But absent from the budget documents was any meaningful new spending on the climate crisis. Instead, dozens of climate-related initiatives, including programmes in the Emissions Reductions Plan and funding for data and evidence specialists were subject to sweeping cuts.

Notice how the critics are all so vague. Their big fear, and worst threat, is some unfashionable place called “backwards”:

The Labour opposition called the budget a “catastrophe” that was “taking us backwards”.

For some reason the opposition did not say “Lord help us, The NZ government will warm the world!” Mostly because it sounds too stupid to lay the point of all these policies right out there. I mean, as if they can say that cancelling the Māori knowledge-based approaches to agricultural emissions will cause more floods in 2070?

And in the end a warmer world isn’t exactly scary to New Zealanders like Ebola, poverty  or an armed invasion. Be afraid, you’ll get more beach weather!

The awful truth is that climate policies are just a fashion contest, so when they are taken away, the main downside is namecalling and a curse on your grandchildren. Like making witches angry or something?

Green party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick described the government as a “coalition of cowards” that was allowing the climate crisis to “rage on unchallenged” and whose attack on the climate would ripple through future generations. “The other day, government parties said, ‘drill, baby, drill,’ and today, they may as well have said, ‘burn, baby, burn’,” Swarbrick said…

Getting to the nitty gritty, this all sounds good. The new right leaning coalition has found good savings in troughing bureaucracies and flag waving green clubs. Amazing how fast these things breed:

• • • $10million of funding has been scaled back for the Accelerator Wood Processing Growth Fund which supports wood processing capacity.
    • MBIE’s Circular Economy and Bioeconomy Strategy work is being stopped ‘as it is considered a low-value programme when compared with other work on climate change.’
    • $38 million is being cut from MBIE’s Energy portfolio programmes, including scaling down the Community Renewable Energy fund, and the Support for Energy Education in Communities Programme. It also includes discontinuing work on the Energy Emissions Reporting Scheme and cutting funding for small-scale distributed renewable energy and demand response systems.
    • $10million is being cut from MBIE’s Just Transitions programme.
    • Funding for the Climate Change Commission is being decreased by $15 million, including axing funding for the Commission’s agricultural emissions policy advisory function.
    • The budget includes a $35million reduction in climate change programmes including reducing funding for:
    • the Climate Change Development Fund
    • Climate Resilience for Māori initiative
    • Climate Change Chief Executives Board
    • implementation of the Carbon Neutral Government Programme
    • Climate Data Infrastructure
    • Enabling a Scaled-up, High Quality Voluntary Carbon Market
    • Cuts are being made to evidence and data functions, with less spending on consultants, external agencies, and specialists that supply evidence and data services ‘including updates to environmental standards, monitoring, reporting, policy work and science assurance.’ 
    • Additionally, as was well signalled early by Government, the budget confirms the axing of the Clean vehicle discount, saving $10 million. 

The new government will instead toss more funds at “climate resilience” and “disaster response”, which means adapting to the climate they already have.

But there is so much further to go: $2.6 billion of climate initiatives will roll over from previous the Climate Emergency Response Fund (CERF) set up by the previous government. So there will still be money wasted on EV chargers, electric buses, emissions measurement schemes, and foreign aid to dictators. It will take years to unwind the climate grift.

And when the Coalition are asked what they are doing for the climate, they point to the “climate resilience” funds instead of calling it pagan witchcraft and asking for hard observable evidence that CO2 causes any problem at all.  Have those UN committees ever been audited? Let’s set up a team to do that. I mean, if we care about the environment and the third world, we need climate models that work, right? No more of these unverified guesses.

Image by Ondřej Šponiar from Pixabay

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

The media bias in favor of industrial wind turbines is a sight to behold. Simple reporting of the facts, from costs to environmental tradeoffs, could inform the public and voters to quite possibly eliminate the government gravy train that disadvantages virtually all of us. That is, everyone except for wind developers and other constituencies of the Climate Industrial Complex.

It is uncommon to see a break in the narrative of “the energy transition.” This was recently done at E&E News’s Energywire, “‘Wake effect’ could drain 38% of offshore wind power, study says“. This piece by Heather Richards (May 5, 2024) is worth revisiting at length. Key quotations follow:

The findings from national lab and university researchers upend assumptions about how turbines interact with each other.

Wind turbines off the East Coast might significantly drain energy from each other, lowering the power output of an offshore farm by up to 38 percent, according to a new study that challenges early assumptions about the nascent industry’s electricity contribution.

The findings add to growing research about the “wake effect,” which is when offshore turbines in close proximity affect each other’s energy output.

Researchers from the University of Colorado and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that entire wind farms can impede neighboring projects, decreasing the power production of adjacent farms by up to 15 percent under some conditions.

———————

In the research paper, “New offshore wind turbines can take away energy from existing ones,” Science Direct reports on the findings, with the authors offering apologetics (“We need a diverse mix of clean energy sources to meet the demand and decarbonize the grid”) and (“With better predictions of wind energy, we can achieve more reliance on renewable energy”). The article states:

In a new paper published March 14 in the journal Wind Energy Science, a team led by Dave Rosencrans, a doctoral student, and Julie K. Lundquist, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, estimate that offshore wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean region, where the U.S. plans to build large wind farms, could take away wind from other turbines nearby, potentially reducing the farms’ power output by more than 30%.

Accounting for this so-called “wake effect,” the team estimated that the proposed wind farms could still supply approximately 60% of the electricity demand of the New England grid, which covers Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

“The U.S. is planning to build thousands of offshore wind turbines, so we need to predict when those wakes will be expensive and when they have little effect,” said Lundquist, who is also a fellow at CU Boulder’s Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute.

When wind passes through turbines, the ones at the front, or upstream, extract some energy from the wind. As a result, the wind slows down and becomes more turbulent behind the turbines. This means the turbines downstream get slower wind, sometimes resulting in lower power generation.

The wake effect is particularly prominent offshore, because there are no houses or trees that stir up the air, which helps dissipate the wakes, said Rosencrans, the paper’s first author.

Using computer simulations and observational data of the atmosphere, the team calculated that the wake effect reduces total power generation by 34% to 38% at a proposed wind farm off the East Coast. Most of the reduction comes from wakes formed between turbines within a single farm.

But under certain weather conditions, wakes could reach turbines as far as 55 kilometers downwind and affect other wind farms. For example, during hot summer days, the airflow over the cool sea surface tends to be relatively stable, causing wakes to persist for longer periods and propagate over longer distances.

There is another problem for offshore wind ….

“Unfortunately, summer is when there’s a lot of electrical demand,” Rosencrans said. “We showed that wakes are going to have a significant impact on power generation. But if we can predict their effects and anticipate when they are going to happen, then we can manage them on the electrical grid.”

Compared with energy sources derived from fossil fuels, wind and solar power tend to be variable, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. This variability creates a challenge for grid operators, said Lundquist. The power grid is a complex system that requires a perfect balance of supply and demand in real-time. Any imbalances could lead to devastating blackouts, like what happened in Texas in 2021 when power outages killed nearly 250 people.

To better understand how the wind blows in the proposed wind farm area, Lundquist’s team visited islands off the New England coast and installed a host of instruments last December as part of the Department of Energy’s Wind Forecast Improvement Project 3. The project is a collaboration of researchers from CU Boulder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and several other national laboratories.

The instruments, including weather monitors and radar sensors, will collect data for the next year or more. Previously, offshore wind power prediction models usually relied on intermittent data from ships and satellite observations. The hope is that with continuous data directly from the ocean, scientists can improve prediction models and better integrate more offshore wind energy into the grid.

Or not. Wind is the perfect imperfect energy for the grid, and offshore wind more so.

The Heartland Institute

Hurricane Season 2024 officially kicks off Saturday, June 1 and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts a more-active-than-normal season in the Atlantic. The agency is “85% certain” that we’ll have 17-25 named storms, 8-13 hurricanes, and 4-7 major hurricanes this year.

Episode #112 of The Climate Realism Show will feature two of America’s best hurricane experts — meteorologists Joe Bastardi and Stanley Goldenberg — to talk about these predictions, and what it will mean for the East and Gulf coasts of the United States.

Tune for our live-stream of the show at 1 p.m. ET (noon CT) to listen to these experts, and leave your own questions for them in the chat. The Climate Realism Show Host Anthony Watts and regular panelists H. Sterling Burnett and Linnea Lueken will also cover, as usual, the Crazy Climate News of the week.