“What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.” (V. Smil, below)

In an article filed under “climate crimes,” The Guardian claims that environmental nirvana is reachable if only politicians stop listening to Big Oil and start listening to social scientists. Author Amy Westervelt argues that the technology needed to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions is at hand; we just lack the will and the laws to implement it. She quotes from a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

Factors limiting ambitious transformation [to address climate change] include structural barriers, an incremental rather than systemic approach, lack of coordination, inertia, lock-in to infrastructure and assets, and lock-in as a consequence of vested interests, regulatory inertia, and lack of technological capabilities and human resources.

Ed. note: This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a fortnightly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete MBN for this post can be found here.

Greed Energy Economics:
*** Wind Power’s ‘Colossal Market Failure’ Threatens Climate Fight
*** Putin ‘colluded’ with green movements
Short video: Renewable Energy — The Biggest Scam We All Fell For
Green Nightmares
Delaying tactics by wind industry will cost consumers hundreds of millions
Video: The Great Renewable Energy Con
Low-cost power pledge is blown away by the wily wind developers

Renewable Energy Health and Ecosystem Consequences:
Analyzing bird population declines due to renewable power sources in California
Offshore wind: The leading birdwatching group doesn’t object to wind farms that will kill birds

Wind Energy — Offshore:
*** Latest Offshore Wind Project Paid to Switch Off 25% of the Time
Conservation groups call for federal review of offshore wind impact on ecosystems
Right whale defenders question energy industry donations
Jacobs Launches Effort to Prevent Wind Turbines in Great Lakes

Wind Energy — Onshore:
*** Numbers Game: Smashing The Wind & Solar Power Storage Myth With Arithmetic
*** Wind Projects Rejections Across U.S.…

“World will ‘run out of food’ in 27 years, according to chilling doomsday prediction,” reads the headline in the Daily Star (UK). The article’s subtitle:

EXCLUSIVE: Scientists have issued a terrifying warning and have said the world could be left starving without any food in just over two decades, according to a chilling doomsday countdown

If the world doesn’t run out of food next year, as Sara Menker with Gro Intelligence warned back in 2017, scientists predict that we’ll run out in “exactly 27 years and 251 days left as of Sunday.” 

In 2050? The author of the Daily Star article, Sian Hewitt, quotes sociobiologist Edward Wilson:

By then, there will be almost 10 billion people on the planet and the food demand will have increased by 70% compared to what we needed in 2017.

“In a profile in Science magazine, [Vaclav] Smil constructed his own models of how carbon dioxide emissions might affect climate and found it ‘wanting.’ ‘I have too much respect for reality,’ Smil said.” (DeSmog, below)

I have previously highlighted DeSmog pieces on climate and energy realists to show that simply imparting the subject’s views create good analysis. DeSmog might think they are prima facie hit pieces, but they are the opposite! Back door justice, perhaps….

Note the guilty-as-charged profiles on Robert Bryce, Isaac Orr, Derrick Hollie, John Christy, and myself. Same for DeSmog’s analysis on the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

DeSmog has done so many profiles that it looks like we are in the majority. And in a sense we are! The public is not buying climate catastrophe (yawn), certainly not in paying more for energy.…