Wow, just wow. Even the “fake accidents to get insurance claims” industry doesn’t have a magazine.
A sample:
By Amy Westervelt
A compelling sticking point arose in the San Francisco and Oakland climate liability suits against the oil industry during U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s hearing two weeks ago: the judge wanted to know how to balance the need to continue using fossil fuels while potentially holding the companies producing them accountable for damages they cause. This week, he received briefs from both sides with their takes on that question.
The debate stems from the oil companies’ contention that the suits are aimed at shutting them down, which would take a massive toll on a society that still primarily relies on fossil fuels for energy. The cities’ attorneys, in response, explained to Alsup in the hearing that is not the case. Steve Berman, lead counsel for the cities, explained to Alsup that the case does not seek to end oil production but to ensure that the companies pay for the costs associated with the damages their product causes.
“Berman’s right,” said Marco Simons, regional program director and general counsel for EarthRights International. Simons is lead counsel for several Colorado communities bringing climate liability suits against ExxonMobil and Suncor. He said that while nuisance cases in the past often did require that the company or person stop doing whatever was creating the problem, the law has evolved.
“The courts have created some exceptions to say, ‘Well, as an alternative we’re going to let you continue, but you have to pay for the damage you caused.’ So, the question of public benefit is only really a question of whether you’re trying to shut down the activity or to make a company pay for the damage that it’s causing. If the benefits are outweighing costs, you can pay for the damage and still continue the activity.”
While Alsup repeatedly returned to the progress enabled by fossil fuel production—from the Industrial Revolution to present day technology—those pressing the suits say that concern over the benefits of fossil fuel production is a red herring.
“We’re not trying to shut down oil production or shut these companies down or even impose limits on emissions,” Simons said. “All we’re trying to do is what courts have done for hundreds of years, which is to say the people responsible for causing damage to people and property have to be responsible for their share of the cost of responding to those injuries. We’re not arguing that fossil fuels are in and of themselves a nuisance. The nuisance is climate change. And these companies that unquestionably played a role in creating the nuisance have to play a role in covering the cost of damages.”
Classic shakedown. I wonder if they’ve considered suing themselves, after all, aren’t USERS of fossil fuels just as culpable in destroying the planet as the suppliers?
What green is not totally full of it? Here is the first paragraph of today’s mindless screed against supersonic flying by former Sierra Club chief Carl Pope in the New York Times: When I read that first sentence, I recalled that I had previously read something about Carl Pope’s flying habits. So I did a … Continue reading Hypocrisy of the Day: Former Sierra Club Chief Carl Pope
As the stool above shows, the climate change package sits on three premises. The first is the science bit, consisting of an unproven claim that observed warming is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. The second part rests on impact studies from billions of research dollars spent uncovering any and all possible negatives from warming. And the third leg is climate policies showing how governments can “fight climate change.”
The call for climate action depends on proponents providing convincing answers to questions regarding these three dimensions. H/T to Master Resource for pointing to essays by William Niskonen and Steven Horwitz setting forth the issues to be resolved. I will refer to excerpts from Global Warming Is about Social Science Too by Horowitz.
To help clarify what’s at stake, I offer a list of questions that are (or should be) at the center of the debate over anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. I will provide some quick commentary on some to note their importance and then conclude with what I see as the importance of this list.
Matters of Science
1. Is the planet getting warmer?
2. If it’s getting warmer, is that warming caused by humans? Obviously this is a big question because if warming is not human-caused, then it’s not clear how much we can do to reduce it. What we might do about the consequences, however, remains an open question.
3. If it’s getting warmer, by what magnitude? If the magnitude is large, then there’s one set of implications. But if it’s small, then, as we’ll see, it might not be worth responding to. This is a good example of a scientific question with large implications for policy.
My Comment: Most people studying climate science agree that it has warmed about a degree celsius since the end of the Little Ice Age (~1850). But there have been multi-decadal periods of warming and cooling as well as the current plateau in temperatures. As well, there are many places (e.g.almost 1/3 of US stations) showing cooling while other places have warming trends. Skeptics note that no one has yet separated natural warming from man-made warming. In the record,natural warming prior 1940s matches almost exactly the warming from 1970s to 2000, claimed to be man-made.
Horowitz continues: All these questions are presumably matters of science. In principle we ought to be able to answer them using the tools of science, even if they are complex issues that involve competing interpretations and methods. Let’s assume the planet is in fact warming and that humans are the reason.
Impacts of Warming
4. What are the costs of global warming? This question is frequently asked and answered.
5. What are the benefits of global warming? This question needs to be asked as well, as global warming might bring currently arctic areas into a more temperate climate that would enable them to become sources of food. Plus, a warmer planet might decrease the demand for fossil fuels for heating homes and businesses in those formerly colder places.
6. Do the benefits outweigh the costs or do the costs outweigh the benefits? This is also not frequently asked. Obviously, if the benefits outweigh the costs, then we shouldn’t be worrying about global warming. Two other points are worth considering. First, the benefits and costs are not questions of scientific fact because how we do the accounting depends on all kinds of value-laden questions. But that doesn’t mean the cost-benefit comparison isn’t important. Second, this question might depend greatly on the answers to the scientific questions above. In other words: All questions of public policy are ones that require both facts and values to answer. One cannot go directly from science to policy without asking the kinds of questions I’ve raised here.
Rotterdam Adaptation Policy–Ninety years thriving behind dikes and dams.
Climate Policies
7. If the costs outweigh the benefits, what sorts of policies are appropriate? There are many too many questions here to deal with in detail, but it should be noted that disagreements over what sorts of policies would best deal with the net costs of global warming are, again, matters of both fact and value, or science and social science.
8. What are the costs of the policies designed to reduce the costs of global warming? This question is not asked nearly enough. Even if we design policies on the blackboard that seem to mitigate the effects of global warming, we have to consider, first, whether those policies are even likely to be passed by politicians as we know them, and second, whether the policies might have associated costs that outweigh their benefits with respect to global warming. So if in our attempt to reduce the effects of global warming we slow economic growth so far as to impoverish more people, or we give powers to governments that are likely to be used in ways having little to do with global warming, we have to consider those results in the total costs and benefits of using policy to combat global warming. This is a question of social science that is no less important than the scientific questions I began with.
I could add more, but this is sufficient to make my key points. First, it is perfectly possible to accept the science of global warming but reject the policies most often put forward to combat it. One can think humans are causing the planet to warm but logically and humanely conclude that we should do nothing about it.
Second, people who take that position and back it up with good arguments should not be called “deniers.” They are not denying the science; they are questioning its implications. In fact, those who think they can go directly from science to policy are, as it turns out, engaged in denial – denial of the relevance of social science.
Steven Horwitz is the Schnatter Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball State University, where he also is a Fellow at the John H. Schnatter Institute for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise. He is the author of Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions.
Climate science, impacts and policies also appear as a house of cards.
Wind power output in the United Kingdom since the end of May has been at low and extremely low levels, confirming, yet again, the observation that wind power contributes little or nothing to security of supply, and so requires a duplication of resources implying a reduction in overall system productivity and so higher costs to consumers.
This is “Onshore Wind Week”, but Aeolus, the fickle god of the winds, has tested his celebrants’ resolve in the run-up to this festival by refusing to blow more than the occasional puff at the United Kingdom’s 9,000 wind turbines (7,000 onshore, 1,800 offshore). In fact, output from the total wind capacity of approximately 16,500 MW has been low to negligible since the 30thof May.
Metered output is available from the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service (BMRS) for about 11,836 MW or 65% of the wind fleet. The remaining 35% is not visible to the system operator, but on the assumption that it performs as well as the visible capacity we can estimate the total output.
In the whole of May wind power visible in the BMRS generated 2.2 TWh of electrical energy, so the full total would have been approximately 3.4 TWh. The same calculation for the period 1–10th of June suggests a total wind generation of 0.31 TWh, implying a daily average amounting to less than 1/3 of that in the previous month.
In fairness one should note that June has historically often been a low wind month, but this year’s output does seem to be modest even by those historical standards. Indeed, for some hours on some days the fleet output was effectively zero. On the 3rdof June, for example, between 07.00 and 13.00, during the morning ramp, output from all 16,500 MW of UK wind power fell to some under 100 MW, a load factor of 0.6%. It must be remembered that this was not a matter of choice, but just what the winds had to offer at that moment. The following chart is the half-hourly fuel mix chart for that day, calculated from the Balancing Mechanism data by Dr Moroney at REF:
Figure 1: Half hour metered UK electricity fuel mix data for the 3rd June 2018. Vertical axis: Megwatts; horizontal axis, half-hourly Settlement Period. Source: United Kingdom’s Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service, reprocessed and charted by Renewable Energy Foundation.
Gas fired power stations, represented by the dark yellow band, are obviously following load, and have thus filled in for absent wind, a fact that can be confirmed by noting that gas fuelled generation accounted for 45% of electricity in May, a level typical for the whole of the previous year, but have generated 51% of megawatt hours so far in June, a level rarely exceed in preceding months.
It should also be noted that load on the system is low, at just under 30 GW, so there is no question here of the operator struggling to get by. The system managed perfectly well, indeed it seems to run more smoothly and certainly more cheaply without wind. There have been, for example, no constraint payments to wind power since the 27thof May, when £105,000 was paid to wind farms to stop generating. In fact some £3.8 million was paid in this way over the whole month, with just under £1 million of it paid on the 26th of May alone. For two weeks the consumer has had a welcome holiday from these arguably unjustified costs. What better way to celebrate Onshore Wind Week.
So, this was no crisis, and if anything a rather desirable state of affairs, but nonetheless very instructive. We learn from the last two weeks, and in particular from the pattern of generation on the 3rdof June, that the output even of a very large distributed wind fleet, on- and offshore around the UK, occasionally falls to low levels for days on end, and sometimes to less than 1% of its potential output for several consecutive hours at a time. In effect the entire national wind fleet from North to South, from East to West, was becalmed. Clearly this could happen at any time, and thus, as experienced engineers have repeatedly indicated, a conservative system operator will prefer to have at hand sufficient conventional, controllable capacity, plus a margin, to meet any probable load on the electricity network. Wind simply cannot be relied upon. This multiplication of resources must result in the electricity supply system as a whole having a lower productivity than it would otherwise possess, which also implies, and in spite of the fuel saving that wind offers, higher costs to the consumer.
Iowa Climate Science Education 