Winds of change

The cruel reality of so-called "green" energy may be catching up with the McGuinty Liberals.

After years of touting wind projects as a critical piece of the alternative energy puzzle, the government let slip — very quietly — that offshore wind projects are no longer part of the game plan.

But it's not just offshore wind projects that are proving to be impractical. A legal challenge to the Green Energy Act is being heard by the Ontario Divisional Court:

If the challenge is successful, it will significantly impede wind development in Ontario until the province can provide satisfactory evidence that there is no evidence of negative health impacts associated with wind farms, an issue that has been the subject of much debate.

It gets even worse. Kelly McParland on the solar energy front:

On Friday, hundreds more Ontarians were told that installations they’d erected at the behest of the government can’t be connected to the provincial grid because of technical problems. Rural residents, some of whom have invested large amounts in solar generating operations, will be left high and dry.

Instead of trying to please his latte sipping yuppies in the GTA with his "green" policies, McGuinty should have given some thought to thousands of rural residents who will be forced to live in close proximity to his wind machines. They're angry. And those people who have invested tens of thousands of dollars into solar panels only to find they won't be getting the exorbitant rates they were initially promised. Or worse, they can't connect those panels they spent their life savings on. They're way beyond angry.

The way I see it, thre are two problems with investing in solar and wind. First, these energy sources are not economically viable on their own. Massive taxpayer subsidies are required. Which leads to the second problem, reliance on the government as a partner. And this government is looking less and less like a reliable partner.

Rex Murphy: misery loves company

Gore-Olbermann: never so fruitful a partnership since Gilligan and the Skipper.

The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder

I often hear from otherwise normal, rational, intelligent people how the weather is getting more and more extreme. And that this is proof that we humans have somehow messed up the climate with our carbon emissions. I argue that it isn't so, that the floods, hurricanes, hot spells and even the record cold and snowfalls are not signs of extreme weather brought about by anthropogenic global warming, er climate change. After all, most of the "records" we have been experiencing recently impact only the last 40 or 50 years, a relatively short time span in the historical record and the global climate change business.

That's why it was encouraging to see this study:

The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

It is all too easy for climate alarmists to point to recent extremes of weather and cry "we must do something before it's too late". We need to keep in mind that while the weather around the globe can and has been experiencing extremes, this doesn't signify anything out of the historical norm.

FCIC Reports

Writing in the Financial Post, Janet Whitman asks, "What caused the financial crisis?". The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has issued it's report on the crisis and surprise, surprise the blame falls largely on party lines.

The Dems on the commission blame "reckless" Wall Street Bankers, the Fed and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and "ethics breaches at all levels". The Republicans blame "the U.S. housing bubble, non-traditional mortgages, faulty credit ratings for investments of bundled mortgages, financial firms with too much exposure to high-risk loans, inadequate capital at some big banks, risk of big bank failures, and financial panic amid failures and near failures of Wall Street banks".

Then there's the dissenting report by Peter J. Wallison, an American Enterprise Institute fellow appointed to the FCIC by Republicans. Wallison offers another viewpoint, assigning the blame most closely to where it should be.

Mr. Wallison pins the blame squarely on U.S. government housing policies. By encouraging and supporting high-risk loans to low-income borrowers, the government inflated a massive and unmanageable bubble of bad home loans.

By 2008, fueled by the policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations, the United States had 27-million subprime and Alt-A home mortgages – representing half of all mortgages outstanding and valued at a whopping US$4.5-trillion.

The U.S. government through vehicles like the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie actively encouraged (forced) the nations banks to loan money to people who otherwise would never have qualified for a mortgage loan. Did bankers act "recklessly"? Probably. But because of government policies they had a lot of "troubled assets" on their hands that they had to deal with or get burned. It was a game of financial "hot potato" and it eventually collapsed.

Read the Wallison's report: http://c0182732.cdn1.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/fcic_final_report_wallison_dissent.pdf

CFLs disappoint

"Green" states like California are finding out that compact fluorescent lamps are not all they were cracked up to be.

It was all flowers and roses when the state of California launched its $548M USD program to help promote consumer use of compact fluorescent lamps. Manufacturers and utilities were onboard because they received bonus pay to enact rebate programs. Citizens were happy as they received cheap CFL bulbs, which promised to save them money on power expenses. And the politicians were happy, as they looked sufficiently "green" to satisfy the eco-minded voters.

Now that utopian vision of futuristic lighting has dissolved into rancor and disappointment. A multi-million dollar program by the state designed to evaluate the actual results has concluded that energy savings were not as good as expected and that utilities were being over-rewarded for their performance.

Emphasis added. Unfortunately, Ontario is unwilling to see the failures of other jurisdictions in the so called "green economy". It's full steam ahead here with CFLs, wind and solar power - all unaffordable and unsustainable without heavy subsidies from taxpayers.

Stupid. Reckless. Incompetent.

What word captures the way Dalton McGuinty’s government has blown it when it comes to windmills and green energy?

For the answer just read this post by Christina Blizzard in the Toronto Sun.

Rex Murphy

offers his unique Newfoundlander's insight on the People's Republic:

We are apologizing ourselves into impotence and irrelevancy over many of our greatest successes, while more confident — even ruthless — powers such as China are emerging brisk with the determination to develop as fast and as far as they can.

Maxime Bernier for smaller government

What did Cancun accomplish?

The Climate Conference in Cancun, Mexico has wrapped up after a long chilling week. So just what was accomplished at this big conflab? Ronald Bailey has a summary at Reason.com. Here's a snippet:

It would be cynical to call it a bribe, but the Cancun agreements were largely reached because the rich countries continued their vague promises to hand over $100 billion in climate aid annually to poor countries beginning in 2020.

Basically the deal on emissions is that countries will agree to agree on cuts at the next climate change conference in Durban. Big developing country emitters like China and India still refused to agree to any legally binding limits on their emissions. Of course, neither did the developed countries.

[...]

I repeat the highlights of the Cancun Agreements below:

(1) As far as I can tell, the COP has indeed kicked the Cancun down the road by agreeing that they "shall aim to complete" further commitments by rich countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions "as early as possible." They do include the saving phrase "and in time to ensure that there is no gap between the first and second commitment period." Translation: Additional cuts should be agreed to before 2012. The telling words are "shall aim to complete." No real promises here.

(2) The shared vision says that the parties set the goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions "so as to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels...." The parties will think about trying to hold average temperature increase to 1.5 later after further scientific review in 2015.

(3) The shared vision drops the earlier text that would have required that the world cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent and that developed countries cut their emissions by 80-95 percent by 2050. Instead, the parties will "work towards identifying a global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050" and consider it at the next meeting in Durban.

(4) The shared vision also drops the proposal that global greenhouse gases should peak by 2015.

(5) The text also sets up a process for creating a system for accounting and monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions from developed countries. As far as I can tell from reading the rather opaque text, the U.S. has not been roped into a process that leads to legally binding emissions reduction commitments.

(6) China, India and other emerging countries also have not been roped into legally binding commitments, but if they take mitigation actions that are supported by outside money, those activities will be subject to some kind of international auditing. On the other, the world will have take their words for their domestically funded activities.

(7) The text also says that the parties decide to establish a Green Climate Fund under the authority of the Conference of the Parties with a board of directors consisting of 24 members, half of whom will be from rich countries and half from poor countries. The devloped country parties commit to "mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries."

Not much commitment to reducing carbon emissions there, but that $100,000,000,000 per year ain't no chump change!

And that's what it's always been about.

Update #1: JoNova has a roundup of the media response and says it was all about the PR:

After the awful post-Climategate-and-Copenhagen year, more than anything else, the Big Scare Campaign needed a PR win. And in that sense Cancun was a major victory. Nobody agreed to anything legally binding, Kyoto was not extended, and all they achieved amounted to nothing more than an extension of the yearly junkets, and the promise that the gravy train is not dead yet. But the headlines will warm the hearts of all on Team-Scare-Us. The most important thing for the side that’s losing friends, faith and face, was to regain momentum. They’re trying to stop the death spiral.

Update #2: From the Christian Science Monitor:

To prevent the talks from collapsing, the language had to accommodate the developing countries that are clinging to Kyoto as well as a Japan that wants very little to do with it any longer. Observers described the language as “weak” without a direct call for countries to pledge reductions in the second commitment period. [...]

“Anything that is said about a legally binding outcome in the future must make it very clear that that is a legally binding outcome that would apply to at least all the major countries including China, India, Brazil, and so forth,” says Todd Stern, the US special climate envoy.

The Wall Street Journal:

World leaders at a climate-change conference in Cancun, Mexico, made clear that addressing the issue will be all about money, agreeing that rich countries would spend potentially trillions of dollars to help poor countries develop on a greener path.

But the diplomats postponed hashing out which rich countries would pay how much, and exactly what the poor countries would have to do to get the checks.

The two-week United Nations climate conference in the resort city of Cancun underscored that future global efforts to address climate change will likely depend more on economic incentives than on environmental mandates.

From Reuters:

(Reuters) - Global carbon markets will struggle after the deal reached at annual U.N. climate talks did little to ensure mandatory emissions caps would be extended next year.

The Gore Effect hits Cancun

The Gore Effect: wherever Al Gore goes, so does record cold weather. I don't know if the Goreacle is in Cancun, but there are enough warmists and climate change activists gathered there at the UN conference to trigger an impressive example of the Gore Effect. From Anthony Watts:

The irony, it burns. Do you think maybe Gaia is trying to send the U.N. and the delegates a message? One record low was funny, three in a row was hilarious, a new record low for the month of December was ROFL, but now six straight days of record lows during the U.N. COP16 Global Warming conference? That’s galactically inconvenient. The whole month so far has averaged below normal

E.P.A. Delays Tougher Rules on Emissions

From the New York Times:

The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers — as it adjusts to a changed political dynamic in Washington with a more muscular Republican opposition.

The move to delay the rules, announced this week by the Environmental Protection Agency, will leave in place policies set by President George W. Bush. President Obama ran for office promising tougher standards, and the new rules were set to take effect over the next several weeks.

Now, the agency says, it needs until July 2011 to further analyze scientific and health studies of the smog rules and until April 2012 on the boiler regulation. Mr. Obama, having just cut a painful deal with Republicans intended to stimulate the economy, can ill afford to be seen as simultaneously throttling the fragile recovery by imposing a sheaf of expensive new environmental regulations that critics say will cost jobs.

The delays represent a marked departure from the first two years of the Obama presidency, when the E.P.A. moved quickly to reverse one Bush environmental policy after another. Administration officials now face the question of whether in their zeal to undo the Bush agenda they reached too far and provoked an unmanageable political backlash.

What next? Will Obama try legislation rather than regulation? I doubt that will fly with the new Republican dominated Congress.

It seems that elections do have consequences.

h/t

Lord Monckton on the New World Order

Update: Joanne Nova: "The power hungry tyrants learnt from Copenhagen. They realized that they have a far better chance of success by underselling the expectations and sliding in long impenetrable documents in front of underling bureaucrats. The UN wants nothing less than 1.5% of our GDP."

Original Post

Via WUWT, here is the report from the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Cancun, Mexico, Dec 9th, 2010 titled The Abdication of the West:

I usually add some gentle humor to these reports. Not today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bl**dy care.

The 33-page Note (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2) by the Chairman of the “Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, entitled Possible elements of the outcome, reveals all. Or, rather, it reveals nothing, unless one understands what the complex, obscure jargon means. All UNFCCC documents at the Cancun conference, specifically including Possible elements of the outcome, are drafted with what is called “transparent impenetrability”. The intention is that the documents should not be understood, but that later we shall be told they were in the public domain all the time, so what are we complaining about?

Since the Chairman’s note is very long, I shall summarize the main points:

I found this particularly disturbing.

The world-government Secretariat: In all but name, the UN Convention’s Secretariat will become a world government directly controlling hundreds of global, supranational, regional, national and sub-national bureaucracies. It will receive the vast sum of taxpayers’ money ostensibly paid by the West to the Third World for adaptation to the supposed adverse consequences of imagined (and imaginary) “global warming”.

The rest is here.