climate change

Electric cars face being fitted with tracking devices under proposals for a pay-per-mile road taxation system put forward by the Government’s own climate advisers.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) says the Government needs to find ways to cover the “significant hole” in the public finances left by the loss of fuel duty and other taxes when petrol and diesel cars are replaced by electric models.

An interesting thing here being that of course electric cars will no longer be cheaper to run….

Coldest start to winter in decades for eastern Australia with power grid under strain

Oh Aye?

Hybrid Air Vehicles’ Airlander 10 is slower than traditional jets, but much more efficient, aiming to slash the carbon output per passenger by 90pc. Slashing carbon output will also make the trips cheaper as fuel expenses are cut.

Lower carbon output per journey means more efficient as measured by carbon output per journey. It does not mean more efficient tho’.

It might end up being cheaper and slower – which in short haul could well be more efficient. For there gets to be a length of journey where the airport time dominates the flying time.

All sounds most fun – but it’s still not true that lower carbon output is defining more efficient.

Not all seaside residents can be protected from rising seas and some must move, the head of the Environment Agency will warn on Tuesday.

In a speech to a flooding and coastal erosion conference, Sir James Bevan will say it is an “inconvenient truth” that some British communities “cannot stay where they are”.

“There is no coming back for land that coastal erosion has taken away or that a rising sea level has put permanently or frequently under water,” he will say.

“Which means that, in some places, the right answer – in economic, strategic and human terms – will have to be to move communities away from danger rather than to try and protect them from the inevitable impacts of a rising sea level.”

Dunwich, for example. Do also note the corollary to this. It’s not worth entirely upending the global economy – you know, entirely stopping climate change – in order to save one village either. All of them, possibly, but even then that would depend upon time scales.

Countries around the world are pouring funds into new natural gas facilities that could destroy the chances of limiting global heating, in response to soaring energy prices and the war in Ukraine.

Governments including the US, Germany, the UK and Canada are investing in new gas production, distribution and use as they seek to sanction Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, according to new research.

So, market activity is working toward our not all shivering in the dark as we be happy.

Lucky that, given the stupidities the politicians are trying.

For 50 years, governments have failed to act on climate change. No more excuses
Christiana Figueres, Yvo de Boer and Michael Zammit Cutajar

Whadda ya mean governments have done nothing?

Jeez.

In the energy sector, evidence of the zero-carbon transition is all around us. Wind and solar generation shows compound growth of about 20% a year and is cheaper almost everywhere than the alternatives. Electric car sales doubled between 2020 and 2021.

See?

When a new report suggested that people who use nitrous oxide when giving birth should be warned about the impacts on climate change, I felt the mild tremor of a collective groan uttered in unison across the country. More than one person sent me headlines accompanied by a rolling eye emoji.

Damn fool idiocy. It’s what happens when there’s a societal panic. Trivia wells up in importance. When they’re witch hunting then having a stammer is fatal* – because the trivial detail is held to be important. Climate change, CLIMATE CHANGE! Therefore women must give birth in pain to assuage our sins against Gaia.

Tossers. Waht’s actually necessary – even if we assume the IPCC is right in all things – is to dial back the use of fossil fuels – dial back, not even extinguish – and we’ll be fine.

*No idea, just what came to mind

John Kerry warns a long Ukraine war would threaten climate efforts
Exclusive: US presidential envoy says limiting global heating to 1.5C could be made harder by conflict

You know, discount rates and all that.

People seem to think that not being crushed by a tank/crushing people with a tank are rather more immediate problems than whether Flipper breaks out in a sweat in 78 years’ time……

So, social cost of carbon. A judge has said this – for the US, obvs – must be determined according to the law. Seems obvious enough. Except the law says a discount rate of 3 and 7% – the two so as to capture the range. But the social cost of carbon is only above a $ or 2 a tonne if the discount rate is much lower than that. But they can’t use the lower rate because the law says 3 and 7%. So, the US social cost of carbon needs to be $ or 2.

The laughter comes from the fact that it’s the progressives who say there must be a law about everything. So, there is. But the law then stops the progressives from doing what they want.

Tee hee.

Sure, sure, appeal and all that. But still petard etc.

A second cable will land two years later in 2029. Together they will provide 3.6 gigawatts (GW) of constant baseload power, equivalent to two Hinkley-sized nuclear reactors. The difference is that we will be able to afford it. That, at least, is the plan.

The £16bn Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project – chaired by former Tesco chief Sir Dave Lewis – has an elegant feature. It combines wind and solar in perfect geographic circumstances to make near-constant power for 20 hours a day.

Trade winds on the coast of North Africa raise the average “capacity factor” of onshore wind turbines to 54pc. A desert convection effect creates a regular wind current in the early evenings and smooths the handover from solar to wind.

So, how do we find out if it does work? We allow them to go build it then we use it if it does work. That’s how markets do in fact work – suck it and see. If they go bust, ah well, their money.

We’re done then:

For the first time the world is in a position to limit global heating to under 2C, according to the first in-depth analysis of the net zero pledges made by nations at the UN Cop26 climate summit in December.

No more plans are needed then, are they?

In The Climate Book, which is due to be published by Penguin this autumn, Thunberg has assembled more than 100 contributors, from scientists Johan Rockström and Katharine Hayhoe to economist Thomas Piketty

Neon isn’t, in fact, a grand problem.

Colourless, odourless, and about two-thirds lighter than air, neon slips by unnoticed in tiny quantities in the atmosphere.

It may soon be conspicuous by its absence, however, as war in Ukraine disrupts vital industrial supplies of the gas.

Ukraine produces about half of the world’s high-purity neon, needed for the lasers that etch patterns onto microchips used in everything from cars to consumer electronics, smartphones, fridges and microwaves.

It’s a technical problem, not a grand one.

So, you collect it from the air. This is obviously expensive, so you don’t do it directly. You sit beside someone else who already collects and processes air. As they take some large chunk of that atmosphere off to do whatever they want to do then you’re left with something already partially concentrated. This leaves you with summat that is richer in neon (and xenon, helium etc, the trace gases) than the atmosphere, this reduces the costs.

Producing neon gas, particularly at the high purity needed for microchips, is a difficult, expensive process,

It’s not difficult, no. But it is expensive, yes. Because what you’re doing is distilling air. You cool down that bit of gas left over after the other uses. As the temperature falls below the liquefaction one for that particular element you get that particular element as liquid. All the others are still in the gas. Remove liquid, lower temperature again and get the next one, according to that turns to liquid temperature of each element.

Sure, some twiddly bits in there but the expense is in the energy to cool that air.

You can do it absolutely anywhere, your raw ingredient really is just the air above the factory. Sure, it’s nice to be beside someone who is already doing it and thus sharing the cost but it’s not necessary.

Cheap energy is necessary though…..at which point we see the problem, right? Let’s everyone make energy more expensive so we —— don’t have neon to make chips with?

A government push for a new generation of onshore wind farms could make Britain even more reliant on gas, campaigners have claimed.

A report by Net Zero Watch, which scrutinises climate policies, stated that turbines deliver “only an illusion” of energy security because they require more reliable sources of power to act as a back-up for when there is insufficient wind to generate electricity.

“In reality, the grid is entirely reliant for its security on the only thermodynamically superior fuel remaining, namely natural gas,” the paper said.

Petrol prices are driving us to electric cars, and surging utility bills are no deterrent
Torsten Bell

Prices work. Well, I never.

A thinktank linked to Japanese technology giant Canon is coming under pressure to remove multiple articles from a research director who describes the climate crisis as “fake news” and compares campaigner Greta Thunberg to a communist.

Greta does say communist-like things. Further, anyone at all can “be compared to a communist”. To compare is to “estimate, measure, or note the similarity or dissimilarity between.” You can compare me to a communist for example. Hopefully you’d be sentient enough to mark the dissimilarities but that would still be to compare.

Of course, the actual complaint here is that the bloke in question isn’t singing from the catastrophic hymnsheet. It’s an attempt at censorship, plain and simple.

On the site of another thinktank, Sugiyama has recommended several reports translated into Japanese from the UK-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – a group founded by the former UK chancellor of the exchequer Lord Nigel Lawson and known for its antagonism towards climate science, the IPCC, renewable energy and policies for governments to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

One GWPF report promoted by Sugiyama criticised a special IPCC report that looked at the benefits of keeping global heating at 1.5C.

Sugiyama was a lead author on a chapter of that report examining the global response to cutting emissions. He is currently a lead author of a chapter of a major IPCC report, due next month, on ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions around the world.

Actual, real, IPCC climate scientists doesn’t believe in catastrophic. Ban him!

One the briefing used to convince Boris.

Of course, most of us would change our minds if we were presented with selective – selected perhaps – data to show us that we should change our minds. Sadly, we would prefer that public policy be determined by the full set of facts – reality. It’s a pity briefings to politicians don’t seem to work that way, isn’t it?

Severe floods and other extreme weather have cost Europe about half a trillion euros in the past four decades, with Germany, France and Italy the worst-hit countries.

Between 90,000 and 142,000 deaths were attributed to weather and climate-related events over the period 1980 to 2020, the overwhelming majority of them from heatwaves.

Because as we know cold weather kills many more than warm or hot.

Still, take them at their word. 500 billion euros. There are, as it happens, about 500 million Euros – folks in Europe that is. That’s therefore 1,000 euro per Euro. Over 40 years – or €25 euro per year the damages from having cheap and reliable power.

Sounds like a fucking bargain, doesn’t it?

It’s so cold in the US, freezing iguanas are falling out of trees
As temperatures drop below zero in Florida, locals are faced with an unexpected aerial bombardment

Abandon capitalism now, Sinners!

America’s hottest city is nearly unlivable in summer. Can cooling technologies save it?

A/C.