Tag Archive for: climate change

The Green Energy Industry Just Had An Absolutely Brutal Week

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The past week has been marked by worrying developments for the state of the green energy industry, suggesting that President Joe Biden’s sweeping climate agenda could be imperiled.

Offshore wind companies are cancelling projects and executives are sounding the alarm on the state of the industry, while solar companies and indexes have seen their value continue a months-long slide that has resulted in diminished earnings forecasts and a solar-oriented loan provider’s bankruptcy. These developments suggest that Biden’s sweeping green energy plans could be in trouble, especially given the intractable nature of some of the crucial economic problems plaguing the industries.

“Boosters for this energy transition bet the farm on three rent-seeking industries: wind, solar and electric vehicles. Two legs of that three-legged stool are now showing signs of financial distress despite massive subsidies they’ve already received from multiple levels of government,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults extensively on energy, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “American consumers, who are paying the price for this in the form of skyrocketing costs of all forms of energy, should demand their representatives hang up the phone when the calls come in from wind and automaker executives asking for even more.”

Orsted, a Danish offshore wind company, announced on Tuesday that it cancelled two major developments off the coast of New Jersey. Company executives blamed factors like inflation, interest rates and supply chain woes, saying that the problems had left the firm little choice but to walk away from the major projects.

Since the cancellations, the company’s stock price has fallen even further and S&P has indicated that it is considering downgrading the company’s credit rating. But Orsted is not the only offshore wind company showing signs that the industry may be in an extremely precarious position.

The U.S. offshore wind industry appears to be “fundamentally broken” due to problems with permitting and rising costs, Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, the head of gas and low carbon energy for British Petroleum (BP), said at a conference on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News. “There’s a fundamental reset needed,” she said, suggesting that there could be solutions and that her company is working with its partner to assess “options for their U.S. offshore wind projects to mitigate the effect of inflationary pressures and permitting delays.”

Under Biden’s leadership, the federal government has heavily subsidized the offshore wind developments, primarily via the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), in a bid to have the industry provide enough power to source electricity for 10 million American homes by 2030. The state of the industry is so dire that numerous energy market experts told the DCNF that a government bailout for the industry may be just around the corner.

The offshore wind goal is just one slice of the administration’s efforts to decarbonize the American energy sector by 2035 and then have the entire U.S. economy reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

Like offshore wind, the administration is counting on solar power to emerge in the coming years as a replacement for the energy generated by fossil fuel infrastructure. Solar power is also similar to wind power in that it is intermittent and currently more expensive than power sourced by natural gas and other fossil fuels, according to Peter Grossman, an emeritus professor of economics for Butler University.

Solar companies have generally had a rough 2023 so far, and this past week has been no different: while stocks are down for several leading solar producers, Sunlight Financing, a company which provided loans to consumers to buy residential solar systems, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday. Several leading home system installers pared back their outlooks for the year this week as well, as higher interest rates and inflation have cooled consumer demand, according to Bloomberg News.

“The green industry makes products that are both very expensive and mostly ineffective,” Larry Behrens, the communications director for Power The Future, told the DCNF. “Yet, instead of admitting reality, we have an administration in Washington that is doubling-down and working overtime to force these terrible products into our lives,” he continued, adding that “thanks to the laughably-named Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden has a $369 billion dollar green slush fund and he’s put a political operative in charge of it… Joe Biden knows that when the green agenda fails, his legacy will sink even further, so there will be no dollar amount too high to keep green boondoggles afloat for as long as possible.”

The White House, Orsted, BP and Sunlight Financing all did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Outsmarting Wind & Solar Lobbyists

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Most people know that lobbyists are paid shills (for a product, industry, or cause). However, few citizens are aware that almost all state and federal laws are written by lobbyists. That said, this commentary is just on one subject area: wind and solar energy. Since lobbyists’ objectives (e.g., their client’s financial gain) are in direct conflict with what is in the best interests of citizens, this is a deplorable situation.

This travesty will continue until lawsuits expose how such laws contradict other statutes on the books. For example, most states require that state utility boards approve energy projects based on two paramount criteria: cost and reliability.

But wind and solar projects are high cost and low reliability — so how could any of them ever be approved? Because: 1) of the undue influence of lobbyists, 2) state utility boards are acting to support political agendas (instead of their own statutes), and 3) no one is suing them for their lack of adherence to state laws, etc..

One way around this has been citizens getting their community to impose reasonable (science-based) rules and regulations on local wind or solar projects (e.g., regarding setbacks, etc.). Of course, lobbyists and political virtue signalers find that citizens restricting non-sensical industrialization in their own community, to be unacceptable.

In response lobbyists got state legislators to pass state laws that limited what local legislators could do regarding the regulation of such projects in their community. For example, local communities are not allowed to make setbacks more than a “state approved” amount — regardless of what scientific information they have.

A major problem here is that in some cases, these new state restrictions are a violation of Home Rule rights. See here for a basic definition of what this means, and the numerous states that have Home Rule. Again, they get away with this extraction of citizens’ rights, because no one is properly suing them for this infringement.

The choice for citizens here is very simple: a) roll over and continue to be beaten down, or b) decide that they have had enough and then take meaningful action.

The good news is: if citizens are finally ready to pay hardball, they have several effective options. I’ve mentioned one already: sue state agencies for not complying with their statutory obligations. The most powerful lawsuit is to sue state agency members individually using the Federal 1983 Statute. This is to sue them personally for violating your civil rights, but it requires a sympathetic, aggressive attorney.

Note: I am not an attorney, so I am not giving legal advice here. Instead, I am simply letting you know some options available. Consult with a competent lawyer.

Another effective strategy against lobbyist influence is to outsmart them. For example, state laws that restrict how communities can regulate wind and solar are almost always about not allowing stricter setbacks, etc. than the state specifies. (Of course, the state has no scientific basis for the setbacks they allow — and, again, a proper lawsuit would expose that major deficiency.)

To effectively fight lobbyists it is essential to know the key factors needed to be properly regulated for industrial wind projects or solar projects. A clever way to outsmart them is to pass local regulations that are not specifically identified (limited) in a state law.

For example, pass a Property Value Guarantee. My energy website has a document about PVG, which also shows the scientific justification for it. PVGs are also incorporated into our model local wind and solar ordinances.

Some other clever tactics are:

  1. Pass zoning laws that limit where wind or solar projects are allowed,
  2. Pass an ordinance prohibiting any wind energy-related PILOT program,
  3. Assess wind or solar projects at their FULL value,
  4. Pass a General Zoning Ordinance listing a wide variety of things (including industrial wind energy) that would be inconsistent with your Town’s character, objectives, etc. [e.g., what the Town of Dryden did, which was upheld in court],
  5. Require that the wind or solar facility developer not impose any confidentiality clauses on any landowners, in their lease or easement agreements, and
  6. Declare your community to be a Sanctuary Community (opting out of certain regulations imposed on it by the State). [Note: to date, this has been done regarding immigration, gun laws, etc., so no good reason why not a renewable sanctuary!]

The bottom line is that if citizens are determined and creative (i.e., use critical thinking), they can outsmart lobbyists and lapdog politicians.

Here is a 100% guarantee: if you don’t properly defend your rights, they will take more of them away!

©2023. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren’t working

Biden: Already Declared Climate Emergency ‘Practically Speaking’

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President Biden has “practically speaking” already declared a national emergency on climate change, the president said in an interview with The Weather Channel published Wednesday. “We’ve conserved more land. We rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, we passed a $368 billion climate control facility.” At first, he said he had declared an emergency, but when pressed he said he had done so “practically speaking.”

The point of an emergency declaration is so that executives can exercise special powers to respond to an emergency, which would be unlawful under normal circumstances. However, due to the enormous powers they unlock, federal emergency declarations are limited by three federal laws.

Under the Public Health Service Act, the Health and Human Services Secretary can declare a public health emergency that grants the secretary extensive powers to respond to the public health emergency.

Under the Stafford Act, a state governor or tribal area chief executive can request federal assistance, allowing the president to declare a disaster or emergency; such a declaration enables the federal government to disburse financial assistance and other relief, coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Under the National Emergencies Act, the president may declare a national emergency without a request from a specific state, which confers 123 powers granted in other laws, although the president must specify which authorities are activated.

The law does not recognize a method of declaring an emergency, “practically speaking,” without an official declaration. Thus, even CNN acknowledged, “President Joe Biden incorrectly claimed in an interview with The Weather Channel that he has already declared a national emergency on the climate crisis.”

Biden elaborated on what he meant regarding a climate change emergency. “It’s the existential threat to humanity,” he stated. A threat to humanity’s existence would logically involve a threat to American lives, and a natural event that threatens American lives would typically be an appropriate subject for an emergency declaration. In that sense, it’s possible to follow Biden’s logic.

But while the logic is certainly clear, the solution is not. To protect lives during a hurricane, tornado, or manhunt, a governor could order citizens to evacuate, shelter in place, or avoid a certain area, as well as stockpiling emergency resources. Then, once the emergency is past, citizens can resume their normal lives. These are not only inadequate but meaningless responses to something as ill-defined as “climate change.” Evacuate to where? For how long? The current climate change narrative identifies a global crisis extending for lifetimes.

In fact, the lack of workable solutions might explain why President Biden has so far declined to declare a climate emergency. Biden has labelled climate change an “emergency” in speeches and vowed to combat it through executive actions, but he has stopped short of declaring an official emergency. If he did declare an emergency, what powers would he invoke, precisely?

Another possible reason for Biden’s delay is the inevitable legal and constitutional challenges, which he might then lose. Under normal circumstances, emergency powers are as short-lived as the crisis. But a climate emergency would be practically endless, enabling a presidential administration to sweep away America’s normal operating procedure forever, “practically speaking.” The courts have already struck down a number of Biden administration executive actions on the climate — from stopping offshore drilling to redefining inland waters — and they might not look too kindly on what would amount to a massive power grab.

But climate change is not the only issue on which emergency powers allure Biden. Biden has been contemplating an abortion emergency declaration since last year. He contemplated declaring an emergency over monkeypox, which primarily affects a very specific subset of the population. And he kept extending the COVID-19 emergency until long after he declared the pandemic over, and Congress had forced him to let it end. Somehow, under the president who promised to restore normalcy to Washington, everything is an emergency.

But President Biden’s track record with emergency declarations — specifically, considering them but not declaring them — suggests they serve a purpose other than good governance. That purpose is politics. When the chief executive is constantly mulling an emergency declaration, that stokes fear and alarm in the public, who assume he has alarming information they don’t. Fear can be a powerful motivator, driving people to vote, protest, or answer polls in the desired way. And many politicians today traffic almost exclusively in the rhetoric of fear. Even 70% of churchgoers have a growing sense of fear, although the Bible repeatedly exhorts them to “fear not.”

Biden is not the only figure to misuse an emergency declaration to advance a political agenda. In May, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper (D) officially declared a state of emergency because the legislature was considering a school choice bill. In June, the Human Rights Campaign — an activist organization with no governmental or emergency power — declared a state of emergency for people in Florida who identify as LGBT because the state government enacted measures to check the inroads of transgender ideology in education and medicine. These nakedly political emergency declarations cheapen the whole concept, so that people are tempted to take it less seriously in the event of an actual emergency.

Today’s progressives are apparently trying to improve on former Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel’s slogan, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” After lurching society to the Left, their worry is not that they might waste a crisis by failing to achieve their agenda, but that there aren’t enough crises to accommodate it all. Thus, they are proactively looking for crises to exploit or, if necessary, manufacture. “Is this a crisis?” they ask themselves. “Or rather, would people believe it is?”

Healthy representative governments don’t flit breathlessly from crisis to crisis, nor do they replace mature deliberation for fear-driven urgency. This is unacceptable, and it must not continue.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARITICLE: Two Princeton, MIT Scientists Say EPA Climate Regulations Based on a ‘Hoax’

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©2023 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

EPA’s New Climate Rule Would Cause Rolling Blackouts In Huge Swath Of America, Analysis Finds

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  • Proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations for power plant emissions could spur blackouts in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) power grid region and cost stakeholders nearly $250 billion in the coming decades, according to comments filed in response to the rule by the Center of the American Experiment (CAE).
  • The average annual cost to stakeholders of building enough capacity to stave off the blackouts CAE projects in the MISO region is greater than the average annual benefit the EPA estimates its proposals will bring for the entire country by 2055, according to CAE’s analysis.
  • “This is the regulatory equivalent of studying the structural integrity of the top floor of a 100-story building without doing so for the preceding 99 floors,” Isaac Orr, policy fellow for the CAE and coauthor of CAE’s comments, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules regulating carbon dioxide emissions for power plants would lead to blackouts in a large slice of the Midwest and impose costs of nearly $250 billion, according to new analysis by the Center of the American Experiment (CAE).

The EPA’s proposed regulations would require fossil fuel-fired power plants to adopt developing technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and hydrogen blending, in order to significantly bring down their greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades. CAE filed comments this week in response to the EPA’s proposals, highlighting in its analysis that the EPA has overestimated the efficacy of wind and solar while exposing the 45 million people living in the area served by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) power grid to elevated blackout risks.

The EPA “does not appear to have the expertise necessary to enact such a sweeping regulation on the American power sector,” CAE wrote in its comments.

CAE’s analysis found that the EPA’s modeled MISO grid could result in massive blackouts across the 15 states it serves, with one stress test scenario estimating that nearly one in five MISO-served households would be without power. Additionally, CAE calculated that building up enough capacity to avoid its projected blackouts in the MISO region would cost $246 billion in total by 2055.

That figure breaks down to $7.7 billion annually on average through 2055, a number which is greater than the EPA’s projected $5.9 billion annual benefit to the entire country if the proposals are finalized.

“For EPA’s RIA on the proposed rules, EPA assumes 99 percent of the emissions reductions resulting from changes to the electric grid are driven by the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is called its ‘Post-IRA’ Base Case and only 1 percent is from the proposed rules,” Orr continued. “But EPA never studies whether its base case, which accounts for 99 percent of the changes, maintains enough reliable power plants on the grid to meet electricity demand, as they only looked at that last 1 percent,” Orr said, adding that “this is the regulatory equivalent of studying the structural integrity of the top floor of a 100-story building without doing so for the preceding 99 floors.”

“EPA is required to justify any proposed regulations from a scientific and economic standpoint in a document called a Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA). Unfortunately, EPA used misleading assumptions in its analysis to justify the rules that don’t accurately reflect their impact on the reliability of the grid or their cost,” Isaac Orr, policy fellow for the CAE and coauthor of CAE’s comments, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Edison Electric Institute, a leading trade group for U.S. energy companies, also filed comments in response to the EPA’s proposals this week, highlighting that the EPA’s assertion that the efficacy of hydrogen blending and CCS has been adequately demonstrated is legally insufficient.

“The proposed rule does not require that plants go offline,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF. “The proposed rule would require plants to install proven technology to abate greenhouse gas emissions. The proposal provides owners and operators of power plants with ample lead time and substantial compliance flexibilities, allowing power companies and grid operators to make sound long-term planning and investment decisions, and supporting the power sector’s ability to continue delivering reliable and affordable electricity.”

The EPA “looks forward to reviewing comments and constructively engaging with stakeholders as we work to finalize the proposed standards,” the spokesperson continued.

Two of the “proven” technologies cited by the EPA in its proposal are CCS and hydrogen blending. A considerable majority of CCS projects have underperformed or failed across the world, according to a 2022 report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, while hydrogen blending is a technique that is neither completely safe nor effective, according to a 2022 report by the Pipeline Safety Trust.

The EPA is seeking to impose these new regulations under the Clean Air Act in a way that accords with the limits to its authority clarified by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA, decided in June 2022. The proposals align with the Biden administration’s wider push to achieve net-zero carbon emissions in the American power sector by 2035 and to have the American economy reach net-zero by 2050.

Some aims of the new proposals are “more aggressive” than those of the Clean Power Plan (CPP), an Obama-era attempt to impose stiff regulations on fossil fuel-fired power plants that ultimately formed the basis of West Virginia’s successful legal challenge in West Virginia v. EPA, according to comments filed in response to the rule by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Mark Christie, a top official for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) warned in June that “catastrophic consequences” could await the U.S. if the premature retirement of fossil fuel-fired power plants continues before green energy alternatives are ready to supply large amounts of power to the grid.

MISO did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Blue State That Pushes Green Energy Delays Closing Power Plants Amid Blackout Concerns

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Kept Husband and Private-Jet Connoisseur Kerry Ripped for Demanding Agriculture Emission Cuts: ‘Bankrupt Every Farmer in America’

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John Kerry’s deranged ‘Green’ policies are wreaking havoc on American families. And Kerry flies around the world on private jets to promote this crap. Kerry has been wrong on practically everything, but he continues to exert significant power in American and global affairs. Watch below.

Kerry made controversial comments during speech in May

By Fox News, July 31st, 2023

Kerry ripped for demanding agriculture emission cuts: ‘Bankrupt every farmer in America’

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry was blasted on social media over the weekend by critics who accused him of trying to destroy the agriculture industry in order to achieve “net zero” emissions.

“Agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions of the world, depending a little bit on how you count it, but it’s anywhere from 26 to 33, and we can’t get to net zero, we don’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution,” Kerry told a climate change summit in May.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Geller Report Staff

RELATED TWEETS:

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Energy Industry Fears White House Will Declare COVID-Like ‘Climate Emergency’

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They promoted lie after lie on Covid and got away with murder, literally. Why wouldn’t work for the fetish hoax on climate?

“Every single prediction they’ve ever made has been wrong… They still haven’t, after 30 years, shown us that human emissions of CO2 drive global warming.”

Energy Industry Fears White House Will Declare COVID-Like ‘Climate Emergency’

By Jack Phillips, The Epoch Times, July 30, 2023:

Some energy industry groups are expressing concern that the White House will declare a COVID-19-like emergency—but for the climate instead.”They’re leaning to that direction,” U.S. Oil and Gas Association President Tim Stewart told Just the News in an article published on July 30. “If you grant the president’s emergency powers to declare a climate emergency, it’s just like COVID.”

An emergency declaration on the climate could give the president “vast and unchecked authority to shut down everything from communications to infrastructure,” said Mr. Stewart, who has been a critic of the Biden administration.

Infrastructure around water and electricity could be affected by such a decision, he said.

“They can literally do exactly what they did in COVID,” Mr. Stewart said. “If you disagree with the climate emergency, [speech] can be shut down. We really need to be paying attention to that because that power could be extended indefinitely until the ‘climate emergency’ is over. Who knows how long that would last.”

The White House press office didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment about whether the administration might be preparing such a declaration.

President Joe Biden and other administration officials have said that the United States and the world are in the midst of a “climate crisis” and have used language describing it as an emergency. So far, Mr. Biden has stopped short of declaring an emergency, although some Democrats and environmental groups have pushed the idea.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Nobel Prize Winner Canceled By IMF After Announcing There Is No Climate Crisis

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Clauser, who won the Physics Nobel Prize in 2022, “was to present a seminar on climate models to the IMF on Thursday and now his talk has been summarily canceled. “This is why no one speaks up and out against the greatest political fraud of the modern age. The immense power and machinery of the left will destroy you.

Dr. John Francis Clauser, PhD is an American experimental and theoretical physicist. He is best known for his contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular for the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality, for the first experimental proof that non-local quantum entanglement is real (Freedman-Clauser), and for the formulation of the theory of Local Realism (Clauser-Horne).

Nobel Prize winner canceled by IMF after denouncing ‘climate change’ alarmism

The UN’s International Monetary Fund canceled a talk by Dr. John Clauser shortly after he declared that he does not ‘believe there is a climate crisis.’

By: Lifesite News, Jul 25, 2023:

Nobel Prize laureate Dr. John Clauser’s talk at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been canceled following his outspoken criticism of the “climate change” agenda.

Clauser, who won the Physics Nobel Prize in 2022, “was to present a seminar on climate models to the IMF on Thursday and now his talk has been summarily canceled,” according to a press release by the CO2 Coalition, an organization critical of the mainstream climate narrative that Clauser joined in May 2023.

“According to an email he received last evening, the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, Pablo Moreno, had read the flyer for John’s July 25 zoom talk and summarily and immediately canceled the talk,” the press release continues, adding that “Technically, it was ‘postponed.’”

Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace activist and now a member of the CO2 Coalition, also insinuated in a tweet that “postponed” means that Clauser’s talk is effectively canceled.

Clauser made headlines recently when he said during a speech at the “Quantum Korea 2023” event that he does not “believe there is a climate crisis.”

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

GOP Lawmakers Introduce Bill That Would Bar Biden From Invoking A National Climate Emergency

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Republican Texas Rep. August Pfluger and West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito introduced legislation Monday morning aiming to preempt any possible attempt by President Joe Biden to use emergency powers to circumvent congressional checks on his administration’s sweeping climate agenda.

“The Real Emergencies Act” would clarify that the president is unable to invoke emergency powers permitted by the National Emergencies Act, the Disaster Relief and Emergencies Act and the Public Health Service Act on the basis of a perceived climate change crisis. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other left-wing congressional lawmakers have called for Biden to declare a national climate emergency to further his administration’s aggressive climate agenda.

“I am proud to join Senator Capito in introducing the Real Emergencies Act, which will prevent the White House from distracting from real emergencies – like skyrocketing inflation and record-high energy costs – by declaring climate change a national emergency,” Pfluger told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Our legislation ensures that President Biden does not abuse the power of his office to pursue his anti-American energy agenda against the will of the American people.”

The Real Emergencies Act by Daily Caller News Foundation

Schumer said in January 2021 that a declaration of climate emergency would enable Biden to “do many, many things under the emergency powers of the President that wouldn’t have to go through – that he could do without legislation.” Schumer’s comments came as the Inflation Reduction Act had stalled in congress amid Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s initial refusal to support many of the bill’s provisions in an evenly-divided Senate.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) similarly urged Biden to invoke emergency powers on the basis of a perceived climate emergency to “invoke authorities under the Defense Production Act and Trade Expansion Act, mobilizing domestic industry to manufacture affordable renewable energy technologies.” The CPC also demanded in the same March 2022 document that Biden unilaterally ban fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and halt all crude oil exports, some four months before Manchin eventually reached a July 2022 deal with Schumer to support the Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate.

With Manchin’s support secured, Biden was able to sign the Inflation Reduction Act into law in August 2022, about three months before Republicans regained control of the House in the 2022 midterms. As a candidate for the presidency in 2019, Biden delivered a personal “guarantee” that his administration would “end fossil fuels.”

Under the auspices of Biden’s COVID-19 emergency powers, the Biden administration imposed an indefinite pause on student loan payments as well as a federal eviction moratorium. Biden only ended the declared COVID-19 national emergency in April 2023, more than six months after admitting in September 2022 that the pandemic was “over.”

“The Biden administration has repeatedly governed by executive overreach when it comes to energy and environmental regulations, ignoring the law and doing so without congressional approval,” Capito told the DCNF. “The Real Emergencies Act would ensure the president cannot go further by declaring a national emergency, which would grant him more executive authority and grow the size of government all in the name of climate change.”

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Lab-grown ‘meat’ worse for environment than retail beef: Study

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The lab-grown meat industry is propped up more by hopeful modelling than favourable data.

The high-tech utopia we keep hearing about will have to wait, if a recent pre-print study on laboratory-cultured meat products is to be believed.

According to researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Holtville, “sustainable” meat alternatives have a carbon footprint that is likely “orders of magnitude” higher than retail beef based on current and near-term production methods.

Cultured meat production may be pumping out between four and 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef, according to the new research, which assessed energy use and greenhouse gas emissions through all stages of production.

If the study passes peer review, its conclusion would be damning: lab-grown meat, long touted as a clean, green alternative to the traditional butcher process, could be harming the planet more than the industry it’s trying to displace.

Truly, who could have guessed that growing meat in giant steel bioreactors using highly-processed pharmaceutical products would be worse for the environment than a herd of cows chewing grass?

The researchers did not rule out the possibility that technological advances that enable a move from using pharmaceutical-grade ingredients to their food-grade equivalents could eventually tip the scales in favour of artificially grown meat.

“It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media,” according to UCD food scientist Edward Spang.

However, the team’s findings suggest that in its current state, the lab-grown meat sector is propped up more by hopeful modelling (read: wishful thinking) than favourable present-day data.

Derrick Risner is another of the UCD food scientists who worked on the study. He wrote that their findings were important “given that investment dollars have specifically been allocated to this sector with the thesis that this product will be more environmentally friendly than beef,” adding, “my concern would just be scaling this up too quickly and doing something harmful for the environment”.

According to Science Alert, which reported on the pre-print study:

While cultured meat uses less land than herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, not to mention less water and antibiotics, environmental costs of the highly specific nutrients required to grow the product rapidly add up.

These include running laboratories to extract growth factors from animal serums, as well as growing crops for sugars and vitamins.

Then there’s the energy required to purify all of these broth ingredients to a high standard before they can be fed to the growing meat lumps. This energy-intensive, extreme level of purification is needed to prevent introducing microbes to the culture.

In their research, the California-based team also reviewed the most climate-friendly beef production systems already in operation today. They found that these outperformed even the best synthetic meat processes available.

The California researchers are not the first to have reached the conclusion that real beef is better for the planet than artificial alternatives.

A 2019 University of Oxford study published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems likewise found that the energy used to make cultivated meat could release more greenhouse gases than traditional farming.

Modelling traditional versus lab-grown meat options 1,000 years into the future, the team in Oxford concluded that synthetic meat would only be “climactically superior” depending on “the availability of decarbonized energy generation and the specific production systems that are realized”.

Reporting on the 2019 research, Vox summarised: “Yes, cows produce a lot of methane, and methane is very bad for global warming. Yet it only lasts in the atmosphere for a dozen years. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, lasts more than a century. And you know what releases a lot of CO2? Labs — including those that make cultured meat.”

So while start-ups in Silicon Valley continue to pour millions of investment capital into poor substitutes with a bigger carbon footprint than Betsy, do your part for the environment and order your favourite fillet next time you dine out.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg

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‘Coordinated Effort’: Tucker Carlson Rips Corporate Media For Parroting Chinese ‘Propaganda’ On Climate Change

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson ripped the media Wednesday for parroting the United Nations’ newest report on climate change, which plays into China’s “coordinated effort” to hobble the United States economically.

“Let’s pretend for a second that our country had a news media that was interested in bringing you the news, not in lecturing you about your moral inferiority, you’re so bad, or lying to you in transparently obvious ways. January 6th was an insurrection, guys. Or even forcing you to repeat whatever childish slogan they’ve come up with,” Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller News Foundation, said. “Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. Okay. Trans women are women. All right, say it or else. Let’s imagine we lived somewhere completely different, in a country where the media was obligated to tell you what was actually happening in the world and why it matters. What stories would we be talking about now if we lived in that country?”

The United Nations released a 36-page report Monday that called for “equity” and the use of “cultural values” and “Indigenous Knowledge” in combating climate change while advocating for “[r]edistributive policies … that shield the poor and vulnerable, social safety nets, equity, inclusion and just transitions.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” which Carlson noted was repeated by multiple media outlets in some form.

“There’s still people in this country, for example, who seem to believe the so-called climate agenda is actually about the climate or the environment or the earth or something and not a coordinated effort by the government of China to hobble the U.S. and the West and take its place as leader of the world. Which of course is exactly what’s going on,” Carlson added later, after discussing China’s involvement in deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia and a trade partnership with Russia. “It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, but most people don’t get a chance to think about it because  propaganda is just too thick. It’s unceasing, it never ends.”

WATCH:

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the United States could learn much from China on how to address climate change March 10. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate change envoy, said that talks with China on climate issues have stalled since the downing of a spy balloon in February.

“If you took a look at the entire U.N.’s report, and actually we spent the entire day doing that, there are big differences in how they plan to solve global warming. This time the plan is much more explicit: Make the West, the United States primarily, but also western Europe, blow up its own economy while China, the fastest growing economy in the world, doesn’t have to do anything,” Carlson said.

China approved 168 new power plants fueled by coal in 2022, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM) released Feb. 27. The country was responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country in 2019, the BBC reported.

“And in fact, they’re not doing anything. China is currently building two new coal plants every week. Every week,” Carlson said. “I’m not good at math but that’s like 104 a year. That’s a lot of coal plants. How many are we building a week? Zero. Pretty weird for a country committed to fighting climate change.”

AUTHOR

HAROLD HUTCHISON

Reporter.

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The Latest Madness: Coffee Is Contributing To Climate Change

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Researchers Claim Coffee Is Contributing To Climate Change

By Anthony Scott, Gateway Pundit, January 19, 2023:

First red meat, then gas stoves, and now coffee.

Researchers from Canada are currently analyzing coffee’s “contribution to climate change”.

The new analysis was published by researchers from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi in a piece titled “Here’s how your cup of coffee contributes to climate change”

In their analysis researchers concluded “Limiting your contribution to climate change requires an adapted diet, and coffee is no exception. Choosing a mode of coffee preparation that emits less GHGs (greenhouse gases) and moderating your consumption are part of the solution.”

In their study, the researchers compared the climate impact of traditional filter coffee, Encapsulated filter coffee, Brewed coffee (French Press) and Soluble coffee (instant coffee).

The study concluded traditional coffee has the highest carbon footprint.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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The case for nuclear power

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Despite its lethal past, nuclear energy is the clean and cost-effective power source we need.

In the fall 2022 issue of the technology-and-society journal The New Atlantis, authors Thomas and Nate Hochman examine the pros and cons of building new nuclear power plants in the United States.  The case of nuclear power is fraught with political issues that are inextricably tied up with technical issues, but the Hochmans do a good job of laying out the problems facing nuclear power and some possible solutions.

If nuclear power had not been invented until 2010, say, it would probably be welcomed as the keystone in our society’s answer to climate change.  Imagine a source of the most fungible type of energy — electricity — that takes teaspoons of nuclear fuel compared to carloads or pipelines full of fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases, and when properly engineered runs more reliably than wind, solar, hydro, or sometimes even natural gas, as the misadventure of Texas’s Great Freeze of February 2021 showed.  What’s to oppose?  Well, a lot, as the Hochmans admit.

Deadly history

It is perhaps unfortunate that the first major use of nuclear technology was in the closing days of World War II, when the US became the only nation so far to employ nuclear weapons in wartime, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese with bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The long shadow of nuclear war has cast a darkness over the technology of nuclear power ever since, despite optimistic but misguided attempts to promote peaceful uses in the 1950s.

The Hochmans describe the golden era of US nuclear power plant construction, which ran roughly from 1967 to 1987, as a period in which the two major US manufacturers — General Electric and Westinghouse — offered “turn-key” plants that were priced competitively with coal-fired units.  The utilities snapped them up, and the vast majority of existing plants were built in those two decades.

The turn-key pricing turned out to be a big mistake, however.  Manufacturers expected the cost per plant to decline as economies of scale kicked in, but for a variety of reasons both technical and regulatory, the hoped-for economies never materialised.  The particular pressurised-water technology that was used was adapted from early nuclear submarines, and in retrospect may not have been the best choice for domestic power plants.  By the time the companies realised their mistake and switched to cost-plus contracts, they had lost a billion dollars, and utilities became much less enthusiastic when they had to pay the true costs of building the plants.

In the meantime, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1970, making it much harder to obtain permits to build complicated things like nuclear plants.  In the pre-Act days, permitting a plant sometimes took less than a year, but once NEPA passed, such speediness (and the resulting economies of fast construction) was a thing of the past.

Then came the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl plant fire and disaster in 1986, further blackening the reputation of nuclear power in the public mind.  Add to that the not-in-my-back-yard problems faced by attempts to find permanent storage locations for nuclear waste, and by 1990 the US nuclear industry was in a kind of coma from which it has not yet recovered.

The Hochmans point to France as a counterexample of a nation that made a conscious decision to go primarily nuclear for its electric power, and even today about 70% of France’s power is nuclear.  But even France is having problems maintaining their aging plants, and French nuclear promoters face the same sorts of political headwinds that prevail in the US.

Viable option

Now that climate change is an urgent priority for millions of people and dozens of governments, the strictly technical appeal of nuclear power is still valid. It really does make zero greenhouse gases in operation, and when properly engineered, it can be the most reliable form of power, providing the essential base-load capacity that is needed to stabilise grids that will draw an increasing amount of energy from highly intermittent solar and wind sources in the future. Eventually, energy-storage technology may make it possible to store enough energy to smooth out the fluctuations of renewables, but we simply don’t have that now, and it may not come for years or decades.

In the meantime, there are plans on drawing boards for so-called “modular” plants.  If every single automobile was a custom design from the ground up, including a from-scratch engine and body, only the likes of Elon Musk could afford to drive.  But that was how nuclear plants were made back in the day:  each design was customised to the particular site and customer specifications.

If manufacturers had the prospects of sales and freedom to develop a modular one-size-fits-all design, they could turn the process into something similar to the way mobile homes are made today:  in factories, and then shipped out in pieces to be simply assembled on site.  And newer designs favouring gravity feeds over powered pumps can be made much safer so that if anything goes wrong, the operators simply walk away and the plant safely shuts itself down.

Standing in the way of these innovations are (1) the prevailing negative political winds against nuclear power, enforced with more emotion than logic by environmental groups and major political parties, and (2) the need to change regulations to allow such technical innovations, which currently are all but blocked by existing laws and rules.

In the Hochmans’ best-case scenario, the US begins importing modular plants from countries where an existing base of nuclear know-how allows efficient manufacturing, which these days means places like China.  Even if the US nuclear industry turned on full-speed today, it would take a decade or more to recover the expertise base that was lost a generation ago when the industry collapsed.  Regulations and regulatory agencies would change from merely obstructing progress to reasoned cooperation with nuclear-plant manufacturing and installation.  And we would derive an increasing proportion of our energy from a source that has always made a lot of technical sense.

On the other hand, things may just go on as they are now, with old plants closing and no new ones to take their place. That would be bad for a number of reasons, but reason hasn’t been the only consideration in the history of nuclear energy up to now.

This article has been republished from the author’s blog, Engineering Ethics, with permission.

AUTHOR

Karl D. Stephan

Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan

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Climate Extremism Is Making America Mentally Ill. Here’s How

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America is floundering in an epidemic of anxiety, depression and drug use.

One in six Americans takes some kind of psychiatric drug, mostly antidepressants, a medical study concluded, and some of them (Prozac and Paxil) are linked to acts of violence. A third of high school students cannot shake feelings of sadness or hopelessness, another report found, and nearly 2 0% of teens have contemplated suicide.

Still more frightening, both studies are based on data collected before the COVID pandemic sent college, teenage and younger children into lockdowns, social isolation, minimal physical activity, hours spent playing video games and reading censored and self-selected online media — and rampant depression and “chronic incapacitating mental illness.” Nor is the problem confined to America.

Researchers and psychologists are constantly finding new reasons to explain the growing inability to cope. Their newest “explanation” is — climate change!

“Climate grief” is “real,” they insist, and it’s spreading rapidly among young people. “The future is frightening,” 77% of 10,000 young people aged 16-25 from the USA and other countries told analysts who investigate “climate anxiety.” Large numbers of children are having climate nightmares.

“The climate mental health crisis” already affects people who have “lost everything in worsening climate infernos,” laments a NASA scientist and climate activist fear-monger who’s convinced we face “the end of life on Earth as we know it.”

“I don’t want to be alive anymore. The animals are all going to die, and I don’t want to be here when all the animals are dead,” a four-year-old child wailed.

Parents fantasize about killing their children, over fears of the “climate-ravaged future” they face. Parents and children alike consider suicide. Indeed, there’s a clear link between increased global temperatures and suicide rates, a Stanford economist asserts.

Dr. Thomas Doherty has built an entire psychology practice around climate psychoses, the Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of “climate-aware therapists,” and a “peer support network” offers grief therapy modeled on twelve-step drug addiction programs.

There’s only one real solution to this epidemic, “experts” insist: Governments must act immediately to “fix” the climate, and eliminate “the death knell of climate chaos hanging over people’s heads.”

Excuse the bad pun — but this is insane! The hysteria and histrionics have gotten completely out of hand. They have no basis in reality.

We do not have a climate “crisis.” We have a climate fear-mongering and cancel-culture crisis.

The solution to the climate drug and mental health crisis is not to “fix” grotesquely exaggerated climate problems. It is to end the indoctrination and censorship that dominate discussions about climate change, from kindergarten through graduate school, and in almost every realm of science, politics and news.

The supposed climate crisis exists in computer models, headlines and hype about “unprecedented” temperatures, extreme weather, floods and droughts that have scant basis in Real World evidence. Viewpoints, evidence and experts questioning and challenging these claims are banned from classrooms, school curricula, news and social media, and government policy discussions – starting at the top.

The White House “national climate adviser,” for example, works hand-in-glove with Big Tech and news organizations, suppressing facts about climate change reality. Most federal (and many state) government agencies have similar officials and programs. Meta (Facebook), Twitter, YouTube and other Big Tech companies routinely, consistently and happily assist with this deplatforming and censorship.

The so-called Next Generation Science Standards feature climate alarmism as a guiding principle for students K-12, and determine what is being taught in over a third of America’s classrooms.

Meanwhile, as America and Europe are propagandized and prodded to eliminate their fossil fuel use — with enormous costs in jobs, living standards and lives — China, India and 100 other countries are rapidly expanding their oil, gas and coal use, to lift people out of rampant poverty.

Worse, China increasingly dominates raw material and “green tech” supply chains — and gets a free pass on its fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental destruction, and slave and child labor.

All these realities are studiously and systematically ignored and cancelled.

Fortunately, millions of parents are becoming more involved in their children’s homework and school boards. Fight for Schools and other such efforts are working to bring science, honesty and accountability back to education. They recognize that we desperately need diversity of political and scientific thought.

Without it, the United States and Western Civilization will see their liberties and living standards rolled backward by decades.

The shrill, alarmist cries of climate extremists must be confronted and doused with sound reason. This, for the sake of the children and everyone’s peace of mind.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

CRAIG RUCKER

Craig Rucker is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org).

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The Real Problem with Greta Thunberg Is Not Her Age

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Greta Thunberg first came into the public light in 2018 when she started a school strike on climate in front of the Swedish parliament.

March 15th saw enthusiastic worldwide school student protests inspired by passionate appeals from 16-year-old Swedish school girl-turned-global-leader Greta Thunberg. Thunberg first came into the public light last year when she started a school strike on climate in front of the Swedish parliament. She rose to worldwide fame in January when she addressed the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Predictably, a lot of the reactions from those who are skeptical of climate change alarmism seem to focus on Thunberg’s age. Even Bjorn Lomborg seems to have alluded to her in his remark about how the predominant narrative about climate change makes children scared.

I disagree with this perspective. I believe that 16-year-olds have as much intellectual capacity as legal adults to understand the issues related to climate change and the potential measures that could be taken to mitigate it. However, if 16-year-olds desire to seriously contribute to important political debates, they should, like anyone else, do it without engaging in demagoguery and scaremongering.

It is here that Greta Thunberg—in spite of all her genuine sincerity and passion—has failed spectacularly and made the legions of her fans, as well as people who may face the consequences of the panicky measures she advocates, a great disservice.

To get a taste of the content of Thunberg’s preachings, let us consider her recent remarks to European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker:

We have to focus every inch of our being on climate change. Because if we fail to do so then all our achievements and progress have been for nothing. […] According to the IPCC report, we are about 11 years away from being in the position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control. To avoid that, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place within this coming decade.

There is no place for nuance here, no trace of uncertainty, no appeal to actual facts or pragmatics of politics—only the demand for total commitment and sacrifice because the absolute urgency of our predicament is supposed to be self-evident since none other than IPCC purportedly said so.

I would wager that it would be pointless to ask Thunberg any serious questions about the actual science underlying the climate change issue—to ask her how much the Earth has warmed so far since 1979 compared to computer model predictions; that the bulk of the recent warming occurred during the El Niño stages of the ENSO climate oscillation; or whether she is aware that the doubling of CO2 can only in itself cause only about 1°C of warming and that to postulate alarmist scenarios one needs to postulate uncertain positive feedbacks, whereas, in reality, the net feedback may be zero or negative; that a lot more people die from cold temperatures than from hot ones and that it is not extreme cold temperatures that are the most deadly; that increased CO2 concentrations are good for plant life, and so on.

Let us focus on an easier issue and ask whether the latest IPCC report even in the (as usual) distorted summary for policymakers says anything remotely similar to Thunberg’s 11-years-left-till-Apocalypse-unless-we-act claim. Unsurprisingly, the summary—biased as it is in favor of alarm—says no such thing. Thunberg seems to be wildly misinterpreting the statement on page 6 of the summary that “global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 (till which date 11 years remain) and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.” There is no implication in the summary that this extent of warming may cause catastrophic planetary consequences.

Even if we take what Thunberg claims about the inevitable impacts of an unaddressed climate change at face value, she does not appear to be cognizant that the only viable way of reducing CO2 emissions is switching to nuclear power. Writing for that famous den of climate change deniers, MIT Technology Review, last July, James Temple cited an estimate that if even California, with its abundant sunshine, were to switch to 100 percent renewables, that would make the price per megawatt-hour skyrocket to $1612.

Instead, we hear from her the usual platitudes that massive emissions reductions should be made immediately using renewable energy sources. Added to this are calls to abandon the focus on competition and focus on equity as if that clearly had anything to do with climate change or handling it.

We must also reflect on the fact that Thunberg is considered by many people to be a global hero. She has even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But is it really brave or enlightened to advocate a cause that has long enjoyed the status of conventional wisdom? To which one can only sadly hear widely disseminated public objections from the likes of President Trump, who is admittedly as clueless on the issue as the most religious alarmists are and who does not care about the outrage his remarks can cause?

It is sad if this is what is taken for Nobel-worthy heroism these days. Countless Venezuelans, for instance, risk their freedom, health, and lives every day, protesting against the Maduro regime that has lost any semblance of connection to reality and plunged the formerly richest country in Latin America into the literal darkness of the pre-industrial age. It is people like them who should be invited to global fora to tell their tale. Them, not a girl from one of the richest and most comfortable countries on Earth who is in too much of a panic because she cannot make herself actually read up on the actual science about climate change and the real state of the potential solutions.

The real problem with the climate change activist sensation Greta Thunberg is not that she is 16 years old. Rather, it is that she is a clueless fanatic who is considered brave and enlightened for promoting a cause that almost everyone agrees with without any study or reflection. And it is the duty of anyone who does not want clueless fanaticism to determine policies affecting billions to call it out as such.

This article is republished with permission from Medium.

AUTHOR

Daniil Gorbatenko

Daniil Gorbatenko is a free-market economist living in Aix-en-Provence, France. He obtained his PhD in economics from Aix-Marseille University in 2018.

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If Climate Change Is a Dire Threat, Why Is No One Talking about Nuclear Power?

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A common (legitimate) concern with nuclear is unhealthy radiation, its usage actually emits less radiation than the burning of coal.

There is a deafening silence surrounding nuclear energy. Yet, if you are to believe the current climate alarmism on display, the world’s future is hanging by a thread. Indeed, the forceful climate marches in London last week, the Greta Thunberg-ization of the world’s youth, and David Attenborough’s new Netflix documentary are all symptoms of a growing call to arms. According to them, climate change is real and impending, and, in young Greta’s words, they “want you to panic.”

The situation appears dire. Yet, assuming it is, there seems to be a gap in reasoning. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for a “Green New Deal,” which would seek to remove America’s carbon footprint by 2030 by “upgrading” every single one of the 136 million houses in America, completely overhauling the nation’s transport infrastructure (both public and private), and somehow simultaneously guaranteeing universal health care, access to healthy food, and economic security—without any consideration of cost. In other words, a complete pie-in-the-sky scheme that is more concerned with virtue-signaling than with pragmatic reality.

But if these people truly care about the environment and the damage being caused by climate change, why is no one talking about nuclear?

Nuclear is fully carbon-free and therefore a “clean” energy source in carbon terms. This is crucial considering the primary villain of climate change is CO2; switching to nuclear would directly cut out carbon emissions and thus represent a significant step forward, except for the construction phase (which would create a one-off nominal carbon debt about equal to that of solar farms). It has successfully contributed to decarbonizing public transport in countries such as Japan, France, and Sweden.

It is also often overlooked that nuclear is the safest way to generate reliable electricity (and far safer than coal or gas) despite Frankenstein-esque visions of nuclear meltdowns à la Chernobyl, which are ridiculously exaggerated and exceedingly rare.

Nuclear is also incredibly reliable, with an average capacity of 92.3 percent, meaning it is fully operational more than 330 days a year, which is drastically more reliable than both wind and solar—combined.

Finally, whereas a common (legitimate) concern with nuclear is that it creates unhealthy radiation, its usage actually emits less radiation than, for example, the burning of coal. Moreover, the problem posed by waste is more psychological and political nowadays than it is technological. Despite the Simpsons-inspired image of green, murky water, nuclear waste is, in fact, merely a collection of old steel rods; the nuclear waste produced in America over the last 60 years could all fit into a single medium-sized Walmart. Furthermore, it is not only securely stored in concrete-and-steel casks in the middle of deserts, but it also loses radiation over time and can actually be recycled to extend the life of nuclear production by centuries.

There are explicit success stories that attest to the power of nuclear. France and Sweden, which have some of the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the developed world, both rely heavily on nuclear (72 percent and 42 percent, respectively) rather than on wind or solar power. France generated 88 percent of its electricity total from zero-carbon sources, and Sweden got an even more impressive 95 percent. At the same time, these countries have some of the lowest energy prices in Europe, whereas renewable-heavy countries such as Germany and Denmark have the two highest energy prices on the continent—without much carbon reduction to show for it relative to France and Sweden.

So why, if people such as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez care as much about the climate as they claim to, are they seemingly so blindly attracted to over-ambitious, unrealistic proposals? Indeed, a near-utopiazation of renewables fails to take into account many of the issues associated with these while neglecting the advantages of nuclear.

Renewable energy isn’t always reliable, as mentioned (which makes sense when you consider the fact that the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow). When the reliability of these renewables falters (wind turbines only provide energy 34.5 percent of the time, and solar panels an even lower 25.1 percent), expensive and carbon-heavy stop-gap measures act as backup.

There are also ecological problems. Wind and solar farms require tremendous amounts of wildlife-cleared land and are often protested by local conservationists. Electricity from solar panels on individual homes, on the other hand, a plan AOC apparently endorses, is twice as expensive, thus making it unaffordable for many American households. Though the debate rages, there is also a case to be made for the fact that wind turbines represent serious hazards to rare and threatened birds such as eagles and other birds of prey. They also threaten marine wildlife such as porpoises and coral reefs.

When compared more directly with various forms of renewable energy, the narrative also skews in nuclear’s favor. Solar farms require 450 times more land than do nuclear power plants; nuclear plants require far fewer materials for production than solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal; and solar produces up to 300 times more hazardous waste per terawatt-hour of energy than nuclear.

Yet the issues aren’t merely technological and ecological. Indeed, there is an argument that renewables such as solar and wind will become more and more efficient and cheaper over time, which is certainly true (though some experts dispute the net validity of this claim). A different problem, however, is that the context within which they are promoted, such as the “Green New Deal,” often translates into economic madness (the GND would cost up to $90 trillion according to some). It is striking how the Green New Deal encapsulates not only climate change but also health care, jobs, and housing.

Indeed, it goes much further than simply combating the issues facing our environment, incorporating a much wider agenda of socio-economic transformation. And this is why some, such as Michael Shellenberger (president of Environmental Progress—a pro-nuclear, climate change NGO), argue that left-wing politicians in the mold of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez idealize renewables: they provide an environmentalist façade for increased government intervention in areas far beyond the climate.

Of course, nuclear isn’t perfect; it is still very expensive (though this is increasingly solvable through more standardization and long-termism), the risk of Fukushima-like disasters will probably always exist, and the localized environmental impacts are concerns to be addressed. Most importantly, the political will is still lacking.

Despite the fact that the public and private sectors spent a combined $2 trillion between 2007 and 2016 on solar and wind power, solar energy still only accounted for 1.3 percent, and wind power 3.9 percent, of the world’s electricity generation in 2016. Operating at a scale of 94 times more in federal subsidies in America for renewables than for nuclear, this looks like an unsustainable trend. Imagine if it had been invested in nuclear instead.

Rather, the Ocasio-Cortezes of the world, who are by far the most vociferous when it comes to climate change, should put money where their mouths are. Though this article is far from exhaustive and was unable to account for all the nuances and intricacies of environmental and energy policy, it seems that, at the very least, nuclear deserves a spot at the table if we are serious about saving our planet.

AUTHOR

Christopher Barnard

Christopher Barnard is the Head of Campaigning & Events for Students For Liberty UK, as well as a final-year Politics & International Relations student at the University of Kent. He tweets at @ChrisBarnardDL.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.