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Tidbits

22 Mar 2023 | News Roundup
  • Yes, they are coming for your gas stove. For your own good you see, since progressive starlet Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted “Did you know that ongoing exposure to NO2 from gas stoves is linked to reduced cognitive performance?” The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is also apparently now reaching for the valve. And “California Bay Area to Start Banning Gas Furnaces and Water Heaters” unlike, say, shoplifting.
  • As for how the war on affordable reliable energy is going, well, it depends on your definition of success. In Australia “Shock power bill jump to hammer households”. So if the idea was for renewables to be cheap, a small setback. Or not, since Peter Coy at the New York Times insists that “Conventional economic wisdom says that it’s costly and inefficient to spend a lot of money fixing a problem before the necessary technology has matured. By that logic, the environmental pluses from quickly stopping climate change have to be weighed against the economic minus of higher costs. But a study published last year in the scientific journal Joule lays out a more encouraging case. The peer-reviewed article, ‘Empirically Grounded Technology Forecasts and the Energy Transition,’ says that ‘in a faster transition, we are likely to reach lower costs sooner.’” So trust the peer-reviewed empirically-grounded forecasts and just ignore your electricity bill.
  • Also last week we snarked that the cost of major Canadian infrastructure programs tends “to skyrocket regardless of the weather.” And now the crown corporation that took over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX to insiders) intended to get more of Alberta’s oil to Canada’s west coast for export, which the federal government regulated and harried and delayed to the brink of death then bought in 2018 for a bargain-basement $4.5 billion, just announced that the cost of the project has somehow leaped to $30.9 billion, up 44% in just one year from an already bloated $21.6 billion and nearly triple the original $12.6 billion estimate, and yet even this latest figure “doesn’t include reserves for ‘extraordinary’ risks.” Just the usual risks like stunning government incompetence… unless the aim was to kill the project all along and money shmoney, we print that stuff.
  • As for the lifestyle you thought you were enjoying but secretly weren’t, and they said you could keep after the Just Transition but secretly can’t, well, no less a sage and poster child for healthy living than Bill Gates promises you can continue to eat some meat, a bit, provided it’s not real. Even in India, where poverty is still a stark reality for far too many, “meat consumption in India will be less … That’s wonderful.” Unless of course you happen to live there.
  • Finally, the fungi keep coming for alarmists’ brains: Euronews.green gets on the mould train with “The Last of Us ‘minus the zombie part’: How fungi are becoming supercharged by climate change” which is that “the human body temperature is typically too hot for infectious fungi to survive” so if it gets hotter they will suddenly kill us unless they don’t, since the text fiddles around with “may cause fungi to be more dangerous” and “might be about to change” unlike the sledgehammer headline. (And for added horror NPR has “Climate is changing too quickly for the Sierra Nevada’s ‘zombie forests’”. One imagines trees moaning “Phloooooem! Phloooooem!”)

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