Green-Scam

UN climate negotiators agree on compensation fund for poor nations, says Maldives minister

Negotiators say they have struck a potential breakthrough deal on the thorniest issue of United Nations climate talks: creation of a fund for compensating poor nations that are victims of extreme weather worsened by rich nations’ carbon pollution.

“There is an agreement on loss and damage,” which is what negotiators call the concept, Maldives Environment Minister Aminath Shauna told The Associated Press Saturday. It still needs to be approved unanimously in a vote later today. “That means for countries like ours we will have the mosaic of solutions that we have been advocating for.”

(Link fixed)

Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.

But that’s absurd.

Here is the rest of my list of “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.

If you cannot make a model to predict the outcome of the next draw from a lottery ball machine, you are unable to make a model to predict the future of the climate, suggests former computer modeller Greg Chapman, in a recent essay in Quadrant. Chapman holds a PhD in physics and notes that the climate system is chaotic, which means “any model will be a poor predictor of the future”. A lottery ball machine, he observes, “is a comparatively much simpler and smaller interacting system”.

In an expansive open-air pit 550 kilometres northwest of Montreal, 100-tonne trucks criss-cross the climbing roads, preparing for the mine to open.

The chalk-white veins of those rocks have metals inside, including one of the most sought-after minerals in the world: lithium, a key component of electric car batteries.

When production restarts at the La Corne, Que., lithium mine early next year, it is set to be one of the only functional lithium concentrate mines in North America and position Quebec as a Canadian lithium leader.

This is all a scam. You won’t ever have an electric car, at least not one you can charge.

Why is a 20-year-old advising the UN about the environment?

Move over, Greta Thunberg. There’s a new pint-sized prophetess of doom in town.

Last week, a photo from the COP27 climate talks in Egypt went viral. Posing next to UN secretary-general António Guterres was 20-year-old Sophia Kianni, an American climate activist and student at Stanford. She claims to be the youngest adviser to the 73-year-old Guterres.

While Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault leads a Canadian delegation of more than 300 people at an ongoing UN climate conference in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt — a seaside vacation resort — Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise again, contrary to claims by the last environment minister.

Having delivered his platitudes on climate change at Cop27, Rishi Sunak returns to a more pressing problem: how to keep Britain’s lights on this winter. Last week it was revealed that the government has been wargaming a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ in which blackouts last up to a week. Whether those fears prove unfounded or not, there is a huge and growing hole in the future of Britain’s electricity supply, with little to explain how it will be filled. The lights might not go out this winter, but there is a reckoning coming as Britain attempts to steer towards net zero.

As demand soars for electric vehicles and clean energy storage, Australia is rising to meet much of the world’s demand for lithium. While this helps reduce the need for fossil fuels, it raises another question – how can we source lithium sustainably?

Brine vs. Hard Rock Lithium Mining

… The refining process carries environmental risks as its energy and chemically intensive, however Allison Britt, director of minerals advice with the government agency Geoscience Australia, says the process of extracting lithium in Australia is not much different to other forms of metals mining. When an economically viable resource is identified, the surface is cleared, the earth is scraped away, the rock blasted and the rubble hauled off for processing into concentrate.

“Each hard rock deposit is its own unique beast,” Britt says. “At a higher-grade deposit, you dig up less rock compared to lithium produced.”

In South America the process is more like playing with a big, fiddly chemistry set. As the lithium lies at the bottom of a salt lake, it is usually mixed with a range of other minerals. Getting it out requires pumping brine out from beneath the bottom of a salt lake into a pit and then waiting for the water to evaporate in the sunlight until lithium concentrations reach 6,000 parts per million. It is a thirsty process – requiring roughly 1.9m litres (418,000 gallons) of water to produce one tonne (2,204lbs) of lithium produced, all of it lost to evaporation – that always carries the risk of leaks and spills.

Interesting article. Despite the apparent abundance of lithium deposits it does not change my mind that the promise of “Electric Cars” for everyone is nothing more than a “Bait & Switch.” The “Switch” is you having no personal vehicle ever again. And Freeland better hope “Friend-shoring” is more than just a talking point.