Month: May 2021

From The MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

May 30, 2021 / Francis Menton

As you may know, a large part of the recent strategy by environmental activists to allegedly address “climate change” has been a legal attack on multiple fronts against the major oil explorers. The onslaught included hundreds of lawsuits in as many jurisdictions, restrictive new laws, regulatory initiatives, proxy competitions, and more.

The past few days have seen news of what appeared to be some major activist victories. In the United States, insurgent shareholders won a voting contest involving ExxonMobil on May 26 and successfully elected two directors (out of twelve) to the company’s board of directors. On the same day, in a lawsuit by Friends of the Earth in the Netherlands, a court in The Hague ordered Royal Dutch Shell to reduce its CO2 emissions by around 45% by 2030.

Various media sources, including the Wall Street Journal at the two links above, report these developments as significant defeats for the oil and gas industry and even as harbingers of its imminent rapid decline in the face of mounting legal obstacles. But is such a decline really likely? The latest developments are sure to matter to Exxon and Shell shareholders, respectively, but I have confidence that the large-scale oil and gas manufacturing industry is not going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, this industry is very likely to grow for many decades to come as fracking releases more and cheaper resources, and developing countries get a taste for things like automobiles, air travel, home heating and electricity.

If you look at the various branches of legal attacks on the oil and gas business, you quickly find that almost everything is concentrated in a relatively small sector of the industry, namely the large oil companies based in the western industrialized world. Exxon in particular is a great bogeyman for anti-fossil fuel activists and finds himself on the defense in almost all legal attacks. Others regularly on the defensive include Chevron, BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips – with headquarters in the US, UK or the Netherlands. For example, in the many cases by local governments in the US seeking to blame oil companies for damage caused by global warming, the culprits are generally the five or a subset of them.

But if you look at the statistics on oil production, it becomes clear that the large oil companies of the western industrialized countries simply do not have that large a share of world production. Here is a diagram on Wikipedia with data from the US Energy Information Administration. In 2020, the world was producing an average of about 76 million barrels of petroleum fluids per day. (That number represented a significant pandemic-induced drop of over 90 million barrels a day in 2019. A major recovery is already underway.) Then here are the 2018 oil production figures for the largest companies. The largest major of the western industrialized countries, Exxon, produced sixth place with around 2.3 million barrels per day and a market share of well below 3%. Before Exxon were Saudi Aramco (11.0 million barrels / day), Rosneft (4.2 million barrels / day), Kuwait Petroleum (3.4 million barrels / day), National Iranian Oil Company (3.3 million barrels / day) ) and China National (3.0 million bbl / day). The only other western major in the top ten was Chevron with 1.8 million bbl / day in ninth place with a market share of well below 2%. The top ten were rounded off by the national oil companies of Brazil, Abu Dhabi and Mexico. The top ten companies overall had less than 35% market share, while the remainder of the market is made up of hundreds of companies, many of whom are small US “frackers”.

Of course, the litigants aren’t interested in attacking the 90 +% production companies that are either small or located in unfriendly jurisdictions like Russia, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia that haven’t drank the climate kool aid. The plaintiffs are looking for money and / or advertising. But if your real goal is to save the world, driving producers out of business with about 10% of production is a completely pointless strategy. The remaining players will simply gobble up the market share and carry on as if nothing had ever happened.

So what exactly were activist investors trying to achieve with the Exxon proxy competition? You can find some of the proxy materials issued by the insurgents here, here, and here. While some of the reports suggest that the insurgents want Exxon to exit the oil business, you won’t really find that. Rather, it is a question of vague general validities such as “Successive but targeted positioning of the company in order to be successful in a decarbonising world”.

Who knows what that even means? I have news for you in case you don’t already know. Exxon has no way of moving from the oil and gas business to any other business with a real chance of success. In particular, the decarbonization business (wind, solar, CO2 capture, etc.) is fundamentally different from the oil business. The oil business is a for-profit business where expertise in oil and gas production and marketing is everything. The decarbonization business is all about cutting government subsidies and handouts, where expertise means nothing and political connections are key.

After the oil shocks of the 1970s, Exxon went through a previous round of thinking that it was necessary to get out of the oil business. It formed a subsidiary called Exxon Enterprises to channel investment into something related companies that Exxon thought could leverage its existing expertise. (I was involved in a lawsuit against this company in the early 1980s.) I remember that Exxon wanted to get into two businesses, namely the nuclear power business and the “word processing business.” No sooner had they founded the Atom subsidiary than in 1979 the accident occurred on Three Mile Island, which ended the entire construction of nuclear power plants in the USA for decades. Exxon’s nuclear business struggled for years as a substitute fuel supplier before it was sold to Siemens at a great loss. The word processing business was also a total bankruptcy and was badly beaten in the market by others like Wang and Digital Equipment in the 80s before they lost to new competitors. In the meantime, Exxon turned back to oil.

Indeed, there is one way Exxon could completely “decarbonize” its operations in no time: selling its oil business. Same for Shell. Global carbon emissions won’t drop a single ton, but they could move the assets to a location less of a target for the process industry.

While the legal assault has absolutely no prospect of wiping out, or even seriously undermining, the oil business, it could have big ramifications for Americans. The oil companies are a big part of what makes our energy cheap and widely available. Predatory government regulation restricting drilling and the transportation of fuel could drive up our energy prices and impoverish Americans significantly.

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Cosmologists have been struggling to understand an apparent tension in their measurements of the present-day expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble constant. Observations of the early cosmos – mostly the cosmic microwave background – point to a significantly lower Hubble constant than the value obtained through observations of the late universe, primarily from supernovae. A team of astronomers have dug into the data to find that one possible way to relieve this tension is to allow for the Hubble constant to paradoxically evolve with time. This result could point to either new physics…or just a misunderstanding of the data.

“The point is that there seems to be a tension between the larger values for late universe observations and lower values for early universe observation,” said Enrico Rinaldi, a research fellow in the University of Michigan Department of Physics and coauthor on the study. “The question we asked in this paper is: What if the Hubble constant is not constant? What if it actually changes?”

Something’s rotten in the state of the Universe

Cosmologists employ a variety of probes and observations to determine the fundamental properties of our universe. They try to measure its age, its contents, its expansion rate, and more. After almost a century of intense scrutiny, those cosmologists have developed a coherent, consistent model of the universe. In short, our cosmos is about 13.77 billion years old, is constantly expanding, and is made of mostly dark energy and dark matter – with normal matter like stars and planets and clouds of gas making up a brightly-lit minority of the ingredients of the universe.

Leaving aside the gigantic mysteries of the true nature of dark energy and dark matter, in recent years cosmologists have run into another frustrating puzzle: different probes disagree about the present-day expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant.

Measurements taken of the young universe, like the cosmic microwave background (the afterglow light pattern that was released when the universe cooled from a plasma state when it was 380,000 years old), tell us that the Hubble constant is somewhere around 68 km/s/Mpc (which means that for every million parsecs away from our vantage point, the expansion rate of the universe increases by 68 kilometers per second).

But more local, late-universe measurements, like observations of supernovae, lean towards a different answer: a Hubble constant of more like 74 km/s/Mpc.

Bin it

A team of astronomers led by Maria Dainotti, an assistant professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI in Japan and an affiliated scientist at the U.S. Space Science Institute dug into this discrepancy more. The work was published in May in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team focused their work on Type-1a supernovae, which are a particular kind of explosion that happens when white dwarf stars accumulate too much mass from a companion star, which triggers a runaway nuclear fusion event. This fusion event has roughly the same brightness every time it happens, so astronomers can use these supernovae as “standard candles” – since they know how bright the supernovae should be, they can compare that to how bright they appear to be and calculate a distance. By combining many such measurements over a wide range of distances, astronomers can calculate the expansion history of the universe.

The team used a catalog of over 1,000 supernovae observations and separated them into different bins of distance ranges, with each bin representing the same number of supernovae. They then used each bin to measure the Hubble constant. In the standard cosmological picture, the expansion rate of the universe is constantly changing as the cosmos evolves, but the Hubble constant is a fixed number – it’s the expansion rate of the universe right now.

Each bin of supernovae should yield the same Hubble constant, but in their analysis the researchers allowed the Hubble constant to not be so constant – they allowed for the possibility that it could change with time. By using different bins, they could test to see if the Hubble constant stayed fixed across the different bins, or if it did indeed vary.

“If it’s a constant, then it should not be different when we extract it from bins of different distances. But our main result is that it actually changes with distance,” Rinaldi said. “The tension of the Hubble constant can be explained by some intrinsic dependence of this constant on the distance of the objects that you use.”

Not very constant

Ultimately, the astronomers found in the study that by adding a little bit of flexibility to the standard cosmological models – by allowing the Hubble constant to change with time – they could relieve almost all of the tension between the supernovae and cosmic microwave background measurements. The researchers were able to extrapolate their evolving Hubble constant back to the time of the cosmic microwave background and match it up with those results.

“The extracted parameters are still compatible with the standard cosmological understanding that we have,” he said. “But this time they just shift a little bit as we change the distance, and this small shift is enough to explain why we have this tension.”

The new results are not altogether surprising. It’s always possible to make differing observations agree by adding more complexity to models. In this case, the researchers added a new variable – how quickly the Hubble constant changes with time – and they were able to find a way to connect the early- and late-time measurements of the Hubble constant. Also, the work did not find a statistically significant measurement of this varying Hubble constant. Although they were able to relieve the tension in cosmological observations, they were not able to conclusively say that the Hubble constant is changing with time.

These results, if they hold up, could give theorists a pathway to introducing new physics into the universe to explain the Hubble constant tension. Or it might also mean that supernovae aren’t as “standard” as we think they are, and that perhaps some bias is creeping into the observations to spoil those measurements of the Hubble constant.

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Reposted by NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT

AY 30, 2021

By Paul Homewood

Solar parks are on the rise across the UK.

Around 1,000 hectares of land in the countryside per month are earmarked for photovoltaic modules and the associated kilometers of cables.

The government admits that more than a fifth of our farmland will ultimately be lost to such “green” initiatives.

Last week, The Mail on Sunday counted 270 solar parks under construction or pending planning permission across the country.

Environmental lobbyists argue that solar power is a crucial part of a sustainable future, but they speak less about the growing doubts that scientists and disgruntled groups of residents are raising.

Aside from ruining the view, solar panels are extremely inefficient at their only job, which is to generate electricity in the midst of the clouds and rain in northwestern Europe.

Then there is the question of disposal.

The materials from which the panels are made have a life expectancy of less than 50 years and are difficult and expensive to recycle, increasing the prospect of discarded piles of panels from which dangerous heavy metals will leak.

And with the majority of panels now made in China, there are plausible fears that some were made in forced labor camps, including those held by members of the oppressed Uighur minority.

“A power supply that is always both unpredictable and intermittent doesn’t make sense,” says Christopher Darwin.

“In a few years, when winter blackouts increase as expected, people will wonder why solar industry sites in the countryside were anything but expensive white elephants.”

The protesters were joined by the actor and local resident John Nettles, who runs a small farm nearby.

Best known for roles in Bergerac and Midsomer Murders, Nettles features today in a video showing the spread of solar parks and in particular the planned mega-development near the village of Pyworthy.

“Enough is enough,” he says. “People have to understand the enormous scale and the visual impact.

‘The huge new project in Derril Water would desecrate the pastoral view in this part of Devon and turn it into an industrialized landscape of solar panels and security fences.

‘It would ruin 164 acres of pasture for at least 40 years. Decision Makers… did not take into account the carbon footprint of producing the 76,000 solar panels on the other side of the world that were transported and installed here.

“They just aren’t low-carbon.”

The UK weather is so unsuitable that it has been calculated that most UK solar farms will never exceed 12 percent of their actual generating capacity over the course of a year.

Solar energy contributed just under seven percent of National Grid electricity last month, despite April being unusually sunny and dry.

In December, the solar contribution was a pitiful 0.67 percent of the total.

Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) think tank, says solar energy doesn’t make sense in this country and the miles of cladding probably do more harm than good.

“There just isn’t enough sun,” he says.

“Maybe in the Sahara, where nobody lives, it makes sense to have those huge, tens of miles long solar panels.

“But in the UK I am concerned about the unintended consequences.

“You would have to cover about five percent of the entire UK land with solar panels to produce enough power to make things work – and only during the day.

“Obviously they don’t work at night. They leave an enormous ecological footprint.

“A single nuclear power plant is located on one square kilometer of land.

“In order for solar collectors to generate the appropriate energy, you need 10,000 times more space – maybe even more.” […]

Direct government subsidies for solar parks were abandoned in 2019 (although previous lucrative agreements are still in place).

However, the rents of solar parks far exceed the precarious profits from conventional agriculture. Devon landowners reportedly earn up to £ 2,000 an acre each year from solar energy.

Some sheep farmers in the county are said to be earning only £ 6 an acre

According to Dr. John Constable, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, is likely to only widen that gap thanks to the government’s Net Zero By 2050 initiative.

The beleaguered farmers have realized that they can make a profit – and are hurrying to take advantage of these benefits.

“The net zero drive is so insensitive to cost and environmental damage that a lot of very strange things happen,” says Dr. Constable.

‘The brakes are completely off. It’s an unbridled area of ​​the economy. We are preparing to lose much of the UK’s farmland to a second rate electricity system.

“We have a growing population, so in a few decades we will be 50 percent dependent on imported food.

“Is that a sensible way of using a finite resource, especially after Brexit? It’s a very strange thing. ‘

It could get worse.

Thanks to a gap in the planning system, Dr. Constable believes solar farms are a great way for developers to turn poor quality farmland into fallow land so that it can potentially be built over in the future.

“Some landowners consider this a nutcracker program,” says Dr. Constable.

“Most of the arable land is protected from development – with the exception of solar energy.

“If you own thousands of acres and want an industrial area, solar is a great way to crack the planning nut.”

Whole story

For illustration purposes only, last year subsidies paid to solar farms through renewable commitment allowances cost energy consumers £ 510 million, equivalent to £ 73 / MWh. For this money we only get 6.9 TWh per year, a tiny 2% of our electricity. Smaller systems that are subsidized by feed-in tariffs add to these costs.

Despite the numbers given in the mail, solar use has practically dried up since the ROC subsidies were withdrawn in 2016. (Line 28 reads “Non-accredited systems – ie not subsidized”). Last year only 326 MW of solar capacity was added, an increase of 2.4%.

If the government really plans a big increase in solar capacity, the current desecration of our landscape will be the tip of the iceberg. It is also clear that, except in a few niche cases, new solar developments are not economically viable. Which raises the question of whether subsidy regulations need to be reintroduced.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/solar-photovoltaics-deployment

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