The only true global temperature record we have is the satellite data and that only goes back to 1979. 1.33 climate data points. Showing moderate warming much of it as a result of 2 large ENSO events in 1998 and 2015. The fact that we have serious calls to abandon fossil fuels by 2030 or 2050 is sheer LUNACY.
Only Three Months Left For Planet Earth( and other false doomsday predictions)
- Thread starter canada-man
- Start date
What a convenient way to try to ignore historic temperatures.
Nice try, but no dice.
Satellites aren't any more accurate, they have their own issues and also clearly show warming.
Solar Panels Generate Mountains Of Toxic Waste—And Heat The Earth
The problem of solar panel waste is now becoming evident. As environmental journalist Emily Folk admits in Renewable Energy Magazine, “when talking about renewable energy, the topic of waste does not often appear.”
She attributes this to the supposed “pressures of climate change” and alleged “urgency to find alternative energy sources,” saying people may thus be hesitant to discuss “possible negative impacts of renewable energy.”
Ms. Folk admits that sustainability requires proper e-waste management. Yet she laments, “Solar presents a particular problem. There is growing evidence that broken panels release toxic pollutants … [and] increasing concern regarding what happens with these materials when they are no longer viable, especially since they are difficult to recycle.”
This is the likely reason that (except in Washington state), there are no U.S. mandates for solar recycling. A recent article in Grist reports that most used solar panels are shipped to developing countries that have little electricity and weak environmental protections, to be reused or landfilled.
The near-total absence of end-of-life procedures for solar panels is likely a byproduct of the belief (and repeated, unsupported assertion) that renewable energy is “clean” and “green.”
Indeed, Mississippi Sierra Club state director Louie Miller recently claimed that unlike fossil fuels and nuclear energy, “Sunshine is a free fuel.” Well, sunshine is certainly free and clean. However, there is a monumental caveat.
Harnessing sunshine (and wind) to serve humanity is not free – or clean, green, renewable, or sustainable.
The 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act mandates that new surface coal mines include plans and set aside funds for full reclamation of mine properties.
The law also sets standards for restoring abandoned mine lands. There is nothing akin to this for solar facilities and wastes.
Similarly, the 1980 Superfund law (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act) created a tax and trust fund to pay for preventing and fixing actual or threatened releases of hazardous substances that could endanger public health or the environment. Again, still nothing for solar.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act prioritizes deep geologic repositories for safe storage and/or disposal of radioactive waste.
Unfortunately, 25 years after being designated as the disposal site, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has never opened because of conflicts among politicians, locals, anti-nuclear activists, government officials, and the nuclear industry; the U.S. still stores its nuclear waste at 75 scattered sites, including some near New York City, New Orleans, and Chicago.
But for solar no steps have been taken.
While coal, nuclear, and petrochemical companies must come up with detailed, costly plans for dealing with real or potential negative consequences of their operations, solar (and wind) companies have been “rewarded” with massive subsidies and absolutely no disposal standards or requirements.
No government grants require these solar companies to set aside money to dispose of, store or recycle wastes generated during manufacturing or after massive solar “farms” have ceased functioning and been torn down.
Solar (and wind) customers are likewise not charged for waste cleanup, disposal, or reuse and recycling. This and the massive subsidies distort and hide the true costs of solar power.
But the reality is starting to catch up. Disposal (or recycling) costs will have to be paid, ultimately by consumers. The more solar panels we have (likely billions within a few years), the higher those costs will be.
Consumers in states like California that have committed to heavy reliance on solar (and wind) energy (and already have the nation’s highest energy bills) will have to pay even more.
California is also facing a secondary problem from the proliferation of subsidized industrial solar installations.
A 2015 study jointly by Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science found that nearly a third of the state’s solar development is occurring on former cropland, where many farmers are shifting from growing crops to using their land to generate electricity – rather than letting it become a wildlife habitat.
As Big Solar also moves into natural areas, California is losing even more habitat and scenic land, while the integrity of state and national parks suffers from the nearby glare of countless solar panels and towering transmission lines to distant cities.
The Stanford study highlights another problem: localized higher temperatures. It found it will take an area the size of South Carolina filled with solar arrays to meet California’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. [It would take at least eight South Carolinas if the California mandate were extended nationwide.]
Other research has found that these large-scale solar power plants raise local temperatures, creating a significant solar heat island effect. Temperatures around one solar power plant were 5.4°-7.2°F (3°-4°C) warmer than nearby wildlands.
Imagine such manmade “global warming” across 20 million acres (South Carolina) or 160 million acres (Texas), to meet California or U.S. greenhouse gas reduction goals!
Australia is already coping with this unwelcome reality. Not until 2018 did Aussie environment ministers mandate fast-track development of new product stewardship schemes for photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, like those television and computer manufacturers and retailers have had to comply with since 2011.
Total Environment Centre director Jeff Angel admitted that setting standards for life-of-product management for solar panels was “long overdue,” and that the 30-year delay in imposing standards revealed a “fundamental weakness” in Australia’s waste policies.
He further noted that while solar panels contain hazardous substances, Aussies are “sending hundreds of thousands of e-waste items to landfills” and creating significant pollution problems. And Australia has less than a tenth of the U.S. population!
Since 2002, the European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive has required that the original producers of e-wastes guarantee and pay for taking back and recycling their wastes, so that end-user consumers aren’t surprised by additional disposal costs.
However, PV solar panel waste was not included in this mandate until July 2012 – and “some uncertainty remains” about the cutoff date for such wastes because the directive has yet to be implemented in national laws.
Producer financing of PV waste treatment thus cannot be applied to older solar panels. So who will pay? And how much?
Ms. Folk and others look to waste-to-energy plants, and indeed the EU does send much of its solar panel waste to incinerators – which many environmentalists oppose.
Landfilling is not a viable option in the U.S., because toxins could leach out. Unscrupulous companies ship solar panel waste to developing nations, but that is a stopgap solution that is environmentally irresponsible.
Tao Meng, the lead author of a new study, says “the big blind spot in the U.S. for recycling is that the cost far exceeds the revenue” – by nearly 10-to-1, especially when including transportation costs.
Chemicals must be used to remove silver and lead from silicon modules before they can be safely placed in landfills, Meng notes.
The problem of solar panel waste will continue to grow as more panels reach their end of life.
Four years ago the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated there were already about 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste worldwide – and that total will explode to 78 million metric tons by 2050!
So when you read that solar energy is already cheaper than natural gas, don’t be fooled. They are omitting the pollution and disposal costs, as well as habitat losses, solar heat islands, and the need for backup power generation or batteries – to lowball the true costs of solar.
We need some honest math now before it’s too late to turn back.
climatechangedispatch.com
The problem of solar panel waste is now becoming evident. As environmental journalist Emily Folk admits in Renewable Energy Magazine, “when talking about renewable energy, the topic of waste does not often appear.”
She attributes this to the supposed “pressures of climate change” and alleged “urgency to find alternative energy sources,” saying people may thus be hesitant to discuss “possible negative impacts of renewable energy.”
Ms. Folk admits that sustainability requires proper e-waste management. Yet she laments, “Solar presents a particular problem. There is growing evidence that broken panels release toxic pollutants … [and] increasing concern regarding what happens with these materials when they are no longer viable, especially since they are difficult to recycle.”
This is the likely reason that (except in Washington state), there are no U.S. mandates for solar recycling. A recent article in Grist reports that most used solar panels are shipped to developing countries that have little electricity and weak environmental protections, to be reused or landfilled.
The near-total absence of end-of-life procedures for solar panels is likely a byproduct of the belief (and repeated, unsupported assertion) that renewable energy is “clean” and “green.”
Indeed, Mississippi Sierra Club state director Louie Miller recently claimed that unlike fossil fuels and nuclear energy, “Sunshine is a free fuel.” Well, sunshine is certainly free and clean. However, there is a monumental caveat.
Harnessing sunshine (and wind) to serve humanity is not free – or clean, green, renewable, or sustainable.
The 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act mandates that new surface coal mines include plans and set aside funds for full reclamation of mine properties.
The law also sets standards for restoring abandoned mine lands. There is nothing akin to this for solar facilities and wastes.
Similarly, the 1980 Superfund law (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act) created a tax and trust fund to pay for preventing and fixing actual or threatened releases of hazardous substances that could endanger public health or the environment. Again, still nothing for solar.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act prioritizes deep geologic repositories for safe storage and/or disposal of radioactive waste.
Unfortunately, 25 years after being designated as the disposal site, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has never opened because of conflicts among politicians, locals, anti-nuclear activists, government officials, and the nuclear industry; the U.S. still stores its nuclear waste at 75 scattered sites, including some near New York City, New Orleans, and Chicago.
But for solar no steps have been taken.
While coal, nuclear, and petrochemical companies must come up with detailed, costly plans for dealing with real or potential negative consequences of their operations, solar (and wind) companies have been “rewarded” with massive subsidies and absolutely no disposal standards or requirements.
No government grants require these solar companies to set aside money to dispose of, store or recycle wastes generated during manufacturing or after massive solar “farms” have ceased functioning and been torn down.
Solar (and wind) customers are likewise not charged for waste cleanup, disposal, or reuse and recycling. This and the massive subsidies distort and hide the true costs of solar power.
But the reality is starting to catch up. Disposal (or recycling) costs will have to be paid, ultimately by consumers. The more solar panels we have (likely billions within a few years), the higher those costs will be.
Consumers in states like California that have committed to heavy reliance on solar (and wind) energy (and already have the nation’s highest energy bills) will have to pay even more.
California is also facing a secondary problem from the proliferation of subsidized industrial solar installations.
A 2015 study jointly by Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science found that nearly a third of the state’s solar development is occurring on former cropland, where many farmers are shifting from growing crops to using their land to generate electricity – rather than letting it become a wildlife habitat.
As Big Solar also moves into natural areas, California is losing even more habitat and scenic land, while the integrity of state and national parks suffers from the nearby glare of countless solar panels and towering transmission lines to distant cities.
The Stanford study highlights another problem: localized higher temperatures. It found it will take an area the size of South Carolina filled with solar arrays to meet California’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. [It would take at least eight South Carolinas if the California mandate were extended nationwide.]
Other research has found that these large-scale solar power plants raise local temperatures, creating a significant solar heat island effect. Temperatures around one solar power plant were 5.4°-7.2°F (3°-4°C) warmer than nearby wildlands.
Imagine such manmade “global warming” across 20 million acres (South Carolina) or 160 million acres (Texas), to meet California or U.S. greenhouse gas reduction goals!
Australia is already coping with this unwelcome reality. Not until 2018 did Aussie environment ministers mandate fast-track development of new product stewardship schemes for photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, like those television and computer manufacturers and retailers have had to comply with since 2011.
Total Environment Centre director Jeff Angel admitted that setting standards for life-of-product management for solar panels was “long overdue,” and that the 30-year delay in imposing standards revealed a “fundamental weakness” in Australia’s waste policies.
He further noted that while solar panels contain hazardous substances, Aussies are “sending hundreds of thousands of e-waste items to landfills” and creating significant pollution problems. And Australia has less than a tenth of the U.S. population!
Since 2002, the European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive has required that the original producers of e-wastes guarantee and pay for taking back and recycling their wastes, so that end-user consumers aren’t surprised by additional disposal costs.
However, PV solar panel waste was not included in this mandate until July 2012 – and “some uncertainty remains” about the cutoff date for such wastes because the directive has yet to be implemented in national laws.
Producer financing of PV waste treatment thus cannot be applied to older solar panels. So who will pay? And how much?
Ms. Folk and others look to waste-to-energy plants, and indeed the EU does send much of its solar panel waste to incinerators – which many environmentalists oppose.
Landfilling is not a viable option in the U.S., because toxins could leach out. Unscrupulous companies ship solar panel waste to developing nations, but that is a stopgap solution that is environmentally irresponsible.
Tao Meng, the lead author of a new study, says “the big blind spot in the U.S. for recycling is that the cost far exceeds the revenue” – by nearly 10-to-1, especially when including transportation costs.
Chemicals must be used to remove silver and lead from silicon modules before they can be safely placed in landfills, Meng notes.
The problem of solar panel waste will continue to grow as more panels reach their end of life.
Four years ago the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated there were already about 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste worldwide – and that total will explode to 78 million metric tons by 2050!
So when you read that solar energy is already cheaper than natural gas, don’t be fooled. They are omitting the pollution and disposal costs, as well as habitat losses, solar heat islands, and the need for backup power generation or batteries – to lowball the true costs of solar.
We need some honest math now before it’s too late to turn back.
Solar Panels Generate Mountains Of Toxic Waste—And Heat The Earth
Harnessing the sun creates a toxic soup that enviros want you to ignore.
climatechangedispatch.com
You need some basic math and facts.
Greenland's ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, study finds
Greenland's ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, and efforts to slow global warming will not stop it from disintegrating. That's according to a new study by researchers at Ohio State University.
www.cnn.com
Arctic sea ice shrinks to second-smallest amount on record
The amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean is now the second smallest since record-keeping began in 1979, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Monday.Ice coverage likely measured abou…
thehill.com
NYC ‘Climate Clock’ Highlights Decades Of Premature Global Warming Doomsdays
In honor of “Climate Week,” New York City is playing host to a massive “Climate Clock” purporting to count down the years, days, and minutes until the world reaches a climate catastrophe point-of-no-return.
The oversized digital display, on view through Sept. 27, underscores a long history of climate doomsayers prematurely warning that a global climate tipping point is just a few short years away.
The digital clockface itself has been a fixture of New York City’s Union Square for over 20 years.
A landmark that has confused many tourists to the city, the clock’s display normally denotes, in one long, unbroken string of digits, the current time of day (in military time) as well as the remaining number of hours and minutes left in the day itself.
Over the weekend, the clock instead began a straightforward countdown, one ticking off seven years and several dozen days, after which — according to the project’s creators, artists Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd — the Earth will have used up its “carbon budget” and will careen toward irreversible climate catastrophe.
The artists said the countdown was based on the calculations put forth by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, one that purports to measure the amount of time humanity has to reduce its carbon output to stay below the 1.5° Celsius warming threshold.
The clock “shows how little time is left for political decision-makers to take action,” the MRI says on its website.
Several decades of constantly shifting climate countdowns
The “Climate Clock” generated headlines across the world for its novelty and striking presentation of what activists claim is a final deadline before global temperatures reach a point from which there is no turning back.
Yet such prophecies are nothing new from climate scientists and activists, who have repeatedly warned the world over recent decades that it was very near the point of no return regarding carbon emissions.
Among the earliest such warnings was one from Noel Brown, who in 1989 led the U.N. Environment Program in New York.
In that year, Brown warned that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000,” as a contemporary Associated Press report put it.
Brown said that scientists at that time were warning that there was “nothing” the world could do at that point to reverse a three-degree rise in temperatures.
“Anything beyond that,” he told the news service, “and we have to start thinking about the significant rise of the sea levels … we can expect more ferocious storms, hurricanes, wind shear, dust erosion.”
Many scientists have since extended the deadline for climate change redemption by years and even decades beyond Brown’s 2000 cutoff.
In 2006, for example, Columbia climate science professor James Hansen predicted that the planet had just 10 years to avoid major catastrophes.
“I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change,” he told the Climate Change Research Conference that year, stating that the planet had “no longer than a decade, at the most” to reverse catastrophic warming across the globe.
In 2008, Al Gore said in a speech that “leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.”
That same year, Australian scientist Tim Flannery argued that a United Nations climate summit in Poland that year was “likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.”
The following year, in 2009, then-United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned at the U.N. Climate Change Summit Plenary that the world would soon reach “critical thresholds,” incurring “consequences that we cannot reverse.”
“The world’s leading scientists warn that we have less than 10 years to avoid the worst-case scenarios projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” he said at the time.
That same year, the U.K.’s Prince Charles argued that the world had just eight years to avoid “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”
In 2018, meanwhile, current U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres extended Ki-moon’s earlier cut-off by another year, warning in a speech that the U.S. had until 2020 to change course, after which “we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.”
More recently, climate activists have pushed the deadline out significantly further than earlier predictions, well past those of Ki-moon and Guterres.
New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, famously suggested last year that “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Also last year, Swedish environmentalist activist Greta Thunberg claimed that the world had 11 years to enact “permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” or else humanity would witness “the end of our civilization as we know it.”
Read more at Just The News
In honor of “Climate Week,” New York City is playing host to a massive “Climate Clock” purporting to count down the years, days, and minutes until the world reaches a climate catastrophe point-of-no-return.
The oversized digital display, on view through Sept. 27, underscores a long history of climate doomsayers prematurely warning that a global climate tipping point is just a few short years away.
The digital clockface itself has been a fixture of New York City’s Union Square for over 20 years.
A landmark that has confused many tourists to the city, the clock’s display normally denotes, in one long, unbroken string of digits, the current time of day (in military time) as well as the remaining number of hours and minutes left in the day itself.
Over the weekend, the clock instead began a straightforward countdown, one ticking off seven years and several dozen days, after which — according to the project’s creators, artists Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd — the Earth will have used up its “carbon budget” and will careen toward irreversible climate catastrophe.
The artists said the countdown was based on the calculations put forth by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, one that purports to measure the amount of time humanity has to reduce its carbon output to stay below the 1.5° Celsius warming threshold.
The clock “shows how little time is left for political decision-makers to take action,” the MRI says on its website.
Several decades of constantly shifting climate countdowns
The “Climate Clock” generated headlines across the world for its novelty and striking presentation of what activists claim is a final deadline before global temperatures reach a point from which there is no turning back.
Yet such prophecies are nothing new from climate scientists and activists, who have repeatedly warned the world over recent decades that it was very near the point of no return regarding carbon emissions.
Among the earliest such warnings was one from Noel Brown, who in 1989 led the U.N. Environment Program in New York.
In that year, Brown warned that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000,” as a contemporary Associated Press report put it.
Brown said that scientists at that time were warning that there was “nothing” the world could do at that point to reverse a three-degree rise in temperatures.
“Anything beyond that,” he told the news service, “and we have to start thinking about the significant rise of the sea levels … we can expect more ferocious storms, hurricanes, wind shear, dust erosion.”
Many scientists have since extended the deadline for climate change redemption by years and even decades beyond Brown’s 2000 cutoff.
In 2006, for example, Columbia climate science professor James Hansen predicted that the planet had just 10 years to avoid major catastrophes.
“I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change,” he told the Climate Change Research Conference that year, stating that the planet had “no longer than a decade, at the most” to reverse catastrophic warming across the globe.
In 2008, Al Gore said in a speech that “leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.”
That same year, Australian scientist Tim Flannery argued that a United Nations climate summit in Poland that year was “likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.”
The following year, in 2009, then-United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned at the U.N. Climate Change Summit Plenary that the world would soon reach “critical thresholds,” incurring “consequences that we cannot reverse.”
“The world’s leading scientists warn that we have less than 10 years to avoid the worst-case scenarios projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” he said at the time.
That same year, the U.K.’s Prince Charles argued that the world had just eight years to avoid “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”
In 2018, meanwhile, current U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres extended Ki-moon’s earlier cut-off by another year, warning in a speech that the U.S. had until 2020 to change course, after which “we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.”
More recently, climate activists have pushed the deadline out significantly further than earlier predictions, well past those of Ki-moon and Guterres.
New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, famously suggested last year that “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Also last year, Swedish environmentalist activist Greta Thunberg claimed that the world had 11 years to enact “permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” or else humanity would witness “the end of our civilization as we know it.”
Read more at Just The News
We don’t have 12 years to save the climate. We have 14 months.
The deadline for protecting our children from a ruined climate is close at hand.
Joe Romm Jul 26, 2019, 8:00 am
archive.thinkprogress.org
The deadline for protecting our children from a ruined climate is close at hand.
Joe Romm Jul 26, 2019, 8:00 am
We don’t have 12 years to save the climate. We have 14 months.
The deadline for protecting our children from a ruined climate is close at hand.
archive.thinkprogress.org
Despite Climate Pledges, China’s Building Dubai Its First Coal Plant
A new wonder is rising in the southern desert of Dubai against the backdrop of Persian Gulf beaches, but it’s not another skyscraper to grace the futuristic sheikhdom.
Instead, it’s one of mankind’s oldest power sources gaining its own space on the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula — a coal-fired power plant.
The construction of the $3.4 billion Hassyan plant in Dubai appears puzzling, as the United Arab Emirates hosts the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency.
It’s also building the peninsula’s first nuclear power plant and endlessly promotes its vast solar-power plant named after Dubai’s ruler. Dubai has also set the lofty goal of having the world’s lowest carbon footprint in the world by 2050 — something that would be impacted by burning coal.
The coal plant’s arrival comes as Gulf Arab nations remain among the world’s hungriest for energy and amid political concerns over the use of natural gas imported from abroad, concerns underscored by a yearslong dispute with gas-producer Qatar, which is boycotted by four Arab nations, including the UAE.
“Dubai was really saying we’re far too exposed on gas imports, those could be interrupted by all kinds of things, the cost is very high and so we have to do something else to diversify our fuel supply and bring down the total cost,” said Robin Mills, the CEO of Qamar Energy, a Dubai-based consulting company. “They got a very competitive offer on the coal plant … and so the decision was made.” …
Enter the coal plant. The Hassyan power plant is being built in part by China, which describes the plant as a “major engineering project of the Belt and Road Initiative,” a project which seeks to expand its influence in Africa and Asia. China anticipates that the plant, which has General Electric Co. involved in its construction, will meet 20% of Dubai’s electrical demand.
Read rest at The Independent
A new wonder is rising in the southern desert of Dubai against the backdrop of Persian Gulf beaches, but it’s not another skyscraper to grace the futuristic sheikhdom.
Instead, it’s one of mankind’s oldest power sources gaining its own space on the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula — a coal-fired power plant.
The construction of the $3.4 billion Hassyan plant in Dubai appears puzzling, as the United Arab Emirates hosts the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency.
It’s also building the peninsula’s first nuclear power plant and endlessly promotes its vast solar-power plant named after Dubai’s ruler. Dubai has also set the lofty goal of having the world’s lowest carbon footprint in the world by 2050 — something that would be impacted by burning coal.
The coal plant’s arrival comes as Gulf Arab nations remain among the world’s hungriest for energy and amid political concerns over the use of natural gas imported from abroad, concerns underscored by a yearslong dispute with gas-producer Qatar, which is boycotted by four Arab nations, including the UAE.
“Dubai was really saying we’re far too exposed on gas imports, those could be interrupted by all kinds of things, the cost is very high and so we have to do something else to diversify our fuel supply and bring down the total cost,” said Robin Mills, the CEO of Qamar Energy, a Dubai-based consulting company. “They got a very competitive offer on the coal plant … and so the decision was made.” …
Enter the coal plant. The Hassyan power plant is being built in part by China, which describes the plant as a “major engineering project of the Belt and Road Initiative,” a project which seeks to expand its influence in Africa and Asia. China anticipates that the plant, which has General Electric Co. involved in its construction, will meet 20% of Dubai’s electrical demand.
Read rest at The Independent
And yet the planet keeps getting warmer and CM still can't explain why.
State of the climate: 2020 on course to be warmest year on record
State of the climate: 2020 on course to be warmest year on record
Eco-Rape Of Africa: Hamburg Power Plants To Use Namibia Bush Wood For Fuel
Environmental rape in the name of climate protection.
To meet its CO2 reductions targets, Hamburg plans to deforest Africa in order to substitute coal with wood at its power plants!
Substituting coal with wood from Africa
German environmental protection group ROBIN WOOD here recently issued a press release calling on the city of Hamburg, Germany to cancel its plan to replace coal with imported bushwood from Namibia at its power plants, such as the Tiefstack cogeneration plant.
In May, 2020, a “Memorandum of Understanding” became known, according to which the Hamburg environmental authority (BUKEA) and Wärme Hamburg GmbH are examining a project of this kind.
ROBIN WOOD is firmly opposed to this project of a “Transcontinental Biomass Partnership Namibia – Hamburg”, which is being promoted by the German Association for International Cooperation (GIZ).
“Obliged” to pursue “socially just, climate-friendly” renewable energies
“With the referendum on the buyback of the energy networks, which was won in 2013, the Hamburg Senate was obliged to pursue the goal of a “socially just, climate-friendly and democratically controlled energy supply from renewable energies,” says the ROBIN WOOD press release. “The intended burning of bushwood from Namibia clearly contradicts this goal.”
Voters apparently were not well informed what meeting the climate-friendly” goals really entailed when they voted.
Namibia land use – to benefit crony euro-corporations
Because of the long transport distances and especially because of changes in land use in Namibia, this form of energy supply would not be climate-compatible. The German environmental group also claims “the main beneficiaries would be corporations in the global North, which would be able to sell machines and transport vehicles and supply themselves with raw materials.”
No transparency
ROBIN WOOD also accuses the green-socialist Hamburg Senate of avoiding an open-ended debate about the project and criticizes the lack of transparency and democratic control.
“We are calling for a climate-friendly, 100 percent renewable energy supply that does not require the neo-colonial import of resources from the global south,” says Ronja Heise, ROBIN WOOD energy consultant.
Namibia already lacking energy
“Namibia is itself in an energy crisis and is importing up to 60 percent dirty coal power from neighboring countries to cover its local energy needs. Instead of exporting biomass, Namibia should use it to produce electricity in its own country. Sustainable methods for bush clearance must be applied. Bushes are an important carbon sink. They must therefore only be harvested in a targeted manner, which cannot be guaranteed if very large quantities of wood are exported,” says Bertchen Kohrs, Director of the organization Earthlife Namibia.
Green-socialist Senate claims support for project
“The Hamburg Senate, in its response to a written petition, gave the impression that the NGOs whichoppose bushwood imports would have a similar number of supporters. This is wrong,” said Gilbert Siegler of the Hamburg Energy Table. “We invite other organizations to join the signatories in opposing the implementation of a ‘Biomass Partnership with Namibia’. This pretense of climate protection must be prevented.”
The signatories of the petition call on the Hamburg environmental authority to stop pursuing this project and to work towards an energy supply for Hamburg that is in line with the binding goals of the referendum.
Environmental rape in the name of climate protection.
To meet its CO2 reductions targets, Hamburg plans to deforest Africa in order to substitute coal with wood at its power plants!
Substituting coal with wood from Africa
German environmental protection group ROBIN WOOD here recently issued a press release calling on the city of Hamburg, Germany to cancel its plan to replace coal with imported bushwood from Namibia at its power plants, such as the Tiefstack cogeneration plant.
In May, 2020, a “Memorandum of Understanding” became known, according to which the Hamburg environmental authority (BUKEA) and Wärme Hamburg GmbH are examining a project of this kind.
ROBIN WOOD is firmly opposed to this project of a “Transcontinental Biomass Partnership Namibia – Hamburg”, which is being promoted by the German Association for International Cooperation (GIZ).
“Obliged” to pursue “socially just, climate-friendly” renewable energies
“With the referendum on the buyback of the energy networks, which was won in 2013, the Hamburg Senate was obliged to pursue the goal of a “socially just, climate-friendly and democratically controlled energy supply from renewable energies,” says the ROBIN WOOD press release. “The intended burning of bushwood from Namibia clearly contradicts this goal.”
Voters apparently were not well informed what meeting the climate-friendly” goals really entailed when they voted.
Namibia land use – to benefit crony euro-corporations
Because of the long transport distances and especially because of changes in land use in Namibia, this form of energy supply would not be climate-compatible. The German environmental group also claims “the main beneficiaries would be corporations in the global North, which would be able to sell machines and transport vehicles and supply themselves with raw materials.”
No transparency
ROBIN WOOD also accuses the green-socialist Hamburg Senate of avoiding an open-ended debate about the project and criticizes the lack of transparency and democratic control.
“We are calling for a climate-friendly, 100 percent renewable energy supply that does not require the neo-colonial import of resources from the global south,” says Ronja Heise, ROBIN WOOD energy consultant.
Namibia already lacking energy
“Namibia is itself in an energy crisis and is importing up to 60 percent dirty coal power from neighboring countries to cover its local energy needs. Instead of exporting biomass, Namibia should use it to produce electricity in its own country. Sustainable methods for bush clearance must be applied. Bushes are an important carbon sink. They must therefore only be harvested in a targeted manner, which cannot be guaranteed if very large quantities of wood are exported,” says Bertchen Kohrs, Director of the organization Earthlife Namibia.
Green-socialist Senate claims support for project
“The Hamburg Senate, in its response to a written petition, gave the impression that the NGOs whichoppose bushwood imports would have a similar number of supporters. This is wrong,” said Gilbert Siegler of the Hamburg Energy Table. “We invite other organizations to join the signatories in opposing the implementation of a ‘Biomass Partnership with Namibia’. This pretense of climate protection must be prevented.”
The signatories of the petition call on the Hamburg environmental authority to stop pursuing this project and to work towards an energy supply for Hamburg that is in line with the binding goals of the referendum.
Climate bedwetting,
March 2000: - 'Children won't know what snow is.'
Reality, February 2021: - 170 million under winter weather advisories.
- 3 million won't have electricity because windmills are frozen.
Winter storm: Half of America is under winter weather advisories as freezing temperatures grip the country - CNN
March 2000: - 'Children won't know what snow is.'
Reality, February 2021: - 170 million under winter weather advisories.
- 3 million won't have electricity because windmills are frozen.
Winter storm: Half of America is under winter weather advisories as freezing temperatures grip the country - CNN
