Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs – Page 15

Greenhouse gas emission targets boost enthusiasm for small modular nuclear reactors – by Dan Healing (CTV News Calgary/Canadian Press – April 25, 2021)

April 26, 2021

https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/

CALGARY — The worldwide battle to control greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change is the best thing that’s happened for growth in the nuclear energy industry in decades, its proponents say.

They add that the development of smaller, scalable nuclear reactors to churn out reliable, emissions-free energy at a much lower than traditional cost makes nuclear an option that’s become impossible to ignore.

“Thirty years ago, the vision was that nuclear energy is going to be so cheap that we’ll be giving electricity away for free,” said Robby Sohi, president and CEO of Global First Power Ltd., a company trying to build Canada’s first small modular reactor or SMR.

Read this book, then forget climate panic – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – April 23, 2021)

April 26, 2021

https://financialpost.com/

Former Obama aide blasts politicians, media and ‘broken science’

The floods of catastrophic projections and raging wildfires of extreme policy initiatives must, at some point in the evolution of humankind, come to an end.

Not today, that’s certain, as U.S. President Joe Biden’s virtual climate summit gives global politicians a platform to spread additional fear and even more extreme policies to rid the world of carbon emissions.

Biden lit the latest wildfire in his opening statement: “This is a moral imperative. An economic imperative. A moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities.” To fight the peril, Biden vowed to cut U.S. carbon emissions to between 50 and 52 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

This Earth Day let’s replace alarmism with smarter policy – by Bjorn Lomborg (Financial Post – April 22, 2021)

April 23, 2021

https://financialpost.com/

Irresponsible exaggerations are destroying our ability to make sensible decisions for the future

This Earth Day, dramatic warnings about climate change will be ubiquitous. At his climate summit, U.S. President Joe Biden will undoubtedly repeat that global warming presents an “existential threat.”

But most of the hype will be vastly exaggerated. This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past few decades.

Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that, along with other environmental concerns, climate change could cause worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Climate Change Activists Need To Get Serious About Nuclear Power – by John Stossel (Reason.com – April 21, 2021)

April 23, 2021

Reason.com

This Thursday, Earth Day, politicians and activists will shout more about “the climate crisis.” I don’t think it’s a crisis. COVID-19, malaria, exploding debt, millions of poor children dying from diarrhea—those are genuine crises.

But global warming may become a real problem, so it’s particularly absurd that Earth Day’s activists rarely mention the form of energy that could most quickly reduce greenhouse gases: nuclear power. When France converted to nuclear, it created the world’s fastest reduction in carbon emissions.

But in America, nuclear growth came to a near halt 40 years ago, after an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. The partial meltdown killed no one. It would probably have been forgotten had Hollywood not released a nuclear scare movie, The China Syndrome, days before.

‘It’s hard, we’re neighbours’: the coalmine polluting friendships on Poland’s borders – by Pawel Wiejski (The Guardian – March 29, 2021)

March 30, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/

When the Czech government announced it was taking Poland to Europe’s highest court it came as a surprise to Warsaw. After all, EU countries rarely sue one another. Prague’s demand is a politically explosive one.

Not only is it challenging the extension of mining activity at Turów, a vast lignite mine that has been in operation for nearly 100 years, it also wants the European court of justice to order its immediate closure.

Sandwiched between Germany and the Czech Republic in the Silesia region of south-west Poland, the open-pit mine is depleting the groundwater supplies of its neighbours and violates EU environmental law, the Czech government alleges.

Carbon-tax green light flashing red – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – March 26, 2021)

March 29, 2021

https://financialpost.com/

It is better not to get too deeply immersed in the constitutional labyrinth embedded in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to legally green light the Trudeau government’s carbon tax plan.

Beyond the 200-plus pages of convoluted and contradictory legal verbiage lie the real issues, which are economic, environmental and political, not legal. And those issues are festooned with flashing red warning lights: Danger ahead.

A carbon tax regime is no closer to reality, on a national or international level, than it was before the Supreme Court’s decision. In light of current global economic conditions, the prospects for a carbon tax look doubtful — a point highlighted by Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole when he said a Conservative government “will repeal Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax.

Guest Commentary | ‘Keep it in the ground’ movement deserves more scrutiny – by Seth Whitehead (News Gazette – March 28, 2021)

March 29, 2021

https://www.news-gazette.com/

The Department of Energy and virtually every other reputable source forecasts
oil and natural gas remaining the country’s dominant source of energy for at
least the next 30 years.

Energy makes the high standard of living most Americans enjoy possible. Affordable, reliable energy is the lifeblood of our economy. And as University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology director Dr. Scott Tinker recently noted, “All forms of energy come from the earth.”

It is with those fundamental facts in mind that keep-it-in-the-ground groups should be viewed as anti-U.S. energy.

Though it’s obvious that traditional energy sources such as oil, natural gas and coal come from the ground, it is often overlooked that wind, solar and battery technologies would not be possible without massive mining projects.

Heavy industries could build on Canada’s low-carbon advantage – by Nelson Bennett (Business In Vancouver – March 24, 2021)

March 25, 2021

https://biv.com/

When it comes to decarbonizing the economy, it’s the stuff of modern life – steel, cement, fertilizer, plastics, chemicals – that will prove hardest to clean up.

Fortunately for Canadian industries, many of these products produced in Canada already have a comparatively low carbon profile compared to many other countries, thanks to its clean power grid (hydro and nuclear power).

Canada already can boast that it produces some of the lowest carbon aluminum in the world, thanks to hydro power in B.C. and Quebec.

The World’s Three Biggest Coal Users Get Ready to Burn Even More – by Will Wade (Bloomberg News – March 16, 2021)

March 16, 2021

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/

(Bloomberg) — The world’s three biggest consumers of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, are getting ready to boost usage so much that it’ll almost be as if the pandemic-induced drop in emissions never happened.

U.S. power plants are going to consume 16% more coal this year than in 2020, and then another 3% in 2022, the Energy Information Administration said last week. China and India, which together account for almost two-thirds of demand, have no plans to cut back in the near term.

This means higher emissions, a setback for climate action ahead of international talks this year intended to raise the level of ambition from commitments under the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gases.

What Countries Will Fight Over When Green Energy Dominates – by Marc Champion (BNN Bloomberg – March 16, 2021)

March 16, 2021

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

(Bloomberg) — The Rand Corporation’s been designing war games with the Pentagon since the 1950s, modelling such hard-nosed security scenarios as a two-front U.S. war with China and Russia.

Now the think tank is turning its realpolitik tool kit to a question more often associated with environmental dreamers: How will clean energy change the world?

Rand is among the small but growing number of research organizations, universities and at least one European government that have started gaming out the gritty geopolitical implications of a globe dominated by green energy. It’s the latest sign that the once quaint idea of renewable energy displacing fossil fuels has gone mainstream.

Breaking News: Wind and Solar Potentially Aren’t Climate Cure-Alls – by William Hughes (CRUX Investors – March 16, 2021)

March 16, 2021

https://articles.cruxinvestor.com/

Fundamental Flaws of Wind and Solar – Reliability

Perhaps the most obvious criticism of renewables is their intermittent nature, or as Fergus calls them “unreliable”. Solar panels clearly don’t work when it’s dark and wind turbines don’t turn when it isn’t windy, but the problem goes far deeper than this.

Solar energy is fundamentally at odds with our energy usage patterns, being offline when we’re making dinner and watching tv after work. On overcast days when we’re more likely to be inside production levels fall, and that’s nothing on the scale of capacity issues caused by snow.

Even the ambitious plans for huge desert solar arrays face repeated cleaning to remove sand from the panel surfaces.

Opinion: Spend billions on green innovation, not trillions on carbon-cutting – by Bjorn Lomborg (Financial Post – February 23, 2021)

March 3, 2021

https://financialpost.com/

Spending trillions on enormous and premature emissions cuts is an unsustainable and ineffective Western world approach

Across the world, politicians are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies.

U.S. President Joe Biden has promised to spend US$500 billion ($630 billion) each year on climate — about 13 per cent of total federal revenue. The European Union will spend 25 per cent of its budget on climate.

Most rich countries now promise to go carbon-neutral by mid-century. Shockingly, only one country has made a serious, independent estimate of the cost: New Zealand found, optimistically, that it would cost 16 per cent of its GDP by then, equivalent to the entire current New Zealand budget.

WORLD BANK NEWS RELEASE: Mineral Production to Soar as Demand for Clean Energy Increases (May 11, 2021)

February 19, 2021

For Report: https://bit.ly/3bl6pkb

The more ambitious climate targets, the more minerals needed for a clean energy transition

WASHINGTON, May 11, 2020 — A new World Bank Group report finds that the production of minerals, such as graphite, lithium and cobalt, could increase by nearly 500% by 2050, to meet the growing demand for clean energy technologies. It estimates that over 3 billion tons of minerals and metals will be needed to deploy wind, solar and geothermal power, as well as energy storage, required for achieving a below 2°C future.

The report “Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition” also finds that even though clean energy technologies will require more minerals, the carbon footprint of their production—from extraction to end use—will account for only 6% of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by fossil fuel technologies.

The report underscores the important role that recycling and reuse of minerals will play in meeting increasing mineral demand. It also notes that even if we scale up recycling rates for minerals like copper and aluminum by 100%, recycling and reuse would still not be enough to meet the demand for renewable energy technologies and energy storage.

As Texas winter storm shows, hurling public money at renewable energy is pure folly – by Rex Murphy (National Post – February 18, 2021)

February 18, 2021

https://nationalpost.com/

The Wall Street Journal editorialized that “Texas’s overreliance on
wind power left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of
the wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity
to plunge to 8 per cent from 42 per cent … there wasn’t sufficient baseload
power from coal & nuclear to support the grid.”

It is time that the brand of environmentalism that travels under the cloak of global warming apocalypse drops its halo.

Environmentalism, the brand, Global Warming the banner, is pure politics. GW partisans are as hard and as cynical and as manipulative as the most corroded politicians.

GW is not about what it says it’s about. It is hardball against the world that most of us appreciate.

De-bunking climate and other varieties of alarmism – by Patrick Moore (Financial Post – February 10, 2021)

February 11, 2021

https://financialpost.com/

Moore’s new book presents 11 alleged present catastrophes or threats of future doom and shows how claims are fake news and fake science

The Great Barrier Reef is alive and well: Go and see it for yourself. The first part of that is true. The second part is tongue-in-cheek, as very few of us will be diving on the Great Barrier Reef anytime soon.

Besides, it is beneath the surface and considerably larger than Texas so you would need to be in the water every day for a very long time to verify its alleged demise.

As it turns out, virtually all the doomsday narratives promoted by today’s alarmists fit this pattern. Their stories are either about something invisible, like CO2 and radiation, or so remote, like coral reefs and polar bears, that the average person cannot observe or verify them for themselves.