JoNova

Peter Brannen argues a real mass extinction doesn’t just wipe out 1% of species, it wipes out 90%.

It turns out humans are not quite as bad as a one-kilometer-deep lava layer covering an area as big as the US.

Earth is not in the midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction

Humans have changed the ecosphere:

So things don’t look so good, no matter where we look. Yes, the victims in the animal world include scary apex predators that pose obvious threats to humans, like lions, whose numbers have dropped from 1 million at the time of Jesus to 450,000 in the 1940s to 20,000 today—a decline of 98 percent. But also included have been unexpected victims, like butterflies and moths, which have declined in abundance by 35 percent since the 1970s.

Is this a mini extinction?

…the only reason we know about mass extinctions in the first place is from the record of this incredibly abundant, durable, and diverse world of marine invertebrates, not the big, charismatic, and rare stuff like dinosaurs.“

So you can ask, ‘Okay, well, how many geographically widespread, abundant, durably skeletonized marine taxa have gone extinct […]

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9 out of 10 based on 51 ratings

Apparently, what electric cars need is not better performance but better subsidies:

Australia’s electric car market was unlikely to take off beyond its current tiny niche unless the federal government introduced subsidies to encourage consumers, says Nissan’s global chairman Carlos Ghosn.

It’s a micro-mini-market for electric cars in Australia:

Despite record sales of new cars, just 219 of the 1.2 million new vehicles sold in Australia in 2016 were electric, even that was a 90 per cent drop from the previous year. Battery powered cars represented only 0.0018 per cent of the total market.

People buy cars to get places. Governments “buy” cars to change the weather.

One of the justifications for subsidies was that sales of electric cars were not driven by consumer demand, but by governments’ desire to reduce emissions.

How rich is the State of California?

In California, sales of Nissan’s Leaf Electric vehicle, which retails at US$30,680, attracts a US$2,500 clean vehicle rebate, a $7,500 federal tax credit and gets some preferential treatment on high occupancy vehicle lanes.

You know a car is bad when it is allowed to go in “bus” lanes.

h/t Dave B

9.8 out of 10 based on 131 ratings

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9.3 out of 10 based on 49 ratings

Bubble popped. :- )

The Leader of the free world leads the way out of the hollow bureaucratic pointless puffery of an agreement that was never going to change the weather.

The people of the free world never voted to join the Paris agreement. Trump has just said the obvious — he’ll look after US citizens first, and renegotiate a deal that helps the environment and doesn’t punish the leading polluters.

The members of the climate cult reacted the way cult members do. A Greens MP in Australia called the President of our greatest military ally a “climate criminal“. Al Gore said it’s reckless, and indefensible, and apparently the “planet has suffered” sayth the spokesperson for the Third Rock from the Sun, Leonardo Di Caprio.

Tom Steyer says Trump is “committing a traitorous act of war against the American people.”

MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch… said the president “is a sociopath.“

Excerpt from the transcript

As the Wall Street Journal wrote this morning: “The reality is that withdrawing is in America’s economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.”

One by one, we are keeping the promises I made to the American people during my […]

Oh the irony. What if “fossil fuels” were driving the climate debate, but on the Warmie side?

Fossil fuels is a misnomer, there is no collective fossil industry, just a bunch of massive multi-conglomerates competing. And the biggest competition for oil and gas comes from coal. Gas wins two ways: not only do “carbon schemes” help gas and oil compete, but the more windmills there are, the more gas we need to cope with the intermittency.

William Kay joins some interesting dots. Rex Tillerson, he argues, is a dark knight, painted as the enemy of climate deals yet pushing Exxon belatedly into the BP and Shell mould as another giant gas company that lobbies for carbon credits. The war waged on skeptics for their “fossil fuel” funding was a red herring to distract from the real direction of the lobbying.

REX TILLERSON: DARK KNIGHT OF THE OIL & GAS LOBBY

Let’s cut to the chase. The coal lobby and the natural gas lobby are dueling over the captain’s share of the U.S. electricity-generating market. As The Donald would say, “The stakes are yuge.” Americans spend almost $400 billion a year on electricity.

Recent figures have natural […]