Mark. The magic word that kickstarts an automatic anti-response is COAL: concentrated evil carbon, forged in the hot depths of the Earth by the Devil’s heat. Coal is anathema to climate protesters. It pollutes our atmosphere with CO2 (and much else besides) and must be kept in the ground at all costs. How dare Cumbria County Council oppose the will of the endangered planet. Remove their Twitter account!

Mark H: as you say, the protests about the coal mine completely miss the point that the coking coal and/or steel has to be transported halfway round the world if it is not produced locally.
That raises the thought that all of the planned wind farms etc should be challenged to source their materials from the UK "to avoid the carbon impact of transportation". Maybe the steelworkers have been making this argument but it hasn't appeared in the general media.

Norway's electric car drive belies national reliance on fossil fuels
Two-thirds of sales at end of 2020 were battery electric vehicles despite dependence on oil and gas drilling

Norway became the first country to sell more electric cars than petrol, hybrid and diesel engines put together last year, new data shows, with battery electric vehicles (BEVs) accounting for two-thirds of sales in the final months of 2020.

Norway has one of the world’s most ambitious green targets, planning to phase out sales of all new fossil-fuel vehicles by 2025, five years earlier than the UK.

It is quite a contradiction in a country that has become one of the richest in the world on the back of its oil and gas revenues, has made itself dependent on oil, and clings to further production even as the world increasingly rejects fossil fuels in pursuit of zero emissions.

While on the one hand the government is auctioning oil exploration licences for fields in the fragile Arctic, on the other it is aiming for a carbon-neutral national vehicle park by 2030. On Friday, it submitted its national plan on climate, which included this ambitious aim and the promise that, from next year, the public sector would be required to procure zero-emission vehicles only.....

Sounds like hypocritical virtue-signalling, to me.

Cold snap forces UK electricity market prices to new high
National Grid issues urgent call for suppliers to generate extra 524MW of electricity capacity

Plunging temperatures and a drop in wind turbine power generation have pushed UK electricity market prices to a new high and prompted the National Grid to put out an urgent call for suppliers to provide extra capacity.

The National Grid control room warned that its spare electricity supplies would be “tight” this week, and on Tuesday issued an official call for generators to bring forward an extra 524 megawatts of electricity capacity within 24 hours.

Electricity market prices have surged tenfold in a day to reach a new record high of £1,000 per megawatt hour, as colder than normal temperatures and lower electricity generation left a dent in Great Britain’s power supplies.

The cold snap is forecast to drive energy demand to its highest level for this winter, while wind turbines come to a virtual standstill only weeks after setting a new generation record. The combination of high demand and low wind speeds has emerged as supplies from many traditional power plants remain out of action, causing electricity prices on the wholesale market to soar....

Greta Thunberg criticises Whitehaven coal mine plan

Environmentalist Greta Thunberg has criticised the government's decision not to intervene in plans for the UK's first deep coal mine in 30 years.

The proposed £165m scheme, at Whitehaven in Cumbria, will not be called in by officials for an inquiry.

On Twitter, the Swedish teenager said it showed pledges to achieve net zero emissions targets by 2050 "basically mean nothing".

The government said it was a matter for Cumbria County Council to decide.

West Cumbria Mining has said 500 jobs will be created by the project and the firm will pay into a community fund for 10 years....

It's a pity she doesn't understand that by mining coking coal in the UK we can avoid transporting it half-way round the world, or alternatively, make our own steel, and avoid transporting that half-way round the world from China. I thought she was showing signs of maturity. Perhaps I was wrong.

As Robert Swan noted, Sydney this summer - and it's now in high summer - has been cold. I live about an hour out of Greater Sydney (although that areal definition gets redefined constantly by C-19 bovverers) and for over 3 months now the temperatures have rarely been above max 14-15C, with night-time around 10-11C and a room heater on.

Our MSM have completely memory-holed this, concentrating on bushfires completely on the other side of the continent. This pattern of non-reporting from the MSM has become mildly tedious. These people know they are cynical, hypocritical liars, and they know we know it, but the thing is that they don't mind that.

Whatever wizardry they might have applied to make 2020 a hot year, it'll take some special techniques to make Sydney's current summer anything other than dismal. Even the ABC's warmist weatherman conceded in last night's weather that it was going to be a wetter summer than average. It's not the wetness that strikes me — Sydney tends to have wet summers — but it's so bloody cold with maxes rarely getting even to the mid-20s (reflected in my pool temperature being over 4 degrees below previous temperatures on 1 Jan).

On a different topic, I recommend this recent EconTalk podcast where the thesis is that we should beware of scientific hubris; that there are many things that cannot be known or predicted.

One example he cited was that, while there's no doubt that smoking causes lung cancer, it tells us nothing about whether an individual smoker will get lung cancer. There have, after all, been plenty of centenarian smokers. I've made a similar observation about treating high cholesterol as if it were a disease when it's only correlated to a real disease.

Finally, TinyCO2, I suppose "prosterity" was a typo, but it could be a useful word as our former prosperity gives way to new austerity.

stewgreen

Thanks. I'll keep trying to get it right, if you're all happy to bear with me while I stumble to the right result. I'll definitely use preview for a while, before posting.