UK: Lights out for winter? Warning 12m people will be in energy poverty

 JoNova (Australia)

All hail the clean green energy reset — where people are being warned to get ready to live in colder, darker houses, and big energy users will be offered money to stop work. Make plans to turn that factory off! Buy candles!

The UK sits on a giant gas storage site they could have tapped 10 years ago. Instead costs are up so much Ofgem has warned this could push around 12 million people into fuel poverty which is one in six people in Great Britain. The energy price cap is projected to hit around £3,200 (maximum annual tariff).

Apparently even newspapers are getting thinner. High energy costs make everything expensive.

Back to the dark ages? Now millions of Britons could be told to switch off the lights and turn down the thermostat to avoid blackouts this winter under emergency plans

Daily Mail, 24 July 2022

Households might have to turn down their thermostats and switch off lights to avoid blockouts under emergency plans.

To avoid rolling blackouts in the UK, the National Grid could also pay some large energy users to use less power to ease the pressure on the grid.

Britain’s next PM urge to target long-term plan after major ‘wake-up’ call

Express.UK

…with the energy price cap tipped to soar to around £3,200 (maximum annual tariff) in October, industry regulator Ofgem has warned this could push around 12 million people into fuel poverty."

 

Net Zero produced the most dramatic fall in European energy since the late Middle Ages

 JoNova (Australia)

If we measure the vibrancy of an economy by its energy use, the EU peaked in 2006 and is down 10%. The UK, alas has fallen even further and faster and is down 30%.

John Constable at the GWPF has produced a damning report on Europe’s Green Experiment and remarked that there hasn’t been a fall in energy this large “since the end of the late middle ages”.

Effectively, the EU paid €770 billion to export it’s carbon emissions and jobs to China and import nearly everything else.

• The study shows that up until 2005 the EU’s energy consumption was on a rising trend, but it has now fallen by over 10% on the 2006 peak, and is now back at levels last seen in the 1990s. The UK is even more severely affected, with consumption falling by about 30% on its peak in the early 2000s and is now at levels last seen in the 1950s.
• Further analysis reveals that electricity generation productivity has collapsed, with system load factor falling from an adequate 56% in 1990 to a worryingly inefficient and expensive 37% in 2020."

 

Climatologists Embarrassed: Increase in Global CO2 Levels Accompanied by Arctic Sea Ice Growth!

 WUWT

 

The CO2 content of the Earth’s global atmosphere has steadily increased from about 380 ppm in 2009 to more than 420 ppm annually by 2022, leading to the further greening of the Earth. The increase in global CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere has been accompanied by growth in Arctic sea ice areas and strong growth in Greenland ice masses this year.”

What an embarrassing development for Al Gore and the tight circle of consensus scientists."

Florida's Ron DeSantis takes a stand against the scourge of ESG

 American Thinker

Environment, Social, and Governance, better known as ESG, is a metric that measures whether a nation or corporation can demonstrate the maximum amount of corporate virtue-signaling.  The most striking example is Sri Lanka, the former government of which massively increased its ESG by mandating only organic fertilizer in the small nation, leading to massive inflation, famine, and the violent overthrow of its government.  ESG is bad business and, as Sri Lanka demonstrates, dangerous to human well-being.  Now Governor Ron DeSantis has announced that Florida is leading the way to stand against this utterly toxic metric.   .....

"The upshot of all this, Tucker," said DeSantis, "is we want to stop these kind of Masters of the Universe from trying to do through economic power what they cannot achieve at the ballot box.  And it's really an end-run around democracy where they're trying to impose these things."

That's exactly right.  In addition, DeSantis believes that other states will follow Florida's lead."

What Greens don't get about volcanoes, oceans, and weather

 American Thinker

Earth's climate history is written in the rocks.  Anyone who cares to read that record will see that recurring Ice Ages, not global warming, pose the greatest threat to life on Earth.  Even in today's warm Holocene Era, the Little Ice Age was a time of war, famine, and distress, whereas the Medieval Warm Period heralded a time of peace and plenty.

Earth's weather is driven by winds powered by convection currents, which get most of their energy from the sun.  ...Australia's famous weather forecaster, Inigo Jones, was well aware of the natural cycles in climate as far back as 1923 — long before coal, cattle and cars could be blamed for "global warming."  ...A bleak northern winter approaches.  As blackouts beckon and the lights start to flicker, coal is suddenly OK again.  But Europeans and Australians still plan a "Net Zero" ritual sacrifice of their farmers on the alarmist altar.  None of this sacrifice will deter La Niña, or stop the volcanoes, or feed the people."

 

Al Gore is baaaack

 American Thinker

...Several Fox News hosts ripped into the recrudescence of this Democrat relic.  Fox host Jesse Watters has a particularly good take, calling Gore a "grifter" and "stickup artist" and comparing his latest act to the return of bad '70s fashion trends:  ....

The question remains, though: why is Gore showing up on prime time all of a sudden? 

The green agenda is falling into complete discredit, what with the example of Sri Lanka, which "went green" and saw its economy collapse, and the Netherlands, whose green agenda set off a mass agricultural sector revolt.  Similar collapses for similar reasons are brewing in Pakistan, Panama, Canada, Italy, and other places.  Bankruptcy, dictatorship, and actual hunger are the rubble of the environmental wackoism and the byproducts of "going green" that have overtaken the world in the wake of Gore's initial entry into green wackoism, which was his Academy Award–winning wokester movie called An Inconvenient Truth.  A recent Rasmussen poll showed that the public views the green agenda at rock bottom among its priorities, while the scolding press prioritizes the issue among its top items.....he other thing is that Gore knows that the greenie agenda is failing — the messaging from Sri Lanka and the Netherlands and all places that have adopted the green agenda is a legacy of failure.  The high gas prices at the pump along with the blithe call to buy expensive and environmentally unfriendly carbon compound–consuming electric cars is also a failed message.  For Gore, all of that is his rice bowl, so he may be in a sense trying to save his legacy — by offering up his face to the cameras as a substitute for the riots and ruins the public are seeing with their own eyes."

The BBC Says They Want To Talk

Real Climate Science

The BBC refuses to talk to anyone who tells the truth about energy and climate – but they have written a primer on how to talk to a climate denier........ 

Rebutting the IMF’s Carbon Arbitrage Scheme

 WUWT

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently issued a draft paper called “The Great Carbon Arbitrage” making various points that are scientifically wrong or unsupported. Our member Lars Schernikau wrote to the IMF asking for clarification and explaining the scientific issues at hand. A reply from the IMF is outstanding. The IMF draft paper targets specifically coal and makes various grossly misleading and actually unsupported statements in direct contradiction to scientific data and information available. This comes at a time when Europe and the world needs to increase coal burn to avoid a worsening energy crisis."

Ireland joins Canada and the Netherlands in contributing to world famine

 American Thinker

What we’re witnessing is a form of madness, as various world governments enter into a race to return the world to a time of cold, dark, and famine. It’s no wonder, then, that Ireland just hopped on board the “let’s create a famine” bandwagon. Ireland too is demanding that its farmers cut their emissions by 28%:  .........This is all to “save the planet,” of course. The current world population is around 8 billion. And while the Georgia Guidestones may be nothing but dust now, it’s reasonable to believe that it states a target world population that sits very well with the World Economic Fund and its acolytes around the world: Fewer than 500 million people. The rest of us are extraneous and would be better as natural fertilizer than as living, breathing CO2 polluters. "

Apocalypse from now on?

 Spiked Online

...Why did they become so central to the media narrative of the heatwave? It is as if the fires offered the best means to present the heatwave as a disaster. After all, the media had portrayed the heatwave as such before the event – as did all those government bodies which classified the heatwave as a ‘national emergency’. More importantly, they wanted, almost unconsciously, to turn the heatwave into something other than it was – into a ‘warning sign’ of the catastrophe to come, a portent of the apocalypse, a terrifying, hellish glimpse into the future. As with every other ‘extreme’ weather event today, our political and media class were determined to present this week’s heatwave as part of our unfolding climate ‘catastrophe’. They wanted to turn it into yet another episode in the dominant metanarrative of our era.......

The myth of the climate crisis

Except that things are not inexorably getting worse. Not by any objective standards. And that is telling. It shows us that the catastrophism that is gripping parts of society is not driven by an actual, observable uptick in disaster. It is driven by something else – by a broader, doomladen cultural sensibility.

 ....There are good reasons for the fall in the number of fires in Greater London. Chimneys and chip pans, which were the source of many conflagrations, are not used to anything like the same extent today. And the rise in use of smoke alarms and sprinklers will also have reduced the risk of fire.

What all this tells us is that the dreadful fires that consumed several houses in Wennington and other properties elsewhere in the UK were not part of an unmanageable, upwards trend. And they certainly were not evidence of the unfolding climate catastrophe. Quite the opposite. They bucked the trend. They were horrible but largely exceptional events. "

The war on fossil fuels is concluding—and the good guys are losing

 American Thinker

There are several entities that saw a benefit in declaring war on fossil fuel: The environmentalists who are so historically illiterate that they believe a world without fossil fuels will be a bucolic paradise, rather than a Hobbesian nightmare; the leftists who want to break the West to rebuild it as a socialist paradise; the Great Reset/New World Order crowd, which envisions happy, possession-free serfs; and the Chinese, who foresee a bloodless conquest of the West which, believe me, will not be anybody’s paradise. While the winner among these groups isn’t clear, the loser is coming into focus: Ordinary people across the Western world. The latest example comes from Germany 

In 2018, President Trump warned Germany, which was proudly shutting down its own coal production and refineries, not to become dependent on Russia’s oil and gas:

Reliance on a single foreign supplier can leave a nation vulnerable to extortion and intimidation. That is why we congratulate European states, such as Poland, for leading the construction of a Baltic pipeline so that nations are not dependent on Russia to meet their energy needs. Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.

Germany and other European countries, basking in Greta Thunberg’s approval and wallowing in their virtue, sneered at Trump’s words and went their own way. And then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. There is no “I told you so” big enough to encompass Trump’s prescience.    

 ....In other words, Germany is facing a total industrial collapse; meanwhile, the media continues to repeat the increasingly more laughable propaganda that Putin is losing the war."

Think It’s Not Now? How Britain Roasted in TEN-WEEK Heatwave During Summer of ’76

 WUWT

The current non-stop sunshine has evoked memories of the summer of 1976, when there were 15 consecutive days that saw temperatures of 89.6F (32C) somewhere in the UK.  ....the summer of 1976 was caused in part by very hot air that had originated in the Mediterranean. The warm weather and lack of rain began on June 23 and did not abate for more than a month.

The highest temperature recorded in the summer was on July 3, when the mercury hit 96.6F (35.9C) in Cheltenham. The average maximum daily temperature was 67.8F (19.9C).  .....By late August, there were only 90 days’ of water supply left in London. In Leeds, the figure was 80. .......However, a week after Mr Howell’s appointment in late August as minister for drought, the rain finally arrived and the hottest and driest days of Britain’s most famous summer were finally at an end.  It had been the worst drought in England in 250 years. 

The hot weather of the past few weeks has prompted many Britons to draw on their memories of the summer of 1976.

On Twitter, one wrote: ‘I’m a survivor of the summer of 1976. What a time to be alive. It was amazing. I was 15 and the No government as I remember instructed me in how to behave.’

Another said: ‘I have no idea how so many of us got through summer of 1976, unscathed. We didn’t have social media to try to frighten the life out of us.’

Carbon capture in Iceland – Oh, the irony!

 American Thinker

Carbon, as we all know, is the central building block of organic life here on Earth. Carbon dioxide is an animal byproduct of the process of living: forming within cells during metabolism, moving via the bloodstream to the lungs, then being exhaled. Plants inhale CO2 to live and grow. What a wonderful symbiosis covering our world! Other sources of CO2 include volcanic eruptions and the byproducts of human communities—burning various fuels for heating, cooking, transport, and industry.

A little less than 0.03% (3 parts in 10,000) of the Earth’s atmosphere is made of CO2, classified as a trace gas. NOAA has this to say “…global average atmospheric carbon dioxide was 414.72 parts per million (‘ppm’ for short) in 2021, setting a new record high…” NOAA’s records only go back 60 years—or 3 parts in 225 million of the Earth’s 4.5 billion years. Perhaps our nation’s premiere atmospheric sciences institution can be forgiven for missing a few facts. But I don’t think they should be.

Evidence exists that CO2 in the atmosphere appears to have no correlation at all with global temperature, although rejiggering timescales can make it look that way. A clear chart shows that, at one time, there were 10,000 ppm (22 times today’s amount) and the Earth was colder than it is today. The climate changes mostly due to the sun and its various cycles and not because of carbon in the air.

Nevertheless, there are those who believe that atmospheric carbon will doom us all.   ...Swiss company Climeworks is building a facility designed to pull 36,000 tons of carbon annually from the atmosphere and sink it underground. That’s 0.0001% of the estimated 36 billion tons that human activity emitted last year. As human inputs account for an estimated 22% of atmospheric carbon, that’s not a lot of mitigation. ....So why do this now? Follow the money. Microsoft just invested part of its $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund into Climeworks."

 

Flawed food science behind alternative protein

 American Thinker

There have been musings from the World Economic Forum (WEF) about giving insects a role in our food systems as an alternative protein to meat. The WEF boldly tells us that in the future… “meat will be a special treat, not a staple for the good of the environment and our health.”   ......It is mind-boggling that one could statistically combine these types of results (most were negative) -- all from randomized trials -- and yet somehow find that “…soy protein lowers LDL cholesterol by a small but significant amount.” Sounds much like the flawed science used by drug companies in their randomized trials to justify the efficacy of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19."

Nearly in the Grip of a Cult

 American Thinker

One cult we know a lot about: “anthropomorphic climate change.”  After a half century, “saving the planet” has been woven into the culture.  Many people share the conceit that humans have the power to save or destroy the earth. 

Over the years, green initiatives have made inroads, being translated into laws and policies.  Now, though, a rising generation of left-wing Democrats, backed by aspiring oligarchs, is pushing a radical green agenda with greater intensity.  Average Americans are already shouldering the costs.     .......The other cult, which is our focus here, centers on the rise of artificial intelligence, which futurists claim will supplant humans as governors.  And, no less, the expectation that practically omniscient, predictive algorithms will control every aspect of human existence. .......

Both cults are magnets for rich, powerful people.  Both satisfy those who seek even greater wealth and power.  Green radicalism is a path to both.  A future run by elites and smart machines attracts elites who thirst for control.  Then come those who seek to fill voids left in their lives by abandonment of God.  They’ve sought religion substitutes in scientism.     ....But we needn’t arrive at Schwab’s dystopic world.  A powerful counter worldview needs to develop.  One that accounts for the spiritual in humans… one that rejects materialism and declares faith and freedom as mutual… one that peoples across the globe rally to because it stands for the inherent value of every human life… one that will kill Schwab’s monstrous vision before it kills us."

 

The revolt against green tyranny has toppled its first government, as farmers' protests spread across Europe

 American Thinker

Green tyranny has finally provoked mass reactions, and the first government has fallen after imposing insane policies that wrecked the food supply for its people.  Both the president and the prime minister of Sri Lanka are resigning in the wake of massive mobs storming and occupying their residences, burning the P.M.'s private house and refusing to leave the presidential palace until both men are out of office.   ....Sri Lanka foolishly signed on to the green initiative in farming, going organic and limiting the importation and use of chemical fertilizers.  Food production, including tea, a vital export earner of foreign exchange, collapsed, and now the government is broke, people are hungry.  .....But it is not just third-world countries that are experiencing mass revolts against top-down green policies.  Farmers in Holland, in open revolt against government plans to destroy their livelihoods by limiting nitrogen application for fertilizer, are tying up that country's roads and cities.  And the revolt is spreading to Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland."

The global warming fraud revealed in one graph

 American Thinker

Two highly distinguished emeritus professors — William Happer, Professor of Physics, Emeritus of Princeton and Richard Lindzen, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus of MIT — have called out the corruption of science in the global warming/climate change fraud.   ....But for a really quick understanding of the depth of the fraud, take a look at this graph put together by John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville that they cite comparing the predicted temperatures of the global warming models with the actual temperature record:   

As Happer and Lindzen summarize their conclusion:

Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence marshalled in support of the theory of imminent catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and CO2.

The Global Warming Golden Goose

 American Thinker

Climate science was an obscure and unimportant corner of academia until the professors lucked out with global warming.  The global warming idea apparently struck a spark with the government and media establishments and caught fire.  Money and influence flooded from Washington to academia.    ...

Global warming provided the professors and academic administrators with a junk science golden goose. They were determined to stop anyone from killing the goose. 

A narrative was developed to crush “deniers” who dared to question the global warming narrative. The deniers were depicted as agents of the international oil companies.  ....Climate science groups have been spending billions of dollars developing computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere in an attempt to support the global warming narrative. The computer models are obedient to their authors.  The scientists can manipulate the models to show whatever result that supports the desired conclusion -- global warming or global cooling. Kevin Trenberth, no denier and one time head of modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), may have clarified the situation when he said: “None of the models… correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.” 

Tucker Carlson’s latest on ‘green’ energy is mandatory viewing

 American Thinker

Also in premodern times, if the energy supplies failed (the wind stopped blowing, the water stopped flowing, and the slaves and/or animals died from disease), there were two inevitable results: Famine and then, once the people were sufficiently weakened, deadly epidemic disease, not on a COVID scale (~1% of the total population) but on a cataclysmic scale, whether it was a single nation seeing tens of thousands dying from smallpox or typhus, or one-third to one-half of the world’s entire population dying from the plague.    ......George Orwell fully understood and perfectly illustrated in 1984 how the past exists only to justify the left’s current and future policies. If the past isn’t helpful, it must be ignored or rewritten. What this means is that leftists cannot learn from the past. All they can do, rather like cross a raging river on the backs of alligators, is just keep erasing their mistakes and assuring a beleaguered population that the newly rewritten past fully justifies their future plans.  ......Tucker Carlson understands all this: He understands all nation’s needs for energy, he understands that solar and wind power cannot serve a modern nation’s needs, and he understands that the leftists are lying and cheating to circumvent the constitutional limitations on despotism. I often say that something Tucker did is a “must-see” because it so perfectly (and often amusingly) encapsulates an issue. This time, I’m telling you that Carlson’s latest monologue is a must-see because it’s a warning bell. If we ignore it, frankly, we’re doomed."

Dutch farmers are fed up with totalitarianism rebranded as 'climate change'

 American Thinker

The "climate change" agenda is a global, existential threat to prosperity and freedom from tyranny.  Nowhere else is that more apparent right now than in the small European country of the Netherlands.  Under the tutelage of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte became a "golden pin-up boy" for the Agenda 2030 cause.  Rowan Dean, a reporter for Australian outlet Sky News, said:

Currently the Dutch government is embarked upon insane efforts to slash greenhouse gases [sic] and reduce the amount of nitrogen ammonia in the soil by 30 to 70 percent by 2030[.] ...

The Netherlands House of Representatives has released a state which said: 'The honest message is that not all farmers will continue in business. Those who do will have to farm differently.'

 ....As O'Neill noted, it's not just the Dutch rising up against the beast of Green fanaticism and the "Cult of Net Zero" — but the French and Sri Lankans, too.  "Progressive" environmentalism has gone over like a lead balloon with ordinary, working-class people — as it turns out, they're more concerned with economic stability, food security, and an optimal standard of living than supporting totalitarianism and the narcissism of the global elites.  It seems as though the globalists have overplayed their hand.  They've failed to adhere to conventional wisdom — boiling the frog and slowly eroding rights — and the historical lessons of Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution — starving people have nothing else to lose."