I have been following the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed and most of the articles described are related to it. 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.
Videos
John Stossel interviews Bjorn Lomborg who points out that there are better things society should spend money on. I particularly like this quote: “Only reporting on the minuses, and only emphasizing worst-case outcomes, is not a good way to inform people.”
Alex Epstein argues that if you believe that fossil fuels are necessary to maintain our current standard of living and improving the lives of those who don’t have adequate energy resources, then you should advocate that the zero by 2050 goal should be replaced by the goal to advance human flourishing around the world.
Michael Shellenberger: Greta Thunberg’s Climate Crusade Is Losing. He argues that renewables are coming into crisis because of local opposition, the high costs of associated transmission and energy storage become evident and the environmental impacts of wind and solar undermine their value.
Conference of Parties 28
The COP 28 Climate Summit closing sound bite for the news cycle was that there was a deal to end fossil fuels. Earlier this “paradigm switch” was off the table but the fact that there was no debate on the final text suggests that the language was designed to be vague enough that it could be interpreted however desired.. Paul Homewood explains that when you dive into the detail of the agreement, you find that it is mostly smoke and mirrors. Finally there are links to numerous related articles here.
Costs and Benefits
The Hochul Administration claims that the costs of inaction outweigh the costs of action of the Climate Act. However, Kenneth Richardson notes that a new report claims the opposite: “The benefits of not meeting Paris Accord emissions-reduction targets outweigh the costs associated even with worst-case-scenario global warming throughout the 21st century.” A new comprehensive analysis (Tol, 2023) weighs the cost-benefit of meeting Paris Accord emission policy targets to keep global warming in check, or under 2°C. Richard Tol is an expert economist who has done a lot of research regarding the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas emission reductions. If the Hochul Administration wants to follow the science then they should ask him about New York’s transition.
Roger Pielke, Jr, also comments on this paper in response to a question about cost-benefit ratios of climate change policies:
RP — This question reminds me of the recent discussion by Bjorn Lomborg in the WSJ of a recent paper by Richard Tol (which is part of a larger collection). Lomborg explains:
Tol finds that if the world meets its 1.5 degree promise, it would prevent a less than 0.5% loss in annual global domestic product by 2050 and a 3.1% loss by 2100. . . Based on the latest cost estimates of emission reductions from the United Nations climate panel, he finds that fully delivering on the 1.5-degree Paris promise will cost 4.5% of global GDP each year by midcentury and 5.5% by 2100. This means that likely climate policy costs will be much higher than the likely benefits for every year throughout this century and into the next. Under any realistic assumptions, the Paris agreement fails a basic cost-benefit test.
I teach cost-benefit analysis (or, I should say, I used to!) and while the idea of comparing costs to benefits makes perfect sense in the evaluation of policy alternatives, I have no expectation that we can accurately evaluate the costs and benefits of any policy over the next 75 years. The meaningfulness of long-term economic projections is one issue where I strongly disagree with Lomborg and Tol. The only way that climate policy works is by taking incremental, short-term steps that the public perceives to provide (and even better — actually has) benefits to their lives, and thus they demand more such policies. There are volumes of studies of policy implementation failures where policies did not provide benefits or made things worse, but that too gives me optimism as policy making is self-correcting. Maybe not efficiently or quickly, but look around — 2023 has more people living healthier and safer lives than at any point in human history. Yes, there are still many problems and many do not presently enjoy such health and safety. That just means we have more work to do. Long-term predictions of policy or the economy are fun exercises, but I don’t find them particularly useful for helping us to decide what to do next.
Levelized Cost of Energy
The primary reference for claims that wind and solar are cheaper than natural gas is Lazard’s levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Andy May explains that even a quick look at their data shows that this is not true: “Even within their April 2023 report they are not consistent in their numbers. To make matters worse, they bury critical details in the fine print and do not define their terms.” May also provides a link to more details.
The comments for this post are also interesting. This is a good point that describes yet another hidden cost: “Renewable electric grids are longer, of higher capacity, by between three and ten times, and are underutilized, in comparison with conventional power station links”. Another comment provides a link to an hour-long video discussion of Lazard LCOE.
Francis Menton also addresses Lazard LCOE in a follow up to his earlier post asking whether climate advocacy is incompetence or intentional fraud. He concludes:
Could the people at Lazard who produce all these fancy and complex charts and graphs really not know that 4 hour duration batteries cycling once per day are not going to come close to solving the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation? Or do they really know that, and they are just hoping to sell a few hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines and solar panels before the stupid politicians and investors figure out the scam?
The 1.5oC Target
Climate Activists never tire of remining everyone that the internationally agreed upon target to “prevent worsening and potentially irreversible effects of climate change” is that the “world’s average temperature should not exceed that of preindustrial times by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)”. An article at Climate Realism explains that this is not supportable:
Reason magazine recently posted an article on its website titled “There Is No 1.5°C Climate Cliff,” arguing that the 1.5°C threshold touted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, world governments, and activists, is not based on any scientific investigation, but is rather arbitrary.
Winter Solstice and Climate Change
In my opinion, climate change is driven by the sun. Admittedly I have not found a lot of research to support my belief so I have to rely on a couple of things. One of the factors causing ice ages are “very minor (and regular) adjustments in the angle of the Earth relative to the sun affects the amount of solar radiation, or insolation, that reaches Earth.” The other thing is the major differences between the seasons caused by changes in sunlight. An article by Ron Klutz includes this nice graphic of the seasons and argues that if climate change is occurring that the highest temperatures in the summer and the lowest temperatures in the winter should both be increasing. He does not find evidence that the summers are getting hotter but does note that the observed increase in winter low temperatures increasing is likely caused by urban heat islands affecting many land-based observing sites.
Humans and Climate Change According to a new study, humans “contribute to global warming” by exhaling greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide 16 times per minute. The study shows that humans are generating methane and CO2. Jo Nova asks:
If belches of methane can cause a climate crisis, how, we marvel, did the planet not boil away when 30 million bison roamed the plains of North America? Why was the climate ideal (apparently) when the vast herds of Wildebeest roamed Africa, and Aurochs stretched across Europe?
Lessons to Be Learned from Ontario
In my last edition of articles of note I included Parker Gallant’s three parts of a series of articles about the transition. The articles describe happenings around the world where members of the Church of Climate Change Cult (CCCC) are starting to question their beliefs. According to his contact link “Parker’s retirement allows him to spend time researching the energy sector and apply his banker’s common sense to analyzing the sector’s approach to the production, transmission and distribution of electricity to Ontario’s consumers.”
In the latest article he pointed out that the media revels in publishing scary stories about current fossil fuel use. However, the same outlets rarely mention issues related to the electrification alternative that is supposed to solve the problems. He goes on to describe the electric grid costs to connect renewables and the astronomical costs. He concludes that the CCCC have been doing their best to drive us in the developed world into poverty via their push to get us to their “net-zero” emissions target.
Weather of 2023
Roger Pielke, Jr. summarizes the weather of 2023. He notes: “We are all well aware of the narrative that the weather is quickly getting worse. Unfortunately, data does not agree.”
I have read many stories exclaiming that this year has been the “Hottest for 125,000 years”. Paul Homewood explains that “The claim is self-evident and baseless nonsense for a number of good reasons:
- There is no such thing as “a global average temperature”
- Even now we have very sparse coverage of temperature measurements. Prior to satellites, we had virtually no data outside of the US, Europe and a few other built up areas
- The temperature record we do have is thoroughly corrupted by UHI, and only dates back to the late 19thC
- Natural variations, including ENSO, volcanic activity etc, can easily cause temperature swings of a degree Celsius from year to year, and decade to decade. But historical proxies don’t have the fine resolution to pick these up, they merely give an idea of average temperatures over decades and even centuries. Consequently you cannot compare one year now with the general climate of, say, 2000 years ago.
But forget about all of these theoretical objections, because the climatic evidence we do have is overwhelming, and it tells us that the climate has been much warmer than now for most of the last 10,000 years, since the end of the ice age.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York 
Agree 💯 = 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.
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