From the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

“Net Zero” — That’s the two-word slogan that has been adopted as the official goal of every virtuous state or country for decarbonizing its energy system. The “net” part is backhanded recognition that some parts of the energy system (like maybe air travel or steelmaking) may never be fully de-carbonized. Thus some kind of offsets or indulgences may need to be accepted to claim achievement of the goal.

But the “net” thing is not for the easy parts of decarbonization. And by the easy parts, I mean the generation of electricity, and the powering of anything that can be run on electricity or batteries. In electrifiable parts of the energy system, there is to be no tolerance for “net”; only “zero emissions” will do. The official line is that zero emissions electricity is easy and cheap because it can be provided by the wind and sun.

The official line is wrong. As the build-out of these wind and solar generation systems continues to progress, it has become increasingly obvious that there will never be a zero-emissions electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun.

The reason should be obvious to everyone although, for some reason I cannot understand, it is not. The reason is that the intermittency of wind and solar generators means that they require full back-up from some other source. But the back-up source will by hypothesis be woefully underused and idle most of the time so long as most of the electricity comes from wind and sun. No back-up source can possibly be economical under these conditions, and therefore nobody will develop and deploy such a source.

This issue has already arisen in many places, as increasing generation from wind and sun has put natural gas power plants into back-up mode, running half or less of the time.

Now consider how things are supposed to proceed as we move to zero-emissions electricity. First, we build more and more wind and solar facilities. Second, we disallow natural gas or any other hydrocarbon fuel as the back-up. Now the back-up must itself be zero-emissions, and also dispatchable. In New York, our regulators have devised the acronym DEFR (“Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource”). Several possibilities have been suggested as the DEFR, the main ones being nuclear, hydrogen, and batteries. All possibilities for the DEFR that have been suggested share the characteristic that they don’t exist today at anything close to the scale that will be needed to fully back up an electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun. In other words, somebody will have to make a huge investment in one or more of these things on a grand scale if we are to have an electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun.

Given New York’s political environment, the regulators who have raised the need for the DEFR have generally buried their discussion of the subject deep in lengthy documents. Roger Caiazza, the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, has done yeoman’s work in digging up and highlighting these items. Roger has created a “Dispatchable Emissions Free Resource Page” where he has accumulated the key information.

For example, we have the Scoping Plan of the Climate Action Council, which Roger describes as “the ‘official’ Hochul Administration strategy description of the Climate Act transition.” The document is some 800+ pages of text plus appendices. Somehow, Roger made it to page 49 of Appendix G, where he found this quote:

During a week with persistently low solar and wind generation, additional firm zero-carbon resources, beyond the contributions of existing nuclear, imports, and hydro, are needed to avoid a significant shortfall; Figure 34 demonstrates the system needs during this type of week. During the first day of this week, most of the short-duration battery storage is quickly depleted, and there are still several days in which wind and solar are not sufficient to meet demand. A zero-carbon firm resource becomes essential to maintaining system reliability during such instances. In the modeled pathways, the need for a firm zero-carbon resource is met with hydrogen-based resources; ultimately, this system need could be met by a number of different emerging technologies.

Here is the Figure 34 that they mention:

It may be a little hard to read, but the dark gray is what they label the “Zero-Carbon Firm Capacity Need.” The width of that dark gray section gets up to well over 20 GW during the illustrated low wind/sun week. For reference, New York State’s current average electricity usage is well less than 20 GW. Meanwhile, even during this low wind/sun week there are times when this DEFR is not called on at all, and other times when it is called on for only a few GW.

So without saying so in as many words, they are telling us that as part of a predominantly wind/sun system we will need to build DEFRs of capacity equal to or greater than our entire current average electricity usage. But if the electricity system is powered mainly by wind and sun, then by definition the DEFRs are only going to operate a minority of the time. We will have now built an entire fleet of new nuclear power plants capable of fulfilling our entire peak electricity demand. Or maybe it’s an entire fleet of new hydrogen power plants of same capacity, or an entire fleet of grid-scale batteries of same capacity, only to keep them idle most of the time.

These are extremely capital-intensive facilities, which can only hope to be economical if they are operated to as much of their capacity as possible. Instead the proposal is that will be intentionally kept idle most of the time.

Who is going to make the investment in these DEFRs that will be kept mostly idle. Certainly, no private investors will do it without enormous government subsidies.

And if we were to build an entire system of these DEFRs capable of supplying all of our electricity needs to back up worst-case wind/sun lulls, wouldn’t it make far more sense just to leave out the wind and solar generation and go with the DEFRs all the time? Of course it would.

At some point this is going to become too obvious to ignore.

From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

A recent post at The Daily Climate news website, titled “Op-ed: People need shelter from climate change — their health hangs in the balance,” claims that climate change is making it harder for people to stay safe from the elements and extreme weather, and that federal housing policy is how to fix that problem. This is false on multiple fronts. Climate change is not causing an increase in dangerous conditions for people, and federal policies that involve subsidized housing will not protect homeless people from weather threats.

The authors assert that vice president Kamala Harris’ proposals to expand federal housing policies, including using federal funds to build housing and down payment assistance, “is actually a climate change adaptation policy” because people need shelter from extreme weather. The Daily Climate refers to this summer as the warmest on record and hypes an early start to the Atlantic hurricane season, asserting that “it is growing increasingly difficult to weather the many different catastrophes — a critical threat to health — that climate change is throwing at us.”

Continuing, they write that it is also becoming more difficult for Americans “to take refuge from climate threats at home, as the cost of housing keeps rising.”

They point out correctly that homeless people are more likely to become ill and die from exposure to extreme high temperatures because of a lack of shelter and air conditioning. This, however, is not because of climate change. In fact, none of the things this article asserts as threats to American families because of climate change are genuine.

Regarding the “hottest on record” claims, as always, it depends on what record you look at. As Climate Realism points out here, here, and here, these claims are at best speculative, even though alarmists present them as definite. Prior to satellites, there are almost no records outside of the U.S. and Europe. We are forced to rely on proxy data, which again are location-specific, but even so, many of them indicate that there were several periods in just the last 10,000 years that were warmer than today.

Regarding hurricanes, there was a single early powerful hurricane that came outside the normal window, but the rest of the season has been remarkably quiet. Fearmongering on hurricanes this year, as with many previous above average hurricane season predictions in the past, is falling extremely flat. Global tropical cyclone accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) is well within normal bounds this year, according to available data.

But the major point of the article is that extreme weather is posing an ever greater threat to an increasing number of people, and especially American families, than before, and this is simply not true.

While it is true that people who are homeless or who don’t have adequate housing and electricity are more susceptible to temperature related illnesses and death, heat and even more so cold, incidences of of people dying from those conditions has declined rapidly around the world over the past hundred plus years of modest warming. It is especially telling that the article focuses on heat, when it is cold that is the real killer. A 2021 Lancet study found that overall deaths due to extreme temperatures have declined in large part due to a massive drop in cold-related deaths. (See figure below)

Likewise, deaths from climate-related disasters in general has also declined. (See figure below)

Ironically, The Daily Climate post complains about the high costs of utility bills, and therefore air conditioning and heating, which are becoming increasingly expensive precisely because of the fossil fuel policies that these same alarmists promote.

Studies have found that Biden’s EPA rules and regulations targeting power plants are expected to cause instability in the electric grid and lead to massive blackouts, because the expectations of the policies are not technologically sound, or even possible, and will only lead to a reduction of power supply. Wind and solar are not dispatchable power, and battery technology is not anywhere near scalable for what is needed. This causes higher prices and less power reliability, which won’t help anyone trying to handle even natural weather extremes. Indeed, real world data suggests that Biden’s energy and climate policies have driven the recent large increases in energy costs across the board, impacting poorer households the most.

Additionally, the idea that federal subsidized housing will help decrease housing prices in general is economically illiterate at best. Policies like low-income housing tax credits have resulted in higher housing costs and fewer choices, and Obama’s Housing First programs have resulted in more homeless people, not fewer.

Handing even more power to government and more subsidized housing will not solve the problem of homelessness. It’s been done for decades and the issue has only become more severe, it has not improved. Fossil fuels for electricity and materials have made human civilizations far more resilient in the face of the fickle nature of the weather, and as long as markets for energy are not limited or constrained by government climate policy, they will continue to do so. All of this is true regardless of climate change, but even on that point, The Daily Climate missed the mark.

Can’t see the fishing nets that killed the dugongs, for the naturally occurring dioxins that made media headlines, is what I might have said on radio back more than two decades.   At the time, it caused me much grief because the Executive Director of Canegrowers Ltd didn’t want his Environment Manager maligning the fishing industry who it seemed were happy for the sugarcane farmers to take the rap for the dead dugongs.

It is the case that I was Environment Manager for Queensland Canegrowers Ltd from 1998 through until 2003 – and that I did nothing about all the agricultural pesticides.   That has been a recent accusation across at my official Facebook page.

I was employed to implement the findings of a three-volume audit of the sugar industry and its environmental impacts.  I got off to a good start, but in 2001, with the launch of the WWF Save the Reef campaign everything was blown off course.   I’ve written about that before, including how it begun here:https://jennifermarohasy.com/2018/11/theprinceandhisdumptrucks/

I first became aware of the specific issue of pesticide in dugongs in August 1998, long before the launch of that campaign.

A senior officer with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) phoned me with the news that a soon-to-be-published research study had found that elevated levels of pesticide residue, most likely from cane farming, were accumulating in the fat tissue of dugongs. Media headlines followed, including ‘Pesticide in reef creatures and cane burning link with dioxin in dugong’.

I obtained a copy of the study and found it was primarily an analysis of the type and quantity of dioxins found in the fat tissue of dugong carcasses that had been killed in fishing nets. Dioxins are a group of organochlorine compounds commonly associated with industrial waste incineration. The research paper made reference to a different study that had analyzed the dioxins found in soils under sugarcane cultivation and commented that the cane-land soils and dugong fat samples both had elevated levels of the same type of dioxins.

Concerned by this news, I contacted a dioxin expert at the University of Queensland. Dr Brian Stanmore informed me that the type of dioxin considered by the GBRMPA to be elevated in the dugongs was common and the least toxic of all dioxins. Furthermore, Dr Stanmore indicated that the level of dioxins found in the dugongs was less than the national average in people in the United States. He commented that ‘it looks like the dugong is better off than we are’.

The GBRMPA study clearly stated, ‘All (dugong) carcasses were in good condition at the time of sampling. All animal deaths were confirmed or suspected (fishing) net drowning.’

However, instead of focusing on net fishing practices, the GBRMPA subsequently provided funding for a full investigation by the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology (NRCET) into the likely origin of the dioxin considered to be at elevated levels in the dugong carcasses, including possible links with sugarcane production.

Two years later, the NRCET investigation concluded that the dioxin of concern to the GBRMPA was common in soils along the entire Queensland coastline, including in regions beyond sugarcane cultivation.  Analyses of dated marine sediment cores indicated that the chemical was present prior to European settlement in Queensland. In other words, the dioxin is a naturally occurring organochlorine and not a pesticide residue. There are, apparently, many naturally occurring non-toxic dioxins.

That has never made media headlines.

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You can read more of this story in the piece I wrote for the IPA Review back when they regularly published me, the article is called ‘Deceit in the Name of Conservation’.