Tag Archives: climate

The Evils of Fracking

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It seems that fracking, that heinous technology used for getting hard-to-reach natural gas and oil out of the very deep underground, far from polluting our water, saves it, especially where natural gas-based electricity generating plants are concerned.  According to a University of Texas study published in Environmental Research Letters,

Even though exploration for natural gas through hydraulic fracturing requires significant water consumption in Texas, the new consumption is easily offset by the overall water efficiencies of shifting electricity generation from coal to natural gas.  The researchers estimate that water saved by shifting a power plant from coal to natural gas is 25 to 50 times as great as the amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing to extract the natural gas.

Natural gas-fired power plants use about two-thirds less water than coal-fired plants to cool the generators.  The switch to natural gas-based electricity generation, made commercially feasible by fracking, thus reduces water use by the plants significantly.  Aside from reducing water consumption in and of itself, and reducing costs for producers and consumers of electricity, this yields another, longer-term outcome.  Senior Research Scientist at UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology, said,

The bottom line is that hydraulic fracturing, by boosting natural gas production and moving the state from water-intensive coal technologies, makes our electric power system more drought resilient.

Bad fracking.  Bad.

Can’t Happen Here

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Enquiries by the Daily Mail have revealed:

  • Four of the nine-person Climate Change Committee, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
  • A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.
  • £3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind.  The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE.  The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.
  • The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees.  His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.
  • Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials—a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.

The Daily Mail identifies specific players in the Green Charade at the link.

 

h/t Power Line

Rule By Law

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This time using the excuse of AGW to drive the fiat governance.

President Barack Obama has issued another of his diktats Executive Orders, this time placing the Executive Branch squarely in charge of “responses” to “climate change” and wholly cutting the people’s representatives, our Congress, out of the discussion.  Never mind that human impact on climate change has yet to be demonstrated—or even hinted at very strongly.  His EO forms a task force to advise the Federal government of how to respond to climate change impacts.

Of course, it’s also an Obama-esque bipartisan group:

The task force includes governors of seven states—all Democrats—and the Republican governor of Guam, a US territory.  Fourteen mayors and two other local leaders also will serve on the task force.

All but three of those appointed are Democrats.

Obama claimed, in his accompanying White House statement,

…that even as the United States acts to curb carbon pollution, officials also need to improve how states and communities respond to extreme weather events like last year’s Superstorm Sandy.  Building codes must be updated to address climate impacts and infrastructure needs to be made more resilient.

This is just more costs inflicted by Feds on states and consumers—ostensibly to guard against climate “change,” but more to increase Federal power and intrusion into our business and private lives.

There’s more:

A possible mandate to bring sweeping new changes to land use and resource policies.

Just like the EPA’s attempts to regulate rain water runoff as a pollutant and to regulate water puddles in people’s backyards.

And

More control and refocus of climate change data….

Which will include a drive to control the release of those data and how they’re being used by the Federal government—just like this administration is doing with Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS targeting, Obamacare software, etc.

So I ask: who will guard us from government’s rule by law at the expense of rule of law?  And a follow up: who will protect us from the mendacity of false climate panic-mongering?

Obama’s War on Energy

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The Obama administration plans to block the construction of new coal-fired power plants unless they are built with novel and expensive technology to capture greenhouse-gas emissions[.]

There’s a surprise.  The EPA’s latest rule version on this subject looks to control CO2 emissions as an urgency exists in the minds of climate deniers (i.e., those who deny that the existing climate change is an ongoing natural phenomenon) to reduce humanity’s output of this “greenhouse” gas.

[T]he revised rule said it would propose an emissions limit of 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour for coal plants and 1,000 pounds per megawatt hour for large gas-fired plants.

…such stringent limits would ban new coal plants….

And

The rule is also a crucial stepping-stone for the Obama administration’s next big environmental project, emissions standards for the fleet of existing power plants.  Mr Obama has told the EPA to produce those standards by June 2014.

Never mind that CO2 is a trailing indicator, confirming the health of the planet.

The climate deniers’ minds—and those of their pet policy makers in the EPA—are made up, and they resent being confused by facts.

Federal Climate Plan and Crony Capitalism

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George Russell, writing for Fox News, had this on the efficacy of President Barack Obama’s national plan to fight “climate change:”

a separate, groundbreaking study by the National Research Council has warned that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases .

The study, which looks at the subsidies and other incentives embedded in U.S. federal tax law after the past several years of climate change initiatives, concludes that they  have done little or nothing so far to cut U.S. contributions to global carbon emissions, and are unlikely to do much more before 2035, the project’s research horizon.

And

[T]he study declared that “their combined impact is less than 1% of total US emissions” over the next 25 years, and they are a lousy bargain to boot:  “Very little if any GHG reductions are achieved at substantial cost with these provisions.”

[T]he study concluded “current tax expenditures and subsidies are a poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”   They “achieve small reductions in GHG emissions and are costly per unit of emissions reduction.”

The full cost was something the study was unable to make entirely clear.  It estimated that the federal government had spent some $48 billion in just the past two years on “tax expenditures”—meaning subsidies, credits, and other incentives—related to the energy sector, and also noted that few were specifically enacted to reduce greenhouse gases.

Obama’s plan also ignores the erroneous nature of its assumptions about what is a significant GHG.  It includes all of their assumed GHGs, for instance including atmospheric CO2….

Worse, for the short term,

[T]he probe underlined how little is yet known about the relationship between government tax-and-spend activity and actual climate change results, especially as government spending gets embedded in a growing thicket of regulations and initiatives created to solve different parts of the greenhouse gas puzzle, but all touted to achieve the same ends.

And

[T]he plan also calls for $7.9 billion in additional funding for advanced clean energy technology, a hike of about 30%.  This includes investment in a range of energy technologies, from advanced biofuels to nuclear mini-reactors.

Never mind that this is a waste of money.  If the technology can’t compete in the free market without subsidies, it’s not commercially viable.  And so does not warrant subsidization—assuming government subsidies are ever appropriate.

The ludicrosity goes on, but you get the idea.

It’s hard to believe that Obama and his colleagues in the Executive Branch and allies in the Legislative Branch didn’t know this stuff a priori; earlier studies, for instance, have debunked the very concept of serious human impact on evolving climate.  But he, and they, do know full well the pecuniary benefit of this plan for the plan’s recipients.

The study itself can be found here.