Books
Click images for more details
Bishop Hill Nov 6, 2015 Blogs Do you know it's almost a year since I did a tip drive on BH? I think it's time for another.
Many thanks as always to those who have been feeding the regular pot over the last twelve months. A few regulars have dropped out after long service, and thanks to them too. If anyone feels like stepping into the breach that would be nice.
I bet Exxon and Cuadrilla are wishing they'd contributed now.
;-)
Bishop Hill Nov 6, 2015 Energy: oil Greens ;){kind=logo}
The decision by New York regulators to investigate Exxon over climate change is an interesting one. Apparently the aim is "determining whether the company failed to disclose the climate change risks to investors as well as the public".
And you can't really say fairer than that. If companies are obliged to disclose risks - and there is no doubt that they are - then I don't think one can argue that Exxon or any other oil company should be disclosing to investors the possibility, say, that governments might do foolish things in response to hysteria over climate change. These are real risks that affect investors. There are interesting questions over what point any particular political foolishness becomes concrete enough to make it disclosable, however. Governments are driven by perverse incentives, and politicians are capricious at the best of times. Political risk is therefore always a hard thing to gauge.
Moreover, Exxon is a global company, and political risks in any one country are therefore even less likely to affect the overall business. Global political risks are even more nebulous than national ones: the possibility of a global carbon tax, for example, remains remote, with the developing world unwilling to let their populations die young in order to make western greens feel good about themselves.
Of course, the investigation looks more like a fishing trip, trying to get access to Exxon's internal communications on behalf of environmental activists. There is, in the minds of greens at least, a vast oil-funded conspiracy to be exposed. I don't suppose they will find very much.
Bishop Hill Nov 5, 2015 Energy: grid This from the FT's coverage of yesterday's power shortages.
Traders watched in amazement as prices surged, with the grid paying £2,500 per MWh to one operator, Severn Power, as it bought in emergency supplies; the usual going rate is around £60.
Bishop Hill Bryony Worthington seems to want to reverse the tide of deindustrialisation her Climate Change Act has brought about.
[T]he Redcar situation... illustrates how important it is that we get our energy and industrial strategy right. There is a risk to dragging our feet and there is an urgency involved in sorting out our policies on how we are going to not just maintain but actively attract industrial players back to the UK to reindustrialise our nation.
I wonder if she goes to sleep at night thinking that all she has achieved in her life is to put thousands of productive people on the scrapheap. I really wonder.
Bishop Hill Nov 5, 2015 Energy: grid Energy: wind 
Yesterday it seems that National Grid had to invoke its emergency procedures as outages at coal-fired power stations and an almost complete lack of a contribution from the wind fleet led to generation margins falling to dangerously low levels.
Given that the weather is very mild at the moment, this is worrying to say the least.
Wind remains very low this morning, although it looks as though it will pick up later in the day.
Interesting times.
Bishop Hill Nov 4, 2015 Bureaucrats Diary dates Energy: grid ;)
Following on from his climate change tour in 2014, Mark Walport is hitting the road again, this time to talk about energy policy. All over the country nubile young environmentalists are going weak at the knees.
Over the next 6 months, Sir Mark Walport will tour the UK to talk about how we supply and use energy today, and the options we have for the future...
Sir Mark said:
The UK faces a series of choices about energy. We all require energy to live and our dependence on it is total. But how we supply energy and how we use it in the future needs to change. We need power that is secure, affordable and more than ever we need it to be sustainable.
When world leaders meet at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris this December, energy will be at the heart of the debate.
Details here.
Josh Nov 4, 2015 COP 21 Paris Josh ;)
With COP21 coming up there is an alternative conference being organised.
The Paris Climate Challenge
In 2009 we laid down the Copenhagen Climate Challenge, when we asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to answer 10 questions about climate. We’re back to ask the same and more questions, and challenge the climate ‘consensus’ in Paris at COP 21 with alternative climate hypotheses. If you have something to say in Paris, we still have places for a few more speakers. Take some time to navigate our pages, you can leave a comment if you’d like to say something in response to the articles backing up our 10 questions to Ban Ki-Moon below.
Head over to this site to read all about it.
Posted by Josh
Bishop Hill Nov 4, 2015 Bureaucrats ;)
Reader Alex Henney sends a copy of a letter that he has recently sent to Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. It concerns our representative in Paris, Sir David King.
Dear Mr. Hammond,
Professor King and the Paris Conference of Parties
I write to object on several grounds to Professor King being UK climate representative at Paris.
The attached paper “The scientific flaws of the Committee on Climate Change and the expensive consequences” shows there is no need for significant concern about climate change.
Professor King knows very little about climate science and has a track record of naïve alarmism, if not semi hysteria:-
Bishop Hill Nov 4, 2015 Energy: grid Greens This morning I chanced upon some interesting documents that set out the vision for the UK of Friends of the Earth. The docs are FoE's contribution to the 2050 Calculator site set up by DECC's former chief scientist David Mackay a few years ago. The site allows users to set down how they think the UK's energy mix should be achieved in the future.
In the graph below (click for larger), we can see that FoE believe that we are going to reduce demand by 30% or so, which strikes me as optimistic. More interestingly they seem to have recognised that we are going to need standby gas powered generation right through to 2050. However, in their wisdom, they seem to think that three quarters of this gas should be imported rather than produced locally. Their stance on oil is similar. Given their stance on unconventional gas this is probably the only choice, but the conclusion must be that FoE believe that when calculating the trade off between environmental posturing and carbon emissions, it is environmental posturing that should win out.
So much for caring about the planet.
;)
Bishop Hill Nov 3, 2015 Greens Shub Niggurath has been taking a look at a report by the Climate Accountability Institute, a small California non-profit, with links to the renewable energy industry, and which features Michael Mann among its advisers. The Institute seems to have been coordinating efforts to bring racketeering charges against climate dissenters in the USA.
The report in question describes a 2012 conference at which the strategy was agreed and Shub's report makes for fascinating reading. The list of those who took part is interesting. Some were entirely expected - Naomi Oreskes and James Hoggan for example - but it was slightly more surprising to see Myles Allen there.
Bishop Hill Nov 2, 2015 Energy: grid Energy: solar Energy: wind Foreign ;)
The authorities in South Australia have been pretty right on in terms of their devotion to the green cause, and the state has been in the forefront of efforts to increase renewables' share of electricity generation. That being the case, the state is something of a leading indicator for us here in the UK. Over the weekend there were strong hints that the chickens are coming home to roost.
Bishop Hill Nov 2, 2015 Climate: Sceptics Greens ;)
Over the weekend, news emerged that the decision by French weatherman Philippe Verdier to come out as a sceptic has resulted in swift retribution.
The Head of Weather France 2, away from the antenna to its challenges to the consequences of global warming, aired Saturday night, a video claiming he was fired by the public channel.
Last year, Roy Spencer was widely criticised for referring to global warming Nazis. But as the list of those who have lost their jobs for questioning the orthodoxy grows, you have to ask yourself, was Spencer wrong?
In related news another weatherman has announced that he is not a sceptic any longer.
Greg Fishel was once a Limbaugh-loving climate skeptic. Now he’s fighting global warming.
You can see why that might be an attractive option.
