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climate change

Looks like we can blame Monbiot here

As the island begins its recovery operation after the apocalyptic scenes last week and the biggest evacuation in Greek history, islanders are turning their anger on the authorities.

Residents said that for years the island’s forests of pine, cypresses, myrtles and oaks have been poorly maintained, which experts said added fuel to the wildfires. Locals cannot cut trees on their own land without a permit, or they will risk a huge fine or even prison time.

Rewilding just is such a danger:

“Poor management of forests leads to increased fuel loads, vegetation of the most flammable type, and few or narrow firebreaks. This is unfortunate, because fire safety and ecology require determined and wise management of the forest,” he said.

This is just so gorgeously wrong

Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests
A collapse would bring catastrophic climate impacts but scientists disagree over the new analysis

Nonsense. Unless you move the continents and stop the Earth spinning the Gulf Stream is not about to close down.

The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) by scientists, would bring catastrophic climate impacts.

a) that’s not the Gulf Stream and b) it would be a mild inceonvenience – it has stopped before – not a catastrophe.

It would actually bring the Arctic ice back…..

Can’t these people count?

Batteries can charge on windy or sunny days cheaply, or even for free, and then deploy that power when needed. The plant is expected to offer the equivalent of 2,080 megawatts – a decent sized power station – for an hour.

Blueprints for the world’s largest battery on the site of an old coal-fired power station in Manchester, storing enough energy for 36,000 homes for a week, have won approval from planning officials.

It’s to cost £750 million. So we’d only need 1,000 of these to cover British housing for a still winter week then.

Sigh.

Well, no, they haven’t

The lawsuit she filed in November goes after a who’s who of the fossil fuel industry — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and others. Ms. Sims argues that since 1965, those companies have produced 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, while at the same time colluding to deceive the public about the disastrous consequences of their actions.

We the people have been making the emissions by using the oil sold to us – which we willingly bought.

But, you know, logic and the law never the twain shall meet etc.

Very funny

The Swedish state energy giant Vattenfall is stopping development of a proposed multibillion-pound wind farm off the coast of Norfolk because of soaring costs. The decision will be a blow to the government’s clean energy goals.

Wind ain’t so cheap, is it?

Yep, rationing

The study, which modelled the effect of narrowing the gaps in energy use between households within 27 European countries, found capping demand from the top fifth, even at a fairly high level, cut greenhouse gas pollution from energy consumption by 9.7%, while raising demand from people in the bottom fifth who also live in poverty to a fairly low level increases emissions by just 1.4%.

“We have to start tackling luxury energy use to stay within an equitable carbon budget for the globe,” said Milena Buchs, a professor of sustainable welfare at the University of Leeds and the lead author of the study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Energy, “but also to actually have the energy resources to enable people in fuel poverty to slightly increase their energy use and meet their needs.”

Why do they keep coming back to the same idiot proposals?

Has Freedland entirely lost his mind?

Once settled on, that metaphor has to be deployed again and again, repeated so often it becomes exhausted – and exhausting – to those using it. This too clashes with progressive habit, which tends to hold to the “enlightenment fallacy”: the belief that the facts will persuade all by themselves. They don’t need to be repeated or simplified or embedded in moral or emotional stories: their sheer truth will prevail.

Perhaps this is why the climate movement has devoted relatively few resources to reaching or persuading the public, outside of periodic fundraising drives – certainly nothing to compete with their polluting opponents, who hire ad men steeped in marketing science to push their message relentlessly. “We’re in a propaganda war, but only one side is on the battlefield,” says Fenton.

The gorbal worming fantasists don’t use enough propaganda? Really?

When the entire idea of 1,5 C as a turning point is, in itself, invented propaganda. Seriously, Freedland must be one some good stuff to manage to write this with a straight face.

‘Brose does get over-excited and yet

Limitless ‘white’ hydrogen under our feet may soon shatter all energy assumptions
There’s a real possibility that vast reserves of this clean fuel can be extracted at competitive costs

Vast amounts of geologic H2 would be both a surprise and a game changer.

Wonder if the EU will manage to ban drilling for it?

They are idiots, aren’t they?

Proposed new UK oil and gas fields would provide at most three weeks of energy a year
Experts and former ministers have also said the developments would not reduce energy prices in the UK

Global prices would fall by some amount. Therefore UK prices would too. That’s just obvious.

The more important point here thought is, well, given winter clod spells and windlessness in them, isn’t three weeks a year about what we need battery power to cover?

And natural gas would be markedly cheaper than trying to build 3 week’s worth of actual batteries…..

Well, yes, but…..

A Just Stop Oil protest was gatecrashed on Friday by a stag party who stole their banner while chanting “we love you oil”.

A video, apparently filmed near Waterloo Station in London, shows a man dressed in a vivid pink shirt and shorts apparently joining in their slow march.

After standing in line with protesters and singing “we love you oil, we do”, he breaks off from the throng and runs away with a banner held by two members of the group.

The man, who also wore white sliders, a frilly pink tutu and a garland around his neck, twirled the banner above his head before throwing it up in the air.

How do we know that it was a stag party? It did, after all, take place duting Pride Month, didn’t it?

All too many Lenins

In Marx’s view, this new order is supposed
to come about through natural historical processes, whereby the capitalistic stage of
society is replaced by the socialistic stage and, eventually, the communist stage in which
the state withers away.
Lenin, however, believed that capitalist forces would suppress
revolutionary notions and that a revolutionary vanguard needed to seize power by force
and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Not quite. Lenin believed that the time for the revolutionary vanguard was now and that the vanguard should be led by Lenin. To the point that it’s very easy indeed to believe that Lenin worked out that necessity of the vanguard becaue that was the only way that Lenin got to tell everyone what to do and right now.

In this Lenin was partly all too many prophets and eschatologists. That this will happen is not enough, it’s that this is going to happen right now so give me all the virgins. It being obvious enough in at least some cases that the prophecies are only the excuse for the virgin collections.

Now, I’m not saying that George Monbiot is trying to get a collection of Greta Thunbergs but he is performing a part in such a tale. Everything he talks of is about to happen right now. So we must do as George says right now. It maybe Gaia keeling over rather than the Lord returning on the millennium but it’s exactly the same in this one manner – the redemption comes only from changing today for the punishment might not even wait until tomorrow if you don’t.

Much the same with climate change more generally. If the western world carries on as it is right now (that is, building out renewables, fossils being only the necessary balancing and dispatchable parts) the developing world largely develops with renewables and coal or gas only as the necessary dispatchable power for a grid then climate change is, pretty much, and by the measurements of the standard models, solved. It’ll all fade away by 2100. We’re, roughly enough, on the old A1T model and scenario. Where that is exactly what happens. And no destruction of markets and capitalism required.

Which is, of course why all the shrieking because the destruction is the thing desired.

But back to Lenin. Or Monbiot, Greta, anyone really. Anyone at all who says blah,blah, action required right now, may well have argued themselves into that blah blah for the joy it offers of directing all that action right now.

Here’s how we go green then, we shoot the planners

Last year Britain wasted enough wind power for a million homes, but new turbines built over the next decade would see that figure grow fivefold by 2030, according to think tank Carbon Tracker.

The cost to pay wind farms to switch off at these times and buy gas to fill in the shortfall would rise to £3.5 billion a year, according to Carbon Tracker’s analysis. That would add an average of £200 to annual household energy bills.

Bottlenecks in the planning process
The problem has been blamed on bottlenecks in the planning process which can take up to seven years for major new electricity cable projects.

Laissez faire RULZ

Smurf and the housing project

That idea of insulating every house in Britain with printed money:

Germany’s Greens are facing ridicule over reports that they have failed to install a heat pump in their party HQ, despite pushing for a nationwide switch to the technology.

A project to install the device at the eco-party’s headquarters in central Berlin has taken three and a half years because of a variety of problems that include difficulties finding qualified tradesmen and a two-year wait for a drilling permit, Der Spiegel magazine reported.

Oh Aye?

Very funny

Britain has started burning coal to generate electricity for the first time in a month and a half, after the heatwave made solar panels too hot to work efficiently.

One unit at Uniper’s Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power plant in Nottinghamshire started producing electricity for the first time in weeks on Monday morning, while another coal-powered plant was warmed up in case it was needed by the early afternoon.

The National Grid turned to coal to generate electricity as a rush to turn on air conditioning and fans across the country during the heatwave led to a spike in demand.

I am deeply unconvinced that there’s enough air conditioning in the UK to make much difference. The solar panels installed (because of course you can install them to operate efficiently in different temperature ranges) start to fail in moderate summer weather? Sure, I can believe that.

Perhaps I am that different

Net zero is a legal obligation. The international pressure, moreover, makes repudiation all but impossible. Britain would be a pariah if it tore up the objective.

For my reaction is bugger what Johnny Foreigner thinks and let’s do what is right and sensible.

But then kicking against the pricks is a ccharacter flaw of mine, agreed.