From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
MARCH 6, 2022
By Paul Homewood
A major new analysis by Michael Kelly on the practicability of Net Zero:
Former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith has called for an “honest and open debate” on Net Zero, warning that politicians have not sufficiently scrutinised the requirements, and saying that they must level with the public about the sacrifices required.
He also highlights the UK’s lack of energy security and Western Europe’s reliance on Russian gas.
Sir Iain’s comments, in the foreword to a new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, reflect growing alarm among Conservative backbenchers about a possible electoral backlash in the wake of the cost of living crisis, and a new awareness of the threat the Net Zero project represents to national security.
The report, by Professor Michael Kelly FRS, examines the scope of the Net Zero project and considers the financial, resource and manpower requirements, concluding that the political and economic upheaval it would necessitate make success a practical impossibility.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith said:
“We owe it to the citizens of the UK to take a long hard look at the path to be taken. Policymakers must be honest and open with the British public about how much all this will cost them and how much change to our everyday lives may be required.”
Professor Kelly said:
“The scale of this project is, in terms of resource and time, so great that a war footing and a command economy will be essential for its delivery”
The report is worth bookmarking, as it covers all of the practical aspects of achieving Net Zero:
Professor Michael Kelly: Achieving Net Zero (pdf)
Of course there will necessarily be cuts to education and health. They want most of you to die and want you to be too stupid and uninformed to know it.
a paranoid, ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Maybe, but gas prices are going up and this will drive further inflation. Inflation is the biggest tax on working poor people. Meanwhile the West wants you to believe it’s Ukraine.
If the West continues its war on fossil fuels then there will be hell to pay. People can only pushed so far by stupid polices.
Strictly speaking, increasing fuel costs are also deflationary – as they reduce ability to spend on other things. Hence the phrase “stagflation” coined during the first major oil shock in the ‘70s.
Like the central bank believing that rising interest rates will lower inflation.
Like gasoline cools a fire.
Rising oil prices make oil more expensive, but since there is less to spend on everything else, it is also deflationary. The only thing that can cause inflation is government printing money faster than the economy is growing.
Close, Mark. The only thing that can cause inflation is government spending more than it collects in taxes.
The lag between that excess spending and inflation is about six months depending on the commodity. Today’s inflation was caused by spending from three months to just short of a year ago. (See Milton F)
Inflation is a tax on savings and wages. A tax mostly on the middle class because most wages are earned and savings held by the middle class. It is the most regressive tax possible reducing the purchasing power of the poor, middle class, and rich by the same percentage.
“Inflation is the biggest tax on working poor people.”
AND retired people, especially those on fixed incomes.
Clearly you didn’t read Michael Kelly’s essay. A command economy will be required, in other words – communism.
Kindly name a communist economy which hasn’t descended into murder and genocide.
You deny the existence of eugenicists?
You deserve nothing, and you will be happy.
Remember that Paul Ehrlich stated that having cheap and abundant power would be like “giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
And another lie spewed by the lie spewing liar.
It matters little as to whether it is a ‘paranoid, ridiculous conspiracy theory’ or a by-product of this ruinous policy – the end result will be the same.
“you to be too stupid and uninformed to know it.”
griff = prima facie evidence of this tactic’s success.
Try a read of Agenda 21, it is all in there!!! Dumbing down of educations systems globally, because educated people have an apparent higher Carbon Footprint (whatever one of those is when it’s at home)!!!
There they go….doing calculations, providing facts and data, and doing a sober engineering analysis. HOW DARE THEY! /snark. Net zero is the biggest pipe dream EVAH!
Of course the big question is the number of politicians, elected representatives, who have the qualifications and/or private sector business experience to understand the ramifications.
After all, many of them seem to believe that a battery storage can replace power station generators, electricity is electricity isn’t it.
But they’re so easy to change
Superb
Great catch, I did find a better (not perfect) audio version w/o the sniffles…
Net zero is actually entirely and practically achievable – if we go 100% nuclear, which of course is the last the last thing that the warmunists and their luddite anti-human supporters want to see happen.
No it is not. Most of the U.S. is too cold for a full fleet of electric vehicles. Over the road trucks, construction, mining, will require diesel engines. Period. All you are claiming, indirectly, is that some magic will happen to batteries.
The USA is too large for 100% electrification of railroads, ala Switzerland. Rail diesel-electric is the most energy efficient form of transportation available.
See the Trans Siberian railroad. All electric, all nine thousand kilometres. Don’t talk nonsense.
9000 Km is about the number of rail miles in a single state like Ohio and it isn’t limited to just a single line.
How many decades do you want to spend on switching over?
Do you really want all those added high voltage lines hanging over railways?
Who is going to pay for the conversion?
Don’t talk nonsense.
Electrification of the Trans Siberian is only possible because of numerous hydro electric plants on the route.
I have ridden it from Vladivostok to Moscow.
Duane, According to a previous post by someone who seems to know a lot more about scheduling than I do, 100% nuclear won’t work. Nuclear works fine as base load but takes too long to ramp up/down to meet fast changing loads. I can’t find his comment but maybe he or someone else will come on and describe it better than I can.
This article at eia.gov (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956) gives the time from cold shutdown to full load for the various forms of power generation. However, it doesnt cover such things as hot standby, shutdown time, etc.
Joe,
largely irrelevant as in practice you don’t shut down thermal plants if they may be needed in the short term. There will be times these plants are running but not feeding the grid.
Well, as touched on in the attached PDF, there are elements that are very challenging to electrify. As mentioned aviation and maritime are two of the big ones. Simply put, battery powered airplanes on a scale comparable to current commercial airplanes are a pipe dream. As for maritime – well, yeah, they could nuke up, but the economics and practical implications of thousands of nuke powered ships boggles the mind.
And then there is agriculture. I really enjoy farming vids on You Tube. The amount of battery power it would take to replace the diesel in a tractor is enormous. Pulling the tillage equipment across the field running 150 or 250 HP non stop for hours on end…let’s see.200 HP = 149kw of power (Ref Google).
So when they’re doing 8 hours of tillage at that power setting, they’d need 149kw *8 hours = 1192 kw-h of battery capacity. LiFePO4 is all the rage for home / off grid / van life solar power folks. For server rack ~5kwh packs in that chemistry, those currently run about 29 cents per watt hour for the cheapest current pricing I can find (Ref Mobile Solar Power dot com). So…the battery pack alone for that tractor would run about $345,000 (1,192,000 watt-hours * 29 cents / watt-hour). About 233 server rack batteries would be needed to get that 1192 kwh capacity at 5.1kwh each (Ref above site, the Jakiper pack). At ~100 lbs per (Ref Jakiper website specs linked from above), that’s 23,300 lbs of batteries (never mind the weight and expense of turning 233 server rack units into a cohesive unit / pack / packs). Hmmm…well, I know a 200+ hp diesel and fuel for 8+ hours is less than that.
And never mind if they want to run 12 hours, or 16 hours straight of tillage, because refueling a diesel tractor and running hard, long hours when you have favorable weather and ground conditions is never a concern for farmers (/snark). It’s a wee bit cheaper to have a saddle tank and a 100 gallons of untaxed diesel in the back of a pickup than keep a spare $345,000, 23,000 lb plus battery pack laying around for a swap out in the field. And this example, is just a modest 200 HP sized tractor. There are plenty that are far, far larger. See the “Big Bud” tractors at Welker Farms YT channel where they farm thousands of acres of Montana wheat.
Oh, and there is no pulling a giant extension cord across the fields either.
This is the same ROM level estimating as the report, and it shows the utter impracticality of the current tech battery powered devices. Electric is fine for niche roles. It’s not ready for the prime mover / heavy duty roles required of a modern society.
Hey no worries, I’m sure the Merchant Marine Academy and the various Merchant Seaman schools are chomping at the bit to put their people through the hell of a Navy nuclear power-program that takes years to complete and has a massive fail rate.
And of course all those shipbuilders are just full of nuclear-reactor designers.
Duane,
possibly, but only if small modular reactors can load follow, something large reactors have difficulty with. It’s essential to have flexible generators to keep demand and supply in balance at all times.
That is what, in the U.K., gas generation does, it is far more than simple back up for renewables as seems to be the perception, it is the backbone of the grid.
More importantly, we should be having a debate on whether the Earth is at immediate and existential danger from human-emitted CO2.
Or whether the models which suggest this are complete frauds which do not match reality in the slightest….
Maybe it’s time for Christopher Monckton to publish his audit of IPCC climate hoax and warming creative accounting again?
Wasn’t he going to get Scotland Yard involved? whatever happened to that?
As the MET police has now taken several weeks not to investigate Boris’ Partygate, I daresay Monckton got them involved some years ago.
Brench believes in the GHE and ECS. It would be better if it were someone who was actually aware that there is no evidence, in a laboratory or in the field, for either of those hypotheses.
You can debate yourself if you want to: clearly there is rapid climate change caused by human CO2 which has serious impacts and the world’s govts and electricity generators and scientists agree on that.
So, Griff, of the sceptic arguments you have heard recently on the BBC, which do you consider the most easily rebutted? That is, with data and falsifiable predictions?
No, the climate has barely changed in the last 100 or so years.
A small and very beneficial warming..
What else has changed ? Absolutely nothing.
What are these “serious impacts”? there are none.
Weather is all within historic bounds, just cooler than most of the Holocene.
You are just making stuff up.
I’m a scientist, I dont agree on that.
Welcome to the 3%!
Ditto!
Here’s a signed list of 31,000 scientists who believe in the net improvement in climate due to human activities.
http://www.petitionproject.org/
no not clearly … in fact zero evidence of rapid man made climate change …
Shouldn’t that be NetZero evidence? 😉
griff “clearly there is rapid climate change…” is a straight-out lie. It is easy to examine sea-level changes versus atmospheric CO2 levels and see the mismatch. Your Hero, Professor Mikey Mann, invented the Hockey Stick to try to show an acceleration in climate change, where none existed. How did that work out?
griff pushes the narrative that if anything happens that didn’t happen last year, this is proof of global warming.
Actually, it worked out fabulously for Mikey: Even as a PhD candidate, Mikey saw the political need to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) so his Thesis produced the Hockey Stick. The UN IPCC politicians immediately saw the propaganda value of the Hockey Stick and promoted Mikey to Lead Author of the Paleoclimate section of AR3, subsequently feting him and showering him with accolades, awards and rapid promotions.
Despite massive paleo climate and historical evidence for the MWP, UN IPCC and other governmental politicians allowed Mikey to push the Hockey Stick as the only representation of millennial temperatures. It was used prominently in the propaganda around the publication of AR3 and by governments around the world to push for the Kyoto Protocol, with Al Gore particularly misusing it.
It is to the eternal shame of science that knowledgeable scientists and responsible governmental bureaucrats allowed not only the publication and promotion of the Hockey Stick, but actively attacked and suppressed any scientist or mathematician questioning Mikey’s data and methodology. Even after it has been clearly and repeatedly debunked, politicians and Deep State denizens still use it to ferment hysteria among the public for ideological gain.
So, all in all Mikey has done rather well from his Hockey Stick, garnering fame and fortune from a lie. He has been promoted to the heights of CliSciFi in academia, received many lucrative awards, sits on paid board positions, travels worldwide to exotic locations on the taxpayer’s dime, & etc. For the public as a whole, however, it has been massive costs and a reduction in their standard of living. Not a good trade.
That’s not the point of Kelly’s essay.
The point is that economic and environmental catastrophe would engulf us far sooner than climate change could.
What Kelly is saying is that adaptation is the solution, not mitigation for something that has been variously predicted to destroy the planet within months, according to some, for the last 50 years of predictions.
” clearly there is rapid climate change caused by human CO2 ”
Please provide us humble ignorants the physical demonstration of that.
Even were there clear evidence of climate change, what harm has come of it?
I have been listening to claims of catastrophe since I was around 15 years old, 50 years ago, firstly that the world was predicted to cool and we would all soon be in the next ice age.
Not only was that claim proven to be nonsense, the world has undeniably become a better place since then: extreme poverty has dropped like a stone, the planet has greened dramatically, agriculture now produces more food than humans can eat, The standard of living has improved immensely, access to education has improved dramatically, instances of conflict have reduced, healthcare has improved beyond recognition.
By almost any metric one cares to use, life has improved almost everywhere in the world over the last 50 years of catastrophic predictions.
I’ll assume by not responding, as is your habit, that you agree with me.
HotScot.
I think everything you sited, for what it is worth, is on the money. However, the sad truth is that you have not listed off anything these climate change/decarbonization lunatics consider to be a GOOD thing. It’s all bad. Why? Because humanity is not being scrubbed from the Earth by famine, war and disease at a rate that reduces our numbers. These nut cases want fewer of us, not more so we need to freeze in the dark, starve, die in wars and be obliterated by disease. I’m fairly certain there is a super, hard core, cadre of them that are hoping someone gets the next, accidentally released, virus ‘right’ and 90% of the human population is eradicated as a result.
Unfortunately, anything that could kill 90% of us is just as likely to kill all of us and the nut cases are not smart enough to know that mother nature is going to cull our numbers, eventually; bolide strike, super volcano eruption, glaciation, etc.
It is a good time to be alive. I hope they last a bit longer.
Max P
Repeats of events that have been happening for thousands of years, is not evidence of rapid climate change, regardless of how many times you are told to say that.
griffo-
If there is rapid climate change as you claim, then how do you
explain this graph from the IPCC?
http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/figures/temp10000.jpg
Secondly, can you tell all of us how much of the current warming
is natural & how much is caused by humans? I & everyone else will
want to see your proof. Just claiming it’s man-made won’t suffice!!!
Agreement is not proof.
Why don’t you calculate the percentage of human induced CO2 in the atmosphere. It is microscopic.
Is “net zero” civilization based on renewables ( biomass, solar, hydropower and wind etc.) nothing more than another version of a civilization driven by perpetual motion machine? Consider a gedankenexperiment where it takes energy x to produce, install, and maintain all the renewables (biomass, solar panels, windmills, as well as future renewable sources ) and during the operation will produce y energy that is much bigger than x +z where z is the energy consumed by the “net zero” civilization. Then x is plowed back to produce more solar panels and wind mills to generate another y quantity of energy to meet the increase in z demand forever and ever.. If y is less than x+z, then another source of energy is needed that must be supplied by nuclear or fossil fuel. If nuclear energy is excluded as what some countries are proposing, then it would not be net zero. Never mind about the problem of storage, getting the energy when it is needed or the highly variable nature of the renewable energy supply and demand. Or would the proponent of “net zero” argue the sun as the nuclear energy source to drive the perpetual motion machineries?
Are we really going to attain a civilization driven by perpetual motion machineries ?
Yes. The power of the mind, you know. It can do miracles.
There is the matter of the personal cost to anyone who sticks their head above the parapet. What happened to those who opposed Stalin or Mao or Hibler? Monckton’s recent WUWT story lays it out very clearly. If there’s complicity, it’s enforced complicity.
However, Michael Kelly has laid out a set of facts and figures that are straightforward and easy to check. How about we compel the Royal Academy of Engineering to express an opinion on whether they are trustworthy.
It isn’t reasonable to expect the British public to bear a cost of £450,000 per household. Even if an engineering analysis whittles that down to half, it still isn’t reasonable.
As the report points out, unless the whole world is on board, any efforts by the developed world will be pointless. The developed world will have to subsidize the developing world. Thus the eye watering cost cited above.
People will assert that, as technology develops, it becomes cheaper, and they will point to the semiconductor industry as an example. The problem is that what happened for semiconductors is not the usual case. Usually, Eroom’s Law (something like the law of diminishing returns) prevails.
Power stations made their big move in specific output during the middle to latter part of the 20th century.
I have been in the turbine hall of a 180MW 1950 vintage power station that contained 6 by 30MW steam turbines and generators. It was very impressive and some 200m long about 80m wide when the boilers were included but the turbine hall only 30m wide.
About 10 years ago I visited a combined cycle gas fuelled plant rated at 240MW that required the space of a single 30MW turbine and boiler from 1950.
The materials intensity of solar and wind is mind boggling. About two orders of magnitude more materials for the same energy output as a modern gas plant. None of the capital invested can ever get better than 30% utilisation. Realistically, once storage is optimised, the effective utilisation of wind power plant ends up between 12 and 15% and 7 to 12% for solar plant.
So weather derived energy extractors have taken an enormous backward step in materials intensity in one huge backward leap for humankind. With that as the starting point, it is simply impossible to get even close to existing fossil or nuclear fuelled energy sources. Even wood burners are better use of resources.
Monckton’s recent ‘story’ was the purest fiction!
Fiction.. No..
Back by science and data.. Yes.
Try it some time.
On what evidence?
Tell me, Griffy-baby, what scientific degree(s) do you possess that makes you so expert on matters of climate, oh & do tell us from where you obtained your degree(s)!!!
We’ll all look forward to your detailed rebuttal sometime soon then griff?
I am sure you have noticed a sign at the zoo, do not feed the animals. We need to apply the same to certain animals posting on this site. We must just laugh at their odd behaviour and move on.
I agree that too much effort is expended on it. I guess it’s just fun to poke the troll and people can’t resist.
Care to provide some evidence? Or is that just what you are being paid to say?
Michael Kelly has laid out a set of facts and figures that are straightforward and easy to check
Spot on.
This is the earmark or key feature of all Michael Kelly’s work for which he is to be highly commended. I have not seen anything comparable coming from alarmists and the green mob nor do I find them attempting a point for point rebuttal or refutation of any of the points he makes. To attempt to do so would simply expose their flawed and shallow reasoning.
Putin
Exactly right. Most of what drove integrated circuit improvements (the so-called Moore’s Law) was geometry—reducing transistor size by 1/2 allowed 4x more transistors in the same area. Progressively making larger and larger silicon wafers had the same effect. Today IC improvements are limited by the wavelengths available for photolithography (almost x-rays now) and problems caused by very small semiconductor sizes.
Not only is there a limiting effect with photolithography but with the speed of light. Light travels about 18 inches in a picosecond so interconnections between components and the change in state of flip flops are becoming limiting factors also.
In a speech by Boris Johnson (edited) at the weekend he said in a rare burst of energy reality;
“What we need to do is help wean the world off Russian gas and the UK wants to bring countries together so that they stop being so dependent.
The Americans are offering huge quantities, the Canadians have a lot, the Qataris, the Saudis.
What we need to do is bring together a coalition of the hydrocarbon producing countries to help in this tough … Algeria is another very good example.
There are huge reserves around the world. We do not have to be beholden to Putin in the way that we are.
You mention the Baltics, and Finland, those countries, and you’re right, Germany and Italy, there are still heavy dependencies.
But everybody’s capable of moving away from dependence on hydrocarbons at all.
So what we can do is help them in the short term by trying to find alternative supplies, but move as the UK has done towards other solutions.
We have a huge amount of that comes from renewables and we’re working with the Baltics and other countries to increase their renewable capacity.
We also think that here in the UK, we’re going to do a lot more on nuclear. I think it was crazy that under the Labour government allowed our nuclear generation to fall away.
I think we’ve got to recognise that hydrocarbons in the interim are going to be part of the solution. And if it comes to metallurgical coal, for instance, to fire out our steel plants, why would you buy that in from Australia when you can get it from the UK?
“So I just think we need to have a big big mix of solutions but we need to help the world to go beyond Putin’s gas.”
Putin is suffering from some gas pains now. By the way, the Ukraine has potentially immense amounts of hydrocarbons, which is undoubtedly one of the reasons Russia invaded.
Yes gas and the vast wheat fields. They will have a stranglehold on both and push prices way up. In the case of wheat of course it will cause food shortages if Russia secure the fields and redirect their output, but it is unlikely they will be planted this year anyway if war is still raging
The problem with wheat is often over-supply. Can farmers who were going to plant canola this year change their minds and plant wheat?
I would not bet more than a friendly coffee on whether there will be a wheat shortage this year. IMHO, sanctions on Russia could be a bigger factor than the removal of the Ukrainian crop.
You are being distracted.
Well that’s Blunderin Boris exiled to the spare bed room then!
I’m no Labour party supporter but this “I think it was crazy that under the Labour government allowed our nuclear generation to fall away.” is downright deception considering the Conservatives have been in office for the last 12 years.
The dismantling of nuclear started way earlier than that.
The problem with the Parliamentary system is that, unlike the US system, when a new party takes over, if it has ba!!s, like Thatcher, it can change EVERY law in short order.
The problem with the “stable” US system is that a new party, except in very specific and extremely rare supermajority circumstances cannot. That is why Shumer and the democrats tried to end the filibuster requiring 60 Senate votes for the federalization of election regulations.
My hope, when TRUMP! is reelected in 2024, that if the Republicans do not get 60 Senators, that they remove the 60 vote rule and revoke all bills with an enabling clause that references the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution that does not actually apply to interstate commerce. You know, welfare, food stamps, EPA, the Department of Education, etc. etc. Block grant the funds currently spent to the states on a per capita legal US citizen basis reducing to 80% the first year, 60% the second year, and so on. Any state that thinks the programs are so important can use their own tax dollars to support the programs.
Then, the republican system, whereby citizens/voters can vote with their feet, will be reestablished. Please see the Federalist Papers and The Anti-federalist Papers. Currently it does not matter where you live, the State governments MUST take part in the programs to get some portion of their share of their citizens tax money sent to DC back.
Imagine when Cali will need to increase their state income tax by 100% or more to pay for their “beliefs”.
Lets face it, it’s what Carrie wants isn’t it? Along with her rich buddies Goldsmith et al for whom the cost of anything is mere bagatelle. To convert my house for net zero £40k plus and it wont even be warm in winter so I need to cost in extra jumpers etc! And……………..I am not convinced it will make a ha’pence worth of difference. In fact I know it won’t. The world has gone nuts.
I had no idea Hugh Grant cared so much for the poorest
“ Hugh Grant issues blunt response to Nigel Farage after net zero referendum campaign announcement
Hugh Grant has told Nigel Farage to “go f*** yourself” in response to his campaign for a net zero referendum.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/nigel-farage-hugh-grant-net-zero-referendum-b2029908.html
Nice guy
Hugh Grant is a turd.
He hasn’t got over the Brexit vote; never will by the look of it.
Typical artistic temperament hissy-fit!!! His use of English is typical of such creatures!!!
All you need do is see whom he was married to and what he was stepping out with some years ago to know Grant’s capacity for rational thought is somewhere south of nil.
The usual nonsense, riddled with errors…
for now I’ll just point out this is rubbish:
‘and there is little scope in the UK for additional pumped hydroelectricity – our biggest facility, Dinorwig in Wales, would only charge 0.7% of all UK cars (all with small 60- kWh batteries) if emptied once’
Because there’s this:
Coire Glas
and that’s not the only one.
(BTW pumped storage is for use to meet peak demand and sudden demand spikes, not car charging)
The idea of running a modern society on unreliables is utterly stupid
Let’s frack Brandon…
Pumped storage has been repeatedly proposed as a replacement for conventional fuels, otherwise it wouldn’t get mentioned here.
no pumped storage was FIRST used for peak demand … it is being pimped as real storage for your “replaceables” … (there are no renewables except maybe hydro) …
your religious belief in the fairy tale of renewables is sad …
Well, I’m all in favor of pumped storage when you can do it. There’s a second video in griff’s link that say they’ll be drilling into rock that’s centuries old. Rock’s probably been there since even before the War of the Roses.
If hydro is only good for peaking then why is it counted in for total generation? Your arguments fall apart.
Even if griff actually read the article, it’s unlikely he actually understood it.
He obviously missed the bit where Malcolm Turnbull (ex Aussie PM) said
“You cannot effect the clean energy transition with variable renewable energy alone. You cannot get there just with solar panels and wind turbines. You’ve got to be able to store energy when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing so you can use it when they’re not”
Coire Glas will store around 30GWh but I didn’t see anything about how many homes it could supply and for how long (as they usually put it).
The assumption that renewables will ever produce enough energy to cover demand and charge whatever storage mechanism you have to meet demand when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining appears to be as realistic as a petutual motion machine.
All that environmental destruction to ummmm…..save the environment. Very good.
Guess why every green organisation hates hydro?
pumped storage?
griff or anyone else, can you explain the logic of using electricity to pump water up hill, only to allow the water to flow back down hill to generate more electricity.
Off peak electricity, generated by fossil fuels, is a cheap means of getting the water back up the hill.
People just conveniently forget about the fossil fuel bit.
Oh goody, you’ve gotten them up to maybe 2.5% of what is needed to supply all cars. Less than 1% of what is needed for the country as a whole.
Really griff, you need to hire someone to review your posts before you post them. Surely your handlers can spare that much.
Griffo-
Since you mentioned rubbish, shouldn’t you be ashamed that Net Zero
really won’t be Net Zero because of all the extra needless pollution it
creates because it’s a total scam?
https://joannenova.com.au/2022/03/americas-national-renewable-energy-lab-warns-a-tidal-wave-of-wind-and-solar-waste-is-coming/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=americas-national-renewable-energy-lab-warns-a-tidal-wave-of-wind-and-solar-waste-is-coming
You seem chronically uninformed, griff.
Pumped hydro does not create energy, it uses more than you get out of it.
What source do you reserve for car charging?
NET ZERO is a scam.
Individual organisations may be able to claim 100%renewable electricity generation or net zero based on offsets, BUT any multi organisation or regional audit will reveal double dipping of offsets and electrical generation.
Certain wind farms will be producing 100% plus output.
That is a great honest essay by someone the establishment consider a valid voice.
I just hope Boris and others, in positions of influence take the time to read it and understand the folly of Net Zero.
Sadly I have my doubts that our political class are capable of reading anything longer than a Twit string…..,
We can but hope.
Thank you Prof Michael Kelly. Now please go and demand the Academic institutions read it and come back into the real world, which they appear to have abandoned this past thirty years.
don’t thank Kelly … he starts with the assumption that Net Zero is needed … which is simply ignorant … I don’t put stock in ignorant people …
I hear you, but work on the principle there is more rejoicing in heaven when one sinner repents. He realises, the impossible Net Zero dream is just a dream and more like him need to come out and say so. No matter what their initial personal preferences might once have been,
Sophistry is sophistry and has no role in science.
A Sophist was a paid public speaker in Ancient Greece, paid to stand on street corners spouting whatever he was paid to speak, regardless of whether he believed it or not!!! To bore you all, again, the word sophisticated means corrupt & adulterated, impure, to spoil the purity of something, to tamper with something, a false argument meant to deceive!!! However, Leitmotif, your observation is very accurate indeed!!!
Political positioning. Everyone dealing with politicians must offer them an olive branch before kicking them into touch.
Kicking them where???
Interesting read – but I tripped up fairly early on this phrase
If the UK stock had been built in Sweden or Spain, the thermal envelope would have been much more effective for keeping energy in during winter, or out during summer.
I own a house in Spain , and can attest to the appalling energy efficiency- they are hopeless at keeping the heat out in summer, and are brutally cold in winter. The vast majority are built of single skin terracotta brick with no insulation at all…….
I don’t disagree with the general premise and have posted here before that looking at the UK government own figured on energy usage we need to double (at least) the electrical generation and distribution system…..
“The vast majority are built of single skin terracotta brick with no insulation at all…….”
It isn’t just the lack of insulation per se, having watched the construction of a couple of villas whilst holidaying in Spain, sitting on the balcony of our rented villa, the total lack of “bonding” of hollow clay masonry units was abysmal, simply placing one unit on top of the other, being held into place with cement-based render applied too soon & whilst the Sun was rapidly rising, the thermal shrinkage cracking was appalling, & such construction would never be accepted in the UK under Building Regulations. The only saving grace was that the basic structural framing was in reinforced concrete (don’t make me go there) in which the hollow terracotta blockwork was merely a filler element between concrete columns & beams!!! It wouldn’t get signed off on my PI Insurance nor a UK Building Control Officer/Building Inspector!!!
since Net Zero is impossible why would I read this nonsense … ?
Because it confirms it’s impossible……….
love it its incredible keep it up thanks for best sharing
Who are these people, what planet are they from.
Why do they not know how things work..
Here’s from Alibaba again – the page of a heat-pump manufacturer
There we can buy a 16kWatt heat pump for less than £400
(Generally reckoned that just a 10kW pump will suffice for most UK homes)
That is about half to a third of what a gas combi-boiler would cost you from any nearby builder’s merchant. Double that to get it installed so about £2,500 to install gas and easily done in a new-build home
And now, when heat-pumps are mandated for UK houses..
Quote:”someone with a family-size three-bed house and larger can expect to pay £8,000-£15,000 in total to install a complete air source system,
And *that* was is from The Grauniad – a place that has an entire editorial dept. devoted entirely to polishing turds
Note well the little bit they slip in about the £5,000 government grant
Do we see the price differential, how £400 becomes £15,000
– because *that* is why I ask about ‘planets’ and why these people don’t know, don’t seem to know of don’t want to know about Cronyism
They don’t want to know about cronyism because they are Cronies themselves.
as in fact we all are now – genuinely convinced that tax payers have bottomless pockets and that there really are such things as Free Lunches
ok ok ok, you get what you pay for. fine
But Free Lunches do not extend to ‘Biomass’ and that is the thing that will take us all down if we don’t recognise how biomass works, what it is and how it controls the climate. And it really does
Meanwhile…
BBC Headline:”Ukraine war ‘catastrophic for global food’
also, hope you can see it:
https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/concerns-mount-over-spring-planting-in-black-sea-region
Never mind Free Lunches, there ain’t gonna be *any* lunches soon.
or breakfasts
or dinners
or snacks
I costed up to NetZero my own modest, 3 bedroom, EOT, Victorian cottage in Kent.
I have a large garden so priced for a Ground Source Heat pump – £20,0000 – £30,000 depending on model, subject to site survey.
Internal insulation (the walls, common to many UK buildings, are solid 9″ brick and the building is listed so no external cladding allowed) would cost £15,000 – £20,000 which would entail ripping out every fitting including bathroom and kitchen. Replacement cost, conservatively, £15,000.
What’s universally ignored is the need for whole house ventilation when it’s even possible. Every floor would need to be ripped up and ducting installed and heat exchangers installed for external ventilation. No one was clear on how this could be driven or incorporated into a Heat Pump system. Vague estimate £20,000.
Then there’s complete redecoration and flooring/carpeting – perhaps £10,000.
Double glazing – £10,000
So, around £90,000 – £110,000 to convert one house.
The Heat Pump engineer was honest enough to tell me that no matter what I did to my house a heat pump just wouldn’t work as they are designed to work in super insulated, modern houses which also utilise optimised positioning, to capture natural sunlight to aid in heating the home. He also said he didn’t know a single installation which wasn’t forced to retro fit a secondary heat source e.g. wood burning stove, which entirely defeated the purpose.
Don’t disagree – except some of your estimates are WAAY under …
Agreed, but people just don’t believe me when I tell them so I keep them modest.
Tell them you also neglected the ongoing short term & long term maintenance costs (paint, replacement windows, replacement roofing, water lines, sewer lines, treatment of water/sewer, fire protection (roads, vehicles, etc) …)
just finished reading the report. it makes a powerfull statment. one thing missing in the text was the amount of land needed for both turbines and pvc to generate the amount of energy needed in 2050 and beyond.
Good point Joe, I will incorporate that.
Michael K
What do those massive land use changes do to the local climate and environments?
The only models anyone should believe are sold by Revell.
Energy storage costs are fantastically higher than the cost of producing the energy in the first place. This dooms any power source that cannot be regulated to match demand.
The problem is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. If you have too little the problem is obvious. But if you have too much, what do you do with it? You can’t simply turn off a switch. The energy needs to go somewhere.
This is a very fundamental problem. A solar farm that produces energy when the grid is full is worse than useless. The grid has to pay someone to take the excess power while also having to pay the solar farm for the unwanted power.
As unregulated solar and wind produce large excess power on days when both the sun shines and wind blows, the price of power goes negative for baseline power stations, eventually driving them out of business, leaving the grid at the mercy of wind and solar.
Nature provides the ultimate “net-zero”. There is little or no year-to-year accumulation of CO2 in the global atmosphere. The open, cold polar waters are the ultimate sink for atmospheric CO2; both natural (95%) and anthropogenic (5%) emissions. Multiple sinks remove CO2 from the atmosphere before it gets to the poles. The major one is cold water in clouds. Rain returns the absorbed CO2 back to the surface. However, a small fraction goes out the tops of tall thunder clouds and is delivered to the poles via jet streams.
The emissions from a power plant only have to travel to the nearest clouds to be mostly absorbed. All the sinks that affect natural emissions affect anthropogenic emissions similarly. So the anthropogenic fraction of atmospheric CO2 that is delivered to the cold polar waters is likely only around 0.25% So essentially all of anthropogenic emissions are “net-zeroed” within a year.
You people just will not learn!!! Please don not try to confuse warmunists with scientific facts, they just can’t handle it, simply because it goes against their politically brainwashed opinion!!! No sarcasm needed!!!
Clearly, we need to build 100s of Nuclear fusion plants with the 645,000,000 MJ/Kg.
The fact that there isn’t even one working to that level should be of no bother.
A statement like this is still misleading. It will be used by the useful idiots brigade to conclude that it is yet possible to implement. All we need is a war footing and a command economy — what we wanted all along!
A real war footing a la WWII required Roosevelt to stop making war on the commercial and industrial sectors of the economy which was what he had been practicing for the previous seven years. I doubt any such thing is now possible. Biden and his myrmidons are engaged in magical groupthink which they are unable to escape. Their goal is to transform an entire world, while enforce all sorts of new social rules and suppressing dissent or even merely good ideas if they don’t follow certain doctrines.
Here in the US, President Biden wants a 50% reduction in America’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030. In addition, America’s power generation sector is to achieve net-zero emissions by 2035. America must be fully net zero by 2050.
The only possible means of achieving these targets is through a massive commitment to energy conservation. And the only means by which the necessary levels of energy conservation can be achieved, if America is to stay on Biden’s schedule, is to (1) quickly raise the costs of all forms of energy to levels perhaps three times (or more) of what they are today, thus greatly reducing demand; and (2) directly constrain America’s supply of fossil fuel energy.
It has been my opinion for some time that the Executive Branch of the US Government has the legal authority to do just that, to quickly raise the costs of all forms of energy thus greatly reducing energy demand; and second, to directly constrain America’s supply of fossil fuel energy. This can be done by fully integrating those Executive Branch authorities already granted under environmental law with those already granted under national security law.
Biden has taken a number of smaller steps to raise the price of energy and to constrain its supply. But he hasn’t gone nearly as far as he could go if he were truly determined to reach his GHG reduction targets; i.e. if he decided to pursue his announced targets through a program of highly coercive government-enforced energy conservation measures.
Conditions are ripe for taking bold action, if President Biden decides to take advantage of those conditions. He could declare that the worldwide impacts of the war in Eastern Europe demand that America must quickly reduce its consumption of fossil fuels, and he could claim that quickly reducing America’s consumption of energy is fully consistent with the urgent need for fighting climate change.
You forgot the cost savings involved by eliminating energy users by letting them die.
They can still vote democratic though.
Over the course of that last eighty years since the beginning of World War II, the Congress has granted a number of authorities to the Executive Branch in the area of national security policy and law. Since the beginning of the 1970’s, the Congress has also granted a number of authorities to the Executive Branch in the area of environmental protection policy and law.
A foundation in law and in past regulatory practice now exists which would allow the Biden administration to combine certain features of national security law with certain features of environmental protection law in a way which could enable a highly coercive policy approach for quickly reducing America’s GHG emissions without getting direct buy-in from the Congress in the form of new legislation.
Critics of Biden’s energy policies ignore this situation at their own peril.
Proof that congress can pass unconstitutional laws that allow for executive branch over-reach.
Critics of Biden’s over-reach in policies are putting this country in peril. According to the latest polls, that is a majority of the citizenry including his own party.
This is exactly what Kerry has been promoting and the MSM has been lapping it up.
“Joe Biden” (the only way to refer to whatever is running the US, see James Howard Kunstler):
“Whoever is behind “Joe Biden” has done all they can to derail American Life, and the feckless leadership of Euroland has also seemed avid to trash its future. There is a welling movement, in America, at least, to resist all that, to sweep these degenerates out of power….”
After their victories in the courts in 2012 in successfully defending the CAA Section 202 Endangerment Finding for carbon, the far left elements of the Democratic Party and the climate activist NGO’s were silent when Barack Obama subsequently refused to use the full power of his office in quickly reducing America’s carbon emissions through direct regulation.
Ten years later, after Biden’s 2022 State of the Union speech, those same far left elements of the Democratic Party offered their own rebuttal to the SOTU speech in which they severely criticized Biden’s lack of action in using the full power of his office to the extent that he could be using that power for quickly reducing America’s consumption of fossil fuels.
The most effective means for enabling the full power of the office of the president in quickly reducing our carbon emissions would be to use the process outlined in the Clean Air Act for expanding the list of substances regulated as ‘criteria pollutants’ to include CO2 and other carbon GHG’s.
The fact that a Section 202 endangerment finding for carbon has been successfully defended in the courts opens the way for publishing a CAA Section 108 endangerment finding for carbon, which is a necessary procedural element for classifying carbon GHG’s as criteria pollutants.
A sticking point in regulating carbon GHG’s as criteria pollutants is that a National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) must be establish for each carbon GHG. The potential stumbling block is that CO2 and other carbon GHG’s are well mixed gases on a worldwide scale such that America cannot by itself achieve the target NAAQS. It can only be done through international cooperation.
IMHO, the way the Biden administration could defend their NAAQS in the courts would be to explicitly acknowledge that their target NAAQS can be achieved only through international cooperation, and that America’s prior adoption of a NAAQS for carbon is vitally necessary if we are to convince other nations to reduce their GHG emissions.
In any case, the climate activists know full well that a pathway exists for achieving their stated GHG reduction objectives without gaining buy-in from the Congress. The question still remains, just how far will Biden go in pushing his targets of a 50% reduction in America’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030, net zero in America’s power generation sector by 2035, and net zero for the economy as a whole by 2050.
Doesn’t matter how far Brandon will go, the idea is impossible.
The thing to read in addition is this:
https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/uk-plc-power-decarbonisation?utm_source=url&s=r
It is not going to happen, at least, our present lifestyles are not going to continue with the implementation of Net Zero.
One of two things are possible. We might simply give up on Net Zero. This is what is blowing in the wind at the moment. The EU has basically started to abandon it, and its most committed devotee Germany is walking. Boris Johnson is also hesitantly signalling a U-turn.
The second thing that would be the inevitable result of a serious effort to implement it would be dramatic changes in lifestyles. 10-20% of the current ownership of cars, for instance. Adaptation to inability to be sure of being able to charge them. Smart meters cutting off the heat from your heat pump when the wind drops. A less mobile and colder population, moving to cities where they can walk or bike to work.
But I do not expect this second one. All the signs are that there is about to be a U-turn in Europe. It won’t be called that, but that is what it will be.
Its a little like the new reading. We started out pretending that learning spelling and sounds of words and syllables was a kind of middle class repression of those who would learn much better if we treated English as an ideographic language.
40 years later we discovered that the only effect of the new reading was to increase the proportion of school leavers who were functionally illiterate. So we went back to the old method. But we didn’t admit that, we pretended we had invented a whole new different and brilliant procedure called ‘synthetic phonics’.
Gas and nuclear? Green as they come, and fully compatible with ‘tacking climate change’. Coal? A transitional technology. Its going to be back to the nineties, without admitting it.
Well, I can’t really take credit for this – primarily because it isn’t me.