Weekly clippings #18 - inflation, science publications, RCP8.5, costly renewables, green bailout, gates of hell

 I’ll kick off this week with a link to an article based on an interview with yours truly. The article was about inflation and I did not fail to mention the inflationary effect of the government attack on affordable, reliable energy sources and their replacement with expensive and unreliable sources (wind and solar). As is always the case, the harm of inflation falls hardest on the most vulnerable in society, and the same happens with all the climate and energy related policies we have seen in recent years. This essential ethical point is usually ignored or deliberately overlooked by the advocates of such policies in their zeal to make the world in their image.

This week in the Science category I bring you an article by a climate scientist who explains the biases expected by well-known publishers and who self-censored to get his research article published, along with the great news that RCP8.5, the pathway that is so unrealistic as to be absurd, is finally being abandoned and the more realistic scenarios are far less scary. Do we think the rhetoric will be dialed down or doubled up?

In the Investment/Economics category there is a flurry of information now being talked about openly regarding the real-world costs of wind and solar being far higher than the whims and wishes of their promoters. We see regular news now of wind developers either backing away from projects due to expected losses or asking for massive bailouts due to losses on existing projects. You see, it turns out that the costs of these things rises rapidly along with the cost of the huge amount of fossil fuels required to make and operate them. Who knew that attacking reliable, cheap energy would make things more expensive?

In the Absurdity category, well, we see the answer to my question about the rhetoric being dialed up or down, and its way up, at least from the head of the UN Antonio Guterres. Oh, and also the mad Canadian housing bubble is being made even worse by federal housing efficiency regulations.

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published  For those seeking to understand the wide gap between factual knowledge and climate alarmism, this researcher’s experience and insight is valuable. “The editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.” “That’s not the way science should work.” “I left academia over a year ago, partially because I felt the pressures put on academic scientists caused too much of the research to be distorted.” This reveals the true nature of climate journals. The journals have been corrupted because they’ve been captured by zealots.

The Coming Revolution in Climate Research  “For well over a decade RCP8.5 has been often treated as a reference scenario, centered on more than 4C warming by 2100 — a new reference scenario will center on 2-3C by 2100. This is a huge change in outlook.” “In fact, climate models are unable to identify differences between a RCP4.5 and a RCP2.6 — current policies vs. policy success — for global average temperature until the second half of this century, at the earliest. It will take much longer (if ever) for far signal emergence for more meaningful metrics, such as the behavior of specific weather extremes.”

Windbaggery Through dishonest manipulation of cost estimates and a relentless campaign of propaganda, proponents of wind energy have convinced countless politicians to support a technology that disrupts the smooth operation of electricity grids and is utterly dependent on the intermittency of the weather. Anybody with a passing knowledge of energy fundamentals knows this simply can't be  sustainable.

Don’t believe the renewables myth. Wind and solar are not cheap  Sunshine and breeze are indeed free, but vast amounts of subsidized infrastructure are not.

Electricity from wind isn’t cheap and it never will be - Matt Ridley

The Coming Green Energy Bailout The IRA includes federal tax credits that can offset 50% of a project’s costs. But renewable developers say their costs are increasing faster than inflation and that the projects will “not be economically viable and would be unable to proceed to construction and operation under their existing pricing.” The climate lobby says power from wind and solar is cheaper than from fossil fuels, but that’s true only with generous subsidies and near-zero interest rates. Price adjustments that renewable developers want in New York would make solar and wind two to five times more expensive than natural gas power.

Antonio Guterres Ups the Propaganda Ante Again  “Our Focus here is on climate solutions, and our task is urgent. Humanity has opened the gates of hell.” So, to summarize, just during 2023, the UN clown in chief has taken his demagoguery from claiming we are on a “highway to hell,” to warning “the age of global boiling” has begun, to now blubbering about how we have “opened the gates of hell” itself. In just 100 years deaths from extreme weather events are 50X lower, and he calls this opening the gates of hell? Do you think maybe something is wrong with his moral standards?

Wrong Move at the Wrong Time: Economic Impacts of the New Federal Building Energy Efficiency Mandates At a time when Canadian house prices look to be in one of the greatest inflationary bubbles of all time, the BEE components of the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan will increase home construction costs by an average of about 8.3% by 2030, potentially adding an estimated $55,000 to the average cost of new homes in Canada. The effects on GHG emissions are small (a reduction of about 1% below the base case) and on a per-unit basis cost about 50 times the carbon-tax value as of 2030. As a result of the large loss of GDP relative to reductions in GHG emissions, emissions intensity of the Canadian economy actually rises slightly due to the regulation. The costs are likely to fall disproportionately on younger and lower-income people trying to enter the housing market.