In this newsletter:
1) Net Zero economy: UK businesses likely to see energy bills increase fivefold in October
Energy Live News, 4 August 2022
2) Energy bills could double to £4,200 a year under new cap
The Times, 5 August 2022
3) Majority of Tory voters want party to pause Boris Johnson's flagship Net Zero plans until the economy improves as poorest and oldest Britons revolt against green push
Daily Mail, 3 August 2022
4) Ben Wilkinson: Britain will pay a heavy price for falling into a Net Zero trance
The Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2022
The Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2022
5) David Frost: Rationing is back – and Britain’s authoritarian greens are delighted
The Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2022
6) John Longworth: We cannot afford Net Zero right now - we have to put Britain first
Daily Express, 4 August 2022
7) Daniel Yergin and Michael Stoppard: Winter in Europe may be Springtime for Putin
The Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2022
6) John Longworth: We cannot afford Net Zero right now - we have to put Britain first
Daily Express, 4 August 2022
7) Daniel Yergin and Michael Stoppard: Winter in Europe may be Springtime for Putin
The Wall Street Journal, 4 August 2022
8) Record coral cover for Great Barrier Reef
The Australian, 4 August 2022
8) Record coral cover for Great Barrier Reef
The Australian, 4 August 2022
9) Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon: The big green lie almost everyone claims to believe
The Epoch Times, 3 August 2022
The Epoch Times, 3 August 2022
10) Matt Vespa: Spain's new air conditioning law is insane
Townhall, 3 August 2022
Townhall, 3 August 2022
Full details:
1) Net Zero economy: Businesses likely to see energy bills increase fivefold in October
Energy Live News, 4 August 2022
New analysis suggests higher energy costs could force more business closures that would cripple the economy
As more and more companies struggle to navigate through soaring energy prices and the rising cost of living, analysts have warned business energy bills are set to rocket in October.
Consultants at independent data analyst company Cornwall Insight have said as many businesses are negotiating their contracts with suppliers in October, some will face bills five times their current price.
They suggest concerns over gas supplies, tight electricity markets and the disruption to liquefied natural gas market could trigger further energy price spikes.
The report suggests business energy prices have been surging for 15 months, with higher increases than those experienced by households.
The consultancy says those businesses who negotiated two-year fixed price contracts in summer 2020 could potentially face a substantial fivefold rise in October.
Those renewing an annual contract are due to see bills twice what they paid this year.
The further increases in energy costs are believed to have a knock-on effect on firms’ resilience as it is feared that soaring energy bills could force more businesses closures.
2) Energy bills could double to £4,200 a year under new cap
The Times, 5 August 2022
Energy Live News, 4 August 2022
New analysis suggests higher energy costs could force more business closures that would cripple the economy
As more and more companies struggle to navigate through soaring energy prices and the rising cost of living, analysts have warned business energy bills are set to rocket in October.
Consultants at independent data analyst company Cornwall Insight have said as many businesses are negotiating their contracts with suppliers in October, some will face bills five times their current price.
They suggest concerns over gas supplies, tight electricity markets and the disruption to liquefied natural gas market could trigger further energy price spikes.
The report suggests business energy prices have been surging for 15 months, with higher increases than those experienced by households.
The consultancy says those businesses who negotiated two-year fixed price contracts in summer 2020 could potentially face a substantial fivefold rise in October.
Those renewing an annual contract are due to see bills twice what they paid this year.
The further increases in energy costs are believed to have a knock-on effect on firms’ resilience as it is feared that soaring energy bills could force more businesses closures.
2) Energy bills could double to £4,200 a year under new cap
The Times, 5 August 2022
Energy bills could more than double to £4,200 a year by January after Ofgem announced changes to the price cap updates and how it is calculated.
Critics said the regulator’s decisions were “inhumane”, with households facing a crippling increase, now even more than expected, in the depths of winter.
Ofgem confirmed yesterday that the price cap would be updated every three months instead of six but it also announced further, unexpected changes to the way it calculates the cap.
It admitted that the changes would further increase bills but insisted they were necessary so suppliers could recoup wholesale costs quickly, reducing “the risk of further large-scale supplier failures which cause huge disruption and push up costs for consumers”.
Energy bills have already risen to an average of £1,971 a year for a typical household, with steep increases already predicted in October and again in January because of soaring wholesale gas and electricity costs.
The surprise methodological changes could see the price cap rise to £3,523 a year in October and to as much as £4,210 a year in January, according to Investec, the investment bank. Martin Young, an analyst, said the January forecast is about £460 more than expected before yesterday’s changes.
“We understand why Ofgem wishes to provide greater market resilience, but the pressure on households grows,” he said. “It is imperative that the two candidates for prime minister reach a common position on help, and quickly.”
The regulator acknowledged yesterday that households faced a “very challenging winter” but said it did “not recognise” the Investec figures, which were “a long way off any working estimates we are currently using”.
It indicated that it expected households to pay £60 extra between October and December as a result of its changes but did not offer any further estimates before the announcement of the October cap level on August 26.
Full story
3) Majority of Tory voters want party to pause Boris Johnson's flagship Net Zero plans until the economy improves as poorest and oldest Britons revolt against green push
Daily Mail, 3 August 2022
A majority of Tory voters want his successor to 'pause' his flagship Net Zero environmental policy, a new poll suggests.
Almost six-in-10 want the move to reduce the UK's emissions by 2050 eased as families try to cope with soaring energy bills and rampant inflation.
The figure in a poll by YouGov contrasts with just 30 per cent of Labour and Lib Dem voters who think the policy should take a back seat to economic concerns.
Both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss committed in July to the government's Net Zero target by signing an environment pledge from the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) - a green forum backed by more than 130 Tory MPs.
But their campaigns have seen the issue only feature peripherally, with party members more interested in tax cuts and help with the cost of living.
Ms Truss wants to suspend green levies added to energy bills and says there is a strong case for lifting the ban on fracking.
Mr Sunak has said he would fund energy efficiency measures by taking money from heat pump subsidies, and would not relax a ban on onshore wind farms in England.
The YouGov poll also found strong support for a full review of Net Zero among voters aged 65 and over, and working class voters, especially in the Midlands and Wales.
Younger voters and those in London and Scotland were more likely to back the green push.
As Conservative party members start voting, some climate campaigners fear the ambitious emissions-cutting strategy planned by outgoing PM Boris Johnson could falter under his successor.
In a letter to the BBC after the broadcaster's head-to-head debate last week, climate campaigners and organisations said it was 'unacceptable' for the issue to be 'skimmed over in just 2-3 minutes'.
Full story
Critics said the regulator’s decisions were “inhumane”, with households facing a crippling increase, now even more than expected, in the depths of winter.
Ofgem confirmed yesterday that the price cap would be updated every three months instead of six but it also announced further, unexpected changes to the way it calculates the cap.
It admitted that the changes would further increase bills but insisted they were necessary so suppliers could recoup wholesale costs quickly, reducing “the risk of further large-scale supplier failures which cause huge disruption and push up costs for consumers”.
Energy bills have already risen to an average of £1,971 a year for a typical household, with steep increases already predicted in October and again in January because of soaring wholesale gas and electricity costs.
The surprise methodological changes could see the price cap rise to £3,523 a year in October and to as much as £4,210 a year in January, according to Investec, the investment bank. Martin Young, an analyst, said the January forecast is about £460 more than expected before yesterday’s changes.
“We understand why Ofgem wishes to provide greater market resilience, but the pressure on households grows,” he said. “It is imperative that the two candidates for prime minister reach a common position on help, and quickly.”
The regulator acknowledged yesterday that households faced a “very challenging winter” but said it did “not recognise” the Investec figures, which were “a long way off any working estimates we are currently using”.
It indicated that it expected households to pay £60 extra between October and December as a result of its changes but did not offer any further estimates before the announcement of the October cap level on August 26.
Full story
3) Majority of Tory voters want party to pause Boris Johnson's flagship Net Zero plans until the economy improves as poorest and oldest Britons revolt against green push
Daily Mail, 3 August 2022
A majority of Tory voters want his successor to 'pause' his flagship Net Zero environmental policy, a new poll suggests.
Almost six-in-10 want the move to reduce the UK's emissions by 2050 eased as families try to cope with soaring energy bills and rampant inflation.
The figure in a poll by YouGov contrasts with just 30 per cent of Labour and Lib Dem voters who think the policy should take a back seat to economic concerns.
Both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss committed in July to the government's Net Zero target by signing an environment pledge from the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) - a green forum backed by more than 130 Tory MPs.
But their campaigns have seen the issue only feature peripherally, with party members more interested in tax cuts and help with the cost of living.
Ms Truss wants to suspend green levies added to energy bills and says there is a strong case for lifting the ban on fracking.
Mr Sunak has said he would fund energy efficiency measures by taking money from heat pump subsidies, and would not relax a ban on onshore wind farms in England.
The YouGov poll also found strong support for a full review of Net Zero among voters aged 65 and over, and working class voters, especially in the Midlands and Wales.
Younger voters and those in London and Scotland were more likely to back the green push.
As Conservative party members start voting, some climate campaigners fear the ambitious emissions-cutting strategy planned by outgoing PM Boris Johnson could falter under his successor.
In a letter to the BBC after the broadcaster's head-to-head debate last week, climate campaigners and organisations said it was 'unacceptable' for the issue to be 'skimmed over in just 2-3 minutes'.
Full story
4) Ben Wilkinson: Britain will pay a heavy price for falling into a Net Zero trance
The Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2022
The Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2022
We all face an apocalyptic financial disaster paying for the Government’s green pursuit
For months, consumer champion Martin Lewis has been telling anyone who will listen that rocketing energy bills will soon inflict catastrophic damage on Britain’s finances.
But no one has been listening. At least, no one in power has. The money saving expert has been a lone voice akin to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Don’t Look Up – a frustrated scientist begging the world to acknowledge that an apocalyptic comet is on a collision course with Earth.
That comet is now visible from the ground below and we are staring at an undeniable disaster. It’s now far too late to do anything about it. And it is due to strike, as the Bank of England confirmed this week, as mortgage costs are going through the roof and inflation shows no sign of slowing down.
The Labour Party must be licking its lips as whoever wins the Tory leadership contest will face an unstoppable storm that will only breed discontent.
What you pay for energy now is 50pc higher than what you paid earlier this year, but in just two months (around the time we all start putting the heating back on) the price of power will nearly double again. This means that in January typical homes will use around £500 worth of energy to keep warm every month.
Analysts Cornwall Insight have predicted that the average annual electricity and gas bill will hit £3,358 in October – £2,000 more than it was in March. Bills are predicted to peak at £3,729 next April and stay high until 2024.
Thousands of families will spiral into debt, once-affluent households will be forced to watch the pennies, savings will be devoured and spending will dry up. Recession is inevitable.
Could our country have done anything to prevent it? The wholesale cost of power will have risen five-fold by next year, driven up by supply issues exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Yet we are not just paying for pricey power.
Our bills have been inflated by repeated regulatory failures and expensive government eco-vanity projects. The £13bn smart meter roll-out bumped up our bills over the years, while the collapse of tiny firms that were allowed to take on hundreds of thousands of customers has added £94.
The Government has put the cost firmly on our shoulders by triggering a countdown to net zero. We are told we should all be driving electric cars and warming our well insulated homes with farcical heat pumps, but we are expected to pay for it at a time when family finances face unprecedented strain.
The British people have been neglected while the Government dropped everything in its trance-like pursuit of net zero. As a result, our household wealth is being used to pay for our country’s unforgivable dependency on foreign energy, failure to invest in self-sufficiency and exploit our own natural resources.
And it’s too late for the Government to do anything meaningful about it. Households will get £400 off their bills, but the Treasury may well have to dig deeper. We will all end up paying the price for net zero folly, whether it is as energy bill payers or taxpayers.
The Great Barrier Reef has set a new record for hard coral cover over two-thirds of its 2300km length, results of the Australian Institute of Marine Science official long-term monitoring program show.
The annual survey found coral cover in the northern and central zones of the Reef, stretching from Cape York to Mackay, had increased despite another episode of bleaching this year.
Coral cover in the southern section of the Reef which stretches from Mackay to Bundaberg had reduced slightly due to a continued outbreak of crown of thorns starfish, but coral cover was comparable to the northern and central regions at 34 per cent.
The AIMS long-term monitoring program has been going for 36 years and is the most rigorous and detailed survey of Reef health.
AIMS program leader Mike Emslie said the results were “good news” and showed that the Reef had “dodged a bullet” in bleaching this year.
“But the fact we have had four bleaching events in seven years is a major concern and highlights the impact of climate change here and now,” he said.
“We are in uncharted territory and still trying to understand what this means.”
Queensland scientist Peter Ridd said the results “should be a cause of national celebration”.
Dr Ridd said coral cover on the Reef as a whole was at record high levels.
“This brilliant result is proof that many science institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the Reef,” he said.
The full impact of this year’s bleaching will not be known until further monitoring is done but expectations are that mortality rates across the Reef will be low.
“The recovery seen this year occurred despite widespread bleaching in 2020 and again in 2022, showing bleaching events do not always lead to widespread mortality,” the report says.
“The 2022 bleaching event was less intense than the 2016, 2017 and even the 2020 events, and mortality is expected to be lower.
“However, the nonlethal effects of frequent bleaching events will take time to be fully understood.”
The significance of the latest AIMS results is that it shows the Great Barrier Reef has maintained its resilience and ability to bounce back from disturbances including bleaching and cyclones.
There are still concerns about the impact of consecutive bleaching events and what this means for the make-up of the Reef and factors other than the amount of hard coral cover.
Eighty-seven reefs were surveyed between August 2021 and May 2022, mainly on the mid and outer shelf.
The recovery has been primarily driven by fast-growing branching and plate corals (Acropora species), which provide good habitat for fish and other reef animals but are vulnerable to disturbances such marine heatwaves, cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish predation.
AIMS chief executive Paul Hardisty said the results in the north and central regions were a sign the Reef could still recover, but the loss of coral cover in the southern region showed how dynamic the Reef was.
“Every summer the Reef is at risk of temperature stress, bleaching and potentially mortality, and our understanding of how the ecosystem responds to that is still developing,” he said.
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chief scientist David Wachenfeld said the results showed that the Reef was still a resilient ecosystem, retaining its capacity to recover from disturbances, at the current level of global warming which is about 1.1C warmer than the pre-industrial temperature.
“Given the significant climate change-driven impacts we have already seen, our biggest concern is for the future, as temperatures increase, because the resilience of the Reef will not withstand future projected warming on current trajectories of greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
The bleaching this year coincided with a visit by a World Heritage Committee monitoring mission to advice on whether or not the Great Barrier Reef should be inscribed on the World Heritage “in danger” list.
The 2022 World Heritage Committee meeting was scheduled to be held in Russia, and has been postponed.
Dr Emslie said he was sure the World Heritage Committee would take the results of the latest AIMS survey into consideration.
Dr Ridd said AIMS should be congratulated for their work over many decades.
“I estimate that in these surveys, AIMS has towed a diver behind a small boat a distance equivalent to around the world,” he said.
“This work has paid off as it demonstrates that the Reef cycles through periods of high and low coral cover.
“This is natural.
“It demonstrates that we should be far more optimistic about the fate of the Reef.”
For months, consumer champion Martin Lewis has been telling anyone who will listen that rocketing energy bills will soon inflict catastrophic damage on Britain’s finances.
But no one has been listening. At least, no one in power has. The money saving expert has been a lone voice akin to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Don’t Look Up – a frustrated scientist begging the world to acknowledge that an apocalyptic comet is on a collision course with Earth.
That comet is now visible from the ground below and we are staring at an undeniable disaster. It’s now far too late to do anything about it. And it is due to strike, as the Bank of England confirmed this week, as mortgage costs are going through the roof and inflation shows no sign of slowing down.
The Labour Party must be licking its lips as whoever wins the Tory leadership contest will face an unstoppable storm that will only breed discontent.
What you pay for energy now is 50pc higher than what you paid earlier this year, but in just two months (around the time we all start putting the heating back on) the price of power will nearly double again. This means that in January typical homes will use around £500 worth of energy to keep warm every month.
Analysts Cornwall Insight have predicted that the average annual electricity and gas bill will hit £3,358 in October – £2,000 more than it was in March. Bills are predicted to peak at £3,729 next April and stay high until 2024.
Thousands of families will spiral into debt, once-affluent households will be forced to watch the pennies, savings will be devoured and spending will dry up. Recession is inevitable.
Could our country have done anything to prevent it? The wholesale cost of power will have risen five-fold by next year, driven up by supply issues exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Yet we are not just paying for pricey power.
Our bills have been inflated by repeated regulatory failures and expensive government eco-vanity projects. The £13bn smart meter roll-out bumped up our bills over the years, while the collapse of tiny firms that were allowed to take on hundreds of thousands of customers has added £94.
The Government has put the cost firmly on our shoulders by triggering a countdown to net zero. We are told we should all be driving electric cars and warming our well insulated homes with farcical heat pumps, but we are expected to pay for it at a time when family finances face unprecedented strain.
The British people have been neglected while the Government dropped everything in its trance-like pursuit of net zero. As a result, our household wealth is being used to pay for our country’s unforgivable dependency on foreign energy, failure to invest in self-sufficiency and exploit our own natural resources.
And it’s too late for the Government to do anything meaningful about it. Households will get £400 off their bills, but the Treasury may well have to dig deeper. We will all end up paying the price for net zero folly, whether it is as energy bill payers or taxpayers.
5) David Frost: Rationing is back – and Britain’s authoritarian greens are delighted
The Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2022
The Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2022
The right way forward is not telling people to do less with less. It is becoming a more productive society once again.
Reset the diary. A new crisis is incoming. We were all set for an energy crunch this autumn, with consumption going up, supplies falling, and chickens coming home to roost. But suddenly we have a water crisis first, a taster version of future problems, just to get us in the right mindset for a difficult winter.
Different utilities, different problems, but similar underlying factors. We already have water rationing, via the initial hosepipe bans, with every chance of it getting worse. Energy rationing in some form seems well-nigh certain and we will be extraordinarily lucky if we do not have an actual blackout here, or in the rest of Europe, over the next few months.
Why are we in this situation? I used to imagine that one of the benefits of living in an advanced country was that at least the basics worked. In the developing world you didn’t have reliable water or power. But in the West, when you turned on the taps, water always came out and the lights stayed on without you having to invest in a private generator.
That is changing. Worse, we aren’t trying to solve the problems, but are instead telling people to “cut back – maybe you don’t really need all that water (or electricity) anyway”. We are being asked to change our lifestyle to match the situation, not the other way round.
Yet mastering our environment to make us wealthier has been a fundamental Western attitude of mind for 200 years. If we don’t do it, we won’t be successful for much longer.
Take the water situation first. No one can blame Vladimir Putin for the hosepipe ban. The country is just as wet as it has ever been. Met Office data shows that there has been no significant change in rainfall levels since 1840 and indeed the past 30 years have been 10 per cent wetter than the previous 30.
It is true that there is now more rain in winter rather than summer and the south of England is drier. Whether or not this is the result of climate change caused by CO2 emissions, there is literally nothing we can do about it for the next few decades. Even the most radical conceivable climate policy in the UK, or even in Europe, is not going to alter it quickly.
So clearly we must adapt. That is going to cost. But the costs are perfectly manageable. The planned Anglian Water pipeline to move water from Lincolnshire to East Anglia, which is limping forward thanks to our painfully slow planning system, will cost about £500 million – small change for infrastructure projects. (It would buy us a couple of miles of HS2 or about 20 miles of dual carriageway.)
But larger-scale projects will be needed and not much is planned. Meanwhile, it is 30 years since we last built a reservoir and only 4 per cent of our water is transferred between water companies.
Another way of adapting is through desalination. We are, after all, surrounded by seawater. It is a very good way of avoiding further extraction of water from rivers. Yet the one plant we have, at Beckton in East London, has not been turned on and might never be. A further proposal, in Hampshire, is stuck thanks to green campaigners, who worry that it is too energy-intensive, and the opposition, typically, of the local Conservative MP.
So instead we take the easy way out – reduce demand. In the short run that means hosepipe bans, shorter showers, and so on. In the longer run, it is said, consumption per person must fall by a third or more.
I don’t agree with that. We have enough water. We need to invest in capturing it, storing it, and moving it around to where it is needed. That is what an advanced country does.
We see the same “learn to live with it” response in energy policy. Obviously, the short-run shock is heavily influenced by the Ukraine war. But the longer run policy is not. We have chosen to invest in forms of energy that are unreliable and simply cannot generate what we need, yet come at extraordinary cost. Indeed the UK’s grid capacity is actually falling despite all the new pressures on it.
This circle can only be squared by reducing demand – and, as you would expect, European final energy consumption has been falling for 20 years and UK electricity consumption is at 1970s levels. Some say these are good things. I say they are symptoms of an advanced society regressing in its ambitions.
Meanwhile, here in Britain, we have decided we don’t need gas storage capacity and we are funnelling LNG to the EU because we can’t store it ourselves. As the unbelievably complacent National Grid winter plan last week showed, we are now very reliant on the Europeans sending power back to us this autumn.
But EU members face the same problems that we do – in many cases worse.
We surely should have learnt from the EU’s vaccine export ban last year, and their attempt to commandeer jabs produced for the UK, that when the chips are down it is every country for itself. We simply can’t rely on power coming back through the interconnectors.
There is every possibility, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been pointing out, that people in this country will face power rationing – just as is already required in parts of Europe – so as to keep the lights on in Germany. That is going to be a hard sell. If we are to be asked by the EU to show such solidarity, a condition must surely be that they end their lawfare against us over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
My big worry is that it has got easier to tell people to “get used to it”. The Covid lockdowns showed that some people – the Establishment laptop class, not those who actually work at work – discovered that they could live a more restricted lifestyle. Some discovered they quite liked it. We must make sure that our leaders don’t think that’s possible again.
The right way forward is not telling people to do less with less. It is becoming a more productive society once again. Building infrastructure. Investing in nuclear and gas – the only power that can do the job. Mastering our environment.
The next Prime Minister can – and I’m sure will – get us back to it.
6) John Longworth: We cannot afford Net Zero right now - we have to put Britain first
Daily Express, 4 August 2022
Net Zero, or at least the Government’s response to it, stands in the way of post Brexit growth and prosperity and is the key contributor to the UK cost of living crisis.
There have been many impediments attached and barriers erected to a successful Brexit story.
Like all revolutions Brexit was not completed the moment it took place and no doubt the battle will go on and on. We have seen this before in our long island history and outcomes are never pre-ordained but require effort. The reason for this is of course that many people will oppose what is not in their personal interests, despite the fact it may be in the national interest. The most powerful of these people is the establishment elite. There are also blockers that are accidents of history.
Net Zero, or at least the Government’s response to it, stands in the way of post Brexit growth and prosperity and is the key contributor to the UK cost of living crisis.
The campaign for Net Zero, ostensibly to prevent a climate emergency, has become almost religious in its zeal, with any naysayers treated in the way that someone claiming the earth was round would have been treated in the 16th century.
The commitment to the climate emergency mantra has developed perfidiously over the decades and has a particularly strong hold now on society and political thinking, I suspect for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the idea of environmental responsibility being paramount and immediate has permeated our education system with an entire generation or two being taught at school that climate change is a fact and that we must act immediately to prevent it or we will all die.
Symbolic of this is the voice of youth embodied on earth by Greta Thunberg.
This process began even when I was at school and university, except then it was all about the ozone (what happened to that?), minerals running out by the year 2000, as predicted in ‘Blueprint for Survival’ (which never happened) and of course global warming - rebranded climate change when warming stopped.
Secondly the idea of climate activism is rather convenient for virtue signalling, left liberal greens, who have captured the media commentariat, in particular the BBC.
Because, after all, who could argue with the saintly David Attenborough?
The chattering classes can manage lightweight, quasi science at the dinner table, look responsible and do not have to get too involved as would be required if they had to address levelling up, the life chances of white, working class boys, poverty, or other difficult, and frankly unfashionable, social issues.
Thirdly, climate change also gave certain badly advised (albeit well-meaning) Royals -who would otherwise have been slightly redundant - a reason, a purpose.
The power of patronage should not be underestimated, I have seen it personally, even top business people will go to great lengths for garden party invites, DIT sponsored Palace receptions and, of course, gongs.
Whatever the cause of the hold of Net Zero on the psyche of the elites and whether or not climate change is occurring, or indeed driven by humans, it is no reason to cause the British economy to fail or to impoverish our people.
Government, particularly politically appointed officials in departments like BEIS and for that matter No 10, have pushed a ruinous agenda resulting in almost all of the cost of living crisis to date.
Green levies have racked up energy costs. A reliance on unreliable and expensive sources of energy has led to fuel poverty and taxpayers are also subsidising uneconomic energy sources, contributing to Britain’s highest tax regime since the Second World War.
All this in order to go the extra mile to set an example to the world.
Does the world care? It seems not. In any event the U.K. could be 100 percent emission free and barely move the dial on global carbon emissions.
Russia, China, India and others continue to pump out carbon dioxide to make cheap goods. Meanwhile while we have exported well paid manufacturing jobs from the regions making us reliant on autocratic and dangerous regimes. Hypocrisy writ large.
Germany continues to buy Russian gas and to burn the very dirtiest fuel, lignite.
At the same time we have under our feet an abundance of clean British Natural Shale Gas, cheap energy, enough for a hundred years and certainly enough to last until we develop home grown nuclear reactors. We must frack now.
Post Brexit Britain has everything it needs and the self-determination of independence, in order to build a prosperous, growing economy, transition to Net Zero at the least cost and have low cost energy security.
We can deal with the symptoms of climate change as they occur, or not.
But we desperately need the Government to get a grip and be prepared to see off the fanatics.
Reset the diary. A new crisis is incoming. We were all set for an energy crunch this autumn, with consumption going up, supplies falling, and chickens coming home to roost. But suddenly we have a water crisis first, a taster version of future problems, just to get us in the right mindset for a difficult winter.
Different utilities, different problems, but similar underlying factors. We already have water rationing, via the initial hosepipe bans, with every chance of it getting worse. Energy rationing in some form seems well-nigh certain and we will be extraordinarily lucky if we do not have an actual blackout here, or in the rest of Europe, over the next few months.
Why are we in this situation? I used to imagine that one of the benefits of living in an advanced country was that at least the basics worked. In the developing world you didn’t have reliable water or power. But in the West, when you turned on the taps, water always came out and the lights stayed on without you having to invest in a private generator.
That is changing. Worse, we aren’t trying to solve the problems, but are instead telling people to “cut back – maybe you don’t really need all that water (or electricity) anyway”. We are being asked to change our lifestyle to match the situation, not the other way round.
Yet mastering our environment to make us wealthier has been a fundamental Western attitude of mind for 200 years. If we don’t do it, we won’t be successful for much longer.
Take the water situation first. No one can blame Vladimir Putin for the hosepipe ban. The country is just as wet as it has ever been. Met Office data shows that there has been no significant change in rainfall levels since 1840 and indeed the past 30 years have been 10 per cent wetter than the previous 30.
It is true that there is now more rain in winter rather than summer and the south of England is drier. Whether or not this is the result of climate change caused by CO2 emissions, there is literally nothing we can do about it for the next few decades. Even the most radical conceivable climate policy in the UK, or even in Europe, is not going to alter it quickly.
So clearly we must adapt. That is going to cost. But the costs are perfectly manageable. The planned Anglian Water pipeline to move water from Lincolnshire to East Anglia, which is limping forward thanks to our painfully slow planning system, will cost about £500 million – small change for infrastructure projects. (It would buy us a couple of miles of HS2 or about 20 miles of dual carriageway.)
But larger-scale projects will be needed and not much is planned. Meanwhile, it is 30 years since we last built a reservoir and only 4 per cent of our water is transferred between water companies.
Another way of adapting is through desalination. We are, after all, surrounded by seawater. It is a very good way of avoiding further extraction of water from rivers. Yet the one plant we have, at Beckton in East London, has not been turned on and might never be. A further proposal, in Hampshire, is stuck thanks to green campaigners, who worry that it is too energy-intensive, and the opposition, typically, of the local Conservative MP.
So instead we take the easy way out – reduce demand. In the short run that means hosepipe bans, shorter showers, and so on. In the longer run, it is said, consumption per person must fall by a third or more.
I don’t agree with that. We have enough water. We need to invest in capturing it, storing it, and moving it around to where it is needed. That is what an advanced country does.
We see the same “learn to live with it” response in energy policy. Obviously, the short-run shock is heavily influenced by the Ukraine war. But the longer run policy is not. We have chosen to invest in forms of energy that are unreliable and simply cannot generate what we need, yet come at extraordinary cost. Indeed the UK’s grid capacity is actually falling despite all the new pressures on it.
This circle can only be squared by reducing demand – and, as you would expect, European final energy consumption has been falling for 20 years and UK electricity consumption is at 1970s levels. Some say these are good things. I say they are symptoms of an advanced society regressing in its ambitions.
Meanwhile, here in Britain, we have decided we don’t need gas storage capacity and we are funnelling LNG to the EU because we can’t store it ourselves. As the unbelievably complacent National Grid winter plan last week showed, we are now very reliant on the Europeans sending power back to us this autumn.
But EU members face the same problems that we do – in many cases worse.
We surely should have learnt from the EU’s vaccine export ban last year, and their attempt to commandeer jabs produced for the UK, that when the chips are down it is every country for itself. We simply can’t rely on power coming back through the interconnectors.
There is every possibility, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been pointing out, that people in this country will face power rationing – just as is already required in parts of Europe – so as to keep the lights on in Germany. That is going to be a hard sell. If we are to be asked by the EU to show such solidarity, a condition must surely be that they end their lawfare against us over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
My big worry is that it has got easier to tell people to “get used to it”. The Covid lockdowns showed that some people – the Establishment laptop class, not those who actually work at work – discovered that they could live a more restricted lifestyle. Some discovered they quite liked it. We must make sure that our leaders don’t think that’s possible again.
The right way forward is not telling people to do less with less. It is becoming a more productive society once again. Building infrastructure. Investing in nuclear and gas – the only power that can do the job. Mastering our environment.
The next Prime Minister can – and I’m sure will – get us back to it.
6) John Longworth: We cannot afford Net Zero right now - we have to put Britain first
Daily Express, 4 August 2022
Net Zero, or at least the Government’s response to it, stands in the way of post Brexit growth and prosperity and is the key contributor to the UK cost of living crisis.
There have been many impediments attached and barriers erected to a successful Brexit story.
Like all revolutions Brexit was not completed the moment it took place and no doubt the battle will go on and on. We have seen this before in our long island history and outcomes are never pre-ordained but require effort. The reason for this is of course that many people will oppose what is not in their personal interests, despite the fact it may be in the national interest. The most powerful of these people is the establishment elite. There are also blockers that are accidents of history.
Net Zero, or at least the Government’s response to it, stands in the way of post Brexit growth and prosperity and is the key contributor to the UK cost of living crisis.
The campaign for Net Zero, ostensibly to prevent a climate emergency, has become almost religious in its zeal, with any naysayers treated in the way that someone claiming the earth was round would have been treated in the 16th century.
The commitment to the climate emergency mantra has developed perfidiously over the decades and has a particularly strong hold now on society and political thinking, I suspect for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the idea of environmental responsibility being paramount and immediate has permeated our education system with an entire generation or two being taught at school that climate change is a fact and that we must act immediately to prevent it or we will all die.
Symbolic of this is the voice of youth embodied on earth by Greta Thunberg.
This process began even when I was at school and university, except then it was all about the ozone (what happened to that?), minerals running out by the year 2000, as predicted in ‘Blueprint for Survival’ (which never happened) and of course global warming - rebranded climate change when warming stopped.
Secondly the idea of climate activism is rather convenient for virtue signalling, left liberal greens, who have captured the media commentariat, in particular the BBC.
Because, after all, who could argue with the saintly David Attenborough?
The chattering classes can manage lightweight, quasi science at the dinner table, look responsible and do not have to get too involved as would be required if they had to address levelling up, the life chances of white, working class boys, poverty, or other difficult, and frankly unfashionable, social issues.
Thirdly, climate change also gave certain badly advised (albeit well-meaning) Royals -who would otherwise have been slightly redundant - a reason, a purpose.
The power of patronage should not be underestimated, I have seen it personally, even top business people will go to great lengths for garden party invites, DIT sponsored Palace receptions and, of course, gongs.
Whatever the cause of the hold of Net Zero on the psyche of the elites and whether or not climate change is occurring, or indeed driven by humans, it is no reason to cause the British economy to fail or to impoverish our people.
Government, particularly politically appointed officials in departments like BEIS and for that matter No 10, have pushed a ruinous agenda resulting in almost all of the cost of living crisis to date.
Green levies have racked up energy costs. A reliance on unreliable and expensive sources of energy has led to fuel poverty and taxpayers are also subsidising uneconomic energy sources, contributing to Britain’s highest tax regime since the Second World War.
All this in order to go the extra mile to set an example to the world.
Does the world care? It seems not. In any event the U.K. could be 100 percent emission free and barely move the dial on global carbon emissions.
Russia, China, India and others continue to pump out carbon dioxide to make cheap goods. Meanwhile while we have exported well paid manufacturing jobs from the regions making us reliant on autocratic and dangerous regimes. Hypocrisy writ large.
Germany continues to buy Russian gas and to burn the very dirtiest fuel, lignite.
At the same time we have under our feet an abundance of clean British Natural Shale Gas, cheap energy, enough for a hundred years and certainly enough to last until we develop home grown nuclear reactors. We must frack now.
Post Brexit Britain has everything it needs and the self-determination of independence, in order to build a prosperous, growing economy, transition to Net Zero at the least cost and have low cost energy security.
We can deal with the symptoms of climate change as they occur, or not.
But we desperately need the Government to get a grip and be prepared to see off the fanatics.
7) Daniel Yergin and Michael Stoppard: Winter in Europe may be Springtime for Putin
The Wall Street Journal, 4 August 2022
The Wall Street Journal, 4 August 2022
The second front has opened in the battle for Ukraine—an energy war in Europe.
There’s no mystery about Vladimir Putin’s strategy. He laid it out at an economic conference in St. Petersburg in June: high energy prices, which bring hardship as they radiate through the European economy, which will create social turmoil, which will mean that people vote their pained pocketbooks. This in turn will bring to power populist parties that will, to use his own language, change “the elites” in Europe.
The ultimate aim is to bring governments to power in Europe that aren’t committed to supporting Ukraine and thus fracture the Western coalition. The strategy is already at work. Last month a right-wing party pulled out of Italy’s governing coalition, citing “the terrible choice” that Italian families face “of paying their electricity bill or buying food.” This forced the resignation of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who in June had traveled to Kyiv to affirm Italy’s support for Ukraine.
This energy war is about current prices but also a countdown to winter. Will Europe have enough gas to fill its storage caverns and meet the elevated heating needs that come with cold weather?
In 2021 Russia provided 38% of the European Union’s total gas consumption. That trade was based on Russia’s (and before that the Soviet Union’s) billing itself as a reliable supplier of gas. Whatever happened politically wouldn’t affect the flow through the pipeline; it was “purely business.”
No longer. Even before the Ukraine war, the Kremlin was beginning to reduce supplies. Recently it has been cutting shipments through the Nord Stream pipeline, which runs directly from Russia under the Baltic Sea for 750 miles to Germany. Before it opened in 2011, it was hailed by the European Union as a “priority energy project.” But that was another time.
Today, Russia, invoking technical reasons, has cut the Nord Stream flow to as little as 20% of normal levels, sending prices up further. Altogether as of this writing Russia has reduced its pipeline shipments to Europe by more than 70%. The result is natural gas prices seven or eight times as high as normal for European customers, or the equivalent of $380-a-barrel oil.
To make up for the shortfalls, Europe’s high prices have been acting like a magnet, pulling in imports of liquefied natural gas that would normally go to other parts of the world. U.S. LNG exports typically flow mainly to Asia, but this year about two-thirds have gone to Europe.
Europe is scrambling to secure new supplies. Germany is fast-tracking LNG import facilities, which it never had before. The European Union has signed a memorandum with Israel and Egypt for gas supplies from the new Eastern Mediterranean gas province. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has flown to Senegal to promote LNG development there; the president of Italy has to Mozambique for the same purpose. A flurry of contracts have been signed to underwrite new U.S. LNG development. But none of these new projects will be ready for this winter—or for the next. Meantime, Germany is putting mothballed coal plants, slated for permanent shutdown, back in operation to spare gas that otherwise would go into electric generation. Mr. Scholz, in an about-face this week, said it could “make sense” to continue to operate Germany’s last three nuclear plants instead of shutting them down.
The situation is likely to worsen in the next few months. Russia will find more reason to cut back on deliveries. It could even cut the flow entirely from both Nord Stream and the Ukrainian pipeline system that also carries Russian gas into Europe, which surprisingly continues to operate despite the war. Even Russian LNG exports could be disrupted. An economic rebound in China, coming out of Covid lockdowns, or a cold winter in Asia, will set up a struggle with Europe for LNG supplies, which will further drive up prices.
The only major response left to Europe is demand reduction. The EU recently issued a call for a 15% cut in gas consumption, but not all members have embraced it, and there is the question of how it gets implemented. Does German industry, already struggling with high prices, cut back, which hits employment? Or will a reduction in demand be forced by high prices themselves and what appears to be a looming recession? Meanwhile economic distress will weigh on European politics.
Europe’s winter natural-gas storage is about 67% filled. It is the further fill that the Kremlin seeks to disrupt. This energy war will be affected by something distinct from politics. As was the case with Napoleon’s advance into Russia in 1812 and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II, the outcome will hinge on the severity of the weather. That is something neither Mr. Putin nor European leaders can control. But one thing on which they can all agree: Winter is coming.
Mr. Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, is author of ‘The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.’ Mr Stoppard is chief global gas strategist at S&P Global Commodity Insights.
8) Record coral cover for Great Barrier Reef
The Australian, 4 August 2022
“This brilliant result is proof that many science institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the Reef.” --Dr Peter Ridd.
There’s no mystery about Vladimir Putin’s strategy. He laid it out at an economic conference in St. Petersburg in June: high energy prices, which bring hardship as they radiate through the European economy, which will create social turmoil, which will mean that people vote their pained pocketbooks. This in turn will bring to power populist parties that will, to use his own language, change “the elites” in Europe.
The ultimate aim is to bring governments to power in Europe that aren’t committed to supporting Ukraine and thus fracture the Western coalition. The strategy is already at work. Last month a right-wing party pulled out of Italy’s governing coalition, citing “the terrible choice” that Italian families face “of paying their electricity bill or buying food.” This forced the resignation of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who in June had traveled to Kyiv to affirm Italy’s support for Ukraine.
This energy war is about current prices but also a countdown to winter. Will Europe have enough gas to fill its storage caverns and meet the elevated heating needs that come with cold weather?
In 2021 Russia provided 38% of the European Union’s total gas consumption. That trade was based on Russia’s (and before that the Soviet Union’s) billing itself as a reliable supplier of gas. Whatever happened politically wouldn’t affect the flow through the pipeline; it was “purely business.”
No longer. Even before the Ukraine war, the Kremlin was beginning to reduce supplies. Recently it has been cutting shipments through the Nord Stream pipeline, which runs directly from Russia under the Baltic Sea for 750 miles to Germany. Before it opened in 2011, it was hailed by the European Union as a “priority energy project.” But that was another time.
Today, Russia, invoking technical reasons, has cut the Nord Stream flow to as little as 20% of normal levels, sending prices up further. Altogether as of this writing Russia has reduced its pipeline shipments to Europe by more than 70%. The result is natural gas prices seven or eight times as high as normal for European customers, or the equivalent of $380-a-barrel oil.
To make up for the shortfalls, Europe’s high prices have been acting like a magnet, pulling in imports of liquefied natural gas that would normally go to other parts of the world. U.S. LNG exports typically flow mainly to Asia, but this year about two-thirds have gone to Europe.
Europe is scrambling to secure new supplies. Germany is fast-tracking LNG import facilities, which it never had before. The European Union has signed a memorandum with Israel and Egypt for gas supplies from the new Eastern Mediterranean gas province. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has flown to Senegal to promote LNG development there; the president of Italy has to Mozambique for the same purpose. A flurry of contracts have been signed to underwrite new U.S. LNG development. But none of these new projects will be ready for this winter—or for the next. Meantime, Germany is putting mothballed coal plants, slated for permanent shutdown, back in operation to spare gas that otherwise would go into electric generation. Mr. Scholz, in an about-face this week, said it could “make sense” to continue to operate Germany’s last three nuclear plants instead of shutting them down.
The situation is likely to worsen in the next few months. Russia will find more reason to cut back on deliveries. It could even cut the flow entirely from both Nord Stream and the Ukrainian pipeline system that also carries Russian gas into Europe, which surprisingly continues to operate despite the war. Even Russian LNG exports could be disrupted. An economic rebound in China, coming out of Covid lockdowns, or a cold winter in Asia, will set up a struggle with Europe for LNG supplies, which will further drive up prices.
The only major response left to Europe is demand reduction. The EU recently issued a call for a 15% cut in gas consumption, but not all members have embraced it, and there is the question of how it gets implemented. Does German industry, already struggling with high prices, cut back, which hits employment? Or will a reduction in demand be forced by high prices themselves and what appears to be a looming recession? Meanwhile economic distress will weigh on European politics.
Europe’s winter natural-gas storage is about 67% filled. It is the further fill that the Kremlin seeks to disrupt. This energy war will be affected by something distinct from politics. As was the case with Napoleon’s advance into Russia in 1812 and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II, the outcome will hinge on the severity of the weather. That is something neither Mr. Putin nor European leaders can control. But one thing on which they can all agree: Winter is coming.
Mr. Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, is author of ‘The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.’ Mr Stoppard is chief global gas strategist at S&P Global Commodity Insights.
8) Record coral cover for Great Barrier Reef
The Australian, 4 August 2022
“This brilliant result is proof that many science institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the Reef.” --Dr Peter Ridd.
Helena Horton, Daily Telegraph, 29 May 2017
The Great Barrier Reef has set a new record for hard coral cover over two-thirds of its 2300km length, results of the Australian Institute of Marine Science official long-term monitoring program show.
The annual survey found coral cover in the northern and central zones of the Reef, stretching from Cape York to Mackay, had increased despite another episode of bleaching this year.
Coral cover in the southern section of the Reef which stretches from Mackay to Bundaberg had reduced slightly due to a continued outbreak of crown of thorns starfish, but coral cover was comparable to the northern and central regions at 34 per cent.
Dr Peter Ridd, The good news about coral reefs (pdf)
The AIMS long-term monitoring program has been going for 36 years and is the most rigorous and detailed survey of Reef health.
AIMS program leader Mike Emslie said the results were “good news” and showed that the Reef had “dodged a bullet” in bleaching this year.
“But the fact we have had four bleaching events in seven years is a major concern and highlights the impact of climate change here and now,” he said.
“We are in uncharted territory and still trying to understand what this means.”
Queensland scientist Peter Ridd said the results “should be a cause of national celebration”.
Dr Ridd said coral cover on the Reef as a whole was at record high levels.
“This brilliant result is proof that many science institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the Reef,” he said.
The full impact of this year’s bleaching will not be known until further monitoring is done but expectations are that mortality rates across the Reef will be low.
“The recovery seen this year occurred despite widespread bleaching in 2020 and again in 2022, showing bleaching events do not always lead to widespread mortality,” the report says.
“The 2022 bleaching event was less intense than the 2016, 2017 and even the 2020 events, and mortality is expected to be lower.
“However, the nonlethal effects of frequent bleaching events will take time to be fully understood.”
The significance of the latest AIMS results is that it shows the Great Barrier Reef has maintained its resilience and ability to bounce back from disturbances including bleaching and cyclones.
There are still concerns about the impact of consecutive bleaching events and what this means for the make-up of the Reef and factors other than the amount of hard coral cover.
Eighty-seven reefs were surveyed between August 2021 and May 2022, mainly on the mid and outer shelf.
The recovery has been primarily driven by fast-growing branching and plate corals (Acropora species), which provide good habitat for fish and other reef animals but are vulnerable to disturbances such marine heatwaves, cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish predation.
AIMS chief executive Paul Hardisty said the results in the north and central regions were a sign the Reef could still recover, but the loss of coral cover in the southern region showed how dynamic the Reef was.
“Every summer the Reef is at risk of temperature stress, bleaching and potentially mortality, and our understanding of how the ecosystem responds to that is still developing,” he said.
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chief scientist David Wachenfeld said the results showed that the Reef was still a resilient ecosystem, retaining its capacity to recover from disturbances, at the current level of global warming which is about 1.1C warmer than the pre-industrial temperature.
“Given the significant climate change-driven impacts we have already seen, our biggest concern is for the future, as temperatures increase, because the resilience of the Reef will not withstand future projected warming on current trajectories of greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
The bleaching this year coincided with a visit by a World Heritage Committee monitoring mission to advice on whether or not the Great Barrier Reef should be inscribed on the World Heritage “in danger” list.
The 2022 World Heritage Committee meeting was scheduled to be held in Russia, and has been postponed.
Dr Emslie said he was sure the World Heritage Committee would take the results of the latest AIMS survey into consideration.
Dr Ridd said AIMS should be congratulated for their work over many decades.
“I estimate that in these surveys, AIMS has towed a diver behind a small boat a distance equivalent to around the world,” he said.
“This work has paid off as it demonstrates that the Reef cycles through periods of high and low coral cover.
“This is natural.
“It demonstrates that we should be far more optimistic about the fate of the Reef.”
9) Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon: The big green lie almost everyone claims to believe
The Epoch Times, 3 August 2022
Almost every member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, pays homage to the Big Green Lie.
So do all the past and remaining Conservative candidates vying to be prime minister of the UK and every candidate currently vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. So does virtually all of the mainstream press.
The Big Green Lie — that carbon dioxide is a pollutant — is so pervasive that even those considered skeptics —including right-wing NGOs and pundits — generally adhere to the orthodoxy, differing not in their stated belief that CO2 is a pollutant but only in how calamitous a pollutant it is.
Because everyone now participates in the CO2-emissions-are-bad lie, the debate over climate policy hasn’t been over whether a CO2 problem exists but over how urgently CO2 needs to be addressed, and how it should be addressed. Do we have eight years left before Armageddon becomes inevitable or decades? Do we get off fossil fuels by building nuclear plants or wind turbines? Should we change our lifestyles to need less of everything? Or should we mitigate this evil — the view of those deemed climate minimalists — by shielding our continents from a rising of the oceans by enclosing them behind sea walls?
With almost everyone across the political spectrum publicly agreeing that curbing CO2 is a good thing, the debate has been between those who want to do good quickly by reaching Net Zero in 2040 and sticks in the mud who want to slow down the doing of a good thing. With discourse careening down rabbit holes, almost everyone gets lost pursuing solutions to Alice-in-Wonderland delusions—and wasting trillions of dollars in the process.
Until the 2000s, when climate change was still called global warming and the mainstream media still noticed that none of the myriad predictions of a climate catastrophe were being borne out — the polar caps weren’t melting, Manhattan wasn’t about to be submerged, malaria wasn’t infecting the northern hemisphere — many exposed man-made climate change as a hoax. The leaked Climategate emails revealed how scientists had conspired to “hide the decline” in temperatures that didn’t conform to their models.
The claim that 97 percent of scientists supported the global warming theory was exposed as a fraud, as was the claim that the 4,000 scientists associated with the IPCC endorsed its report — those 4,000 hadn’t endorsed it, and most hadn’t even read it but had merely reviewed parts of the report and often disagreed with what they read.
The claim that the “science was settled” on climate change never withstood scrutiny. Scientists around the world signed a series of petitions to dispute that claim. The 2008 Oregon Petition, spearheaded by a former president of the National Academy of Science and championed by Freeman Dyson, Albert Einstein’s successor at Princeton and one of the world’s most preeminent scientists, was signed by more than 31,000 scientists and experts who agreed that “the proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. … Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”[ ](
What is settled is the abject failure of the three-decade-long attempt by the bureaucracies of the 195 countries of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to convince anyone other than themselves, a credulous media, and a relatively few gullible people that climate change represents an existential threat. Poll after poll over the decades show the public gives climate change short shrift when asked to rank its importance.
A Gallup Poll released this week, which asked Americans, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” found that climate change didn’t meet its criteria of the many issues worth listing. As Gallup noted, “Many parts of the nation have suffered record heat in recent weeks, and other regions have received record flooding. But a low 3% of Americans mention the weather, the environment or climate change as the nation’s top problem.” So, too, last month, where “just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named climate change as the most important issue facing the country …. Even among voters under 30, the group thought to be most energized by the issue, that figure was 3 percent.”
Although most elites continue to pay lip service to the urgency of curbing carbon dioxide, their actions belie their words, whether judged by their penchant for private jet travel or their disingenuous commitment to climate-related policies. According to an International Energy Agency (IEA) announcement last week, coal is once again king: Global coal demand this year will “match the annual record set in 2013, and coal demand is likely to increase further next year to a new all-time high.”
The IEA’s assessment comports with a worldwide embrace of coal that includes the European Union, until recently the world’s most zealous climate scold. The EU is now walking back its Net Zero commitments.
In some countries, governments are not so much walking back climate policies as unabashedly kicking them out. Calling wind turbines “fans” that harm the environment and cause “visual pollution” without providing much energy, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the government will end the subsidies and stop issuing permits for new wind projects. Israel is also set to pull the plug on the country’s wind industry, its environmental protection minister arguing that wind provides a “negligible contribution” to the country’s power system “compared to the potential for harm to nature, which is high.”
Recognizing renewables as economic and environmental boondoggles, as Mexico and Israel have done, is a step toward puncturing the lie that a fuel that emits carbon dioxide can be sensibly replaced. The other shoe to drop is the lie that carbon dioxide-emitting fuels should be replaced.
The fantastical claim that CO2 is a pollutant was cut out of whole cloth. The 2008 statement by the 31,000 experts—that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate” is as true today as it was then, and as it always has been. No scientist anywhere at any time has shown that manmade CO2 emissions—aka nature’s fertilizer—do any harm to anything.
The Epoch Times, 3 August 2022
Almost every member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, pays homage to the Big Green Lie.
So do all the past and remaining Conservative candidates vying to be prime minister of the UK and every candidate currently vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. So does virtually all of the mainstream press.
The Big Green Lie — that carbon dioxide is a pollutant — is so pervasive that even those considered skeptics —including right-wing NGOs and pundits — generally adhere to the orthodoxy, differing not in their stated belief that CO2 is a pollutant but only in how calamitous a pollutant it is.
Because everyone now participates in the CO2-emissions-are-bad lie, the debate over climate policy hasn’t been over whether a CO2 problem exists but over how urgently CO2 needs to be addressed, and how it should be addressed. Do we have eight years left before Armageddon becomes inevitable or decades? Do we get off fossil fuels by building nuclear plants or wind turbines? Should we change our lifestyles to need less of everything? Or should we mitigate this evil — the view of those deemed climate minimalists — by shielding our continents from a rising of the oceans by enclosing them behind sea walls?
With almost everyone across the political spectrum publicly agreeing that curbing CO2 is a good thing, the debate has been between those who want to do good quickly by reaching Net Zero in 2040 and sticks in the mud who want to slow down the doing of a good thing. With discourse careening down rabbit holes, almost everyone gets lost pursuing solutions to Alice-in-Wonderland delusions—and wasting trillions of dollars in the process.
Until the 2000s, when climate change was still called global warming and the mainstream media still noticed that none of the myriad predictions of a climate catastrophe were being borne out — the polar caps weren’t melting, Manhattan wasn’t about to be submerged, malaria wasn’t infecting the northern hemisphere — many exposed man-made climate change as a hoax. The leaked Climategate emails revealed how scientists had conspired to “hide the decline” in temperatures that didn’t conform to their models.
The claim that 97 percent of scientists supported the global warming theory was exposed as a fraud, as was the claim that the 4,000 scientists associated with the IPCC endorsed its report — those 4,000 hadn’t endorsed it, and most hadn’t even read it but had merely reviewed parts of the report and often disagreed with what they read.
The claim that the “science was settled” on climate change never withstood scrutiny. Scientists around the world signed a series of petitions to dispute that claim. The 2008 Oregon Petition, spearheaded by a former president of the National Academy of Science and championed by Freeman Dyson, Albert Einstein’s successor at Princeton and one of the world’s most preeminent scientists, was signed by more than 31,000 scientists and experts who agreed that “the proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. … Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”[ ](
What is settled is the abject failure of the three-decade-long attempt by the bureaucracies of the 195 countries of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to convince anyone other than themselves, a credulous media, and a relatively few gullible people that climate change represents an existential threat. Poll after poll over the decades show the public gives climate change short shrift when asked to rank its importance.
A Gallup Poll released this week, which asked Americans, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” found that climate change didn’t meet its criteria of the many issues worth listing. As Gallup noted, “Many parts of the nation have suffered record heat in recent weeks, and other regions have received record flooding. But a low 3% of Americans mention the weather, the environment or climate change as the nation’s top problem.” So, too, last month, where “just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named climate change as the most important issue facing the country …. Even among voters under 30, the group thought to be most energized by the issue, that figure was 3 percent.”
Although most elites continue to pay lip service to the urgency of curbing carbon dioxide, their actions belie their words, whether judged by their penchant for private jet travel or their disingenuous commitment to climate-related policies. According to an International Energy Agency (IEA) announcement last week, coal is once again king: Global coal demand this year will “match the annual record set in 2013, and coal demand is likely to increase further next year to a new all-time high.”
The IEA’s assessment comports with a worldwide embrace of coal that includes the European Union, until recently the world’s most zealous climate scold. The EU is now walking back its Net Zero commitments.
In some countries, governments are not so much walking back climate policies as unabashedly kicking them out. Calling wind turbines “fans” that harm the environment and cause “visual pollution” without providing much energy, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the government will end the subsidies and stop issuing permits for new wind projects. Israel is also set to pull the plug on the country’s wind industry, its environmental protection minister arguing that wind provides a “negligible contribution” to the country’s power system “compared to the potential for harm to nature, which is high.”
Recognizing renewables as economic and environmental boondoggles, as Mexico and Israel have done, is a step toward puncturing the lie that a fuel that emits carbon dioxide can be sensibly replaced. The other shoe to drop is the lie that carbon dioxide-emitting fuels should be replaced.
The fantastical claim that CO2 is a pollutant was cut out of whole cloth. The 2008 statement by the 31,000 experts—that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate” is as true today as it was then, and as it always has been. No scientist anywhere at any time has shown that manmade CO2 emissions—aka nature’s fertilizer—do any harm to anything.
10) Matt Vespa: Spain's new air conditioning law is insane
Townhall, 3 August 2022
Townhall, 3 August 2022
Is this becoming a thing for left-wingers? Is air conditioning the next front in the climate change debate?
It might be, though luckily, no politician here is insane enough to go to war with this fantastic appliance that keeps millions upon millions of tremendous people comfortable during the summer months. This appliance is killing mother Earth. Spain has decided to move on a law that would ban most places from setting their air conditioning temperature below 27 degrees Celsius. That’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit (via EuroNews):
"A debate has been sparked after Spain's government moved to prevent offices, shops and other venues from setting air conditioning below 27°C in the summer. It is part of plans to cut the country's energy consumption and limit dependency on Russian gas. [...]
“Right now, perhaps suggested by the heat wave we are experiencing, I would say that with 27 degrees we will be very hot," Andrea Castillo, a worker at Castellón university, told Euronews. "Perhaps we could work at 25 degrees, but not at 27.”
Laura Berge, a civil servant in Valencia, questioned the practicality of the measure.
“Generally speaking, you can work at 27 degrees, but to reach that temperature in hot areas, you need to put the air conditioner at 22 or 23 degrees for a couple of hours, so I am worried that it will not be allowed to exceed 27 degrees. at any time,” she told Euronews.
"In that case, the air would have to be turned on well in advance and it would be counterproductive in terms of energy savings."
Berge's colleague, MarÃa Isabel Ruiz, agrees.
"I am in favour of saving energy and that this requires sacrifices, but these proposed temperatures are not adequate," she said.
80 friggin’ degrees! What’s the point of even setting the air conditioning at that point? It does not apply to homes, but you know the next level. Given how everyone went crazy during COVID, you know the Left would back an AC police to go around making sure people’s thermostats get set to the proper government-mandated setting.
It might be, though luckily, no politician here is insane enough to go to war with this fantastic appliance that keeps millions upon millions of tremendous people comfortable during the summer months. This appliance is killing mother Earth. Spain has decided to move on a law that would ban most places from setting their air conditioning temperature below 27 degrees Celsius. That’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit (via EuroNews):
"A debate has been sparked after Spain's government moved to prevent offices, shops and other venues from setting air conditioning below 27°C in the summer. It is part of plans to cut the country's energy consumption and limit dependency on Russian gas. [...]
“Right now, perhaps suggested by the heat wave we are experiencing, I would say that with 27 degrees we will be very hot," Andrea Castillo, a worker at Castellón university, told Euronews. "Perhaps we could work at 25 degrees, but not at 27.”
Laura Berge, a civil servant in Valencia, questioned the practicality of the measure.
“Generally speaking, you can work at 27 degrees, but to reach that temperature in hot areas, you need to put the air conditioner at 22 or 23 degrees for a couple of hours, so I am worried that it will not be allowed to exceed 27 degrees. at any time,” she told Euronews.
"In that case, the air would have to be turned on well in advance and it would be counterproductive in terms of energy savings."
Berge's colleague, MarÃa Isabel Ruiz, agrees.
"I am in favour of saving energy and that this requires sacrifices, but these proposed temperatures are not adequate," she said.
80 friggin’ degrees! What’s the point of even setting the air conditioning at that point? It does not apply to homes, but you know the next level. Given how everyone went crazy during COVID, you know the Left would back an AC police to go around making sure people’s thermostats get set to the proper government-mandated setting.
The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.
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