Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York Balancing the risks and benefits of environmental initiatives
This is an update of articles that I have read that I want to mention but do not require a detailed post. Previous commentaries are available here.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York
Balancing the risks and benefits of environmental initiatives
Commentary on Recent Articles 14 July 2024
Frequent readers of this blog know that many of my posts are long because I get document all my statements. This is because of my background in industry where it is necessary to prove my arguments to have credibility. This is an update of articles that I have read that I want to mention but do not require a detailed post. Previous commentaries are available here.
I have been following the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed and most of the articles described below are related to the net-zero transition. I have devoted a lot of time to the Climate Act because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.
Basic Economics and Renewable Energy Development
This is a great article I recommend that you read the whole thing. Irina Slav explains a fundamental factor affecting the deployment of wind and solar.
The biggest developer of wind and solar in Europe, Norway-based Statkraft, said last month that electricity prices in Europe have gone too low and production costs have gone too high, so it’s planning fewer projects for the immediate future.
“The transition from fossil to renewable energy is happening at an increasing pace in Europe and the rest of the world. However, the market conditions for the entire renewable energy industry have become more challenging,” Statkraft’s chief executive told the Financial Times.
Obviously, she was being modest and if she was being honest instead, the quote would have gone as follows: “The attempted transition to renewable energy is happening at an increasing pace, so market forces are kicking in more noticeably than before, making conditions for the industry more challenging.”
Slav goes on to argue that supply and demand is the fundamental driver of economic growth:
presence of so many massively huge corporations) supply and demand play equal roles as fuel for the growth engine. When supply for a product goes too high, demand lags behind, supply declines and, unless demand remains low and the product is replaced by another, demand begins to exceed supply and causes a supply rebound.
Of course this is as basic an explanation as is possible to produce but it serves my purpose, which is a comparison with planned economies. In planned economies, demand is a secondary concern. In planned economies, you buy what’s in front of you and don’t ask for a choice because there is none.
I encourage you to read the article because her arguments that the net-zero transition planned economy is destined to fail are compelling. She concludes:
Twenty years of transition attempts and we are still at the “wind and solar are free” stage of denial. The market will fix all this eventually but the signs are multiplying that the pain during the healing process will be of the more rather than less severe variety.
Gaslighting of the Year Nominee
Gaslighting refers to “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage”. The Free Press TGIF edition describes Jack Schlossberg:
Jack Schlossberg is Vogue’s newest political correspondent. But besides being insanely hot and the only surviving grandson of JFK, Schlossberg’s contribution to the political landscape amounts to a series of bizarre videos on Instagram where he puts on different accents to tell his followers why they should vote Biden. There’s one where he’s pretending to be a guy from Southie who cares about reproductive rights and another where he plays a British character called Reginald who wants to tell you about oil production under our current president.
In his monologue about oil production, he claims that it has reached record levels under Biden. Bud’s Offshore Energy notes that the opinions of State and local governments and tribes are fully considered as long as they are aligned with the preordained political decision. The example given was the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rule making the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A) off limits to oil and gas development. To claim that Biden contributed to the record oil production when in the first week of his administration he introduced a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands makes Schlossberg a gaslighter of the year nominee.
Crude oil isn’t just for electricity
Ronald Stein makes a very good case that ridding the world of crude oil without a replacement is global suicide. The fact is that there are so many products produced with oil that society would basically would come to a stop without them.
The world has also experienced significant economic growth and prosperity, benefiting from the more than 6,000 products that are derived from fossil fuels. These products support the following infrastructures and were not around a few short centuries ago because they all need components and parts made from fossil fuels that were NOT available in the pre-1800s.
Non-animal powered Transportation
Airports
Hospitals
Electronics
Telecommunications
Communications systems
Militaries
Space programs
I am continually amazed by the folks that think we can go cold turkey from fossil fuels that provide so many benefits. This article is a good reminder of those benefits.
Methane
One of the most glaring examples of the misinformed “science” behind the Climate Act is the irrational obsession with methane. Steve Gorham explains that “Claims about the global warming potential of methane are accurate in the laboratory, but not in the atmosphere.” He goes on to point out “Because of greenhouse gas saturation in the atmosphere, methane regulations across the world will have no measurable effect on global temperatures.” The article is a good overview of the irrelevance of methane. There is more information on this topic on my methane page.
Ithaca NY Climate Goal
Rich Ellenbogen describes the link between a Christian Science Monitor article on the Ithaca climate goal and our warning about New York City’s Local Law 97. One recommendation in our report is the necessity of a test case to prove the viability of wholesale electrification relying on renewables. We arbitrarily picked Ithaca because I knew they had some climate goals, but I did not realize how ambitious the Ithaca plan was.
On July 10, there was a puff piece in the Christian Science Monitor regarding Ithaca’s electrification plan. It discusses building retrofits for electrification but totally ignores all of the associated infrastructure that will be needed to support the electrified buildings. Infrastructure that does not presently exist at utility scale, and won’t for decades. It also shows all of the difficulties that a city of 33,000 – 40,000 is having achieving this, and despite having large amounts of funding lavished upon them, they are missing their deadlines.
For a city of over 8 million, those issues will be orders of magnitude greater and funding will run out well before the process is even 5% completed. Ithaca also does not have the major power transmission issues that exist in the downstate region that will make the transition even more difficult.
This is nothing that hasn’t been obvious for over 5 years but as the implementation deadlines approach, it is more critical than ever to educate people as to the mess that the city and state government have placed us in so that we can hopefully prevent loss of life.
