The Latte Fallacy: German Switch to Renewables Likely to Be Expensive
By Alexander Neubacher
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government insists that electricity bills will only grow modestly as a result of the nuclear energy phase-out. Experts, however, disagree, with many pointing to Berlin’s massive subsidies for solar power as the culprit. (Spiegel)
BRADLEY: Renewable energy running scared
This may be the beginning of the end of the energy welfare state
By Robert L. Bradley Jr.
The ethanol, wind and solar industries are running scared from a House proposal to reduce federal subsidies for renewable energy by 25 percent for fiscal 2012. A surefire sign of the trouble with big government is that you run out of other people’s money.
The environmental left is running scared, too, at least when it comes to wind and solar. Federal cutbacks, leftists fear, will shrink the business lobby needed for their grand energy-transformation plan. In the parlance of political economy, the teetotalers need the help of bootleggers to sell their message to the voters.
U.S. rules seen shutting 20 percent of coal power capacity
The U.S. power industry will probably retire up to 20 percent of the country’s coal-fired electricity generating capacity this decade, due to proposed federal environmental regulations, consulting firm ICF International said in a report on Wednesday.
Fairfax, Virginia-based ICF, which helps utilities meet environmental rules, among other things, said grid operators and regulators in charge of reliability will have to work with environmental regulators to ensure the system remains reliable as 30 to 50 gigawatts of coal-fired generation are shut. (Reuters)
Posted in Coal, Energy, EPA, Regulation
Making Heat Waves Deadly Again
by Dennis T. Avery
CHURCHVILLE,VA—This last heat wave has been sweltering, but that happens. It was even hotter in 1934, 1911 and other “hot” summers in the past. That’s not extreme weather, it’s “normally abnormal”.
The benchmark to remember is that 12,000 people died in the heat wave of 1926! Newspapers as far flung as Australia reported U.S. babies “died like flies” in the Chicago ghetto in 1911. With no power for air conditioning, today’s far-larger urban population and hotter urban heat islands might have suffered 50,000 deaths last week!
Posted in Activists, Energy, Health care, Misanthropy
A Scientific Reply to Specific Claims and Statements in EPA’s Proposed NESHAP Rule, Focusing on Mercury Emission Issues
Written by Willie Soon, PhD
Important new scientific report challenges EPA claims about mercury risks from power plants Real threat is from power plant closings, soaring electricity rates and lost jobs. (SPPI)
In fact there is no known biologically plausible mechanism by which nonionizing radio waves of low energy can disrupt DNA and lead to cancer.
Mobile use doesn’t alter kids’ cancer risk: study
Children and adolescents who use mobile phones are at no bigger risk of developing brain cancer than those who do not use them, according to a study of patients aged 7 to 19.
The research, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on Wednesday and partially funded by mobile phone operators, addresses concerns that children may be more vulnerable to health risks from electromagnetic radiation from cellphones.
Children’s nervous systems are still developing, and there are fears that their smaller head circumferences could allow radiation to penetrate deeper into their brains.
But the study — the first to look specifically at children and the risk of cancer from cellphones — found that brain tumor patients were no more likely to be regular phone users than control subjects who did not have cancer. (Reuters)
How to Clean Up a Broken CFL Bulb
By Greg Pollowitz
From our friends at the Media Research Center. Good stuff:
How It Got So Hot … How It Got So Humid … How Cooling May Have Played A Role
Written by Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
The southern plains drought, followed the second strongest La Niña (behind only 1917/18) according to the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), an atmospheric pressure based measure (standardized Darwin, Australia versus Tahiti surface pressure). Positive values are La Niña, negative El Niños. The April to April SOI showed the 1917/18 peak and 2010/11 close behind. (SPPI)
Posted in Climate
The rise of the eco-imperialists
Tim Black
Why the United Nations is wrong to depict everything from war to famine as a ‘climate change issue’. (spiked)
Posted in Climate change, IPCC, UN
Junior maintains his obsession with “decarbonization”, which, frankly, is about the most stupid ambition on the planet.
The ostensible “reason” for this ambition is that carbon dioxide emission from carbon fuel combustion will cause catastrophic global warming.
Even a casual glance at the real world demonstrates such fears to be horse feathers. The world has supposedly warmed as much as three-fourths of one degree (C or 0.75 K, if you prefer) since the late 1800s with changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide responsible for some or none of this.
By comparison, Boulder, Colorado (home of UCAR and Junior too, I believe) is at an elevation of some 5,000 feet which means should Junior visit the beach he’ll experience well over 10 times as much warming just from atmospheric lapse (average adiabatic lapse is about 2 °C/1,000′). Hikers experience far more aggressive environmental temperature changes going up and down ridges and valleys than the world experiences from changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and I doubt this induces any fear. During most day/night cycles people and critters experience multi-degree temperature changes, as they do seasonally, about which the world and its denizens are largely untroubled.
The rational thing is to utilize abundant resources – specifically our carbon dense fuels – while they are of value (this could change due to falling population, increasing efficiency, discovery of cheaper alternative sources or any combination of external factors). What is not rational is to invent scary “reasons” we should waste societal funds and effort to not utilize abundant resources.
A truly honest broker would bluntly inform politicians they are being utterly stupid even giving a moment’s attention to “global warming” (there, there, it happens every day and it hasn’t hurt you). An honest broker would tell politicians that artificially inflating the cost of energy harms everyone but most particularly the disadvantaged and their moral obligation is to facilitate the use of abundant resources to improve the lot of everyone.
But I can’t see Junior doing that – he’s all starry-eyed over “decarbonization” and to Hell with the little people. At least he’s honest about that.
Things More Worrisome than AGW: Exasperated Alabama Coal Owner Tells the Feds – “I’m Just Quitting”
Source: The Blaze Blog
Ronnie Bryant was vastly outnumbered.
Leaning against a wall during a recent Birmingham, Alabama, public hearing, Bryant listened to an overflow crowd pepper federal officials with concerns about businesses polluting the drinking water and causing cases of cancer.
After two hours, Bryant—a coal mine owner from Jasper—had heard enough and, in a moment being described as “right out of Atlas Shrugged,” took his turn at the microphone: (SPPI)
Peter Foster: Keystone versus green Keynesianism
Keystone jobs should matter more to Obama than green theology
Posted in Activists, Crazy carbon schemes, Energy, Regulation
Wind Turbines and Whooping Cranes: Going Soft on Soft Energy (politically correct environmental damage)
by Tom Tanton
The Federal agency charged with protecting endangered species under the Endangered Species Act is evaluating a plan to allow a 200-mile wide corridor for wind energy development from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The draft land-based guidelines–made ostensibly to avoid, minimize, and compensate for effects to fish, wildlife, and their habitats” — represent one more example of overt and destructive favoritism for an industry that already benefits from fat tax subsidies and mandated market purchases. (MasterResource)
Eco activists detained at wind energy test site
Police in Denmark detained six environmental activists on Tuesday protesting the felling of trees in a forest to make room for a research center for wind turbines. (Reuters)
Waxman calls for a climate change re-education camp(aign)
By Elmer Beauregard
Henry Waxman, who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday wrote a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, wanting him to launch a national climate change re-education camp(aign).
Here are some highlights. (M4GW)
Posted in Activists, Climate change, Propaganda
Can Prof Rajendra Pachauri really survive ‘Glaciergate’? – Telegraph
The head of the UN panel on climate change, Prof Rajendra Pachauri, is still adamant that one famously exaggerated report should not cost him his job.
…
Few areas of science are as bitterly contested as that of man-made climate change….Prof Pachauri is crystal clear that the IPCC’s role is to advise governments on “policy relevance”, not “policy prescription”)…
Pachauri has come forearmed with a copy of the IPCC press release that accompanied the report on renewables. It makes plain, as he shows me, that the 77 per cent figure is just the highest of a range of possibilities that the IPCC scientists considered. In the very next paragraph of the release is the lowest figure: 15 per cent.
(Tom Nelson)
Posted in Activists, Climate change, Propaganda
Seeing the wood for the trees: New study shows sheep in tree-ring records
Nibbling by herbivores can have a greater impact on the width of tree rings than climate, new research has found. The study, published this week in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology, could help increase the accuracy of the tree ring record as a way of estimating past climatic conditions.
Many factors in addition to climate are known to affect the tree ring record, including attack from parasites and herbivores, but determining how important these other factors have been in the past is difficult.
Working high in the mountains of southern Norway, midway between Oslo and Bergen, a team from Norway and Scotland fenced off a large area of mountainside and divided it into different sections into each of which a set density of domestic sheep was released every summer.
After nine summers, cross sections of 206 birch trees were taken and tree ring widths were measured. Comparing these with local temperature and the numbers of sheep at the location where the tree was growing allowed the team to disentangle the relationship between temperature and browsing by sheep and the width of tree rings.
According to lead author Dr James Speed of the NTNU Museum of Natural History and Archaeology: “We found tree ring widths were more affected by sheep than the ambient temperature at the site, although temperatures were still visible in the tree ring records. This shows that the density of herbivores affects the tree ring record, at least in places with slow-growing trees.” (EurekAlert)
On Green Hell Blog On JunkScience.com On Corporate Energy Subsidies
