Best Energy Picks - June 1, 2024

Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.

Jun 01, 2024

This week’s best energy picks:

Stop Conflating the Politics with the Science! — Cold Weather Kills People and EVs — From the "They’re Coming for You Next” Files — Well, Call Me A Techno-Pessimist Then! — and much more.

Stop Conflating the Politics with the Science!

This discussion gets at a point neglected by every major news source; the difference between IPCC politics and science:

One of the most often cited sources of climate information is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of scientists and government appointees that, according to its website, is dedicated to “assessing the science on climate change.”
The United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization established the IPCC in 1988.
The IPCC is both a scientific and a political body. It doesn’t conduct its own research but rather assembles teams of hundreds of scientists in working groups that collect reports from scientific journals regarding climate change, its effects, and what should be done about it.
About every seven years, an IPCC Working Group called Working Group I synthesizes the latest reports into Assessment Reports (ARs), often several thousand pages thick, which are then reviewed and edited by government appointees from the 195 member nations.
In 2023, the IPCC released its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
The information on which the ARs is based often has a bias from the start, critics say, because research grants typically fund studies that support the prevailing narrative on climate change, and because scientific journals often avoid publishing studies that suggest climate change is not dire.

“Any literature that supports alarmism is promoted and any that does not is rejected,” William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, told The Epoch Times.
According to Mr. Happer, the source of much of today’s climate data comes from “centers whose generous funding would cease if climate hysteria were to abate.”
In addition, according to Richard Lindzen, emeritus professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served as one of the scientists on Working Group I in the past, “the IPCC itself is only studying anthropogenic [man-made] climate change.
“It doesn’t do anything regarding natural climate change,” Mr. Lindzen said, “and that’s a severe technical shortcoming because you can’t do things like attribution unless you know what natural variability is.”
Despite that, “when you read the [Assessment] Reports, focusing mostly on the science, they’re actually pretty good,” Mr. Koonin said.
The data presented in the ARs is a relatively sober analysis. However, it provides little support for the narrative of climate catastrophe—at least as far as what has been observed to date.

We need a lot more reporting like this!

Hat Tip: D.S.

Cold Weather Kills People and EVs

Let’s be honest about EVs:

Cold weather is a nemesis of EVs, as it is for many battery-operated devices. Temperatures below 32 °F (0 °C) can cause the driving range of EVs to drop significantly or even render the vehicle useless due to the increase in the internal resistance of lithium-ion batteries at cold temperatures. Charging EVs in cold weather can significantly increase the time needed for recharging and may cause permanent battery damage.
While it’s true that EVs do not have exhaust emissions, one needs to consider that there are other types of emissions, including particulate matter (PM) from brake wear, tire wear, road wear and resuspension of road dust. Because EVs are 24 percent heavier (due to their batteries) compared to their equivalent internal combustion engine vehicles, EVs emit about the same amounts of PM10 and emit only about 1-3 percent less PM2.5 than internal combustion engine vehicles. In fact, there is a positive relationship between the vehicle weight and its particulate matter emissions.

**"Front tires, wear" by badheartbull is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.**

Finally, the disposing of EV batteries and the decommissioning of wind turbines and solar panels are both problematic environmental issues.
EV batteries last about 5 to 10 years and need to be replaced when their output goes below 80% of their initial capacities. Storing, burying, and exporting these used lithium-ion batteries are no longer acceptable. Unfortunately, the direct recycling of these batteries, with high remaining capacities, would be prohibitively expensive and highly energy- and resource-intensive, and would pollute the air, water and land.

Cold kills and the truth hurts in the case of EVs.

Hat Tip: D.W.

From the "They’re Coming for You Next” Files

The extremists and their grifter enablers are determined to make us eat bugs…

Last week, the World Bank Group released a new report that highlights the urgent need to drastically reduce GHG emissions to address the climate crisis and calls on countries to” act. However, while the World Bank's acknowledgment of the damaging climate impacts of industrial agriculture is a crucial step forward, it's simply not enough.
To address the climate emergency, the World Bank must walk the talk and take action on its own portfolio - which currently has billions invested in livestock production - by halting all financing for the global expansion of factory farming.
First, the climate consequences of industrial livestock are staggering. As the World Bank's report points out, the global agrifood system accounts for approximately one-third of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and industrial livestock production accounts for the lion's share of these.

**Source: https://pixabay.com/users/leuchtturm81-7214328/**

Research has shown that livestock production alone will consume nearly half of the world's 1.5°C emissions budget by 2030 and a staggering 80% by 2050. The World Bank's report aptly states that "the system that feeds us is also feeding the planet's climate crisis."
The World Bank cannot effectively tackle the climate crisis without a significant shift in lending away from high-polluting industrial livestock and toward a more sustainable food system.
Second, the World Bank's continued financing for industrial livestock starkly contradicts its own commitments, spanning from the Paris Agreement targets to the Sustainable Development Goals to the Bank's biodiversity policies, and even its own mission statement.
The World Bank itself says that "the world cannot achieve the Paris Agreement targets without achieving net zero emissions in the agrifood system." Yet, the Bank continues to finance the expansion of industrial livestock - putting the Bank's financing at odds with its commitment to align its strategies, activities, and investments with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement.

Aside from the grifters’ short-term objectives of unjustly enriching themselves off our backs, the real goal is not reducing the livestock population, but reducing ours.

Hat Tip: J.C.

Well, Call Me A Techno-Pessimist Then!

The great Mark Mills strikes again!

The total direct and induced spending on the energy transition could easily exceed $5 trillion before a decade passes, or sooner, if advocates prevail. For context, the entirety of World War II cost the U.S. roughly $4 trillion (in today’s dollars). More relevant in terms of domestic scope, building the entire U.S. interstate highway system cost just $600 billion (also inflation-adjusted).
The transition spending that’s coming will add up to far more money than the amount printed for economic “rescue” during the Covid lockdowns. Since all the Inflation Reduction Act, and related, spending has yet to flow through the economy, it bears asking why economists aren’t alarmed about reigniting inflation. Perhaps, behind closed doors, the Federal Reserve is worried…
Meantime, economists and regulatory lawyers fuel the fantasies of the transitionists by suggesting that markets can be manipulated to yield their desired outcomes. There is some truth to that, but manipulating parts of markets, and specific products, is entirely different than trying to do the same for the entirety of society, which is the transitionists’ ambition. The idea that this can be done at all, much less painlessly, redefines the word naïve.

**Solar Silicon, Source: Klaus Mueller, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons**

But these challenges and materials shortfalls will, the economic theorists propose, induce more innovation. They imagine the “market” will rapidly produce new and better technologies that conquer lithium batteries’ aversion to cold, the limits of photovoltaic efficiencies, or the staggering energy-intensity of fabricating solar silicon, which requires about 100 times more energy per pound than steel. The last fact matters because of China’s 90 percent market share in producing solar silicon on its coal-fired grids. It is no exaggeration to say that the realities of solar silicon fabrication mean that solar subsidies and mandates have induced eager Californians to festoon their roofs with transmuted coal.
But there are real-world limits to the velocity of commercialization of all industrial-class technologies, and firm physics boundaries for all hardware. The limitations of economic theory become apparent at the scale of civilizational engineering, and economic incentives cannot alter physical laws that govern technology. Crucially, it’s a practical fact that the technologies available today are those that will be deployed in the coming decade, not speculative future inventions. And subsidizing today’s technologies tends to lock in the use of yesterday’s innovations. The transitionists who dismiss those who make such observations as “climate solutions deniers” have recently adopted a new tactic: labeling such perspective as “techno-pessimism.”

Face it, the climate cult is simply a false religion under the cover of which which the Big Green Grift is taking place.

Hat Tip: R.N.