The Completely Fraudulent "Levelized Cost Of Electricity"

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The Completely Fraudulent "Levelized Cost Of Electricity"

  • My last post on Tuesday reported on the Soho Forum climate change debate that had taken place the previous day. Debater Andrew Dessler, arguing in favor of rapid reductions in human greenhouse gas emissions by the method of vastly increasing electricity production from wind and solar generators, had heavily relied on the assertion that wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to generate electricity. An important slide in his presentation showed comparative costs of generation from various sources, with wind and solar clearly shown as least expensive. At the bottom of the slide, the acronym “LCOE” was legible.

  • LCOE stands for Levelized Cost of Electricity. I first encountered this term a couple of years ago, and thought that I should get on top of it to understand its significance. It took me about a half hour to figure out that this metric was completely inapplicable and invalid for purposes of comparing the costs of using dispatchable versus non-dispatchable generators as the predominant sources to power an electrical grid that works. The reasons are not complicated, but do take some minutes of thought if the matter has not previously been explained to you. In Tuesday’s post, I asked as to Dessler’s reliance on this LCOE metric:

  • [I]s he aware of this [inapplicability of LCOE] and therefore intentionally trying to deceive the audience? Or, alternatively, is he innumerate, and does not understand how this works quantitatively?

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Report On Yesterday's Soho Forum Climate Change Debate

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  • The Soho Forum “climate change” debate yesterday went off without a hitch at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street in Lower Manhattan. The proposition debated was “Climate Science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University took the affirmative; Steven Koonin of NYU took the negative. Mrs. MC and I were among the sponsors of this debate. Daughter (and MC contributor) Jane Menton, who is Chief of Operations for the Soho Forum, was responsible for lining up the speakers and taking care of all the event details.

  • Congratulations to the Soho Forum for succeeding in having Dessler actually show up and participate in this debate. Generally, the official position of the climate alarm movement is that no adherent should ever debate a skeptic who expresses doubt about any aspect of the orthodoxy. After the debate, I made a point of approaching Dessler, and thanking him personally for his willingness to participate. In our short conversation, he said that several of his colleagues had told him that he should not debate a “denier” like Koonin, but that he had decided that it was important to engage with the public. This willingness to engage publicly is much to Dessler’s credit.

  • I was very much looking forward to hearing one of the marquee names of the climate movement give his best statement of the basis for the position that “greenhouse gas” emissions must be reduced. At the end, I was left thinking, “Could this really be all they’ve got?”

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On The Causes Of Racial Health Disparities In The United States

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On The Causes Of Racial Health Disparities In The United States

  • Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has a much-linked article in the current (Summer 2022) issue of the City Journal with the title “The Corruption of Medicine.” The subject matter has substantial overlap with a Manhattan Contrarian post from last November with the title “The Progressive Neo-Racist Cancer Has Completely Destroyed The AMA.”

  • Mac Donald’s piece goes deeply into what she calls “two related hypotheses” that have recently come to dominate the medical profession:

  • Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for [1] racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for [2] racial disparities in health outcomes.

  • For today, I’m going to focus on the second hypothesis, that “systemic racism” in the U.S. medical system is responsible for “racial disparities in health outcomes.” Is this hypothesis remotely plausible?

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We May Have Dodged A Bullet In The Misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act"

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  • On Sunday (August 7) the Senate passed the 700+ page bill with the Orwellian name of the “Inflation Reduction Act.” The bill has essentially nothing to do with supposedly reducing inflation, and is really just a conventional tax-and-spend extravaganza, with hundreds of billions of dollars of completely counterproductive taxing on the one hand, and even larger amounts of equally counterproductive and wasteful spending on the other hand.

  • The bill is still not final, since it differs substantially from a version previously passed by the House. So it may be a while before there is an enacted statute. But now that the main hurdle of Senate passage has been cleared, there probably will be a statute within days, in all likelihood identical to what the Senate has passed.

  • This is one of the very worst bills ever to clear a house of Congress, although to be fair the (equally misnamed) Build Back Better bill passed by the House toward the end of last year was much larger and would have been even worse.

  • But from information coming to me, it appears that the very most destructive provision of the proposed bill got scrapped at the very last minute, just prior to Senate passage. That was a provision that would have attempted to substantially undo the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in West Virginia v. EPA.

  • Although the bill is not final, and I cannot find definitive information at the time of this writing, it appears likely that we have dodged a huge bullet, at least for the moment.

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Net Zero Is Not Just For Carbon Emissions -- Now It's Nitrogen

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Net Zero Is Not Just For Carbon Emissions -- Now It's Nitrogen

  • In recent months the insane world-wide campaign against the emission of carbon into the atmosphere has not been going all that well for the zealots.

  • Among other things, the Ukraine war has highlighted the fact that wind and solar electricity generators can’t really work on their own to power a modern economy. That has left places like Germany and the UK that built the most of them facing soaring energy prices and dependence on natural gas from Russia for backup. Those countries and others are in the process of being forced by reality to at least slow down on their march toward Net Zero as to carbon emissions.

  • But meanwhile, there’s another campaign for Net Zero that until recently has been flying mostly under the radar. That is the campaign against nitrogen.

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Miners Explore Amazon Basin To Support "Green" Energy; New York Times Horrified

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  • The front page of today’s New York Times features a big article clearly intended to get the readers riled up about the latest environmental horror that must be stopped. The headline is “The Illegal Airstrips Bringing Toxic Mining to Brazil’s Indigenous Land.” Subheadline: “The Times identified hundreds of airstrips that bring criminal mining operations to the most remote corners of the Amazon.”

  • Wow, this is bad. The airstrips are “illegal.” The mining is “toxic,” and not only toxic but also “criminal.” And it’s all happening in the most pristine place left in the whole world, the “remote corners of the Amazon,” much of it inhabited by the most innocent of all innocent indigenous people, the Yanomami.

  • So what is driving this big rush of miners into these remote regions? Could so-called “green energy” — with its vast demands for raw materials like nickel, manganese, aluminum and iron — have anything to do with it?

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