Status Report On New York's Quest For "Climate Leadership"

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An important focus of this blog is on trying to find the true “climate leader” among all the world’s political jurisdictions. After all, somebody needs to get out front to save us from the climate crisis. But who? Germany? They adopted the Energiewende policy in 2010, and have since thrown hundreds of billions of dollars at transitioning to “renewable” energy. Result: windmills everywhere, consumer electricity bills triple the U.S. average per kWh, and emissions essentially flat since the 2010 start of the program. China? They were awarded the mantle of “climate leadership” by the New York Times back in March 2017, shortly before Pravda figured out that China had hundreds of gigawatts of coal power plants under construction in their own country, and many hundreds of more gigawatts of such plants under construction in other countries around the world. The talk of energy transition was all a charade.

So now it’s time for some real progressives to show how it’s done. As reported here on June 19, New York ‘s legislature has now passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The goals of the Act are to get 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, followed by reduction of all carbon emissions — not just from the electricity sector — by 85% below 1990 levels by 2050. Admittedly, this new Act has just been passed. But we’ve been talking about transitioning to renewable energy for many years. Surely we should be setting the example for the world by now. Let’s take a look at where we are, and what the plans are from here. . . .

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIII

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIII

The scandal that I call “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the alteration of official world temperature data by a small number of government employees in the US and the UK. Uniformly, the alterations have the effect of lowering temperatures early in the record, and raising recent temperatures, in order to create and enhance a warming trend that does not exist in the data as originally reported. The purpose of the fraudulent data alteration is to support the continuation of the “global warming” climate scare. To read the prior 22 posts in this series, go to this link.

Despite what you might think from reading the mainstream press, the past few years in world temperatures have not been particularly good for the continuation of climate alarm. No matter how you measure them (the main methods being ground thermometers, weather balloons, and satellites), world atmospheric temperatures have gone down for more than three years since a peak reached in early 2016. The data set that I consider to be the most reliable — the satellite-based measurements from the University of Alabama at Huntsville — gives the global temperature “anomaly” for the most recent month (June 2019) as +0.47 deg C. That is well down from the peak of +0.88 deg C in early 2016, and represents a decrease of about a third of what had been the entire increase since the satellite record began in 1979. Here is the most recent UAH global lower atmosphere temperature graph: . . .

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Finally The U.S. (aka Trump) Has Caught On To What The G20 Is About

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Everybody knows what the G20 is about. Everybody, that is, except high-ranking members of the Democratic Party, the “establishment” branch of the Republican Party, the mainstream press, and the U.S. State Department career bureaucracy. Those people somehow think that what the G20 is about is reasonable people trying to work together in good faith to solve the world’s problems. Really! (Could anybody be that dumb? Yes. In fact, the “smarter” they appear to be from their credentials, the dumber they prove to be when it comes to understanding world affairs.)

And by the way, I don’t mean particularly to single out the G20, other than by the fact that they were just holding their annual meeting last week in Japan. Essentially all major international organizations, from the UN on down, are about the exact same thing.

And here’s the thing that all those organizations are about: . . .

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Every Redistricting Map Is A "Gerrymander" From Somebody's Perspective

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Every Redistricting Map Is A "Gerrymander" From Somebody's Perspective

How do you tell a perfectly fair and neutral congressional redistricting map from a “gerrymander”? You might think that the answer to the question can be found by looking at the map. If you see sprawling and oddly-shaped districts, whose outlines in some cases resemble the form of a salamander, then obviously this is a “gerrymander.” But then you look at the maps that were at issue in yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, and you are not so sure. In the case of North Carolina, the outlines of the districts in question — drawn by partisan Republicans allegedly to maximize their advantage — look relatively compact and normal, mostly following county boundaries, and not particularly unusual in any way. Here is the North Carolina map that was at issue: . . .

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The Democratic Candidates' Bidding War: Can Anybody Even Compile A Full List?

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In the run-up to tonight’s first debate among the 2020 Democratic candidates, many have noted the outbreak of what is being called the “bidding war.” In this war, the “bids” consist of proposals for new government spending, handout and giveaway programs. Among both the candidates and those covering the process, the assumption appears to be that the game will be won by the candidate who bids the biggest collection of the most expensive and extravagant such new programs. With time running out to get bids on the table before the debates begin, the last few weeks have seen a blizzard of new and ever-more-expensive proposals for buying the votes of the electorate. After all, when you get hit at one of these debates with a question about some human problem, you certainly don’t want to be caught without having already proposed a program or handout to “solve” that particular problem.

Meanwhile, don’t worry, none of these moderators will bother to ask you how you plan to pay for your various proposals. Obviously, we all know that payment can come from the infinite pile of free government loot. In the off chance that somebody tries to press you, you can always refer to your plan for a new “billionaire’s tax.” No details required.

A funny thing about this process is how piecemeal it is. One day one candidate comes out with a proposal for Medicare for All, and another day another candidate comes out with a proposal for a universal childcare system, and on yet another day another candidate comes out with a proposal for a renters’ tax credit. Can anybody give us a complete list of all the proposed new programs? How else are we ever going to get an idea of what kind of country these people intend to leave us with when all their programs get enacted?

Well, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but I don’t think it’s possible. . . .

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The Wall Street Journal Embarrasses Itself On The Economics Of 100% Intermittent Renewable Energy

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The Wall Street Journal Embarrasses Itself On The Economics Of 100% Intermittent Renewable Energy

Here on this site there is a section called “Articles,” where I have posted several pieces that are longer than my typical blog post of about 1000 words. Except that I haven’t actually posted any new Articles there in several years. The reason is that I couldn’t figure out how to do it. But a couple of weeks ago I got a young consultant to give me a step by step procedure. And voilá! I have now posted a new Article. Go to the Articles section to check it out.

The subject of the new Article is the economics for a country of trying to get 100% of its electricity from the intermittent renewables, wind and solar. You will get a feel for my take on the situation from the title: “The Disastrous Economics Of Trying To Power An Electrical Grid With 100% Intermittent Renewables.” This Article is a slightly-modified version of a section of a Comment that some colleagues and I filed with the EPA with respect to some of its recent regulatory initiatives.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal chose this Saturday to attempt to tackle the same subject, covering the front page of its second section (“Exchange”) with a huge feature article headlined “Plugging In the Wind,” by a guy named Russell Gold. So does Mr. Gold of the Journal agree with me that the economics of trying to power an electrical grid with 100% intermittent renewables would be “disastrous”? Actually, the opposite. According to Gold:

For years, the wind and the sun were widely dismissed as niche sources of power that could never fill America’s vast need for energy. But now the cost of solar and wind power ha[s] fallen so much that the U.S. could substantially reduce harmful emissions while also lowering the price of electricity. . . . Renewable energy sources now provide the cheapest power in windy and sunny parts of the country.

Is there anything to that? Or is it complete pie-in-the-sky? . . .

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