Can Solar & Wind Fix Everything (e.g., Climate Change) with a battery break-through?

[Checkthisout]

I see the people giving you marching orders are having a contest for worst video thumbnail.

 

[aenyc]

Tracking The Demise Of The U.S. Green Energy Transition​

We’re coming up on three and a half years into the Biden presidency — a presidency which from the outset promised an “all of government” regulatory onslaught to force a transition away from fossil fuels and to “green” energy. And the regulatory onslaught has indeed come forth. But how about the actual transition in energy use? Not so much.

Let’s have a round-up of some recent data points.

On the regulatory onslaught front, on March 7, 2024 Thomas Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research put out a list of “200 Ways the Biden Administration and Democrats Have Made it Harder to Produce Oil & Gas.” The list is chronological, beginning with Executive Orders that Biden issued on his first day in office (January 20, 2021) and continuing right up to the date of the post. Yes there is some duplication and overlap in the list (e.g., separately listing multiple steps toward approval of a single regulation); but even with that, the sheer number of efforts to restrict, hamper, harass and extort fossil fuel producers is breathtaking. You will probably remember most of this stuff, but it’s remarkable to see it all put together in one place. By all means look through the full list, but meanwhile here is a small sample of the more significant items:

• Item 1, January 20, 2021: “[C]anceling the Keystone XL pipeline.”
• Item 2, also January 20, 2021: “ssuing a moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”
  [*]Item 5, January 27, 2021: “{I}ssu[ing] an executive order announcing a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands.”
  [*]Item 10, also January 27, 2021: By the same Executive Order, “promoting ‘ending international financing of carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy while simultaneously advancing sustainable development and a green recovery.’”
  [*]Item 14, February 19, 2021: “[R]ejoin[ing] the Paris Climate Agreement.”
  [*]Item 24, April 22, 2024: “ssu[ing] the U.S. International Climate Finance Plan to funnel international financing toward green industries and away from oil and gas.”
  [*]Item 33, September 3, 2021: “ssu[ing] a proposed rule that would update the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards for Model Years 2024–2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks to increase fuel economy regulations on passenger cars and light vehicles.”
  [*]Item 48, November 12, 2021: “[Issuing] New Source Review . . . regulations target[ing] new, modified, and reconstructed oil and natural gas sources, and would require states to reduce methane emissions from hundreds of thousands of existing sources nationwide for the first time.”
  [*]Item 66, February 18, 2022: “[Updating policy] for assessing proposed natural gas pipelines, adding new considerations for landowners, environmental justice communities, and other factors. In a separate but related decision, the commission also laid out a framework for evaluating projects’ greenhouse gas emissions.”
  [*]Item 75, March 21, 2022: “The SEC [issues a] proposed rule [that] would require public companies to disclose greenhouse gas emissions.”
  [*]Item 95, April 21, 2022: Climate Czar John Kerry announces, “We have to put the industry on notice: You’ve got six years, eight years, no more than 10 years or so, within which you’ve got to come up with a means by which you’re going to capture, and if you’re not capturing, then we have to deploy alternative sources of energy.”
  [*]Item 105, June 8, 2022: “President Biden’s Interior Department announced it will reduce the fees on renewable projects on federal lands after announcing recently that royalty rates and rents would increase as much as 50% for oil and gas projects on federal lands.”
  [*]Item 139, January 17, 2023: “Biden appointee [Richard Trumka] proposes ban on gas stoves.”
  [*]Item 152, April 12, 2023: “[Issuing] new rules to force electric Vehicles on Americans. The New York Times notes that EPA is releasing rules that are intended to ensure that electric cars represent between 54 and 60 percent of all new cars sold in the United States by 2030 and 64 to 67 percent by 2032—in 9 years.”
  [*]Item 153, April 12, 2023: “[Issuing] new GHG emissions regulations for heavy duty vehicles.”
  [*]Item 156, May 15, 2023: “EPA proposes new regulations requiring power plants to reduce GHG emissions and require carbon capture and sequestration or hydrogen co-firing even though these are uneconomic technologies.”
  [*]Item 167, August 1, 2023: “EPA proposes updated greenhouse gas reporting requirements for the oil and natural gas industry.”
  [*]Item 171, August 7, 2023: “Biden proposed 236-pages of revisions to NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) guidance to make it harder to permit any natural gas, oil, or coal project.”
  [*]Item 180, October 27, 2023: “A proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule on hydrofluoric-acid-based alkylation could spur a round of refinery closures as the cost of replacing hydrofluoric acid based alkylation with alternatives is extremely high.”
  [*]Item 193, January 26, 2024: “Biden halts permitting for new LNG export facilities.”
  

That’s only 20 of the 200. There are plenty of other significant ones that I skipped over.

At the same time, the Biden Administration has dramatically ramped up subsidies and other favors and incentives for so-called “green” energy. The badly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” of August 2022 alone contained over $400 billion of subsidies and handouts to the green energy industry.

So with the double whammy of endless restrictions and harassment of fossil fuel producers, and subsidies for the wind and sun, undoubtedly oil and gas production must be shrinking rapidly? Not at all. In fact, domestic production of both has just recently hit all-time records. Here is a chart of U.S. crude oil production from the EIA, with data through January 2024:


Production reached an all-time record of 13.29 million bbl/day in December 2023, before having a small down-tick in January. The current production level is well over double where it was when Barack Obama took office in 2009. You really have to hand it to these oil and gas producers for somehow getting around whatever the government throws at them.

 

[aenyc]

And here’s another chart from the same source showing natural gas production through December 2023:

From EIA: “U.S. natural gas production grew by 4% in 2023, or 5.0 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), to average 125.0 Bcf/d, according to our Natural Gas Monthly.” There had also been increases in 2023 and 2022.

Well, but surely the transition to electric vehicles is taking off? Maybe — but the latest data would seem to indicate that the electric vehicle market is suddenly in big trouble. For an overview, Robert Bryce has a long post at his Substack today, titled “Tesla In Turmoil: The EV Meltdown In 10 Charts.” You may know that Tesla has just announced that it is laying off 10% of its workforce. Bryce concludes: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it one more time: Electric vehicles are The Next Big Thing, and they always will be.”

Here’s a chart not from Bryce, but from Statista, on Tesla sales by quarter:


Does it seem that Tesla is going gangbusters? It does until you look closely. Tesla sold 485,000 cars in 4Q 2023, and only 387,000 in 1Q 2024. That’s rather a sudden and dramatic decline. Elsewhere in the EV biz, the story is the same. From Cox Automotive, April 11:

Sales [of EVs in the U.S.] in Q1 rose 2.6% year over year, but fell 15.2% compared to Q4 2023.

Do these declines represent a one-quarter blip, or an accelerating trend. I’m betting with Bryce that this is the trend. My prognosis is that the EV market is close to saturated. I have no interest in buying one of them, let alone paying a premium to do it. Do you? But meanwhile the large automakers (except Toyota) have all made big, big bets that the government can make its mandates stick. If consumers don’t go along, this could be the end of Ford and GM, let alone Audi, Mercedes and BMW. Tough luck, guys.

Our current rulers think that they have infinite ability to tell the people how to live, and infinite money to force the people to change their ways. They are wrong, and reality will catch up to them, if only gradually.

 

[svetz]

Opinion: KAIST has a good reputation, but some dislike them due to military ties and they have had retractions with dubious papers. So, believe it when you see it.

 

[aenyc]

Svetz, stop spewing would-be-could-be-maybe BS....
With current tech, BEV are completely unsustainable for a multitude of reasons already discussed ad infinium.


Sodium batteries have much less energy density that Lithium, as such they will never be suitable for any kind of EV application (Unless you are ok with 1/3 of the current mileage, lol)

Will Sodium Batteries Replace Lithium Batteries? - Lithium ion Battery Manufacturer and Supplier in China-DNK Power

Will sodium batteries replace lithium batteries? Explore their safety, cost, and performance advantages in energy storage.

www.dnkpower.com

Will Sodium Batteries Replace Lithium Batteries?​

NO, sodium batteries would not replace lithium batteries in short time. It is generally believed in the industry that sodium-ion batteries and lithium-ion batteries are COMPLEMENTARY to each other rather than substitutes. Due to the low energy density of sodium-ion batteries, they are more suitable for use in medium and low-speed electric vehicles and large-scale energy storage.

What are the main challenges for sodium-ion batteries

In the long run, there will be no shortage of lithium minerals, but it will still have a great impact on the industrial chain. Therefore, a response is needed.

www.tycorun.com

Conclusion​

From the performance point of view, the main weakness of sodium-ion batteries lies in energy density, but they are better in cost, low temperature, fast charging, and thermal stability. From the perspective of energy storage, sodium-ion batteries have advantages.

In addition, sodium-ion batteries can also be applied to electric vehicles with medium and low range (Golfcarts?). Before the mass production of sodium-ion batteries with higher energy density, the first generation of sodium-ion batteries can at least be able to get on the car with a battery mix-and-match scheme, so that sodium-ion batteries and lithium-ion batteries complement each other.

Disruption or hype: Are sodium-ion batteries catching up and replacing lithium-ion ones in EV?

In recent years, the popularity of sodium-ion batteries has suddenly risen. Chinese companies such as Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), Gotion Hi-Tech, EVE Energy and BYD are all engaging in researching sodium-ion batteries. CATL is even about to put them into mass production. Here are...

www.digitimes.com

Conclusion: Performance takes priority​

My conclusion is relatively pessimistic. I don't think sodium-ion batteries can replace lithium-ion batteries in electric cars alone or storage facilities for replacing lead-acid batteries. At most, it is a means of reducing cost, and it can be used in conjunction with lithium-ion batteries to reduce the cost of the entire battery pack.

An important point of view is that the core of the competition between power batteries must be performance rather than cost. It must be performance first and then cost reduction, rather than reducing cost first and then improving performance. Giving up performance just for cost is putting the cart before the horse.

 

[svetz]

 

[aenyc]

Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO2 Concentrations (eCO2)​

We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest research report Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO2 Concentrations (eCO2).

Despite many years of claims that increasing concentrations of CO2 are an “existential threat” to life on Earth, one cannot identify any harm that has been done. In fact, the only clear result of increasing CO2 has been an overall greening of the Earth and increasing productivity of agricultural and forest crops.

The evidence for greening of the Earth from eCO2 is now too obvious to deny. In recent years, some researchers have claimed that that nutritional values are negatively affected by elevated CO2 concentrations. Media promoters of climate alarmism have seized on these results to further demonize CO2.

In this paper we explain why the nutritional value of our more abundant crops can and will remain high as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase toward values more representative of those existing throughout most of Earth’s history.

While this is a somewhat technical report, it is a valuable tool for you to put in your quiver to use the next time you see increased CO2 being linked to declining nutrition.

https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Nutritive-Value-of-Plants-Growing-in-Enhanced-CO2-Concentrations-2024-04-22.pdf

 

[aenyc]

Climate worries are non-credible, luxury beliefs that harm civilization itself​

I live in a small village at the edge of lands surrounded by very harsh nature. Those who occupied these valleys in ages past lived ruthlessly dangerous lives, where starvation was a constant worry, the sea just as often nurtured as it took away, and the winters were long and perilous. Nowadays, while I’m walking the desolate mountains or admiring the fierce storms from inside my nice, sheltered existence, echoing in my head is Thomas Hobbes’s descriptions of man’s precivilizational life: “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In the 2020s, we live fairly comfortable lives here, my fellow villagers and I. Our hearths are warm, our command over economic goods excellent. We live long, safe lives where nobody starves and where almost nobody perishes in outbursts of nature’s wrath. We use machines—constructed far, far away using materials we don’t have, that run on fossil fuels that these lands don’t contain—to move away the snow that frequently and predictably lands on our doorsteps and otherwise would have made our roads impassable and our houses prisons. We use different machines—constructed far, far away using materials we don’t have, that run on fossil fuels that these lands don’t contain—to get ourselves out of our valley and transport goods and services back, including exotic fruits and vegetables that never grow here (certainly not in winter!).

It truly is fascinating to behold the astonishing things that globalized trade and capitalism can accomplish. Stepping back and thinking about the miracles of modern trade, innovation, and division of labor is so humbling.

Yet we well-off moderns worry about our collective existence to the point that kids have nightmares, and survey respondents overwhelmingly say climate change will end the human race. Something like one-third of young people say they don’t want kids for fear of worsening the climate condition or how they’d fare in that brave, new world. “Climate anxiety is widespread among youth,” reports National Geographic. “How can we help kids cope with ‘eco-anxiety’?” asks the British Broadcasting Corporation. The vast majority of respondents in a global ten thousand–person study published in the Lancet in 2021 admitted to being very or extremely worried. Vox writers worry about the ethics of raising children. A new study, reported on by Phys.org, pointed to how many young people won’t have kids because of climate change: it’d be unfair to “bring a child into the world,” who’d have to live with the constant “feeling of impending doom, every day, for their whole life,” says one interviewed would-be parent.

Many of my fellow villagers entertain all these global ideas—melting glaciers and parts per million–numbers, floods, and ethical dilemmas about us vulgar humans making earth inhospitable or uninhabitable.

It’s a strange thing to worry about obsessively while the vicious storm raging outside the double-glazed windows affects nothing about our food supply, electricity use, heating, or ability to participate in the global division of labor—whether in our offices or remotely via high-speed internet. It somehow seems contradictory to passionately rally against capitalism from the comforts of very capitalistically built and maintained houses, hotels, and pubs to inveigh against the burning of fossil fuels that literally keeps one alive.

It has me thinking about the action axiom, the starting point of Ludwig von Mises’s praxeology and the pillar-stone upon which Austrian economics rests. The colloquial version of this foundational Austrian maxim is “put your money where your mouth is” or “actions speak louder than words”. We demonstrate by our actions where our preferences and values lie; we reveal them to the world (act them into existence, really) when we do one thing instead of another, when we purchase one good instead of another, when we work instead of relax. All of this is wrapped in uncertainty and hopes and subjective human desires trading off against other such desires; in hindsight, we can regret the choices we made. Still, says Murray Rothbard, a man’s “preferences are deducible from what he has chosen in action.”

Perhaps all this climate complaining is simply virtue signaling, in a world where feelings matter more than facts. The detachment from the physical processes of basic living—energy, materials, transportation, and in complicated monetary economies, money—has made many people ignorant, taking for granted the lifestyles we live and the standards of living we have. It has allowed us to start thinking foundational and civilization-carrying systems like money, fossil fuels, or commercial institutions are optional—a mere matter of ideological choice between good and evil people. They’re not.

I’m reminded too of luxury beliefs, a somewhat hyped concept coined by Rob Henderson, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge and author of the recent book Troubled. Henderson transfers Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption”—the purchasing of expensive, often seemingly useless goods, with the purpose of flaunting one’s wealth—to the moral and political domain. A luxury belief, like a conspicuous good, is acquired in order to impress others, and is designed to “confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while inflicting costs upon the lower classes”.

Luxury beliefs don’t make much sense and don’t have staying power in the real world of atoms and temperature, of nature and starvation. But we’re so far detached from the world that physically supports us—so rich, so deluded, so well-off—that we’re willing to believe (and by extension willing to experiment with) the very systems that uphold our existence.

Cue environmental concerns and anticapitalism. Taken literally, enacting policies based on such follies into place, we’re on a path to horror and poverty, with brutish and short lives to follow.

 

[aenyc]

The good news is that those systems are remarkably resilient and these voices might still be all “tawk,” as Nassim Taleb would say.

The popular energy-finance Substack Doomberg made a similar observation in February, listing two paragraphs’ worth of major events that happened from 1971: oil crisis, Iran-Iraq, Kuwait wars, Middle Eastern conflicts, the Asian and peso and ruble financial collapses, the terrorist attacks, Libya-Syria-Ukraine, the global financial crisis, and COVID. Through all of them, as tumultuous as they seemed at the time and as relevant as they remain in the political consciousness, the world’s total energy consumption is a straight line through all of it. Here’s their graph:

BP Statistical Review global total energy consumption

​

Source: Doomberg[DB1]​

Socioeconomic events as radical as women’s rights or racial equality; left-wing or right-wing leaders; crises and recessions, inflations and boom years; generations of scholars and scientists and political movements . . . and there’s no impact on the basic thing that powers our civilization.

Eighty-five percent of the globe’s primary energy consumption comes directly from fossil fuels—the same it was over thirty years ago when I was born. You can speak beliefs about climate change, about noncredible, net-zero policy goals (always with years suspiciously ending in zero or five), about reducing reliance on fossil fuels, or about how “clean” renewable energy is. You can throw government money at it, pass laws, or pontificate in the high courts, legislative auditoriums, or the public square, but you’re just not changing that. You can’t change that.

Cypherpunks write code. Clever people ignore politics. You should get out of the house, stop worrying too much about the lunatics running the asylum, and instead admire nature. That’s what I’m doing.

 

[42OhmsPA]

3 Physicists Use Experimental Evidence To Show CO2’s Capacity To Absorb Radiation Has Saturated

notrickszone.com

https://twitter.com/x/status/1783207197217837104

 

[svetz]

...Adding CO2 to the atmosphere can have no significant climatic effect when rising above the threshold of about 300 ppm... And yet we're over 300 ppm (we're at 423 ppm) and we're still warming. In fact, we passed 300 ppm around the turn of the prior century (1900s). During the last ice age, we were about 280 ppm. So physical evidence says otherwise (see image right). It's been debunked so many times anyone that's researched it at all must know it's a lie, so good chance your source knew and is purposefully misleading you. Their argument is based on wavelength absorption (Plank's law) which is correct, but it doesn't consider simple things, like the Earth is spherical, has gravity, or how energy moves through the atmosphere. The effect, and why CO2 PPM matters is fascinating, and discussed in this video. The frequency "ditch" the lie refers to is discussed starting at 11:28.

 

[svetz]

Trump Is Scaring Republican Believers
Power of cork
Pope Francis calls climate change deniers 'fools' in US TV
Xi Thinks China Can Slow Climate Change

 

[aenyc]

The Green Agenda Will Lead to Civil War​

Chris Stark, the outgoing Chief Executive of the U.K. Climate Change Committee (CCC), is demob-happy. In a number of interviews, the highly-paid civil servant has criticised the Prime Minister for seemingly faltering in his commitment to Net Zero. This unguarded criticism is unusual in itself, unwittingly highlighting, rather than seeking to resolve, the increasing tensions between green ideological ambition and political reality. But it is Stark’s curious framing of the problems apparently holding climate policy back that is most revealing of the growing democratic deficit. The only things now sustaining the green agenda are the political establishment’s intransigence and sense of entitlement. And that increases the risk of catastrophic policy failure.

The CCC is a troubled organisation. Its former Chairman, pka John Gummer, now Lord Deben, left his role last year, and since then political disagreements between Westminster and the devolved governments have prevented the appointment of a permanent successor. Now, the CCC’s Chief Executive’s chair is also empty, and whoever steps into it has a much bigger set of problems to face than his or her predecessor.

This is all the more an irony because the CCC itself was summoned into existence by the Climate Change Act 2008 (CCA), which was the act not just of the dying days of the last Labour Government but also the expression of the cross-party consensus on climate change. MPs didn’t believe that they or their successors were able or should be free to represent their constituencies on matters of climate policies, and so only an ‘independent’ panel of experts – a quango, or Non-Departmental Statutory Body – would be able to set the terms of climate and energy policy, which the Act put beyond democratic control. Accordingly, the CCC has since its inception set the U.K.’s Carbon Budget. Now, however, the quarrelsome devolved parliaments – which were also created to bring all parts of Britain into harmonious consensus – and a growing sense of the impossibility of Net Zero makes it hard to fill the current vacancies. The pay is good, but you’d have to be daft to accept such a poisoned chalice. The climate agenda is literally out of control.

According to Stark in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the problem began last year when “Sunak delayed a ban on new petrol and diesel cars, and weakened targets on phasing out gas boilers”. However, as I argued at the time, the problem with this claim is that Sunak’s interventions were the smallest possible dampener on the policy agenda – a mild tapping of the brakes and nothing like a U-turn. The U.K.’s phasing out of petrol and diesel cars was, and still is, a target which reduces the proportion of internal combustion engine cars sold each year in stages. The change merely extended the last phase of this abolition from 2030 to 2035. By 2030, 80% of new cars sold will have to be EVs. Similarly, the 2035 ban on sales of new domestic gas boilers is largely intact, save for exemptions for low-income households. And properties that aren’t connected to the gas grid will not be required to shift to electric heating until 2035, because, as many argued, the previous target of 2026 was ‘premature’.

In other words, Sunak was attempting to save Net Zero, not depart from it. EV sales, for example, are rising only because of absurdly generous tax breaks given to well-off middle-class people, and have no chance of reaching 100% by 2030 without causing immense problems, as well as sacrificing a great deal more of the British and European car industry to China – a problem now acknowledged across the continent. Extending the target by five years was the only option available to the Government. And despite Sunak’s slightest possible dilution of the policy target, firms such as Vauxhall are now citing Net Zero, and the lack of consumer interest in EVs, as reasons for threatening to leave the U.K.

But Stark (who has done as much as anyone to salt the earth for his successor) attempts to catastrophise about Sunak’s decision in much the same way that civil servants have dramatised recent senior politicians’ decisions. “The diplomatic impact of that has been immense,” says Stark. “The overall message that other parts of the world took from it is that the U.K. is less ambitious on climate than it once was.”

This seems unlikely, and the plight of the U.K.’s poor climate diplomats facing the fallout from Sunak’s five-year extension should raise 67 million shrugs, if it is worthy of any attention at all. Diplomacy was not Stark’s or the CCC’s brief, and the notion of the PM derailing the global climate agenda by slightly undermining the world’s perception of the U.K. as a climate champion is only going to upset green wonks and the BBC and Guardian’s ideological hacks, not the hoi polloi.

In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Stark’s attempt to rescue climate policy from inevitable watering down grew more obviously desperate. “Net Zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it,” he told Fiona Harvey. “It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it.”

It seems to be a tactic of people who believe in the genetic transfer of historical guilt and the interchangeability of biological sex – among other bizarre, unscientific things – to claim that anyone who disagrees with them, however reasonably, is waging a ‘culture war’. In this view, if you refuse to take a knee, or believe that gender-confused children ought not to be dispatched on irreversible medical pathways, then you are the dangerous activist. And the greens have embraced this tactic, believing that sceptics of climate science, and more pertinently climate policies, have simply joined the ranks of the ‘culture warriors’.

 

[aenyc]

What the defenders of the radical progressive policies mean by ‘culture war’ is that they no longer have everything their own way. There used to be a cross-party consensus and widespread public support for our membership of the EU, various woke social policies and on the need to reduce carbon emissions. But the consensus has broken down and people who no longer have the ‘correct’ opinions on these issues are, understandably, seeking representation for their views. They’re not ‘culture warriors’.

Take the green agenda. The consequence of the abolition of petrol and diesel cars is not merely limiting consumer choice, but the restriction of mobility through price and technological limitation. The phasing out of the domestic gas boiler has an effect far beyond mere lifestyle – it requires a household to find many thousands of pounds, perhaps tens of thousands, to pay for a heat pump. And by seeking to prioritise the reduction of carbon emissions over maximising GDP, the successive U.K. Governments, the Treasury and the Bank of England, in cahoots with other central banks, have given enormous powers to financial institutions to regulate the economy and business activity via ESG, leading to a massive misallocation of resources, pushing prices up, with the main (perhaps sole) beneficiaries being green billionaires.

Stark, of course, will never have heard such criticisms. As far as he’s concerned, the prices of things are mere arbitrary numbers that can simply be controlled by yet another policy intervention to disguise yesteryear’s policy failures. Life is sweet when you’re a senior civil servant on a £400,000 package and your career is protected from markets and political whims. So what if energy prices double and double again, when you earn more than 10 times the national average? But such protection from reality means isolation from reality, too. His waving away critics as mere ‘culture warriors’ reveals that he – and the fawning journalists that surround him – lack even the vocabulary to understand criticism. Establishment hacks simply have no other term with which to explain the phenomenon of people disagreeing with them. It’s called democracy, Chris.

So if not a ‘culture war’, what is the right term for the divisions within society that are growing up around the climate agenda? I believe the correct term is ‘civil war’. Net Zero requires intensely political transformations of society – as radical as the changes sought by the early 20th century’s ideological movements. Net Zero requires the transformation of the relationship between the individual and the state. It requires the complete reorganisation of the economy. And it requires new powers to be created and put beyond democratic control.

It may not be a ‘hot’ civil war – or not yet. But our intransigent and chaotic political class seem not to have registered the possibility of their failure and have taken for granted our willingness to accept our immiseration ‘to save the planet’ without question or challenge. Much like many a military blunder, armies of wonks like Stark have no real idea about how to achieve Net Zero, nor what the costs and consequences of failure are, but will not be swayed from the agenda. Critics can just be written off as ‘deniers’ and ‘culture warriors’.

Under Chris Stark’s tenure, the CCC has lied, made stuff up, hidden its calculations from scrutiny and based its feasibility studies of the U.K.’s pathway to Net Zero on technologies that do not exist or have not been proven to be economically viable. And this was made possible by Parliament’s dereliction of its duty to scrutinise legislation and represent the public’s interests, and its desire to delegate difficult decisions to an unaccountable technocracy. Moreover, as Andrew Neil pointed out this week, this radical dismantling of democracy came with very little comment from the news media.

If the civil war is not yet apparent, it is because its battle fronts are not barricades, but remote agencies and lofty courts and financial markets. Their assaults on our freedom, wealth and ways of life are unannounced and greeted joyfully by journalists, while green activists protest that they’re not going nearly far enough. Our public institutions are captured and turned against us by legislation and legal precedent. Not by guns and bombs, of course, but the difference is merely one of rate: the difference between the speeds of combustion and metabolism. Either way, we get burned or eaten. Stark has quit his job at the CCC just as the reality of the Net Zero agenda has been made plain. This is a war of some kind, and it is bound to get hotter until politicians put the climate agenda to a full and proper democratic contest.

 

[aenyc]

Climate Scientists Hail Boost to Global Plant Growth From Higher CO2​

Both the quantity and nutritional value of plants is growing around the planet due to recent increases in carbon dioxide, claim the authors of an important new science paper. The recent rise in carbon dioxide during modern industrial times, from a period of dangerous denudation, is at the centre of worldwide fearmongering designed to enforce a Net Zero collectivisation. “In fact, the only clear result of increasing CO2 has been an overall greening of the Earth and increasing productivity of agricultural and forest crops,” state the authors.

Regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be aware of the massive greening of the planet that has occurred over the last 40 years. Alas, this astonishing success story is inexplicably missing from most mainstream Net Zero-focused discourse. This latest paper is written by a group of scientists and published by the U.S.-based educational foundation CO2 Coalition. It is highly technical but it seeks to explain why the nutritional value of the world’s more abundant crops “can and will remain high as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase towards values more representative of those existing throughout most of Earth’s history”. With CO2 levels considerably higher over most geological history, the current level of 425 parts per million (ppm) is much less than optimum for most plants, the experts observe.

For too long, note the scientists, atmospheric CO2 has been the nutrient in shortest supply holding back plant growth. “Rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have clearly been beneficial for the biosphere, agriculture, humanity and particularly for global food security at very low additional cost. Still higher concentrations will bring additional benefits,” they note. The CO2 Coalition, supported by the work of atmospheric scientists like Emeritus Professor William Happer of Princeton, has long argued that CO2 becomes ‘saturated’ at certain levels in the atmosphere. At higher levels its warming properties diminish rapidly. Due to this ‘saturation’, which helps explain why atmospheric CO2 concentrations been up to 20 times higher in the past without the planet turning into a fireball, “man-made CO2 emissions are not capable of triggering dangerous future warming”.

The great success of what is termed the ‘green revolution’ is shown above. The scientists note that important factors in the dramatic increase in food production have been increased atmospheric CO2, the development of greatly improved plant varieties and intelligent use of mineral fertilisers. The authors quote from a recent scientific paper, Taylor and Sclenker 2023, which states: “We consistently find a large CO2 fertilisation effect: a 1 ppm increase in CO2 equates to a 0.4%, 0.6%, 1% yield increase for corn, soybeans and wheat respectively.”

The evidence for greening of the Earth from atmospheric carbon dioxide “is now too obvious to deny”. The scientists publish the world map below to prove their point.

The above map was produced from satellite data recorded between 1982 and 2012. Greening by 20-30% was recorded in India, West Australia, the Sahel and the Anatolian highlands. Reference is also made to Chen et al. 2024, reported here in the Daily Sceptic, that found CO2 greening had actually accelerated over the last two decades. The increase in C02 was found to be the dominant driver of the positive trend of the Leaf Area Index over most of the global land surface.

Attempts have been made recently to downplay the benefits of more vigorous CO2-driven plant growth by suggesting it leads to a slight dilution of some nutrients, notably nitrogen, in plant tissues. In the course of their work, the authors state that these deficiencies are small compared with the nutritional shortages that agriculture and livestock face because of natural phenomena. “These problems have been routinely dealt with for generations through adequate fertilisation, proper species and cultivar selection, and food supplements for livestock and humans,” they argue.

The numerous desirable and beneficial effects of more CO2 in the atmosphere greatly outweigh ‘climate-damaging’ or ‘nutrient-damaging’ impacts, to the extent that these even exist. There is no ‘social cost’ of carbon, as is incorrectly claimed in numerous recent publications. In the course of their paper, the scientists say that have reviewed the literature and provided arguments that “arrive at quite a contrary view” to those who claim enhanced atmospheric CO2 somehow threatens human nutrition. “In fact, there is a social benefit from more CO2 in the air,” they conclude.

 

[42OhmsPA]

And yet we're over 300 ppm (we're at 423 ppm) and we're still warming. In fact, we passed 300 ppm around the turn of the prior century (1900s). During the last ice age, we were about 280 ppm. So physical evidence says otherwise (see image right). It's been debunked so many times anyone that's researched it at all must know it's a lie, so good chance your source knew and is purposefully misleading you. Their argument is based on wavelength absorption (Plank's law) which is correct, but it doesn't consider simple things, like the Earth is spherical, has gravity, or how energy moves through the atmosphere. The effect, and why CO2 PPM matters is fascinating, and discussed in this video. The frequency "ditch" the lie refers to is discussed starting at 11:28.

Really not sure, I just cross posted it from a coal burning forum I'm part of.

I really could care less because there are much larger issues to deal with than manfaked climate change.

 

[aenyc]

 

[svetz]

Really not sure, I just cross posted it from a coal burning forum I'm part of.

It's pretty common, I'd say you could cross-post back that it's wrong, but they sound like a tough crowd ; -)

I really could care less because there are much larger issues to deal with than manfaked climate change.

Except it's not fake. But I get it. For most people climate change is around worry number 10. There's so many stupid things going on (e.g., the U.S. vs. itself, Middle east on the brink, Ukraine conflict, fight over critical minerals) and the margin for error in handling them has never seemed smaller.
Climate warming doesn't care, and unlike the others it isn't a fear it might happen... it is happening.

 

[42OhmsPA]

It's pretty common, I'd say you could cross-post back that it's wrong, but they sound like a tough crowd ; -)

Have at it. There is actually some pretty good discussion at times.

Except it's not fake. But I get it. For most people climate change is around worry number 10. There's so many stupid things going on (e.g., the U.S. vs. itself, Middle east on the brink, Ukraine conflict, fight over critical minerals) and the margin for error in handling them has never seemed smaller.
Climate warming doesn't care, and unlike the others it isn't a fear it might happen... it is happening.

Climate change isn't fake, I'm not disputing that. It's been changing for millennia.

 

[svetz]

Climate change isn't fake, I'm not disputing that. It's been changing for millennia. True words! But it's never changed as rapidly before, nor has it been over 300 ppm for over 800,000 years (that's a few ice ages). It's been higher back in the time of the dinosaurs, but not since Neanderthals have been roaming around....

We also know humans have made the problem (e.g., not volcanoes or other natural phenomena) by isotopes and other means....