The Third World Is Coming Around Fast On The Climate Scam

It was back in the early days of this blog, in 2013, that I started writing about the incomprehensible and immoral efforts of international and U.N. bureaucrats to keep the poor of the world poor by denying them access to cheap and reliable electricity.  Here is a post from November 2013 titled "The Looking Glass World Of The U.N. Climate Bureaucracy."   That post reported on a conference that had just been held by the U.N. under the auspices of its "Framework Convention on Climate Change."  

The 2013 UN FCCC conference was an opportunity for every third-world corruptocrat to play on the guilt of guilty first worlders by blaming all flukes of the weather on the driving of SUVs and then demanding some kind of "climate reparations" payments to enrich the governing elites of the poor countries while doing absolutely nothing about either the climate or poverty.  For example, a New York Times article linked in my piece quoted one John Kioli ("chairman of the Kenya Climate Change Working Group") as follows:

John Kioli . . . called climate change his country’s “biggest enemy.” Kenya, which straddles the Equator, faces some of the biggest challenges from rising temperatures. . . .  Developed countries, Mr. Kioli said, have a moral obligation to shoulder the cost, considering the amount of pollution they have emitted since the Industrial Revolution. “If developed countries are reasonable enough, they are able to understand that they have some responsibility,” he said.

Without doubt, there is plenty of that kind of thinking and approach still around today, particularly at the insanely corrupt U.N.  But something rather big has changed since 2013, which is that rapidly increasing numbers of people, and even government officials, in the developing world have come to the realization that the poor people are entitled to get access to cheap and reliable electricity, and that the only way they are going to get it is by using fossil fuels, mostly coal.  More and more of these people are not afraid to speak out.

Last week in Washington, D.C., there was the big joint annual meeting of the World Bank and the IMF.  The meeting coincided with the release by the Global Warming Policy Foundation of the piece by Rupert Darwall (covered by me here) that excoriated the World Bank for its anti-development stance of refusing to finance anything having to do with fossil fuels.  The Washington Post reported on the Washington meeting in an October 14 piece headlined "Global finance leaders warn against complacency."   Don't bother reading that article.  You won't be surprised to learn that the Washington Post doesn't even mention the various demands at the meeting by developing world officials that the Bank and IMF stop fighting the development of fossil fuel resources.  Remember that WaPo functions today mainly as a means to suppress all news that might actually be important.  By the way, I can't even find an article in the New York Times covering the World Bank/IMF meeting.

So let us turn instead to The Zimbabwean (isn't the internet wonderful?), which offers an article today headlined "Africa, US question World Bank policy on poor."   

[I]f [the huge] Kariba [dam in Zimbabwe] was built today, the World Bank wouldn’t fund it. Same with the Three Gorges Dam in China, oil wells in Saudi or the coal-fired power stations that account for 60 per cent of Africa’s kilowatts.  At the bank’s annual summit last week, hosted by its president Dr Jim Yong Kim, these policies loomed into focus as more than 11,500 delegates, including six from Zimbabwe, converged on Washington.  Where else might you find Donald Trump and Robert Mugabe on the same side, along with India, China, Australia, Ghana, Nigeria and a clutch of others calling for change? . . .  Some say the bank has been hijacked by an army of lobbyists who want to shut down anything not powered by wind or sunshine.  In 2013 the bank adopted an outright ban on funding for coal except where there was no alternative.

After discussing Darwall's paper (which calls the World Bank the "anti-development bank" for its war against fossil fuel electricity), the Zimbabwean then turns to a delegate from India for a series of quotes:

Indian government minister Piyush Goyal, for example, could have been speaking for Zimbabwe or any developing country when he said, "The people of India want a certain way of life. They want jobs for their children, schools and colleges, hospitals with uninterrupted power.”  Solar, he complained, only worked when the sun is shining.  “We need a very large amount of baseload power and this can only come from coal.  They’re saying to us, 'we’re sorry but you Indians can only have power for eight hours a day. The rest of the time you must live in darkness.'"  More than 300,000,000 Indians are not on the grid, a hot topic at elections.

The heretics are on the loose!  Of course, the President of the World Bank pushed back:

For his part, Dr Kim spoke passionately about the falling cost of renewables. Using his numbers, green electricity is cheaper than watts from coal, gas, the turbines of Lake Kariba, even the continent’s only nuclear plant in South Africa.

Seems like Dr. Kim's arithmetic skills are about on a par with those of the New York Times.  

More on the subject comes from James Delingpole, writing in the UK's Spectator, "How the World Bank keeps poor nations poor."   Delingpole focuses on Nigeria -- Africa's most populous country -- and describes some of the miseries it faces from lack of reliable electricity:

Blackouts and brownouts are common, as they are throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and the costs to the economy are enormous. The local mobile phone company MTM, with 62 million subscribers, spends 70 per cent of its operating expenditure on diesel to keep its network powered up.

And then there is this, from Kemi Adeosun, Nigeria's Minister of Finance:

"We want to build a coal power plant because we are a country blessed with coal, yet we have a power problem. So it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it will make sense to build a coal power plant. However, we are being blocked because it is not green. This is not fair, because they have an entire western industrialisation that was built on coal-fired energy.”

India (1.3 billion people), Nigeria (almost 200 million people) -- pretty soon we're going to have a critical mass here.

Meanwhile, the next big meeting of the UN FCCC is next month, November 6 - 17, in Bonn, Germany.  Don't expect the leaders of that clique to back off their efforts to force the poor to use only power that costs a fortune and doesn't work.  But with the U.S. no longer promising to buy the silence of the poor-country elites with a gusher of cash, you definitely can expect that more and more developing countries will speak out on their intention to use coal and other fossil fuel resources.  Ultimately, who's going to stop them?

UPDATE, October 23:  A line that originally appeared in this post, stating that Rupert Darwall is the former research director of the World Bank, was in error and has been deleted.  The former research director of the WB is Deepak Lal.  Lal wrote a foreword to Darwall's GWPF paper.     

The Quality Of Thinking About Climate And Economics At Pravda

On Monday the New York Times gave over its full unsigned editorial space to a single item, titled "5 Climate Truths Mr. Trump Doesn't Get."   In the full-page-length piece dripping with scorn, Pravda informs us how our ignoramus President just "doesn't get it" when it comes to energy policy.  It's not only that he's destroying the planet, but he also doesn't understand anything about basic economics:

Donald Trump promised he would be “an unbelievable positive” for the [coal] miners. Now he’s trying to deliver by repealing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan and proposing to subsidize coal-fired power plants. These moves are, in fact, unbelievable: Not only are they a setback in the fight against climate change, but they also make no economic sense, since the cost of renewable energy is falling sharply.

So let's check out a few of their arguments.  Do they make any good points?

I'll start with their fifth point, which deals with advances in batteries that supposedly are going to make "renewables" like wind and solar power more "productive and reliable":

Wind turbines and solar panels cannot produce electricity at all times in all weather conditions. But there have been great technical strides that have improved their performance. . . .  What’s more, batteries have become much cheaper, making it less expensive to store electricity when it’s windy or sunny for times when it is not. The average cost of lithium-ion batteries fell 73 percent, to $273 per kilowatt-hour, between 2010 and 2016. . . .  

They then provide a chart showing costs of lithium-ion batteries per kilowatt hour dropping from close to $1000 in 2010 to only $273 today.  Wow!  That's cheap!  Or, at least, that is clearly the impression that you are intended to come away with.

So then, New York Times, can you kindly give us a calculation of how much it would cost for some random place -- say, New York City -- to buy enough batteries to cover a worst-case period of cloudy-and-calm-for-days-on-end-in-the-winter when we have an electric system that consists of nothing but wind, solar and batteries?  Of course not.  As always, you have to ask whether the failure to provide this information means that they have done the calculation and are concealing it as part of an intentional deception, or whether the basic arithmetic of the calculation is beyond their abilities.  Whichever it is, it's not good for them.  But fear not, the Manhattan Contrarian specializes in basic arithmetic.

So let's do the calculation.  From the New York ISO (Independent System Operator) we get load data for recent days for New York City.  The load varies over the course of a day, but averages about 5000 MW.  (This is actually a low time of year, due to mild temperatures.  Loads are higher in the summer, due to air conditioning, and in the winter, due to heat.)  Multiply by 24 to get the number of MWH used in a day:  about 120,000.  Multiply by another thousand to get the number of KWH used in a day:  about 120,000,000.  Multiply by $273 to get the cost of enough batteries to store the 120,000,000 KWH to cover one calm and dark day:  $32.76 billion.  (Whoa!)  Now, how many dark/calm days could you get in a row?  Five?  Now we're talking $163.8 billion, just for batteries for New York City.  (That's about double the total annual budget for the NYC government, which is about $80 billion.)  Reader Dennis Rushworth reported last week in a comment that on an island called El Hierro -- one of the Canary Islands that are part of Spain -- they are trying to establish an electrical system using only wind and storage -- and they just had a calm period of 11 days!  Rushworth provides this link to the actual data from El Hierro, but it's in Spanish so I can't read it.  Anyway, at these "greatly reduced" prices for batteries that the Times is crowing about, eleven day's storage for New York City would go for something like $370 billion!  And New York City is only about one-fortieth of the U.S. by population.  Multiply by 40 to get the price for the whole U.S.:  around $15 trillion.  Hey, it's less than annual GDP (although not by much -- U.S. annual GDP is running around $18.5 trillion.)  No problem!  So what if we have to give up literally everything else in our lives from housing to food to clothing in order to buy nothing but zillions of batteries stacked higher than the Empire State Building?  We're saving the planet!

Anyway, once you start doing these calculations, you quickly realize that this couldn't possibly make sense until the cost of the batteries falls by at least another order of magnitude (factor of ten) or, more likely, two orders of magnitude.  Good luck trying, but I think the chance of that happening any time soon is about zero.  And then, of course, plenty of other questions occur to me (although they never seem to occur to anyone at Pravda), such as:  Does the capacity remotely exist to produce batteries in the kinds of quantities that could power entire cities and states for a week?  If you tried to buy so many batteries, would supply shortages of raw materials cause prices to soar?  Does the engineering knowledge exist to turn all these batteries into a functional system?  And so forth.

Dare we now consider another of the points made by the Times in this editorial?  How about point 4:  "Wind and solar are becoming cheaper every year":

In some countries like India, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and Chile, auction prices for renewable energy have fallen so much that they are “comparable or lower than generation cost of newly built gas and coal power plants,” according to the agency, which researches the energy sector for 29 member countries, including the United States. Based on current trends, the agency forecasts that the cost of land-based wind turbines and utility-size solar projects will fall an additional 15 percent and 25 percent, respectively, in the next five years.        

That's interesting.  So then kindly explain why you are so upset by the Trump administration revoking the Clean Power Plan.  The point of the CPP is to force utilities to close plants burning coal and other fossil fuels.  If wind and solar are cheaper (without subsidies), then there would be no need for force, because the utilities will obviously turn to those sources and close the more expensive plants without any need for coercion.  What are we missing?  The answer is, we are missing that nobody will build wind and solar facilities without subsidies because they are known to be far more expensive despite what you are saying; and on top of that, wind and solar can't work on their own without either massive backup from fossil fuel plants and/or hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries, which costs are just being omitted when Pravda tells us that wind and solar costs are "comparable" to those of fossil fuel plants.  Where are those things mentioned in this editorial?  Nowhere.

The other points in the Pravda editorial are of comparable quality and deceptiveness.

So, maybe President Trump hasn't ever thought about this and just has decent instincts, or maybe he is a lot more intelligent than Pravda is giving him credit for.  That's not necessarily saying all that much.  You don't really have to be particularly intelligent to be a lot more intelligent than the New York Times on these subjects.

Sixty-Five Scientists Demand Reconsideration Of EPA's Endangerment Finding

Today a large group of some sixty-five top scientists sent a letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt demanding that he initiate a process to reconsider the so-called Endangerment Finding of 2009.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize the EF as one of the most egregious and preposterous bureaucratic power grabs of all time.  By the EF, EPA purported to "determine" that carbon dioxide -- a colorless, odorless gas that has no known adverse health effects at any concentration you will ever experience and that is the basis for all life on earth -- is a "danger" to human health and welfare.  The so-called science underlying the EF is and always was a joke.  See, for example my post "The 'Science' Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing" from September 2016 (and multiple similar posts).  Nevertheless, the EF was used by the Obama administration as the basis for, among other things, its Clean Power Plan, seeking to force the closure of all coal-fired power plants (and ultimately the closure of all power plants involving any fossil fuel).  Just today, a group of about seventeen "blue" states and their environmentalist co-parties filed a brief in the D.C. Circuit (behind pay wall) seeking to compel the Trump administration to reinstate the CPP or something like it, on the grounds that the EF requires the government to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide.  

Here is a link to today's letter.  And here is the full text:

You have pending before you two science-based petitions for reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding for Greenhouse Gases, one filed by the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, and one filed jointly by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Science and Environmental Policy Project.

We the undersigned are individuals who have technical skills and knowledge relevant to climate science and the GHG Endangerment Finding. We each are convinced that the 2009 GHG Endangerment Finding is fundamentally flawed and that an honest, unbiased reconsideration is in order.

If such a reconsideration is granted, each of us will assist in a new Endangerment Finding assessment that is carried out in a fashion that is legally consistent with the relevant statute and case law.

We see this as a very urgent matter and therefore, request that you send your response to one of the signers who is also associated with a petitioner, SEPP. 

Readers here will also recognize that I am serving as a lawyer for one of the Petitioners (the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council) seeking reconsideration of the EF.  Our group issued a press release this morning simultaneous with the release of the scientists' letter to Administrator Pruitt.  Key points from our press release:

The Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council fully endorses the recommendations of these scientists because recent research has definitively validated that: once certain natural factor (i.e., solar, volcanic and oceanic/ENSO activity) impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no “natural factor adjusted” warming remaining to be attributed to rising atmospheric CO2 levels. That is, these natural factor impacts fully explain the trends in all relevant temperature data sets over the last 50 or more years. At this point, there is no statistically valid proof that past increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations have caused what have been officially reported as rising, or even record setting, global average surface temperatures (GAST) . . .  Moreover, additional research findings demonstrate that adjustments by government agencies to the GAST record render that record totally inconsistent with published credible temperature data sets and useless for any policy purpose. . . .  

This scientifically illiterate regulation [based on the EF] will raise U.S. energy prices thereby reducing economic growth and jobs as well as our National Security. . . .  The Electricity Consumers Council therefore, based on this new scientific evidence, must insist that the EPA grant the “very urgent” request of these scientists “that an honest, unbiased reconsideration is in order.”

I won't attempt to list here who all the letter's signers are, but if you go to the link you will see that they are a who's who of the top scientific people active on these issues.  To the extent that credentials count for anything in today's corrupted world, many of them have top degrees and top professorships at top institutions.  

Now, perhaps you have seen the claim that "97% of scientists agree" that human-caused global warming is a crisis, or something like that.  I guess that would have to mean that the alarmist team will shortly produce a responsive letter signed by in excess of 2000 comparably-qualified scientists.  Don't bank on it.  No such group exists.  Yes, there is a substantial government-funded clique of lightweights and charlatans that spend their lives manipulating the world temperature records and putting out fake press releases of "hottest year ever!"  Undoubtedly they can exceed our group in numbers (government dollars buy a lot of loyalty and corruption).  But no such group that could be assembled could remotely match our group of sixty-five for bona fide scientific heft.  If they try to assemble such a group, the contrast of the real scientists versus the lightweights will be immediately apparent.    

And by the way, the signing process for our scientists' letter is still open, and we expect the number of signers to increase over time.  Let the games begin!    

How Can You Identify White "Oppression" Or "Implicit Bias"?

Here we are multiple decades into the era of affirmative action intended to raise up racial minorities and women in education and in the workforce, and yet by reported statistics certain groups -- women, Hispanics, and particularly blacks -- continue to lag.  Indeed, by many such reported measures, the lags have not shrunk noticeably in all these decades.  Protesters from Black Lives Matter to Antifa to NFL players to various university students and faculties think they have identified the cause:  "oppression" by white males; or maybe, in a less harsh articulation, "implicit bias."  But does that hypothesis hold up to scrutiny?  And, if there is "oppression" or "implicit bias," how can you spot it?

On the subject of the racial gap, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has just come out with a lengthy analysis of the extensive literature on implicit bias, titled "Are We All Unconscious Racists?"   It is fair to call her highly skeptical.  Her fundamental point:  how could the explanation for black under-performance be "implicit bias" on the part of whites, when literally every major societal institution is explicitly engaged in some kind of affirmative action program intended to achieve the opposite?

[Blacks] are still not proportionally represented in the workplace, despite decades of trying to engineer “diversity.” You can read through hundreds of implicit-bias studies and never come across the primary reason: the academic skills gap. Given the gap’s size, anything resembling proportional representation can be achieved only through massive hiring preferences.  From 1996 to 2015, the average difference between the mean black score on the math SAT and the mean white score was 0.92 standard deviation, reports a February 2017 Brookings Institution study. The average black score on the math SAT was 428 in 2015; the average white score was 534, and the average Asian score was 598. The racial gaps were particularly great at the tails of the distribution.

Meanwhile, over in my own beloved legal profession, it's all one big guilt-fest over the failure of the profession to achieve percentages of women and minorities at all levels -- including partners of the largest and most profitable firms and lead trial lawyer roles in the most high-profile matters -- strictly in accordance with overall population ratios.  After decades of affirmative action, the percentage of women partners at major law firms remains under 20%, and the percentage of black partners under 3%.  "Implicit bias"?  Reacting to the failure of these numbers to move much over decades, the ABA in 2008 instituted its "Goal III":  to "Eliminate Bias and Enhance Diversity" in the profession.  In its most recent web page on the issue, the ABA lists no fewer than six big initiatives, bodies and commissions:  the Diversity and Inclusion Center; the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession; the Coalition on Racial and Ethnic Justice; the Council for Diversity and Inclusion in the Educational Pipeline; the Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights & Responsibilities; and the Commission on Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity.  But the numbers continue to move little if at all.    

As I pointed out in this post back in August, the problem with the "implicit bias" hypothesis in the law firm world is that there are several hundred major law firms, literally all of which claim that they are engaging in affirmative action in favor of women and minorities.  And literally all of them have in place a "diversity" bureaucracy (almost always staffed by people who are either female or minority or both) charged with achieving that goal.  Could it all be a big scam, orchestrated simultaneously by hundreds of seemingly independent entities?

And, even if you could believe that all these law firms are discriminating against minorities and women while loudly proclaiming they aren't, what about the formation of law firms?  After all, any given firm could, if it tried, discriminate in hiring.  But nobody can keep you from starting your own law firm and then trying to grow it.  All of the major commercial firms started from scratch, and remarkable numbers of the biggest and most profitable of them during my lifetime.  AmLaw Media compiles an annual list of the 200 largest and most profitable commercial firms;  here is one of their lists from 2016.  Of these 200 firms, how many were started by blacks?  The answer is zero.  But don't feel too bad, blacks.  How many were started by women?  Zero.  How many by Hispanics?  Also zero.  Was that "implicit bias"?  Or maybe, "oppression"?  If so, how did it work?  Who stopped these people from starting and building their own firms?  The same question could be asked as to firms in the technology business and, I suspect, numerous other fields.

Of course, for every white male who started one of these successful law firms, there were probably at least ten -- or maybe more like 50 -- who tried and failed at the effort to build a big and hugely profitable behemoth.  Some such start-up firms just remained small and marginal, while others failed entirely.  But in today's world, where all major law firms are practicing affirmative action for women, blacks, and Hispanics, why would any such person take the huge risk of striking out on their own and trying to make it big?  With affirmative action, the much easier, secure paycheck beckons.

From the University of North Carolina comes a story of affirmative action carried to its logical conclusion.  The NCAA has been investigating UNC for violations of its code of conduct, allegedly for providing its athletes with no-show, easy grade courses where the basketball stars can get an A without ever going to a class and then turning in one meaningless paper.  You won't be surprised to learn that the courses at issue are in the African American Studies Department.  But UNC has just been exonerated!  Its defense:  these were not special courses for athletes, but rather were courses available to all students.

In the bubble of today's higher education, the people who put this together apparently can't see that they are saddling the intended beneficiaries with an incredible handicap in life.  George W. Bush used the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations."  The phrase seems to me a remarkable understatement.  How about "white oppression"?

What Your Moral Superiors Are Up To

You probably think that the main thing that people claiming to be your moral superiors have been up to for the past few decades is covering up the story of Harvey Weinstein's sexual predation.  And you are right, that has been an important part of their activities, particular those of them who are Democratic pols on the receiving end of Weinstein's largesse, or those who are part of the insufferable Hollywood/entertainment groupthink clique.  But there is another activity that consumes even more of the time and attention of these moral preeners, and that is their never-ending struggle to keep the poor poor.  Of course, they wouldn't put it quite that way.  In their minds, they mainly believe that they are "saving the planet" -- staving off some theoretical and unmeasurable hundredths of a degree of global warming a hundred years from now.  The poor are just the collateral damage.

I have previously discussed multiple instances of our self-proclaimed moral betters getting deluded into supporting programs that have the effect of obstructing the ability of the poor to improve their condition.  For example, in this post I discussed proposals of the IMF to increase the amounts of taxes and grow the size of the state in poor countries; and in this post I discussed the support from none other than the Pope for proposals to restrict access of the poor to cheap and functional energy and electricity.  Sometimes the effort to point out such immoral follies has seemed rather lonely.  Can you ever recall reading a piece in any mainstream source calling out some progressive proposal for its effect in keeping the poor poor?

But today I would like to applaud one of my comrades in true morality, the Global Warming Policy Foundation of England.  This morning they published a new Report titled "The Anti-Development Bank:  The World Bank's Regressive Energy Policies."   The author is Rupert Darwall, the same guy whose new book "Green Tyranny" was covered in my post just a few days ago.

Now the World Bank has never been one of my favorite organizations.  If you wonder why rich countries got rich without any outside aid and poor countries stay poor forever even though they get endless amounts of outside aid, just take a look at the World Bank.  What works in economic development is rather obvious:  limited government, private property, the rule of law, and private investment.  The World Bank model is the opposite:  government-to-government lending for state-owned projects.  The result is endless bad ideas, with limited-to-no market discipline, and with the frequent result of destroying rather than creating wealth.  But on the other hand, it's hard to say that poor countries couldn't use electricity, even if it has to be through a state-owned or state-supported utility.  Surely, the World Bank could at least do that.

But in practice, it can't.  Instead, the World Bank, like all international organizations today, is completely in the grip of the climate change religion, and totally willing to sacrifice the poor at the altar.  Darwall and the GWPF document just how far this has gone.

The World Bank’s stated mission is to alleviate poverty. . . .  [But u]nder its president, Dr Jim Yong Kim, appointed by President Obama in 2012, the World Bank abandoned its core development mission.  It did this by prioritising environmental sustainability over poverty reduction.  In 2013, it adopted anti-coal funding policies, effectively blocking investment in what, for many developing nations, is likely to be the cheapest and most reliable generating capacity. The World Bank’s near categoric refusal to finance coal-fired capacity is worsened by it favouring high-cost, unreliable wind and solar technologies. This amounts to an inhumane and senseless attempt to try to save the planet on the backs of the world’s poor. 

It seems that in 2013, early in the presidency of Dr. Kim, the World Bank put out a big Report, "Toward a Sustainable Energy Future for All: Directions for the World Bank Group’s Energy Sector," in which it announced that it basically would no longer finance cheap electricity that works (i.e., coal) and instead would inflict upon the poor countries expensive energy that doesn't work, namely wind and solar.  According to that Report, henceforth new coal plants would only be considered in "rare circumstances."  From Darwall:

To date, the only coal project considered by the World Bank since adoption of these criteria in 2013 is a 600-MW lignite power station in Kosovo, for which it is providing $40m that is deemed crucial to the underwriting of the $2 billion financing cost of the project. The project was the very last coal plant in the World Bank’s pipeline; the Kosovo government has spent more than a decade trying to build it. 

So they're out there in poor countries trying to build an electrical grid from scratch, but with no background of dispatchable power plants, and nothing but wind and solar.  Does anybody realize that this isn't going to work?

There has been no technological breakthrough in the intervening period [since 2013] that has solved the inherent unreliability and cost disadvantages of wind and solar. Rather, what changed was the World Bank’s decision to subordinate the needs of today’s poor to green ideology. . . .  The World Bank’s mission has been subverted by green ideologues who assert that a low-carbon world benefits the world’s poor but fail to acknowledge that making energy much more costly increases poverty.  

So -- let the poor freeze in the dark.  Doesn't that make you feel really morally superior?     

Two Big Cracks In The Climate Hysteria Edifice In One Day

Predicting the impending collapse of climate hysteria is a lot like predicting the impending collapse of Venezuela or North Korea.  Yes, it is so transparently crazy that it can't possibly go on for too much longer.  On the other hand, it is backed by an enormous propaganda apparatus, by near unanimity in the media and academia kept intact by ruthless orthodoxy enforcement, and, at least up until recently, by complete control over vast government funding.  You can see cracks developing in the structure here and there, and clearly, as with Venezuela and North Korea, the entire edifice will definitely collapse eventually; but maybe it will take years or even decades before the final implosion.

Today brings two rather significant new cracks.  First, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has announced that EPA will repeal the so-called Clean Power Plan.  EPA's release can be found here.  The CPP, a regulation promulgated by the Obama EPA in October 2015, was the centerpiece of the prior administration's program to achieve emissions reductions of so-called "greenhouse gases" as prescribed by the Paris climate accord.  Back in February 2016 I called EPA's issuance of the CPP "the biggest-in-history see-how-far-we-can-push-the-envelope-and-get-away-with-it power grab."  The goal was supposedly to reduce CO2 emissions from power plants by some 30 plus percent by 2030.  To achieve that goal, the CPP basically set emissions limits that could not be met so long as coal-burning plants were part of the electricity system, thereby forcing all the coal plants to close.  Likely, oil plants, and even those fired by natural gas, would have also come on the chopping block as the strictures tightened with the approach of the 2030 deadline.  Associated with the CPP were many tens of billions of dollars of costs, all destined to make their way into your electricity bill.  

In February 2016, in response to litigation brought by the majority of states and many other parties, the Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the CPP.  Subsequently the litigation made its way before the en banc DC Circuit, which however has been holding the matter in abeyance while it waits to see what the Trump administration will do.  Looks like that litigation will now be moot -- undoubtedly soon to be replaced by new litigation to be brought by the other states and environmental groups seeking to compel the government to regulate and restrict the GHGs.

EPA's release does not really get into the question of whether CO2 from power plants is any kind of environmental problem, or whether restricting CO2 emissions is or is not a good idea.  Instead, its main thrust is that the section of the Clean Air Act mainly relied on by the Obama EPA, namely Section 111, does not in fact give EPA sufficient legal authority to support the CPP.  According to the new administration EPA's legal analysis, Section 111 only authorizes EPA to regulate emissions from individual sources of pollutants, rather than completely transforming an entire electricity system.  This was actually a principal argument advanced by the litigants in the case challenging the CPP.  And it is a good argument.  In any event, the CPP is going to be withdrawn.

Withdrawing the "biggest-in-history" government regulatory power grab -- that's a pretty big development on the climate front for one day.  But I have another one, also from today, that may be even bigger.  Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia, made a speech today at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London.  Here is a link to the speech.  With this speech, Australia takes another big step among the governments of the world toward joining the ranks of the climate apostates.

I certainly will not claim to be any kind of an expert on the politics of Australia, but I'll share what I can learn from easily available sources.  Abbott -- a member of the "Liberal" Party (we would call them "conservatives") -- was Prime Minister from 2013 - 2015.  He has been succeeded by Malcolm Turnbull, from the same party.  Prior to Abbott, the Prime Minister (briefly in 2013) was Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party, and before him, Julia Gillard (2010 - 2013), also of the Labor Party.  The Labor Party of Australia strongly supports policies to "save the planet" through mandatory restrictions on GHG emissions.  The Liberal Party has been somewhat conflicted in its positions on this issue.  Abbott famously stated in October 2009 that the science of climate change was "absolute crap."  That did not prevent him from becoming PM in 2013, but on becoming PM he substantially toned down his position on the issue.  Within a couple of years, he lost the job to his colleague Turnbull, who could not be called a climate skeptic, and has moved forward with a so-called "clean energy target" to reduce Australia's emissions.

Meanwhile, Abbott remains a major force in the Liberal Party.  And the "clean energy target" thing has not gone well in Australia.  While remaining a major producer of coal and natural gas (increasingly for export only), Australia has been closing down coal plants and seeking to replace that energy with solar and wind facilities that basically don't work when you need them.  South Australia -- ground zero for massive expansion of wind power -- has had several major blackouts.  With that background, here are some excerpts from Abbott's speech today:

Hydro aside, renewable energy should properly be referred to as intermittent and unreliable power. When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow. Wind and solar power are like sailing ships; cheaper than powered boats, to be sure, but we’ve stopped using sail for transport because it couldn’t be trusted to turn up on time.  Because the weather is unpredictable, you never really know when renewable power is going to work. Its marginal cost is low but so is its reliability, so in the absence of industrial scale batteries, it always needs matching capacity from dependable coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear energy. This should always have been obvious. . . .  

In the longer term, we need less theology and more common sense about emissions reduction. It matters but not more than everything else. As Clive James has suggested in a celebrated recent essay, we need to get back to evidence based policy rather than “policy based evidence”.  Even if reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely-better-than-futile; because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s. . . .  

Should Australia close down its steel industry; watch passively while its aluminium industry moves offshore to places less concerned about emissions; export coal, but not use it ourselves; and deliberately increase power prices for people who can’t install their own solar panels and batteries? Of course not, but these are the inevitable consequences of continuing current policies.  That’s the reality no one has wanted to face for a long time: that we couldn’t reduce emissions without also hurting the economy; that’s the inconvenient truth that can now no longer be avoided.

I particularly like that part about Australia exporting coal but then not using it themselves.  Is it really possible to be that dumb?  But the push back has started.

The Sydney Morning Herald, reporting on Abbott's speech, suggests that the turn toward climate skepticism is driven by party backbenchers who think that energy prices are a far more significant concern than environmental purity.  But whatever the driving force, it now appears likely that Australia will not be adopting a new "clean energy target".any time soon.  Some semblance of rationality has returned.  It has suddenly become acceptable in polite circles to care more about what working people pay for electricity than about multi-hundred-billion-dollar schemes to reduce global warming by 0.02 degrees over the next century.  That actually is a momentous development.  What country will be the next to join the ranks of the climate apostates?  England?  How about Germany?