NEW UK COAL MINE CAUSES PROBLEM FOR BORIS'S GREEN AGENDA

 COP26 in trouble as Boris Johnson's government split over new coal mine.

What a fuss over a mine that produces coking coal used in steel-making. Utter madness!

The Sunday Times, 24 January 2021
 
Boris Johnson’s climate change tsar is “apopletic” with a cabinet minister for approving Britain’s first new deep coalmine in decades.



Alok Sharma, who quit as business secretary this month to devote himself full-time to the presidency of the COP26 summit, is said to be furious with Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, for not stopping the mine in Cumbria.

On January 6, Jenrick formally refused to intervene in the £165m Whitehaven project to remove coking coal from beneath the Irish Sea for steel-making. Jenrick, 39, decided not to use his powers to call in the scheme, which would have given him the right to block it, instead telling councillors he was “content” for the decision to be made locally. A government source said Jenrick did not consult Sharma or other ministers on the plan, in line with planning guidance.
 
Work is likely to begin on the first deep coalmine for 30 years as the government tells other nations to slash carbon emissions. The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 18, said the approval of the mine showed that Britain’s commitment to go carbon neutral by 2050 “basically means nothing”.
 
The decision could complicate efforts to forge an alliance with Joe Biden’s White House, which has described international action on climate change as a key foreign policy goal.

GOVERNMENT ORDERED TO REVEAL NET ZERO COST CALCULATIONS

 

London, 21 January: The government faces a major embarrassment after the Information Commissioner ordered the Treasury to release an email containing its official estimate of the cost of decarbonising the economy.   In June 2019, some weeks before Parliament adopted the 2050 Net Zero target as law, the then chancellor Philip Hammond wrote to Prime Minister Theresa May, warning that her plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 was likely to cost the UK more than £1 trillion.   In his letter, the chancellor wrote that the costs meant that less funding would be available for schools, the police and hospitals, pointing out that Net Zero would render some industries “economically uncompetitive.”    A Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the underlying cost calculations of the estimate was refused by the Treasury, arguing that these were “internal communications.” Remarkably, the cost estimate was contained in the body of a single email. However, the Information Commissioner has now ruled that the public interest was not given sufficient weight in the Treasury’s decision and has ordered the cost calculation’s release [1]. Welcoming the decision, Andrew Montford, deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum said:   “This is a major embarrassment for the Treasury. It appears that it cobbled together a few numbers on the back of an envelop, and simply emailed them off to the Prime Minister without a blush. After Parliament’s decision to adopt the Net Zero target without any meaningful scrutiny, and without consideration of the economic and engineering implications, it is becoming clear that the whole project is misgovernance on a historic scale.” [1] The Commissioner’s Decision Notice ref IC-46878-R8K0, will be published on the ICO website in due course.   Contact   Andrew Montford awmontford@gmail.com

WILL GREEN POLICIES CAUSE THE NEXT CRASH?

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Here is a thought-provoking article looking at why green policies are likely to cause the next economic crash. 

"If you believe in wind  power then don’t, whatever you do, read ‘The Costs of Offshore Wind Power: Blindness and Insight’.  Written back in September, the report might make you quite unhappy about the current direction and prospects for the Green Economy. The authors describe how costs are escalating, rather than declining as promised. Operating and maintenance costs have risen even faster than they were anticipated to fall! Gas prices will look impossibly cheap compared to renewables if the true facts are ever revealed."

AFRICANS PLANNING 1250 NEW COAL AND GAS POWER PLANTS

  

GWPF & Power Engineering International, 13 January 2021

Of Africa’s 2500 planned power-generation projects, half are coal and gas power plants, Oxford University study reveals
 

 
 Africa’s current and predicted 2030 electricity capacity mix by fuel type. “Fossil fuels will continue to dominate generation capacity, accounting for 62% of the total and half of all newly commissioned capacity.” Source: Alova et al. 2020

 

 

Fossil fuels to dominate Africa’s energy mix this decade – report

A new study into Africa’s energy generation landscape uses a state-of-the-art machine-learning technique to analyse the pipeline of more than 2,500 planned power plants and their chances of successful commission.

The study shows the share of non-hydro renewables in African electricity generation is likely to remain below 10% in 2030, although this varies by region.

The research, published in Nature Energy, from the University of Oxford predicts that total electricity generation across the African continent will double by 2030, with fossil fuels continuing to dominate the energy mix – posing potential risk to global climate change commitments.  

“Africa’s electricity demand is set to increase significantly as the continent strives to industrialise and improve the wellbeing of its people, which offers an opportunity to power this economic development through renewables,” says Galina Alova, study lead author and researcher at the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

Aloya adds: “There is a prominent narrative in the energy planning community that the continent will be able to take advantage of its vast renewable energy resources and rapidly decreasing clean technology prices to leapfrog to renewables by 2030 – but our analysis shows that overall it is not currently positioned to do so.”

The study predicts that in 2030, fossil fuels will account for two-thirds of all generated electricity across Africa. While an additional 18% of generation is set to come from hydro-energy projects.

Full story

THE "NEWSPEAK" LANGUAGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

 Peter Foster: Sustainable Newspeak by 2050

Financial Post, 5 January 2021

As Orwell noted, the language of fear and panic is one of the main instruments of political control. 
 


George Orwell pointed out that one of the first casualties of socialism is language. The damage is not collateral, it is deliberate — designed to numb minds and render critical thought difficult or impossible. The instrument of this dumbing down in Nineteen Eighty-Four was Newspeak, the official language of the English Socialist Party (Ingsoc).
 
Newspeak was a sort of Totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting and manufacturing words. New words had a “political implication” and “were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.” The meaning of words was often reversed, as was most starkly emphasized in the key slogans of Ingsoc:
 
War is peace.
 
Freedom is slavery.
 
Ignorance is strength.
 
Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1949. Its nightmarish fictional world is now 37 years in the past, so one might reasonably conclude that Orwell was far too pessimistic, but his great book was less a prediction than a warning, and above all an analysis of the totalitarian mentality.
 
Meanwhile, there is another significant date in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book’s appendix on “The Principles of Newspeak” stressed that the corruption of language was a multi-generational project whose fruition would not come until well into the present century. Ingsoc’s objective was to render independent thought impossible by “about 2050.”

Intriguingly, that is the same year that the world allegedly has to become “carbon neutral,” or “net zero,” to avoid climate Armageddon.
 
Weasel Words
 
The year 2050 has become a key date for the UN’s “Global Governance” agenda, which seeks nothing less than to oversee and regulate every aspect of life on the basis of a suite of alarmist projections. The main existential threat is claimed to be catastrophic man-made climate change.
 
“Climate Governance” has thus emerged as the “fourth pillar” of the UN’s mandate, joining Peace and Security, Development, and Human Rights.
So far — as with the other three pillars — the UN’s climate efforts have been spectacularly unsuccessful. It has held 25 enormous “Conferences of the Parties,” or COPs, which have promoted a morass of uncoordinated national policies that have had zero impact on the climate.
 
COP 21 in Paris in 2015, for instance, was meant to hatch a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol. But all it produced was a raft of hypocritical, voluntary, fingers-crossed “Nationally Determined Contributions.” The failure of Paris, and of temperatures to rise in line with flawed models, led to a doubling down of “ambitions.” One new commitment that seeped out of Paris was for the countries of the world to hold temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above levels before the Industrial Revolution (the original climate sin). Staying below that level, UN policy wonks rapidly calculated, would require the world to become carbon neutral, or net-zero, by 2050.

In a video lecture to Chinese students last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres claimed that there was “no excuse” not to meet the net-zero emission target by 2050. “The time for small steps has passed,” he said. “What is needed now is transformational change.” For “transformational” read “revolutionary” — change that would involve the destruction of Western industrial society and freedom.
 
In fact, there is no climate “crisis” or “emergency.” However, as Orwell noted, the language of fear and panic is one of the main instruments of political control.
 
Today, just as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the classical liberal concepts of liberty and equality (of opportunity) are under relentless attack, as are the values of reason and objectivity. Liberty and equality were classified in Newspeak as “Crimethink.” Objectivity and rationalism were “Oldthink.” A doomed Newspeak lexicographer named Syme tells the book’s equally doomed hero, Winston Smith, that even the party slogans will eventually become incomprehensible: “How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished?”
 
Orwell was hardly the first observer to point to the political dangers of linguistic manipulation, which go back to discussions of sophistry in Plato. The great economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek pointed in particular to the left’s use of “social.” He dubbed it a “weasel word” that not merely sucked meaning from words to which it was attached but often reversed meaning. Thus, by classical liberal standards, social democracy is undemocratic, social justice is unjust, and a social market economy is anti-market. We have a prime current example in the phrase “social licence to operate,” which in fact means a potential veto on corporate activities by radical environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), the stormtroopers of the Global Governance agenda.
 
Private corporations were once socialism’s enemies; now they have been co-opted as its partners, agents of “Global Salvationism.” Nobel economist Milton Friedman pointed to the subversive, open-ended nature of “Corporate Social Responsibility,” where “responsibility” represents another weasel word. CSR’s purpose is to force corporate executives to abandon their responsibility to their shareholders in favour of an endless list of “stakeholder” demands.

Friedman has been regularly and ritually subjected to the Two Minutes Hate ever since. The most recent example was a collection of overwhelmingly condemnatory essays in the New York Times to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of his essay on CSR. Typically, it grossly misrepresented Friedman and wrote off his alleged bottom line as “Greed is Good.”
 
The shackles of CSR have now been tightened by the concept of ESG (Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance). ESG is, like the neologisms of Newspeak, “intended to impose a desirable mental attitude” on executives, who often seem intellectually and morally defenceless in the face of NGO campaigns of lies and intimidation. Business schools certainly don’t appear to equip them to counter such assaults.
 
A Climate of Newspeak
 
Perhaps the most significant new weasel word to have emerged from the UN’s equivalent of the Ministry of Truth is “sustainable.” Commitment to sustainability is now mouthed by every politician, bureaucrat, marketing executive and media hack on Earth. It sounds so benign, so reasonable, but what it actually means is “bureaucratically controlled and NGO-enforced within a UN-based socialist agenda.” Like most aspects of socialism, it is based on incomprehension and/or hatred of the nature and function of market capitalism, not least because markets — which signal scarcity, reward economy and promote profitable innovation — are the only true source of sustainability.
 
Projected catastrophic man-made climate change was enthusiastically embraced by global socialism because it was — in the words of Nicholas Stern, who was ennobled for his manufacture of an egregiously skewed review of climate impacts for his political masters in the U.K. Labour Party — “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.” The problem is that we haven’t actually seen it, except, that is, through the biased lens of “official” science and an alarmist crusading media.

Like “social,” “sustainable” tends to vitiate or reverse the meaning of words to which it is attached. Thus sustainable development is development retarded by top-down control, and whose effectiveness is further compromised by the insertion of a long list of cart-before-the-horse social policy objectives, from gender equity to “responsible consumption.”
 
Full essay
 
Peter Foster is a Toronto-based journalist and the author of 10 books. A collection of his National Post columns, titled How Dare You!, was recently published by the Global Warming Policy Forum.  It can be purchased in hard copy or ebook from Amazon: UK – USA – Canada – Australia

EU GREEN DEAL NEEDS A "CERTAIN DEGREE OF DICTATORSHIP" TO SUCCEED

According to Deutsche Bank: EU Green Deal can only succeed with “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship”

GWPF & Deutsche Bank Research, 10 January 2021

A senior economist at Deutsche Bank warns that for the EU’s Green Deal to succeed, “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship will be necessary”



An analysis published by Deutsche Bank sharply criticises the “dishonest debate” with which the EU is selling its “Green Deal” to the people of Europe. The massive risks of the project for prosperity, the economic system and democracy itself should not be concealed, but should be addressed openly.

Eric Heymann, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research, warns that Europe’s Green Deal and its goal of climate neutrality by 2050 threatens a European mega-crisis, leading to “noticeable loss of welfare and jobs”. And he warns: It won’t work without “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship”.
 
The analyst describes it as dubious that the Green Deal is being touted across the board as “a new growth strategy” which would allow the EU to become a “fair and prosperous society.” While this may look good on paper, Heymann writes, in order to achieve carbon neutral by 2050, Europe’s economy and its entire political and legal systems will have to be changed fundamentally.
 
For the time being, the revolutionary consequences of the EU’s climate agenda for everyday life are “still relatively abstract” and for most households “still acceptable.” Soon, however, the path towards climate neutrality will require drastic interventions in the choice of means of transport, the size of housing, the means of heating, the possession of electronic consumer goods, as well as restrictions in the consumption of meat and tropical fruits.
 
And he warns these restrictions and infringements will inevitably trigger “massive political resistance.”
 
"Some parties will find arguments against strict climate protection policies if the latter lead to a significant increase in energy prices or to restrictions of personal freedom or ownership rights. And let us not fool ourselves: these parties will find voter support. At the EU level, there will be major conflicts about distribution, which may contribute to (further) divisions within the bloc. Are we ready to deal with this polarisation?"

( where are these parties in the UK, I hear you ask)
 
Below are excerpts of Eric Heymann’s analysis.
 
 

Climate neutrality: Are we ready for an honest discussion?

[…]
 
A certain degree of eco-dictatorship will be necessary
 
The impact of the current climate policy on people’s everyday lives is still quite abstract and acceptable for many households. Climate policy comes in the form of higher taxes and fees on energy, which make heating and mobility more expensive. Some countries have set minimum energy efficiency standards for buildings or similar rules in other areas. However, climate policy does not determine our lives. We take key consumption decisions, for example whether we travel at all, how much we travel and which means of transport we use, whether we live in a large house or a small apartment and how we heat our homes, how many electronic devices we have and how intensely we use them or how much meat and exotic fruit we eat. These decisions tend to be made on the basis of our income, not on climate considerations.

If we really want to achieve climate neutrality, we need to change our behaviour in all these areas of life. This is simply because there are no adequate cost-effective technologies yet to allow us to maintain our living standards in a carbon-neutral way. That means that carbon prices will have to rise considerably in order to nudge people to change their behaviour. Another (or perhaps supplementary) option is to tighten regulatory law considerably. I know that “ecodictatorship” is a nasty word. But we may have to ask ourselves the question whether and to what extent we may be willing to accept some kind of eco-dictatorship (in the form of regulatory law) in order to move towards climate neutrality. Here is an example: What should we do if property owners do not want to turn their houses into zero-emission buildings; if they do not have the financial means to do so; if doing so is not possible for technical reasons or if the related investments do not pay off?

Loss of competitiveness or restrictions to free trade
 
If the EU moves considerably more quickly towards climate neutrality than the rest of the world, carbon prices in the EU will rise more rapidly, too. This will reduce the competitiveness of energy-intensive companies in the EU. Are we willing to pay that price? Probably not – remember, nobody is to be left behind. So will we subsidise these companies to enable them to use expensive, but climate-friendly technology? This option will be difficult to implement in the long run due to budget constraints. An honest discussion will have to deal with the truth that each euro spent on climate protection is no longer available for expenses on education, research, public health, digital infrastructure, domestic and external security, tax cuts or higher pensions. The EU commission plans to introduce a carbon border adjustment system to address the competition problem. Do we really believe that doing so will not make the affected countries introduce countermeasures? Are we really willing to give up the advantages of free trade in favour of climate protection?

Massive political resistance ahead
 
Nobody is to be left behind on the path towards climate neutrality. This statement from the Green Deal probably amounts to trying to square the circle. A major turnaround in climate policy will certainly produce losers among both households and corporates. In addition, prosperity and employment are likely to suffer considerably. If this was not the case, climate protection would be an easy undertaking. These developments will obviously have an impact on the political landscape, both at the national and EU level.

Some parties will find arguments against strict climate protection policies if the latter lead to a significant increase in energy prices or to restrictions of personal freedom or ownership rights. And let us not fool ourselves: these parties will find voter support. At the EU level, there will be major conflicts about distribution, which may contribute to (further) divisions within the bloc. Are we ready to deal with this polarisation? Or will we adjust our climate policy ambitions if we find that (overly) ambitious climate policies are not acceptable to a majority of the people?

The full analysis is available at  Deutsche Bank Research  (pp. 70-73) 
 

HUNDREDS OF PACIFIC ISLANDS GETTING BIGGER DESPITE SEA LEVEL RISE

 

ABC News, 8 January 2021

New research says hundreds of islands in the Pacific are growing in land size, even as climate change-related sea level rises threaten the region.
 
 
Jeh, an island in the Marshall Islands, was one of the landmasses researchers say are growing.

Scientists at the University of Auckland found atolls in the Pacific nations of Marshall Islands and Kiribati, as well as the Maldives archipelago in the Indian Ocean, have grown up to 8 per cent in size over the past six decades despite sea level rise.
 
They say their research could help climate-vulnerable nations adapt to global warming in the future.
 
The scientists used satellite images of islands as well as on-the-ground analysis to track the changes.
 
Coastal geomorphologist Dr Paul Kench said coral reef sediment was responsible for building up the islands.
 
"All the islands that we're looking at, and the atoll systems, comprise predominantly of the broken up corals, shells and skeletons of organisms on the coral reef, which waves then sweep up and deposit on the island," he said.
 
Dr Kench said in areas where coral reefs were healthy, enough sediment was being produced to cause islands to grow.


Historical aerial images show how much Jeh's shoreline has changed over the decades.
 
"The majority of islands in each of those nations has either got larger or stayed very similar in size," he said.
 
"So, you know, one of the remarkable takeaways of the work is that these islands are actually quite dynamic in a physical sense."
 
Healthy coral reefs key to growth
 
Coastal erosion from rising sea level is considered a major threat to many Pacific communities, with some already watching shorelines recede.
 
Dr Kench said about 10 per cent of islands captured in the study had gotten smaller in size.
 
He said a better understanding of which islands are growing and which are eroding could help Pacific nations adapt to climate change.
 
"That gives the island nations some power to think about adaptation strategies, about where do you focus further development, and you would perhaps choose those islands which we can demonstrate are actually growing in size," he said.
 
"So we think it's affording some different sort of strategies and opportunities for islands to think about as they're contemplating an uncertain future."
 
Dr Kench said there was more work to be done in understanding other factors influencing the growth or reduction of Pacific islands.
 
Full story

SET OF CLIMATE BROCHURES FROM A SCEPTIC VIEWPOINT

 

Here is the link.

UPDATE

In case the link disappears there is a back-up link 

here.

GOVERNMENT PLANS TO CONTROL THE HOUSING MARKET ARE DEEPLY FLAWED

 

This report explains a major problem with the government's latest plan to combat global warming by introducing new high standards for insulation and lowering CO2 emissions on the housing stock here in the UK. The 'problem' is that it will render large numbers of properties as unsaleable because they will not be able to reach these standards, ands so under the proposals they cannot be sold legally. This is exactly what happens when the state controls every detail of our lives - common sense goes out of the window.

SPAIN RECORDS LOWEST EVER TEMPERATURE AT -34C

 Reuters, 7 January 2021

MADRID (Reuters) - Heavy snow and icy winds blasted Spain as temperatures plumetted to -34.1C, the lowest ever recorded on the Iberian peninsula, the State Meterololgical Agency said on Wednesday.


 
The chilling temperature was recorded at Clot del Tuc de la Llanca in Aragon in the Spanish Pyrenees at 5.19 a.m., the agency said.
 
This was two degrees lower than in 1956, when temperatures of -32C were recorded in Estany-Gento, in Lleida, in northeastern Spain.
 
Full story

 

CLIMATE RELATED DEATHS DROP BY 99% IN THE PAST CENTURY

 After 100 years of climate change, ‘climate related deaths’ approach zero

By Anthony Watts, Climate Realism, 2 January 2021

New data shows the global climate-related death risk has dropped by over 99% since 1920.
 
Despite the near constant caterwauling from climate alarmists that we are in a “climate emergency”, real-world data, released at the end of 2020 shows that climate related deaths are now approaching zero. The data spans 100 years of “global warming” back to 1920 and shows “climate related” deaths are now approaching zero.

Below is an update of the graph in the 2020 peer-reviewed article by Bjørn Lomborg: Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies


Lomborg posted the updated graph on his Facebook page January 2nd, 2021. Clearly, the risk from climate related disaster has shrunk to nearly nothing.
 
Lomborg reports:
 
“Back in the 1920s, the death count from climate-related disasters was 485,000 on average every year. In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,357 dead per year or 96% lower. In the first year of the new decade, 2020, the preliminary number of dead was even lower at 8,086 — 98% lower than the 1920s average.

But because the world’s population also quadrupled at the same time, the climate-related *death risk* has dropped even faster. The death risk is the probability of you dying in any one year. In the 1920s, it was 243 out of a million people that would die from climate-related disasters.
 
In the 2010s, the risk was just 2.5 per million people — a drop of 99%. Now, in 2020, the preliminary number is 1 per million — 99.6% lower.”
 
This is clearly the opposite of what climate alarmists have been screaming about, but that is because we’re been exposed to a constant stream of “disaster TV” on cable news and Internet news outlets telling us daily about yet another new disaster, which invariably gets blamed on “climate change”.
 
There’s an important distinction that must be made: increased reports does not equal increased death risk.
 
While the number of reported events is increasing, that is mainly due to increased reporting. Called “the CNN effect“, we now have 24 hour news, Internet, and people able to make reports of weather disasters from their cellphones, i.e. storm-chasers.
 
30 years ago, we had none of that, and we weren’t exposed to the constant stream of disaster reporting with the climate blame-game attached.
 
Despite this good news, it is unlikely to deter climate alarmism, since it has evolved into a belief system, eschewing data and science for “climate justice”.

UK GOVERNMENT HIDES THE FULL COST OF DECARBONISING ELECTRICITY

 

This piece looks at the recently published energy white paper and finds the key detailed costings are missing. The GWPF are asking for the information to be made public. How long will they fail to do so?

USA CITY TO POST CLIMATE WARNING SIGNS ON PETROL PUMPS

 

Here are the details. Do they really think this will have any effect on drivers who come to fill up? It is simply a futile gesture. I suppose they think it will have a subliminal effect, but I doubt it. The warnings on cigarette packets made more sense in that there was little doubt that inhaling smoke caused damage to their lungs, but hardly anyone can believe that exhaust fumes can do much harm as they disperse and get diluted in the air. 

UK AND IRELAND AUTUMN TEMPERATURES HAVE STALLED SINCE 1990'S

 

This piece  gives the details to show that the mean autumn temperatures in the UK and Ireland have not increased since 1995. So why have they stalled? Global warming alarmists don’t want you to know this, but there are oceanic cycles that dominate regional climates on a decadal scale. For Western Europe especially the Atlantic Meridional Overturn (AMO) has a significant impact.

GREENLAND ICE MELT CAUSED BY GEOTHERMAL ACTIVITY SAYS NEW STUDY

 

This article explains the new findings. So next time you hear that the Greenland ice shelf is melting due to "climate change" you can be sure that this finding will not be mentioned.

THE HUGE COST OF DECARBONISING HOUSING

 

This article summarises the two main ways of achieving this and comes to the conclusion that it is unaffordable at £46,000 per household. But will the public be told before it is too late?

CHINA CONTROLS THE ESSENTIAL MATERIALS FOR A GREEN FUTURE

 Europe's wind and e-car industry dependent on China's magnetic metals 

Clean Energy Wire, 22 December 2020

The green energy industry, in particular the wind energy sector, has become increasingly dependent on China for vital magnetic metals, writes Stefan Hajek in WirtschaftsWoche Online.
 
Wind farms are set to play an ever larger role in the world’s future energy supply. Offshore wind power capacity in the EU alone is expected to increase 25-fold by 2050.

Magnetic metals such as neodymium are an essential component for wind turbines as well as for every modern electric motor, including those used in almost every electric car and plug-in hybrid. That’s leading to a bottleneck in two main sectors of the energy transition that very few political leaders and industry executives have addressed, Hajek notes. The extraction and processing of neodymium almost entirely in the hands of one country, China. The country already used its market power once before, in 2009, and paralysed entire industries worldwide with an export boycott on rare earths for computers.

Hajek warns that China could do this again in other industries in view of its ongoing trade conflicts with the US, which he says are not expected to ease under President-elect Joe Biden. “This time there is even more at stake than in 2009,” Hajek writes. “Without a sufficient supply of magnetic metals, climate protection will be much more difficult, protracted and much more expensive,” says Oliver Gutfleisch, professor of Functional Materials at the Technical University of Darmstadt. “The energy transition is also a material transition -- it doesn't work without certain raw materials. That is often overlooked.”

Bernd Schäfer and Andreas Klossek, who head the EU’s European Innovation and Technology (EIT) Raw Materials think tank, are sounding the alarm despite the fact that companies have not yet had any problems getting magnets. The US Geological Survey agency expects the demand for permanent magnets to double by 2029. "90 percent of e-cars and all hybrid cars have electric motors with permanent magnets," says Klossek. “We expect a supply shortfall of 65,000 tonnes per year for the ores required from 2030 onwards.”

WILL WE BE FORCED TO HAVE HEAT PUMPS BY AN INCREASE IN THE COST OF GAS?

This article points out exactly why heat pumps will not be popular. This begs the question of how exactly will the government 'persuade' us to swap our gas boilers for more expensive alternatives. I doubt if they will offer to pay for them, so that leaves the other option of increasing the price of gas.

TONY HELLER PUTS HIS VIDEOS ON NEWTUBE

 As censorship on the main video channel Youtube becomes more invasive Tony Heller has decided to put his videos onto a new channel called Newtube 

It will be interesting to see if the censorship causes more popular, but controversial people to follow suite. I am not very up with these new formats, but it is just as easy to go to Newtube as it is to go to Youtube and once viewers have found it, if they find its content good then they may prefer to go there. 

THE GWPF CHRISTMAS LECTURE

 

This lecture raises some interesting and important ideas about the way our society views the fears in our modern world. The speaker, Frank Furedi, mentions the role of scientists and how they have become crucial to policies to deal with any matter which has a fear element, such as global warming and covid. 

While these fears do have some things in common it is important to note that there are also differences. Covid is a real and present threat, while global warming is not a proven threat and its supposed effects will come in the distant future. However in both cases there are very costly policies advocated by some prominent scientists, while other equally well-qualified scientists claim that these policies are unnecessary or extreme.

Because science has become so specialised, politicians usually defer to the scientists, and it always seems to be the alarmist scientists whose advice is chosen. The reason for this is simple, no political leader wants to be blamed for not doing enough, so the solution is to err on the side of caution and do (or appear to be doing) everything possible. That way they cannot be blamed for what happens. If it turns out to be bad, they are covered, and it isn't so bad they can claim credit for the policy they adopted, despite its high cost.

HERE'S A REAL LIFE EXPERIMENT WITH 750000 PPM CO2

 It is interesting to find that there are some areas of the world where CO2 bubbles up into the atmosphere naturally creating a local atmosphere which has an extremely high level of CO2 of up to 75%. At this level it would be impossible to breathe, so I expect there are warnings to keep people out. 

Here is an article to explain the effect of such conditions on the local temperature. Surprisingly the effect is zero - no difference from a nearby area with levels which are at the normal value of around 400 ppm.