Adani’s proposed $16.5 billion Carmichael coalmine and the development of Queensland’s Galilee Basin, which federal Labor has opposed. “Opening up the Galilee would generate 16,000 direct mining jobs and tens of billions in taxes.”
What do Australia’s big […]
Last Chance to Book for Tony Abbott Lecture: Melbourne, 3 July 2018
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The place to be on Tuesday night.
“Climate Change & Restraining Greenhouse Gas Emissions“ Last days to book your tickets for the Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture given by the Hon. Tony Abbott—the former PM and current MHR for Warringah in NSW—on 3 July 2018.
Tickets: Book them through Eventbrite. Tickets:$35 for AEF members and $42 for others.
Book Tickets here.
9.4 out of 10 based on 34 ratings […]
What costs $1,500m, makes no electricity, but “saves money”?
South Australia has used federal subsidies to build more wind power than it can use. They’ve spent half a billion already on diesel powered jet engines and a battery that can power the state for “minutes”. For 139 hours last year the state produced so much wind power it supplied 100% of the states electricity needs and then some, and the problem of excess electricity is only getting worse as wind generation keeps increasing and solar PV uptake is rampant.
When government rules and regs have created an inefficient, expensive problem, what do we do? More of it. A new report suggests that South Australia needs a direct transmission line to NSW which will cost $1.5b. We could spend that on a reliable generator instead, or get the government out of the way and let the private sector do it for us, but instead we need to pay for another transmission line to connect up different zones-of-subsidy-rent seekers and hope we get $30 off the bill? It’s a savings in the statistic margin of error…
South Australia didn’t even have an interconnector til 1990. Now with decentralized and renewable power they […]
This is serious. The World Cup cometh, and the United Kingdom is running out of beer.
The UK emits over one million tons of CO2 each day but bottles of flood-drought-n-coral-killing CO2 are in short supply.
Trade journal Gas World, which first revealed there was a problem last week, said it was the “worst supply situation to hit the European carbon dioxide business in decades”.
Carbon capture is the way of the future, which is a shame. If it worked now, people wouldn’t be running out of beer, bacon, coke and even crumpets.
We spend billions to take pollution out of the sky and stuff it into deep holes. Then we pay people to generate the same pollution and put it in our food. Someone, join the dots. Cut out the middle man and move Heineken next to Drax!
9.6 out of 10 based on 66 ratings […]
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