Essay by Eric Worrall

Global Authoritarian Revolution? “… young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity …”

World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say

Disastrous events included flash flooding in Africa and wildfires in Europe and North America

Jonathan Watts @jonathanwatts Sat 30 Dec 2023 01.26 AEDT

The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.

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“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said. “Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”

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Now director of the climate programme at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York, Hansen said the best hope was for a generational shift of leadership. “The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.

His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/29/world-will-look-back-at-2023-as-year-humanity-exposed-its-inability-to-tackle-climate-crisis

James Hansen has a track record when it comes to talking up authoritarianism – who can forget Hansen’s absurd praise of the Chinese system in 2015, for the alleged advantage of Chinese Communism over Western democracies and republics, when it comes to addressing climate challenges?

“I think we will get there because China is rational,” Hansen says. “Their leaders are mostly trained in engineering and such things, they don’t deny climate change and they have a huge incentive, which is air pollution. It’s so bad in their cities they need to move to clean energies. They realise it’s not a hoax. But they will need co-operation.”

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud

Not that I’m denying this has been an interesting weather year in Australia.

The Aussie MET predicted dry conditions because of El Nino, and there have been dry periods, but there have also been some exceptional rainfall events, lots of water falling in normally dry inland areas in June and December, and probably other events I’ve forgotten.

This is likely just random chance – Australia is famed for its extreme weather, and weather forecasting in Australia is just as big a joke as most other places.

But what if the unusual El Nino rainfall in Australia is because of global warming? What if the “new normal” is fewer prolonged droughts, more chaotic weather with shorter dry spells, and more rain, including in the parched interior of Australia?

In that case we would all be better off cancelling useless solar panels and wind turbines, and investing in flood and water management project, to mitigate the harm when a small ocean drops on our heads. And people could mitigate their own personal risks, by avoiding purchasing in dubious housing estates which look suspiciously like filled in river valleys, ditching the EVs and useless town automobiles, and instead buying long range diesel 4WD vehicles to better handle Australia’s increasingly neglected and flood prone roads, and increasingly unreliable, power cut prone fuel supplies.

Purchasing a 4WD diesel in Australia is becoming more a necessity than a choice, especially if you plan to do any rural driving. My recent Aussie driving holiday, I saw some truly appalling roads. A recent Grattan Institute Report found roads in Australia are full of potholes, in a poor state of repair. On my holiday there were lots of towns with no fuel, because of recent road or electricity disruptions.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the towns I saw were friendly, we have good memories of visiting the Australian outback. But there was an exception. At one particularly remote toilet stop in far Western NSW I saw someone repairing an EV charger, in a boarded up town with lots of drunk aboriginals. I’ve since learned the town features in reports about places with intractable drug and alcohol issues. They didn’t seem overtly hostile, but during the 5 minutes we stopped for a quick toilet break, two teenage boys did separate walk by reconnaissance of my 4WD. I can take a hint, they weren’t very subtle about what they were doing. But if an EV driver attempted my route, with all the big distances between outback towns, there aren’t a lot of other options for a recharge in places that remote.

The EV charger repair guy was happy. He was making a fortune being paid to repair that one EV charging station on a regular basis, he told me the kids kept vandalising it. He kept the back of his van locked while he was doing his repair. I did actually see one EV on my trip, heading in the opposite direction towards that town. Lets hope they got lucky.

Even in Sydney road quality seems to be deteriorating. I witnessed a respectable Darwin Award entry, council workers waste deep in rushing floodwaters in Sydney trying to clear the grating of a large blocked drain with a pry bar, during the middle of a deluge. The drains I saw exposed above the flood didn’t look well maintained, and more than one drain had blown out its grating and was gushing water, because the downstream pipe was blocked. I bet those workers I saw bashing the drain grating in the middle of a flood wished their council had spent more money on drain maintenance before it started raining, instead of squeezing the road maintenance budgets so they could blow taxpayer cash on climate posturing, or whatever other nonsense caught the attention of incompetent local politicians.

I think James Hansen got one thing right, 2023 will be looked back on as a turning point, but it won’t be the year of children leading the global authoritarian climate revolution James Hansen seems to want. Instead, especially if we actually did breach 1.5C for much of this year. 2023 will be looked back on as the year the wild exaggerations of climate alarmists were exposed, the year people realised they should just go about their daily lives, do what is right for their families, buy a rugged automobile which can handle our poorly maintained roads, vote for politicians who get the basics right, like road maintenance, and ignore the perennially wrong climate prophets of doom.

If you think I’m exaggerating about the state of Australia’s roads, the following is a video I shot earlier this year on the Fraser Coast. Do any of these roads look EV ready?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

This is an excellent article:

Human beings are an adaptable species – which is fortunate, given that modern-day politicians incessantly foist new laws, rules and regulations on us.

In few areas of public policy is this more exhaustive than net zero. So we’ve grown accustomed to paying 50p for a plastic bag in some supermarkets. Driving in many cities now brings an array of charges, and that’s before bewildered motorists accidentally stray into a new bus or cycle lane, yet still we just shrug.

As of October this year, single-use plastic straws, bowls, trays and cutlery have been banned, but seldom do we complain.

And the wider green drive is paying dividends, of sorts. This week it was reported Britain has become the first major economy to halve its carbon emissions. Curiously, the news has not been widely shared nor lauded by the nation’s usually noisy eco-fanatics. Perhaps it doesn’t fit their common refrain that the Government “isn’t doing anything” about climate change.

Some people may think this reduction has been painless, but they’d be wrong. While the minor inconveniences can be downplayed, the costs should not be.

Green levies now make up a significant proportion of energy bills. Restrictions on new North Sea developments and a windfall tax are likely to have combined to drive up energy bills further at a time when the post-Covid rebound and war in Ukraine had already sent them soaring.

Progress on environmental aims may have been aided by the failure of successive governments to build homes and lockdowns, but those policies have themselves wrought enormous harm on the UK economy.

It has, however, been relatively straightforward. The decarbonisation of power and offshoring of heavy industry, for instance, accelerated an existing trend. The consumption of intermittent renewables was able to increase because fossil fuels could be relied on to provide baseload power.

The next half will be much more difficult, clobbering the economy and imposing massive costs on the consumer. Conscious that the public’s patience may begin to wear thin, the Prime Minister earlier this year promised a more “pragmatic, proportionate and realistic approach” to net zero. This primarily involved pushing back the deadline for the end of new petrol and diesel cars and the phasing out of gas boilers – but even the new 2035 date will be a stretch.

Despite the subsidies and the exemptions from resident parking permits or congestion charges, only a small proportion of vehicles in the UK are currently electric.

The charging infrastructure is hopelessly inadequate and battery duration is prohibitive for many. Meanwhile, the Government is shovelling money towards homeowners to boost heat pump uptake, yet is falling far short of its annual installation targets.

The bigger problem is that Rishi Sunak has far less wriggle room than he might have voters believe.

If the 2050 net zero target – the most consequential economic policy decision for generations, made by a piece of secondary legislation without a proper parliamentary debate – wasn’t restrictive enough, the Government is obliged to set binding, five-year carbon budgets which cap the maximum amount of emissions allowed during each period. Ministers face legal action if they fail to do enough to reach them, as judged in part by the apparatchiks on the Climate Change Committee (CCC) quango.

We are currently on the fourth (2023-27) carbon budget, which requires a 52pc fall in emissions compared with 1990. This might be achievable, but the fifth and sixth (involving a 77pc fall by 2037) surely won’t be, at least not without a walloping blow to our economy, freedoms and living standards.

In its sixth Carbon Budget Paper, the CCC, which ostensibly provides advice to the Government but often acts more like an eco-activist NGO, advises homeowners to turn on their heating in the afternoon, so that they can turn it off again in the evening when demand for electricity is higher. Rishi Sunak was ridiculed when, in September, he announced there will be no tax on meat nor new levies on aviation, as though such ideas were preposterous.

And yet they’re right there in this document, which says that around 10pc of emissions saving will come from “changes that reduce the demand for carbon-intensive activity” – particularly “an accelerated shift in diets away from meat and dairy products… slower growth in flights, and reductions in travel demand”. Will the public tolerate such radical changes to their lifestyles, ones that may not even be necessary?

Few would challenge the need to decarbonise, but our current, highly dirigiste approach will be economically ruinous. There will be huge waste, with the taxpayer footing the bill: when the Government asked the economist Dieter Helm to look into what it was doing to meet the net zero target, he concluded that up to £100bn had been squandered, largely from investment in technologies which hadn’t matured to the point where they were cheaper than the alternative.

The market discovery process will be shut down, meaning costs will inevitably rise. Regulators may be captured, rents will be sought, and poor decisions will be maintained long after it is clear they are irrational.

Responding to the news that the UK had halved its emissions, Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho hailed the country as a “world leader” in tackling climate change. This might be true, but is not something to trumpet given we are responsible for less than 1pc of global emissions.

It would be far more reassuring to learn that the main polluters – China, whose emissions are up nearly 50pc since 1990, or the US, or India – were leading the charge. But why would they row behind an agenda at such speed it might damage their domestic interests? Why, indeed, are we?

Germany is emitting 666 million tons of CO2, the US 5,057 million tons. We shouldn’t take heart from going further than other G20 nations: we should slow down.