Weekly ESG clippings #50 - eminent scientists, climate lunatics, wind dreams, costly batteries, booming oil
This week features a concentration on wind and batteries that investment managers focused on “sustainability” should find revealing.
Science
- Commentary on Climate: The Movie
- Washing away the climate lunatics
Investment/Economics
- Wind Dreams: Why wind power will
always be niche
- A Shockingly Inept Report From The
IEA On Battery Storage Of Energy
- Battery Storage is 141 Times More
Expensive Than Liquefied Natural Gas Storage
- The used electric car timebomb
- EVs could become impossible to
sell because battery guarantees won't last
- Biden’s oil boom
Absurdities
- This Single Chart Rings the Death
Knell for Any Real 'Energy Transition'
SCIENCE
Climate: The Article Look up Climate: The Movie if you think due diligence into the claims about climate change danger are worth considering. Here is an excerpt from a thoughtful commentary on the film and its contents, written by the remarkable Doomberg.
"Considering the trillions of taxpayer dollars spent (plus thousands of special interest groups formed, employees hired, advanced degrees pursued, infrastructure re-oriented, corporate initiatives prioritized, measurements required, and on and on) in a dedicated effort to abate “catastrophic global warming,” one would expect that the scientific investigations in support of the theory were performed with the utmost integrity, welcoming of a wide range of critique and data interpretation. After all, the decarbonization solution is no picnic, threatening the citizens of the Western world with degradation to their standards of living and condemning billions of others in developing nations to a permanent state of poverty.
"A hushed secret of the scientific community is that many of the world’s top scientists have serious and legitimate questions about the entire construct. They believe much of the experimental and modeling work in the field to be shabby at best and find the efforts to censor alternative views abhorrent and anti-scientific. We’ve certainly heard such hushed musings countless times over the decades, although we suspect few who expressed them could have imagined the scale to which the carbon affair has subsequently bloomed.
"The filmmakers draw upon interviews with distinguished scientists across a range of relevant disciplines and renown. Physicist Steve Koonin, former professor of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology and founding Director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, is one of the more familiar names. Koonin is the author of the aptly titled book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. Also appearing is John Clauser, a recent contributor to the skeptical side of the debate and recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. Having climbed the highest mountain in the field of science, Clauser felt liberated to go public with his climate views, a release he specifically alludes to in the interview. Numerous other current and former professors from top research institutions are woven into the film’s presentation of evidence, and the viewer is led to understand that those donning the “former” distinction do so directly because their views jeopardized employment."
Our take: with some of the world's most eminent climate scientists getting together to oppose the irrationality of climate catastrophism, how long will it be until the whole apparatus of this alarmism, used to justify total control of our economy and lives, collapses and destroys the reputations of its advocates with it?
Washing away the climate lunatics "At the same time that the climate fanatics are encountering irresistible political headwinds, the intellectual arguments of the climate skeptics are becoming steadily more unanswerable. A brief filed with the court of appeals in The Hague in November by three eminent, American climate-related academics, Richard Lindzen of MIT, William Happer of Princeton, and Steven Koonin of New York University, the Hoover Institute, and former climate adviser to President Obama, challenged the finding of a lower court and held that scientific analysis, as opposed to an aggregation of “government opinion, consensus, peer review, and cherry-picked or falsified data,” shows that “Fossil fuels and CO2 will not cause dangerous climate change, there will be disastrous consequences for people worldwide if fossil fuels in CO2 emissions are reduced to net zero, including mass starvation.” They assert that the poor, future generations, and the entire West will suffer profoundly from any such policy. which “will undermine human rights and cripple the realization of the first three UN sustainable development goals-no poverty, zero hunger, and good health and well-being.”
"This highly recondite and meticulously documented paper states that “600 million years of carbon dioxide in temperature data contradict the theory of catastrophic global warming being caused by high levels of CO2, and that the atmospheric CO2 is now heavily saturated, which means that more will have little warming effect.” Up until recently, the zealots pretended that such opinions are held only by the uninformed, or the paid lobbyists of the oil industry, but they are not going to be able to get away with this much longer The ranks of the critics are swelling every week with aggrieved members of the voting public distressed by completely unnecessary skyrocketing costs generated by the fear-mongering climate zealots. With any luck, the tide of logical evidence will wash away the climate lunatics of this country before the damage becomes irreparable."
Our take: when reality, measurements and facts support your position, it should only be a matter of time until the ideology of climate catastrophism gives way, and you don't want to be below that dam when it bursts.
INVESTMENT/ECONOMICS
Wind Dreams: Why wind power will always be niche "The optimal amount of practical wind power in the global energy mix is greater than zero. It is also much less than 100%. Today I argue why the proportion of wind power in the global electricity generation mix is always going to be closer to zero than to 100%. That doesn’t mean that wind power is not of value or useful, but it does mean that wind power is not going to drive a global energy transformation, or even be a big part of any such transformation. The sooner we realize that, the better for energy and climate policies. This post gives explains three reasons why wind will always be niche — low density, low capacity, the age effect — and why costs are not among those reasons."
A Shockingly Inept Report From The IEA On Battery Storage Of Energy "But in a field rife with bad, worse, still worse, and even dangerously incompetent work, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything as shockingly inept as the Report just out from the International Energy Agency with the title “Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions.” The Report has a date only specified to the month of “April 2024,” but the press release came out just two days ago on April 25.
If I had been given the assignment by the North Koreans to write the Report to somehow induce the West to self-destruct, I don’t know how I would have done it differently.
I suppose it would be too much for me to expect these grandees to have read my energy storage report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in December 2022. But if you are claiming that you have at hand a “competitive, secure and sustainable alternative to electricity generation from fossil fuels,” as these guys are, there is a series of very obvious question that must be addressed. Those include:
1. Quantitatively, how much energy storage, in watt-hours (or gigawatt-hours) will be necessary to provide full back-up to a national electricity grid once all fossil fuel back-up has been banished and the storage is all that is available when the instantaneous generators are not supplying the full demand?
2. How much will that amount of storage cost?
3. What is the maximum length of time that energy must be held in storage before it is called upon, and is the proposed storage technology capable of the task of storing energy for that period of time?
There are other comparably important questions, but at least those are absolutely essential. The IEA Report addresses none of them.
Our take: ineptitude fits with other aspects of the attempts of central planners to force bad energy policies upon us all.
Battery Storage is 141 Times More Expensive Than Liquefied Natural Gas Storage "Battery cost data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Assumptions to the Annual Energy Outlook shows a cost of $1,316 per kilowatt of four-hour battery storage. Dividing this value by four gives us a cost of $329 per kWh of storage capacity, which translates into $329,000 per MWh.
"This means that building enough battery storage capacity to provide five days of electricity would cost a cool $11.25 billion, 141 times more expensive than the proposed LNG storage facility at Astoria Station and three times more than the company’s entire market capitalization.
"Any way you slice it, building battery storage facilities that cost 141 times more than LNG storage and may not be charged is the dumbest possible way to power a society that has never been more dependent upon always-on electricity and will never be less dependent upon it in the future."
Our take: this should tell us all we need to know about battery backups for the electrical grid.
The used electric car timebomb - EVs could become impossible to sell because battery guarantees won't last "Our investigation found that many EVs could become almost impossible to resell because of their limited battery life. Experts said that the average EV battery guarantee lasts just eight years. After this time, the battery may lose power more quickly and so reduce mileage between charges.
"The second-hand market might seem a natural place to look for an EV but unfortunately it is fraught with danger as the batteries are worth more than the car. If the battery stops working, the vehicle becomes almost worthless."
Our take: we will find out in the next few years just how bad the market for used EVs gets.
Biden’s oil boom "The counter-intuitive fossil fuel boom under Biden reflects an awkward truth for his supporters and detractors alike ahead of the November elections, proving that what happens in globally interconnected markets like oil and gas is often well outside the immediate control of the person in the White House."
"The profits of the top five publicly traded oil companies, for example — BP, Shell, Exxon, Chevron, and TotalEnergies — amounted to $410 billion during the first three years of the Biden administration, a 100% increase over the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to data compiled by Reuters."
"Jobs growth in U.S. fossil fuels also far outpaced that in the renewable energy industries Biden has been promoting to fight climate change, according to the data."
"In addition to soaring share prices, dividend payments and share buybacks by the top five oil companies were $111 billion during the first three years of the Biden administration, a 57% increase over the first three years of Trump’s presidency, according to the data."
Our take: despite their best efforts to destroy markets, central planners don't have an easy time doing so.
ABSURDITIES
This Single Chart Rings the Death Knell for Any Real 'Energy Transition' "There can be no energy transition in any real sense without a doubling or tripling of the US power grid - including transmission - in just a little more than a decade. The Biden government itself admitted last year the US would need to build more than 200,000 miles of new high voltage transmission by 2030 [!], a very, very conservative, low-ball estimate. But none of that is happening, which means the vaunted “energy transition” is not happening, either."
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