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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 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through 2013 alone. But that figure could well be too low. The Obama administration didn’t always include “climate” in program names, said Alice Hill, director for resilience policy on Obama’s National Security Council. What was $79 billion in climate funding from 1989-2009 doubled in the next 5 years. The US government has spent far more than $150 billion. “The Trump Administration needs to defund the entire apparatus of the climate change federal funding gravy train,” said Marc Morano, a former Republican staffer for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “In order to dismantle the climate establishment, agencies and programs throughout the federal government need to be targeted.” “The climate funding has spread to almost every aspect of the federal government with sometimes wacky results,” said Morano, who doubts global warming and runs the website climatedepot.com. He cited one example of a Department of Transportation query about the link between climate change and fatal car crashes. Marc is right. h/t Climatedepot 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  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 obeyPress Release: The title is direct, “Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?” and the answer, according to the results of this replication study, is yes. Social psychologists from SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland replicated a modern version of the Milgram experiment and found results similar to studies conducted 50 years earlier.The research appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. “Our objective was to examine how high a level of obedience we would encounter among residents of Poland,” write the authors. “It should be emphasized that tests in the Milgram paradigm have never been conducted in Central Europe. The unique history of the countries in the region made the issue of obedience towards authority seem exceptionally interesting to us.” For those unfamiliar with the Milgram experiment, it tested people’s willingness to deliverer electric shocks to another person when encouraged by an experimenter. While no shocks were actually delivered in any of the experiments, the participants believed them to be real. The Milgram experiments demonstrated that under certain conditions of pressure from authority, people are willing to carry out commands even when it may harm someone else. “Upon learning about Milgram’s experiments, a vast majority of people claim that ‘I would never behave in such a manner,’ says Tomasz Grzyb, a social psychologist involved in the research. “Our study has, yet again, illustrated the tremendous power of the situation the subjects are confronted with and how easily they can agree to things which they find unpleasant.” While ethical considerations prevented a full replication of the experiments, researchers created a similar set-up with lower “shock” levels to test the level of obedience of participants. The researchers recruited 80 participants (40 men and 40 women), with an age range from 18 to 69, for the study. Participants had up to 10 buttons to press, each a higher “shock” level. The results show that the level of participants’ obedience towards instructions is similarly high to that of the original Milgram studies. They found that 90% of the people were willing to go to the highest level in the experiment. In terms of differences between peoples willingness to deliver shock to a man versus a woman, “It is worth remarking,” write the authors, “that although the number of people refusing to carry out the commands of the experimenter was three times greater when the student [the person receiving the “shock”] was a woman, the small sample size does not allow us to draw strong conclusions.” In terms of how society has changed, Grzyb notes, “half a century after Milgram’s original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual.” The good news from a study last year: Matthew Hollander listened to all the Millgram recordings again, and there were about 800 in the full set. He found that even among obedient people there were signs of resistance as the experiment got more painful. They had ways of slowing the experiment, tried to talk their way out of it, and talk to the victim too. The difference was that the disobedient people were more aggressive about slowing things down, they started to resist earlier, and had more options to resist. It would seem likely that if we train people better, a lot more people will stand up to authority. “Before examining these recordings, I [Hollander] was imagining some really aggressive ways of stopping the experiment — trying to open the door where the ‘learner’ is locked in, yelling at the experimenter, trying to leave,” Hollander says. “What I found was there are many ways to try to stop the experiment, but they’re less aggressive.” Most often, stop tries involved some variation on, “I can’t do this anymore,” or “I won’t do this anymore,” and were employed by 98 percent of the disobedient Milgram subjects studied by Hollander. That’s compared to fewer than 20 percent of the obedient subjects. Interestingly, all six of the resistive actions were put to use by obedient and disobedient participants. “What this shows is that even those who were ultimately compliant or obedient had practices for resisting the invocation of the experimenter’s authority,” says Douglas Maynard, a UW-Madison sociology professor who leads the Garfinkel Laboratory for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. “It wasn’t like they automatically caved in. They really worked to counter what was coming at them. It wasn’t a blind kind of obedience.” If people could be trained to tap practices for resistance like those outlined in Hollander’s analysis, they may be better equipped to stand up to an illegal, unethical or inappropriate order from a superior. And not just in extreme situations, according to Maynard. — See Infamous study of humanity’s ‘dark side’ may actually show how to keep it at bay Though the numbers do still look depressing. There are critics of the Millgram experiments, who say that it was an artificial setting, unethical, and people wouldn’t react that way, but this second round of research has replicated at least some of those findings. There is a kind of Millgram experiment going on in climate science. The experimenters keep pushing more ridiculous buttons… References:
March 16th, 2017 | Tags: Psychology | Category: AGW socio-political, Psychology |  Print This Post | | 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 dollars (and you thought an interconnector was expensive — SA could buy 60 – 90 interconnectors). For perspective the total state GDP is $97B (compared to AUS total of $1629). South Australian state govt revenue and expenses is about $16B so they can afford the batteries in 5 years if they cancel their own government. If they were buying Power Walls from Tesla instead they would need 20 million of them. The retail cost is $180 billion. They also would have some 2000 wind turbines at 2.5 MW so 10,000 Power Walls per turbine. — Jo h/t David B, Scott of the Pacific too. _______________________________________________ South Australia – a Renewable State?Paul Miskelly and Tom Quirk With $90 billion spent on batteries and 4,000 MW of more wind farms, South Australia could be a totally renewable state, at least for electricity. South Australia along with one or two other states has been described by Al Gore as the canary in the coal mine for climate change and renewable energy. This interesting comparison was rewarded by South Australia putting the canary in the dark as there was no coal. But it would be interesting to see what the electricity supply of South Australia might be like with zero CO2 emissions as is the fond wish of many and even of learned societies. There are many combinations of renewables that could be considered with wind, solar, biomass, pumped storage and various storage technologies. The following is the simplest, combining wind farms and batteries. The starting point for this analysis is the dominance of wind power in South Australia. To expand this renewable source we must add battery storage as there are no present alternatives. The present 1575 MW of wind farms meets some 35% of demand and expanding this to give an average 100% of supply, we must store the surplus and use that when the wind falls away. The performance of the present demand and wind farms supply is sampled from AEMO data for 3 January to 31 March 2016. Keep reading → March 14th, 2017 | Tags: Battery, SA (South Australia) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | Don’t mention the climate — unskeptical conservatives give away some of their best weaponsThe 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 even brave enough to go with the federal government of the day. Barnett publicly backed Obama’s climate plans instead. Like Turnbull, Barnett missed the chance to roast the opposition for pandering to the climate faith, wasting money, making energy unaffordable, crippling industry etc etc etc. Last year the WA Labor party waved the fantasy that this 13% renewables state could become a 50% Renewable Energy State. This should have been ripe fodder since it was South Australia on steroids: bigger and more risky. We’re a small isolated grid, not connected to the rest of Australia. There’s no hydro, no nukes, and no hope of another state keeping us running. We would be the blackout-state-in-waiting. But weeks ago, after yet another South Australian debacle unfolded — and leader of the Labor Party, Mark McGowan dropped the 50% target. Criticism was muted instead of savage. Turnbull couldn’t unleash on his opponents in last years election, and neither could Barnett. Unskeptical politicians are just firing blanks. Keep reading → 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:
 Click to enlarge, The Sunday Times So science serves its purpose as a tax revenue generator and source of support for parasitic industries that need government money and government propaganda to keep them alive. (Yes, I’m talking about renewable energy). The public is hammered with record hot stories, even before they’ve happened in this case, yet there are no BoM announcements or media stories detailing WA’s remarkable run of well below average temps since about April last year. Last week the Climate Council report on summer mentioned Perth had record rainfall and the second hottest December day on record at 42.4C on 21 December, but they didn’t mention 9 February when Perth had by far its coldest February maximum daily temp since records began in 1897, smashing the previous record by a whopping 1.6C. — Jo _____________________________________________________________________ Fake News doesn’t mention the real climate that West Australians should get used toGUEST POST by a Weather Watcher reader in WA.  Click to enlarge It’s what Donald Trump likes to call Fake News. The Bureau of Meteorology was in the media on Sunday 5th March to warn that if the forecasts in the following four days were accurate, Perth would have an average maximum of 35.5C in the first eight days of March. The alarm bells were ringing because Perth was sweltering through the second hottest first eight days of March ever recorded. Well, the first eight days of March have passed and Perth’s average maximum was 34.8C. So the first eight days of March were the 5th warmest on record, not the 2nd warmest. A warm start to March but a bit of a non-event and no longer of any interest to the media. However, the several hundred thousand people who read the Sunday newspaper will nevertheless be telling all their friends that the first eight days of March this year were the second hottest ever in Perth. The bureau and the media created record temperatures before they had (not) happened, misleading the public but reinforcing the climate warming theme. Are you used to it? The same Sunday story included Will Steffen from the Australian Climate Council, who said WA’s temperatures and a hot eastern states season were further evidence that Australia can expect more frequent and hotter heatwaves, with WA to be belted by regular 50C days within decades. Professor Steffen says what happened in Perth and WA this week is more data confirming that extreme heat is on the increase, and West Australians should get used to days such as the 36.1C recorded in Perth last Saturday. Hang on. 36.1C in Perth during early March? Perth’s hottest ever March day was 42.4C and the month always has at least a few days in the high 30s, some years slipping into the 40s. Recent WA climate Fake News has created evidence of climate change because Perth had a warm first week of March. But what does the real news have to say about the recent climate in WA? For that we turn to the bureau’s February Monthly Summary (www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/wa/summary.shtml):
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:
As I said — their surveys were designed to get one kind of answer: Obviously The Climate Institute don’t want real answers, which they must know would be devastating. They won’t ask how much people want to pay out their own pocket to fix the climate. They won’t ask people to rank “climate change” against all the other issues they care about. They won’t ask people if Climate Change is a scam, a con, or a scheme to make the green industry rich (a year ago a US poll showed 31% were happy to call climate change a “total hoax“). Things don’t get more skeptical than that, but if surveyors don’t ask, they’ll never know. These surveys never ask if the public thinks windmills will slow storms or make floods less likely. There is a good reason for that…
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. Keep reading → 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 somethin 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 that science sometimes addresses controversial issues. It’s no surprise to us that scientific findings can trigger fierce disagreement. We’ve devoted over thirty years to making sure that science teachers have the expertise and support they need to teach about evolution and climate change, even when there are people in their communities who object. So this is a climate protest in disguise, masquerading as a generic “science” protest. These people couldn’t form a sequential cause-effect argument if their lives depended on it. Indeed, their jobs almost depend on them not doing it. (If they did, they might get sacked, evicted, blackballed, terminated, punished, vilified and bullied.) It will be touted by religious climate believers as a protest for “climate change”. Whatever: it’s another Science-for-Big-Government-PR exercise. It’s a form of Argument from Authority: “Trust us” some scientists can make good beer, therefore they can predict the climate. Wash out your brain, cleanse your thoughts, scientists speak with one mind. The irony and projection of Ann Reid peaks in the next sentence: But it is important to remember that many who object to the teaching of evolution or climate change haven’t encountered the science for themselves. How much does Ann Reid know of the missing water vapor feedback recorded by 28 million weather balloons. How much has she looked at the scandal of temperature adjustments that are larger than the trends they measure? Keep reading → 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 the corruption of officials, bureaucrats, car companies and politicians. It is time the real culprits paid. Way back in 2006 – 2009 the Eco-Worriers were pushing diesel as a green alternative to “save the planet”. E.g Diesel: Greener Than You Think. MotherEarth top ten Green Cars. If the Greens actually cared about emissions and pollution they would have checked, protested and stopped this long ago. Instead, they ignored it and it is coming back to bite. Diesel Cars Banned from Stuttgart on Days When Pollution is Heavy:
Death of Diesel, by EuroIntelligence.
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 Sorry I am a bit distracted with other things this week. Light postings. Advertising your virtues sometimes conflicts with advertising your social status.Paul Joseph Watson never minces his words. The surprising thing is that these guys get away with it. Not laughed out of town for their grandstanding piety at awards nights. h/t Scott of the Pacific Climate Change threatens to make bread less tastyOver at The Conversation the panic is rising. Life is not going to be the same. Get ready for the bland future — if we stop all plant breeding tomorrow, and don’t change our fertilizers at all, it possible, by 2050, in dry years, wheat may have a 6% decrease in protein. It’s that serious. Everyone likes the high protein kind of wheat, and it’s worth more. Glenn Fitzgerald, at The Conversation argues that Australian wheat is going to be lower in protein, and downgraded, making us less competitive and our farmers poorer. (Cynics among us note that authors at The Conversation only seem to care about farmers when climate change might hurt them, not when climate-change-action actually sends them broke, makes them homeless or puts them in jail. Y’know — whatever.) As for Australia’s export earnings, I say, forgive me, but I thought the CO2 elevation was a global thing — so unless we are competing with aliens and intergalactic wheat, color me unconcerned. All the wheat producers on Earth will be dealing with the same issue. How to make a good thing sound badThe bottom line in biology is that because CO2 is plant food, and makes the molecular carbon backbone of carbon-life-forms, if there is more of it in the air, plants grow faster and the extra carbon will dilute everything else. The benefits of carbon dioxide are greatest in dry years because CO2 makes it easier for plants to cope with less water and droughts. It takes some effort to construe this as a bad thing, but with enough government funding, and years of academic training, it’s possible. (Thank Glenn Fitzgerald, Honorary Associate Professor of Agriculture and Food, University of Melbourne). Carbon dioxide is such a basic part of biology — plants wake up in the morning and drink in the CO2 from the air around them. In a cornfield, the plants will even change the atmospheric concentration of CO2 in the air over the field. By lunchtime every day, CO2 will have dropped, and growth slows. Carbon dioxide is that important. This graph from Chapman in 1954 really shows how intrinsic CO2 is:  Fig. 1. Variations in the C02 content of air in a corn field and 152 m above it on a still day. A C02 deficit of more than 100 lbs an acre was developed within 3 hrs after sunrise, to remain nearly constant until late afternoon. See this for more detail. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be discussing this, or preparing for it, but honestly, Climate change will make bread taste bad? Fergoodnesssake. Our lower protein diet, solved with a chickpeaFitzgerald tells us that people might be malnourished because of nutrient changes thanks to excess CO2. We’ve been through this line of thinking before. The problem is so easy to solve, yet so obviously missed by our experts. Even if the projected protein deficiency occurs in wheat, it is so small and irrelevant that all we have to do is eat slightly less wheat and slightly more of nearly anything else bar other grains. I calculated that a person could make up for the deficiencies in rice-of-the-future by swapping some rice for a chickpea: specifically, one extra chickpea for every 100g of rice: According to the USDA nutrient profiles Gelatinous White Rice, Cooked (doesn’t that sound delicious) has all of 0.14mg of iron per 100 grams and 0.41mg of zinc. Chick peas on the other hand have 2.89mg of iron per 100g and 1.53mg of zinc. So chickpeas have 20 times the iron content, and 3.7 times the zinc content. In other words, to solve a shortage of a 10% reduction in iron and zinc in rice, the average person eating 100g of rice would need to eat an extra 2.6 grams of chickpeas (or is that chickpea, singular?). As a bonus they would be getting five times more iron than what they are missing out on in the rice. Wheat is richer than rice, and contains significant protein for people without access to meat. But a mere 5- 10% deficiency is still easily solveable with a shift in dietry composition. Indeed, even if all food types became slightly diluted (like if poorer grain-feed leads to poorer beef steak) the principle still works. Where are the grownups when you need them? REFERENCES[1^]Chapman H. W .,Gleason L. S., Loomis W. E. (1954): The carbon dioxide content of field air. Plant Physiology 29,6, pp 500-503 [PDF freely available] Smile. One more noxious, power-grabbing bit of legislation: fixed. Farmers and land-owners lost control of the puddles and ditches on their land under the guise of environmental protection. Remarks by President Trump at Signing of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) Executive OrderThe EPA’s so-called “Waters of the United States” rule is one of the worst examples of federal regulation, and it has truly run amok, and is one of the rules most strongly opposed by farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers all across our land. It’s prohibiting them from being allowed to do what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s been a disaster. The Clean Water Act says that the EPA can regulate “navigable waters” — meaning waters that truly affect interstate commerce. But a few years ago, the EPA decided that “navigable waters” can mean nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer’s land, or anyplace else that they decide — right? It was a massive power grab. The EPA’s regulators were putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands, and regulations and permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if they were a major industrial polluter. They treated them horribly. Horribly. If you want to build a new home, for example, you have to worry about getting hit with a huge fine if you fill in as much as a puddle — just a puddle — on your lot. I’ve seen it. In fact, when it was first shown to me, I said, no, you’re kidding aren’t you? But they weren’t kidding. In one case in a Wyoming, a rancher was fined $37,000 a day by the EPA for digging a small watering hole for his cattle. His land. These abuses were, and are, why such incredible opposition to this rule from the hundreds of organizations took place in all 50 states. It’s a horrible, horrible rule. Has sort of a nice name, but everything else is bad. (Laughter.) I’ve been hearing about it for years and years. I didn’t know I’d necessarily be in this position to do something about it, but we’ve been hearing about it for years. Keep reading → You might think we’d know whether a solar PV system produced energy before we installed 1,000 Megawatts of it. But it’s hard to even know after the fact. Dr John Constable points us at an interesting new paper that discusses the odd creature called EROEI. This stands for energy return on energy invested. If you get back less than “one”, it sucks. That sounds like a fine idea except everyone seems to get different answers to the same question. Solar PV in Switzerland achieves either a tenfold return or it costs a fifth of your energy. Plan your national policy with a Ouija Board? Constable comes to the conclusion that the whole calculation is so uncertain it’s useless. There are so many subjective estimates on the “energy invested side” that the answer is almost irrelevant. Constable points out that what we really need to know is how the whole system responds to the addition of a new generator –but the whole grid analysis is even harder than just the EROEI to calculate. His conclusion, it that we really need something more like a neural net to calculate the costs. Luckily we have one — us — and the contractual free market. It’s just the government keeps getting in the way of it working. ENERGY RETURN AND ECONOMIC PLANNINGDate: 22/02/17 Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy Editor In 2016 Ferruccio Ferroni and Robert J. Hopkirk published a striking article (“Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation”, Energy Policy 94 (2016), 336–344) claiming that the energy return for Solar PV sites in Switzerland might be as low as 0.8, implying that the technology was not a net energy producer but a consumer. Unsurprisingly, this paper has been the subject of intense criticism, and a detailed and in many points persuasive rebuttal has recently been published by Marco Raugei et al. (“Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation: A comprehensive response” Energy Policy 102 (2017), 377–384). Raugei and his colleagues make a number of methodological criticisms of Ferroni and Hopkirk and using alternative methods, calculate that the energy return is in the region of 7 to 10. While Raugei et al’s figure is positive it is not particularly high, as compared for example to figures in the literature for electricity from coal and gas (EROEI = 28–30), and nuclear (EROEI = 75–105) (see D. Weissbach et al. “Energy intensities, EROIs (energy returned on invested), and energy payback times of electricity generating power”, Energy 52 (2013), 210–221). See — ENERGY RETURN AND ECONOMIC PLANNING
If you think the Swiss were crazy, ponder the Germans. If I read this chart correctly, they’ve installed 40,000MW. … It would make any hunter gatherer proud. [The Times] Britain is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds subsidizing power stations to burn American wood pellets that do more harm to the climate than the coal they replaced, a study has found. Chopping down trees and transporting wood across the Atlantic Ocean to feed power stations produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal, according to the report. It blames the rush to meet EU renewable energy targets, which resulted in ministers making the false assumption that burning trees was carbon-neutral. The UK tribes can thank chief Huhne (Energy and Climate secretary) for the 7.5 million tonnes of dead trees otherwise known as biomass — which mostly come all the way from the US and Canada. Naturally, doing something this improbable takes a lot of money. Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies in 2015 for burning biomass, which was mostly American wood pellets. Curiously, there are over 200 trillion cubic feet of dead trees stored under Lancashire. They may have been very very small trees, like algae sized, but nonetheless, 4,999 kilometers closer. Apparently when all the trees of Canada and the US are used up, and the UK moves out of the Wood Age, it will have some spare gas to heat UK homes for the next 1,200 years. The climate debate has now moved on to arguing whether trees are renewable. There’s a kind of death-spiral bickering between different varieties of “renewables” beasts. If it takes 200 years to grow a tree back, and you believe the models that are 97% wrong, oceans might boil before the carbon is back in the tree.This is just another carbon accounting bun-fight. The report author, Mr Bracks, calls the subsidies ridiculous, but only because the money could have gone to “zero carbon” wind or solar instead. Shame he didn’t point that out then, when he was the special advisor to Chris Huhne. Having poured countless millions into Biomass, by a remarkable coincidence, three months after Huhne got out of jail for lying about speeding fines, he was appointed European Director of a company called Zilkha Biomass. Wood pellets fuel Huhne’s journey into private sectorHe is not the only one to follow this gravy laden career path: Several other former energy ministers have gone on to lucrative jobs in the sector. Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem who replaced Mr Huhne as energy and climate secretary but lost his seat in 2015, advises three companies on low-carbon energy projects. Lord Barker of Battle, the Tory former energy minister, took up posts advising a renewable heat business and a solar panel company. The appointments of both were approved by Acoba. Pretending to save the world can be a lucrative career. They claim to reduce greenhouse gases, — Ruairi |
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g that virtually everyone agrees on: the value and importance of science.
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