Why Wind and Solar Make Our Power Grid Less Reliable

From StosselTV

Politicians and activists tell how “renewable” energy will save us from the climate “crisis.” They don’t tell us about the real costs of green power.

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My new video covers a documentary series called, “Juice: Politics, Power and the Grid.” It reveals how although renewables sound green, they have lots of problems. California promises to get 50% of their electricity from renewable sources. Now they deal with blackouts, rationing, and prices that increased 3x faster than in the rest of the US. You can watch the full documentary at @JuiceTheSeries .

After 40+ years of reporting, I now understand the importance of limited government and personal freedom.

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Libertarian journalist John Stossel created Stossel TV to explain liberty and free markets to young people. Prior to Stossel TV he hosted a show on Fox Business and co-anchored ABC’s primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20. Stossel’s economic programs have been adapted into teaching kits by a non-profit organization, “Stossel in the Classroom.” High school teachers in American public schools now use the videos to help educate their students on economics and economic freedom. They are seen by more than 12 million students every year.

Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award.

Links

JohnStossel.com

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To get our new weekly video from Stossel TV, sign up here: https://www.johnstossel.com/#subscribe

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Related Topics:#JohnStossel #JuiceTheSeries #StosselTV #TheGreenFantasy #WhyWindAndSolarMakeOurPowerGridLessReliable

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Scientific Report Pours Cold Water On Major Talking Point Of Climate Activists

Environment

Scientific Report Pours Cold Water On Major Talking Point Of Climate Activists

Published on May 7, 2024

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By GREGORY WRIGHTSTONE

The purveyors of climate doom will not tolerate the good news of our planet thriving because of modest warming and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, a recent scientific paper concludes that an optimistic vision for Earth and its inhabitants is nonetheless justified.

Widely accepted data show an overall greening of Earth resulting from a cycle of natural warming that began more than 300 years ago and from industrialization’s additions of CO₂ that started in the 19^th century and accelerated with vigorous economic activity following World War II.

Also attributed to these and other factors is record crop production, which now sustains 8 billion people—ten times the population prior to the Industrial Revolution. The boost in atmospheric CO₂ since 1940 alone is linked to yield increases for corn, soybeans and wheat of 10%, 30% and 40%, respectively.

The positive contribution of carbon dioxide to the human condition should be cause for celebration, but this is more than demonizers of the gas can abide. Right on cue, narrators of a planet supposedly overheating from carbon dioxide began sensationalizing research findings that increased plant volume results in lower concentrations of nutrients in food.

“The potential health consequences are large, given that there are already billions of people around the world who don’t get enough protein, vitamins or other nutrients in their daily diet,” concluded the The New York Times, a reliable promoter of apocalypse forever. Among others chiming in have been The Lancet, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the National Institutes of Health.

Of course, such yellow journalism lacks context and countervailing facts —elements provided in “Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO₂ Concentrations” published by the CO₂Coalition, Arlington, Virginia.

Any deficiency of nutrients from the enhancement of plant growth by elevated carbon dioxide “are small, compared to the nutrient shortages that agriculture and livestock routinely face because of natural phenomena, such as severe soil fertility differences, nutrient dilution in plants due to rainfall or irrigation and even aging of crops,” says the paper.

And while there is evidence of marginal decreases in some nutrients, data also show that higher levels of CO₂ “may enhance certain groups of health-promoting phytochemicals in food crops” that serve as antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds, says the paper, which lists seven authors and more than 100 references. The lead author is Albrecht Glatzle, a member of the Rural Association of Paraguay and a former international researcher of plant and animal nutrition.

Among other points made by the paper are the following: Throughout a majority of geological history, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have been several times higher than today’s, which are less than optimum for most plants; atmospheric warming from even a quadrupling of CO₂ concentrations would be small compared to natural temperature fluctuations since the last glacial advance more than 10,000 years ago.

Having virtually no scientific basis, the “green” movement’s hostility to carbon dioxide seemingly ignores the gas’s critical role as a plant food. As the paper notes, “CO₂ is the only source of the chemical element carbon for all life on Earth, be it for plants, animals or fungi and bacteria — through photosynthesis and food chains.”

The so-called greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide— perversely exaggerated to support climate fearmongering— is a life-saving temperature moderator that keeps Earth from freezing over.

The obvious benefits of CO₂ is “an embarrassment to the large and profitable movement to ‘save the planet’ from ‘carbon pollution,’” write the authors. “If CO₂ greatly benefits agriculture and forestry and has a small, benign effect on climate, it is not a pollutant at all.

More CO₂ is good news. It’s not that complicated.

Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist; executive director of the CO₂ Coalition, Arlington, Va.; author of “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity” and a co-author of “Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO₂ Concentrations.”

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Environment

Climate Alarmists Want To Fight The Sun. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Published on May 2, 2024

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By DAVID BLACKMON

What should we say when one of America’s pre-eminent media platforms endorses a plan so fraught with unknowns and pitfalls it invites potential global catastrophe?

That’s what the editorial board at the Washington Post did on April 27 in a 1,000-word editorial endorsing plans by radical schemers and billionaires to engage in various efforts at geoengineering.

The Post’s editors engage in an exercise of saying the quiet part out loud in the piece, morphing from referring to monkeying around with the world’s ability to absorb sunlight as “a forbidden subject,” to concluding it is “indispensable” and “urgent” in the course of a single opinion piece. Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?

What could go wrong with plans to, say, block sunlight with thousands of high-altitude balloons? Or with a plan that involves spraying the upper atmosphere with billions of tons of sulfur particles? Or with a plan to spend trillions of debt-funded dollars to build a gargantuan shield placed in stationary orbit in outer space?

The editors are so cocksure in their arrogance that they even admit some such concepts have already been tried out, writing, “Climate geoengineering is so cheap and potentially game-changing that even private entrepreneurs have tried it out, albeit at small scales.”

The “small scale” experiment to which the editors refer took place in Baja, Mexico, where researchers launched two large balloons filled with sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere. The goal was to measure the sun-dimming effects of the sulfur dioxide, a real, actual pollutant that the Environmental Protection Agency and regulators all over the world have spent the last half century attempting to remove from the atmosphere.

It turned out that Luke Eisman, an entrepreneur who financed the experiment, launched the balloons without seeking prior approval. When Mexican officials found out it had been conducted, they quickly moved to ban such geo-engineering projects on the grounds that they violate national sovereignty. Reuters reports that Mexico’s environment ministry statement said it would seek a global moratorium on such geoengineering projects under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

But despite such concerns in Mexico, here come the Post’s editors advocating we simply just have to trust the science. You know, like we trusted the “science” of COVID vaccines and the “science” of locating giant offshore wind farms in the middle of a whale migration corridor off the Northeast coast, right? Sure. After all, what could go wrong?

The editorial writers go on to cite a similar, larger scale project being promoted by climate-engineering scholars David Keith at the University of Chicago and Wake Smith at Yale. These gentlemen propose to try to lower temperatures by spewing out 100,000 tons of sulfur dioxide – again, a real pollutant humanity has worked decades to eliminate – at an annual cost of $500 million (no doubt to be paid for by more taxpayer debt) using what they refer to as “15 souped-up Gulfstream jets” to create what could accurately be called chemtrails.

In a piece published in February at the MIT Technology Review, the scientists say the project could be mounted as soon as five years from now, which we should all probably consider a threat rather than a mere projection.

Talk of mounting similar geoengineering projects has been ramping up in recent years. In 2021, Bill Gates said he was investing in a project based at Harvard University to spray tons of calcium carbonate particles into the stratosphere above Scandinavia, but the project was ultimately cancelled due to understandable outrage from indigenous groups and environmentalists.

Fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz have also plowed millions into bioengineering projects.

But until recently, the thought of mounting projects designed to block out sunlight was, like the agenda to intentionally reduce the global population, a subset of their agenda that climate alarmists have tried to keep mainly under wraps. The reason is obvious: Whenever such radical and frankly dangerous ideas are made public, people tend to look at one another and ask, “who in the world would want to do that?”

Now come the members of the Washington Post editorial board, joining Gates and Bezos and Moskovitz in answering that question. Way to go, folks.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.