Why are we still debating the climate?

redfish said:
If the libs would focus on pollution and overpopulation instead of the AGW lie, we might be able to get something done. But they are not about humanity or the planet, they are about power and control and nothing else.
Click to expand...

So why don't conservatives lead on pollution and overpopulation?
 
One thing that I've found interesting about the climate debate (and this thread is NOT about warming), is how far the right-wing position has traveled.

20 years ago, conservatives generally did not acknowledge climate change or any kind of warming. It was all made up.

Today? If you look back on this thread, many now argue that of course there is warming & climate change - but there always has been, and man has nothing to do with it.

Just food for thought.
 
BartenderElite said:
One thing that I've found interesting about the climate debate (and this thread is NOT about warming), is how far the right-wing position has traveled.

20 years ago, conservatives generally did not acknowledge climate change or any kind of warming. It was all made up.

Today? If you look back on this thread, many now argue that of course there is warming & climate change - but there always has been, and man has nothing to do with it.

Just food for thought.
Click to expand...

Even the Brit maggot puts his scrawny hand up to an element of AGW. In his case, of course, he'll be hoping to claim later that he's never been a singer in the Denier Choir.



Haw, haw.............................haw.
 
BartenderElite said:
So, if immigration is a big issue for you...you should be working the border, right?
Click to expand...

no fuckwit.....demmycunt congressmen should pass the law cleaning up a square mile of floating plastic......I would never waste my time asking you to do something personally.......we know lib'ruls don't do heavy lifting.....
 
Primavera said:
.

So many fucking idiots spouting bullshit about climate. Barfly Effete is one of the worst alongside McMoonshi'te and Reagan's Gobshite of course, stupidity is baked in with these arsewipes.


Today’s Soaring Energy Prices Are Only The Beginning

Energy prices are soaring, and it’s likely a sign of things to come.

The rise can be blamed on a variety of things, including the demand rebound after the lockdowns ended, a drop in renewable electricity output from a lack of wind in Europe during most of 2021, and increasingly costly climate policies.

But while the pandemic will end and the wind will blow again, climate policies to achieve “net-zero” emissions will keep hiking prices.

Barack Obama acknowledged in 2008 that electricity prices “would necessarily skyrocket” under his proposed climate policies. He was more candid than many of today’s politicians and advocates.

Limiting the use of fossil fuels requires making them more expensive and pushing people toward green alternatives that remain pricier and less efficient.

In the U.K., real electricity prices have doubled since 2003, after dropping fivefold over the 20th century. British climate policy had already added more than £10 billion annually to the national electricity bill by 2020.

Even before last year’s energy price hikes, 50 million to 80 million people in the European Union couldn’t afford to heat their homes sufficiently.

That’s likely to get worse, as this year European energy bills are expected to increase by almost $400 billion.

And in the U.S., gasoline prices soared to a seven-year high in October, while gas heating is predicted to be 30% more expensive this winter than the previous one.

Costs will continue to rise if politicians remain bent on achieving net-zero emissions globally. Bank of America finds that achieving net-zero globally by 2050 will cost $150 trillion over 30 years—almost twice the combined annual gross domestic product of every country on earth.

The annual cost ($5 trillion) is more than all the world’s governments and households spend every year on education. Academic studies find the policy is even costlier.

The largest database on climate scenarios shows that keeping temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius—a less stringent policy than net-zero by midcentury—would likely cost $8.3 trillion, or 3.3% of world GDP, every year by 2050, and the costs keep escalating so that by the end of the century taxpayers will have paid about $1 quadrillion—a thousand trillion—in total.

These estimates are based on the heroic assumption that climate policy costs will be spread efficiently, with big emitters China and India cutting the most.

New Delhi says it will only keep moving toward net-zero if the rest of the world pays it $1 trillion by 2030, which won’t happen. Other developing nations are showing the same understandable reluctance.

This means that achieving global net-zero emissions by 2050 will be impossible. Those cuts that are enforced will most likely occur in rich countries, taking a smaller notch out of global emissions at a high cost.

Though the EU, the U.K., the U.S., and others have adopted national net-zero emissions goals, few have undertaken rigorous cost estimates. The official independent assessment done in New Zealand shows achieving net-zero by midcentury will cost 16% of its GDP annually by 2050.

That is more than its entire current budget for social security, welfare, health, education, police, courts, defense, and the environment—combined.

For the U.S., one recent study in Nature found reducing emissions by only 80% by 2050 will cost more than $2.1 trillion in today’s money annually by midcentury. That is more than $5,000 per American a year.

The cost of achieving 100% reductions would be far higher. And this study assumes reductions will be carried out in the most efficient way possible—namely using a single national, steadily increasing carbon tax—but that’s unlikely, and with less-than-ideal policies, the price would be still higher.

Climate activists may not want to acknowledge these costs, but voters will force them to eventually. If you divide Bank of America’s annual cost for net-zero emissions globally, it comes to more than $600 a person—including the world’s poorest, in India and Africa.

Even in a rich country like the U.S., most voters are unwilling to give the government more than about $100 a year to fight climate change, and a couple of hundred dollars is the limit for a majority of voters in many other countries, such as China and the U.K.

France has already seen sustained protests against gasoline price hikes of only 12 cents a gallon. Imagine the backlash against policies enforcing net-zero emissions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/soarin...t-zero-renewable-wind-electricity-11641417084
Click to expand...

Not one of these climate alarmists will ever acknowledge the huge costs involved.
 
.

Respect is due to Michael Shellenberger, despite numerous attempts by Regressives to shut him down he's fought back and severely embarrassed them.

Finally, Bloomberg Admits Renewables Mania Caused Energy Shortages

Plus, new Environmental Progress Analysis finds German emissions rose in 2021 and in will rise again in 2022

Michael Shellenberger
Jan 4, 2022

Michael Bloomberg is directly invested in natural gas and renewables and is the owner and publisher of Bloomberg Media

Between 2017 and 2021, Environmental Progress and I researched and published dozens of articles, testified before Congress, and authored a book, Apocalypse Never, arguing that weather-dependent renewables were making electricity increasingly unreliable and expensive, and making the United States, Europe, and Asia, dangerously dependent on natural gas. In response, there was an organized and somewhat successful effort by progressive climate-renewables activists to cut off our funding, censor us on Facebook, and prevent me from testifying before Congress.

But now, one of the biggest boosters of natural gas and renewables, media giant Bloomberg, whose owner, Michael Bloomberg, is directly invested in natural gas and renewables, has published an article conceding and substantiating almost every single point we have made over the years. “Europe Sleepwalked Into an Energy Crisis That Could Last Years,” screams the headline. The article concludes that the crisis was “years in the making” because Europe is “shutting down coal-fired electricity plants and increasing its reliance on renewables.”

Bloomberg still pulls its punches and misdescribes the situation in some ways. The article, like many other Bloomberg articles, mislabels the deployment of renewables as an “energy transition” similar to past transitions from wood to coal and coal to natural gas, failing to acknowledge that the poor physics of energy-dilute renewables make that impossible. And it suggests that Europe’s energy crisis is the result of ignorance. “The energy crisis hit the bloc,” notes a renewable energy PR person, “when security of supply was not on the menu of EU policymakers,” ignoring the reality that I and others warned EU policymakers of this very crisis.

But, to its credit, the article acknowledges that the energy crisis is a direct result of Europe over-investing in unreliable renewables and under-investing in reliable energy sources. “Wind and solar are cleaner but sometimes fickle,” the authors admit, in the understatement of the year, “as illustrated by the sudden drop in turbine-generated power the continent recorded last year.” (I was the first U.S. journalist to report Germany saw its emissions rise 25% in the first half of 2021 due to lack of wind.)

Now, a new analysis from Environmental Progress finds Germany increased its emissions last year and will likely increase them again this year. This year, German electricity generation coming from fossil fuels will be 44% compared to 39% in 2021 and 37 percent in 2020, assuming weather conditions and electricity demand are similar to 2021. Emissions from Germany’s power sector will rise from 244 million tons in 2021 to 264 million tons in 2022.

And Bloomberg notes that Europe is in a full-blown energy crisis. “The retired salt caverns, aquifers, and fuel depots that hold Europe’s stockpiles of natural gas have never been so empty at this point in winter,” it notes, and “the continent is grappling with a supply crunch that’s caused benchmark gas prices to more than quadruple from last year’s levels, squeezing businesses and households. The crisis has left the European Union at the mercy of the weather and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wiles, both notoriously difficult to predict.”

It’s true that American natural gas from fracking, a practice I have defended since 2013, is being shipped to Europe, and will ease Europe’s pain. And it hasn’t helped that France’s leaders have grossly mismanaged their nuclear power plants, resulting in an embarrassing 30% decline in their output during the crisis.

But, notes Bloomberg, the relief provided by American liquified natural gas (LNG) is “temporary at best…. Storage sites [for natural gas] are only 56% full, more than 15 percentage points below the 10-year average… Barring an increase in Russian exports, something that doesn’t appear to be in the cards, levels will be at less than 15% by the end of March, the lowest on record… With the two coldest months of winter still ahead, the fear is that Europe may run out of gas.”

And the lack of nuclear energy underscores the need for more nuclear plants since they are reliable and operate independently of the weather when they are managed well. No matter how well a solar farm is managed, it can’t change the weather.

And now, Russia is massing troops on its border with Ukraine, and may invade. This is a problem since one-third of Russian gas going into Europe goes through Ukraine. If war breaks out, Europe could suffer serious gas shortages. Overdependence on natural gas and renewables, and underinvestment in nuclear, has thus undermined the energy security, and thus national security, of Europe, since heads of state dependent on Russian gas will be less likely to speak out against an invasion.

Even longtime natural gas and renewable energy boosters agree there’s a crisis. “The ability of Europe and the U.S. to respond to a Russian invasion is constrained both by a desire not to exacerbate Europe’s energy crisis by sanctioning Russian energy exports and, more broadly, by the threat that Russia could retaliate to any confrontation by restricting gas flows into Europe, as Russia did in 2006 and 2009,” Jason Bordoff, a former Obama administration official, told Bloomberg.

Covid accelerated many trends and one of them is the recognition that unreliable and weather-dependent renewables cannot power modern economies. Senator Joe Manchin specifically mentioned the role that renewables are playing in making America’s electricity less reliable when he killed Build Back Better legislation in December. The Netherlands mentioned the need for reliable electricity when it announced plans to expand nuclear energy.

Now, with New England at grave risk of energy shortages for the exact same reasons as Europe, it’s time for the American people and their representatives to fully wake up to the reality that modern societies cannot rely on unreliable renewables. It would also help if the renewable energy industry, and its dogmatic supporters, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Rep. Sean Casten, and Rep. Jared Huffman, would stop trying to censor and otherwise shut down the people who raised the alarm about the coming crisis in the first place

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/finally-bloomberg-admits-renewables
 
Last edited:
Primavera said:
.

Respect is due to Michael Shellenberger, despite numerous attempts by Regressives to shut him down he's fought back and severely embarrassed them.

Finally, Bloomberg Admits Renewables Mania Caused Energy Shortages

Plus, new Environmental Progress Analysis finds German emissions rose in 2021 and in will rise again in 2022

Michael Shellenberger
Jan 4, 2022

Michael Bloomberg is directly invested in natural gas and renewables and is the owner and publisher of Bloomberg Media

Between 2017 and 2021, Environmental Progress and I researched and published dozens of articles, testified before Congress, and authored a book, Apocalypse Never, arguing that weather-dependent renewables were making electricity increasingly unreliable and expensive, and making the United States, Europe, and Asia, dangerously dependent on natural gas. In response, there was an organized and somewhat successful effort by progressive climate-renewables activists to cut off our funding, censor us on Facebook, and prevent me from testifying before Congress.

But now, one of the biggest boosters of natural gas and renewables, media giant Bloomberg, whose owner, Michael Bloomberg, is directly invested in natural gas and renewables, has published an article conceding and substantiating almost every single point we have made over the years. “Europe Sleepwalked Into an Energy Crisis That Could Last Years,” screams the headline. The article concludes that the crisis was “years in the making” because Europe is “shutting down coal-fired electricity plants and increasing its reliance on renewables.”

Bloomberg still pulls its punches and misdescribes the situation in some ways. The article, like many other Bloomberg articles, mislabels the deployment of renewables as an “energy transition” similar to past transitions from wood to coal and coal to natural gas, failing to acknowledge that the poor physics of energy-dilute renewables make that impossible. And it suggests that Europe’s energy crisis is the result of ignorance. “The energy crisis hit the bloc,” notes a renewable energy PR person, “when security of supply was not on the menu of EU policymakers,” ignoring the reality that I and others warned EU policymakers of this very crisis.

But, to its credit, the article acknowledges that the energy crisis is a direct result of Europe over-investing in unreliable renewables and under-investing in reliable energy sources. “Wind and solar are cleaner but sometimes fickle,” the authors admit, in the understatement of the year, “as illustrated by the sudden drop in turbine-generated power the continent recorded last year.” (I was the first U.S. journalist to report Germany saw its emissions rise 25% in the first half of 2021 due to lack of wind.)

Now, a new analysis from Environmental Progress finds Germany increased its emissions last year and will likely increase them again this year. This year, German electricity generation coming from fossil fuels will be 44% compared to 39% in 2021 and 37 percent in 2020, assuming weather conditions and electricity demand are similar to 2021. Emissions from Germany’s power sector will rise from 244 million tons in 2021 to 264 million tons in 2022.

And Bloomberg notes that Europe is in a full-blown energy crisis. “The retired salt caverns, aquifers, and fuel depots that hold Europe’s stockpiles of natural gas have never been so empty at this point in winter,” it notes, and “the continent is grappling with a supply crunch that’s caused benchmark gas prices to more than quadruple from last year’s levels, squeezing businesses and households. The crisis has left the European Union at the mercy of the weather and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wiles, both notoriously difficult to predict.”

It’s true that American natural gas from fracking, a practice I have defended since 2013, is being shipped to Europe, and will ease Europe’s pain. And it hasn’t helped that France’s leaders have grossly mismanaged their nuclear power plants, resulting in an embarrassing 30% decline in their output during the crisis.

But, notes Bloomberg, the relief provided by American liquified natural gas (LNG) is “temporary at best…. Storage sites [for natural gas] are only 56% full, more than 15 percentage points below the 10-year average… Barring an increase in Russian exports, something that doesn’t appear to be in the cards, levels will be at less than 15% by the end of March, the lowest on record… With the two coldest months of winter still ahead, the fear is that Europe may run out of gas.”

And the lack of nuclear energy underscores the need for more nuclear plants since they are reliable and operate independently of the weather when they are managed well. No matter how well a solar farm is managed, it can’t change the weather.

And now, Russia is massing troops on its border with Ukraine, and may invade. This is a problem since one-third of Russian gas going into Europe goes through Ukraine. If war breaks out, Europe could suffer serious gas shortages. Overdependence on natural gas and renewables, and underinvestment in nuclear, has thus undermined the energy security, and thus national security, of Europe, since heads of state dependent on Russian gas will be less likely to speak out against an invasion.

Even longtime natural gas and renewable energy boosters agree there’s a crisis. “The ability of Europe and the U.S. to respond to a Russian invasion is constrained both by a desire not to exacerbate Europe’s energy crisis by sanctioning Russian energy exports and, more broadly, by the threat that Russia could retaliate to any confrontation by restricting gas flows into Europe, as Russia did in 2006 and 2009,” Jason Bordoff, a former Obama administration official, told Bloomberg.

Covid accelerated many trends and one of them is the recognition that unreliable and weather-dependent renewables cannot power modern economies. Senator Joe Manchin specifically mentioned the role that renewables are playing in making America’s electricity less reliable when he killed Build Back Better legislation in December. The Netherlands mentioned the need for reliable electricity when it announced plans to expand nuclear energy.

Now, with New England at grave risk of energy shortages for the exact same reasons as Europe, it’s time for the American people and their representatives to fully wake up to the reality that modern societies cannot rely on unreliable renewables. It would also help if the renewable energy industry, and its dogmatic supporters, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Rep. Sean Casten, and Rep. Jared Huffman, would stop trying to censor and otherwise shut down the people who raised the alarm about the coming crisis in the first place

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/finally-bloomberg-admits-renewables
Click to expand...

That only means that better planning is needed - more cooperation, more resources, more attention & greater urgency.

That doesn't speak to the crisis we're facing. It only points to marginal failures in the 1st attempts to change the way we live & consume energy. As a species, we have never given up at the 1st sign of trouble.
 
.
Michael Shellenberger is that rare individual, especially in California, that is a committed environmentalist but is also pragmatic and well informed. He supports nuclear energy and warns against renewables unreliables.
 
Primavera said:
.
Michael Shellenberger is that rare individual, especially in California, that is a committed environmentalist but is also pragmatic and well informed. He supports nuclear energy and warns against renewables unreliables.
Click to expand...

So you're a Shellenberger spear-carrier, maggot.
The respect just grows and grows.



Haw, haw...........................................haw.
 
BartenderElite said:
That only means that better planning is needed - more cooperation, more resources, more attention & greater urgency.
Click to expand...


Yes, fully-committed international battery technology development and sharing of resources and raw materials. Leave it to the capitalists and kiss your ass goodbye.
 
Hello BartenderElite,

BartenderElite said:
AGW is a distraction to me. It's the shiny object in the climate "debate." It allows detractors to focus on something unproveable, and ignore the larger crisis that is near a tipping point.

We are losing whole ecosystems at this point. We're in the middle of a mass extinction (and unlike AGW, that one is on us, without a doubt). We're losing habitat, drinkable water & breathable air at alarming rates.

None of this is even remotely sustainable, even for another decade. People used to talk about preserving the planet for our children & our children's children - but this is about us just as much as anyone.

We can't possibly be this shortsighted and careless. This is a crisis, and it's the most important and impactful crisis we have. Without a habitable planet, all of the other issues are meaningless.

This shouldn't be political. This should be the top priority for both parties, and for every world leader.
Click to expand...

It is, and has been for a long time, my number one issue.

I totally agree. If we can't get this one right nothing else matters.

And it is not just a US politics issue. It's worldwide.

That is one of the reasons it is so bogus for it to become a US political left-right issue.

All of the resistance on the right has been manufactured.

There was a time when it was not a US left-right issue.

That was before it was manipulated by the right wing propaganda machine.
 
There is no debate.

A debate is where people look at a set of facts and differ on what conclusions to draw about them and what action to take or not take.

Climate change is a fact. There is no debating facts.

What there is, are people who believe the facts, and those who deny the facts.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top