Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.
China is building new coal power so fast that energy transition by the West is meaningless. Even if the US went completely off coal tomorrow, its plants would be more than replaced. (1)
There are a total of 3,092 operating coal plant units in China. As of January 2023 the province of Shandong, which lies to the south of Beijing, houses the greatest number of coal power plants, at over 400 units.
America is preparing to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars to install offshore wind turbines for illusory benefits.
Advocates claim offshore wind energy is clean and sustainable. Wind certainly is, but that doesn't mean getting energy from wind is. (1)
The cleanliness of bed sheets and pillowcases is often overlooked yet nothing in your bedroom is as dirty as your pillowcase. Studies have shown that after just one week of use, pillowcases harbor bacteria levels surpassing those found on a toilet set by a staggering nearly 20,000 times. (1)
Rising living expenses in the European Union (EU) are causing conflicts over climate mitigation efforts, with members like Germany and others expressing concerns. (1)
Consistent;y higher living expenses have deepened a rift among and within EU members about tackling climate change and moving away from oil, gas, and coal.
Mysteriously warming is happening across the solar system. The one common factor is at the center of it all: the sun.
Neptune's giant moon Triton is the first body in the solar system where global warming could be detected. According to measurements, the atmosphere pressure doubled and the temperature rose 3 degrees Kelvin.
International scientists have jointly signed a declaration dismissing the existence of a climate crisis and insisting that carbon dioxide is beneficial to Earth. A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.
"There is no climate emergency," the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its Would Climate Declaration made public in August. "Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures." (1)
New studies affirm Antarctica has not been cooperating with either the global warming or 'polar amplification' narratives. (1)
The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades despite a monotonic increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. (2)
Mankind has emitted fully 65% of our total carbon emissions since the year 1980, and yet it has not done much at all to the melt rate of the ice shelves of Antarctica.
China consumes 55% of the world's coal, and that consumption continues to rise. As a whole, The Asia Pacific region is responsible for 81% of the world's coal consumption, as well as the vast majority of the world's ongoing carbon dioxide emissions.
China's reliance on coal fired power generation increased during the first half of 2023 as continued drought severely reduced hydroelectric power in the southern provinces. (2)
People don't like bird bashing giants and thumping infrasound. And who could have seen that spending trillions turning the electricity grid into a giant weather machine would make energy costs higher, thus piling wood on the inflationary fires that have come back to bite wind turbine manufacturers? (1)
The wind industry should be flying high but instead is entrapped by a cornucopia of troubles. Projects are too often held up by red tape and nimbyism, while contracts signed years ago have become oneous due to material and logistics cost inflation. Anywhere you look around the world, wind is facing serious problems.
Climate change prophecy hangs its hat on computer climate models, yet these models have gigantic problems.
With the enthusiasm of religious zealots and the ruthlessness of the power mad, a climate industrial complex is driving energy policy on the basis of a hundred or so badly flawed computer models. More than 95 percent of these digital prognosticators have proven unreliable in predicting climatic trends. Yet, they are used anyhow. (1)
Two recent headlines:
• Duggan Flanakin, "Italy returns to nuclear sanity. Shouldn't we?", nuclearenergy.org, May 15, 2023
• Kristen Walker, "The US must take note: Sweden backpedals on renewable energy. Sweden is going nuclear," realclearenergy.org, July 6, 2023
The world set a new record for energy use in the last year. And even though renewables are being installed at the fastest rate they have ever been, it isn't enough to keep up with the growing demand for energy let alone to 'convert' the world to net zero. (1)
Overall, despite the best efforts to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the world remains 'stuck' getting 82% of its energy from them. We are a fossil fueled world. Solar and wind power make up just 6% of our energy needs.
Last year, the Biden administration set an ambitious new goal for the US: to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by the year 2030, increasing US offshore capacity more than seven hundred times. The UK already has 15 GW of offshore wind, more than 300 times as much as the US, and the experience should be a warning to Americans. (1)
Net zero and its corollary the "energy transition" are talked about often and so loosely that many take them for granted as worthy goals that could be accomplished with greater buy-in from political and business leaders. But two new reports form the utility industry should put an end to such loose talk. (1)
The Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the US electric utility industry, released a report titled "Net Zero 2050: US Economy Wide Deep Decarbonization Scenario Analysis." This report concludes that the utility industry can't attain net zero. The study showed that clean electricity plus direct electrification and efficiency are not sufficient by themselves to achieve net zero economy wide emissions.
John Kerry leads an international jet-set life that might exhaust a runway model. If President Biden's special envoy for climate was not in Washington or relaxing at his mansion near Nantucket Harbor, he could be found in Brazil, Panama, the Bahamas, Germany, or Iceland. And that's just in February and March. (1)
In his effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Kerry has flown hundreds of thousands of miles, sometimes commercially, sometimes on his own private jet. In just nine months last year he logged more than 180,000 miles, emitting some 9.5 million pounds of carbon.
Flying is in general the most carbon intensive way to travel per mile. Private plane travel is at an all time high; demand continues to outpace supply, and it's more accessible than ever.
A number of celebrities don't 'walk the walk' when it comes to climate change--they just talk the talk.
In the first half of 2022, 10 celebrities released a staggering 3,376 metric tons of carbon emissions. That's about 482 times the average person's annual emissions. Average flight times came in at just 72 minutes with an average 67 miles traveled per flight.
There has been no rise in global temperatures from July 2015 to March 2023.
This fact-based claim draws on satellite readings from the University of Alabama in Huntsville that measures temperatures in the troposphere, a much more accurate method of keeping score than the shoddy records produced by ground based weather stations. (1)
Most Germans used to be enthusiastic supporters of the country's Energiewende (transition of renewable energies),especially in the early days when they were brazenly misled about the endeavors humungous costs and technical limitations. (1)
Those days are gone. Catastrophic report: whopping 88% of those surveyed see move to green energies as unachievable.
As the government gears up to try to pass legislation that would force most home owners to carry out extensive renovation to their homes and upgrades to their heating systems, the Energiewende is suddenly no longer looking like a bargain and is no longer welcome by the vast majority of Germans. (1)
President Biden said recently that "we're going to be shutting coal plants down all across America having wind and solar."
Obituaries for coal have been announced ad nauseam, most recently at last year's UN climate change COP26 summit in Edinburgh. Yet there has been an eight fold price surge in coal since September 2020 to over $430 per ton two years later from prices that ranged between $50-$150 a ton through the past decade. This was led by a resurgence of demand after the pandemic lockdowns--especially in China and India, the worlds two largest coal consumers accounting for two-thirds of the world total--but also in Japan, South Korea, Europe and the US. (1)
Two independent groups of scientists have destroyed the always improbable claim that vertebrates across the planet have declined by 69 percent since 1970 made by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. (1)
A group of Canadian biologists has shown that the figure is a statistical freak. They reveal that the estimate is driven by 2.4 percent of wildlife populations, adding, "If these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase."