Discover more from This Week at The Pipeline
Elizabeth Nickson looked into the carbon sequestration scam.
Cowering Before 'Carbon'
Right now South Dakota is under attack by a freshly born green corporation, Summit Carbon Solutions, funded by China’s Belt and Road initiative, and you, through the Green New Deal provisions buried in the last debt ceiling deal, to pipe “carbon,” from the oil fields to some obscure part of the Dakotas and bury it.
There can be no more stupid waste of money than this. But even some of our bravest politicians, including Kristi Noem, Pierre Poilivere and Danielle Smith in Canada cower before the almighty (anti-)carbon lobby and rabbit on about sequestering it. It is an industry into which thieves flood because it means you loot the public purse at the beginning through Green New Deal giveaways, and then for all perpetuity because of the tax advantage. People have been so scarified by the word, they do not know what it means anymore, they nod enthusiastically.
So let’s refresh: carbon = carbon dioxide. Plant food. Your outbreath. The thing that makes life on earth habitable. The thing they are trying to introduce into Mars to make it habitable. In order to terraform Mars, you need carbon dioxide.
A policy researcher friend tried to track down the annual billions, trillions over the last thirty years, that the U.N. and its various satellites have given of your money to "climate change" mitigation outfits in the Global South. The money vanishes, nothing happens, it’s stolen. She google-earthed one heavily PR’ed outfit, only to discover that it didn’t exist, just a pile of sand. These projects are payoffs to an army of activists placed at every weak point in the system. If the projects exist, they don’t work. Both the Guardian and Harper’s have done extensive work on the fraud of "climate mitigation." Carbon sequestration is a scam meant to steal public money.
This time, Kristi Noem is facing down an activated people who are fit to be tied, protesting and signing petitions. This is generally taken as “the people’s voice” in the enviro business and must be obeyed. But not, apparently, when you are fighting "green." This time, Summit Corporation is barreling through people’s farms, breaking into their barns, threatening ranchers with armed guards, and generally behaving like the WEFer army Trudeau sent to brutalize the truckers. This is a new iteration from the One World Government, anonymous Kevlar-coated mercenaries in the heartland.
So it is that the carbon dioxide pipeline in North Dakota is receiving rapid approvals and aggressive eminent domain clearing overturning the years, even decades it takes to clear a pipeline. The first thing Biden did was cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. It was protested by the activist army that moves into any hot spot, the leaders of which are paid well to lead the chaos. But in this instance, the carbon pipeline is being protested by actual residents fearing actual harm. Co2 is an unstable gas, unlike oil and natural gas. Co2 pipelines explode and kill people. They blow up in part because the technology is not sorted out, unlike petroleum engineering. But never mind! It’s virtuous. It’s fabulous, it must be done, whether you like it or not.
Peter Smith wrote about a prominent environmentalist in his native Australia who has declared war on wind.
Gone With the Wind
Mount Emerald wind farm is so named because it sits on a high plateau aside Mount Emerald in North Queensland. It needs to sit high otherwise there is insufficient wind. Therein lies a tale, which I’ll come to, told by photographer, environmentalist and global-warming believer Steven Nowakowski. Who, relevantly, also exhibits an evident penchant for statistics. Mr Nowakowski is part of a growing environmentalist rebellion against the vandalization of landscapes by wind turbines.
I read only this morning of Bob Brown’s continuing opposition to a planned new high-capacity undersea cable to carry power from his home state of Tasmania to Victoria. It’s part of a project to make Tasmania the “battery of the nation” via hydro and wind. Dr Brown (a medico) and former leader of the federal Greens (party), doesn’t want his idyllic Tasmanian backyard transformed into a battery. Other people’s backyards? Well, that might be a different story.
The delicious irony. Greenies hoist by their own climate-alarmism petard. True, having them on our side of the fence opposing (some) wind farms is disconcerting. But, on the plus side, they are experts at protesting. Among his credentials, Brown has stared down bulldozers in Tasmanian forests. Wind developers may be in for a torrid time, particularly as country-wide opposition from local communities is also growing. It couldn’t happen to a more flagrant bunch of rent-seekers.
Mount Emerald wind farm comprises 53 turbines sitting on cleared concreted land, most with a height of almost 150 metres to the top of the blade. There they are on high ground blighting the landscape for miles around. Still folks, they are saving the planet. Along comes (the big) Nowakowski to burst the bubble. He sourced data for the whole of 2022 on the power output of the windfarm in question from NEMLOG which, in turn, collects its data from the Australian Energy Market Operator. It’s reliable data, providing electricity output at five-minute intervals. That’s a spreadsheet of over 105,000 observations. He found, despite its elevation, that the overall median output of the wind farm was a mere 18 percent of its 180 megawatts plated capacity. For 107 days it produced on average less than 10 megawatts (less than 6 percent) and for 63 of those days produced nothing at all.
Nowakowski didn’t stop there. He considered the length of time a turbine must operate to reach so-called carbon neutrality. I can’t vouch for his calculations but enjoyed his comment, via an email, which he was happy I share:
After doing these calculations I looked at what time it takes for a wind turbine to become ‘carbon neutral’ and found it takes 10-15 years. This is considering a capacity factor of 35 percent. Therefore, Mount Emerald with half of that capacity factor will take twice that long and therefore will never become ‘carbon neutral’. I can confidently say that this particular wind farm is a scam on every level.
A scam on every level, sums up the whole boondoggle that is wind turbines.
Lisa Schiffren looked into the very sad-sounding world of climate depressives.
Welcome to the 'Climate' Nut House
Like everyone, we at The Pipeline have our moods. So when we stumbled across the recent “Therapy Issue” of New Yorker Magazine we were intrigued enough to see what they had to say about things. After all, given the unhappy realities of America’s elite, liberal culture, and the depression, anxiety, and isolation that has been so widely reported since the Covid lockdowns, maybe they knew something we don’t.
And, indeed, in one particular article we learned that there is a whole new category of mental illness stalking young people in particular, leading to despair, loneliness, and a sense of impending mortality. Its title: “What To Do With Climate Emotions?: "If the goal is to insure [sic] that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?” It turns out, according to author Jia Tolentino, that the highly ideological "climate change" narrative has taken a serious toll on them, plunging them into a deep depression over the putative impending death of our planet.
Tolentino begins the piece with a smug little dig at conservatives. A young man named Tim Wehage grew up in South Florida. The family television was usually on Fox News. But in college he studied as a mechanical engineer and began learning climate science. The suggestion is, of course, if you're to the right of center, you're not smart enough to "follow the science." Of course the opposite is the truth -- constantly assaulted by Leftist narratives, we on the Right have generally had to seek out the truth ourselves to avoid falling into their traps.
Eventually Tim moved to Seattle for a job. He didn’t have a car. He walked a lot. He became a vegan. (One begins feeling sorry for his parents, who tried…) He visited a bunch of Second and Third World cities with bad air and learned that “orangutans were going extinct in Indonesia." He was horrified to learn that their habitat, among palm oil trees, had been cut down for food. When he got home, he spent too much time alone in his undecorated apartment, "dazed by grief." He took garbage bags with him to clean up the streets when he went for walks. He doom-scrolled the internet for climate stories and felt powerless.
Tim decided he needed help. He found the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, part of the growing field of therapy for people dealing with the emotional effects of the climate crisis. It connects patients with "climate aware" psychiatrists. But none of the therapists he contacted had room. Which is to say, these climate shrinks were too busy with others whose emotions were similarly wracked by the state of the planet. In Seattle, who would doubt it? Finally, Tim found someone. When he told her what his problem was, she assured him that “she talked about the climate crisis with most of her clients.” Tim cried tears of joy to know he was not alone.
To make a long story short, the therapist told Tim to stop scrolling Reddit for climate stories and to get off social media. He decorated his apartment. He started doing fun things in nature. He got over thinking it was all up to him to fix the planet and acknowledged that there were policies in place to deal with these issues. But Tolentino is not happy with Tim. She notes:
It may be impossible to seriously consider the reality of climate change for longer than ninety seconds without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, grief-stricken, or simply insane. The earth has warmed about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times, and the damage is irreparable. Vast zones of hypoxic water expand in the oceans; wild bees, fireflies, and birds are disappearing; one study suggests that around half of trees currently alive will be dead in forty years.
"Should we change the subject before we get too despondent?” she asks. She doesn't think so. She describes her own "frenetic wheel spinning” and late-night hysteria about climate doom and her role as a consumer of things for her baby. “Every day, I felt like a self-serving piece of shit.”
Tom Finnerty contributed three blog posts this week. The first was about a Nobel laureate who has come out as a climate skeptic.
Send in the Clouds
Well this is fun -- Gript, the alternative Irish media outlet, reports that Dr. John F. Clauser, the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate for Physics, has come out harshly against our old friends in the climate cult. Says Clauser,
The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists.
Dr. Clauser has a particular beef with the extremely unreliable climate models which we at The Pipeline have discussed frequently in the past, including here, here, here, and here. Those models have been wildly off the mark in their temperature predictions for the several decades that they've been employed. They're even terrible at predicting temperatures going backwards -- when you plug the available data for the early decades of the 20th century, for instance, the models project temperatures well above those that actually occurred.
For Clauser, the biggest problem with the prevailing models is that they overemphasize the negative effects of carbon dioxide and take the "greenhouse effect" as gospel while ignoring "the dramatic temperature-stabilizing feedback of clouds" which he contends to be "more than fifty times as powerful as the radiative forcing effect of CO2." Gript further explains his position:
Dr. Clauser notes that bright white clouds are clearly the most conspicuous feature in satellite photos of the earth. These clouds are mostly produced by the evaporation of seawater by sunlight. They cover variably one third to two thirds of the earth’s surface. Most of the energy incident on the earth is in the form of visible sunlight. Clouds reflect sunlight energy back into space before it can reach the earth’s surface to heat it. According to the Nobel Laureate, this creation of a reflective cloud cover provides a natural thermostat that regulates the earth’s temperature with a powerful negative feedback effect.
Finnerty also blogged about the lies that sustain the climate narrative.
Has Santa Barbara Sunk Beneath the Waves Yet?
And the Biden Administration’s plot to outlaw everyday appliances.
Biden's War on Home Appliances
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for our upcoming articles at The Pipeline!
Green Therapy; Traitors to the Climate Class; & the Carbon Sequestration Scam
Excellent! Thank you. Keep on it.