Unsustainable cow manure
By Paul Driessen 21 Sep 2010

From http://townhall.com/columnists/PaulDriessen/2010/09/21/unsustainable_cow_manure/page/full/

Seek a sustainable future! Wind, solar and biofuels will ensure an eco-friendly, climate-protecting, planet-saving, sustainable inheritance for our children. Or so we are told by activists and politicians intent on enacting new renewable energy standards, mandates and subsidies during a lame duck session.

It may be useful to address some basic issues, before going further down the road to Renewable Utopia.
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This question was received in response to the article “Government Gas Wastrels”

Re: “Government Gas Wastrels”

Well, Viv, Gas burns cleaner.

And Big Coal doesn’t need to be defended — it is capable of defending itself, or are you Big Coal itself… bought paid, signed sealed and delivered…?

B&T

Reply to B&T:

“Carbon Sense” does not defend or oppose any particular energy source. We will comment on their technical or economic advantages and disadvantages. We oppose government taxing some and not others for spurious climate reasons. And we oppose government forcing everyone to pay more for electricity because politicians have forced electricity companies to use unreliable and costly means of generating their power (via their market mandate schemes).

You should be free to buy gas energy, or solar energy, or coal energy, or cannabis energy, or cow pat energy as long as you pay the full cost, and leave me also free to make my choices on whatever basis I choose.

My personal position is clear. I do not represent Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Gas, Big Farming or Big Government. I have been chairman of a small oil and gas company, director of a coal producer, manager of a cattle grazing enterprise and a lowly public servant. I am presently a director of a small coal exploration company and I breed and graze cattle and sheep. I also use electricity and liquid carbon fuels. Does all that make me a vested interest schizophrenic? I have learned from all of these experiences, and I do not hide my continuing interests in mining, pastures, cattle, sheep and politics. Should we only listen to people who know nothing about the science and economics of the industries they presume to “Cap-n-Tax”?

My interests do not change in one whit what I think and say about the science, and politics, and economics of the Global Warming Scam.

In fact I am opposed to the weak policies of the industry bodies representing Big Coal and Big Farming. Both seem to think they can get special deals for themselves leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves (and thus pay their share of the increased costs of Cap-n-Tax). Far better to oppose the whole thing.

Unfortunately Big Coal does not support the policies of “Carbon Sense”. They support the emissions trading scheme with all the stupidities that brings. They also have conned taxpayers and shareholders to pour billions of dollars into Carbon Capture and Burial. They also lobby for exemptions from the Ration-N-Tax Scheme that they are content to see foisted on the rest of us. “Carbon Sense” has opposed all of these policies.

The Carbon Sense Newsletter has been funded sparingly by about 40 individuals who pay subscriptions for newsletters and advice. Another 1,500 or so get the newsletter for free. Like the government, our expenses exceed our income, so we are making our contribution to the Great Financial Stimulus Package.

Viv Forbes

By Cliff Reece

The PVV (Party for Freedom) led by Geert Wilders (pictured above) emerged victorious in a seismic election in the Netherlands last week that resulted in fears from left-wing climate activists’ groups that it will adversely impact on the country’s global warming objectives.

The party is projected to win 37 seats in the 150 seat Dutch parliament, putting it in the driver’s seat to form a new government.

“We are shocked,” Extinction Rebellion Netherlands says. “This outcome will likely mean a rollback of climate measures, new fossil investments, exclusion of marginalised groups, and more.”

Friends of the Earth Netherlands spelled out what PVV’s rule could mean for Dutch society: “A Wilders government will mean four years of climate change denial, exclusion and a breakdown of the rule of law.”
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By Dr. John Happs

Wat: “You have been weighed.”
Roland: “You have been measured.”
Kate: “And you have absolutely…”
Chaucer: “Been found wanting.”
– A Knight’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340’s – 1400)

A knighthood is a title given to a man by a British king or queen for his achievements or service to his country. Founded by King Edward the Third in 1348, the knighthood is regarded as the highest British civil and military honour obtainable and one would expect recipients to be persons of honesty and integrity.

There are at least 4 English knights who appear to have strayed from the path of honesty and integrity when it comes to relating information about climate change to politicians, the media, business and the general public.

The first Knight’s Tale is about Sir David King, former Professor of physical chemistry at Liverpool University, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was knighted in 2003 and made the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor (2000 – 2007).
In 2008 King became the Director of Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment established by generous funding from the Martin Smith Foundation of which the Vice-Chancellor of the university, Dr. John Hood, said:

Oxford University is enormously grateful for the generous benefaction from the Martin Smith Foundation that has ensured this exciting project can be made a reality. Martin Smith and his wife, Elise, have devoted great energy and enthusiasm to this initiative to combat global climate change. – https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2013/09/sir-david-king-uks-extreme-weathervane/

Read the full article: https://papundits.wordpress.com/2022/03/14/four-knights-and-their-tales-of-climate-lies-and-exaggeration/

Monumental, Unsustainable Environmental Impacts of Green Energy

Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy would inflict major land, wildlife, resource damage

By Paul Driessen

Extract from: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/05/monumental-unsustainable-environmental-impacts/

Solar panels on Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base generate 15 megawatts of electricity perhaps 30% of the year from 140 acres. Arizona’s Palo Verde nuclear power plant generates 900 times more electricity, from less land, some 95% of the year. Generating Palo Verde’s output via Nellis technology would require land area ten times larger than Washington, DC – and would still provide electricity unpredictably only 30% of the time. Now run those solar numbers for the 3.5 billion megawatt-hours generated nationwide in 2016.

Modern coal or gas-fired power plants use less than 300 acres to generate 600 megawatts 95% of the time. Indiana’s 600-MW Fowler Ridge wind farm covers 50,000 acres and generates electricity about 30% of the year. Calculate the turbine and acreage requirements for 3.5 billion MWH of wind electricity.

Delving more deeply, generating 20% of US electricity with wind power would require up to 185,000 1.5-MW turbines, 19,000 miles of new transmission lines, 18 million acres, and 245 million tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass and rare earths – plus fossil-fuel back-up generators for the 75-80% of the year that winds nationwide are barely blowing and the turbines are not producing electricity.

Read more:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/05/monumental-unsustainable-environmental-impacts/

“The Benefits of Human CO2 Emissions” by Dr Patrick Moore

All life is carbon based and the primary source of this carbon is the CO2 in the global atmosphere.

As recently as 18,000 years ago, at the height of the most recent major glaciation, CO2 dipped to its lowest level in recorded history at 180 ppm, low enough to stunt plant growth. This is only 30 ppm above a level that would result in the death of plants due to CO2 starvation.

It is calculated that if the decline in CO2 levels were to continue at the same rate as it has over the past 140 million years, life on Earth would begin to die as soon as two million years from now and would slowly perish almost entirely as carbon continued to be lost to the deep ocean sediments.

The combustion of fossil fuels for energy to power human civilization has reversed the downward trend in CO2 and promises to bring it back to levels that are likely to foster a considerable increase in the growth rate and biomass of plants, including food crops and trees.

Human emissions of CO2 have restored a balance to the global carbon cycle, thereby ensuring the long-term continuation of life on Earth.

This extremely positive aspect of human CO2 emissions must be weighed against the unproven hypothesis that human CO2 emissions will cause a catastrophic warming of the climate in coming years.

The one-sided political treatment of CO2 as a pollutant that should be radically reduced must be corrected in light of the indisputable scientific evidence that it is essential to life on Earth.

Read More: https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Positive%20Impact%20of%20Human%20CO2%20Emissions.pdf

And here is an improved version: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1353857523

Dr. Patrick Moore is a Senior Fellow with the Energy, Ecology and Prosperity program at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He has been a leader in the international environmental field for over 40 years. Dr. Moore is a Co-Founder of Greenpeace and served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada and seven years as a Director of Greenpeace International. Following his time with Greenpeace, Dr. Moore joined the Forest Alliance of BC where he worked for ten years to develop the Principles of Sustainable Forestry, which have now been adopted by much of the industry. In 2013, he published Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout – The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, which documents his 15 years with Greenpeace and outlines his vision for a sustainable future.

Speech by Hon Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic. March 4, 2008.

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,

I would like first of all to thank the organizers of this important conference for making it possible and also for inviting one politically incorrect politician from Central Europe to come and speak here. This meeting will undoubtedly make a significant contribution to the moving away from the irrational climate alarmism to the much needed climate realism.
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Windmills and Electricity Supply

Allan Duffy (Press and Journal, August 26), makes a number of assertions and claims which invite challenge.

First, there are far more than a “small number of people” opposing “windfarm sites”.

Second, the cause of this opposition is about more than the potential impact on tourism.

And, finally, they will never generate “excess power” that can be sold to the national grid to enhance Scotland’s economy.

Much of the opposition to windmills relates to their inability to produce electricity when required, combined with their negligible impact on CO emissions because of the expensive associated need for “spinning” back-up from conventional CO-emitting generators.

In his time in Germany, Mr Duffy may have noted that, for all their thousands of windmills, the Germans have not shut down one conventional power station and, in fact, are having to build new coal-fired power stations to meet demand.

If he were to look at the NETA (New Electricity Trading Arrangements) website, he would see that, with all the windmills at present operating in the UK, wind contributes only about 0.1-2% of daily national demand.

Yes, renewable energy must be a component of our future energy mix, but unreliable and expensive windmills are not the answer.

G.M. Lindsay,
Whinfield Gardens,
Kinross, Scotland

Idle Windmills Enrich Some

Yet again, while travelling through the Glens of Foudland, I was struck by a distinct lack of movement by even one of the many wind turbines you drive past.

Another bad day in Scotland’s fight against global warming… sorry, I forgot for a moment that climate change seems to have been adopted as a more appropriate term now.

In the meantime, the landowners, renewable-energy companies – through massive subsidies – and overseas manufacturers of said turbines continue to get rich at the expense of the taxpayer. Strange times indeed.

Chris Davis,
Maryhill, Orton,
Fochabers, Scotland

Source: http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1890438/

Sea levels have been rising and falling for as far back as we have evidence, and current sea levels are lower than they were during the Roman Warm Period.

Robert Endlich has looked at the evidence still visible today:

An important turning point in British history occurred in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings. Less well-known is that, when William landed, he occupied an old Roman fort now known as Pevensey Castle, which at the time was located on a small island in a harbor on England’s south coast. A draw bridge connected it to the mainland. Pevensey is infamous because unfortunate prisoners were thrown into this “Sea Gate,” so that their bodies would be washed away by the tide. Pevensey Castle is now a mile from the coast – further proof of a much higher sea level fewer than 1000 years ago.

Before modern Italy, the region was dominated by the famous City States of the Mediterranean, among which is Pisa, with its picturesque Cathedral Square and famous Leaning Tower. Located near the mouth of the Arno River, Pisa was a powerful city, because maritime trade brought goods from sailing ships right into the port. Its reign ended after 1300 AD, the onset of the Little Ice Age, when sea levels fell and ships could no longer sail to her port. Once again, some say “river silting” was the cause.

However, Pisa is now seven miles from the Tyrrhenian Sea, with large meanders upstream from Pisa and little meandering downstream. When a river is “at grade,” the downstream gradient is as low as possible, as with the meandering Mississippi River and delta in Louisiana. Rivers with a strong downstream gradient flow to the sea in a direct route, with few meanders, as with the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

The facts of history are clear. Sea level was 400 feet lower at the end of the Wisconsin Ice Age, 18,000 years ago. Sea levels rose rapidly until 8,000 years ago. As recently as 1066, when the Normans conquered England, sea levels were quite a bit higher than today.

During the Little Ice Age, 1300 to 1850 – when temperatures were the coldest during any time in the past 10,000 years – snow and ice accumulated in Greenland, Antarctica, Europe and glaciers worldwide. As a consequence, sea levels fell so much that important Roman Era and Medieval port cities (like Ephesus, Ostia Antica and Pisa) were left miles from the Mediterranean.

Since the Little Ice Age ended about 160 years ago, tide gages show that sea level has risen at a steady rate – with no correlation to the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Sea level is a dynamic property in our planet’s climate cycles, which are closely linked to changes in solar energy output and other natural factors. It is unlikely to change in response to tax policies that make energy more expensive and economies less robust – no matter what politicians in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations might say.

Much to their chagrin, Mother Nature doesn’t listen to them. She has a mind of her own.

Robert W. Endlich served as a weather officer in the US Air Force for 21 years and a US Army meteorologist for 17 years. He was elected to Chi Epsilon Pi, the national Meteorology Honor Society, while a basic meteorology student at Texas A&M University. He has degrees in geology and meteorology from Rutgers University and the Pennsylvania State University, respectively, and has studied and visited the ancient sites of Rome, Ostia Antica and Pisa.

For the full article see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/endlich-sea-level-claims.pdf [PDF, 76 KB]

Reference: http://www.cfact.org/2013/12/01/history-falsifies-climate-alarmist-sea-level-claims/

This paper provides a factual and objective view of the reality of the effects of some of the world’s greatest oil spills. It particularly deals with the geography of the region in which the spill occurred, the climatic effects on the spill, the probable volume oil spilled, the cleanup actions that followed and the long-term environmental effects.

As an introduction, Part 1 of the paper deals with some of the commonly held beliefs that the world is about to run out of fossil fuels, that oil spills and leaks are universally ‘environmental catastrophes’ and challenges the long term view that the effects are persistent and adverse to the environment. The seemingly endless alarmism that follows each spill is highlighted and the reader is asked to read the remainder of the paper with an open mind, comparing the predictions of doom with the evidence revealed by the reality of hindsight.

It is concluded that the effects of the relatively few spills that have occurred have been exceptionally exaggerated for political purposes by both politicians and environmental activists. Both these alarmist cliques loudly report claims in every case that go far beyond the actual effect of the spill itself. Some of the unfortunate claims by scientists are also exposed as political activism unrelated to scientific method.

Finally the paper provides a ‘prophesy’ (based on the history of previous spills) as to the long-term results and effects of the recent BP Macondo Well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that commenced on 20th April 2010 and was capped on 29th July 2010, 100 days later.

The author writes under a pseudonym to protect his privacy. However any comments or corrections will be passed onto him. He has experience and contacts in this field and is skilled at extracting and documenting facts.

The report is presented in six parts, with subsequent parts appearing over time:

Part 1: A Summary of Oil Chemistry and the Environmental Effects of Oil.
Available as PDF, 73KB: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/oil-spills-1.pdf

Part 2: The World’s Largest Oil Spill – The Gulf War, Kuwait, 1991. The spill, the prophets of doom and the reality that unfolded.
Available as PDF, 596KB: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/oil-spills-2.pdf

Part 3: The Exxon Valdez Spill, Alaska. A small spill with huge publicity and extensive cleanup activity, much of which probably made things worse.
Available as PDF, 561KB: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/oil-spills-3.pdf

Part 4: The Ixtoc I Well Blowout, Gulf of Mexico, 1979. Despite forecasts of disaster for the environment, within five years the effects of this huge spill were undetectable. In fact the fisheries recovered quickly because they were relieved of fishing pressure, and locals swapped low paying fishing jobs for high paying cleanup or oil industry jobs. As in all spills, the biggest loser was the well owner.
Available as PDF, 88KB: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/oil-spills-4.pdf

Part 5: The BP Macondo Well Blowout, Gulf of Mexico, 2010. This may be the second largest man made oil spill in history, and at times the slick covered 6,500 sq km. However about 74% of the oil lost evaporated, dissolved, bio-degraded, or was burned, skimmed or captured. Just 5 days after the leak was plugged, the US government agreed that the oil was no longer a problem. Once more the damage was forecast to be catastrophic, once more it was not. The Gulf of Mexico copes with natural leaks of this size every year. The real costs were political and losses by BP shareholders.

Available as PDF, 133KB: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/oil-spills-5.pdf

Part 6: Conclusions & Comments. In 2009, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rohm Emanuel said: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste… it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” The recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was a marvellous crisis used by the Obama administration and extreme environmentalists to weaken Big Oil, demonise carbon fuels, and drive the so-called “clean fuel” agenda. Foreign oil producers and the green energy promoters are the beneficiaries. Innocent local businesses and BP were the victims, both of the oil spill but more so of the government actions designed to benefit from the crisis.

Available as PDF, 1200KB: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/oil-spills-6.pdf

Note: This 6 part article can be printed from the 6 PDFs and then bound into one indexed report.

UPDATE 9 April 2013:

Those who wish to check the accuracy of the forecasts in these articles should check this reference:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22075182

Oil is a natural product and the oceans have been coping with it for millennia.

Author’s Profile

The author retired from the Australian Army as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1986. He served in various postings in Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. He is a frequent contributor of book reviews, short stories and the occasional article to several journals. He works internationally as a self-employed project manager and project management trainer and consultant.

He has worked part-time for 9 years in the oil and gas industries in the Middle East (Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi) and in North and Central America, and has made it his business to question the experts. Everything he quotes is on the web (except where it is stated as an opinion.)