Tag Archives: climate

Of Course He Did

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The Washington Policy Center says that Washington’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Jay Inslee has known all along that his carbon tax would significantly increase gas prices in the State.

In a Thursday morning blog post, WPC Environmental Director Todd Myers notes that reports from Inslee’s 2014 Carbon Emissions Reduction Task Force, or CERT, showed a carbon tax could result in a significant hike in the price at the pump.
In fact, Inslee’s then-chief policy advisor Matt Steuerwalt, based on an analysis created for the task force, told the Senate Environment, Energy & Technology Committee that a carbon dioxide price of $52 per metric ton—almost identical to the state’s current carbon dioxide price—would increase prices by 44 cents per gallon.

Of course he’s known this all along. It’s why he pushed so hard for his carbon tax Climate Commitment Act. He’s trying to price hydrocarbon-based energy out of existence in his State.

CO2 Fans

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An atmospheric CO2 removal technology is gaining interest.

In western Texas, a major carbon removal plant that is under construction also recently got a $550 million investment from BlackRock. Once it is up and running in 2025, the plant will use fan-like devices roughly the size of tennis courts to pull carbon from the air and bury it underground, a process known as direct-air capture.

To the extent that this is a good idea—and I’m not convinced that it is—such direct-air capture facilities would be better placed in targeted locations, rather than being randomly situated. And few places are more random than the wide-open spaces of West Texas. That location may be OK for a proof of concept run, but….

If this technology works at scale, the facilities would be better placed just downwind of gas-, oil-, and coal-fired power generation plants to capture CO2 emissions as they are emitted and before they get diffused throughout the atmosphere.

Also: rather than burying the captured CO2, better to freeze it and use the dry ice for shipping perishables, since shipping times will be much longer with the sailing ships and horse-drawn overland wagons that will be the core of our shipping industry after the Left’s war on fossil-fuels is over.

And then recapture that CO2 for recycling….

“Just Another Use of Fossil Fuels”

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There’s a move afoot to produce hydrogen as an energy source by fracturing natural gas into its hydrogen and carbon and oxygen components, the latter two typically as CO2 (and then capturing the CO2 and sequestering it). The foolishness of trying to use hydrogen as an energy source is for another day. What interests me here is the beef from the Global Warming Know Betters who see [fracturing natural gas] as just another use of fossil fuels.

Those august persons, then, must object to our several materials industries, in which natural gas, oil, and coal are major inputs to plastics.

Oh, wait—they hate plastics, too.

They Don’t Know What They’re Doing?

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Or is that they’re just riding the Climate Funding Industry Hobby Horse?

East Coast wind projects are in jeopardy after a decision by New York regulators Thursday to deny requests from renewable energy developers to charge customers billions of dollars more.
Offshore wind developers say they have been struggling against record inflation, supply chain issues, and interest rate hikes. Facing these pressures, Orsted, BP, and Equinor and other renewable developers requested that contracts for four offshore projects and 86 land-based projects be renegotiated, according to Reuters.
The offshore developers asked the New York Public Service Commission to alter its long term contracts and raise purchase prices to a level that would have let them collect an additional $38 billion from ratepayers.

They missed—badly—their initial financing and execution estimates, and they failed badly in their early adjustments following actual execution. The supply chain problems about which they complain have been extant since the depths of the Wuhan Virus situation. The inflation that has them in such an uproar has been a problem for the last three years. The rising interest rates have been an inevitable outcome of the inflation.

Do these guys—at the top of the top companies in their industry—really not know what they are doing?

Or are they just trying to rake in the money from their shadow industry of global warming hysteria funding, and some jurisdictions are starting to get tired of being taken for granted as cash cows?

Continuing His Father’s Virtue-Signaling

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Prince William is royally frustrated with the pace of “climate” solutions and wants them developed and executed faster.

For now, we’re quite keen on the scale…when we scale up [solutions], how can we have the biggest change? For me, that’s something I haven’t quite cracked yet, is “how do we scale faster?”
I’m impatient with all this. You guys provide the product…the inspiration, the solution, my role is to get you as big, as fast, and as scalable as possible…. We’ve still got some work to do on that.

First, though, William needs to demonstrate that there is, actually, a crisis. The idea that storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, etc are getting steadily worse has long since been debunked.

Then there’s the fact that the plethora of climate models have consistently exaggerated the degree of predicted global warming over the last 25+ years they’ve been making their predictions—in fact, there’s been very little global warming. And those models still cannot even simultaneously predict the past and the present.

Then there’s the fact that the climate mavens’ go to source, the UN’s IPCC, has used the highly unlikely worst case scenario to push for zero atmospheric carbon emissions “right damn now,” while desperately ignoring the much more likely middle scenario which predicts…meh.

Then there’s the larger picture:

  • we’re 11.5k years after the end of the last severe glaciation (and still in middle of the latest Ice Age, which began some 2.8 million years ago), and we’re still cooler than the geologic warming trend line*, and much cooler than the warming excursion of 6k, or so, years ago
  • ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica that reach back 400k years indicate the atmospheric CO2 increases coincident with or after planetary warming, not before
  • there are epochs in which Earth was much warmer than today, and life was lush; there are epochs where atmospheric CO2 was much higher than today, and life was lush; those epochs do not correlate with each other—indeed, there are epochs of high temperature and low atmospheric CO2 and periods of high atmospheric CO2 and low temperature, along with high levels of each and low levels of each
  • there are epochs with no Artic ice sheet and a greatly reduced Antarctic ice sheet, and life was lush.

If the prince doesn’t demonstrate the existence of a climate crisis, instead of just blindly repeating what members of the climate funding industry tell him, he is just virtue-signaling and needn’t be taken seriously, no matter his august nobility.

 

*The trend line is very noisy, but Earth is warming, and has been since it began—because our sun has been warming ever since it gravitationally collapsed far enough to light off its fusion process.