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All Solar, Et Al, In 12 Years?

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Imagine winter with green energy

Imagine if radical environmentalists successfully convinced local officials across the country to drop fossil fuels and instead embrace green energy.

This isn’t farfetched. Cities across the country have been moving in this direction for years.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, environmentalists have managed to convince 29 states to adopt “renewable portfolio standards.”

RPSs require utilities to make sure a specific percentage of the energy they offer is from renewable sources like solar, wind, and hydropower. In California, for example, utilities must produce a third of their electricity from renewables by 2020. Maine is aiming for 40 percent by 2017.

One environmental group claims that 96 cities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and a few other countries are making the transition from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable energy.

But with winter coming, though, it’s worth analyzing what such a world would look like.

Let’s begin with heating. Under this scenario, city residents wouldn’t be able to use heating oil or natural gas because those are fossil fuels. Their access to electricity would most likely depend on wind and solar power.

But there is very little sunshine during snowstorms, and acres of solar panels would likely be covered in snow, anyway.

Wind would be catastrophically expensive. Just look at Massachusetts’ plan to put 130 electricity-generating windmills in Nantucket Sound. After securing a $780 million taxpayer-funded credit and a $150 million loan guarantee from the U.S. government to build the windmills, the two utilities that were willing to pay above-market prices for that energy pulled out of the deal saying project administrators misled them. Now the project is mired in lawsuits and doubt.

Streets would also remain covered in snow all winter.

After all, without fossil fuels, city-owned snowplows would be limited to the distance a fully charged battery provides. But batteries don’t get electric vehicles very far on a single charge, between 50 and 80 miles — and that’s for very lightweight cars. Snowplows and dump trucks are heavy machinery doing energy-consuming work, like scooping up snow and transporting it to the countryside.

In short, city life would quickly turn into city death without fossil fuels.

Thankfully, Americans have ready access to fossil fuels to heat (and cool) their homes and to power their cars.

Americans’ need for fossil fuels becomes particularly strong as the temperature drops. Last winter saw record low temperatures in mid-west cities and record snowfalls in New England. And yet fossil fuels were able to meet the demand.

Alternative sources simply can’t create enough energy to help Americans through blizzards and extreme winters.

http://www.newtondailynews.com/2015/10/19/imagine-winter-with-green-energy/a310yza/

Well, for those cities with 100% green energy, winter will be a fun time without electric power. :)
 
Californians upset that they can’t sell their green energy homes

A tale of woe comes to us from the Left coast. Trouble has reared its head for Californians who enrolled in a special government program designed to allow them to use taxpayer funds to upgrade their homes with solar panels, wind turbines, unicorn flatulence converters and any number of other green energy improvements. Tens of thousands of Californians signed up for the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing program which provided them with funding for installing such energy efficient goodies over the past several years, but now they’re finding their homes stalled on the market when they want to sell them. Apparently buyers aren’t too enthused about picking up the tab for the assessment.

More than 50,000 California households have signed up for Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing since state legislators passed a law in 2008 allowing residents to borrow money for such things as solar panels and energy-efficient windows. The financing method, authorized by cities and counties, and funded by venture capital-backed startups like Renovate America Inc, Renew Financial LLC and Ygrene Energy Fund Inc, is then paid off through special assessments on property tax bills.

Because the improvements stay with the home, and subsequent owners will reap the benefits of them, the assessments are intended to remain with the property in the event of a sale.

But some homeowners trying to sell their houses have found potential buyers scared off by the higher tax assessments. And now realtors in the state are organizing against PACE, saying it makes getting new mortgages much tougher and can leave sellers stuck in their homes.

This is a program which President Obama has been touting all across the country. (More on that below) But the trouble these homeowners are facing is just the tip of the iceberg. First of all, they knew (or should have known) what they were getting into when they signed up for the program. They received money up front for the improvements, but it had to be repaid somewhere along the line. They had their homes assessed at a higher rate which makes the tax bill a bit higher. With real estate still being something of a buyer’s market across much of the country, who wants to sign on for a new home that’s going to have a built-in tax hike on it? It’s hard to have too much sympathy on that score.

But what happens if they can’t sell their homes because of this added financial burden on the buyer and they go into default? Previously, the PACE money was paid back first under any default settlement which at least spared a bit of burden to the taxpayers. But the mortgage companies didn’t like that very much, so in August the President announced a change which would “remove existing barriers” to the program. You know what that means, right?

PACE obligations enjoy first-lien status in most states, making municipalities first in line to be repaid — ahead of the mortgage agencies, in case of default — and mortgage agencies don’t like that.

So today, the White House and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) established a new PACE guidance aiming to “remove existing barriers and accelerate the use of PACE financing for single-family housing.” (The FHA guidance letter can be found here.)

According to the California Association of Realtors, the FHA guidance will require PACE liens to be subordinate to FHA single-family first-mortgage financing.

Translation: if the homeowners couldn’t figure out what this was going to do to their home’s resale value and wind up going under, the FHA agency will get their money back first and you (as the taxpayer) will get stuck with the bill for the rest of the value lost in the default. But hey… don’t let that bother you. The President knows that you don’t mind taking on a bit more debt as long as you’re helping to save the planet from global warming.

Don’t you feel all warm and fuzzy, God Bless America now?

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/...that-they-cant-sell-their-green-energy-homes/

Nothing like a free lunch to draw in the suckers who are easily duped by the government and the president.
 
Climate change treaty will be the flop of the year

After failures at Kyoto in 1997, and Copenhagen in 2009, climate change activists face the same obstacles in Paris next month.

At the end of this month 40,000 politicians, officials, green activists, lobbyists and journalists from 195 nations will converge outside Paris – at Europe's largest airport reserved only for private jets – for a conference they hope will change the world.

Their declared aim is to agree on a treaty that commits to such a massive cut in greenhouse gas emissions that the earth's temperature is prevented from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius higher than when the climate began naturally warming again two centuries ago.

The chief obstacle to such an agreement is exactly the same as it was at Kyoto in 1997, and at that last mammoth conference at Copenhagen in 2009, which so signally failed to get Kyoto renewed. The vast majority of countries have argued all along that, if man-made CO₂ is causing a problem, the fault lies with those "developed" nations that became rich before everyone else by burning fossil fuels to power their industrial revolution.

It is therefore up to the developed countries of the West to make the most drastic cuts, leaving the still "developing" nations to catch up. They say they are prepared to make some contribution to reducing CO₂, but only if they are paid to do so out of a $100 billion a year "Green Climate Fund", financed by the rich countries that originally created the problem.

Now, as Paris approaches – although scarcely noticed by the Western media – we can see just what the 20 countries responsible for 81 per cent of global CO₂ emissions are proposing as their "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions" to cutting emissions by 2030. These have been meticulously analysed on the Notalotofpeopleknowthat website, with further reporting on that site of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

China, now easily the world's largest emitter, contributing 24 per cent of the total, plans by 2030 to double its CO₂ emissions, not least by building 363 more coal-fired power stations. India, now the third-largest emitter, plans by 2030 to treble its emissions. The fourth-largest emitter, Russia, despite slashing its emissions after 1990 by closing down much of its old Soviet industry, now proposes to increase them from their 2012 level by up to 38 per cent.

Japan, the fifth-largest emitter, does claim that it will cut its emissions by some 15 per cent, but is still planning to build more coal-fired power plants. Although South Korea, the world's seventh-largest emitter, claims that it will cut emissions by 23 per cent (not least by buying "carbon credits" that will allow it to "offset" its continuing production of CO₂ for cash), even its proposed target will still be 100 per cent higher than it was 25 years ago.

As for the Middle East, the oil states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran (the eighth and ninth-largest emitters) have not yet submitted any proposals. But the United Arab Emirates, which have more than doubled their emissions since 2002, show no sign of slowing that increase, apart from a promise to invest in more "carbon-free" solar and nuclear power. As for Brazil, which as the 11th largest emitter has been rapidly increasing its dependence on fossil fuels, it sees its main contribution as being to slow the felling and burning of the Amazon rainforest.

So which countries are obviously missing from this list? President Obama may talk the talk about his ambitious plans for the United States, the world's second-largest emitter. But there is no more chance of Congress agreeing to the proposed treaty than there was in 1997, when the Senate unanimously voted no to Kyoto.

Which leaves the European Union as the only part of the world committed to cutting its emissions by 40 per cent within 15 years. However, Poland is already refusing to sign the treaty, as it builds more fossil-fuel power stations to keep its lights on, while Germany, the sixth-largest emitter does the same.

The only government in the world wholly committed to meeting that 40 per cent target by 2030 is Britain, the 14th-largest emitter, responsible for just 1.3 per cent of global emissions. This is less than China or India are now adding every year, as we shut down those fossil-fuel power plants that still manage to provide 70 per cent of our electricity.

And what about that Green Climate Fund, supposed by 2020 to be dishing out $100 billion every year to help developing countries to "adapt to climate change"? Firm pledges received so far total just $700 million, leaving $99.3 billion still to go.

The only real question that will remain after the failure of this bid for a binding treaty in Paris is how much longer it can be before the most expensive and foolish scare story in history finally falls apart.

http://www.afr.com/comment/climatec...lop-of-the-year-20151101-gkod0l#ixzz3qJ4qIZNu

Anyone would think that if 97% of scientists agree that global warming is caused by man burning fossil fuels producing CO2, all these advanced countries would be rushing to limit their CO2 emissions. Reality speaks louder than words. Surely flying 40,000 people to Paris from all over the world is not the green thing to do, if they believed in man emitting CO2 causing global warming.

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Surprising study finds that solar energy can also cause climate change

Large solar arrays could have some surprising side effects, according to a new study, including causing changes in the local climate.

Figuring out how renewable energy sources will affect their local landscapes is an increasingly relevant challenge for scientists, as more and more nations are vowing to slash their carbon outputs and switch to alternatives, such as solar and wind energy. Previous studies have shown that both solar arrays and wind farms have the potential to cause regional changes in temperature and precipitation by altering the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the Earth or disrupting local airflow patterns.

With this in mind, Aixue Hu, a climate change research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, conducted a study, published Monday in Nature Climate Change, that attempted to predict the climatic effects of solar arrays.

For their experiments, Hu and his colleagues assumed a low-carbon scenario, in which global greenhouse gas emissions would start to decline after the year 2020 as renewable energy sources are more widely used.

The researchers then carried out a series of simulations. The first simulation included solar panel installations across the world’s deserts — the parts of the world likely to receive the most sunlight — and throughout all the world’s urban areas.

The second simulation mimicked that scenario, but also assumed that the world would continue to consume a lot of energy through the use of air conditioning.

The final simulation dropped the thermostat assumption and scaled back the number of solar panel arrays. This scenario is the “more realistic” of the bunch, according to Hu, and was meant to test whether a more modest solar panel installation would be able to address the global energy demand through the end of the century.

After running the simulations, the researchers found that the solar power generated in each of the experiments would be enough to satisfy global electricity demand by 2100. That was the good news. But the experiments also showed that the panels do have an impact on climate, at least regionally.

Solar panels change the way sunlight is reflected and absorbed by the Earth. Any radiation they take in is radiation that’s not being absorbed by the Earth. This leads to a cooling effect in the region surrounding the array. In fact, the first two simulations in this study, which assumed solar panel installations throughout the world’s desert and urban areas, produced a 2-degree Celsius regional cooling in the desert regions. This cooling was also associated with a 20 percent decrease in precipitation in the deserts. Other, slightly broader changes in precipitation and wind patterns occurred as a result in the regions surrounding the deserts.

In urban areas, the effects were a little different. In the first simulation, the model predicted a very small amount of cooling, with temperature falling approximately 0.26 degrees Celsius. In the second simulation, the one in which global thermostat regulation is significantly increased, the large amount of power consumed actually produced an urban heat island effect, in which human energy use releases heat into the environment and causes the regional temperature to warm up. In this scenario, the warming from the heat island effect essentially compensated for the cooling caused by the solar panels.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...nergy-can-also-cause-climate-change-a-little/

I suspect that all the solar farms being built in southern California and Nevada will disturb the climate. Especially after these simulations demonstrate that. :)
 
What global warming? Antarctic ice is INCREASING by 135 billion tonnes a year, says NASA

A NEW Nasa study of the Antarctic from space has thrown the case for climate change into disarray after finding that more NEW new ice has formed at the Antarctic than has been lost to its thinning glaciers.

The US space agency research claims an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is "currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from melting glaciers.

Global warming theories have been thrown into doubt after Nasa also claimed current horror predictions into future sea-level rises may not be as severe.

Major studies previously made the case for global warming being a man-made problem, including the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which said that Antarctica was overall losing land ice.

But a Nasa spokesman said: "According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001.

"That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008."

Nasa agrees ice has been lost in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica.

But says the gains elsewhere, which total 200 billion tonnes a year, outweigh all these losses of 65 billion tonnes a year - leaving a net annual Antarctic ice gain of 135 billion tonnes.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/scien...tarctic-ice-INCREASING-135BILLION-TONNES-year

How does anyone trust Climate Scientists who are proven so wrong on their predictions and claims? :shrug:
 
Global warming deniers shut out of funding

Global warming hysteria continues in full force; unfortunately it’s become a religion, not science. There has been way too much fudging of data over the years to prove the fairy tale.

The global warming computer models can predict global warming out 30 years from now, but can’t predict what's going to take place in 2017.

Follow the money trail. Global warming scientists/believers will continue receiving federal grant money along with Green Peace dollars; however, those scientists who disagree with their religion are shut out of the money trough.

http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20151102/OPINION/151109987

There's money to be made working for the government funded programs. Just like a good accountant when asked what is 2 + 2, his answer was what do you want it to be, so too is a good Climate Scientist concluding man is causing the weather to change.
 
Climate Change Kills the Mood: Economists Warn of Less Sex on a Warmer Planet

And fewer babies would be bad news.

Climate change has been blamed for many things over the years. Never, until now, has anyone thought it was possible to see it as a kind of contraceptive.

Hot weather leads to diminished “coital frequency," according to a new working paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Three economists studied 80 years of U.S. fertility and temperature data and found that when it’s hotter than 80 degrees F, a large decline in births follows within 10 months. Would-be parents tend not to make up for lost time in subsequent, cooler months.

An extra "hot day" (the economists use quotation marks with the phrase) leads to a 0.4 percent drop in birth rates nine months later, or 1,165 fewer deliveries across the U.S. A rebound in subsequent months makes up just 32 percent of the gap.

The researchers, who hail from Tulane University, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Central Florida, believe that their findings give policymakers three major things to think about.

1. Birth rates do not bounce back completely after heat waves.
That's a problem. As summers heat up, developed countries may see already low birth rates sink even lower. Plunging birth rates can play havoc with an economy. China's leaders recently acknowledged this by ditching the longtime one-child policy and doubling the number of children couples are allowed to have. A sub-replacement U.S. birthrate means fewer workers to pay Social Security benefits for retirees, among other consequences.

2. More autumn conceptions means more more deliveries in summer.
Infants experience a higher rate of poor health with summer births, "though the reasons for worse health in the summer are not well-established," the authors write. One possibility may be "third-trimester exposure to high temperatures."

3. Air conditioning might prove to be an aphrodisiac.
Control over the climate at home might make a difference. The researchers suggest that the rise of air conditioning may have helped offset some heat-related fertility losses in the U.S. since the 1970s.

The paper's title is about as lascivious as the National Bureau of Economic Research gets: "Maybe Next Month? Temperature Shocks, Climate Change, and Dynamic Adjustments in Birth Rates." The researchers assume that climate change will proceed according to the most severe scenarios, with no substantial efforts to reduce emissions. The scenario they use projects that from 2070 to 2099, the U.S. may have 64 more days above 80F than in the baseline period from 1990 to 2002, which had 31. The result? The U.S. may see a 2.6 percent decline in its birth rate, or 107,000 fewer deliveries a year.

Just when you thought climate change policy couldn't get any less sexy (PDF).

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...conomists-warn-of-less-sex-on-a-warmer-planet

Gee, Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, and Central Asia refutes that study of temperature and birthrates.

Just remember, your tax dollars paid these guys to come up with that alarming statistic and conclusion.
 
Youths across US are suing states, federal government to force action against climate change

SEATTLE (AP) — They can't vote yet, but dozens of young people want a say in the planet's future, so minors nationwide have been suing states and the federal government in recent years to push action on climate change.

They say their generation will bear the brunt of global warming and that government at every level has an obligation to protect natural resources, including the atmosphere, as a "public trust" for future generations.

The Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children's Trust has been leading efforts to file lawsuits or administrative petitions in every state and against the federal government. Some of the youth-led cases have been dismissed, while others are pending in states including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Oregon.

"None of them have gotten to the finish line," said Michael Gerrard, a professor and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. "It's an uphill climb. The U.S. courts have so far not wanted to set climate policy."

Other experts say it's unclear how a state can combat a global problem.

In Seattle, eight activists between ages 10 and 15 petitioned Washington state last year to adopt stricter science-based regulations to protect them against climate change. The case has been moving through a state court, and oral arguments are scheduled Tuesday.

"We're the ones who have to live with it if the oceans are acidic and the planet is 5 degrees warmer," said Gabriel Mandell, 13, an eighth-grader and plaintiff in the case. "The snowpack is melting. Ocean is acidifying. The Earth is warming. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong, and we need to fix it."

Mandell and other youths represented by the Western Environmental Law Center argue that Washington state has failed to reduce carbon emissions based on the best available science. They say the government has violated its duties under the state constitution and the legal principle called the public trust doctrine, which requires the government to protect shared resources.

The state said in court documents that the Washington Department of Ecology department was working on adopting a rule to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

"Climate change is the most important environmental problem," said Stu Clark, Washington's air quality program manager. "We need to do whatever we can. We are doing what we can with what we have."

Nationwide, the cases need to pass certain legal hurdles, such as establishing that the public trust doctrine applies to the Earth's atmosphere or that the children have standing to sue. The cases have cleared some hurdles but not all, said Gerrard, the professor.

"I don't think this litigation is going to be successful because climate change is a global problem, and it's not clear what a state could do," added Richard Stewart, a law professor at New York University. "A state could do certain things, but it can only make an infinitesimal contribution" to a global problem.

In Oregon, two Eugene teens are appealing after a state judge rejected their petition in May. The judge ruled that Oregon's public trust doctrine does not apply to the atmosphere, water, beaches and shorelines.

In August, 21 youths across the country sued the federal government, alleging that approval of fossil fuel development has violated the fundamental right of citizens to be free from government actions that harm life, liberty and property.

The EPA did not comment on specifics of the lawsuit but said in a statement that President Barack Obama and the agency have been taking action to "give our kids and grandkids the cleaner, safer future they deserve."

Aji Piper, 15, a Seattle high school sophomore, is a plaintiff in that case and the one in Washington state.

"The government isn't doing the best to assure that we have the best quality of life," he said. "It holds more urgency for us. Our future is at hand."

The Washington case has gone the farthest because a judge in King County Superior Court will be hearing arguments on the petition's merits, rather than on a procedural or jurisdictional issue, said Julia Olson, executive director for Our Children's Trust.

http://www.usnews.com/news/science/...us-suing-to-push-government-on-climate-change

These children are taught in school about the evils of made caused CO2 and climate change. If they believe that is a problem, wait until they pay their share of the national debt. Wait until they find out their education is worthless and they can't get a livable source of employment.

More people should sue their governments (local, state and federal) for aiding in the causes of global warming and not taking action to prevent it. Let's force the government to govern by the best science they paid for.
 
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