Green New Deal

Biden’s Infrastructure Plan: Paving the Road to Hell

April 2, 2021by madeleine in Environmentalism updates, General, Green New Deal

Huge amounts of ink, digital and otherwise, are being wasted in discussion of President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan announced yesterday. But one of the more revealing comments came from the ever-green Washington Post, which insisted that the whole purpose of the plan isn’t infrastructure, but bringing about a paradigm shift.

“President Biden’s infrastructure plan would turbocharge the country’s transition from fossil fuels, using the muscle and vast resources of the federal government to intervene in electricity markets, speed the growth of solar and wind energy, and foster technological breakthroughs in clean power,” the Post wrote. “The linchpin of Biden’s plan… is the creation of a national standard requiring utilities to use a specific amount of solar, wind and other renewable energy to power American homes, businesses and factories. The amount would increase over time, cutting the nation’s use of coal, gas and oil over the next 15 years.”

The Post concluded with excitement: “Biden’s strategy would amount to the most sweeping federal intervention in the electricity sector in generations.”

As that reality sinks in, there will be foot-dragging and more from all sorts of political and business layers in the country. The following response by Brian Wolff, executive vice president for public policy of the Edison Electric Institute, the power sector’s biggest trade association, is indicative:

“Certainly, we will review any proposed clean energy standard closely,” he said, “and we support policies that enable our member electric companies to continue to get the energy they provide as clean as they can as fast as they can, without compromising the affordability and reliability our customers value.”

Not precisely a ringing endorsement.

Kerry to Demand India Must Declare a Net-Zero Emissions Target Date

April 2, 2021by madeleine in Environmentalism updates, General, Green New Deal

U.S. Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry will visit India in early April, The Hindu reported. The visit is a run-up to the April 22-23 virtual “Leaders Summit on Climate” hosted by President Joe Biden from the White House. Kerry’s April 1-9 itinerary will also include Abu Dhabi and Dhaka.

The Kerry visit is likely to focus on pressuring India to declare a target year, preferably 2050, for achieving net-zero emissions of greenhouse gas. But there is strong opposition to this within India, including prominent advisers to Prime Minister Narendra Modi such as Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, a Member of PM’s Council on Climate Change and former ambassador to China and the EU. In a recent interview with the Indian news daily, The Hindustan Times, Dasgupta answered a question on what he believes would be the impact on the Indian economy of pursuing net-zero emissions target:

“First, it would require us to immediately scrap all existing coal-based power plants and factories, or alternatively, retrofit them with carbon capture and storage technology. This would entail astronomical costs at a time when the economy is already reeling from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.” He added that it would also quickly derail Modi’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) policy: “It would necessitate an immediate switch-over to imported, existing clean energy technologies at a huge cost, denying our own industry the time required for indigenization or development of affordable indigenous technologies. Let us not forget that the US lodged a complaint against us at the WTO when we took some modest measures to promote domestic manufacture of solar cells and modules.”

“Third, we need to examine the trade-related implications of surrendering our principled position on ‘common and differentiated responsibilities’. The European Union is set to impose levies on carbon-intensive imports, even from developing countries. It would be naive to think that the countries calling on India to adopt a 2050 net-zero target are motivated purely by altruistic concerns unrelated to commercial interests.”

The “common and differentiated responsibilities” clause refers to the argument made for decades by developing countries that any global targets have to be applied in a differentiated way to their countries, since they are also trying to overcome underdevelopment.

The pressure on India is intense. Last February, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) hosted an annual event, the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS), in New Delhi with a focus on the climate crisis, with the presence of high-level representatives from the U.S., the U.K., the EU, the United Nations and other countries. At this virtual Summit, John Kerry did not mince his words: “We all have to adopt the notion of zero emissions.” And his finger pointed towards India when he noted that “90% of the world’s emissions come from somewhere other than our country (US)” and “70% come from somewhere other than China”.

The pressure has been building, especially over the last six months as Biden took over the White House. Some analysts claim that China’s 2060 carbon neutrality pledge has also contributed to the pressure, as has the UK’s diplomatic push to ramp up climate matters ahead of Cop26. Cop26 is the next annual UN climate change conference scheduled to be held in Glasgow, UK, from Nov 1-12. Cop26 president Alok Sharma visited India in February and issued a statement before his departure stating, “I firmly believe that powerful action from India will be a catalyst for change, encouraging others to be more ambitious in their approaches to protecting both people and planet.”

With the heat on, discussions have begun in India on what it can do to withstand the pressure.

Climate Models: With Enough ‘Free Parameters,’ Data Will Confess to Anything

August 5, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, Environmentalism updates, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal

Aug. 3, 2021 (EIRNS)—One of the criticisms leveled against the climate models used to terrify the world with the unfathomable horror of a change of 1.5 degrees by the turn of the century, relates to how modelers deal with uncertainties.

The entire Earth is a very complex system to model, and our understanding of many of its processes—wind patterns, rainfall, ocean circulation—is incomplete. This means that models cannot claim to be based purely on fundamental physics and well-known laws of nature, the way a simple physics demonstration used in a classroom would.

Instead, each of the uncertain values that is incorporated into the final model has some “wiggle room” in the specific value given to it.

If there are only a few uncertainties, the model as a whole will have only a few adjustment points, and there may be a very small range of setting the uncertain parameters that results in the model accurately producing past data, against which it can be verified.

But if there are many “knobs” on the machine, so to speak, there can be many ways of adjusting them such that the model matches the past relatively well (given the extremely incomplete data, no one expects perfection), while offering wildly different predictions for the future.

Climate models have many free parameters, many knobs to adjust, such that their matching past data says little about their ability accurately to predict the future. In this sense, you can get the underlying climate data to confess anything you’d like about the future, including out- of-control warming.

The Executive Director of the CO₂ Coalition recently wrote about the origin of climate models: “The father of these models was Cold War military theorist John von Neumann, who wanted to see if we could cause drought in the Soviet Union. He failed, thank goodness. Von Neumann joked, ‘with four parameters I can draw an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.’”

Professor Will Happer uncovered a 2010 paper by Jürgen Mayer et al. (DOI: 10.1119/1.3254017) that does just that. They use a Fourier coordinate expansion with four complex parameters to successfully parameterize a shape resembling an elephant. And adding a fifth causes the trunk to move around as its path is traced.

(Unlike the cases in climate models, in this case there was no data against which to validate the parameters, so the authors were completely free to set them as they pleased.)

What can a climate modeler achieve with hundreds or thousands of free parameters?

NASA’s Goddard Institute Pours Cold Water on Climate Change Sales Pitch

August 2, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal

NASA’s Goddard Institute Pours Cold Water on Climate Change Sales Pitch—

Aug. 1 (EIRNS)–Under the headline “U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming,” a July 27 article in Science magazine covers the bombshell that has just hit the IPCC’s climate modelers: “Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the model makers themselves, believe are implausibly fast.”

Now, the article says, “scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong.” Some of them are wondering how they can “turn their models into useful guidance for policy makers” – which was their supposed raison d’être in the first place! Worst of all for them, their feet are being held to the fire by Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who said: “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this [fixing the models].”

The IPCC is in trouble, because by the time the modelers’ bias was exposed, the supercomputing runs were already done and the IPCC report, based on these implausible fast warming rates, was nearing completion. The IPCC is now perilously close to being totally discredited, even by its own disciples. Meanwhile, other scientists, who actually measure phenomena rather than fiddle with models, are using recent observational data [gasp] “to rein them in.”

Here is a warning by one of the IPCC’s own climate projection leaders, Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: “For now, policy makers and other researchers need to avoid putting too much stock in the unconstrained extreme warming the latest models predict.”

Already climate papers are appearing using CMIP’s [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project] unconstrained worst-case scenarios for 2100. “But,” says the Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “that practice needs to change. You end up with numbers for even the near-term, that are insanely scary—and wrong.”

Insane U.S. “Wind Corridor” Is Also Top “Food Corridor”—Starve in the Dark

July 21, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Agriculture, Economic development updates, Environmentalism updates, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal

July 20, 2021 (EIRNS)—The “Wind Corridor” in the Central States (Dakotas south through Texas), created by the green rip-off interruptible cartels, is also the “Food Corridor” for the entire U.S., as well as a large part of the world. The two states in the center of the Wind Corridor, Iowa and Kansas, head the nation with the highest percent share of their electricity coming from wind and solar: Iowa, 49 percent and Kansas, 43 percent. Plus, there are still more “renewables” projects underway here, and more shutdowns of coal and nuclear.

Central States spokesmen against the killer green energy subversion will participate in the July 24 Schiller Institute conference, “There Is No Climate ‘Emergency’—Apply Science and Development to End Blackouts and Death.”

Blackouts in farming are a disaster. Water pumps stop. Irrigation stops. Grain drying stops. Auguring stops for moving grain. Livestock heating, cooling, and watering stops. Manure removal stops. Electrified repair machinery stops. Food processing stops. Frozen storage stops. Milk goes bad. Milking machinery stops. Transportation of inputs (fertilizers, chemicals, seeds) stops. Transportation to market and processing jams up for animals, grains, produce.

Look at the rank of Kansas and Iowa, combined population six million, in U.S. states’ food production: Wheat: Kansas is number one, accounting for nearly 20 percent. Corn: Iowa is number one. Soybeans: Iowa ranks either 2nd or 1st with Illinois, year to year. Hogs: Iowa is number one, accounting for nearly one third. Cattle: Kansas ranks third; but together with Iowa, the two states rank second after Texas. Eggs: Iowa is number one.

Great Leap Backwards: Kerry Mobilizes Deadly Green Finance

March 14, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Counterintelligence, Environmentalism updates, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal

Kerry Mobilizing Green Finance Genocide

Mar. 13 (EIRNS)–John Kerry, the Biden Administration hit man to enforce the Great Reset, is now actively running operations on the major banks to be sure they follow the Great Reset to cut off credit to anything productive, and pump money into the Green Bubble. Politico ran a column Friday on Kerry’s role in the fascist scheme. “The push — which could include a new executive order on climate finance — comes as Kerry’s team and the White House scramble to line up new announcements for Biden’s April 22 Climate Leaders Summit,” Politico reports.

Kerry, it seems, served as the chairman of a global advisory council for Bank of America after leaving the Obama administration. Politico notes: “Kerry is leveraging personal relationships with Wall Street players as well as banks’ broad public promises to help fund climate efforts that they made alongside their pledges to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 or align with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

“The White House met with environmental and Wall Street watchdog groups on March 9 to discuss its approach to potential financial sector regulations and executive actions to limit risk from climate change-fueled shocks. Groups on the call included the Center for American Progress, Public Citizen, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club and 350.org, among others.”

Great Leap Backwards: Pushback to Biden’s “30×30” Cuts in Food, Water …

March 11, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Agriculture, Economic development updates, Environmentalism updates, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal

Pushback Against Biden’s “30×30” Move to Cut Agriculture and All Human Use on 30% of U.S. Land, Water by 2030

Mar. 10 (EIRNS)–A key part of the Great Leap Backward is that land and water use must be dictated, first, by greening the environment, and only secondly, for agriculture use, which will produce far less food. This is explicit in the EU “Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies” May, 2020 document; and in the 2020 Agriculture Law of Britain. For the U.S., this green dictate appears in the “30 x 30” scheme, which says that by 2030, human use of any kind—agriculture, forestry, transportation, energy, minerals–must be reduced on 30 percent of U.S. land and water, including oceans.

Biden was programmed to say this during his 2020 campaign, and it was formally announced Jan. 27, in his Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” (86 Fed. Reg. 7,619).

A huge pushback is underway. On Feb. 22, 17 state governors signed a letter to Biden, opposing the Federal government overreach on this. Many also issued their own press releases. The states include most of the farmbelt, e.g. the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, Idaho and others.

There are local meetings of all kinds in opposition. For example, March 2 in Wyoming, a resolution opposing the 30×30 plan, and calling for local consultation, was introduced in the Uinta County Commissioners meeting, by the county’s Citizens Coalition for Sound Resource Use. The Commissioners will take it up March 16.

Last night in the small town of Valentine, Nebraska, a public briefing was held by Margaret Byfield, who has been holding meetings across the Plains states to mobilize people. Her organization is the American Stewards of Liberty, based in Texas. See https://americanstewards.us/

The usual citation is made that 12 percent of U.S. land area is already currently in Federal control. Most of it is in the Western states, and varies widely state by state. However a 2020 estimate by the Federation of American Scientists is much higher.

The text of the EO 14008, in Section 216, directs various Federal departments to provide a report within 90 days of Jan. 27, “recommending steps that the United States should take, working with state, local, tribal and territorial governments, agricultural and forest landowners, fishermen, and other key stakeholders, to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30% of our lands and waters by 2030.”

The save-nature groups are all issuing specifics on where human uses should be locked out first—Sierra Club, National Geographic, Conservation Foundation and others. The National Wildlife Federation, for example, has put out, through its Associate VP for Public lands Tracy Stone-Manning, a starter list of which lands to lock up: 80,000 acres in Montana; 1.3 million acres of the Mojave Desert in Nevada; 250,000 acres in California of redwood forest and river rapids; and over 400,000 acres in Colorado.

The 30×30 catchy concept is also pushed in other nations, as a benchmark on the way to “50×50,” the crazed idea—also called “half Earth”—that by 2050, half of the land and water area of the Earth should be in a state of nature, minus people, so that biodiversity can prevail, and this, it is asserted, will keep creature life in balance, so that zoonotic diseases won’t happen, and life will be peachy.

The “half Earth” lunacy was promoted a few years back in a book by E.O. Wilson, the so called biologist. The Center for American Progress has backed it; and it was in the 2020 Democratic Party Platform, it is reported. A resolution was introduced in Congress on this. There is a 30×30 Ocean Alliance.

On October 4, 2020, Scientific American carried an article sub-titled, “The so-called 30 by 30 plan would protect 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters from development by 2030.” Under the main headline, “An Ambitious Strategy to Preserve Biodiversity,” the author is David Shiffman. He wrote, “Scientific American’s historic endorsement of Joe Biden noted that Biden ‘has a record of following the data and being guided by science.’ With his campaign’s incorporation of 30 by 30 goals, that’s also true when it comes to biodiversity conservation…”

In May, the U.N. Biodiversity Summit will be in China in Kunming.

U.S. States File Lawsuit To Stop Biden’s Climate Fraud

March 10, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, Environmentalism updates, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal

U.S. States File Lawsuit To Stop Biden’s Climate Fraud; Defend Jobs, Food, and Energy for Americans and Millions of Poor Worldwide

March 9, 2021 (EIRNS)– Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, joined by the Attorneys General of the states of Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah, filed suit yesterday in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, Eastern Division, challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of President Biden’s Executive Order 13990, issued on his first day in office under the title “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.”

The twelve states intend to stop implementation of regulatory measures which they rightly contend will not only destroy U.S. jobs, energy production, energy independence, agriculture, and innovation, and impoverish its working families, but which will also deprive millions of people around the world of the affordable food and energy they urgently need to escape from poverty and hunger. And they are feeling pretty frisky about doing so. Schmitt proudly tweeted that “JoeBiden recently took executive action that will cost hardworking families, farmers & businesses trillions — crushing jobs & innovation. It’s a Trojan Horse for the #GreenNewDeal. Today we led a coalition to stop it. Missouri is fighting back.”

The states recognized the deadly ramifications of Section 5’s seeming gobbledygook. Titled, “Accounting for the Benefits of Reducing Climate Pollution,” the section establishes a federal interagency Working Group which is charged with estimating the “social cost,” or “monetized damages,” allegedly incurred from incremental emissions of three so-called “greenhouse gases,” carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. Those estimates, which supposedly will “capture the full costs of greenhouse gas emissions as accurately as possible … taking global damages into account,” then are to become the basis for regulating the activities producing those “emissions” out of existence, using rigged “cost-benefit analyses.”

According to the lawsuit, the interim report issued by that Working Group, came up with the incredible figure of $9.5 trillion a year in “social costs” from those three gases, but repeatedly indicated that the group believes that these numbers “likely understate” the true costs of these gases and that higher numbers are likely in future calculations. “The potential regulatory impact of such numbers is enormous,” the suit warns. “These numbers are high enough to justify massive increases in regulatory restrictions on agricultural practices, energy production, energy use, or any other economic activity that results in the emission of such gases.”

The lawsuit summarizes the real world consequences if this EO is allowed to stand:

“In practice, President Biden’s order directs federal agencies to use this enormous figure to justify an equally enormous expansion of federal regulatory power that will intrude into every aspect of Americans’ lives—from their cars, to their refrigerators and homes, to their grocery and electric bills. If the Executive Order stands, it will inflict hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of damage to the U.S. economy for decades to come. It will destroy jobs, stifle energy production, strangle America’s energy independence, suppress agriculture, deter innovation, and impoverish working families. It undermines the sovereignty of the States and tears at the fabric of liberty.

“The Biden Administration’s calculation of such `social costs’ of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane is also arbitrary and capricious. Affordable and reliable methods of agricultural and energy production—which these actions would stifle—have global benefits that the Biden Administration studiously ignores. Affordable food and energy production lift millions of people out of poverty, eliminate hunger, promote economic development and opportunity, create millions of jobs, enable innovation and entrepreneurship, encourage industry and manufacturing, promote America’s energy independence, and create the conditions for liberty to flourish. These benefits enrich the entire world, and yet the Biden Administration gave them little or no weight in its calculation of the `social cost’ of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.”

The defendants named in the suit start with President Biden, and continue with ten cabinet secretaries and agencies, plus the members of the interagency Working Group.

Top Renewable Energy Co. Fails

March 6, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, Environmentalism updates, Finance, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal, New financial order updates

Leading Renewable Energy Company Abengoa, Once the Cat’s Meow, Fails

March 5 (EIRNS)–A leading renewable energy firm, Abengoa SA, which has been the darling of the City of London and Wall Street financiers, and green Malthusians, filed for bankruptcy, on Feb. 23. The Spanish company has carried out projects in the United States, and in 2010, it received a large United States loan guarantee from the Barrack Obama-Joe Biden administration to build a solar energy plant in Arizona. This is the second largest bankruptcy in Spanish history, according to the El Pais newspaper, and has global implications. This represents a snap shot of the significant vulnerability of a planned $40 trillion green speculative bubble in “renewables,” even before it is built.

This will be the third failure of Abengoa; having cooked its books in 2015—it was later found out—in order to present a picture of functionality, it collapsed in 2016 (wiping out almost all the value of its stockholders). It restructured its debt in 2018, and was in the process of attempting to restructure its current 6 billion euro/US$7.3 billion debt load, when the Spanish regional government of Andalusia unravelled a larger bail-out package by withdrawing its part of the package: an offer of a 20 million euro loan to the failing Abengoa.

The July 5, 2010 GreenTechMedia reported that in 2008, Abengoa ‘negotiated with the Obama-Biden administration, along with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, that the U.S. government would extend to Abengoa a $1.4 billion U.S. federal loan guarantee—a very large sum at that time for renewables—to build a “250 megawatt “Solana solar concentrating power plant near Gila Bend, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, Arizona. It would be a parabolic trough plant, that would supposedly be able to store some of the solar rays in the form of thermal energy. But the trick was that the plant would generate about 38% of its rated capacity, meaning that it would generate almost two-thirds below what its rated capacity said.

Abengoa also built in Hugoton, Kansas a hybrid biomass plant, which would convert 350,000 tons of biomass/year into 25 million gallons per year of liquid fuel. Abengoa opened this plant in October 2014; the plant shut down operations in December 2015. Abenoga sold the plant, which cost more than $110 billion to build, to another company for $43 billion.

It has not been made known what will happen to the $1.4 billion Obama-Biden loan guarantee that was made to Abengoa.

It should be noted that many solar and wind turbine companies survive only through U.S. government tax breaks and subsidies. According to the America’s Power organization, solar and wind have received $82.1 billion in tax subsidies just between 2010 and 2018.

The failure of Abengoa is a cautionary tale of what may unfold from a $40 trillion geen speculative bubble. That would take down the energy and electricity generating process, and slash agro-manufacturing processes, and human population. It would also, through its insanity, collapse financially.

Great Leap Backwards: the Green Deal

March 2, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Environmentalism updates, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal, New financial order updates

Biden Drops a `Green’ Hammer on American Industry

March 1 (EIRNS) – The Biden White House on Feb. 26 announced that it would multiply the “price of carbon” by more than seven times, to $51 per ton of CO2, for all cost-benefit analyses of industrial technologies – and was likely to more than double that again after “further analysis”. The “carbon price” set by the Federal government since the Bush 43 Administration in 2004 is not a purchase price but rather the price assumed for all use of carbon in materials – energetic, chemical, industrial, agricultural – whose use can form CO2, and is supposed to govern the valuation of bids for government contracts of all kinds. Obviously it would also then affect the valuation of industrial and agricultural products and even the valuation of capital goods and/or entire companies for investment.

The Biden Administration’s proposed price announced by the Department of Energy under new Secretary Jennifer Granholm is supposed to be the price that greenhouse gas emissions impose on society. The $51/ton of CO2 is not only seven-plus times the Trump Administration’s “price”, but double that of the Obama Administration. And it is likely soon to be adjusted to the “price” the Andrew Cuomo government of New York State adopted in 2020, which is a range of $79-125/ton.

A UC-Santa Barbara Environmental Science assistant professor, Tamma Carleton, responded giddily, “A new social cost of carbon can tip the scales for hundreds of policy decisions facing the Federal government. Any policy, project or regulation that lowers emissions will now have a higher dollar value.” And any decision to use carbon products, a lower one. This will hit all industries, not just the energy and power production sector.

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