Net Zero Watch | 19 Aug 2022
1) Britain faces ‘humanitarian crisis’ as energy costs soar
Reuters, 19 August 2022
2) Record-breaking gloom grips Britain ahead of ‘nightmare’ winter
The Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2022
3) Green Britain: Pubs and shops to close because of soaring energy bills
Daily Mail, 18 August 2022
4) Jamie Blackett: Britain may go hungry thanks to faulty eco dogma
The Daily Telegraph, 18 August 2022
5) WSJ: Britain’s Dumbest Energy Policy
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 19 August 2022
6) While Western companies go green, Middle East states set for $1.3tn oil windfall
Financial Times, 19 August 2022
7) Mike Preston: A fossil fuel investment resurgence amidst Europe’s energy crisis
Energy Voice, 18 August 2022
8) Terry Jarrett: Inflation Reduction Act could threaten U.S. power systems
The Washington Times, 18 August 2022
9) Wind energy boom and golden eagles collide in the U.S. West
Los Angeles Times, 17 August 2022
10) Francis Menton: The completely fraudulent “Levelized Cost Of Electricity”
Manhattan Contrarian, 18 August 2022
11) Ryan Mills: Great Barrier Reef defies doomsday predictions
National Review, 18 August 2022
1) Britain faces ‘humanitarian crisis’ as energy costs soar
Reuters, 19 August 2022
LONDON, Aug 19 (Reuters) – Britain faces a “humanitarian crisis” this winter when the difficult choices forced upon low-income households by soaring energy bills could cause serious physical and mental illness, a healthcare lobby group said on Friday.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has resisted calls to provide more support to households struggling with higher bills, insisting his government will leave major fiscal decisions to the next prime minister who takes office in early September.
“The country is facing a humanitarian crisis,” said Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents organisations across the healthcare sector.
“Many people could face the awful choice between skipping meals to heat their homes and having to live in cold, damp and very unpleasant conditions,” Taylor said in a statement.
The situation could cause outbreaks of respiratory conditions, mental illness, worsen children’s life chances and add to pressure on the already stretched state-run National Health Service (NHS), he added. read more
A spokesperson at Britain’s health department said the government was already helping households through a 37-billion-pound ($44 billion) cost-of-living support package announced in May and was also working to increase NHS capacity
Britain’s average annual household energy bills — covering both gas and electricity — look set to double again to more than 4,000 pounds ($4,766) by January, exacerbating inflation which already topped 10% in July.
Facing growing pressure, Johnson’s government said last week it was working on a cost-of-living support package for the next prime minister to consider, while the opposition Labour Party wants to recall parliament to freeze energy bills. read more
The NHS Confederation said it was concerned that “fuel poverty”, in the absence of further government support, would cause more deaths associated with cold homes, which are currently estimated at around 10,000 a year.
2) Record-breaking gloom grips Britain ahead of ‘nightmare’ winter
The Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2022
A record-breaking economic gloom is gripping Britain as households brace for a “nightmare” winter of soaring costs.
Consumer confidence has plummeted to its lowest ever level as the Bank of England increases interest rates to counter rocketing inflation, according to a closely watched survey from the data company GfK.
Meanwhile, separate data showed that a host of industries are in contraction in a sign the country is teetering on the brink of recession.
GfK blamed acute concerns over the cost of living for a drop in its confidence index to -44, the lowest it has been since launching in 1974.
The outlook darkened on every one of GfK’s measures, with Britons feeling increasingly pessimistic about their own finances and the general economy both at present and over the next year.
The bleak outlook is unlikely to be enough to prevent the Bank of England from a spate of further interest rate rises to control inflation, which reached a new 40-year high of 10.1pc in July.
Joe Staton, of GfK, said: “These findings point to a sense of capitulation, of financial events moving far beyond the control of ordinary people.
“With headline after headline revealing record inflation eroding household buying power, the strain on the personal finances of many in the UK is alarming.
“Just making ends meet has become a nightmare and the crisis of confidence will only worsen with the darkening days of autumn and the colder months of winter.”
At -60, the sub-gauge for how Britons see the economy performing a year from now was also a record low.
Linda Ellett, head of consumer markets at KPMG, said people “are either already struggling with rising costs, or are fearing what’s looming on the horizon”.
The report comes as data this morning is expected to show retail sales excluding fuel dropped by 0.3pc last month, a further blow to Britain’s high streets.
Chris Hare, an economist at HSBC, said some external price pressures appear to be easing as global supply chain entanglements ease, but warned domestic inflation is on the march.
He said: “For now, the UK’s cost of living outlook keeps getting worse.”
Full story
3) Green Britain: Pubs and shops to close because of soaring energy bills
Daily Mail, 18 August 2022
Pub, restaurant and business owners are being forced to close their doors as the crippling cost of living crisis continues to take hold over the country.
Small businesses in particular have been unable to cope with the soaring cost of energy and food bills – and are now calling for immediate government intervention.
It comes as inflations hit double figures for the first time in 40 years, the highest it’s been since 1982, at 10.1 per cent.
Now, an estimated 45 million people will struggle to pay energy bills this winter with predicted rises in price cap.
The new study, by the University of York, shows that 18 million families will be left trying to make ends meet after further predicted rises in the energy price cap in October and January.
Martin McTague, the national chair of the Federation of Small Businesses, has warned that the ‘toxic cocktail’ of rising taxes, energy costs, inflation and shrinking economic growth means ‘action is needed right now’.
‘The cost of living crisis can’t be solved without addressing the cost of doing business crisis,’ he said.
Yorkshire restaurant boss, Marco Di Rienzo has been forced to close his business after five years because of a £2,000 monthly bill.
Full story
4) Jamie Blackett: Britain may go hungry thanks to faulty eco dogma
The Daily Telegraph, 18 August 2022
Food prices are rising, but productive farmland is being converted into solar parks or woodland
The focus of the world’s attention might be on gas prices, but the lowest common denominator and the worst aspect of our cost of living crisis could well turn out to be food.
It was the largest contributor to UK inflation in July. Most people can do without central heating in a British winter by wearing more clothes – and many did until comparatively recently – but only if they can afford to buy enough calories to sustain themselves. Yet food is an uncomfortable subject for politicians of all parties, because they have been exhorting British farmers to grow less of it.
In fact, there has been a drive to cover farmland with trees, solar panels, wilding projects, HS2 – almost anything other than crops and livestock, partly as a result of a misunderstanding of the causes of climate change and its remedies. It’s not the growing of food that is the problem, but whether we do it regeneratively or degeneratively.
Post-Brexit free trade was supposed to usher in lower food prices. But the penny is now dropping that this isn’t 1846. British farmers have been selling most of their commodities at or near world prices for some time and, though sometimes there is cheaper food to import from elsewhere, we still have to move it, and logistics have suddenly become much harder and more expensive.
Economists blame this on the world’s post-pandemic economic adjustment and the war in Ukraine, but the truth is that we have allowed our domestic agricultural base to wither. When it has needed to invest, it hasn’t had the confidence that the government really wants it to produce food. When it has needed labour, foreign or otherwise, there hasn’t been any. When it has needed irrigation, it has gone thirsty for lack of investment in water infrastructure.
All these things are inflationary. The quantity of food we produce in this country has a direct impact on prices in the shops. Why else would economists blame a wet harvest or a dry summer for spikes in food prices?
Thankfully, there are signs that Liz Truss, the heir presumptive to the premiership who represents a rural constituency, may understand agriculture better than her predecessor. She has been derided for the clunky delivery of her infamous “cheese speech” at the 2014 Tory party conference, when she said that it was a disgrace that we import so much food that we can produce ourselves, but she was correct in that assertion.
Recently, she attracted the ire of the renewables industry by saying that she would stop fields being filled with solar farms, but she is right to think that we should not be taking farmland out of production when there is still so much roof space available for solar panels.
I have been attempting to put some on our cattle sheds to power our milking parlour but have been told that, in Scotland, the loan scheme, without which the investment is too marginal, is “full”. Better joined-up government could help us reach net zero faster without jeopardising our food supply.
Despite the siren voices of the food-tech industry with their “lab food”, we would be very unlikely to achieve complete self-sufficiency in nutrition in the UK because we have evolved to eat meat, dairy, eggs, green vegetables, fruit in season and very little else. Still, this should not stop us from making a better job of it.
Our time in the EU led us to outsource much of our fruit and vegetable production to our continental neighbours, reduce our dairy herds and chain ourselves to the hamster wheel of cereal production to feed animals in sheds – a highly inefficient way of converting plant matter into animal protein which is also devastating for our biodiversity.
A change of direction would see more pasture producing meat and milk efficiently but sustainably, more orchards, fields of vegetables, greenhouses and hydroponic systems, insects being bred to feed fish and poultry instead of grain, better use of food waste to feed pigs again (if it can be done without spreading foot-and-mouth disease), and low intensity grazing in our woodland and uplands.
Such a strategy would boost domestic food production and bring prices down while being better for both carbon sequestration and biodiversity. We should start now.
Jamie Blackett’s new book ‘Land of Milk and Honey, Digressions of a Rural Dissident’ is out now
5) WSJ: Britain’s Dumbest Energy Policy
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 19 August 2022
Britain’s ruling Conservatives have imposed some awful energy policies in recent years, but their cap on household energy bills deserves a special mention. The scheme has been an economic loser, and now it’s becoming a political loser in ways that illustrate the dangers when parties of the right play socialism lite.
That cap is supposed to limit household costs for electricity and natural gas, which most British homes use for hot water and central heating. It’s set twice a year by the industry regulator based on prevailing global energy prices. At the last adjustment, which took effect in April, households saw their energy bills shoot up some 54%, and the October rise is likely to be about as big.
The cap traces back to 2015, when Ed Miliband, the Labour candidate for Prime Minister, proposed a limit on energy bills. He lost that election, but his energy idea resurfaced in 2017 when Tory Prime Minister Theresa May embarked on a campaign to position the Conservatives as a kinder, gentler party. The effort didn’t work politically. In that year’s snap election she lost the majority her predecessor David Cameron had won when he defeated Mr. Miliband in 2015. But the price-cap notion lived on and she implemented it in 2019.
Big mistake. The cap has exacerbated economic havoc in Britain’s energy market. As global gas and other commodity prices started to rise in 2021, energy retailers found it impossible to pass to consumers the prices retailers were paying for the energy they were supplying. This has contributed to a wave of bankruptcies, some of which have stuck taxpayers with the cost of supplying households whose energy company went bust.
Meanwhile, since it only raises prices at a lag rather than limiting them, the cap leaves households frighteningly exposed to recent movements in global gas prices and the high-price consequences of Britain’s domestic energy policies—and leaves the Tories exposed to voters’ wrath. And now here comes the Labour Party to argue for making the cap a real cap by freezing it at its current level instead of allowing the next rise due in October.
This is terrible policy that would shift the burden of rising energy costs to taxpayers, who would have to make up the gap between energy companies’ revenues under the cap and their costs on the global market. But who are the Tories to disagree? They’re the wizards who created the cap, and they now will have to either risk bankrupting Britain’s utilities or explain to voters why the “cap” isn’t really a cap.
None of this has anything to do with increasing the supply of energy, which should have been the Conservative policy. Instead the party has resisted shale-gas fracking and pursued the costly fantasy of net-zero carbon emissions. Voters don’t seem to care about Tory green ambitions, but they definitely blame the Tories for soaring energy costs.
The moral: Even half-hearted energy price controls are political losers for conservative parties. More energy supply or bust.
———
Don’t say you haven’t been warned: See 2017 GWPF Energy Manifesto: Climate policies, electricity prices and the energy price cap
6) While Western companies go green, Middle East states set for $1.3tn oil windfall
Financial Times, 19 August 2022
Bonanza will bolster firepower of Gulf’s sovereign wealth funds
Energy-rich Middle East states are set to reap up to $1.3tn in additional oil revenues over the next four years, according to the IMF, as they enjoy a windfall that will bolster the firepower of the region’s sovereign wealth funds at a time when global asset prices have sold off.
The IMF’s projections underscore how high energy prices driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine are buoying the Gulf’s absolute monarchies while much of the rest of the world grapples with soaring inflation and fears of recession.
Jihad Azour, IMF director for the Middle East and north Africa, told the Financial Times that relative to expectations before the war in Ukraine, the region’s oil and gas exporters, particularly Gulf states, “will see additional cumulative oil revenues of $1.3tn through 2026”.
The Gulf is home to some of the world’s biggest oil and gas exporters, and several of its largest and most active SWFs. These include Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, Abu Dhabi’s stable of vehicles, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Mubadala and ADQ, and the Kuwait Investment Authority.
The $620bn PIF, which is chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, invested more than $7.5bn in US stocks in the second quarter, including in Amazon, PayPal and BlackRock, as it sought to take advantage of falling stock prices, according to market filings.
Gulf SWFs were similarly active during the pandemic as they looked to capitalise on the market volatility triggered by the Covid-19 crisis. During the global financial crisis in 2009, they took advantage of the turmoil to snap up stakes in distressed western companies.
Full story
See also: John Constable and Gordon Hughes: Bubble or Babble? Models of stranded fossil fuel assets cannot be trusted (pdf)
7) Mike Preston: A fossil fuel investment resurgence amidst Europe’s energy crisis
Energy Voice, 18 August 2022
With conflict in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia continuing to exacerbate supply issues, rising energy prices are fuelling new opportunities for private equity in the European oil and gas industry.
This squeeze on energy prices began last year as the post-pandemic recovery in demand for energy highlighted weaknesses in the transition to renewable energy, with dwindling oil and gas capacity causing prices to climb.
But are concerns over energy security and rising energy prices enough to make fossil fuels attractive as a long-term investment opportunity? Particularly as countries stand by their commitments to reach net zero, and investors increasingly focus on impact and ESG strategies?
Commitments to reducing fossil fuel consumption and investment in oil and gas have been at the forefront of investors’ minds in recent years.
As European governments set increasingly ambitious climate targets, including the European Green Deal that pledges net zero emissions by 2050, so too are funds that are increasingly examining their role in achieving climate goals.
Last October, Dutch pension fund ASP announced that it was looking to divest €15 billion of coal, oil and gas assets by 2023. It joined some 1,500 organisations around the world that have pledged to dispose of $39 trillion of assets in the sector, according to data from DivestInvest.
Private equity investment in the sector also draws negative attention, particularly following the publication of the Private Equity “Dirty Dozen” report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, which listed the fossil fuel assets of 10 of the largest private equity groups.
However, energy prices are escalating at unprecedented levels across Europe as the EU tries to reduce its reliance on Russian gas imports. This has led to concerns about fuel poverty and shifting climate priorities down the agenda. As supply constricts, fossil fuels will remain a necessity until alternative energy sources are sufficient to meet demand.
Too lucrative to ignore
Private equity investors have taken advantage of rising energy prices as overall investment in fossil fuels in 2021-22 soared.
By the end of last year, buy-side deals totalled $149.3bn globally, notably including Sval Energi’s $1bn purchase of Spirit Energy’s Norwegian oil and gas operations, with backing from Norwegian private equity firm HitecVision.
This year has seen a continuation of international private equity interest, with $35.5bn worth of investment as suppliers responded to increased demand. Other investors have also sought to expand their reach in Europe, including Israeli conglomerate Delek Group’s $1.5bn acquisition of Siccar Point Energy.
Despite attempts at divestment away from fossil fuels over recent years, statements made in May by asset managers reflect how increased activity in the sector may prove too lucrative for investors to step away from.
Full post
8) Terry Jarrett: Inflation Reduction Act could threaten U.S. power systems
The Washington Times, 18 August 2022
From California to Texas to New England, America’s power grid reliability is in alarming shape. And there’s a common thread: The nation is taking apart its existing energy infrastructure far faster than it’s building reliable replacement generation.
This is most apparent in the Democrats’ sweeping new climate and health care bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation is full of ambitious energy provisions. But it appears that the bill is likely to make America’s chaotic energy transition even worse.
The legislation contains plenty of tax credits to accelerate the deployment of weather-dependent wind and solar power. The problem for America’s power grid, however, is that the rapid addition of these intermittent energy sources is making grid management exponentially more difficult. That’s particularly true when wind and solar are replacing the on-demand power currently provided by coal, natural gas and even nuclear power.
Renewable advocates believe a massive expansion of the nation’s electricity transmission capacity, along with the development of grid-scale battery storage, is the solution. Their thinking is that batteries can help with storing excess solar power for night-time use — or provide backup capacity when the weather doesn’t cooperate. They also envision that transmission corridors can easily move power to regions experiencing electricity deficits. That sounds great. But even with significant incentives to encourage new energy storage, the required grid-scale batteries to make this possible are still in their infancy. And the siting and building of new electricity transmission infrastructure is proving difficult as well.
Utilities and grid operators are currently approving some large-scale transmission projects. But getting them into service is now a remarkably tall order. At present, it can take a decade to gain the federal, state and local government approvals needed for new, long-distance power lines. And high-voltage interstate transmission lines inevitably run into a variety of objections, including the permitting challenges of erecting wires through private and public lands, and the reluctance of local authorities to forfeit control or submit to greater federal oversight.
Consider the case of just one transmission line proposed to connect part of Texas to the Southeast. The Southern Cross transmission line, a 400-mile, $2 billion project, is on track to begin construction in 2023, with the hope of entering service in 2026. Should the line actually be completed, it will have taken 17 years from inception to finish. This tells us that building the transmission systems needed for widespread renewable systems is unlikely to happen at the speed and scale required.
There’s still another problem, however. As America’s baseload power plants are being pushed off the grid, replacement infrastructure simply isn’t coming online in time. The problem is serious enough that grid reliability experts are raising alarms.
The North American Electricity Reliability Corporation, which oversees the reliability of the nation’s power supply, recently warned that the pace of America’s grid transformation is now “out of sync with the underlying realities and the physics of the system.” In fact, NERC says that seven different regions of the United States face elevated risks of power outages during extreme weather or spiking demand.
The Inflation Reduction Act’s enormous incentives for wind and solar are likely to exacerbate this trend. The bill’s market-altering subsidies are joining a flurry of regulations that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to accelerate coal plant closures. That means the nation’s current grid problems could turn into an unabated crisis.
Washington needs to do a critical rethink right now — while the nation still has significant baseload power plant capacity. The U.S. needs its longstanding power plants — particularly its remaining coal fleet — as a reliability hedge against the uncertainty and myriad challenges of ramping up renewable energy systems. Dismantling the nation’s existing energy infrastructure in the hope of finding reliable, future alternatives is a mistake. The warnings from regulators are clear. It’s past time we heed them.
Terry Jarrett is an energy attorney and consultant who has served on both the board of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the Missouri Public Service Commission.
9) Wind energy boom and golden eagles collide in the U.S. West
Los Angeles Times, 17 August 2022
The rush to build wind farms to combat climate change is colliding with preservation of one of the U.S. West’s most spectacular predators — the golden eagle — as the species teeters on the edge of decline.
Ground zero in the conflict is Wyoming, a stronghold for golden eagles that soar on seven-foot wings and a favored location for wind farms. As wind turbines proliferate, scientists say deaths from collisions could drive down golden eagle numbers considered stable at best and likely to drop in some areas.
Yet climate change looms as a potentially greater threat: Rising temperatures are projected to reduce golden eagle breeding ranges more than 40% later this century, according to a National Audubon Society analysis.
That leaves golden eagles doubly vulnerable — to the shifting climate and to the wind energy promoted as a solution to that warming world.
“We have some of the best golden eagle populations in Wyoming, but it doesn’t mean the population is not at risk,” said Bryan Bedrosian, conservation director at the Teton Raptor Center in Wilson, Wyo. “As we increase wind development across the U.S., that risk is increasing.”
Turbine blades hundreds of feet long are among myriad threats to golden eagles, which are routinely shot, poisoned by lead, hit by vehicles and electrocuted on power lines.
The tenuous position of golden eagles contrasts with the conservation success of their avian cousins, bald eagles, whose numbers have quadrupled since 2009. There are about 350,000 bald eagles in the U.S., versus about 40,000 golden eagles, which need much larger areas to survive and are more inclined to have trouble with humans.
Federal officials have tried to curb turbine deaths, while avoiding any slowdown in the growth of wind power — a key piece of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda.
In April, a Florida-based power company pleaded guilty to criminal charges after wind turbines killed more than 100 golden eagles in eight states. It was the third conviction of a major wind company for killing eagles in a decade.
Full story
see also: Green Killing Machines: The impact of renewable energy on nature and wildlife (pdf)
10) Francis Menton: The completely fraudulent “Levelized Cost Of Electricity”
Manhattan Contrarian, 18 August 2022
My last post on Tuesday reported on the Soho Forum climate change debate that had taken place the previous day. Debater Andrew Dessler, arguing in favor of rapid reductions in human greenhouse gas emissions by the method of vastly increasing electricity production from wind and solar generators, had heavily relied on the assertion that wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to generate electricity. An important slide in his presentation showed comparative costs of generation from various sources, with wind and solar clearly shown as least expensive. At the bottom of the slide, the acronym “LCOE” was legible.
LCOE stands for Levelized Cost of Electricity. I first encountered this term a couple of years ago, and thought that I should get on top of it to understand its significance. It took me about a half hour to figure out that this metric was completely inapplicable and invalid for purposes of comparing the costs of using dispatchable versus non-dispatchable generators as the predominant sources to power an electrical grid that works. The reasons are not complicated, but do take some minutes of thought if the matter has not previously been explained to you. In Tuesday’s post, I asked as to Dessler’s reliance on this LCOE metric:
“[I]s he aware of this [inapplicability of LCOE] and therefore intentionally trying to deceive the audience? Or, alternatively, is he innumerate, and does not understand how this works quantitatively?”
Some commenters on the post were quite harsh in their judgments of Dessler. They argued for the inference of intentional deception, on the basis that no one claiming expertise in this field could really be so obtuse as to think LCOE was a valid metric for the purpose for which Dessler was using it.
So today I thought to look at how others go about comparing the costs of generation of electricity from wind and solar versus dispatchable sources like fossil fuels or nuclear. I can’t say that I was surprised to learn that LCOE is everywhere as the metric of choice for the comparison. Moreover, it is almost impossible to find any discussion of why LCOE is completely misleading when comparing the cost of a grid powered predominantly by dispatchable sources to the cost of a grid powered predominantly by intermittent wind and solar sources backed up by storage.
Consider, for example, the International Renewable Energy Agency, going by the acronym IRENA. IRENA is a UN offshoot, launched in 2009 and based in Abu Dhabi, that currently has 168 member countries including all the big ones. IRENA’s mission is to advocate for and promote “renewables” as the way to go for the world’s energy system. Surely, with all the big countries (and most of the small ones) backing its efforts, IRENA’s utterances can be relied upon as definitive.
IRENA puts out annual reports on the costs of renewable power generation. The latest one, titled “Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2021,” just came out in July. Here is the press release, dated July 13, 2022. Excerpt from the press release:
“New IRENA report shows almost two-thirds of renewable power added in 2021 had lower costs than the cheapest coal-fired options in G20 countries. . . . IRENA’s new report confirms the critical role that cost-competitive renewables play in addressing today’s energy and climate emergencies by accelerating the transition in line with the 1.5°C warming limit and the Paris Agreement goals…
“Renewables are by far the cheapest form of power today,” Francesco La Camera, Director-General of IRENA said. “2022 is a stark example of just how economically viable new renewable power generation has become.”
Amid the excited claims that renewables are “by far the cheapest” sources of power, the term LCOE does not appear anywhere in the press release. To find that that is the metric being used to make these “by far the cheapest” claims, you need to go to the main Report.
Excerpt:
“The global weighted average levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) of new utility-scale solar PV projects commissioned in 2021 fell by 13% year-on-year, from USD 0.055/kWh to USD 0.048/kWh. . . . The global weighted average LCOE of new onshore wind projects added in 2021 fell by 15%, year-on-year, from USD 0.039/kilowatt hour (kWh) in 2020 to USD 0.033/kWh.”
Here is the featured chart, showing that costs of power from solar PV cells have now fallen well below the costs of power from natural gas:
You can see right there that here in 2022 power from natural gas is at least three times as expensive as power from solar PV cells. But the title of the chart gives away that the metric for comparison is LCOE.
Look around for others making cost comparisons of ways to produce electricity, and you will find more and more of same. From Bloomberg, June 30, 2022, “Renewable Power Costs Rise, Just Not as Much as Fossil Fuels”:
“The costs for renewable plants plunged for a decade as production of solar and wind equipment surged and technologies improved, but the supply-chain chaos triggered by the pandemic ended those steady declines last year, according to BNEF’s biannual survey of the levelized cost of energy. . . . New onshore wind now costs about $46 per megawatt-hour, while large-scale solar plants cost $45 per megawatt-hour. In comparison, new coal-fired plants cost $74 per MWh, while gas plants are $81 per MWh.”
From the Guardian, June 23, 2021 (citing last year’s report from IRENA — also based on LCOE):
“Almost two-thirds of wind and solar projects built globally last year will be able to generate cheaper electricity than even the world’s cheapest new coal plants, according to a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena). . . . Francesco La Camera, Irena’s director general, said . . . ““Today renewables are the cheapest source of power.”
So it’s not just Dessler. Some big international agency of “experts” adopts LCOE for making these cost comparisons, and everybody just nods along without ever putting in the 30 or so minutes of critical thinking that would be needed to figure out that this is completely wrong.
To reiterate points previously made, the LCOE metric assumes that wind and solar generators are essentially the same kind of thing as dispatchable fossil fuel-powered generation plants. Just build about the same amount of nameplate capacity, and everything will work out just fine. But in fact a predominantly wind/solar system requires vastly more infrastructure to make a fully-functioning reliable grid: some combination of a 4x or 5x overbuild of generators, vastly more transmission lines, and 20 or 30 days of battery storage. These elements could easily multiply the cost of electricity to the consumer by a factor of 5 or 10 or more. Nobody knows, because there is no functioning demonstration project from which reasonably precise costs can be extrapolated.
And frankly, there never will be such a demonstration project, because the costs are so enormous that it can never be done. Meanwhile, everyone just nods along as if LCOE comparisons are meaningful.
11) Ryan Mills: Great Barrier Reef defies doomsday predictions
National Review, 18 August 2022
The headlines were dire: “Half of the Great Barrier Reef’s corals have been killed by climate change,” CBS News reported in October 2020.
Bleaching of the reef’s corals is “getting more widespread,” the New York Times reported earlier that year. A Vice headline in 2017 promoting David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II documentary said, “the Great Barrier Reef will die this century,” while National Geographic predicted an earlier demise for reefs around the globe: “Coral reefs could be gone in 30 years.”
It became almost common knowledge that the Great Barrier Reef was assuredly doomed, the victim of a warming climate, rising ocean temperatures, and increasingly acidic water.
Then, in early August, the authoritative Australian Institute of Marine Science released a new report on the 1,400-mile natural wonder. Two-thirds of the reef — its northern and central regions — are showing record levels of coral cover. The southern region is also showing high levels of coral cover. The AIMS report was hardly a portrait of a dying ecosystem.
While the news may have been shocking to those who have been relying on the mainstream media for their information, it was no surprise to Peter Ridd, a marine geophysicist in Australia who has been studying the Great Barrier Reef since the mid 1980s. Ridd, 62, has long been a prominent voice dissenting from the chorus of reef doomsayers and what he describes as “the usual scaremongers” predicting the reef’s impending death.
“It’s just been half a century of doom, doom, doom, doom, doom. And now we’ve got records amount of coral,” Ridd told National Review in a telephone interview from Australia.
Now an adjunct fellow with Australia’s free-market Institute of Public Affairs think tank, Ridd was fired from James Cook University in Queensland in 2018, allegedly for publishing disparaging comments about some other scientists’ research on corals. He believes his heterodox views on the reef and the impact of climate change were also to blame.
“I was fired because I said there was a quality-assurance problem at some reef institutions,” said Ridd, who unsuccessfully fought his dismissal in court. “They’ll say, oh, I didn’t say it in a nice way. You explain to me how you say to another group of scientists your quality assurance is grossly deficient, which means your work is untrustworthy.”
Despite the professional setback, Ridd has continued to insist that the Great Barrier Reef is not doomed, and that prominent reef-science institutions have been misleading the world.
The Great Barrier Reef is “one of the most fluctuating ecosystems on earth,” marked by boom and bust cycles that can sometimes last a decade or more, Ridd said. Hurricanes — or tropical cyclones in Australia — can wipe out large swaths of coral in a matter of hours or days. And a prolonged El Niño climate pattern, like the one that occurred in 2016–17, can bathe coral in bathtub-warm water, leading to mass bleaching events. But over the course of a decade or so, the coral grows back.
The AIMS report noted the resiliency of the Great Barrier Reef and explained that over the last year it has experienced low levels of acute stress, with no severe cyclones and a decreased number of outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish, which feed on coral.
“You could tell that this year was going to be a really good year. Last year was a really good year. This year is just a bumper year for coral,” Ridd said, adding that the boom time won’t last forever. “You don’t get records every year.”
The regular bust cycles the Great Barrier Reef goes through make it an easy poster child for whatever alleged environmental catastrophe activists are fighting at the moment: a plague of crown-of-thorns starfish, overfishing, climate change. When Ridd started studying the reef in the mid ’80s, the big concern was about mud from dredging projects and farming, he said.
“There’s always some part of the reef somewhere going through a bust. Almost always,” Ridd said. But then the coral grows back. “That’s always what happens.”
While the AIMS report documented record levels of coral on the reef, it also noted that much of it was due to fast-growing Acropora coral that is more susceptible to wave damage, bleaching, and tropical cyclones. Ridd noted that while the loss of these corals in recent years was a labeled a “disaster,” their rapid recovery is now somehow a cause for concern.
“This is just a pathetic excuse to try to make a brilliant good-news story into a bad-news story, so that we can keep scaring the children that the reef is doomed,” he said.
Ridd has said that many scientists exploring the reef have become “emotionally attached” to it, abandoning their objectivity and biasing their studies to arrive at desired conclusions. He said one problem with much of the science around the reef is that it often looks at data — and periods of time — selectively.
“If you say, ‘Did we lose half the coral between 1985 and 2011?’ The answer is, yes, we did,” Ridd said. “But then it all grew back again. So, you can pick out a time slot that you like, and you can make a doom story about that. And then you forget about the periods when it recovers.”
He also believes scientists at many top institutions suffer from “a significant degree of groupthink,” and the peer-review process hampers scientists who don’t fall in line.
“All of these things together mean that a lot of environmental-science institutions are now effectively untrustworthy,” Ridd said.
It’s critiques like that that have made Ridd persona non grata at prominent reef-research institutions. He’s at the end of his career, he said, and was able to take the risks. And he insists he’s not alone. “There’s almost nobody with the scientific establishment which will publicly say the sorts of things that I’m saying. But they’re in there,” he said.
There are also some retired and independent scientists who don’t toe the doomsday line.
“When you have people whose entire experience of a reef has been in the context of studying and promoting these various environmental threats, they tend to see every fluctuation of nature as some kind of a potential threat,” said Walter Starck, a longtime independent reef researcher who was a pioneer in developing underwater photography and exploration gear.
“It’s very healthy,” Starck said of the Great Barrier Reef. “It’s actually one of the more pristine marine environments on the planet.”
Starck, a policy expert with the Heartland Institute, started his career in Florida, before moving to Australia decades ago to study the Great Barrier Reef. He said early research was focused on learning more about the reef generally, but the focus of the research shifted over the years to identifying environmental threats.
“Researchers found that if you could find a possible environmental threat, your chance of getting funding to investigate it was a lot better,” Starck said.
Over the last few decades, the mother of all environmental threats has been the threat of climate change, and warming and more acidic ocean water caused by burning fossil fuels.
A significant increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has warmed the planet, but Ridd said a degree or two increase in temperature “is not a catastrophe” for reefs. “Basically, the warmer it gets the faster they grow,” Ridd said. “Now, obviously there is a limit. But one or two degrees is not the limit.”
Ridd said he does have some concerns about rising ocean pH levels caused by climate change. “The trouble is, I’ve sort of lost confidence in so much that comes out of the scientific institutions that it’s difficult to know what’s real and what isn’t,” Ridd said.
Ridd and Starck said that while they have concerns about much of the media reporting on the reef — Starck said a lot of reporting is regurgitated press releases — their bigger concern is with the state of the science around the reef.
“The media are reporting what the scientific institutions are saying, and we’re supposed to trust the scientists,” Ridd said. “Now, sure, the media should be a little bit more critical. They should ask some harder questions. They should talk to the dissenters. They shouldn’t blow things up as much. But heck, that’s what media does.”
“No, the problem is with the institutions, the science institutions. That’s where it’s all come from,” Ridd added. “Don’t blame the media, not too much.”
While Ridd and Starck are confident the Great Barrier Reef remains healthy and dynamic, the same cannot be said for all of the world’s reefs. The reefs in Florida and the Caribbean, for example, are closer to shore, and face more pressure from fishing and pollution.
“They’re much more heavily exploited,” Starck said. “It’s a totally different situation.”
Eugene Shinn, a longtime Florida-based marine geologist and pioneer reef researcher, said the reefs in Florida have been shrinking and degrading for decades. “They’re still going downhill as we speak,” he said. “A warming climate may have something to do with it. But I don’t think that’s everything.”
Shinn has looked into everything from the waste from septic tanks and wells to the possibility that pollutants are being carried over in Saharan dust storms from Africa to explain the decades-long die-off of staghorn and elkhorn coral. A 2019 paper out of Florida Atlantic University found that nitrogen from poorly treated sewage and fertilizer is throwing off the nutrient balance in the water, leading to algae blooms and killing coral.
Back in Australia, Starck said news reporters should take a closer look at the reef-based tourism industry that supports tens of thousands of jobs. “At the same time they’re all saying the reef is dying and how terrible it is, you’ve got a tourist industry with millions of people visiting the reef every year and coming back enthralled with what they’ve seen,” he said.
Ridd questioned why the Australian government continues to fund doomsday science about the reef. “Why would you do that? Why would the Americans say, ‘The Grand Canyon is just a disaster area. It’s not even worthwhile going to see.’ That’s what we do in Australia.”
See also Peter Ridd: The good news on coral reefs (pdf)
