March 20, 2024

Starting To Notice That The Energy Transition Is Not Happening

March 20, 2024/ Francis Menton

Supposedly, there is a big energy transition going on. Throughout the West, countries have made ambitious pledges to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by specific percentages and by specific dates.
Many such pledges were notably made in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. Some countries — for example, the U.S. and UK — have even gone beyond the Paris Agreement and made still more ambitious pledges in the years since then. But is any of it real?

No, none of it is real. The failure to make the progress that would be necessary to achieve the alleged pledges and mandates is obvious and easily tracked. But a code of silence has enveloped the progressive media, commanding that no one is allowed to notice.
A small crack in the wall of silence suddenly happened in the New York Times on March 14.

March 18, 2024

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXXII (Sea Level Rise Edition)

March 18, 2024/ Francis Menton

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud by which government functionaries alter data collected and previously reported in official data bases in order to support a narrative of impending catastrophic global warming. No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance.
The prior 31 posts in this series have all concerned alteration of one particular sort of data, namely temperature records.
But why should we really care that the earth’s atmosphere is getting a little warmer? The UN has supposedly set some kind of Maginot Line at a 1.5 deg C temperature increase from 20th century levels — an amount so small that you can barely feel it when it occurs each day. The 1.5 deg mark is just not that all that scary. So the bureaucrats need a Plan B to scare the bejeezus out of the people. Plan B is sea level rise.
So don’t be surprised to learn that the sea level data, produced by NASA, have recently been altered — and of course, in a way to enhance the global warming scare narrative.

March 15, 2024

March 15, 2024/ Francis Menton

For those interested in why some countries become wealthy while others remain in extreme poverty, Haiti is one of the most important case studies.
Despite being only a few hundred miles from the U.S. mainland, and even closer to Puerto Rico, with investment capital readily available and unlimited opportunities for trade, Haiti has essentially no economic development and is one of the poorest countries in the world.
And instead of improving, conditions in Haiti only get worse. The past few weeks have seen yet a new extreme low point, with the Prime Minister locked out of the territory and the country taken over by armed gangs.
At this blog I have returned repeatedly to the subject of Haiti over the years, in the attempt to understand how things could have gone, and continue to go, so terribly wrong.

March 11, 2024

March 11, 2024/ Francis Menton

What is it about fossil fuels and the people who produce them that brings forth such uncontrolled hatred, anger, and vengefulness in a very large segment of the population?
I’ve been trying to figure out the answer to that question for many years, but I’m no closer today than when I started.
I look at the use of fossil fuels in the world, and somehow I see enormous benefits to mankind — reliable electricity, transportation of people locally and at long distances, and of freight to enable worldwide trade, comfortable heating and cooling of homes, refrigeration to preserve food, computers, and so much more, all at remarkably low cost and remarkably small environmental impact. Most uses of fossil fuels either have no good substitutes (e.g., air travel, ocean shipping, steel-making), or only substitutes that have both higher cost, plus inferior functionality and/or their own environmental problems (e.g., wind, solar, or nuclear for electricity).
With almost no exceptions (e.g., the Unabomber) everybody who has access to fossil fuels or their energy output uses them in large quantities, precisely because they provide great benefits at low cost and low environmental impact, in ways that nothing else can. Even the most virtue signaling of climate fanatics, with almost no exceptions, won’t give up air travel, or buildings made with steel and concrete, or full-time life-saving electricity at the hospital, or plenty of other things that come only from fossil fuels.

March 08, 2024

March 08, 2024/ Francis Menton

For a number of years, I’ve been observing demands of activists and promises of politicians that we transition our electrical grid to being supplied mainly by the intermittent renewables, wind and solar, with all large dispatchable sources (fossil fuel and nuclear) banished.
Early on, I thought it was obvious that such a transition would inevitably mean that the only way to make the grid function full-time would be energy storage — on a vast scale never before contemplated or attempted.
How much storage, and at what potential cost? This is actually an arithmetic problem, somewhat cumbersome but conceptually very elementary, and easily done with today’s widely-available spreadsheet programs. To help matters along, in December 2022 I produced my energy storage Report (“The Energy Storage Conundrum”), laying out the main options and the calculations involved. My conclusion was that I could not see any way that this could be done at remotely feasible cost. (Anybody who disagrees is welcome to prove me wrong.) Today, if somebody wants to effect an energy transition in a state or country, they can just look to my Report to quickly understand the nature and extent of the energy storage challenge.
What has actually occurred since December 2022 is that our “climate leader” jurisdictions — in the U.S., that would be New York and California — have moved forward with energy storage proposals that any moron can easily see will not work.

March 05, 2024

March 05, 2024/ Francis Menton

The energy implosion set in motion by New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (Climate Act) continues to unfold slowly. This week we have gotten a few more new data points.
If you can read between the lines of wild spinning by the Governor and her team of bureaucrats, you will find that the scope of offshore wind projects moving forward with accepted bids has decreased by about two-thirds, while the price has just jumped by over 30%.
First, some background. The Climate Act sets several unachievable and impossible targets, the first of which is 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030.
How to get there? The bureaucrats in charge of meeting the targets have no idea what they are doing, but they have established as a first goal to have some 9,000 MW of offshore wind turbines (nameplate capacity) up and running by some point in the 2030s.