In this newsletter:
1) US states tout Biden's green subsidies to lure clean tech from Europe
Financial Times, 24 January 2023
2) Greedy wind lobby is asking Biden for more subsidies
Washington Examiner, 23 January 2023
3) Net Zero Britain risks leaving households in near darkness
The Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2023
4) Ford plans 3,200 job cuts in Europe as it moves some work to the US
Reuters, 23 January 2023
5) Investors plow into renewables, but projects aren’t getting built
The Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2023
4) Ford plans 3,200 job cuts in Europe as it moves some work to the US
Reuters, 23 January 2023
5) Investors plow into renewables, but projects aren’t getting built
The Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2023
6) Ross Clark: The National Grid is falling apart thanks to Net Zero
The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2023
The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2023
7) Andrew Montford: Big wind turbines wearing out faster
Net Zero Watch, 24 January 2023
8) Andrew Orlowski: How Net Zero will drive British entrepreneurs abroad – who can blame them?
The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2023
9) Rupert Darwall: When the New Right meets the Old Left on ESG
Real Clear Energy, 23 January 2023
Net Zero Watch, 24 January 2023
8) Andrew Orlowski: How Net Zero will drive British entrepreneurs abroad – who can blame them?
The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2023
9) Rupert Darwall: When the New Right meets the Old Left on ESG
Real Clear Energy, 23 January 2023
10) And Finally: For ‘select’ at Davos, money, money, money is key to staying cool
Editorial, The Washington Times, 23 January 2023
Editorial, The Washington Times, 23 January 2023
Full details:
1) US states tout Biden's green subsidies to lure clean tech from Europe
Financial Times, 24 January 2023
Financial Times, 24 January 2023
Economic officials from several US states have stepped up efforts to lure European clean energy businesses across the Atlantic, touting deep tax breaks available to foreign developers despite a bitter backlash from EU leaders.
Delegations from Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and other states have toured Europe armed with details of juicy subsidies offered by the Inflation Reduction Act, the administration of Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation passed in August.
“I don’t think we’ve actively recruited companies as intensely as we are now,” said Justin Kocher, director of international business for JobsOhio. Ohio officials met with clean tech companies in Germany, Italy and Belgium in the past four months.
The IRA will provide about $370bn worth of subsidies for clean energy, marking America’s most ambitious effort to tackle climate change, but has triggered furious criticism in Brussels and allegations that the US is discriminating against EU companies.
Valdis Dombrovskis, Europe’s trade commissioner, said last week that the fight against climate change should be done by “building transatlantic value chains, not breaking them apart”.
But the campaign by US states and localities has intensified, including visits to the World Economic Forum in Davos last week by the governors of Michigan, Georgia and Illinois, as well as West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who was one of the IRA’s architects. Georgia governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, was seen pitching his state as a clean-tech investment destination at a lunch hosted by the forum.
“I have been astonished by the many activities from state governments, from business development agencies, state-owned business development agencies, which have been trying hard to lure us in,” said Gunter Erfurt, chief executive of Meyer Burger, a Switzerland-based solar modules manufacturer.
“If the EU does not come up with something similar [to the IRA] then we may continue growing outside, in the US in particular, as opposed to continuing to invest in Europe,” Erfurt added. The company has one US site in Arizona.
But European politicians have been less impressed. Germany and France have expressed unease with the IRA. Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo complained about the “very aggressive way” the US had pitched it to EU businesses.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told delegates in Davos that the “need to be competitive with offers and incentives that are currently available outside the European Union” could lead the EU to loosen its own restrictions on subsidies.
Since the IRA’s passage at least 20 new or expanded clean energy manufacturing plants have been announced in the US, according to the American Clean Power Association. More than half are from foreign companies.
In October, BMW said it would spend $1.7bn on new EV and battery manufacturing capacity in South Carolina. South Korea’s Hanwha Q-Cells this month announced a $2.5bn solar factory expansion in Georgia.
The US sales pitch shows little sign of ending.
Full story
2) Greedy wind lobby is asking Biden for more subsidies
Washington Examiner, 23 January 2023
Delegations from Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and other states have toured Europe armed with details of juicy subsidies offered by the Inflation Reduction Act, the administration of Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation passed in August.
“I don’t think we’ve actively recruited companies as intensely as we are now,” said Justin Kocher, director of international business for JobsOhio. Ohio officials met with clean tech companies in Germany, Italy and Belgium in the past four months.
The IRA will provide about $370bn worth of subsidies for clean energy, marking America’s most ambitious effort to tackle climate change, but has triggered furious criticism in Brussels and allegations that the US is discriminating against EU companies.
Valdis Dombrovskis, Europe’s trade commissioner, said last week that the fight against climate change should be done by “building transatlantic value chains, not breaking them apart”.
But the campaign by US states and localities has intensified, including visits to the World Economic Forum in Davos last week by the governors of Michigan, Georgia and Illinois, as well as West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who was one of the IRA’s architects. Georgia governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, was seen pitching his state as a clean-tech investment destination at a lunch hosted by the forum.
“I have been astonished by the many activities from state governments, from business development agencies, state-owned business development agencies, which have been trying hard to lure us in,” said Gunter Erfurt, chief executive of Meyer Burger, a Switzerland-based solar modules manufacturer.
“If the EU does not come up with something similar [to the IRA] then we may continue growing outside, in the US in particular, as opposed to continuing to invest in Europe,” Erfurt added. The company has one US site in Arizona.
But European politicians have been less impressed. Germany and France have expressed unease with the IRA. Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo complained about the “very aggressive way” the US had pitched it to EU businesses.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told delegates in Davos that the “need to be competitive with offers and incentives that are currently available outside the European Union” could lead the EU to loosen its own restrictions on subsidies.
Since the IRA’s passage at least 20 new or expanded clean energy manufacturing plants have been announced in the US, according to the American Clean Power Association. More than half are from foreign companies.
In October, BMW said it would spend $1.7bn on new EV and battery manufacturing capacity in South Carolina. South Korea’s Hanwha Q-Cells this month announced a $2.5bn solar factory expansion in Georgia.
The US sales pitch shows little sign of ending.
Full story
2) Greedy wind lobby is asking Biden for more subsidies
Washington Examiner, 23 January 2023
Siemens is imploring policymakers for additional help.
Inflation is stifling the wind energy sector even though many projects just became a lot more viable with the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage.
Higher costs are causing project delays and cutting badly into profitability, and with this, the sector is putting extra pressure on the Treasury Department to finalize tax guidance for the enhanced incentives and imploring policymakers for more help to meet growing demand.
What changed with the IRA: The law completely changed the landscape for wind, according to Shannon Sturgil, CEO Onshore North America for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, who said he’s “never had a level of certainty that I do now” about the prospects for renewable energy thanks to the law.
Congress has extended subsidies for renewable energy in years past, some of which have been tech-specific. However, the big name production and investment tax credits had relatively short lives, requiring Congress to revisit and reauthorize them every few years, which it did with the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 during Trump’s final days.
“There's never really been any long term certainty to it,” Sturgil, who’s spent 23 years with Siemens Gamesa, told Jeremy. “There wasn't really any local content. There wasn't really any manufacturing incentives for the U.S. It was really more just focused on the actual subsidy related to the [power purchase agreement] price of production.”
The IRA extended the credits again and beefed them up, while also subsidizing not just investment in and production of renewable electricity but the manufacture of equipment used to generate it. Projects can also get bonus credits for meeting domestic content thresholds and locating in fossil-fuel-dependent “energy communities.”
Sturgil said the manufacturing credit is particularly beneficial for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, which operates two facilities — one manufacturing turbine blades in Iowa and another making nacelles, which house a turbine’s electricity generating equipment, in Kansas. It’s also building an offshore blade facility in Virginia, the output of which will supply Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.
What the Inflation Reduction Act hasn’t fixed just yet: Inflation. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, like many of its competitors, has been struggling immensely with cost overruns due to the higher price of materials like steel, resin, and copper.
In fiscal year 2022, new orders slowed year over year. Revenue fell by 4% compared to the year before, and the company’s net income went in the red to the tune of more than $1 billion. The company had to place its two U.S. manufacturing facilities in “hibernation” last year before restarting production at the end of the year.
Sturgil and co. are imploring policymakers for additional help.
Full story
Inflation is stifling the wind energy sector even though many projects just became a lot more viable with the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage.
Higher costs are causing project delays and cutting badly into profitability, and with this, the sector is putting extra pressure on the Treasury Department to finalize tax guidance for the enhanced incentives and imploring policymakers for more help to meet growing demand.
What changed with the IRA: The law completely changed the landscape for wind, according to Shannon Sturgil, CEO Onshore North America for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, who said he’s “never had a level of certainty that I do now” about the prospects for renewable energy thanks to the law.
Congress has extended subsidies for renewable energy in years past, some of which have been tech-specific. However, the big name production and investment tax credits had relatively short lives, requiring Congress to revisit and reauthorize them every few years, which it did with the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 during Trump’s final days.
“There's never really been any long term certainty to it,” Sturgil, who’s spent 23 years with Siemens Gamesa, told Jeremy. “There wasn't really any local content. There wasn't really any manufacturing incentives for the U.S. It was really more just focused on the actual subsidy related to the [power purchase agreement] price of production.”
The IRA extended the credits again and beefed them up, while also subsidizing not just investment in and production of renewable electricity but the manufacture of equipment used to generate it. Projects can also get bonus credits for meeting domestic content thresholds and locating in fossil-fuel-dependent “energy communities.”
Sturgil said the manufacturing credit is particularly beneficial for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, which operates two facilities — one manufacturing turbine blades in Iowa and another making nacelles, which house a turbine’s electricity generating equipment, in Kansas. It’s also building an offshore blade facility in Virginia, the output of which will supply Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.
What the Inflation Reduction Act hasn’t fixed just yet: Inflation. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, like many of its competitors, has been struggling immensely with cost overruns due to the higher price of materials like steel, resin, and copper.
In fiscal year 2022, new orders slowed year over year. Revenue fell by 4% compared to the year before, and the company’s net income went in the red to the tune of more than $1 billion. The company had to place its two U.S. manufacturing facilities in “hibernation” last year before restarting production at the end of the year.
Sturgil and co. are imploring policymakers for additional help.
Full story
3) Net Zero Britain risks leaving households in near darkness
The Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2023
The Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2023
Thousands of households across Britain were ready as dusk fell on Monday evening: washing machines turned off, electric cars unplugged and, crucially, cups of tea delayed.
This thrift was not an effort to save money in the midst of an energy crisis – for the first time, families were being paid to use less electricity to help operators manage tight supplies.
National Grid decided to enlist households’ help on Sunday as the prospect of still, cold weather – dreadful for wind turbines – loomed on Monday evening.
It will need to do so again on Tuesday, with households due to be paid to avoid normal electricity usage between 4.30pm and 6pm.
These efforts mark the first real-world deployment of National Grid’s new “demand flexibility service”.
Under the scheme, households who voluntarily sign up are paid to shift their electricity usage outside of peak times when requested. Efforts to manage demand are intended to help cut the risk of blackouts.
“Stay warm, safe and comfortable during your Saving Session,” Octopus Energy, one of the UK’s largest suppliers, told its customers ahead of last night’s national turn down.
“Don't turn anything essential off. It can be good fun to light a few candles but don't feel you have to sit in total darkness to save.”
The “demand flexibility service” was introduced last year amid concern about power supplies this winter as Russia’s war on Ukraine caused turmoil in gas markets. Outages on France’s nuclear fleet, which typically exports power to Britain at times of heightened demand, increased pressure on Britain’s power system further still.
The first deployment of this response by the Grid outside of testing comes during a particularly vicious cold snap, which is forecast to lead to a spike in demand for electricity.
Yet while the scheme has been brought in at a time of emergency, demand flexibility services are set to endure.
Regulators and operators want consumers to become much more flexible about when they use electricity, as part of the shift to “net zero” carbon emissions. Ditching fossil fuels will mean supply of electricity becomes more intermittent, just as demand leaps.
Full story
4) Ford plans 3,200 job cuts in Europe as it moves some work to the US
Reuters, 23 January 2023
Ford plans to cut 3,200 jobs across Europe and move some product development work to the United States, Germany’s IG Metall union said on Monday, vowing action that would disrupt the carmaker across the continent if the cuts go ahead.
Ford (F) wants to axe 2,500 jobs in product development and a further 700 in administrative roles, with German locations most affected, IG Metall said.
Workers at the US carmaker’s Cologne site, which employs around 14,000 people — including 3,800 working at a development center in the neighborhood of Merkenich — were informed at works council meetings on Monday of the plans.
Ford declined to comment, referring to a statement on Friday in which it said that shifting to electric vehicle production required structural changes but that it would not say more until plans were finalized.
Full story
5) Investors plow into renewables, but projects aren’t getting built
The Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2023
This thrift was not an effort to save money in the midst of an energy crisis – for the first time, families were being paid to use less electricity to help operators manage tight supplies.
National Grid decided to enlist households’ help on Sunday as the prospect of still, cold weather – dreadful for wind turbines – loomed on Monday evening.
It will need to do so again on Tuesday, with households due to be paid to avoid normal electricity usage between 4.30pm and 6pm.
These efforts mark the first real-world deployment of National Grid’s new “demand flexibility service”.
Under the scheme, households who voluntarily sign up are paid to shift their electricity usage outside of peak times when requested. Efforts to manage demand are intended to help cut the risk of blackouts.
“Stay warm, safe and comfortable during your Saving Session,” Octopus Energy, one of the UK’s largest suppliers, told its customers ahead of last night’s national turn down.
“Don't turn anything essential off. It can be good fun to light a few candles but don't feel you have to sit in total darkness to save.”
The “demand flexibility service” was introduced last year amid concern about power supplies this winter as Russia’s war on Ukraine caused turmoil in gas markets. Outages on France’s nuclear fleet, which typically exports power to Britain at times of heightened demand, increased pressure on Britain’s power system further still.
The first deployment of this response by the Grid outside of testing comes during a particularly vicious cold snap, which is forecast to lead to a spike in demand for electricity.
Yet while the scheme has been brought in at a time of emergency, demand flexibility services are set to endure.
Regulators and operators want consumers to become much more flexible about when they use electricity, as part of the shift to “net zero” carbon emissions. Ditching fossil fuels will mean supply of electricity becomes more intermittent, just as demand leaps.
Full story
4) Ford plans 3,200 job cuts in Europe as it moves some work to the US
Reuters, 23 January 2023
Ford plans to cut 3,200 jobs across Europe and move some product development work to the United States, Germany’s IG Metall union said on Monday, vowing action that would disrupt the carmaker across the continent if the cuts go ahead.
Ford (F) wants to axe 2,500 jobs in product development and a further 700 in administrative roles, with German locations most affected, IG Metall said.
Workers at the US carmaker’s Cologne site, which employs around 14,000 people — including 3,800 working at a development center in the neighborhood of Merkenich — were informed at works council meetings on Monday of the plans.
Ford declined to comment, referring to a statement on Friday in which it said that shifting to electric vehicle production required structural changes but that it would not say more until plans were finalized.
Full story
5) Investors plow into renewables, but projects aren’t getting built
The Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2023
Even as developers plan an unprecedented number of grid-scale wind and solar installations, project construction is plummeting across the U.S.
Despite billions of dollars in federal tax credits up for grabs and investors eager to fund clean energy projects, the pace of development has ground to a crawl and many renewables plans face an uncertain path to completion.
Supply-chain snags, long waits to connect to the grid and challenging regulatory and political environments across the country are contributing to the slowdown, analysts and companies say.
New wind installations plunged 77.5% in the third quarter of 2022 versus the same period the year before, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. New utility-scale solar installations likely fell 40% in 2022 compared with 2021, according to a report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and research firm Wood Mackenzie.
The decline belies enormous demand for renewable projects. The industry is ready to launch a would-be building spree after last year’s spending and climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, extended and increased tax credits for wind and solar projects and introduced new incentives for green hydrogen and battery storage for the electric grid. The success of the IRA, the Biden administration’s climate targets and many state decarbonization plans hinge on adding massive amounts of renewable energy into the grid.
More than $40 billion in wind, solar and battery projects were announced in three months late last year—as much as the total clean-energy investment for all of 2021, according to the industry group American Clean Power Association. Large corporations with climate targets are among the most eager buyers of green power, contracting for enough wind and solar capacity last year to power more than 1,000 data centers.
“Ten years from now there’s going to be a huge shift in the landscape where there is going to be a significant amount of electricity coming from renewables,” said Matt Birchby, president of renewable-project developer and owner Swift Current Energy LLC. “But getting from A to B is inherently going to be messy.”
Supply-chain and trade issues have complicated planning. Average lead times for securing high voltage equipment have risen from 30 weeks to more than 70, Mr. Birchby said.
Full story
Despite billions of dollars in federal tax credits up for grabs and investors eager to fund clean energy projects, the pace of development has ground to a crawl and many renewables plans face an uncertain path to completion.
Supply-chain snags, long waits to connect to the grid and challenging regulatory and political environments across the country are contributing to the slowdown, analysts and companies say.
New wind installations plunged 77.5% in the third quarter of 2022 versus the same period the year before, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. New utility-scale solar installations likely fell 40% in 2022 compared with 2021, according to a report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and research firm Wood Mackenzie.
The decline belies enormous demand for renewable projects. The industry is ready to launch a would-be building spree after last year’s spending and climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, extended and increased tax credits for wind and solar projects and introduced new incentives for green hydrogen and battery storage for the electric grid. The success of the IRA, the Biden administration’s climate targets and many state decarbonization plans hinge on adding massive amounts of renewable energy into the grid.
More than $40 billion in wind, solar and battery projects were announced in three months late last year—as much as the total clean-energy investment for all of 2021, according to the industry group American Clean Power Association. Large corporations with climate targets are among the most eager buyers of green power, contracting for enough wind and solar capacity last year to power more than 1,000 data centers.
“Ten years from now there’s going to be a huge shift in the landscape where there is going to be a significant amount of electricity coming from renewables,” said Matt Birchby, president of renewable-project developer and owner Swift Current Energy LLC. “But getting from A to B is inherently going to be messy.”
Supply-chain and trade issues have complicated planning. Average lead times for securing high voltage equipment have risen from 30 weeks to more than 70, Mr. Birchby said.
Full story
6) Ross Clark: The National Grid is falling apart thanks to Net Zero
The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2023
The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2023
We're left with demand management to keep the lights on – rewarding the rich at the expense of the poor, and all using taxpayer funds
So near, and yet so far. A couple of weeks ago, when the air was mild and the wind was blowing strongly, it became fashionable to thumb your nose at Vladimir Putin. We made it through the winter of 2022/23 without the blackouts he tried to inflict on us. Russia can keep its filthy gas and oil – we can do without it thanks to our cheap and plentiful renewables.
Not so fast. Temperatures have plummeted again, Britain is becalmed by an anticyclone, and the National Grid is warning that supply is going to be tight this evening. Coal plants are being dusted down several months after they were supposed to have closed, and the National Grid is activating what it calls its Demand Flexibility Service. This means customers signed up to the scheme can earn up to £6 per kilowatt-hour saved if they agree to turn off their appliances between 5 and 6pm.
It is not hard to spot a slight issue with this offer: the more electricity you use on a normal Monday, the easier it will be for you to cash in today. As with so many green subsidies, it perversely rewards the well-off at the expense of the poor. If you own an 18 bedroom mansion you can easily claim your fee by switching off the lights in the east wing and delaying recharging your Tesla until 7pm. If you normally use only one electric light, there will be no savings for you. And needless to say, the free electricity for some households will ultimately be subsidised through higher bills for everyone else.
But there is a far bigger problem with trying to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar power through demand management. The gaps in supply are far too big to be filled in this way. Britain already has enough installed wind and solar capacity – 38 gigawatts of it – to theoretically meet 100 per cent of average electricity demand. On a good day, such as we had a fortnight ago, solar and wind generate more than 50 per cent of our energy needs. But this morning at 10 am it was down to 19 per cent, and at times in December it fell to less than two per cent. If you are going to try to build a grid based on wind and solar, and try to manage demand by paying people to switch their appliances off, you are going to have to chuck such enormous quantities of money at people that they are prepared to spend days on end shivering in the dark.
The trouble is that that is more or less what the Government is trying to do. For years it has incentivised the green energy industry to build more and more wind and solar farms. Energy storage, on the other hand, has followed way, way behind. A few token – and very expensive – battery installations have been built, but, together with pumped storage systems built between the 1960s and 1980s, they can only store enough energy to keep Britain powered-up for less than an hour. Meanwhile, the steady baseload provided by nuclear is shrinking as old reactors shut down and new ones fail to open; Hinckley C is still years away.
At the moment we fill the gaps with gas-generated power, but once that has been removed from the grid, as the Government intends to do by 2035, all we will have to save us from unplanned blackouts is demand management – which is really just blackouts through bribery.
Ross Clark's next book "Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)" is published on February 2nd
I get a similar pattern for onshore wind turbines.
This is important in light of recent news that the Scottish Government intends to allow much larger wind turbines to be deployed onshore. There may in fact be very little benefit.
8) Andrew Orlowski: How Net Zero will drive British entrepreneurs abroad – who can blame them?
The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2023
Our entrepreneurs and engineers may well follow the path of our best cricketers – and consider booking a flight to India. And who would blame them?
No one greets failure with quite as much relief as we do in Britain, so let’s chill the champagne, for we have another reason to celebrate. Last week the start-up Britishvolt went into administration, with the loss of 200 jobs. The company had vowed to become the £3.8bn cornerstone of the British electric vehicle sector, by building a battery “gigafactory” in Red Wall Blyth.
The news is desperately disappointing for the employees who have lost their jobs in a region that Westminster has ignored for decades, but at the risk of sounding callous, the rest of us may breathe a sigh of relief. For this failure is actually a surprising success.
Britishvolt executives had reportedly made use of private jets, while scrambling to buy in the manufacturing technology they needed from Germany. The company had no market-ready technology, no customers and no assets beyond a large field in Northumbria. Nevertheless, it besieged the Government for £100m in funding to tide it over to 2024, when it said the first battery packs would roll off its still-unbuilt production lines.
However, with private investors notably wary, officials were unconvinced. Britishvolt failed to meet the thresholds they demanded. So for once, the system has actually worked as it should. While ministers are being chided by their Labour shadows for not doing more, we know we won’t have another DeLorean to rue. But can we be confident this rigour will be the default in the future? I’m not so sure.
Noises from Ed Miliband’s office do not suggest that future Britishvolts would have any difficulty getting our cash. Under Labour’s Green New Deal, they will merely need to knock more loudly.
That would bring us full circle, of course. Over four decades, UK industrial policy has swung from the state orchestration of key sectors, to laissez faire, and back again. The hands-off approach of the Eighties obliged private capital to step up and assume the job of picking winners, rather than the taxpayer.
Gradually, a US-style model of investment took root here, so more innovations from our great universities could be commercialised. Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage was heeded: we would no longer indulge domestic producer interests. But it took only one economic crash for old memories to stir.
By 2008, and in the turbulence of the financial crash, Gordon Brown’s industry minister was boasting that he had “reclaimed industrial strategy from the smokestacks of the 1960s and 1970s”, as the self-styled “industrial activist” Peter Mandelson told us.
Vince Cable and the Coalition Government then embraced the policy with enthusiasm. Initiatives were launched, and policy began to resemble a Bonfire Night fireworks display that had been accidentally ignited before the spectators arrive. The Government even appointed an ambassador to a road feature in Old Street, in the hope that some Silicon Valley magic would fall on East London.
By 2017, we had a vast new word salad to digest, in the form of yet another new industrial strategy. This was replete with “sector deals” – including the construction industry, and food and drink – “Grand Challenges”, and a promise to raise R&D investment to 2.4 per cent of GDP. No one was left out, the sign of a country that couldn’t decide who it wants to be: the USA, a Singapore, or a protectionist France.
Today, there’s broad consensus around the idea that Government can make a big difference by funding in research projects, and STEM education. But even that’s not so simple.
With China now viewed as a belligerent rival, interventions have increased. In 2021 the Ministry of Defence acquired Forgemasters, and pledged to give £40m to ensure British steel ended up in UK nuclear submarines. Belatedly, ministers ordered the reversal of the sale of Newport Wafer Fab, a plant that makes the miraculous electronic components that transmit power and light, compound semiconductors.
The 2017 industrial strategy paper noted how 2,000 organisations had helped create it – and therein lies much of the problem. You can be forgiven for thinking that more people waffle on about innovation than actually do it. The leading lights funnel buzzwords into Number 10, and you don’t need a lot of expertise to make a splash.
“Government today is captured by people who present well, and are good at networking, but lack the expertise and the track record in business,” rues Woz Ahmed. the former Imagination executive who has advised Innovate UK. “A lot of talent has left Whitehall and we now have a lot of twenty-somethings making decisions.”
But the largest shadow is cast by the macro environment. As our only world-class industrialist, Sir James Dyson, pointed out last week, tax and regulation are suffocating Britain: “Growth has become a dirty word and an idea too risky to contemplate,” he lamented in The Telegraph.
In addition, our officials’ commitment for Net Zero targets is also likely to hamper British innovation, as it’s a mania confined largely to the Anglophone countries. The emerging BRICS, and particularly China and India – have no intention of cursing their manufacturers with high energy prices, or encouraging the production of uncompetitive products, such as hydrogen engines.
Our entrepreneurs and engineers may well follow the path of our best cricketers – and consider booking a flight to India. And who would blame them?
9) Rupert Darwall: When the New Right meets the Old Left on ESG
Real Clear Energy, 23 January 2023
So near, and yet so far. A couple of weeks ago, when the air was mild and the wind was blowing strongly, it became fashionable to thumb your nose at Vladimir Putin. We made it through the winter of 2022/23 without the blackouts he tried to inflict on us. Russia can keep its filthy gas and oil – we can do without it thanks to our cheap and plentiful renewables.
Not so fast. Temperatures have plummeted again, Britain is becalmed by an anticyclone, and the National Grid is warning that supply is going to be tight this evening. Coal plants are being dusted down several months after they were supposed to have closed, and the National Grid is activating what it calls its Demand Flexibility Service. This means customers signed up to the scheme can earn up to £6 per kilowatt-hour saved if they agree to turn off their appliances between 5 and 6pm.
It is not hard to spot a slight issue with this offer: the more electricity you use on a normal Monday, the easier it will be for you to cash in today. As with so many green subsidies, it perversely rewards the well-off at the expense of the poor. If you own an 18 bedroom mansion you can easily claim your fee by switching off the lights in the east wing and delaying recharging your Tesla until 7pm. If you normally use only one electric light, there will be no savings for you. And needless to say, the free electricity for some households will ultimately be subsidised through higher bills for everyone else.
But there is a far bigger problem with trying to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar power through demand management. The gaps in supply are far too big to be filled in this way. Britain already has enough installed wind and solar capacity – 38 gigawatts of it – to theoretically meet 100 per cent of average electricity demand. On a good day, such as we had a fortnight ago, solar and wind generate more than 50 per cent of our energy needs. But this morning at 10 am it was down to 19 per cent, and at times in December it fell to less than two per cent. If you are going to try to build a grid based on wind and solar, and try to manage demand by paying people to switch their appliances off, you are going to have to chuck such enormous quantities of money at people that they are prepared to spend days on end shivering in the dark.
The trouble is that that is more or less what the Government is trying to do. For years it has incentivised the green energy industry to build more and more wind and solar farms. Energy storage, on the other hand, has followed way, way behind. A few token – and very expensive – battery installations have been built, but, together with pumped storage systems built between the 1960s and 1980s, they can only store enough energy to keep Britain powered-up for less than an hour. Meanwhile, the steady baseload provided by nuclear is shrinking as old reactors shut down and new ones fail to open; Hinckley C is still years away.
At the moment we fill the gaps with gas-generated power, but once that has been removed from the grid, as the Government intends to do by 2035, all we will have to save us from unplanned blackouts is demand management – which is really just blackouts through bribery.
Ross Clark's next book "Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)" is published on February 2nd
7) Andrew Montford: Big wind turbines wearing out faster
Net Zero Watch, 24 January 2023
Net Zero Watch, 24 January 2023
It is often said that larger wind turbines will perform better than smaller ones, thus bringing electricity at lower cost. It is undoubtedly true that larger turbines produce a higher percentage of their nameplate capacity (the capacity factor), because wind speeds are higher further from the ground. However, the effect is relatively small, as the figure below, taken from my 2021 paper on the cost of offshore wind suggests.
The yellow dots are the actual figures for UK windfarms in their first few years of operation, so larger turbines appear to be delivering better capacity factors than smaller ones, although in fact some of the improvement will be due to the fact that larger wind turbines are being installed further from shore as well. The other data points are capacity factors predicted by various other commentators, in each case with a high figure, representing the early years’ performance, and a lower one, representing the lifetime average. (The ludicrous nature of BEIS’s figures is obvious, but that’s another story).
The yellow dots are the actual figures for UK windfarms in their first few years of operation, so larger turbines appear to be delivering better capacity factors than smaller ones, although in fact some of the improvement will be due to the fact that larger wind turbines are being installed further from shore as well. The other data points are capacity factors predicted by various other commentators, in each case with a high figure, representing the early years’ performance, and a lower one, representing the lifetime average. (The ludicrous nature of BEIS’s figures is obvious, but that’s another story).
That distinction is important. Windfarms deteriorate over their lifetimes, and capacity factors fall.
It’s therefore interesting to look at the analysis below. This divides the offshore fleet into cohorts by turbine size and then looks at how the capacity factor for each cohort changes over time. The pattern is striking. Small turbines – the longer traces – start low, but deteriorate slowly, if at all. Then, for each step up of turbine size, you get a higher starting point, but a faster rate of deterioration. (Ignore the drops at the end of the grey and blue series, which are anomalies of one kind or another).
It’s therefore interesting to look at the analysis below. This divides the offshore fleet into cohorts by turbine size and then looks at how the capacity factor for each cohort changes over time. The pattern is striking. Small turbines – the longer traces – start low, but deteriorate slowly, if at all. Then, for each step up of turbine size, you get a higher starting point, but a faster rate of deterioration. (Ignore the drops at the end of the grey and blue series, which are anomalies of one kind or another).
This is important in light of recent news that the Scottish Government intends to allow much larger wind turbines to be deployed onshore. There may in fact be very little benefit.
8) Andrew Orlowski: How Net Zero will drive British entrepreneurs abroad – who can blame them?
The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2023
Our entrepreneurs and engineers may well follow the path of our best cricketers – and consider booking a flight to India. And who would blame them?
No one greets failure with quite as much relief as we do in Britain, so let’s chill the champagne, for we have another reason to celebrate. Last week the start-up Britishvolt went into administration, with the loss of 200 jobs. The company had vowed to become the £3.8bn cornerstone of the British electric vehicle sector, by building a battery “gigafactory” in Red Wall Blyth.
The news is desperately disappointing for the employees who have lost their jobs in a region that Westminster has ignored for decades, but at the risk of sounding callous, the rest of us may breathe a sigh of relief. For this failure is actually a surprising success.
Britishvolt executives had reportedly made use of private jets, while scrambling to buy in the manufacturing technology they needed from Germany. The company had no market-ready technology, no customers and no assets beyond a large field in Northumbria. Nevertheless, it besieged the Government for £100m in funding to tide it over to 2024, when it said the first battery packs would roll off its still-unbuilt production lines.
However, with private investors notably wary, officials were unconvinced. Britishvolt failed to meet the thresholds they demanded. So for once, the system has actually worked as it should. While ministers are being chided by their Labour shadows for not doing more, we know we won’t have another DeLorean to rue. But can we be confident this rigour will be the default in the future? I’m not so sure.
Noises from Ed Miliband’s office do not suggest that future Britishvolts would have any difficulty getting our cash. Under Labour’s Green New Deal, they will merely need to knock more loudly.
That would bring us full circle, of course. Over four decades, UK industrial policy has swung from the state orchestration of key sectors, to laissez faire, and back again. The hands-off approach of the Eighties obliged private capital to step up and assume the job of picking winners, rather than the taxpayer.
Gradually, a US-style model of investment took root here, so more innovations from our great universities could be commercialised. Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage was heeded: we would no longer indulge domestic producer interests. But it took only one economic crash for old memories to stir.
By 2008, and in the turbulence of the financial crash, Gordon Brown’s industry minister was boasting that he had “reclaimed industrial strategy from the smokestacks of the 1960s and 1970s”, as the self-styled “industrial activist” Peter Mandelson told us.
Vince Cable and the Coalition Government then embraced the policy with enthusiasm. Initiatives were launched, and policy began to resemble a Bonfire Night fireworks display that had been accidentally ignited before the spectators arrive. The Government even appointed an ambassador to a road feature in Old Street, in the hope that some Silicon Valley magic would fall on East London.
By 2017, we had a vast new word salad to digest, in the form of yet another new industrial strategy. This was replete with “sector deals” – including the construction industry, and food and drink – “Grand Challenges”, and a promise to raise R&D investment to 2.4 per cent of GDP. No one was left out, the sign of a country that couldn’t decide who it wants to be: the USA, a Singapore, or a protectionist France.
Today, there’s broad consensus around the idea that Government can make a big difference by funding in research projects, and STEM education. But even that’s not so simple.
With China now viewed as a belligerent rival, interventions have increased. In 2021 the Ministry of Defence acquired Forgemasters, and pledged to give £40m to ensure British steel ended up in UK nuclear submarines. Belatedly, ministers ordered the reversal of the sale of Newport Wafer Fab, a plant that makes the miraculous electronic components that transmit power and light, compound semiconductors.
The 2017 industrial strategy paper noted how 2,000 organisations had helped create it – and therein lies much of the problem. You can be forgiven for thinking that more people waffle on about innovation than actually do it. The leading lights funnel buzzwords into Number 10, and you don’t need a lot of expertise to make a splash.
“Government today is captured by people who present well, and are good at networking, but lack the expertise and the track record in business,” rues Woz Ahmed. the former Imagination executive who has advised Innovate UK. “A lot of talent has left Whitehall and we now have a lot of twenty-somethings making decisions.”
But the largest shadow is cast by the macro environment. As our only world-class industrialist, Sir James Dyson, pointed out last week, tax and regulation are suffocating Britain: “Growth has become a dirty word and an idea too risky to contemplate,” he lamented in The Telegraph.
In addition, our officials’ commitment for Net Zero targets is also likely to hamper British innovation, as it’s a mania confined largely to the Anglophone countries. The emerging BRICS, and particularly China and India – have no intention of cursing their manufacturers with high energy prices, or encouraging the production of uncompetitive products, such as hydrogen engines.
Our entrepreneurs and engineers may well follow the path of our best cricketers – and consider booking a flight to India. And who would blame them?
9) Rupert Darwall: When the New Right meets the Old Left on ESG
Real Clear Energy, 23 January 2023
“Anti-market ideology is a growing presence among some conservatives. By joining with the Left, the New Right would help bring about the very thing it deplores: the Europeanization of America.”
This month, conservative critics of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing had something of a surprise – an almost-simultaneous attack on their views from both Left and Right mounting remarkably similar arguments.
Writing for CNBC last week, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senate’s climate-denier-witch-finder-in-chief, together with Senators Brian Schatz and Martin Heinrich, denounced state Republican officials for their stand against financial institutions whose anti-fossil-fuel policies damage their states’ economies. These elected officials, the senators wrote, are engaged in a purely ideological, anti-capitalist crusade against free-market principles.
Ten days earlier, from the Right, American Affairs senior editor Julius Krein launched a 4,800-word broadside on ESG’s conservative critics. They don’t understand, Krein suggested, that ESG is an outgrowth of shareholder primacy, the very thing they believe in.
Thus, both ends of the political spectrum end up on the same page, accusing pro-market, anti-ESG critics of subverting free-market principles.
The Old Left and New Right are converging in other areas. The trio of Democratic senators write of the “significant economic risks” of not transitioning to a low-carbon economy. Krein agrees. Major environmental catastrophes are generally bad for business, he writes. Clean energy also gets the nod. It’s the future, Klein avers, and missing out on it represents “a major business risk.” Krein even supports some aspects of the corrosive Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity (DEI) component of ESG. Disney, he suggests, “can easily make a prima facie case that its management should reflect the demographics of its target audience.”
In getting to this point, Krein does not disclose the role of the United Nations in the origins of ESG, a detail that might spoil his narrative of ESG as an efflorescence of shareholder supremacy. Krein’s essay links to a 2004 report, “Who Cares Wins,” its first page carrying the logos of the UN and the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. The report had been produced under the auspices of the financial sector of the UN Global Compact. Neither does Krein mention that the Global Compact had been launched five years earlier at Davos by Kofi Annan when he was UN secretary general.
Sure, ESG is hard to pin down. It’s not a coherent investment strategy and means different things to different people. As Krein puts it, its purpose “isn’t entirely clear,” a factor explaining much of its appeal. Nonetheless, he prefers to view ESG as a passive risk-disclosure matrix, downplaying ESG as a vehicle for promoting a political agenda – surely the reason why Senators Whitehouse, Schatz and Heinrich are such ardent advocates of ESG and why the UN birthed ESG in the first place.
In this telling, index investment-product providers such as BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, are relatively indifferent to the performance of individual stocks, something that happens to be broadly true. Then follows confusion. Index product providers do care about beta or overall market risk, Krein says. However, beta isn’t a measure of market risk – or, as the finance jargon has it, non-diversifiable risk. Beta is a measure of the riskiness of individual securities or groups of securities compared to the market as a whole. Because macro-economic factors, such as the Fed’s monetary policy, drive overall market risk, asset managers like BlackRock use ESG to disclose such macro risks, Krein claims, even though, as its initials imply, ESG has nothing to say about interest rates, inflation, and GDP growth. It’s all nonsense on stilts.
In fact, BlackRock’s conversion to climate activism and demanding that the companies it invests in should produce net-zero transition plans followed an intervention by the Sisters of Mercy, who had filed a motion ahead of BlackRock’s 2020 annual meeting accusing it of neglecting climate issues in its stewardship program. Whatever the motives of the sisters, it is highly improbable that they included maximizing the value of BlackRock stock.
Krein derides conservatives for hiding behind what he calls “liberal proceduralism” to content themselves with “redefining” directors’ fiduciary duties to “reemphasize” shareholder interests. This, too, is incorrect. It is not a matter of redefining, but restating – and that’s a big difference. As former BlackRock senior executive Terrence Keeley points out in his new book “Sustainable,” shareholder primacy long predates Milton Friedman. In a 1919 suit brought by the Dodge brothers against the Ford Motor Company, Justice Russell Ostrander wrote for the Michigan Supreme Court that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders.”
Krein argues that conservatives should drop their “silly pretence” in the efficacy of markets and promote a conservative version of ESG, incorporating “their own substantive goals” – an implicit admission that ESG is indeed a vehicle for promoting a political agenda. This is asking conservatives to accept two counterintuitive propositions: first, that Congress and the administrative state have the potential to be more efficient capital allocators than markets; second, that conservatives can impose their cultural values and political preferences on Wall Street and blue-state pension funds such as CalPERS, CalSTRS, and the New York State Common Retirement Fund.
Entirely missing from Krein’s account of ESG is any notion of beneficiaries. Trust law, statutes such as Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), and the courts require fiduciaries to act in the sole financial interests of beneficiaries. This mandate is anathema to collectivists of all stripes who want access to trillions of dollars of retirees’ capital to pursue public-policy objectives purportedly necessary for societal improvement and bringing harmony between people and planet. This effort to socialize savings is already underway in Europe. By joining with the Left, the New Right would help bring about the very thing it deplores: the Europeanization of America. Is this what national conservatism is going to be about?
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.
This month, conservative critics of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing had something of a surprise – an almost-simultaneous attack on their views from both Left and Right mounting remarkably similar arguments.
Writing for CNBC last week, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senate’s climate-denier-witch-finder-in-chief, together with Senators Brian Schatz and Martin Heinrich, denounced state Republican officials for their stand against financial institutions whose anti-fossil-fuel policies damage their states’ economies. These elected officials, the senators wrote, are engaged in a purely ideological, anti-capitalist crusade against free-market principles.
Ten days earlier, from the Right, American Affairs senior editor Julius Krein launched a 4,800-word broadside on ESG’s conservative critics. They don’t understand, Krein suggested, that ESG is an outgrowth of shareholder primacy, the very thing they believe in.
Thus, both ends of the political spectrum end up on the same page, accusing pro-market, anti-ESG critics of subverting free-market principles.
The Old Left and New Right are converging in other areas. The trio of Democratic senators write of the “significant economic risks” of not transitioning to a low-carbon economy. Krein agrees. Major environmental catastrophes are generally bad for business, he writes. Clean energy also gets the nod. It’s the future, Klein avers, and missing out on it represents “a major business risk.” Krein even supports some aspects of the corrosive Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity (DEI) component of ESG. Disney, he suggests, “can easily make a prima facie case that its management should reflect the demographics of its target audience.”
In getting to this point, Krein does not disclose the role of the United Nations in the origins of ESG, a detail that might spoil his narrative of ESG as an efflorescence of shareholder supremacy. Krein’s essay links to a 2004 report, “Who Cares Wins,” its first page carrying the logos of the UN and the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. The report had been produced under the auspices of the financial sector of the UN Global Compact. Neither does Krein mention that the Global Compact had been launched five years earlier at Davos by Kofi Annan when he was UN secretary general.
Sure, ESG is hard to pin down. It’s not a coherent investment strategy and means different things to different people. As Krein puts it, its purpose “isn’t entirely clear,” a factor explaining much of its appeal. Nonetheless, he prefers to view ESG as a passive risk-disclosure matrix, downplaying ESG as a vehicle for promoting a political agenda – surely the reason why Senators Whitehouse, Schatz and Heinrich are such ardent advocates of ESG and why the UN birthed ESG in the first place.
In this telling, index investment-product providers such as BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, are relatively indifferent to the performance of individual stocks, something that happens to be broadly true. Then follows confusion. Index product providers do care about beta or overall market risk, Krein says. However, beta isn’t a measure of market risk – or, as the finance jargon has it, non-diversifiable risk. Beta is a measure of the riskiness of individual securities or groups of securities compared to the market as a whole. Because macro-economic factors, such as the Fed’s monetary policy, drive overall market risk, asset managers like BlackRock use ESG to disclose such macro risks, Krein claims, even though, as its initials imply, ESG has nothing to say about interest rates, inflation, and GDP growth. It’s all nonsense on stilts.
In fact, BlackRock’s conversion to climate activism and demanding that the companies it invests in should produce net-zero transition plans followed an intervention by the Sisters of Mercy, who had filed a motion ahead of BlackRock’s 2020 annual meeting accusing it of neglecting climate issues in its stewardship program. Whatever the motives of the sisters, it is highly improbable that they included maximizing the value of BlackRock stock.
Krein derides conservatives for hiding behind what he calls “liberal proceduralism” to content themselves with “redefining” directors’ fiduciary duties to “reemphasize” shareholder interests. This, too, is incorrect. It is not a matter of redefining, but restating – and that’s a big difference. As former BlackRock senior executive Terrence Keeley points out in his new book “Sustainable,” shareholder primacy long predates Milton Friedman. In a 1919 suit brought by the Dodge brothers against the Ford Motor Company, Justice Russell Ostrander wrote for the Michigan Supreme Court that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders.”
Krein argues that conservatives should drop their “silly pretence” in the efficacy of markets and promote a conservative version of ESG, incorporating “their own substantive goals” – an implicit admission that ESG is indeed a vehicle for promoting a political agenda. This is asking conservatives to accept two counterintuitive propositions: first, that Congress and the administrative state have the potential to be more efficient capital allocators than markets; second, that conservatives can impose their cultural values and political preferences on Wall Street and blue-state pension funds such as CalPERS, CalSTRS, and the New York State Common Retirement Fund.
Entirely missing from Krein’s account of ESG is any notion of beneficiaries. Trust law, statutes such as Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), and the courts require fiduciaries to act in the sole financial interests of beneficiaries. This mandate is anathema to collectivists of all stripes who want access to trillions of dollars of retirees’ capital to pursue public-policy objectives purportedly necessary for societal improvement and bringing harmony between people and planet. This effort to socialize savings is already underway in Europe. By joining with the Left, the New Right would help bring about the very thing it deplores: the Europeanization of America. Is this what national conservatism is going to be about?
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.
10) And Finally: For ‘select’ at Davos, money, money, money is key to staying cool
Editorial, The Washington Times, 23 January 2023
Editorial, The Washington Times, 23 January 2023
Americans should be wary of Chicken Little-like rhetoric contending that the planet can be saved from a coming climate catastrophe only by handing over more money, money, money.
Beware of the individual who refers to his ilk as “we select group of human beings.” It’s the unmistakable mark of the elite who believe their concern for climate can save the world. Mindful that those who guaranteed the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines now associated with disturbing health anomalies derive from the same exclusive class, Americans should regard the purveyors of climate change remedies with studied caution.
The most self-assured of this sort have a habit of showing up for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering, which recently concluded in Davos, Switzerland. With his “select group” puffery, President Biden’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, gathered his fellow discussion panelists and audience into a league of their own.
It is all a part of forum founder Klaus Schwab’s plan to “master the future” through climate change activism. Eager to oblige, Mr. Kerry urged all within earshot to rebuff any self-image of “a crazy tree-hugging lefty liberal” and embrace their identity of the “almost extraterrestrial” breed who are “saving the planet.” He made the case that the key to staying cool is “money, money, money, money, money, money, money”: The denizens of Davos want $3 trillion annually to finance greenhouse gas reductions.
By contrast, climate guru and former Vice President Al Gore showed little hesitation in personifying the crazy tree-hugger. Referring to human-caused atmospheric emissions, the Davos forum regular claimed, “That’s what is boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land, creating the droughts and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach one billion in this century.”
All this “settled science” from a self-appointed climate expert who, according to The Washington Post, could not quite manage a gentleman’s C in his Harvard science classes.
Roy Spencer, the principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, is reputed to embrace only meteorological facts.
In studies posted in recent months at Drroyspencer.com, he makes the case that computer models employed to explain climate change trends over the past half a century have exaggerated the warming effect by more than 50%: “Homogenization techniques” — scientific lingo for methods of averaging out temperature anomalies — “can remove abrupt changes in station data,” he writes, “but cannot correct for any sources of slowly-increasing spurious warming.”
Mr. Spencer submits that such “spurious warming” is caused by “urban heat island effects” on ground-based temperature monitors in areas of intensifying population growth. Using data gathered by space-based satellites instead, he writes, “The results show an average trend fully 50% below that produced by the official [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] product.”
Evidence has emerged that the governing elite has oversold COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in stopping virus transmission and underplayed the incidence of vaccine-caused health ailments. Consequently, Americans should be wary of Chicken Little-like rhetoric contending that the planet can be saved from a coming climate catastrophe — with boiling oceans, rain bombs and climate refugee waves — only by handing over more money, money, money.
Beware of the individual who refers to his ilk as “we select group of human beings.” It’s the unmistakable mark of the elite who believe their concern for climate can save the world. Mindful that those who guaranteed the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines now associated with disturbing health anomalies derive from the same exclusive class, Americans should regard the purveyors of climate change remedies with studied caution.
The most self-assured of this sort have a habit of showing up for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering, which recently concluded in Davos, Switzerland. With his “select group” puffery, President Biden’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, gathered his fellow discussion panelists and audience into a league of their own.
It is all a part of forum founder Klaus Schwab’s plan to “master the future” through climate change activism. Eager to oblige, Mr. Kerry urged all within earshot to rebuff any self-image of “a crazy tree-hugging lefty liberal” and embrace their identity of the “almost extraterrestrial” breed who are “saving the planet.” He made the case that the key to staying cool is “money, money, money, money, money, money, money”: The denizens of Davos want $3 trillion annually to finance greenhouse gas reductions.
By contrast, climate guru and former Vice President Al Gore showed little hesitation in personifying the crazy tree-hugger. Referring to human-caused atmospheric emissions, the Davos forum regular claimed, “That’s what is boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land, creating the droughts and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach one billion in this century.”
All this “settled science” from a self-appointed climate expert who, according to The Washington Post, could not quite manage a gentleman’s C in his Harvard science classes.
Roy Spencer, the principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, is reputed to embrace only meteorological facts.
In studies posted in recent months at Drroyspencer.com, he makes the case that computer models employed to explain climate change trends over the past half a century have exaggerated the warming effect by more than 50%: “Homogenization techniques” — scientific lingo for methods of averaging out temperature anomalies — “can remove abrupt changes in station data,” he writes, “but cannot correct for any sources of slowly-increasing spurious warming.”
Mr. Spencer submits that such “spurious warming” is caused by “urban heat island effects” on ground-based temperature monitors in areas of intensifying population growth. Using data gathered by space-based satellites instead, he writes, “The results show an average trend fully 50% below that produced by the official [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] product.”
Evidence has emerged that the governing elite has oversold COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in stopping virus transmission and underplayed the incidence of vaccine-caused health ailments. Consequently, Americans should be wary of Chicken Little-like rhetoric contending that the planet can be saved from a coming climate catastrophe — with boiling oceans, rain bombs and climate refugee waves — only by handing over more money, money, money.
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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