November 14, 2024

Are You Even Aware That There Is Another Big UN Climate Conference Going On?

November 14, 2024/ Francis Menton

The overwhelming focus of the environmental movement over the past three decades and more has been the push to eliminate the use of hydrocarbon fuels and transform the world’s energy system into something based on supposedly cleaner wind and sun.
This effort has always been doomed to failure, because energy produced by wind and sun does not work satisfactorily and is wildly too expensive. So it has long been obvious to the well-informed that this whole effort will inevitably go away at some point. But after the desperate cries of crisis and alarm from thousands of activists for decades on end, and after the trillions of dollars government funds invested, how could that possibly occur?
My prediction has long been that at some point the whole thing would just quietly fade away, as if it had never happened.

September 24, 2024

Somebody Please Tell Kathy Hochul That The Climate Jig Is Up

September 24, 2024/ Francis Menton

It’s Climate Week here in New York, and you can feel the excitement.
The UN General Assembly is in town, and simultaneously something called the “Climate Group” (“Our mission is to drive climate action. Fast.”) is holding some 600 (!) events to promote policies that they somehow believe will “save the planet.”
At one of these events yesterday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul showed up to deliver what she probably thought was a significant policy speech. The Governor’s web page describes the speech this way:

August 19, 2024

August 19, 2024/ Francis Menton

Come here for the latest news on how the so-called “energy transition” is grinding to a halt. No amount of government handouts can make this ridiculously uneconomic fantasy work.
My last post on the subject, on July 20, reported on the collapse of a large “green hydrogen” project in Australia, with the stated loss of an investment of about $2 billion (Australian) (equivalent to about $1.3 billion U.S.).
It seems that that one was just the tip of the iceberg.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a substantial roundup of the financial status of a half-dozen or so so-called “clean fuel” projects.

January 12, 2024

January 12, 2024/ Francis Menton

The cries of climate alarm get ever louder and more urgent. (E.g., New York Times, January 9, “It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.”). We’re all about to boil! Something must be done!
OK, but then there is the proposed solution: Order up by government fiat that our current fully working and inexpensive energy system must be replaced with a never-demonstrated pipe dream conjured up by political science and gender studies majors who know nothing about how an energy system works.
We’re far enough into this by now that some of the pieces are starting to blow up in dramatic fashion. Are we allowed to notice?

November 30, 2023

November 30, 2023/ Francis Menton

The COP 28 climate confab opened today in Dubai. Some 70,000 true believers in the energy transition are said to be gathering. And not one of them appears to be either willing or able to do the simple arithmetic that shows that this can’t possibly work.
So far, no country that has made a commitment to “net zero” has officially backed off. (Argentina may soon become the first.). Things proceed as if all that is needed is to build sufficient wind and solar generation facilities, until eventually you have enough of them to meet demand.
But that’s not how this works. The absurdity becomes more obvious every day. Can somebody please tell the poor people making fools of themselves in Dubai?
Let’s consider the latest from Germany.

December 04, 2021

December 04, 2021/ Francis Menton

Somewhere a couple of decades or so ago, the rich parts of the world embarked on a program of replacing energy from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) with energy from intermittent “renewables” (mainly wind and solar). In trendy academic, journalistic, and otherwise progressive circles, the idea took hold that this was the way to “save the planet.”
This program was undertaken without any detailed engineering study of how or whether it might actually work, or how much it might cost to fully implement. In the trendy circles, there took hold a blind faith in the complete ability of the government, by dispensing taxpayer funds, to order up whatever innovation might be needed to move us forward to this energy utopia.
The latest UN-orchestrated effort to implement the renewable energy program, known as COP 26, has just broken up. To read the verbiage emanating from the affair, all is on track, if a bit slower than one might have hoped.
But I have long predicted that this program would come to an end when (absent some miraculous innovation that nobody has yet conceived) the usage of the renewables got to a sufficient level that their costs and unworkability could not be covered up any longer. Until very recently the pressure of elite groupthink has been able to maintain a united front of lip service to the cause.
But consider a few developments from the past few weeks, just since the end of COP 26: