“Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner. (IPCC, below)

… government (coercive) mitigation policy is being left behind by self-interested energy actions around the world. Wind and solar and batteries … are running into limits. A new public policy era post-COP27 is called for. (RLB, below)

The UN Conference of Parties to be held in Cairo, Egypt, next month (COP27) has long been in preparation. Net Zero may be a dead he/she walking (Halloween fright?), but expect no backtracking from the Church of Climate. “Don’t Look Up” … IPCC reports … ExxonKnew … it is a one-after-the-other global media campaign to not focus on the Green Energy Crises or the tripartite fossil-fuel boom but on … Net Zero.…

“Assaad Razzouk needs to dial back the alarmism and comprehend the twin, inherent, fatal drawbacks of wind and solar: diluteness and intermittency. The scholarly work of Vaclav Smil, who has entered the mainstream as a voice of realism, is a great place to start.”

The business social-media site LinkedIn has an active traffic in energy and climate opinions. There can be legitimate debate, and some good first-hand knowledge about energy technology is imparted. “People are the best University” applies.

Recently, one Assaad Razzouk, Chief Executive Officer at Gurīn Energy, posted on greenwashing. In the climate alarmist camp, he wants radical energy transformation (government enabled, of course) and not the stuff we see all around us that qualifies as “look green” and get-the-tax-favors.

His new book, Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit, “clears a path through the clutter surrounding our daily efforts to do the right thing.”…

“In its Ahab-like focus on harpooning ExxonMobil, the BBC missed an opportunity to explore the enormous challenges involved in replacing fossil fuels. The costs of ignoring those challenges may well be tragically put on display this winter when Europeans face freezing temperatures with nothing but BBC-approved power systems to keep them warm.”

In Episodes 1 and 2 of its three-part documentary, Big Oil vs The World, the BBC succeeded only in demonstrating its own bias. Time and again, viewers were presented with only one side of a many-sided issue. Episode 3 is no exception. This episode’s main narrative is that, for years, oil companies have touted natural gas as a clean alternative to coal, but poor execution has largely offset the benefits.

Per unit of energy generated, natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of coal.…

Perhaps the most compelling testimony in Episode 2 of the BBC’s documentary Big Oil vs The World comes from Bill Heins, a geoscientist who worked with ExxonMobil from 2001 to 2019:

I’m disappointed, I’m angry, I’m disenchanted at the duplicity exhibited by ExxonMobil to say one thing internally and to say a different thing with a much different consequence in the political arena.

The implication is that the same people within ExxonMobil were saying one thing internally and another publicly. But the story Heins tells suggests that it was different people who were saying different things:

Shortly after I joined ExxonMobil, there was a presentation by Art Green, who was the chief geoscientist of ExxonMobil Exploration. All the scientific staff were there. Art got up and gave his presentation about how ice core records were unreliable and here were temperature excursions in the past when there couldn’t possibly be any human influence.