John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s administration’s climate envoy, sounded the alarm on an upcoming climate crisis.
Kerry told CBS “This Morning” reporter Ben Tracy in an interview which aired Friday, that the winter weather seen across the country could be the “new normal” and needs to be prevented by cutting global carbon emissions.
Things are surreal here in Texas right now. From Dallas to San Antonio, century-old low temperature records were shattered almost every day this week. The state is blanketed in snow and ice, and the power grid has failed.
What began Sunday morning as an exciting novelty — six inches of snow in Central Texas — has devolved over the week into something more sinister. Four million Texans are now without power, many of them unable to drive on roads covered in ice and made impassable by snowfall.
The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid can take months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.
It is time that the brand of environmentalism that travels under the cloak of global warming apocalypse drops its halo. Environmentalism, the brand, Global Warming the banner, is pure politics. GW partisans are as hard and as cynical and as manipulative as the most corroded politicians.
Rolling blackouts in Texas have put the importance of oil pipelines into perspective, according to business executives.
Ryan Palazzo, a former chief operating officer of a pipeline construction company and a resident of Houston, Texas, received text messages on Feb. 15 about rolling blackouts to protect the electricity grid which was strained by record low temperatures. Millions have been affected since.
On Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took a swipe at Texas political leaders, propounding that the suffering Texans are experiencing because of the freezing cold and concomitant power outages could have been addressed by her “Green New Deal.”
Ford has pledged that all of its cars on sale in Europe will be electric by 2030, in the latest move by the world’s biggest auto manufacturers to set out plans to move away from polluting internal combustion engines before looming bans on fossil-fuel vehicles across the world.
The US car giant said on Wednesday that it was going “all in” on electric vehicles and would invest $1bn (£720m) converting a vehicle assembly plant in Cologne, Germany, to become its first electric vehicle facility in Europe. It said the first all-electric cars would start rolling off the production line there in 2023.
Somehow I doubt the eco-zealots will approve all the nuclear reactors needed to power these vehicles. But then they don’t want you driving at all.
The federal government owes Canadian families in three provinces more than $200 million after underestimating how much it would raise from the carbon tax during the first year of the program.
Finance Canada thought the new price on pollution would bring in about $2.3 billion in 2019. When the final tallies were counted however, the program raised $2.42 billion.
By law, all revenued from the carbon price are to be returned to the province in which they were raised, with 10 per cent going into funds to help smaller businesses, schools, hospitals and municipal governments cut their own emissions and 90 per cent going to families through income tax rebates.
Not only have freezing temperatures created an excessive draw on the power grid as residents struggle to keep warm, but generating electricity has also become a major issue for areas that rely on sources such as solar and wind power.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson railed against unreliable green energy sources and the Democrats who are pushing them after wind turbines in Texas froze Monday during a winter storm that proved deadly amid power massive outages.
A polar vortex began gripping the South and Midwest on Sunday, leaving states with normally mild winters, such as Texas, unprepared. Thanks to the Lone Star State’s decision to rely on wind farms for a substantial amount of its energy, Texas is now a model for why green energy sources are not yet a realistic solution.
Bill Gates has urged rich nations to move to “100% synthetic beef” in order to address the greenhouse gas emissions driving global climate change.
In his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the billionaire philanthropist stresses that while it remains possible for humanity to avert the disaster through technological achievements, government policy will ultimately be needed.
Wind farms across the state generate up to a combined 25,100 megawatts of energy. But unusually moist winter conditions in West Texas brought on by the weekend’s freezing rain and historically low temperatures have iced many of those wind turbines to a halt.
“We really want people not to charge or heat their electric car between eight and nine in the morning.” In fact, according to Norway’s E24 news, the strain on the national grid was so great that the average cost for electricity in Norway ballooned some 600 per cent that Thursday morning.
h/t Mauser
(Note – Google translate) Installed in the summer of 2020 in the Chapel district, the “Naturinoirs”, which were to aid in the greening of the district, turned into a total fiasco. Dilapidated, unsanitary and inefficient, they are now closed to the public.
It was a foregone conclusion. Less than six months after their installation, the “Naturinoirs” of Paris have already become giant bins. Basically, reports Le Parisien , the three installations – two urinals and a cabin – were to allow urine to be recycled, in order to transform the latter into fertilizer. Unfortunately, the “Naturinoirs” do not work, the shadow of the neighborhood prevents the solar panels powering the equipment from working. Worse, the huge tanks, which can contain 1000 liters of urine, leak … After barely a few weeks, the “Naturinoirs” are extremely damaged, and no longer work at all. And local residents describe the unpleasant consequences of this failure to the Parisian :“The vespasians never worked! says a local resident. It was horror. Liters of piss flowing on the pavement and no one to clean up. The horror! “
Being, as the saying has it, a little under the weather over the weekend suggested to me, in the torpor that comes with that state, the idea of looking at that other weather, the real stuff. And what a fun time it was to dip into the meteorological sites just as a check on how much closer our part of this great planet is to the edge of global warming doom.
In his last year in office, Secretary of State John Kerry was touting the fact that he had traveled over 1.06 million miles and spent some 96 days in the air in the course of 3 years. The archived State Department site tallies Kerry’s total record at 1,417,576 miles and 126 days in the air.
Kerry spent more time flying in 3 years than the average American would in 50 years.
