Quotulatiousness

March 20, 2012

Australian billionaire claims Greenpeace accepts CIA funding to fight coal exports

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

Australian bush hats can apparently be made of tinfoil:

Australian Mining Magnate Clive Palmer has declared the CIA is behind a Greenpeace campaign that aims to slow the growth of Australia’s export coal industry.

[. . .]

The Greenpeace campaign centres on a document titled Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom (PDF) which explicitly states that “Our strategy is to ‘disrupt and delay’ key projects and infrastructure while gradually eroding public and political support for the industry and continually building the power of the movement to win more.” Greenpeace hopes to do so in order to build support for fuels other than coal, in order to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions.

The Greenpeace document says it is “… based on extensive research into the Australian coal industry, made possible by the generous support of the Rockefeller Family Fund.”

That statement is Palmer’s smoking gun, as he said at an event today, as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Commission and other outlets, that “You only have to go back and read the Church Report in the 1970s and to read the reports to the US Congress which sets up the Rockefeller Foundation as a conduit of CIA funding.”

March 7, 2012

Wind turbines are “a technology that isn’t ready for prime time”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Andrew Orlowski on the bad economic and technological decision by the British government to put so much reliance on wind power:

Two studies published this week calculate the astounding cost of Britain’s go-it-alone obsession with using wind turbines to generate so much of the electricity the nation needs.

Both studies make remarkably generous concessions that favour wind technology; the true cost, critics could argue, will be higher in each set of calculations. One study reckons that the UK can still meet its carbon dioxide emissions targets and save £140bn — but only if it dumps today’s inefficient hippie technology. The other puts the potential saving at £120bn — pointing out that the same amount of electricity could be generated using open cycle gas plants at one-tenth the cost of using wind turbines.

“There is nothing inherently good or bad about investing in renewable energy and green technology,” writes economist Professor Gordon Hughes — formerly of the World Bank and now at the University of Edinburgh. “The problem is that the government has decided to back a technology that isn’t ready for prime time, thus distorting the market.”

Hughes’ study — Why is Wind power so expensive? An economic analysis — is published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation today, and simply looks at the costs. The other study, by technical consulting group AF-Mercados, specifically looks at how to reduce CO2 in the cheapest manner — by incurring the least collateral economic damage. It’s called Powerful Targets: Exploring the relative cost of meeting decarbonisation and renewables targets in the British power sector. KPMG originally commissioned the study, but then got cold feet. Both come to similar conclusions: wind is astronomically expensive compared to other sources of energy — and consumers and businesses must pay a high price for the privilege of subsidising such an inefficient technology.

Update, 10 March: A lovely little cartoon from Watts Up With That on this topic:

March 5, 2012

The failure of wind power

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Matt Ridley on the inability of wind power advocates to distort reality:

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

It’s a lesson we still need the Ontario government to learn: our electricity prices are scheduled to go up substantially to finance the massive wind farm investment the McGuinty government has signed up for. Much more of our landscape will look like this in future:

Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?

One answer is money. There were too many people with snouts in the trough. Not just the manufacturers, operators and landlords of the wind farms, but financiers: wind-farm venture capital trusts were all the rage a few years ago — guaranteed income streams are what capitalists like best; they even get paid to switch the monsters off on very windy days so as not to overload the grid. Even the military took the money. Wind companies are paying for a new £20 million military radar at Brizlee Wood in Northumberland so as to enable the Ministry of Defence to lift its objection to the 48-turbine Fallago Rig wind farm in Berwickshire.

February 8, 2012

European energy policy based on renewables falters in face of severe winter weather

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Kevin Myers on the folly of abandoning nuclear power generation in favour of renewables:

Russia’s main gas-company, Gazprom, was unable to meet demand last weekend as blizzards swept across Europe, and over three hundred people died. Did anyone even think of deploying our wind turbines to make good the energy shortfall from Russia?

Of course not. We all know that windmills are a self-indulgent and sanctimonious luxury whose purpose is to make us feel good. Had Europe genuinely depended on green energy on Friday, by Sunday thousands would be dead from frostbite and exposure, and the EU would have suffered an economic body blow to match that of Japan’s tsunami a year ago. No electricity means no water, no trams, no trains, no airports, no traffic lights, no phone systems, no sewerage, no factories, no service stations, no office lifts, no central heating and even no hospitals, once their generators run out of fuel.

Modern cities are incredibly fragile organisms, which tremble on the edge of disaster the entire time. During a severe blizzard, it is electricity alone that prevents a midwinter urban holocaust. We saw what adverse weather can do, when 15,000 people died in the heatwave that hit France in August 2003. But those deaths were spread over a month. Last weekend’s weather, without energy, could have caused many tens of thousands of deaths over a couple of days.

[. . .]

Frau Merkel has announced that Germany is going to phase out nuclear power, simply because of the Japanese tsunami. Well, that is like basing water-collection policies in Rhineland-Westphalia on the monsoon cycle of Borneo. As I was saying last week, the Germans have a powerfully emotional attachment to everything that is “green”, and an energy policy based on renewables will usually win German hearts. But it will not protect the owners of those hearts from frostbite and death due to exposure, for wind can often be not so much a Renewable as an Unusable, and also an Unpredictable, an Unstorable, and — normally when it’s very cold — an Unmovable.

The seriousness of this is hard to exaggerate. The temperature in the Baltic countries last weekend was -33 degrees Celsius. The Eurasian landmass from Calais to Naples to Siberia was an icefield in which hundreds of millions of people were trapped. Without coal, oil and nuclear energy, mass deaths of the old and the young would have occurred on the first night. Three nights on of such conditions, and even the physically fit would have been dying of exposure, as the temperature inside dwellings fell and began to match that of the outside, an inverse image of what happened during the French heatwave 10 years ago, when there was no escape from the heat.

February 6, 2012

Battery sizes: AAA, AA, C, plus S, M, L, and XL

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Coming to a boutique near you soon: wearable battery clothing.

Scientists charged into the fashion industry this week, unveiling a flexible battery that can be woven into fabric and used to boost the juice of everyday gadgets.

The lithium-ion cells were produced by a group of boffins from the Polytechnic School of Montreal. The team claims their bendy power cells are the first wearable battery that uses no liquid electrolytes, New Scientist reports.

The team sandwiched a solid polyethylene oxide electrolyte between a lithium iron phosphate cathode and lithium titanate anode. These are thermoplastic materials which, when gently heated, can be stretched into a thread.

There is a short-term restriction, however:

The next step is to waterproof the technology before attempts to implement it in future clothing and accessories can go ahead. Backpacks and medical-monitoring garments are said to be the first items the team is planning to add the tech to.

It’d be a bit unpleasant to have your shirt packing “hundreds of volts” discharge unexpectedly just because you broke a sweat …

January 20, 2012

Renewable energy: the ethanol scam writ even larger

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

Patrick J. Michaels looks at what he calls the “Great Renewable Energy Scam” and shows what happened with the ethanol fuel program which preceded the current programs:

… here in the U.S. there are some 30 different statewide “renewable portfolio standards” (RPSs) that also mandate pricey power, usually under the guise of fighting dreaded global warming.

RPSs command that a certain percentage of electricity has to come from wind, solar, geothermal, or biomass. Given that this power generally costs a lot more than what comes from a modern coal or gas plant, your local utility passes the cost on in the form of higher bills, which the various state utility commissions are only too happy to approve in the name of saving the planet.

[. . .]

One needs to look no further than ethanol as a motor fuel, mandated by the feds. Sold as “renewable” and reducing pernicious carbon dioxide emissions, it actually produces more in its life cycle than simply burning an equivalent amount of gasoline. It also — unconscionably — consumes 40% of U.S. corn production, and we are the by far the world’s largest producer of this important basic food.

The popular revulsion against ethanol has succeeded in cutting its massive federal subsidy, of $0.54 per gallon, which ran out on Dec. 31. But that doesn’t stop the federal mandate. Last year it was for roughly 14 billion gallons from corn and it will be nearly 15 billion in 2012. By 2022, up to 20 billion gallons will be required — all from corn — unless there is a breakthrough in so-called “cellulosic” ethanol, which, no matter how much money the government throws at it, hasn’t happened. Indeed, the largest cellulosic plant, Range Fuels, in Camilla, Ga., just went bankrupt. The loss to American taxpayers appears to be about $120 million, or about 25% of a Solyndra.

[. . .]

Having seen the ethanol debacle, will the states put solar and wind in their rightful (small) niches by repealing the RPSs? Increasing utility bills with renewable mandates is politically dangerous, and there is less and less political will to subsidize and otherwise prop up energy sources and technologies that cost too much.

January 11, 2012

Pro-nuclear power opinion piece on the BBC

Filed under: Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

January 1, 2012

Bargain hunting: pay only $103,000 for a car costing $2.2 million

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

They’re pretty exclusive: so far they’ve only made 239 of them, and they start at $103,000 per unit. They have, however, taken on a bit of US federal government funding:

It’s another example of USA tax dollars at work — in Finland:

From ABC News, Oct 20th, 2011:

    With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

    Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department’s $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the company’s manufacturing jobs are still limited to the assembly of the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car in Finland.

Let’s do the math.

239 cars produced for 2012 model year.

$529,000,000 USD in Government loans

That works out to $2,213,389 (2.2 million) per car.

Selling price $103,000 USD, that leaves only $2,110,389 in taxpayer funded overhead per vehicle. And, they’ve only sold 50 so far.

Such a deal.

Of course, when your promotion strategy revolves around a sitcom based on Charlie Sheen, such things are bound to happen

December 23, 2011

“‘Sustainable Development’ is just an airy-fairy moonbeam fantasy”

Filed under: Environment, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:56

Willis Eschenbach guest-posts on Watts Up With That?

So other than sunlight, wind, and rainbows … just what is sustainable development supposed to be built of? Cell phones are one of the most revolutionary tools of development … but we are depriving future generations of nickel and cadmium in doing so. That’s not sustainable.

Here’s the ugly truth. It’s simple, blunt, and bitter. Nothing is sustainable. Oh, like the sailors say, the wind is free. As is the sunshine. But everything else we mine or extract to make everything from shovels to cell phones will run out. The only question is, will it run out sooner, or later? Because nothing is sustainable. “Sustainable Development” is just an airy-fairy moonbeam fantasy, a New Age oxymoron. In the real world, it can’t happen. I find the term “sustainable development” useful for one thing only.

When people use it, I know they have not thought too hard about the issues.

Finally, there is an underlying arrogance about the concept that I find disturbing. Forty percent of the world’s people live on less than $2 per day. In China it’s sixty percent. In India, three-quarters of the population lives on under $2 per day.

Denying those men, women, and especially children the ability to improve their lives based on some professed concern about unborn generations doesn’t sit well with me at all. The obvious response from their side is “Easy for you to say, you made it already.” Which is true. The West got wealthy by means which “sustainable development” wants to deny to the world’s poor.

December 10, 2011

“Green is the easiest virtue”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Rex Murphy looks at how what he calls Dalton McGuinty’s “reasonably competent government” could fall for the snake oil salesmen of every shabby Green initiative going:

The Ontario government, and Premier McGuinty in particular, gave themselves over to this madness, becoming overzealous crusaders, because the cause was green. And, sadly, there seems to be no other area of public policy in which fitful enthusiasms, pie-in-the-sky thinking, under-researched proposals and the mere hint of possible benefit get so respectful a response and are shielded — almost as if by magic — from the criticisms and analysis that would greet proposals from any other policy area whatsoever. Call it green and every other consideration goes out the window. Start phantom carbon markets, subsidize a Solyndra, put gardens on roofs . . . green will rationalize every cost and subdue every sane objection.

For example: During the early day’s of McGuinty’s determination to “make Ontario a world leader in green technology,” it was interesting to watch him and his government studiously ignore the articulate criticisms and protests from some Ontario landowners. Now any other project inspiring such protests would naturally instigate the usual relentless series of environmental studies that have become so common in our time. But — windmills being “green initiatives” — naturally it was the reverse. The landowners who protested were pilloried as being the worst of the NIMBY crowd, just selfish types safeguarding their little nooks against the common green future.

Green is the easiest virtue. All it takes in most cases for politicians is simply to say the word often enough and whatever they propose — for a time — gets a pass. Who would question McGuinty against those “selfish” landowners. Wasn’t Dalton moving towards a greener world? Enough then. No studies required. No review of the windmills (until election time, that is, when suddenly Ontario voters were told, in effect, the science “wasn’t in” on what secondary effects windmills might have). Question the contracts for solar power? Impossible. Solar power is “clean.”

December 5, 2011

Why GM is very worried about the reported battery fire risk in the Chevy Volt

Filed under: Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll know I’m not over-optimistic about electric cars in the short-to-medium term (for example, here, here, here, and here) and I’m especially underwhelmed with GM’s most recent offering, the Chevy Volt:

Let’s talk economics first. Electric and hybrid-electric vehicles are more expensive to make and bring in less profit than other cars. They cost more to finance, more to repair, and more to insure. Their sales depend heavily on tax incentives, which means that selling more of them will require more taxpayer dollars. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates that plug-in hybrid vehicles cost $3,000 to $7,000 more than regular hybrids, even though the performance differences between the two models are slight, and the really fuel-efficient hybrids cost $12,000 to $18,000 more than the conventional brand. Consider the GM Volt. When it was first announced, the price estimate from General Motors (GM) was $30,000. That soon jumped to $35,000. Today, they sell for nearly $40,000.

Hybrids are also more expensive to insure, which has been known for some time. Back in 2008, online insurance broker Insure.com showed that it cost $1,374 to insure a Honda Civic but $1,427 to insure a Honda Civic Hybrid. Similarly, it cost $1,304 to insure a Toyota Camry but $1,628 to insure a Toyota Camry Hybrid. According to State Farm, hybrids cost more to insure because their parts are more expensive and repairing them requires specialized labor, thus boosting the after-accident payout.

And that, of course, presumes they don’t burst into flames, which brings us to today’s not-so-”ideal” headlines. Several crash tests have suggested that the plug-in hybrid Volt, the flagship vehicle at Government Motors, has a bit of a problem: when hit or badly disturbed in accident tests, the Volt’s Lithium-Ion (Li-ion) battery packs have been seen to spark, or burst into flames afterward.

H/T to Monty.

November 25, 2011

Climategate 2.0 for dummies

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

For anyone who managed to avoid hearing about the original release of emails from many of the leading lights in the anthropogenic global warming community, revealing a much more sordid and less-than-honest process to publicize information on the global climate, James Delingpole explains why the latest batch of emails are important:

The latest batch of emails, leaked by a person or persons unknown (but whoever they are they deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor at the very least) comprises 5,000 files, dumped as before onto a Russian server, revealing private correspondence between many of the scientists at the heart of the Great Global Warming scam.

These are men like Penn State’s increasingly infamous Michael Mann (inventor of the discredited Hockey Stick) and the University of East Angia’s Phil Jones: not just two-bit research assistants but the “experts” whose data, research papers and lobbying forms the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) pronouncements on Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The IPCC, in turn, is the organization on whose doomy prognostications of man-made climate disaster our political leaders base their policy. So when Obama pours billions of your tax dollars into failed clean-tech companies like Solyndra, when you are banned from using the kind of lightbulbs that actually illuminate a room rather than merely flicker and give you a headache, when the EPA’s Lisa Jackson tries reducing the number of showers you take or seeks to regulate when you use your aircon, when your energy bills rise and your flights grow more expensive due to carbon taxes — all these infringements on your economic wellbeing and your liberty can be traced back to these Climategate scientists. This is why Climategate matters.

November 22, 2011

The biggest threat to the environmental movement

Filed under: Economics, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

No, it’s not some ferociously polluting corporation, or a dangerously powerful conservative politician or a candidate for the GOP nomination in the United States. It’s algae:

“We can engineer, humbly, like we have been domesticating plants for a long time,” one scientist told me. “We engineer the algae to do biochemically something quite different to what they’d be doing in the wild: they still take photons from the sun, and via biology, turn it into a useful captured molecule. We have them doing something similar but with stunning efficiency: it’s 40 to 100 times more efficient,” says Elbert Branscomb, chief scientist to the US Department of Energy.

There are (at least) around 60 startups hoping to produce oil and diesel biologically, with accelerated fermentation or photosynthesis techniques to produce an end product that is 100 per cent compatible with the existing infrastructure. Some, for example, tweak the algae to make them do photosynthesis anything from 40 to 100 times more efficiently. LS9 received $30m in funding and has a one-step process to convert sugar to create renewable petrol. It expects production within five years. If oil prices remain high, say over $40 or $50 a barrel, then it’s viable.

So why is this the biggest threat to the environmental movement?

But the greatest challenge cheap hydrocarbons poses is for people whose outlook is founded on what I call “End Times logic”. The most successful political movement in recent years is environmentalism, which expanded from specific concerns about pollution and conservation into an all-encompassing worldview, complete with very preachy appeals to changing parts of our lifestyles.

These ranged from “Don’t flush the loo too often”, to “Don’t fly for a weekend break”, to “Eat less red meat”. Very few politicians have felt courageous enough to contradict this. And the movement has achieved its ascendancy through urgent, apocalyptic appeals, rather than using calmer methods of rational persuasion which involve costs and benefits to be totted up. These new energy sources pose a profound problem: they saves the planet, and we carry on with minimum disruption.

I expect that one effect will be that environmentalism will become much more about everyday concerns such as pollution, and conservations again, back to where it started. But it grew into a vacuum, after the end of the Cold War, when great political ideas seemed to lose credibility. As a way of driving the political agenda, it will become currency without value. Buzzwords such as “sustainability”, founded on a resource-constrained view, will no longer be credible. People will simply laugh at them.

October 14, 2011

Green beliefs, but brown realities

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Patrick J. Michaels reviews a new book by Todd Myers, Eco-facts:

Just about every organo sacrament withers under Myers’ scrutiny. “Buying local” often means more dreaded greenhouse gas emissions from inefficient short-term shipment compared to the economies of scale when carloads of spuds ride the Burlington Northern Santa Fe across the country. “Certified Organic” means so much paperwork and oversight that mom-and-pop farms (another organo icon) get pushed out by corporate agriculture, which can afford to spend the time and resources satisfying bureaucrats.

Then there are “green jobs.” Solyndra is no outlier; governments are just very bad at picking winners and losers in the energy world. Myers documents the decline and fall of biofuel plants throughout the northwest. Inefficiencies destroy jobs. The Teanaway “Solar Reserve”, supported by an ever-increasing feed of taxpayer dollars, was supposed to be the “world’s largest”, supplying power to a grand total of 45,000 homes. That’s all you get?

John Plaza, CEO of the failed biofuel facility Imperium Renewables (you would think a better name would have helped) thinks it’s all the government’s fault. “What the industry needs,” he said, “is a two-fold support, a mandated floor, and incentives and tax policy to get the outcomes we’re trying for.” In other words, more expensive energy subsidized by you and me, and the government rigging the market. That will create jobs!

What is missing here (and everywhere else) is a comprehensive analysis of how much money the organo fads, follies and delusions cost us. Hopefully that will be in Myers’ next book. The incredible constellation of policy errors, wrongheaded logic and downright stupidity has to be extracting a dear cost from our very sick economy. It’s time to stop this. It’s time for you to read this book.

September 23, 2011

Solyndra: “They doubled down, just like some chump who lost his stake at the Vegas blackjack tables”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Megan McArdle tries to figure out how Solyndra managed to spend nearly a billion dollars in two years:

By my count, Since September 2009, they borrowed $535 million from us to get their second fab up and running, raised $219 million in a private equity offering, got $175 million from issuing convertible promissory notes after their IPO was pulled, received $75 million in the last-ditch round where the DOE allowed their seniority to be subordinated, and maybe got a loan from a different bank. By the time they filed bankruptcy in August, my understanding is that they were basically out of cash.

The Washington Post‘s rather scathing new account, full of employees saying that post-loan, Solyndra started spending money like it was about to be discontinued, says the new facility for which we loaned them all that money cost $344 million to build. So it seems that in the space of two years, Solyndra managed to spend $344 million building a factory and $660 million . . . doing what?

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