Utopia, you are standing in it!

Other posts have addressed the murky science underneath the claim that burning fossil fuels makes the earth warmer, and the alarmist claims that a warmer world is more dangerous than a colder one. This post takes up the issue that even if rising human CO2 emission were causing dangerous warming, what are the likely consequences of policies to cut down on carbon-based energy. Text below in italics comes from sources listed as links at the end.

This issues arises in the US context because presidential candidates of leftist stripes have pledged to do away with fracking operations and forego the resulting boom in natural gas and tight oil production.

The Narrative

“I will ban fracking—everywhere.”
— Elizabeth Warren

“Any proposal to avert the climate crisis must include a full fracking ban on public and private lands.”
— Bernie Sanders

“I favor a ban on new fracking and a rapid end…

Well, Her Highness has a short summary of the worst aspects of 2019 in The Critic (click on screenshot). By “worst”, of course, I mean that the year was packed with incidents that offended the faux wokeness of Ms. McGrath (if that’s her right pronoun).

An excerpt from her litany of 2019’s outrages:

We all thought that 2019 was the worst year in human history thus far. We were wrong: 2020 is already turning out to be an utter disaster for social justice. On New Year’s day I had the misfortune of seeing Toy Story 4 with my seven-year-old niece (formerly my nephew) at my local cinema.

I was shocked at the lack of diverse representation, and even more shocked to see that there were people of colour in the audience who appeared to be enjoying themselves. I later read an article in the Hollywood Reporter by a middle-class white…

Reader Bryan called my attention to this video from 2016 in which Brady and Keith, who “uncover science treasures”, visit the Council Room of Britain’s Royal Society. Among the treasures they examine are the famous portrait of Darwin that you’ve surely seen, and a nice scale model of H.M.S. Beagle.  As I noted in my Darwin lecture in Antarctica, the Beagle was very small: 27.5 m (90 feet) long and just 7.5 m (24 feet) across. That is tiny!

They then examine what appears to be a first edition of the four-volume account of the Beagle’s voyage (actually the voyages of two ships: the set is called The Narrative of the Voyages of H.M. Ships Adventure and Beagle), which includes the famous volume by Darwin known as The Voyage of the Beagle. This set was given to the Royal Society by Darwin and his captain, Robert FitzRoy.

Pity…

On this date in history: February 10, 1840. Her Majesty Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland married her maternal first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Victoria once complained to her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, that her mother’s close proximity promised “torment for many years”, Melbourne sympathized but said it could be avoided by marriage, which Victoria called a “schocking alternative”. Although a marriage between Victoria and her cousin Prince Albert had been encouraged by the Coburg family, specifically King Leopold I of the Belgians since 1936, Victoria was ambivalent at best toward the arrangement.

The idea of marriage between Albert and his cousin, Victoria, was first documented in an 1821 letter from his paternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, (Countess Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf) who said that he was “the pendant to the pretty cousin”.

Victoria did however, show interest in Albert’s education…

Enormous expense, twenty times more wind turbines, hydrogen production, much less meat eating, carbon capture, hard ‘lifestyle changes’ and so on. Maybe travel to work on a flying pig – and all for what?

It won’t be easy, but clean energy analyst Chris Goodall believes that the UK is entirely capable of becoming carbon neutral, says BBC Science.

Belatedly, the world has realised it has to eliminate greenhouse gases within a few decades.

The UK has promised ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050. Is this is an achievable aim? How much will it cost? In what ways will our lifestyles need to change?

Here’s the latest installment in our ongoing series of posts documenting BDS fails.

Political

Sudan gives Israel initial okay for overflights- official

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan has agreed to allow flights heading to Israel to cross its airspace, a military spokesman said on Wednesday, two days after Sudan’s military head of state held a surprise meeting with Israel’s prime minister.

Israel officially allows Israelis to travel to Saudi Arabia

Jordan gets first natural gas supplies from Israel

Under the agreement, the U.S.-Israeli consortium will supply Jordan gas for 15 years from the field in the Mediterranean.

The deal has faced opposition in Jordan where many view Israel as an erstwhile enemy. Activists and parliamentarians have lobbied the…

I came upon this article when someone sent me the tweet below (I don’t know who Cathy Young is). The caption is pretty snarky, but the article in The Atlantic  by Megan Garber, which you can access by clicking on the link or the bottom part of the tweet, justifies the snark. It’s really a pretty dire article that criticizes due process because in some cases (read: accusations of sexual misconduct), “due process” involves making the witnesses uncomfortable or upset, and causing harm. And it can’t guarantee justice.

The article is about how the defense lawyers for Harvey Weinstein have been going pretty strongly…

No industrial economy has ever powered itself on sunshine and breezes; no country ever will.

Wherever in the world the subsidies begin to dry up, so too has investment in new wind and solar capacity. Nowhere has that collapse been more prominent than in China. Which doesn’t quite fit with the meme that’s been run by renewable energy zealots for years now, that China is hell-bent on a renewable energy future.

Instead, China is building coal-fired power plants, hand over fist.

At the official level the Chinese give a nod and a bow to meeting their purported “climate obligations” – which is simply code for preventing them from enjoying the same industrial and economic success as Europeans have done for the last two centuries – by promising (sometime between now and never) to slash their emissions of carbon dioxide gas.

Always inscrutable, the Chinese have incensed renewable energy rent seekers…

The Productivity Commission looks into topics the government of the day asks them to.  The current government asked for a report on issues around the “future of work” (a favoured topic of the current Minister of Finance when he was in Opposition) and the final report is due out next month.

The Commission has released a series of five draft reports looking at various aspects of the issue.  Late last year I wrote quite critically about one of those reports in which the Commission championed the case for a larger and more active welfare state, claiming that by adopting such policies New Zealand’s productivity performance might be improved.  As I noted

What it boils down to, amid various reasonable insights, is a push for a much bigger welfare state, allegedly in the cause of lifting average New Zealand productivity (and sustainable wages), without a shred of evidence or careful considered…

H/T The GWPF

The UK government seems to have a bad case of climate derangement syndrome at the moment, in the run-up to the COP26 conference in Glasgow this year. How much economic damage could its futile attempts to reduce the supply of essential carbon dioxide (CO2) to the Earth’s ecosystems do?
– – –
Homeowners could be forced to replace their gas boilers to ensure the UK meets its target to be carbon neutral by 2050, ministers are warning.

The Government will publish a White Paper later this year which will set out the “bigger decisions” that the UK has to make to meet the target, says the Sunday Telegraph.

Lord Duncan of Springbank, the Climate Change minister, said that the White Paper will consider whether the Government should ban gas central heating altogether from all homes.

by Peter Lang and Ken Gregory

A new paper ‘Economic impact of energy consumption change caused by global warming’ finds global warming may be beneficial.

Needless to say, this won’t please either the real or fake climate obsessives.
– – –
In his recent presentation to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Gautam Kalghatgi answers the question: ‘Is it really the end of internal combustion engines and petroleum in transport?’

Gautam Kalghatgi is currently a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London (Mechanical Engineering) and also at Oxford University (Engineering Science).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Society of Automotive Engineers, Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Combustion Institute and an Honorary Fellow of the International Society for Energy, Environment and Sustainability.

He worked for 31 years at Shell Research followed by 8 years in Saudi Aramco before retiring in June 2018.

Source: The GWPF