Environmentalism

UK must double down on renewables as wars drive up energy costs, experts say
Fossil fuel price surge after US-Israeli attacks on Iran prompts calls to end dependence on ‘volatile’ energy source

Should we have cheaper but volatile or more expensive and less volatile?

It’s possible to make philosophic arguments for both or either. Myself I think I’d prefer cheaper yet volatile. I also think most people would if only the choie were explained to them in this manner. Which, of course, it never is.

A North Dakota judge has said he will order Greenpeace to pay damages expected to total $345m in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline from nearly a decade ago, a figure the environmental group contends it cannot pay.

In court papers filed Tuesday, Judge James Gion said he would sign an order requiring several Greenpeace entities to pay the judgment to pipeline company Energy Transfer. He set that amount at $345m last year in a decision that reduced a jury’s damages by about half, but his latest filing did not specify a final amount.

They caused damage to people. Why shouldn’t they have to pay?

And can populations of wild animals that have proliferated since the disaster be controlled in a way that makes coexistence with humans possible?

Evidence of the relentless march of the natural world is everywhere in Okuma and other communities located in the shadow of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.

The plant, which is now being decommissioned, suffered a triple meltdown after tsunami waves knocked out its backup power supply, sending large quantities of radiation into the atmosphere.

Gardens have become jungles and homes places of nocturnal refuge – and food – for the wild boar, raccoons and black bears that now have free rein to roam streets long deprived of artificial light.

‘Mazin‘ how fast nature returns when just left alone to do so.

Which does lead to a thought. We’ve people demanding that humanity restreat and leave vast areas just for wildlife. Hmm, well, OK. But given the way fertility rates are going this is going to happen over the next century and two anyway. We don;t actually have to “do” anything, just carry on having as few kiddies as we do and it will happen anyway.

Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years.

However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked.

Gosh, now isn’t that a surprise?

One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.

Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue.

Oh, my.

Or claims even:

US plan to exploit Venezuela’s oil could eat up 13% of carbon budget to keep 1.5C limit
Exclusive: ClimatePartner analysis shows how move would risk plunging Earth further into climate catastrophe

From which we can derive two claims.

1) US intervention in Venezuela is bad, see, because broiling Flipper.

2) Socialism in Venezuela crippled the oil industry so was good, see?

Masses of toxic litter pours from Rhine into North Sea each year, research finds
Citizen scientists help in University of Bonn study showing river carries up to 4,700 tonnes of ‘macrolitter’ annually

I dunno. Perhaps we can work it out?

The Rhine River has an average discharge (volume flow) of about 2,900 cubic meters per second (m³/s),

OK, a m3 is a tonne in weight. So the solids discharge in a year is 1x, or perhaps 1.5x, the water flow in a second. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year therefore the solids are 1/31,536,000 of the total flow. Or, 0.00003%.

Is that a lot?

The Seagreen wind farm off Scotland’s east coast is squandering vast amounts of its power because there is not enough grid capacity to transport it to areas of the country where it is needed most.

This inability to handle surplus electricity led to 77pc of Seagreen’s total output going to waste last year, new accounts show, from a total of 114 turbines.

This is likely to have sparked hundreds of millions of pounds in so-called constraint payments for the wind farm, which is run by Scottish energy giant SSE and France’s TotalEnergies.

These payments are made under a government scheme to encourage renewables, aimed at guaranteeing cash for green power even if it cannot be used.

So cheap, renewables, so cheap, eh?

Saying, well, just upgrade the grid doesn’t solve this problem either. Because that’s an extra cost, meaning that renewables are not so cheap, right?

German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.

Because, of course and as you know, if the lefties get their way then all of society will suffer such outages regularly. There is no possible way to run an industrial society with the more extreme demands about power generation after all…..

In the distance, you can see the outlines of the reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which is in the slow process of being decommissioned at a cost so far of $35bn (£26bn) almost 15 years since it suffered a triple meltdown after being struck by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and a 15m (49ft) tsunami.

That plant is borked, yes.

The plan has been controversial with campaigners because it ditches attempts to reduce Japan’s reliance on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, calling instead for a “maximisation” of nuclear power, which will account for about 20% of total energy output in 2040: about 14 reactors have been restarted and the assumption is that 30 will be in full operation by then.

The others aren’t. And, of course, the very worst that could possibly happen to a nuclear plant led to zero direct deaths. So, pretty safe then.

Pity Germany heard the close it all down bit and not the restart them all bit, eh?

Céüze ski resort is fast becoming one of these pollutants. The little wooden cabin at the bottom of the first button lift is shedding insulation. Ropes once used to mark out the piste hang in tatters and bits of plastic are falling off a pylon. The old sheds at each end of the ski lifts often still contain transformers, asbestos, motor oils and greases. Over time, these substances seep into the soil and water.

Corrosion and rust from metal structures left over from the second world war, such as anti-tank rails and metal spikes, have led to changes in plant species in the surrounding area, potentially offering a vision of what could happen if pylons are left to rust over the coming decades.

Abandoning the old ski huts etc to rot isn’t allowable. A rotting hut is pollution, ‘ye see?

Or, alternatively, decades worth of grift for some local group to slowly take apart the huts, eh?

Wonder which is the real motivation here?

The UK’s largest proposed datacentre is understating the scale of its planned water use, according to an analysis.

The first phase of construction for the hyperscale campus in Cambois in Northumberland has been given the go-ahead by the local council. The US operator QTS, which is developing the site, has promoted its “water-free” cooling system as proof of its sustainability.

But research published this week calls that claim into question. A study of the power and water footprints of AI production by the data scientist Alex de Vries-Gao highlights the underestimated scale of indirect, or embedded, water consumption caused by datacentre operations.

QTS estimates the two initial data halls will consume 2.3m litres of water annually, according to documents it submitted to Northumberland county council. Yet applying De Vries-Gao’s methodology to the electricity generation required for the site’s AI servers produces a figure more than 50 times higher, at 124m litres a year, according to analysis by Watershed Investigations and the Guardian.

How much water does a data centre use?

How much does the data centre use?

How much does the 3lectricity to feed the data centre use?

The two are, clearly, quite different. But if you’re against a data centre (seems to be the latest Greenpeace et al shriek) then you’ll use the one that has water flowing in and out of a nuclear power plant as being the same as that evaporated off a data dentre cooling system.

Lyin’ bastards.

By comparison, Scotland is still feudal in scale.

OK.

Scottish ministers point out that by getting landowners to tell the government before any large-scale sale, they can give community groups a chance to put together a rival bid. But many big estates lie in sparsely populated upland areas where communities lack purchasing power.

So, the land currently belongs to those who value it the most. The problem with this is?

Mr Wightman, a former Green MSP, argues persuasively that the pattern of ownership results from a free market in land which privileges those with the deepest pockets.

And?

His reasoning is that Scotland’s land should be regulated as a shared resource in the public interest.

Doesn’t anyone ever read Ostrom? Or even regard the history of land as a shared resource in the socialist and communist countries? The shit and pollution that results?

Meanwhile, an upsurge in climate protest – Fridays for Future around the world and Extinction Rebellion in the UK – has been met by a policing crackdown. The UK was an outlier on this, with nearly a fifth of environmental protests ending in arrests, while activists’ disruption of daily life provoked public aggravation. The side of the climate movement that emphasised the need for shared sacrifice rather than the promise of prosperity has effectively been neutered.

The number willing to wear hair shirts for Flipper always was low. Not zero, obviously, for there are always some ascetics looking for a justification, but low all the same.

But there is a sharp line between the mass of trees inside the scheme, home to hundreds of elephants, giraffes, buffalo and other wildlife, and the expanse of scrub beyond it, where charcoal burners and subsistence agriculture have devoured the forest.

It’s usually not billionaire capitalists devouring the world’s forests. It’s poor people with poor people lifestyles doing so.

Which gives us an interesting plan. We here in Europe are so rich that we’re using less land each year. The wilds out there are depopulating. So, we need economic growth in all those poor places so that the same happens there.

Grow the economy to save nature….

About drilling for gas in the Wadden Sea:

“We’ve been confronted with the ‘not in my back yard’ argument – that everyone wants gas but nobody wants to be affected by it,” said Akkermann. “But I always say: this isn’t just any back yard.”

Yeah, everyone’s a hypocrite ‘cept me.

Sure.

When they thought through this:

The surge in the use of disposable face masks during the Covid pandemic has left a chemical timebomb that could harm humans, animals and the environment, research suggests.

Billions of tonnes of plastic face masks created to protect people from the spread of the virus are now breaking down, releasing microplastics and chemical additives including endocrine disruptors, the research found.

As a result, the very equipment whose use was intended to protect people during the pandemic now poses a risk to the health of people and planet, potentially for generations.

“This study has underlined the urgent need to rethink how we produce, use and dispose of face masks,” said Anna Bogush of Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, the lead author of the study.

WOOT! We got one! Trivial issue of no regard that no one else has thought of yet that we can big up into a lifetime of papers and campaigning! Quick, Xers, find the vegan champagne!

Starmer cannot have armoured electric Range Rover ‘because of bomb risk’

Aha.

If a bomb goes off then the battery will too. Therefore an EV cannot be bomb proof.

Siri, tell me, what does “antinomianism” mean?

In Ynysddu, a village in the Sirhowy valley in south Wales, waste from companies was dumped in the former Ty Llwyd quarry on the mountain above the village in the 1960s and 70s.

Residents have warned for years that after heavy rainfall, foul-smelling brown and foamy liquid seeps from the quarry and downhill into the surrounding woods, council-owned land that was used by children and dogwalkers until it was recently fenced off.

In 2023, testing by Dr David Megson, an environmental chemist from Manchester Metropolitan University, found unsafe levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in Ynysddu. PCBs are forever chemicals that accumulate in the food chain and can cause liver damage and increased cancer risk in humans.

All testing commissioned by Caerphilly county borough council to date has indicated zero level of PCBs, and the site is not legally defined as contaminated land.

Megson has suggested that the council may be using tests that are not sensitive enough, or testing in the wrong places. Caerphilly council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

So, if we use these new tests which go to parts per trillion then we can prove that there are trillionths of naughties and we should abolish capitalism!

The cponcept of “clean enough” never really does register, does it?

Labour’s rewilding plans risk sparking a surge in wildfires across Britain, gamekeepers have warned.

The Government is proposing to ban winter burning – a traditional upland management technique that reduces the amount of fuel for potential fires – from more than half of all peatland in England.

It is claimed the changes will help to “re-wet” Britain’s peat bogs, reduce the risk of wildfires and cut carbon emissions.

Environmentalists want to preserve peat bogs because they soak up vasts quantities of carbon. But landowners and gamekeepers have warned that, far from protecting the environment, the burning restrictions will instead leave Britain’s moors and heaths at the mercy of wildfires that will be “too large to fight”.

As I’ve pointed out before, the number and intensity of wildfires does depend upon the management – or not – of the fireload itself. Don;t have controlled burns and there’s more to go up, obviously.

Not that I expect us to be offered a great deal of evidence – either side – on this.

‘Is that what net zero should be about?’ Farmland falls to solar gold-rush
Tenant farmers are being thrown off prime land as their landlords sell up to net zero developers

Planning permission for solar. OK. But is that a halfway stage to planning permission for housing? Is it easier to get housing permission on land that has – once – been used for that solar industrial purpose?

That would be interesting if it were, no?