Joint 10 Point 100% RE Declaration
A group calling itself the Global 100% RE Strategy Group has just made a press release for a 10 point joint declaration. It has seven main signers which, of course, includes Mark Jacobson of Stanford. The other six and their main affiliations are:
Prof. Andrew Blakers (Australian National University)
Hans-Josef Fell (Energy Watch Group)
Prof. Brian Vad Mathiesen (Aalborg University)
Prof. Eicke Weber (ESMC, CBC, UC Berkeley em.)
Prof. Christian Breyer (LUT University)
Tony Seba (RethinkX)
The gist of these ten points is number two where they propose transforming the worlds energy system to 100% renewable by 2030-2035. In the press release they point out that 2030 is for electricity and 2035 is for the other sectors. I’m getting erratic behavior trying to copy and paste from these PDFs which is a pity, because ridicule can not do them justice. Besides being beyond delusional, they’re horribly organized. They’re not very long so IMO they’re worth the amusement. They remind me of a post by Geoff from 2017 entitled, Conversation in a Straight Jacket.
The declaration has a few dozen other co-signers that includes Michael E. himself:
Another name I recognize is Benjamin K. Sovacool. He once published a report that claimed nuclear plants kill more birds than wind farms. It got dissected at Atomic Insights. He more recently did a study for Nature Energy claiming nuclear power did not lower a country’s GHG emissions as much as renewables. It was found to misrepresent energy poverty
I wonder if any or how much of this effort is being financed by Jeff Bezo’s $43 million gift to Jacobson’s spreadsheet jockeys at the Solutions Project. You’d think he could’ve just bought them all new MacBook pros.
The only good I can see coming from this is some actual scrutiny of this madness. I suspect my trouble copying and pasting is due to preemptive measures on their part.
Climate Scepticism 
As it is today, academics of the distant past believed in unicorns.
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I’m not familiar with the others, but Jacobsen has always been out there.
“The only good I can see coming from this is some actual scrutiny of this madness.”
Yeah. I tend to feel that this much distilled nonsense tends to do the cause of catastrophism and net-zero more harm than good. Some of Jacobsen’s prior efforts were so risable even died-in-the-wool believers threw them out (and Jacobsen threatened to sue them, but withdrew). As far as I recall, even Mann was critical back then, so it’s interesting that he appears to have moved position. That might be a useful thing.
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Contrast with another recent publication highlighted by Judith Curry ( http://www.roadtoclimateneutrality.eu.), which debunks 100% Renewables. Summary – renewables will not be able to do the job; nuclear can and is more cost effective.
An excerpt also shows how to avoid questions where the answer doesn’t suit the political narrative, ie. don’t ask them.
“
Of course, it would have been preferable had the European Commission itself done a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis of alternative policy options available to pursue the EU’s climate neutrality objective. The fact that no such analysis has been conducted, despite the European Commission’s ‘Better Regulation,’ highlights the strong political forces and sense of urgency behind EU climate policy-making. “
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I tried copy and pasting the first sentence from their pdf and it came out like this:
ediwdlrow dna ,seirtnuoc ,snoiger ni smetsys )ER( ygrene elbawener %001 detagitsevni evah seiduts suoremuN
i.e. backwards. They also do this trick which is common to the whole green blob of mentioning their backers by logo, meaning that you have to guess who they are before you can google them.
Did nosbocaJ .Z kraM .forP plan this do you think, or is backwards their normal way of operating?
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Geoff, considering all their principles appear to be backwards too, that’s highly appropriate!
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One of the signatories is Tony Seba, of RethinkX. He’s a fund manager who claims extraordinary investment success from rethinking disruption, i.e. predicting how to make a killing from the solar power and similar market niches where the normal workings of capitalism are disrupted by government intervention, subsidies, boondoggling etc. Rethink Disruption is the name of their zombie blog,
https://rethinkdisruption.com/experts/ and the other expert (it takes two experts to produce a highly professional blog that nobody reads or comments at) is James Arbib:
I wrote about Tellus Mater years ago. It’s a green charity which, by distributing piddling amounts to other green charities and think tanks, gets its logo everywhere alongside the big boys like Deutsche Bank and the Dutch Post Office. This enables James to push projects and friends in forty other shady shades of green (awarding eco prizes to sustainable investment analysts etc.) and all for a few hundred thousand tax-deductible quid.
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Geoff
I haven’t been able to get the backward effect. I get discontinuous highlighting and reordered pasting.
This reminds me of my post about Brian Dunning’s claim that wind turbines save birds:
https://cliscep.com/2020/06/05/from-skeptoid-wind-turbines-save-birds/
When Dunning got convicted of ripping off Amazon with a cookie stuffing scheme, he posted a statement in a form that can’t be highlighted and copied from:
https://www.briandunning.com/message.html
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“a statement in a form that can’t be highlighted and copied”
If the inaccessible text is in HTML, you can usually get to it by right-clicking and choosing ‘View page source’ (or similar wording). You do have to strip out the tags, of course. In this case Dunning’s chosen to use Javascript to do the hiding: it’s hard to think of a creditable reason for this.
PDFs are a different matter. The renewables declaration was generated using an online graphic design tool, which may explain the cack-handed way it has handled text.
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Ben Sovacool was also one of the scientific experts for the Climate Assembly. A small world indeed.
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@ Geoff Sovacool has a very memorable name. It is a name that I remember being associated with shenanigans in the past – I will have to look them up and summarise when I have a mo (the new search function on WUWT is handy in this respect).
Co-joint signatory the great Mann was on Today today (@8.40 if you have access to the BBC website). I found myself torn between shouting at the radio for him to shut up and wishing he was on more frequently, so ludicrously unbalanced was his mind. The following is liberally paraphrased.
“The old climate war was the assault on basic science by fossil-fuel interests. But we’ve reached the point when we can see the impacts of climate change playing out in real time in the form of unprecedented extreme weather disasters – we’ve seen that in the UK in recent summers. Even prfessional denialists can deny this undeniable fact.”
Utter tripe, to insult the gastric apparatus of a sheep. Salt and vinegar with that?
Gakkkk.
“The new climate war – World War Climate Two, I liken it to – is against the forces of inaction. (A bizarre concept.) “The inactivists, I call them.” (How he must have chortled when he came up with that.) “Such folk can’t argue it isn’t happening any more.” (Oh yes we can you charming man.) “Such folk blather on about geoengineering or carbon sequestration. Then there is doom-mongering, where the denialists try to convince us it’s actually too late to do anything, so we might as well just carry on as we are.”
At this point the interviewer comes in with an anecdote about how Shell is going zero carbon. (Anyone with any shares in this operation, yet another once great company gone to seed, probably thought of selling them at this juncture, but realised that a large company turning into a subsidy farm is actually more profitable than a large company actually mining oil).
The great man replies with the need for subsidies for renewables (the interviewer does not interject with the wide-eyed “But doc, they don’t need subsidies any more because they are the cheapest form of electricity generation.”) CCS is no good (reading between the lines this is because it *might* allow us some form of civilisation moving forwards.) What we need are demand-side measures and (again) support for renewable energy. (Demand-side seems to mean poor folk paying more for their power.)
Now a sensible question. Who are we to tell the third world not to burn fossil fuels, when we became wealthy doing so?
Sage answer: “The third world is going to leapfrog fossil fuels. What is the point of a reliable grid? They need decentralised generators that don’t work. We’re not going to send the third world our excess slide rules, because they don’t want them, they want calculators.”
What about William Gates and his support for nuclear? Answer: “It’s not viable in the free market without massive government subsidies AND what’s worse is that a dollar wasted on a nuke that will run at 90% capacity for 50 years is a dollar not spent on those amazing whirligig-things, what do you call them?”
What would you say to other countries at COP26? Answer: “Look at what we’re doing and raise your ambition you layabouts, we need to save the Earth yesterday. Look at Biden. Look at him. Go on! I dare you.”
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Will Gates do to climate policy what Windows did to the Mac OS — add a bunch of bloat and sluggishness? OTOH I do think his new Terrapower Natrium molten salt reactor is pretty cool.
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Wow. I’m sometimes a proofreader. *Even professional denialists can’t deny this undeniable fact.*
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