Federal judge tells climate litigants to tally the numerous blessings from fossil fuels since 1859
Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek
Judge William Alsup has a BS in engineering, has written computer programs for his ham radio hobby, delves deeply into the technical aspects of numerous cases before him, and even studied other programming languages for a complex Oracle v. Google lawsuit.
As presiding judge in People of the State of California v. BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell, he insisted that the litigants present their best scientific evidence for and against the state’s assertion that fossil fuel emissions are causing dangerous climate change. Now he wants to see, not just the alleged damages from burning oil, natural gas and coal – but also the immense benefits to humanity and the people of California from using those fuels for the past 150 years and more.
Environmental and climate activists, including cities pursuing climate lawsuits against oil companies, almost never acknowledge those benefits, which are far-reaching and indisputable. We can only hope attorneys Anne Champion, Philip Curtis, Diehl Kemper, et al. and friends of the court will do justice to the many blessings attributable to our use of these once unimaginable energy resources.
For countless millennia, our ancestors struggled to survive amid deprivation and backbreaking dusk-to-dawn labor, often on the brink of starvation – with the bulk of humanity living little better than their domesticated animals. Average nasty, brutish and short life expectancy hovered in the low thirties.
But then, suddenly and miraculously, in barely two centuries, health, prosperity and longevity began to climb. First coal, then oil, then natural gas paved the way, providing the fuels for transportation, communication, refrigeration, electricity and other incredible technologies that improve, enhance, safeguard and save lives. Incomes increased eleven-fold. Mass die-offs so confidently predicted by Malthus and Ehrlich never materialized. In fact, global life spans more than doubled, and today billions of people enjoy living standards that even kings and queens could not dream of 120 years ago.
Sadly, equal numbers of people still struggle on the edge of survival. A billion and a half are still without electricity, two billion still exist on a few dollars a day, and millions still die every year from insect-borne, lung and intestinal diseases – largely because they still burn wood and dung, instead of fossil fuels.
In 1900, New York City’s 3.4 million people relied on 100,000 horses whose “tailpipes” emitted 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine every day. Sanitation crews cleaned it up, dumped it mostly in local rivers, and hauled dead horses to rendering plants. Farmers devoted thousands of acres just to growing horse feed. Imagine what today’s 8.6 million NYC residents would require and emit.
Today, far more powerful, far less polluting, trucks, cars, buses, trains, subways and airplanes move people, food and products far more quickly and efficiently. They take us to work, school and worship services; to the grocery, bank, drug store, doctor and restaurant; to movies, picnics and sporting events. Fire trucks help us battle devastating conflagrations, and ambulances take our injured to hospitals.
All these vehicles (internal combustion and electric) exist because of, are fueled by – and travel on roadways made with fossil fuels: asphalt from oil, metal and concrete manufactured using fossil fuels.
Even electric cars require oil, gas and coal for manufacturing and recharging. Indeed, the earth-moving machines, drilling rigs and production platforms, pipelines, foundries, factories and other technologies needed to extract, process and fabricate raw materials into the world around us exist because of fossil fuels. Every bit of metal, plastic, concrete, wood, fabric and food we see results from fossil fuels. Even wind turbines, solar panels and biofuels are impossible without the fuels that California so loves to hate.
Medical devices, computers, cell phones, radios and televisions, kitchen appliances, household and office heating and air conditioning, millions of other products of every description require fossil fuels for their components, manufacturing and daily operation. The schools and research laboratories that made our amazing technologies and other advancements possible are themselves made possible by fossil fuels.
The modern agricultural equipment and practices that feed the world share the same ancestry: tractor and harvester fuel, ammonia fertilizer from natural gas, pesticides and herbicides from petrochemicals. Carbon dioxide from burning these fuels helps crop, forage, forest and grassland plants grow faster and better, with less water and better resistance to droughts and diseases. Our bounteous grain and other crops mean fewer famines, except where forced starvation is used to subdue and eliminate enemies.
Indeed, between 1961 and 2011, the total monetary value of CO2 enhancement for 45 crops reached an estimated cumulative value of $3.2 trillion! Carbon dioxide’s annual enrichment value rose from $19 billion in 1961 to $140 billion in 2010. Between 2012 and 2050, these benefits will total $9.8 trillion!
Pharmaceutical and cosmetic products all have their roots in petrochemicals – as do paints, synthetic fibers and plastics. Hockey and football players are dressed head to toe in fossil-fuel-sourced materials.
High-rise office and residential buildings made possible by steel and concrete allow our cities to grow upward, instead of just outward, preserving millions of acres of wildlife habitats and scenic areas.
Then there’s electricity. Look around you, and try to imagine your life without this wondrous, pervasive energy source. Electricity was properly ranked humanity’s second most significant innovation of the past 6,000 years, after the printing press! It has created, shaped, defined and powered the modern world, and facilitated virtually every technological achievement of the past century. Electrification of nations is undeniably the world’s most significant engineering and life-enhancing achievement of the past century.
Economic growth, quality of life and longevity are directly correlated to sufficient, reliable, affordable electricity. In today’s world, nothing happens without it: communication, transportation and research; the operation of every home, office, hospital, factory and airport; refrigeration to preserve food and medicine; heating and air conditioning to save lives and enable people to survive and prosper in any climate.
Electrification will be increasingly important in the 21st century, and world electricity consumption is forecast to double within four decades, as electricity supplies an increasing share of the world’s ever-increasing energy demand. Fossil fuels will continue generating at least 75% of electricity, even in 2050.
Hydroelectric and nuclear (which radical environmentalists also despise and oppose), a bit of geothermal, and a smattering of unreliable, weather-determined wind and solar power will supply the rest. The land, resource and environmental impacts of building and operating wind and solar must also be considered.
Social media and internet search engines (to run biased searches for alarmist climate news) also depend on electricity – 91.4% of which was generated by fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro in 2016 in the USA.
Increased productivity generated by all these technologies creates the leisure time and wealth that enable everyone to enjoy evenings, weekends and holidays – and the fossil fuel transportation to go places (including to faraway, exotic locales and 5-star hotels for IPCC climate change confabs).
Finally, aside from nuclear-powered ships, our highly mechanized military gets there “the fastest with the mostest” thanks to fossil fuels, to combat terrorism and provide for our national defense.
Judge Alsup’s case is thus really about highly speculative manmade climate disasters versus indisputable fossil fuel benefits – as further documented here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere. Indeed, today’s undeniable fossil fuel benefits outweigh any hypothesized climate, sea level and other costs by literally orders of magnitude: at least 50:1 to more than 200:1.
Barring major efficiency, battery storage and other technology improvements, renewable energy cannot possibly replace fossil fuels. Judge Alsup has no choice but to rule in favor of the oil company defendants … and all who rely on oil, gas and coal for the countless, life-enhancing benefits barely touched on here.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of articles and books on energy, climate change, carbon dioxide and economic development. Roger Bezdek is an internationally recognized energy analyst and president of Management Information Services, Inc.
Environmental activists and green academics in Western Australia are pushing the government to make radical changes to bushfire policy and operations. In place of the current approach, which integrates pre-fire mitigation with post-fire response, the activists are pushing for “response only”, otherwise known as ‘the Aunt Dolly Bushfire System’.
Specifically, they want the government to abandon the program of mild-intensity prescribed burning, a strategy aimed at reducing fuel levels in a mosaic pattern across south-west forests so as to make it easier, safer and cheaper to control fires under the worst case scenario situation.
As we watch the disturbing daily images of a dry Darling River, parched Menindee Lakes, millions of dead fish, and outback towns without drinkable water, both bush and city are screaming – Why?
Who is responsible they ask? Name the scapegoats and brand them criminals is demanded.
Any lesser response would be shameful, but some reactions, while understandable, are not rational.
Before we look more closely at why and how these unacceptable events have occurred, we need to put to rest some misconceptions about this river and recent claims made by some aboriginal people that the Darling was previously a “Mighty River” that always flowed.
It wasn’t. After discovery by English explorers Stuart and Hume in 1828, history kept at Menindee tells us it was bone dry there at least 48 times up to 1960 – something that no doubt also happened for hundreds of years before.
The paddle steamer NILE on the dry bed of the Darling River, near Bourke, about 1898. From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository (more…)
“The assumptions are suspect, the relationships are far more complex than the models assume, and the scary forecasts are worthless.”
By Viv Forbes
Weather or climate? It pays to know the difference before we slaughter our economy on the climate alarm altar.
“Weather” describes atmospheric conditions at any location – temperature, humidity, clouds precipitation and winds. Every place has its own weather which depends on the time of day, the season, the latitude, local topography and the surface temperature of the nearest ocean. (more…)
A long-forgotten scientific paper on temperature trends in New Zealand may be the smoking gun on temperature manipulation worldwide.
Since Climategate first broke, we’ve seen scandal over temperature adjustments by NZ’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research, NIWA, which in turn prompted a fresh look at raw temperature data from Darwin and elsewhere.
Now, a study published in the NZ Journal of Science back in 1980 reveals weather stations at the heart of NIWA’s claims of massive warming were shown to be unreliable and untrustworthy by a senior Met Office climate scientist 30 years ago, long before global warming became a politically charged issue.
Earth has only three significant sources of energy.
First is geothermal energy from Earth’s molten core and decaying radioactive minerals in Earth’s crust. This energy moves continents, powers volcanoes and its heat migrates towards the crust, warming the lithosphere and the deep oceans. It can be harvested successfully in favourable locations, and radioactive minerals can be extracted to provide large amounts of reliable heat for power generation.
Second is energy stored in combustible hydrocarbon minerals such as coal, oil, gas, tar sands and oil shale. These all store solar and geothermal energy collected eons ago and they are the primary energy sources supporting the modern world and its large and growing populations.
Third are radiation and gravitational energies from the Sun and Moon which are captured by the biosphere as heat, winds, tides, rain, rivers and in biomass such as forests, crops and animals. These are the natural “Green” energies that support all processes of life and still support a peasant existence for some peoples.
Green zealots believe that we can and should run modern societies exclusively on “Green” energies, and they have embarked on a war on hydrocarbons. They need to be told that their green energy favourites are just stealing from the biosphere – they are not as green as they claim. (more…)
The Climate Change Authority wants Australians to cut their production of carbon dioxide to 19% below 2000 levels by the year 2020.
The climate boffins should employ a demographer before they set such unrealistic goals.
The population of Australia in 2000 was about 19 million and it is now 23 million. By 2020 it will probably be over 25 million.
If Australia’s production of carbon dioxide was merely frozen at the 2000 level, that would require a 24% reduction per head of population by 2020.
If we add to that a real reduction in total emissions of 19% by 2020, emissions per capita would need to fall by 39% in just 6 years.
Even more unbelievable, China (supported by the UN/IPCC) thinks that developed countries “need to cut emissions by 40% from their 1990 levels by 2020”. This would require Australia’s per capita emissions to fall by 60% to just 40% of their 1990 levels. All achieved within the next six years.
Nothing real gets produced or done without generating carbon dioxide. Every working car, truck, tractor, dozer, quad bike, boat, helicopter, bulk carrier and aeroplane generates carbon dioxide. None of these will be powered by wind-mills, sunbeams or nuclear power in the next six years. How will they force us to use 39% less of them – carbon ration cards?
Making steel, bricks, cement, bitumen, minerals, metals, food, fertilisers and roads produces carbon dioxide – shall we each use just 61% of what we did in 2000?
Humans, cattle, sheep, pigs, barbeques, champagne and beer also emit carbon dioxide – shall we ration these too?
And Australian trains, lifts, supermarkets, operating theatres, refineries and power stations will not keep working 24/7 without base-load electricity from coal and gas, both generating carbon dioxide. Who is volunteering for living solely with Green Energy – brown-outs, blackouts or irregular “Earth Hours” for about four months of the year?
There is one way to achieve these goals – “The Tasmanian Solution”. Send 40% of our remaining industry to Asia, and convert Australia into a quiet green utopia of genteel poverty. This should create sufficient unemployment and reduced consumption to achieve the required emissions austerity.
Is the Climate Change Authority engineering an emissions target depression to achieve its savage cuts, or is this just another mindless model-driven target? We should demand to see their detailed plans for achieving these targets.
Carbon dioxide is hugely beneficial for all plant life, and its effect on global temperature is tiny and probably beneficial for most people. There is no evidence that carbon dioxide causes extreme weather. Man-made Climate Policy is a far greater and more certain danger than Man-made Climate Change.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the tide has turned in the war on carbon. Global warming stopped seventeen years ago; the carbon price collapsed a year ago; the EU is backpedalling on its disastrous green energy gamble; Russia, China, India, Japan, Canada, USA, Brazil and South Africa will not sign any binding Kyoto agreement; China has plans to build 160 new coal fired power stations in the next four years; and Tim Flannery has been sacked.
More, as well as:
Modern Magic – Clean Energy by Wire
There is “NO SIGNIFICANT GLOBAL WARMING”
But if we had some Global Warming, things would be better – a bit of fun
The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science –A new book by Dr Tim Ball
But a Professor Wants Climate Change “Deniers” Thrown in Jail
“The difference between taking a part of my life,
and taking my whole life, is just a matter of degree.”
Anon
Special thanks to Mr. Larry Pickering for permission to reproduce this cartoon. If you like, you can follow him on Facebook or visit him at pickeringpost.com Copyright L Pickering 2014
There was a time, before the baby-boom generation took over, when we took pride in the achievements of our builders, producers and innovators. There was always great celebration when settler families got a phone, a tractor, a bitumen road or electric power. An oil strike or a gold discovery made headlines, and people welcomed new businesses, new railways and new inventions. Science and engineering were revered and the wealth delivered by these human achievements enabled the builders and their children to live more rewarding lives, with more leisure, more time for culture and crusades, and greater interest in taking more care of their environment.
Then a green snake entered the Garden of Eden.
Read more, as well as:
The Sky Fell last month, but almost nobody noticed
So Much for the Consensus – just 20% believe “the debate is over”
The Big Lie
Ian Plimer new Book Launch.
Peer Review of Tim Flannery – “The Weather Makers Re-Examined”
Wind and solar are parasitic power producers, unable to survive in a modern electricity grid without the back-up of stand-alone electricity generators such as hydro, coal, gas or nuclear. And like all parasites, they weaken their hosts, causing increased operating and transmission costs and reduced profits for all participants in the grid.
Without subsidies, few large wind/solar plants would be built; and without mandated targets, few would get connected to the grid.
Green zealots posing as energy engineers should be free to play with their green energy toys at their own expense, on their own properties, but the rest of us should not be saddled with their costs and unreliability.
We should stop promoting parasitic power producers. As a first step, all green energy subsidies and targets should be abolished.
State and Federal Governments should stop wasting community resources on useless schemes for carbon trading and carbon sequestration and focus on some real world pollution crises.
The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that the government and media focus on carbon dioxide emissions was totally misdirected and counter-productive.
“All it will do is delay the spread of coal powered electricity to many areas now desperate for clean invisible power. It will also give an enormous boost to the demand for uranium fuel, whose mining and use is deterred by politicians in Australia.
“There is already a groundswell of opposition from well informed scientists and engineers to the whole basis of the Greenhouse Religion. Even the PM’s own backbench contains well informed sceptics, and the ranks of scientific sceptics are growing all over the world.
“This irrational and hysterical focus on carbon dioxide is diverting attention and resources from real pollution which is altering local climate and affecting many areas of the world.
“For example, the “Asian Brown Cloud”, a haze of pollution about 3 km thick and sometimes covering an area as big as Australia, is causing real human health and safety problems. At times this cloud drifts right across the Pacific Ocean and is noticed in America.
“China now emits more sulphur dioxide (SO2) than anywhere else in the world. This chokes their people, causes acid rain and damages buildings. This brown haze is already affecting local climate and melting glaciers in China and the Himalayas. In Arctic areas, soot is covering snow and absorbing more heat from the sun. Soon the brown haze will obscure the sun in some polluted Asian cities.
“This pollution is caused by millions of cow-dung cooking fires and open-air cremations in India, cooking with wood, coal and cardboard all over Asia, forest fires in Indonesia and millions of small obsolete and dirty wood, charcoal and coal stoves and furnaces all over Asia and Africa. Similar problems are obvious in places in South America.
“The western world went through this pollution phase fifty years ago, and although improvements can still be made, we have banished the notorious smoke pollution of places like London, Manchester and Pittsburgh.
“London smoke pollution was so bad that the city became known as “The Big Smoke”. Children developed rickets from the lack of sunshine, plants and animals died and lung disease was widespread. During its last and worst ever pollution event, “The Black Fog” of 1952, caused by a temperature inversion over London, visibility was reduced to less than a foot and 4,000 Londoners died from SO2 poisoning (50 in one small London park alone). This shock brought action – cooking and heating with open fires of wood and coal was banned in big cities. Clean electric power saved the forests and cleared the air.
“The world’s worst pollution is caused by open air combustion of wood, dung and coal which produces not only the harmless greenhouse gases of water vapour and carbon dioxide, but also real pollutants such as soot, smoke, ash, dust and chemicals containing sulphur, chlorine, nitrogen, fluorine, and metals. In dilute quantities, these trace elements are not a problem, but when concentrated in city air, they can be toxic.
“Ignoring this real monster threatening human health and the environment, the media and politicians are chasing the CO2 mirage.
“Carbon dioxide puts the bubbles in your beer, the fizz in your soda water, the holes in your bread, the dry ice in your Esky and the gas in your fire extinguisher. It is colourless, odourless, and non-toxic and does not form polluting smog or acid rain. It encourages the growth of all plant life on land and in the oceans. The whole plant world breathes in CO2 during the growing season and releases much of it again when the leaves fall. It is the key recycler of organic matter for the whole food chain, including the human race.
“Man’s emissions of CO2 are a miniscule factor in determining Earth’s temperature. But while are we are wasting time and money trying to catch and imprison this harmless Will o’ the Wisp, an ominous brown smelly choking cloud of real pollution is growing in our northern skies.
“Removing most of the pollutants from combustion emissions is difficult but not impossible. Removing or burying all carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of carbon fuels is an impossible dream. “Zero emissions” and “carbon sequestration” for key carbon fuels like coal, oil, gas and wood are nonsense goals, and their pursuit is diverting attention and truck loads of money from a worthy goal such as “Zero Pollution”.
“The western world has largely beaten its pollution with inventions such as the chimney, the stove, but most of all by a clean, silent, invisible energy called electricity, generated in clean, concentrated and remote power stations while delivering lighting, heating, cooling, cooking and motive power into the most humble home in the poorest suburb.
“To fly over a clean modern coal-fired power station at say 10,000 m is to put it into perspective – a puny cooling tower or two emitting wisps of water vapour and a small amount of (invisible) carbon dioxide and which is dwarfed by any passing cloud, no matter how small.
“This third world problem presents a real opportunity for Australian energy companies to make profits and clean up the environment by promoting clean non-polluting modern power stations burning high quality Australian coals. This will allow cow dung to be used for soil improvement and allow re-afforestation of areas denuded by centuries of scavenging for fire wood.
“Invisible energy from coal has already banished most of the terrible pollution that affected cities such as London, Manchester and Pittsburgh, and allowed the regrowth of American forests.
“The public has been misled on this issue by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests.
“Anyone with the real interests of ordinary Australians, Australian industry or the environment at heart would divert public attention and political action from the non-problem of carbon emissions and towards the world’s real pollution problems.
“History shows that people cannot and will not live without energy in their homes. Unless we allow coal to supply clean silent invisible energy, they will continue to burn dung, wood, cardboard, trees, oil, charcoal or reject coal to get their warmth or cook their food.
“Just one well designed, well-scrubbed, modern Australian designed coal power plant running on natural fossil sunshine from the Sunshine State could provide the light, heating, cooling and entertainment silently and invisibly to the front door for about 3 million Asian homes, housing maybe 10 million people.”
Mr Forbes called on government and opposition to cease political grandstanding on the Greenhouse issue, where carbon taxes and carbon emissions trading will adversely affect most Australians, and focus on goals that will really benefit all of Australia and the environment.
“Do we wait for the re-appearance of rickets and lung disease before acting?”
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