‘Outside the Green Box’: New book unmasks ‘sustainable development’ fallacies
By Robert Bradley Jr. — May 8, 2017
“Energy consumption is not a villain. Nations that consume the most energy per person discharge the lowest level of air and water pollutants per person. Low-cost energy provides economic growth and generates capital for pollution control.”
Editor note: Steve Goreham has written another primer of note. The author of Climatism!: Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic (2010) and The Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change (2012), Goreham has just published a fun, readable book with great political timing.
The audience for Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development is not only any classroom studying energy choices and related public policies. Goreham is targeting the green consultant. The back cover explains:
Your firm spends millions to be environmentally sustainable. Carbon credits, renewable energy, ethanol fuel, and electric vehicles demonstate your company’s commitment. Fluorescent light bulbs, organic foods, and a hybrid car may be part of your personal commitement. But contrary to what your green consultant tells you, these and other sustainable measures provide little positive benefit to Earth’s environment.
But more so. When it comes to energy, the eco-benefits of renewables are illusory and have distinctive environmental costs.
MasterResource is pleased to publish an excerpt from the concluding chapter of Outside the Green Box, available from Amazon or at stevegoreham.com.
——————-
Much of government policy, academic thought, and public opinion stands on fears created and promulgated by environmental sustainable development. The philosophy that humans are too many, too polluting, climate destroying, and profligate wasters of natural resources holds today’s society in a powerful psychological grip. Thousands of energy and environmental laws are justified on these misconceptions. Let’s briefly review why these ideas are incorrect.
‘Dying Green’: Green burials are a growing trend in Colorado
BOULDER COUNTY, Colo. — We all know what it means to live green, but what about dying green?
Less costly goodbyes known as green burials are growing in popularity in Colorado and a new Lafayette business is helping people die as naturally as possible, with minimal impact to the earth.
“It’s a whole new approach to end of life care,” explained Prescott Knock, the executive director of the Natural Funeral.
Those who chose to live green also want to die green, which is how the green burial idea was born.
“Many of the people that are socially conscious, environmentally conscious really appreciate that alternative,” said Knock.
Knock’s new venture in the heart of downtown Lafayette will be one of the first in the state to help people die green. The Natural Funeral plans to open this summer at 102 West Chester Street after renovations are completed on the existing buildings.
What is a green burial?
The burials look more like something straight out of the wild west than your traditional cemetery.
“The grass is going to remain tall, we’re going to pull weeds mechanically by hand,” said Roselawn Cemetery Supervisor Kevin Williams. “We leave the ground more mounded.”
A green burial or natural funeral means your body is placed directly into the ground in a pine casket or shroud.
“When a pine casket goes into the ground it’s just going to biodegrade,” explained Luc Nadeau, the owner of Nature’s Casket, who makes pine caskets out of his backyard workshop in Longmont.…
EPA’s Pruitt hammers Obama environmental record: ‘What did they achieve?…Flint and Gold King’
Al Gore Personally Pleads With Trump to Stay in the Paris Climate Agreement
By Michael Bastasch / @MikeBastasch /
Former Vice President Al Gore personally asked President Donald Trump not to withdraw the U.S. from a United Nations agreement aimed at limiting global warming, a source revealed.
Gore called Trump Tuesday morning to discuss the Paris Agreement that the Obama administration joined in 2016, the source told Axios. “Mr. Gore made the case for why the U.S. should stay in the agreement and meet our commitments,” a source close to Gore said.
Gore praised the Paris Agreement when it was first announced in 2015, calling it “a bold and historic agreement.”
The agreement requires countries to voluntarily submit plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and those plans are supposed to be ratcheted up every five years. White House officials are split on whether or not the U.S. should remain in the agreement. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner favor staying, while chief strategist Steve Bannon favors keeping the president’s pledge to withdraw.
Ivanka Trump and Kushner have been backed by State Department career staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Multinational corporations from Starbucks to Exxon Mobil Corp. favor staying in Paris as well. Some Republicans have argued the U.S. can stay in the Paris Agreement with a weakened pledge to cut emissions. That argument has been supported by former Obama administration climate diplomats who have an interest in not seeing their work thrown out.…
Why India and Pakistan Are Renewing Their Love Affair with Coal
One nation is shirking emissions targets and the other is investing in more coal plants—but with America as a role model, that’s hardly surprising.
Much of the world agrees: burning coal is bad, and we ought to do less of it.
But not everyone sings from that sheet, including Pakistan’s Water and Power Ministry. As part of a large infrastructure investment project with China, it’s committed to spending $15 billion on as many as 12 new coal power plants over the next 15 years. Reuters reports that the figure is almost half of the $33 billion being invested into energy projects as part of the initiative, and that around 75 percent of the extra generation capacity will come from new coal plants.
The government insists that the new plants will use technology to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. But the nation’s minister for planning, development and reform, Ahsan Iqbal, sounds downright Trumpian in his view of the nation’s future energy policy: “Pakistan must tap [its] vast underground reserves of 175 billion tonnes of coal, adequate to meet the country’s energy needs for several decades, for powering the country’s economic wheel, creating new jobs, and fighting spiking unemployment and poverty.”
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports (paywall) that India will fail to meet its own targets to reduce emissions from its coal power plants. India’s struggle to clean up its energy act is well-known. But it’s currently unable to meet its own power demands, so it’s not really that practical to shut down plants—and given that no penalties will be imposed for failing to reduce emissions, there’s little incentive to do so.
To anyone who would criticize the move, Piyush Goyal, India’s power minister, had this to say: “India is not a polluter,” he told the Financial Times. “It’s America and the western world that has to first stop polluting.” There’s a grain of truth to that: America and Europe did a lot of coal burning during their development, and now have strong economies to leverage in order to clean up their acts. Developing countries aren’t so lucky. And developed countries still emit far more greenhouse gases per citizen than India and Pakistan. As of 2013 the annual per capita CO2 emissions of India and Pakistan were 1.59 and 0.85 metric tons respectively. In the U.S., the figure is 16.39 metric tons.
The
Europe’s Biggest Solar Company Goes Up In Smoke
Germany’s SolarWorld, once Europe’s biggest solar power equipment group, said on Wednesday it would file for insolvency, overwhelmed by Chinese rivals who had long been a thorn in the side of founder and CEO Frank Asbeck, once known as “the Sun King”. A renewed wave of cheap Chinese exports, caused by reduced ambitions in China to expand solar power generation, was too much to bear for the group, which made its last net profit in 2014. —Reuters, 11 May 2017
The company once hailed as Europe’s largest solar panel producer filed for bankruptcy Wednesday, blaming cheap Chinese panels for flooding the market. SolarWorld is only the latest bankrupt solar company to blame the Chinese. U.S.-based Suniva Inc. filed for bankruptcy in April, also citing stiff competition from Chinese solar panel makers. The solar industry’s biggest problem is likely the very mechanism that led to its rise: lucrative subsidies. European subsidies, mostly in Germany, led to a massive expansion of the companies green energy industry, but eventually subsidies became their undoing as cheaper solar panels from China began to win out. –Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 11 May 2017
More than 100 coal power plants are in various stages of planning or development in 11 African countries outside of South Africa — more than eight times the region’s existing coal capacity. Africa’s embrace of coal is in part the result of its acute shortage of power. –Jonathan W. Rosen, National Geographic, 10 May 2017
1) Europe’s Biggest Solar Company Goes Up In Smoke
Reuters, 11 May 2017
2) Largest US Solar Panel Maker Files For Bankruptcy After Receiving $206 Million In Subsidies
The Daily Caller, 11 May 2017
3) African Nations To Build More Than 100 New Coal Power Plants
National Geographic, 10 May 2017
4) Why India And Pakistan Are Renewing Their Love Affair With Coal
MIT Technology Review, 3 May 2017
5) Al Gore Personally Pleads With Trump to Stay in the Paris Climate Agreement
Daily Caller, 10 May 2017
6) ‘Apple Of Oil’ Says New Permian Shale Wells ‘Shattered’ Records
Investor’s Business Daily, 8 May 2017
7) Matt Ridley: Wind Turbines Are Neither Clean Nor Green
The Spectator, 11 May 2017 …
Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Fred Singer on the ‘failure of UN IPCC to find credible evidence for anthropogenic global warming’
By S. Fred Singer
Exploring some of the intricacies of GW [Global Warming] science can lead to surprising results that have major consequences. In a recent invited talk at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC-12 [Twelfth International Conference on Climate Change], I investigated three important topics:
1. Inconsistencies in the surface temperature record.
2. Their explanation as artifacts arising from the misuse of data.
3. Thereby explaining the failure of IPCC to find credible evidence for anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
A misleading graph
Fig 1 20th century temps; top—global; bottom– US
Although these two trends look similar, they are really quite different: the initial warming is genuine, but the later warming is not. What a surprise! I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘fake,’ but it just does not exist; I try to demonstrate this difference as an artifact of the data-gathering process, by comparing with several independent data sets covering similar time intervals.
The later warming is contradicted by every available dataset, as follows:
**the surface record for the ‘lower 48’ [US] shows a much lower trend; [see fig 1, bottom]; presumably there is better control over the placement of weather-stations and their thermometers;
**the trend of global sea surface temp [SST] is much less; with 1995 temp values nearly equal to those of 1942 [according to Gouretski and Kennedy, as published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2012];
** likewise, the trend of night-time marine air-temperatures [NMAT], measured with thermometers on ship decks, according to data from J Kennedy, Hadley Centre, UK
** atmospheric temperature trends are uniformly much lower and close to zero (during 1979-1997), whether measured with balloon-borne radiosondes or with microwave sounding units [MSU] aboard weather satellites [see fig 8 in ref 2]
** compatible data on solar activity that show nothing unusual happening. Interestingly, the solar data had been assembled for a quite different purpose – namely, to disprove the connection between cosmic rays and climate change [see here fig 14 of ref 2], assuming that the late-century warming was real. In the absence of such warming, as I argue here, this attempted critique of the cosmic-ray–climate connection collapses.
** proxy data also show near-zero trends, whether from tree rings or …
CJR Finds Scientific Opposition to Linking Hurricanes and Global Warming
By Aly Nielsen |
A surprising report from the George Soros-funded Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) revealed several scientists oppose the way the media have tried to blame hurricanes on man-made climate change.
CJR used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to acquire emails “sent from or received by six hurricane researchers or forecasters” which included the terms “global warming” or “climate change.” The May 2, article written by Rob Verger indicate CJR was looking to see how scientists talked to the media about Hurricane Alex and “whether climate change should be blamed.” Verger said the emails showed a “heated online discussion among scientists.”
Because it was far earlier than a typical hurricane, Alex drew attention to itself and media climate alarm. The Washington Post described it Alex as “rare,” and turned to Weather Underground’s Jason Masters who tried to make the global warming point.
“It is unlikely that Alex would have formed if these waters had been close to normal temperatures for this time of year,” Masters wrote (and the Post quoted).
Christian Science Monitor was even more blunt, asking in its headline “Is climate change to blame for rare January hurricanes?”
“With the unusual occurrence of Hurricane Alex as an out-of-season hurricane, there have been a couple of meteorologists stating to the media that manmade global warming helped to cause the hurricane. Such statements are not, in my opinion, factual.” National Hurricane Center science and operations officer Chris Landsea said in a Jan. 18, 2016, email acquired by CJR.
Landsea told CJR he was similarly disturbed by how strongly former vice president Al Gore linked Hurricane Matthew to climate change in October 2016. Gore’s claims made Landsea “cringe, because there’s some links but it’s much much more subtle than he is insinuating.”
Hurricane Matthew wasn’t the only thing Gore has gotten wrong. After his climate alarmist film An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2007, a British court identified at least eleven material falsehoods, including attributing Hurricane Katrina to climate change.
In promotional footage of Gore’s follow up film, An Inconvenient Sequel, slated for July 2017, release Gore twisted and rewrote his earlier claims about what would cause massive global flooding including flooding of New York City in order to try to claim Hurricane Sandy proved him right.
While CJR’s report cited stories written by The Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor erroneously linking specific hurricanes to …