Links tagged “emission”

Politico: "...lawmakers are investing new energy into formulating a Republican response to the crisis, at least on paper."

"We believe that our energy solutions are climate solutions and that addressing climate change is absolutely a prime priority," Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told Jeremy. That’s in line with McCarthy’s own efforts to craft a GOP climate strategy before last year’s midterms. ... 

Some Republican lawmakers are promoting measures to boost deployment of renewable energy and sequester carbon through tree planting (while others are stuck on the hoax thing)...“Republicans have moved from denial to an acknowledgment of climate change,” Alex Flint, a former Republican congressional staffer who now leads the conservative group Alliance for Market Solutions, told Emma.

The bottom line: The GOP wants to appease climate-conscious voters and powerful business interests that want the party to act on climate.

Benny Peiser of Net Zero Watch - Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in DC

Peiser: "In Europe, we are degrading our own economy and degrading our nations, in the name of saving the planet without doing anything about CO2 emissions because we are just shifting them abroad, we're just exporting them. That is at the core of all these 27 COPs we've seen over the last 30 years. It's always the same old, it's always the same outcome. The developing world, China, India, etc. are not going to risk their own economies, the well-being of their people, their energy security, their national security. We're doing it and we're paying the price for it."
 
Peiser: "And this is the biggest warning to Americans: If you want to avoid your energy bills going up fourfold, don't do what we are doing."

Flashback: Book reveals UN’s goal of ‘2 degree’ limit of ‘global warming’ has no scientific basis – ‘Pulled out of thin air’

China consumes over 4 billion tons of coal a year, most of it domestically mined with imports making up less than a tenth of its needs. In 2021 its reserves stood at around 208 billion tons, 28% more than the prior year’s level, while the outlay on exploration rose 10% to 1.3 billion yuan ($184 million), according to the ministry.

The push for “green” energy alternatives is causing a shortage of sulfuric acid, a resource critical for the production of food and lithium-ion batteries, according to a new report from the University College London. The paper, published in Geographical Journal, explains how over 80 percent of the global sulfur supply currently comes from the desulfurisation of fossil fuels. Pushes for decarbonization, however, which seek to ban the use of fossil fuels, will create a “shortfall” in the annual supply of sulfuric acid between 100 and 320 million tonnes by 2040, researchers estimate.

Michael Shellenberger: Why are the people who say they want to save civilization actively undermining it? The main reason policymakers are pursuing pro-scarcity policies is because they, along with most of the public, believe the environment is getting worse, not better. The share of Americans who say the state of the environment is fair or poor rose from 49% to 61% between 2015 and 2022. Movies and television reinforce this perception. ... But almost every major environmental trend is improving. Lead, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxide pollutants declined 99%, 91%, and 61% between 1980 and 2018, according to the U.S. EPA. It’s true carbon emissions are rising again...Carbon emissions globally were flat over the last decade and declined 22% in the U.S. from 2005 and 2020. And there is little evidence that microplastics actually harm human health, something Cronenberg himself acknowledged.

Wash Post: An entire supply chain of rare minerals, semiconductors, batteries and financing has to fall into place before Americans give up their combustion engines.  ... And some money will go to projects that never materialize or fail altogether. The 2009 stimulus bill, the largest investment in clean energy before the new bill, created a clean energy loan program that infamously funded the failed solar start-up Solyndra, which became an embarrassment for the Obama administration. And it poured billions of dollars into a high-speed-rail system in California that has still not come to fruition.

British environmental activist George Monbiot: "It's by far and away the greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of wildlife loss, the greatest cause of extinction, greatest cause of soil loss, greatest source of fresh water use. It's one of the greatest causes of climate breakdown, bigger than transport."  ...

"We need to act as drastically within that sector as any other sector to prevent the collapse of our life support systems and what that means, above all else, is getting out of livestock farming is really shutting down animal farming altogether, because that has massively disproportionate impacts on the living planet, and we need to switch towards other sources of food plant-based diets which are far more efficient, far lower environmental impacts."

"It's a bit like leaving fossil fuels in the ground unless we do that. We've really got very little chance indeed of preventing this domino effect of system collapse right across systems which basically makes the planet uninhabitable. So eating meat and milk and eggs is an indulgence we cannot afford." 

"Dr. Roger Pielke ran the numbers and found that, even if it achieved Biden’s 50% emissions-reduction target for 2030, which it almost certainly won’t, the impact on overall global emissions would be nearly unmeasurable."

Climate Depot's Morano comments: Biden is pushing for utterly meaningless climate-based emission reductions of CO2 that would have no potential impact on the climate -- and even if fully achieved, would have no impact on global emissions! All of this as we further hammer America. Biden should have listened to his climate envoy John Kerry has admitted this publicly several times.

See: Flashback: John Kerry explains climate futility: If U.S. zeroed out CO2 emissions, it ‘still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world’

Update: Statistician Bjorn Lomborg: Biden’s IRA climate bill will ‘do almost nothing for the global temperature…even by end of century’ – ‘Will reduce temps by less than 1 thousandth of a degree F by the end of the century’

Flashback 2021: Morano testifies to Pennsylvania House Committee on Climate regs: ‘It’s time to confront the wannabe planet savers here in this room & this state & tell them to not only NO, but HELL NO’