Climate News This Week: What Was Important?

To begin with, there was President Trump's Executive Order on Tuesday directing EPA and other government bureaucracies to begin the process of unwinding the dozens of Obama-era fossil fuel restrictions that were supposedly going to "stop climate change," or something like that.  But you already knew about that one.  

The next day, Wednesday, there was a hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space & Technology that inquired into the scientific basis for all those Obama-era regulations.  Witnesses included John Christy, Judith Curry, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Michael Mann.  The links go to the written testimony of each of those witnesses.  The first three witnesses were called by the Republican majority of the committee, while Mann was the pick of the Democratic minority.  (Really, was this guy the best they could do?  Needless to say, his testimony was all about how the "overwhelming majority" of scientists agree with his position, with no effort to engage on the merits whatsoever.)

Not to minimize the other two witnesses, but I'll focus on Christy's testimony.  The gist of that testimony was that the climate models that are the basis for all greenhouse gas regulation have failed in empirical testing against real world data.  In other words, the basis for IPCC and EPA claims that human greenhouse gas emission have a measurable impact on climate has been disproved.  From Christy's summary:

When the “scientific method” is applied to the output from climate models of the IPCC AR5, specifically the bulk atmospheric temperature trends since 1979 (a key variable with a strong and obvious theoretical response to increasing GHGs in this period), I demonstrate that the consensus of the models fails the test to match the real-world observations by a significant margin. As such, the average of the models is considered to be untruthful in representing the recent decades of climate variation and change, and thus would be inappropriate for use in predicting future changes in the climate or for related policy decisions. 

Well, that's rather a bombshell.  I wonder, how did the New York Times report this news?  And the answer is, in the three editions of that paper since Dr. Christy testified on Wednesday, there has not been one word about what Christy said at this hearing, or for that matter, mentioning the hearing at all.  

Christy goes into considerable detail as to the sources of evidence used to track real world temperature trends, and his methodology.  I'll leave it up to you to read that information at the link.  But a couple of more things of interest.  Christy presented a chart that was buried deep in the "supplementary material" of the most recent IPCC Report, "AR-5."  His comment:

What is immediately evident is that the model trends in which extra [i.e., human-added] GHGs are included lie completely outside of the range of the observational trends, indicating again that the models, as hypotheses, failed a simple “scientific-method” test applied to this fundamental, climate-change variable. That this information was not clearly and openly presented in the IPCC is evidence of a political process that was not representative of the dispassionate examination of evidence as required by the scientific method. 

Christy also discussed the results of the Wallace, et al., Research Report of September 21, 2016 (of which he was a co-author).  That Research Report was discussed here when it first came out back in September ("The 'Science' Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing").   The summary conclusion from Christy's testimony:

The basic result of this report is that the temperature trend of several datasets since 1979 can be explained by variations in the components that naturally affect the climate . . . .      

So that is what the New York Times found to be completely unimportant in climate news this week.  And what did they find to be important?  Well, there was that big article on the front page Thursday, and continuing onto most of a full page in the interior, headlined "China Poised to Take Lead on Climate After Trump's Move to Undo Policies."  From the Times:

“They’ve set the direction they intend to go in the next five years,” Barbara Finamore, a senior lawyer and Asia director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York, said of China. “It’s clear they intend to double down on bringing down their reliance on coal and increasing their use of renewable energy.”  “China wants to take over the role of the U.S. as a climate leader, and they’ve baked it into their five-year plans,” she added, referring to the economic development blueprints drawn up by the Chinese government.

So, New York Times, what does that mean quantitatively?  I mean, how much coal generation capacity does China now have compared to the United States, and are the numbers for the two countries increasing or decreasing?  Of course, this being Pravda, don't expect to find any of that easily-available information in their article.  So I'll give it to you.  For China statistics, here is London-based Carbon Tracker, November 2016:

As of July 2016, China has 895 GW of existing coal capacity being used less than half of the time – and perversely has 205 GW under construction and another 405 GW of capacity planned. . . .  

In January 2017, China canceled some 103 GW of that planned-and-under-construction capacity, meaning that it now has "only" 507 GW of coal generation capacity planned and/or under construction, to add to its 895 GW of existing coal generation capacity.  And the numbers for the U.S.?  We have only about 325 GW of coal generation capacity according to this report from 2015 -- and that figure has likely declined somewhat since then.  In other words, our total of existing coal generation capacity is about a third of China's, and not much more than half of what China is planning to add in the next few years.  By that time, our coal generation capacity will be less than one-quarter of theirs, and maybe even less.  Good "climate leadership" China!

Now that you know those numbers, you can consider some of the more ridiculous things in this Times article.  For example, we have this from Chinese energy "researcher and policy advisor" Chai Qimin:

Chai Qimin, a climate change researcher and policy adviser, said that policies adopted at a recent Communist Party meeting showed that China “has attached ever greater importance to ecological civilization and green development.”  “Everyone is taking this more and more seriously,” he added.

Or consider this, quoted by the Times from an editorial in the Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper:

“Washington is obliged to set an example for mankind’s efforts against global warming, and now the Trump administration has become the first government of a major power to take opposite actions on the Paris Agreement,” the newspaper said. “It is undermining the great cause of mankind trying to protect the earth, and the move is indeed irresponsible and very disappointing.”

Does the Times realize that these people are laughing at them?  Honestly, I don't think they do.

Now, as between Dr. Christy's testimony on the empirical invalidation of the IPCC climate models, and the seizure of "climate leadership" by China, which do you think is the more important?

Paying Attention To The Huge Costs Of Generating Electricity From Intermittent Sources

Yes I sometimes feel lonely harping away at the huge costs of trying to make a functioning electrical grid out of intermittent wind and solar sources.  For a few of my posts on the subject, see here, here, and here.  Maybe with President Trump's dramatic move yesterday to back away from fossil fuel suppression under the guise of "climate" control, this whole thing will quickly fade away.  But as of now, many states, not the least California and my own home state of New York, soldier on with so-called "renewable portfolio standards" for electric utilities, requiring ever increasing amounts of generation from the unreliable renewables. 

I start from the proposition that, in the world of intentionally deceptive and fraudulent government data on virtually everything important (GDP, poverty, government debt, temperature records, etc.), it is still almost impossible to top the intentional deception that the government puts out on the subject of the cost of obtaining electricity from the intermittent sources.  (OK, I have dubbed the temperature data tampering fraud the "Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time."  But the fraud on the subject of the cost of wind and solar power is not technically a scientific fraud.)  The idea as to the energy costs is to put out numbers purporting to show that wind and solar power are no more expensive than, or possibly even cheaper than, reliable and dispatchable sources like natural gas and coal.  This is done by creating an arbitrary and useless concept known as the "levelized cost of energy" ("LCOE") that simply leaves out all of the massive extra costs that use of intermittent sources requires if you want a system that actually works 24/7/365 -- costs of things like backup from dispatchable sources, storage, extra transmission costs, and extra costs from running backup plants in a mode of constantly cycling up and down.  Thus the government's annual Energy Information Agency report, most recently issued in August 2016, shows the LCOE from wind turbines as much less than nuclear and just slightly higher than natural gas -- and actually cheaper than natural gas once you take into account the tax credits!  Their chart of comparative costs on page 6 at the link does not even deign to put a cost on new coal facilities.  Hey, this was the Age of Obama!  Coal was to be verboten!

The LCOE concept at best addresses the costs associated with adding one facility of any one of the generation types to our massive existing infrastructure.  But suppose that instead of adding a few more wind turbines, we actually propose to take wind-generated electricity up to 30%, or 50%, or even 90% of all generation.  What then?  EIA's LCOE numbers do not remotely address that question.  Back of the envelope calculations at some of my previous posts (linked above) suggest that such an effort could multiply the cost of electricity by a factor of five, or ten, or even more.  Moreover, this would be one of those unbelievably giant engineering projects -- orders of magnitude bigger than, say, the California bullet train -- that inevitably have massive cost overruns.  Can somebody other than yours truly please pay attention to this subject?

A couple of things in the last week indicate that a few people are beginning to wake up at least a little.  But unfortunately "little" is the operative word.  

Last week I attended the International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, put on by the Heartland Institute.  One of the panels addressed the cost of alternative sources of energy, and one of the three panelists on the panel addressed, at least to some extent, the incremental costs of adding wind and solar sources to an electric grid.  That panelist was Mary Hutzler, who appears to be employed by a think tank called the Institute for Energy Research.  Ms. Hutzler has actually done research aimed at correcting some of the more egregious omissions from the EIA's LCOE calculations, including a fairly detailed report from 2015 titled "The Levelized Cost of Electricity from Existing Generation Resources."   Her presentation at the Conference is available at the Heartland site here.  Comparing her presentation to the Report, it seems that most of the presentation came from the Report, including many of the charts.

Frankly, I found Ms. Hutzler's presentation extremely disappointing.  The basic thing that she and co-authors had tried to do in the Report was to add in to EIA's LCOE numbers some obvious adjustments to account for things that EIA just fraudulently left out, even at today's low levels of generation from intermittent sources -- things like capacity factor adjustments to the actual capacities that wind turbines have achieved, adjustments of the assumed lifetime of wind turbines to match real experience, and attribution to the cost of power from wind of at least some of the costs of backup fossil fuel power.  With these adjustments, wind power suddenly becomes about 50% more expensive than combined cycle natural gas, according to a chart on page 26 in the Report.

Fair enough.  But what additional costs would be needed if we tried to make a fully functioning electricity system where the electricity itself comes out of predominantly wind, say 70% or 90%?  That question was not addressed by Ms. Hutzler in her presentation, nor is it addressed in the Report.  Nor was it clear from the presentation that that question was not addressed.  You had to get the underlying Report and study it.  And when you study it you find that it basically addresses scenarios where wind turbines are matched with gas plants of similar "capacity," so that the gas plant can cycle up and down as the wind blows less and more.  Those scenarios will never get the generation from wind up much above 30%.  To get higher you will need to avoid calling on the fossil fuel backup as much as possible.  You will thus need multiple times excess wind turbine capacity, plus some combination of vastly increased transmission capacity or storage capacity or both.  To find out how much you will have to pay for four times excess capacity in wind generation, tens of millions of Teslas worth of batteries, and massive new transmission capacity (and, of course, full fossil fuel backup -- just in case!), you will have to look elsewhere.

Well, you could try looking in the new report just out from the UK's Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, written by a consultancy called Frontier Economics.  The report has long been known to be in the works, and supposedly was to address the "total system costs" of variable renewable electricity generators.  It had been expected out about a year ago, but then ran into a long unexplained delay, and finally came out last Friday.  Oh, according to the press release from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, "The study is not only very late, but contains no quantitative estimates of additional system costs."

What?  Wasn't that the whole point?  It gets worse.  They include in the released material some peer review comments, from which one can infer that quantitative estimates of those additional costs were in the drafts but have been deleted from the final.  Here is the comment from GWPF, titled "Is the UK Concealing 'Very High' Renewables System Cost Estimates."   Excerpt:

After an unexplained delay of a year since completion the UK’s Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has published (24.03.17) a report by Frontier Economics on the total system costs of uncontrollably variable renewable generators, a topic of crucial importance in understanding the cost-effectiveness of current climate policies. The study is not only very late, but entirely qualitative, and contains no quantitative estimates of additional system costs per megawatt hour (i.e. £/MWh), figures which would normally be considered the principal output of such work. However, examination of the peer reviews, which are published with the study, reveals that an entire table of numerical cost estimates, some of which were described by the external reviewer as “very high”, were in fact present in the version sent out for comment in mid 2015, but have been subsequently removed. This does not smell right and BEIS should release the original draft.

If you are starting to get the impression that you are being defrauded, you are right.  Kudos to the GWPF for joining in the small and still nascent efforts to hold the crooks to account.  But, when will any government put out a remotely honest effort to calculate the real cost of the mostly-wind-and-solar generation system that they are busy trying to force on the people?  Probably, not before the entire current crop of bureaucrats in the field have been fired and/or jailed.  

The Sad Cancer Of Third Party Pay Medical Care

As noted in my previous post a couple of days ago, almost all of the commentary about the recent defeat in Congress of the American Health Care Act proposal is about the immediate blow-by-blow of the ongoing political battle.  President Trump has suffered a huge defeat!  Paul Ryan is a loser and must be replaced immediately!  The Republicans can't govern!

Can we look at this with a little perspective?  Here's my perspective:  Third party pay for health care, whether it be government pay (Medicare, Medicaid), or near-universal insurance-company pay for ordinary and routine expenses, or a combination of both, cannot work for the long pull.  Unfortunately, like it or not, scarcity is the essential unavoidable condition of human existence.  No-questions-asked third party pay for healthcare ignores the fundamental grinding reality of scarcity.  We pretend that healthcare can be demanded and consumed in whatever infinite amounts somebody might want, without downside.  It's the usual illusion of socialism, seemingly confined to one small area of the economy; so, really, how much destruction can it wreak?  Unfortunately, the amount of destruction it can wreak is vast, and may only have begun.

Somehow it has become a shibboleth of the Left that third party pay for all or nearly all healthcare expenses is some kind of moral necessity of a decent society.  The official line is that without some form of universal "healthcare," some people will be stuck worrying about whether they can afford a treatment that may be important or even necessary; some people might lose most of their net worth or even be bankrupted by a health crisis; some people might forego necessary treatment.  Some people might even die!  (The part about excess deaths has proved remarkably difficult to demonstrate empirically.) 

But for these purposes, assume that all of these things are true, or at least somewhat true.  Meanwhile, in pursuit of the mirage of perfect cost-free healthcare for all, health spending has gone from about 7% of the economy in 1965 when Medicare and Medicaid were launched, to almost 18% today.  The incremental amount represents around $2 trillion per year to today's economy -- enough, for example, to cure all defined "poverty" about 6 times over.  The costs are buried all over the place -- some in insurance premiums paid by households, more in insurance premiums paid by employers that therefore never turn up in take-home pay, and still more in taxes at all different levels of government -- so that nobody can ever get a handle on how much they are paying and who gets the money.  And let's not kid ourselves that the "rich" do or can be made to pay all or even most of this mushrooming healthcare spending.  $2 trillion is more than the total income of the top 1% of taxpayers according to the most recent IRS data from the Tax Foundation!  There is no getting around the fact that medical spending has become a tremendous drag on the incomes of the middle class.  If you want to find the one main reason why middle class incomes do not go up, and why middle class families are angry at their inability to get ahead, this is it.

And they are right to be angry.  The moral necessity of universal third party pay healthcare is generally sold by presenting a small number of hardship cases to tug at the emotional heartstrings of the public.  OK, how much of the $2 trillion would actually be needed to take care of the bona fide sympathetic cases, and nothing for the bureaucrats and rent seekers?  5%?  Maybe 10%?  Unfortunately a socialist-model system has no ability to find the real need and spend only on that.  There is no known example of a socialist-model system not being taken over by the unproductive bureaucrats and rent seekers and run for their benefit.    

Among the dozens of articles during the last few days on this subject, I have managed to find just a couple that get past the immediate blow-by-blow and show a little perspective.  First, here is one from thezman.com, titled "The Truth About Health Care."   It is definitely worth your time to read the whole thing, but I'm going to incorporate some significant quotes:

This is an iron law of economics. All goods and services are rationed. This is true for health care too. There are no exceptions to this law. Thus, the First Truth of Health Care: No health care plan or system can ever be taken seriously unless it addresses, up front, how it will say “No, you cannot have it” to people who want it. At some point, someone has to tell the patient they cannot have whatever it is they want or need. . . .  

Thus, the Second Truth of Health Care: The current insurance model is just a wealth transfer from the middle-class to the health care industry, in order to cover the cost of poor people and the metastasizing layer of people who live off the system. Th[is] is really just a tax. Most people use about 5% of their plan for themselves; the rest is used to pay for poor people and the army of people who work in the system. . . .  

Thus, the Third Truth of Health Care: Health services are a massive skimming operation. Today, the one area of the economy that “grows” is the health care industry. Every year, more and more people pile into that wagon, mostly in administrative roles. The number of nurses and doctors does not grow very much, but the number of bureaucrats grows like a weed.

Then you have the pill makers, machine makers, research people and lawyers. There are always lots and lots of lawyers. The health care industry is massive and government dependent. It’s why rub rooms are now called message therapy centers. They are angling to get it on the racket, by having their service declared an essential health care service. . . .  

Third party pay health care is why the price of lasik surgery for your eyes (not covered by insurance) drops like a stone, while newly approved drugs that come to market (covered by insurance) now get priced at $50,000 or $100,000 for a course of treatment.  Hey, how are the government or insurers going to say no to the price if the drug might save somebody's life?  The government and insurers have infinite deep pockets -- otherwise known as what could and would have been increasing middle class incomes, now diverted to the parasites by the genius of socialism.

Returning from court today on the subway, I came across this ad, representing the dead end into which our healthcare system is headed by the irresistible incentives of third party pay:

You too can now get in on the racket!

A second article today with some sense of perspective on the situation is from Myron Magnet of the Manhattan Institute, appearing in the LA Times, titled "The original mistake that distorted the health insurance system in America."  That original mistake was the establishment, during World War II, of first-dollar or near-first-dollar healthcare "insurance" as a pre-tax employee fringe benefit.  With that foundational error, consumer cost-consciousness was banished from the medical arena, and the cancerous tumor got its start.  Tumor growth has proceeded from there.  Medicare and Medicaid represented the metastatic phase.  We are now well into Stage IV of the terminal disease.

Is there any possible cure at this point?  The only one I can see is a massive return to the states of responsibility for the healthcare issue.  If this occurs, those states brave enough to return to consumers the individual responsibility for low dollar health expenses will see a clear competitive advantage over those states that indulge in the socialist illusion.  Barring such a reform, the (now multiple) tumors continue their growth.  CMS here projects that healthcare expenditures in the U.S. will reach about 20% of GDP in the early 2020s.  I suspect that the growth will be even faster.  Don't count on much real growth of middle class incomes until this issue is addressed.   You will not find any organ of progressive journalism ever discussing this trade-off.

Obamacare: Is There Any Bipartisan Compromise Possible?

On Friday afternoon, Speaker Paul Ryan pulled the so-called American Health Care Act shortly before a scheduled vote in the House of Representatives.  From reading the press over the weekend -- both liberal and conservative -- you would have to think that this is a huge disaster for Speaker Ryan, for President Trump, and for all Republicans.  The Republicans can't govern!  They're hopelessly divided!  Paul Ryan is a loser and should resign immediately!  Trump has suffered a huge defeat!

Time for a new narrative.  Seems to me like this is something that is complex and may take a few tries.  Meanwhile, here are a few points that should be obvious, but that nobody seems to be making:

• This particular bill was carefully engineered to meet the tests for "reconciliation," so that it would be immune to filibuster.  A bill immune to filibuster can therefore pass the Senate with only 51 votes, not to mention not requiring any Democratic support in either house.  But that constraint severely limited the scope of what could be covered in this bill.  Here's a suggestion:  If the filibuster can be done away with for judicial nominations by a bare majority vote, then why not go a step further?  I suggest doing away with the filibuster for any bill that seeks to repeal prior legislation.  The filibuster was designed to slow the pace of new legislation that might have unintended consequences; but there's no reason to have a filibuster when the issue is getting rid of destructive prior legislation, of which Obamacare is just the most obvious example among thousands.
• Meanwhile, without this bill, Obamacare lives for another day.  But for how long?  The failure to schnooker the affluent young and healthy into signing up becomes more painfully obvious with every passing day and month.  Result: soaring premiums on the Obamacare "exchanges," and an accelerating death spiral.  From Time Magazine (no enemies of Obamacare) last October:  "[F]or Americans who don't get insurance through work, and who make too much money to qualify for federal subsidies, the cost of health coverage is about to soar dramatically. . . ."  They report average premium increases for the 2017 year in various states as: Alabama 36%, Georgia 32%, Illinois 44%, Minnesota 50-67%, Nebraska 35%, Oklahoma 76%, Pennsylvania 33%, Tennessee 44-62%.  Is it any wonder that people are angry?  
• It seems to be a given that no Democrat will support any effort to redo Obamacare, whether that means full repeal, or for that matter any significant reform in the direction of reducing federal control or spending.  Somehow, I can't find any article that even mentions this subject.  But without the passage of some Republican-backed reform, the law in place is the one passed by Democrats without a single Republican vote in support.  Is this where Democrats want to find themselves as premiums continue to accelerate?   

I for one will be very surprised to see Obamacare survive in anything like its present form all the way through to the next election in 2018.  What we just had is only round one.

But here's the interesting question:  Is it even remotely possible to come up with some reform that some Democrats will consider supporting?  There is nothing complicated about the partisan divide as currently constituted.  The Republicans (appropriately, in my view) are only willing to consider reforms that reduce government control and government spending.  The Democrats are only willing to consider reforms that increase government control and government spending.  There is literally no basis for compromise between those two positions.

So the Republicans have some tinkering to do before they can come up with a bill that will get the majorities that they need to pass it.  Meanwhile, isn't the real narrative the staunch refusal of even a single Democrat to participate in any way in a reform of Obamacare that might reduce, even slightly, government control or spending?         

The Weird Obsession With Russia Just Won't Go Away

A few weeks ago, when I wrote the post titled "What Is With This Weird Obsession With Russia?", I was getting the impression that all progressives, and for that matter the movement itself, had completely lost their minds.  Really, this would have to fade away in short order.  And yet here we are, most of a month later, and the narrative seems to be going as strong as ever.

And so, the day before yesterday, we had FBI Director Comey called before Congress (the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) for what was reported as over five hours of testimony.  Not that Comey himself got to say much -- it was mostly Congressmen grandstanding for as long as they could get the mic and the TV cameras focused on them.  (Don't worry, I didn't watch the whole thing, or even significant amounts; just enough to get a flavor.)  The hearing got the New York Times sufficiently excited yesterday to gin up an article in the lead position covering about a third of the front page.  According to that article, Comey confirmed the existence of an investigation into efforts by the Russians to "interfere" in the election, including contacts between Russians and members of the Trump campaign:

“The F.B.I., as part of our counterintelligence effort, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 president election,” [Comey said], adding that the investigation included looking at whether associates of Mr. Trump were in contact with Russian officials, and whether they colluded with them. 

And for how long has the investigation been going on?

Mr. Comey told lawmakers that the investigation began in July. . . . 

The guy who got to carry most of the water for the Democrats was a fellow from California that you've probably never heard of before, Adam Schiff.  Meanwhile, outside the hearing room, Senate Minority Leader Schumer took the opportunity to intone to the New York Times how really, really important this subject is:

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, responded: “The possibility of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials is a serious, serious matter. The investigation must be fair, independent, and impartial in every way, and the F.B.I. must be allowed to follow the facts wherever they may lead.”

Now, I'm just trying to imagine the most damning conversation I can think might conceivably have happened between some Trump campaign aide (or maybe Trump himself!) and either Putin or one of his right-hand men, like Ambassador Kislyak, or maybe even Dmitri Medvedev.  I'm imagining something like this:

Trump aide (or Trump):  "On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space."

(Kislyak or Medvedev): "Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…"

Trump aide (or Trump): "After my election I have more flexibility."

Kislyak or Medvedev: "I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you."

Now there's some real collusion, right?  But we know that this particular collusion was completely OK.  We know that, because this is the actual transcript of a conversation between ex-President Obama and Dmitri Medvedev on March 26, 2012.  Obama and Medvedev met in Seoul, South Korea, and Obama didn't realize that he was speaking on an open mic.  Anyway, if there were a transcript remotely this damning involving Trump or one of his aides, you can be sure that it would have been leaked by now.

And then there is the $64,000 question:  If the FBI was investigating "the possibility of coordination" between Trump campaign aides (or Trump himself) and the Russians, doesn't that necessarily mean that the FBI was wiretapping the conversations of at least some senior Trump campaign aides, if not Trump himself, during the heat of the campaign?  After all, Comey has confirmed that the investigation went back at least to July.  How could the FBI conduct such an investigation without wiretapping telephone conversations?  Or, to put it another way, if the FBI was not tapping telephone conversations of senior Trump aides and/or Trump, was it even a real investigation?

Somehow Trump himself managed give the Democratic press the chance to divert all attention away from those obvious questions with his famous March 4 tweet ("Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower . . . .")  And thus the New York Times et al. have had the opportunity to quibble over whether Obama personally gave the order for the tapping, whether it was of Trump personally, and whether it included conversations held in Trump Tower.  None of which quibbles go to the heart of the matter, which is whether the FBI -- which, like all government agencies, consists 95% of partisan Democrats -- was wiretapping senior members of the Trump campaign during the thick of the election contest.  I guess Trump has no one but himself to blame for the diversion.  But one of the senior Republican Congressmen in the investigation, Devin Nunes, confirmed the obvious in a press release today:

• I recently confirmed that, on numerous occasions, the Intelligence Community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.
• Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration  -- details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value -- were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.

Meanwhile, am I the only one who thinks that the whole "Trump is in bed with the Russians" story makes no sense?  Actually I'm not, because Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club has a post from Monday titled "Red Herring," with a roundup of many reasons why the whole thing doesn't hang together.  Fernandez's main point is that everything Putin does is for Russian domestic consumption to begin with, so he wouldn't go out of his way to help either candidate.  

But, getting to the next point, if Putin were to care about one thing in U.S. affairs, you would have to think that he would want our energy production hobbled.  I mean, the Russian government is completely dependent on revenues from oil and gas production, and our frackers are absolutely killing him, capping the world price of oil and gas at a level where he can't pay his bills.  The sustained low price of oil and gas has recently forced a massive 25% cut in Russia's defense budget.  That just has to be eating away at Putin, since using an outsize military to throw weight around on the international stage is what gives him his reason to exist.  Now, as between Clinton and Trump, which was the candidate who might conceivably get conned into hobbling U.S. energy production?

And then there's the tough talk of Nikki Haley at the UN.  And Trump's exhorting the Europeans to spend more on their own defense and on NATO.  Is any of this where Hillary would have gone?  Can Putin like any of it?

Really, I wouldn't mind a bit getting proved wrong on this subject.  But as of now, all I can see in the endless conspiracy theories about Russia is a weird obsession.

A Compendium Of Climate Laughingstocks

At a very basic level there is nothing funny about the climate alarm movement.  After all, climate alarmists are people who have as a goal keeping the poorest of the world's poor -- the 2 billion or so people who lack even access to reliable electricity -- forcibly trapped in their state of crushing poverty.  And then as another goal these people want the living standards of the next lowest tiers of world income earners, the low and lower middle classes, to be drastically reduced through multiplying costs of things like electricity and gasoline by factors of around three, or maybe five, or even ten.  (This goal often goes by the deceptive euphemism of "cap and trade.")  These goals are deeply immoral and troubling; they are no laughing matter.

But, I'm sorry to say, many times I still just can't help laughing at these people.  I mean, their goals may not be funny, but they are.  We're talking about a collection of preening, supercilious elitists, often with fancy university degrees and credentials, big houses, fancy cars, even private jets, pretending to be a morally superior form of human being because, based on fake science whose flaws they do not understand, they have convinced themselves that they are "saving the planet."  And then, time after time, their arrogance and ignorance leads them into major blunders -- getting totally fleeced in international agreements, or making commitments to energy systems that can't possibly work for anything remotely approaching reasonable cost (in ways that are completely obvious if you can do basic arithmetic).

I got on to this topic a few days ago with this post that covered the Paris climate agreement signed last year by ex-President Barack Obama.  (Have I mentioned anything yet about "preening, supercilious elitists with fancy university degrees and credentials"?)  He and his people are such geniuses that they supposedly committed the United States to achieve a (completely impossible without crippling the economy) 25 - 28% cut in our "greenhouse gas" emissions within the next 8 years, while exacting from China the "promise" to maybe think about not growing their own emissions any more after 2030, unless they change their mind in the meantime.  Talk about laughingstocks!

And then there is the joke that is California, where my wife and I have been spending the past week.  This is the state that loves to lecture the rest of the country about climate virtue.  Their Air Resources Board has put out the ultimate "Climate Plan" ("to reduce greenhouse gases and move forward toward a clean, green economy").  Supposedly their greenhouse gas emissions are going to plummet by the early 2020s.  But get here and all you see are massive freeways everywhere.  Back in New York we have a number of big six-lane expressways.  Here, any freeway worth its salt has at least 10 lanes, and some have up to 16.  And they are always jammed with big gas guzzlers.  Sometimes there is one "high-occupancy" lane, which here is defined as two people and up in a car.  We made a small game of seeing how many cars we could count with only a single occupant before seeing any with a second; sometimes it was several dozen.  They have a subway that goes almost nowhere, and it's impossible to conceive how it could ever make more than a few percent of the city accessible, given the vast sprawl of the region.  But don't worry, all of this is going to be transformed within about 8 years!  Sure.  And if they could actually accomplish the transformation, and assuming that the IPCC's worst-case warming models are right, they might be able to reduce future world warming by a completely unmeasurable 0.02 of a degree or so.

But is California more ridiculous than Germany?  Germany has supposedly agreed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by an incredible 95% by 2050.  Shall we check in on how that's going? They've now built enough solar and wind capacity that, if the darned things worked all the time, they would supply 100% of Germany's electricity needs.  Unfortunately, they don't work most of the time.  According to Environmental Progress in January, Germany's greenhouse gas emissions actually increased in 2016 -- and it was for the second year in a row!  Here's how the effort to transition to solar and wind generation is going:

Not only did new solar and wind not make up for the lost nuclear, the percentage of time during 2016 that solar and wind produced electricity declined dramatically.  Germany added a whopping 10 percent more wind turbine capacity and 2.5 percent more solar panel capacity between 2015 and 2016, but generated less than one percent more electricity from wind and generated one percent less electricity from solar.  The reason is because Germany had significantly less sunshine and wind in 2016 than 2015.

That's right, with solar and wind, you can add more and more capacity and get no more (or even less) electricity.  But can you at least get rid of some of the fossil fuel backup?  The opposite!  They shuttered some more nuclear capacity in 2016, and had to add new coal capacity to provide the steady backup that wind and solar cannot provide.  Oh, and their cost to consumers per kWh is about triple the U.S. average.  Keep it up guys!

And then there is South Australia.  SA wants its electricity generation to be 100% renewable.  What would that take?  At the link, a couple of guys named Paul Miskelly and Tom Quirk do some detailed calculations.  At present, South Australia has average electricity usage of around 1700 MW, and peak usage of around 2500 MW.  It has 1575 MW of generation capacity in wind farms.  Does that sound like they are close to getting all of their electricity from wind?  Don't be ridiculous.  The generation from wind regularly goes way below usage (when things are relatively calm) and frequently goes right down to around zero.  Miskelly and Quirk calculate that to have enough wind generation to provide the total amount of electricity that they use in a year, they would need to increase the current capacity by a factor of 3.58 -- and then come up with sufficient battery capacity to store excess electricity in all cases until it is needed, without ever running out.  Here is a chart of what SA's generation and usage would have looked like hour by hour in the first 3 months of 2016 with 3.58 times the generation capacity that they actually had.

Note that the amount of electricity being generated regularly swings wildly between three or so times usage at some points, and right around zero at other points.

So first they will need about 4000 MW of additional wind farm capacity -- close to triple what they have already, and bringing their "capacity" to about 4 times their average usage.  And then there's the storage.  M&Q calculate the maximum storage they would have needed during this period as around 270 GWh.  Better to get 300 GWh to be safe.  Now, how much would that cost? With some variations depending on whether you want (cheap) lead acid batteries or (superior) lithium ion batteries, M&Q calculate that it will run in the range of $60 to 90 billion.  And by the way, South Australia has all of about 1.7 million people.  

And that doesn't include the cost of the extra capacity, nor the cost of whatever new technology might be needed to make these wind turbines and batteries into a stable grid.  I'd say that multiplying the cost of electricity by a factor of 10 will be at the way, way low end of the range that you might expect.

Really, it's hard to know which of these is the funniest.