From: The Honest Broker - Substack

By: Roger Pielke Jr.

Date: August 12, 2024

The Top Five Climate Science Scandals

Science is science because it is self-correcting. That means that when researchers go down a dead end path they turn around and look for another route. However, science in highly politicized situations can face obstacles to self-correction, meaning that it can be more difficult to change course when science gets off track. This is especially so when bad science becomes politically important.

That’s where climate science finds itself in 2024. Long time readers here at THB will know that climate change is real and poses risks. At the same time, the climate science community appears to have lost its collective ability to call out bad science and get things back on track. Today, particularly for the many new readers that THB has gained this year, I summarize the top 5 climate science scandals covered here at THB over the past few years.

I define a scandal as a situation of objectively flawed science — in substance and/or procedure — that the community has been unable to make right, but should.

Let’s jump right in . . .

5. The Interns Made a “Dataset” and We Used it for Research

I have recently documented how the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) — supposedly one of the top science journals — published a paper using a “dataset” cobbled together by some interns for marketing a now-defunct insurance company. There is actually no such dataset out in the real world — it is a fiction. The paper is the only normalization study purporting to identify a signal of human-caused climate change in disaster losses and thus has been highlighted by both the IPCC and U.S. National Climate Assessment. That context makes its correction or retraction politically problematic. When I informed PNAS about the fake dataset they refused to look at it and stood behind the paper. Read about the backstory and how PNAS stonewalled any reconsideration. (continue reading)

The Top Five Climate Science Scandals

The historical paradigm of the US electric industry has been “the energy you want when you want it.” Generation was adjusted to match contemporaneous demand as required.

The average demand on the US electric grid is approximately 40% of peak demand. Therefore, the majority of grid generation is largely underutilized for most of the year. The industry has also maintained a capacity reserve margin in excess of peak demand to assure adequate supply in the event of an unscheduled generator shutdown.

There would be significant economic benefit to increasing the load factor on the grid. The industry has taken numerous steps to attempt to encourage customers to shift their demand to hours when demand is lower. These steps have included a variety of Demand Side Management (DSM) programs coordinated with the state utility commissions. They have also included demand charges applied to consumption during high demand periods to encourage load shifting and the use of interruptible service contracts. Participation in DSM programs has been largely voluntary. However, demand charges were imposed in state utility commission approved rates. While these programs have had some effect, they have not significantly increased the load factor on the grid.

The combination of Net Zero by 2050 and “All-Electric Everything” by 2050 is imposing major changes on the electric industry and the electric grid. “All-Electric Everything” would require grid capacity to roughly triple, requiring massive investment in generation, transmission and distribution assets.

Government is incentivizing installation of intermittent renewable generation on the grid. However, most of this renewable generation capacity has not included the storage capacity necessary to render this capacity dispatchable. Therefore, as intermittent renewable generation capacity is added to the grid, dispatchable generating capacity must also be added to backup the intermittent capacity when it is not generating. The intermittent generating capacity is therefore redundant, in that the demand on the grid can be satisfied when it is unavailable or significantly diminished. Were the intermittent generating capacity dispatchable, it would not be redundant.

The projected major increase in generation, transmission and distribution investment has increased government and industry focus on increasing grid load factor to reduce the required investment. The recent US DOE “Decarbonizing the U.S. Economy by 2050: A National Blueprint for the Buildings Sector” focuses on several approaches to controlling grid demand to reduce investment requirements. Many of these approaches involve mandatory participation by electric customers, implemented through the use of “smart meters” and “The Internet of Things”. HVAC system, EV charging and major appliance usage would be curtailed or interrupted as required to reduce demand during periods of peak demand or low renewables availability.

DOE also encourages behind the meter, on-site generation and storage and contemplates drawing down on-site storage and EV batteries as required to support the grid. Participation would likely be enforced by requiring that HVAC, EV chargers and major appliances be internet connected to operate, to assure that they would remain subject to external control. DOE also suggests expanded use of Virtual Power Plants (VPP), in which groups of customers have their service interrupted to effectively free power plant scale capacity for other uses.

This appears to presage a paradigm shift from “the energy you want when you want it” to “the energy you want when it is available”. The involuntary aspects of these efforts would likely make them both more effective and less popular.

From: Master Resource

By: Robert Bradley Jr.

Date: July 30, 2024

Project 2025: Environmental Policy

“A more conservative EPA … will prevent unnecessary expenditures by the regulated community [and] … deliver savings to the American taxpayer. Improved transparency will serve as an important check … [to] deliver tangible environmental improvements to the American people in the form of cleaner air, cleaner water, and healthier soils.” ( – Heritage Foundation, Project 2025)

Last week’s post examined the energy section of the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page Mandate for Leadership: 2025. This post reproduces the environmental section of the same document (1,200 words) calling for a return to the basics of clean air and water–and away from the cancer of climate policy as ecological.

As explained below, EPA needs to prioritize achievable, definable environmental improvement, not engage in wasteful, futile climatism and forced energy transformation.

The challenge of creating a conservative EPA will be to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being co-opted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states. Further, the EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator.

Not surprisingly, the EPA under the Biden Administration has returned to the same top-down, coercive approach that defined the Obama Administration. There has been a reinstitution of unachievable standards designed to aid in the “transition” away from politically disfavored industries and technologies and toward the Biden Administration’s preferred alternatives. This approach is most obvious in the Biden Administration’s assault on the energy sector as the Administration uses its regulatory might to make coal, oil, and natural gas operations very expensive and increasingly inaccessible while forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables…. (continue reading)

Project 2025: Environmental Policy

The capacity of the US electric grid has historically been designed to meet peak demand, with limited additional generating capacity equal to +/- 20% of peak demand or sufficient to replace the capacity of the largest generating unit on the grid in the event of an unscheduled shutdown. That additional generating capacity can be considered to be redundant in that it is necessary on peak only in the event of an unscheduled generator shutdown. The conventional generators on the grid have capacity factors of ~85% (coal), ~90% (gas CCT) and ~95% (nuclear). The maintenance and repair downtime of these generators is typically scheduled for the shoulder months of the year when grid demand is expected to be well below peak. However, unscheduled shutdowns do occur.

The grid generation transition currently underway is intended to replace existing coal and natural gas generation with intermittent wind and solar generation plus electricity storage. However, most of the wind and solar generating capacity which has been installed to date has not included the electricity storage capacity required to replace dispatchable coal and natural gas generation. Therefore, the wind and solar generator output is capable only of displacing output from coal and natural gas generators when the wind and solar generators are operating. Wind generators currently on the grid have capacity factors ranging from ~24 – 46.6% depending on location, mounting height and season. Solar generators currently on the grid have capacity factors ranging from ~12.5 – 33.2% depending on location and season.

Wind and solar generators which are not paired with sufficient electricity storage capacity to render them dispatchable are, by definition, redundant capacity since conventional dispatchable generating capacity must remain available to provide backup during periods when the wind and solar generators provide low/no output. Redundant capacity always increases costs because of increased investment in generation and transmission infrastructure. Redundant generation also increases costs by reducing the output of conventional generators, which causes their fixed costs to be allocated across lower generator output, thus increasing the prices necessary to maintain profitable operation. These higher prices, in turn, increase the wholesale power prices paid to the renewable generators.

Installing sufficient storage to render the currently installed wind and solar generation dispatchable would make a portion of the existing conventional generating capacity redundant, which would be essential if that capacity is to be decommissioned as envisioned by the Administration. Installing sufficient storage capacity to render all additional wind and solar generation capacity dispatchable would allow replacement of additional conventional generation as it became redundant. However, the pace of replacement of conventional generating capacity would have to be slower than the pace of commissioning of new dispatchable renewable generation to accommodate the demand growth expected as the result of the Administration’s push for “all-electric everything”.

It appears increasingly unlikely that the dispatchable generating capacity required to replace current conventional generation as well as to meet the consumption and demand growth expected to result from the transition to “all-electric everything” would be installed and operational by 2050. It appears even less likely that the result would be reduced energy costs.

From: Climate Realism

By: Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling

Date: July 29, 2024

Why Nuclear is Cheaper than Wind and Solar

Editors’ Note: This guest post explains how nuclear is actually cheaper than wind and solar, contrary to what most renewables advocated claim. Climate Realism has explained previously how wind and solar are actually far more costly than activists claim, here and here, and that they are not as “green” as advertised, here.

Wind and solar supporters have a nasty habit of pretending that their preferred energy sources are the “cheapest forms of energy.” The problem, of course, is that they use unrealistic Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) estimates—see Cooking the Books for wind and solar—and they conveniently forget to mention the large system costs needed to reliably serve electricity demand using these unreliable energy sources.

That’s why, despite its high up-front capital costs, powering an electric grid with nuclear power is cheaper than using wind, solar, and battery storage.

Before we jump into the benefits of nuclear power, it’s important for our readers to understand that building a fleet of nuclear power plants will be very expensive, which will increase costs for ratepayers. A forced energy transition of any kind is going to increase costs inherently, and nuclear is no different.

If your main priority is reliable, low-cost power, keeping the existing coal and natural gas plants online and building new natural gas plants as needed will be the more affordable option. If decarbonizing the electric grid is your main priority, building new nuclear power plants will deliver a superior value to electricity customers, with reliable service at a lower cost than a grid powered largely by wind, solar, and battery storage. (continue reading)

Why Nuclear is Cheaper than Wind and Solar

The US government currently subsidizes utility scale wind and solar generation, transmission and electricity storage, in competition with coal, natural gas and nuclear generation. The government also subsidizes on-site residential and commercial solar generation installations in competition with the electric utility grid. In some cases, state government requires the utility and its non-generating customers to subsidize solar generating customers through net metering.

The government is planning to subsidize building efficiency improvements for residential and commercial buildings, including insulation and weatherstripping, window upgrades and appliance replacement. Subsidies for on-site solar would be expanded to include on-site storage.

Government also subsidizes light duty electric vehicles and their public charging infrastructure; and, would also subsidize on-site EV charging systems.

Subsidies – Undeniable Facts of Life

Subsidies distort markets by changing the relative transaction prices of competing options. For example, the subsidy offered for the purchase of electric vehicles reduces the transaction price of EVs relative to alternative ICE vehicles. This issue is compounded by the fact that manufacturers increase the prices of ICE vehicles to partially offset the losses incurred in the production and sale of EVs, raising the transaction price of ICE vehicle purchases.

Subsidies disadvantage competitors. In the example above, a manufacturer which does not produce EVs is forced to compete with the subsidized price of competitors EVs. Also, the subsidies available for wind and solar support installations which displace the generation output of existing coal and natural gas generation, reducing sales from those generators and increasing the prices at which their output must be sold to remain profitable.

Subsidies increase societal costs. The subsidies available for renewable generation encourage the expansion of renewable generation infrastructure, which is redundant capacity since it requires full capacity backup from dispatchable generation. This increases the total investment in generation capacity with no corresponding increase in generation output, thus increasing the cost of electricity.

Subsidies transfer costs from participants to non-participants. The subsidies available for residential and commercial on-site solar installations frequently include net metering, which transfers a portion of the utilities’ fixed costs of service to solar generators who sell surplus electricity back to the grid. This requires the utility to recover that portion of its fixed costs through increased rates which affect non-generating customers.

Subsidies encourage sub-optimal decisions by making the uncompetitive appear competitive. This has recently been demonstrated in the states which have eliminated simple net metering, which eliminates or reduces the transfer of utility fixed costs to solar generators, thus reducing the price paid to the solar generators by the utilities. The loss of this subsidy has had a dramatic negative impact on solar residential and commercial installations because the economics are no longer as attractive. This has also been demonstrated recently in Germany, where the elimination of EV incentives has caused a dramatic decrease in EV sales.

Government cannot subsidize everything forever. The grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act will likely result in an increase in the US national debt of approximately $1 trillion, which will be taken from others in the future.

"The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.", Ronald Reagan

From: Climate Etc.

By: Joachim Dengler

Date: July 10, 2024

Implications of the Linear Carbon Sink Model

This post is the first of two extracts from the paper Improvements and Extension of the Linear Carbon Sink Model.

Introduction – Modelling the Carbon Cycle of the Atmosphere

When a complex system is analyzed, there are two possible approaches. The bottom-up approach investigates the individual components, studies their behavior, creates models of these components, and puts them together, in order to simulate the complex system. The top-down approach looks at the complex system as a whole and studies the way that the system responds to external signals, in the hope to find known patterns that allow conclusions to be drawn about the inner structure.

The relation between anthropogenic carbon emissions, CO2 concentration, and the carbon cycle has in the past mainly been investigated with the bottom-up approach. The focus of interest are carbon sinks, the processes that reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration considerably below the level that would have been reached, if all CO2 remained in the atmosphere. There are three types of sinks that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere: physical oceanic absorption, the photosynthesis of land plants, and the photosynthesis of phytoplankton in the oceans. Although the mechanisms of carbon uptake are well understood in principle, there are model assumptions that cause divergent results.

The traditional bottom-up approaches are typically box-models, where the atmosphere, the top layer of the ocean (the mixed layer), the deep ocean, and land vegetation are considered to be boxes of certain sizes and carbon exchange rates between them. These models contain lots of parameters, which characterize the sizes of the boxes and the exchange rate between them. The currently favored model is the Bern box diffusion model, where the deep ocean only communicates by a diffusion process with the mixed layer, slowing down the downwelling carbon sink rate so much, that according to the model 20% of all anthropogenic emissions remain in the atmosphere for more than 1000 years. (continue reading)

Implications of the Linear Carbon Sink Model

All freight rail and most long-distance passenger rail is powered by Diesel-electric locomotives. Some short-distance passenger rail (commuter rail) is powered by electric locomotives. Light rail is typically powered electrically, as are subway systems.

Decarbonization of the rail sector and the transition to “all-electric everything” would require replacement of Diesel-electric locomotives with electric locomotives or locomotives fueled by Green Hydrogen.

The technology required to electrify freight rail is currently available, though it would need to be adapted to the more stringent requirements of freight rail. Long freight trains frequently use two to four 3,000 – 4,000 kW locomotives, which would determine the required current capacity of the overhead power lines. Freight rail is not suitable for the application of third-rail power supply because of the unrestricted access to the railbed.

The US Class 1 rail system comprises approximately 90,000 miles of track. Cost estimates for the electrification of freight rail vary widely depending on terrain, but would likely exceed $1,000,000 per mile, which would result in an investment requirement exceeding $90 billion, not including the investment in the electric generation and storage capacity required to reliably power the system. Conversion of other classes of rail systems would add additional costs.

There are also efforts underway to develop battery powered electric locomotives. These would likely be restricted to railyard and railcar placement duty and could be recharged from extensions of the overhead power lines in railyards. The locomotives could be paired with tenders holding larger batteries to extend their range.

Hydrogen could be used to fuel either Otto-cycle or Diesel-cycle combustion engines to power electric alternators or generators. However, the most efficient approach would be direct electric conversion in Hydrogen fuel cells. Each locomotive would be paired with a fuel tender carrying approximately 20,000 gallons of liquid Hydrogen for long-haul service. Railyard and railcar placement locomotives could use onboard fuel storage.

The technology required to produce a liquid Hydrogen fueled railroad locomotive largely already exists, with the exception of a durable, long-life 3,000 – 4,000 kW hydrogen fuel cell suitable for railroad application. Argonne National Laboratories is leading a project to develop a Hydrogen fuel cell powered locomotive. Matching the cost and durability of the Diesel engines with fuel cells is a major technical challenge. Matching the cost of Diesel fuel with liquid Green Hydrogen is also a major challenge, since Green Hydrogen is currently more than three times the cost of Diesel fuel.

It is difficult to estimate the investment required to store liquid Hydrogen throughout the Class 1 rail system and the investment required to transport the liquid Hydrogen from the liquefaction plants to the rail system storage facilities. Transportation of liquid Hydrogen at that scale is unprecedented and untested.

It is very likely that a liquid Hydrogen fuel system for the rail sector would be part of a larger system to produce Green Hydrogen for use as a long-duration energy storage medium, although the liquefaction facilities would be specific to the rail sector.

From: Climate Etc.

By: Javier Vinós

Date: July 5, 2024

Hunga Tonga volcano: impact on record warming

The climate event of 2023 was truly exceptional, but the prevailing catastrophism about climate change hinders its proper scientific analysis. I present arguments that support the view that we are facing an extraordinary and extremely rare natural event in climate history.

1. Off-scale warming

Since the planet has been warming for 200 years, and our global records are even more recent, every few years a new warmest year in history is recorded. Despite all the publicity given each time it happens, it would really be news if it didn’t happen, as it did between 1998 and 2014, a period popularly known as the pause.

Figure 1. Berkeley Earth temperature anomaly

Since 1980, 13 years have broken the temperature record. So, what is so special about the 2023 record and the expected 2024 record? For starters, 2023 broke the record by the largest margin in records, 0.17°C. This may not sound like much, but if all records were by this margin, we would go from +1.5°C to +2°C in just 10 years, and reach +3°C 20 years later. (continue reading)

Hunga Tonga volcano: impact on record warming

The US electric utility grid has typically operated at a load factor of approximately 40% of peak demand. US utility scale generating capacity in 2023 was 1,141 GW, of which 341 GW were renewable generation. The nominal annual potential generation from this generation fleet would be 9995 TWH (1141 GW * 8760 hrs/yr). However, 252 GW of the generating capacity consisted of intermittent renewables with a capacity factor of approximately 30%, reducing the expected total annual generation potential to approximately 8,450 TWH. Therefore, the actual load factor on the grid was approximately 47%.
 
The Administration’s intent to transition the US energy economy to “all-electric everything” would require a rough tripling of electric generation and of the capacity of the electric grid. However, achieving an additional 17,000 TWH of generation potential with intermittent renewables would require installation of approximately 6,000 GW of additional intermittent renewable generation plus the storage capacity required to render the intermittent generation dispatchable.

The additional intermittent generation capacity required is sensitive to the round-trip efficiency of the supporting storage. Current battery storage has a round-trip efficiency of 90+%. However, Green Hydrogen storage has a round-trip efficiency closer to 50%, which would require additional generation capacity to compensate for the higher round-trip energy losses.

Significant reductions in the required expansion of grid capacity would be possible if the load factor on the grid could be increased by shaping the grid demand profile. However, it is unlikely that the grid load factor could be increased beyond 60% without significant disruptions, such as rotating blackouts and the activation of virtual powerplants. Utilities and regulatory commissions have attempted to use tools such as demand-side management, time-of-day rates, demand charges and interruptible rates to shape grid demand profiles, with limited success.

US DOE has produced a document entitled “Decarbonizing the U.S. Economy by 2050: A National Blueprint for the Buildings Sector” which outlines several approaches to shaping the electricity demand profiles for the buildings sector. No such document has been produced for the other sectors of the economy, particularly the industrial sector, in which massive transitions from direct fossil fuel end uses to electric end uses would be required to occur. In many cases, the required electric end use technologies do not currently exist or are in their infancy.

There is also no blueprint for the transportation sector, particularly medium and heavy-duty trucks and railroads. Commercialization of EV medium and heavy-duty trucks is in its infancy. There is significant concern about vehicle range and about the increased vehicle weight and its effect on allowable cargo loads. There is also interest in Green Hydrogen as a medium and heavy-duty truck fuel, although its cost appears to be prohibitive.

Passenger rail and light rail electrification is an established technology for densely populated inter-urban transportation corridors and urban mass transit. However, electrification has not been applied to long-haul freight operations, which involve both longer distances and much heavier loads.  

The data on which this analysis is based may be found in the following tables in the EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2023.
Table: Table 9. Electricity Generating Capacity
Table: Table 10. Electricity Trade
Table: Table 16. Renewable Energy Generating Capacity and Generation

From: National Review

By: Mario Loyola

Date: June 13, 2024

Our Coming Energy Famine

Economic change and Biden’s hostility to fossil fuels are setting up an electricity crisis
Most Americans are unaware of a grave danger looming on the horizon: a historic — and entirely self-inflicted — energy-scarcity crisis. The “transition from fossil fuels” presupposes that “clean energy” substitutes will be ready when needed. But while the war on fossil fuels is making real gains, at least in the electricity sector, the effort to deploy renewable substitutes is failing catastrophically. Add soaring demand, and America is facing the worst energy shortfall in its history.

The nation’s grid regulators are already sounding the alarm. “I am extremely concerned about the pace of retirements we are seeing of generators which are ... (continue reading)

Our Coming Energy Famine

The Internet of Things refers to the variety of devices which are remotely accessible from the internet. At their most basic, these devices include wall switches, electrical outlets and plug-in outlet adaptors which can be used to power connected devices on a predetermined schedule or remotely at will.

Electronic heating and cooling thermostats can also be connected, allowing remote access to change equipment operating schedules, temperature setpoints and other system settings.

High efficiency electric heat pump water heaters, laundry dryers and induction ranges have also been added to the internet of things.

Security systems are now also accessible from the internet, allowing the systems to be set remotely to secure and unsecure the property and to remotely authorize secure access to the property. Garage door operators are also available in internet connected versions.

While these functions of the Internet of Things (IOT) were intended to provide owner/occupant convenience, they also provide an opportunity for others, including utilities and government to control energy end uses remotely in response to high grid demand or low renewable energy availability. The Internet of Things could be used to interrupt the operation of building heating and cooling systems or to limit those systems to low-capacity operation, or to adjust the set temperatures to reduce demand or to enforce minimum and maximum temperature control settings. It could also be used to prevent the operation of water heating systems or laundry equipment during periods of high demand or low energy availability.

In installations including solar photovoltaic collectors, solar storage batteries and electric vehicles and chargers, the IOT could also be used to direct solar collector output to the grid and to direct stored solar energy in on-site batteries to the grid. The IOT could also be used to control the operation of EV charging systems to periods of low grid demand and to direct energy stored in EV batteries to the grid when needed.

While this flexibility to control individual customer energy use might be useful to utilities forced to rely on intermittent renewable generation plus storage to meet grid demand, it also represents the potential to interfere with the lifestyles of individual residential customers and the operation of the businesses of commercial and industrial customers. EV owners could be faced with the situation in which they could not drive to work on a given day because the grid had drawn down the charge in their EV battery. Solar customers could also be faced with the unavailability of power from their on-site storage batteries in the event of a power failure because the grid has drawn charge from those batteries.

These issues are clearly a concern because of the perceived need to minimize the investment in renewable generating capacity, grid-scale storage, transmission and distribution capacity and “last mile” transformer, service line and building electrical system capacity.

The issue is further complicated by the federal focus on providing advantages to disadvantaged communities, which would almost certainly result in applying disadvantages to advantageed communities in what appears to be a zero sum game, or perhaps even a negative sum game.

From: Watts Up With That

By: Gabriel Oxenstierna

Date: June 18, 2024

The Battle of Climate Hypotheses: The Green-House Gas Forcer Vs. The Winter Gatekeeper Round 3: The Two Arctic Paradoxes

For the first time, the IPCC’s doctrine of CO2 as a ‘control knob’ in our climate faces a serious challenger in the form of a comprehensive hypothesis about what drives climate and its shifts.[1][2] This article is the third in a series evaluating this new hypothesis of natural climate variability.

The Arctic [70-90°N] is a real focal point for the climate, as well as for the two competing climate hypotheses. It has warmed 3-4 times faster than the globe since 1979, and is by far the region with the highest rate of warming.[3] This phenomenon started in the late 1990s and is mainly seen during winter:

Figure 1. The AA is mainly a winter phenomenon (blue curve) in the highest latitudes, 80 – 90°N. Temperature anomalies compared to a 30-year comparison period. The ‘1997’ shift period is marked with a yellow bar. Image source: DMI

For the “Winter Gate-keeper hypothesis” [WGH], the Arctic is particularly important: The weak and sensitive polar vortex there allows for large variations in poleward heat transport that it claims regulates the climate, much like a control knob.[1, p.542] Energy is transported to the Arctic in order to get radiated from there, where radiation is as most efficient – not least due to a low green-house effect [GHE].

When heat is moved to a location where it can be more easily radiated to space, the outgoing radiation increases, leading to a reduction in the energy content of the system. Changes in transport of heat and humidity up to the Arctic explain both the strong warming trend in the Arctic and its effects on global warming, according to WGH. This is especially the case during the dark polar winter, which is why we see the pattern in figure 1. Cf. the first post in this series, here.

The Green-house Gas Forcer hypothesis says that Arctic warming primarily is caused by the increased amount of anthropogenic GHGs in the atmosphere (CO2 etc.).[5] These increase the GHE, which is assumed to cause the large temperature increase in the Arctic. The GHE-driven warming in the Arctic has even been given its own name: “Arctic Amplification” [AA]. This is IPCC’s take on the relationships: (continue reading)

The Battle of Climate Hypotheses: The Green-House Gas Forcer Vs. The Winter Gatekeeper Round 3: The Two Arctic Paradoxes

The energy transition currently being pursued by the current Administration imposes several types of societal costs, many of which are ignored.

The cessation of fossil fuel use would strand approximately $60 trillion of coal, oil and natural gas resources, depriving the owners of those resources of their profitable sale and depriving the nation of their beneficial use.

The replacement of natural gas end uses with electric end uses would result in abandonment of billions of dollars of natural gas production, transmission and distribution infrastructure. It would also require development of additional electric generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure. The replacement of oil and gasoline end uses with electric end uses would result in abandonment of oil production, refining and distribution infrastructure and require further increases in electric infrastructure.

Consumer replacement of typical gas and electric appliances and equipment with high efficiency electric appliances and equipment such as heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, heat pump laundry dryers and induction ranges adds significant consumer cost, as those appliances are approximately twice as expensive as their conventional counterparts. While it is true that these high efficiency appliances would offer lower operating costs than their conventional counterparts, it is questionable whether their higher costs would be recovered through energy cost savings over their useful lives.

Upgrading residential and commercial buildings to reduce their energy consumption by the DOE 50% target would be extremely expensive and it is doubtful that the cost would be recovered through energy savings. Replacing windows in buildings with windows which reduce undesirable heat gain and heat loss is particularly expensive. It is also a classic case of “broken window economics”.

Adding solar photovoltaic collectors to those residential and commercial buildings which are suitably oriented for such installations is also expensive, as is the addition of storage batteries to store solar generated electricity for later use.

Replacing ICE vehicles with electric vehicles also involves a significant cost premium, as well as a reduction in vehicle utility. It would also require significant electric generation, transmission and distribution investment as well as electric service upgrades to support vehicle chargers.

Interestingly, DOE’s Decarbonizing the U.S. Economy by 2050: A National Blueprint for the Buildings Sector views the storage batteries in both electric vehicles and building solar installations as “generators”, available to supply power to the grid during periods of peak demand or reduced renewable generation output, potentially reducing the value of these assets to their owners.

It is unclear the extent to which government would choose to incentivize the above actions or subsidize the incremental costs. However, while such government actions might reduce the direct costs of the actions for individual building owners or vehicle purchasers, they would not reduce the societal costs of the actions.

The current situation with electric vehicles provides a compelling societal cost example. If a vehicle manufacturer prices a vehicle at approximately $60,000 and experiences a loss of approximately $60,000 on each vehicle sold and the government offers an approximate $7,500 subsidy for each vehicle purchased by an ultimate consumer, the ultimate consumer pays approximately $52,500 for the vehicle, but the societal cost of the vehicle is approximately $120,000 ($52,500 + $7,500 + $60,000). Actually, the societal cost is higher, whether the government subsidy is paid from tax revenues or from borrowing, because of the administrative costs incurred by the government and, in the case of borrowed funds, because of the interest expense over the life of the financial instrument.

From: CO2 Coalition

By: R. Lindzen, W. Happer, and W. A. van Wijngaarden

Date: June 11, 2024

Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase

June 2024

Many people are surprised by how little warming would be averted from adoption of net zero policies. For example, if the United States achieved net zero emissions of carbon dioxide by the year 2050, only a few hundredths of a degree Celsius of warming would be averted. This could barely be detected by our best instruments.  The fundamental reason is that warming by atmospheric carbon dioxide is heavily “saturated,” with each additional ton of atmospheric carbon dioxide producing less warming than the previous ton.

Abstract:

Using feedback-free estimates of the warming by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and observed rates of increase, we estimate that if the United States (U.S.) eliminated net CO2 emissions by the year 2050, this would avert a warming of 0.0084 ?C (0.015 ?F), which is below our ability to accurately measure. If the entire world forced net zero CO2 emissions by the year 2050, a warming of only 0.070 ?C (0.13 ?F) would be averted. If one assumes that the warming is a factor of 4 larger because of positive feedbacks, as asserted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the warming averted by a net zero U.S. policy would still be very small, 0.034 ?C (0.061 ?F). For worldwide net zero emissions by 2050 and the 4-times larger IPCC climate sensitivity, the averted warming would be 0.28 ?C (0.50 ?F). (continue reading)

Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase