Hawaii Going Off the Deep End Regarding Net Zero, With Electric Rates at 39.85 c/kWh

By Bud Bromley in Hawaii

Below are my published online comments to a recent online (very long and complex) draft for comments of the ‘net zero’ plan for the island of Hawai’i (which is the county of Hawai’i) (link below). 

My comments referenced, and linked the excellent, recent CLINTEL critical analysis of the UN IPCC AR6, and quotes from the press release for that Clintel report, edited by Marcel Crok and Andy May (https://clintel.org/thorough-analysis-by-clintel-shows-serious-erro...

Some of your readers may be interested and may have occasion to use some of this when similar boondoggles are tried in their neighborhood.

 

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Summary of my comment

There is no valid scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gas causes "unprecedented warming" or global climate change or global warming. 

Therefore, there is no need to reduce human-produced CO2.  Even if we humans reduce our CO2 emissions, there will be no significant or measurable reduction in global CO2 concentration and no significant change in temperature. 

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co estimated the cost of the global “Net Zero” plan is $9 TRILLION per year.  It would be an extremely wasteful exercise in futility.

 

Quoting Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (31 March 2021. Zoom call Clintel Foundation), quoted by his permission, “Stop treating it [i.e. AGW…human-caused global warming/climate change] as a worthy opponent. Do not ascribe reasonableness to the other side. It is not reasonable, not true, not even plausible.” 

Dr. Lindzen also said, “So there you have it. An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization.

What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays.

False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to reduce trust in and support for science.”

The scientific hypothesis that human-caused greenhouse gases, such as CO2 causes global warming is "not reasonable, not true, not even plausible."

 

In the words of John F Clauser, BS, MA, PhD (all in physics), the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Physics, "The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world's economy and the well-being of billions of people.

Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.

In turn, pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills.

It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists.

In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis.

There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world's large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science."

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What is the reason to waste my tax dollars and yours on an implausible and unproven hypothesis? Doing so would be malfeasance on the part of public officials.

I hereby register my complaint. 

CO2 is food for plants in ocean and on land. 

There are proven and substantial benefits of increased global CO2 concentration.  (I will be happy to supply these to ICAP upon request.) 

But there are no substantial negatives, even if CO2 concentration were ten times higher.  

CO2 is not pollution, it is plant food. 

The ONLY way carbon gets into the plants is by plants absorbing CO2 gas from the air and water. 

Plants then form carbohydrates in their cells by photosynthesis with sunlight and water.  

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There are many objections to and errors by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC.)

For example, thorough analysis by Clintel shows serious errors in the latest IPCC report.

This Clintel report is an analysis of the latest IPCC report AR6, and is signed by over 1500 scientists and qualified people, including me. link here: https://clintel.org/coming-soon-the-frozen-climate-views-of-the-ipcc/

To give you a feel for the extraordinary errors and omissions by the UN IPCC, here is an excerpt of the press release, so you get an idea of what was found:

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"The IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature showing that normalized disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920.

The IPCC, by cherry picking from the literature, drew the opposite conclusions, claiming increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change.

These are two important conclusions of the report: The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, published by the Clintel Foundation.”

 

“The 180-page [Clintel] report is – as far as we know – the first serious international ‘assessment’ of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report.

In 13 chapters, the Clintel report shows the IPCC rewrote climate history, emphasizes an implausible worst-case scenario, has a huge bias in favor of ‘bad news’ and against ‘good news’, and keeps the good news out of the "Summary for Policy Makers.”

 

“The errors and biases Clintel documents in the report are far worse than those that led to the investigation of the IPCC by the Interacademy Council (IAC Review) in 2010.

The IPCC had denied the existence of the Little Ice Age, the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, because they did not align with its pre-conceived notions, while CO2 had not changed from 280 ppm for about 2000 years

Clintel believes that the IPCC should reform or be dismantled." Link here: https://clintel.org/thorough-analysis-by-clintel-shows-serious-erro...

 

This Clintel report is only one of many over the last several decades documenting the many problems with the IPCC. 

Thousands of reputable scientists have signed many documents, letters, and petitions in protest of the scientific and political hoax being perpetrated by climate activists and politicians, and multiple letters and petitions from multiple countries to Secretaries General of the United Nations. 

I will be happy to supply the ICAP with many petitions and lists of scientists and other qualified signers from around the world. 

 

The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change is another example.

Among other statements, it declares “Now, therefore, we recommend …That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth…

“That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.” 

Since its creation in March 2008 by the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change has attracted more than 1,200 signatories from 40 countries, including over 200 climate experts.  https://clintel.org/coming-soon-the-frozen-climate-views-of-the-ipcc/

 

Despite the expense of trillions of dollars, UN IPCC and other proponents of the hypothesis of human-CO2-caused global warming, have produced no verifiable evidence to support their hypothesis. 

Computer models are not evidence.  Computer models are only hypotheses, and so far the computer models “substantially” overstate global warming (running hot)

This is admitted by modelers, and as shown by analysis of the models against actual temperature trends. 

“In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble,” reads the first line of the abstract of lead author, climate scientist Ben Santer’s 2017 paper in Nature Geoscience  http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/articles/article... 

In other words, the actual temperature trends were less than their models.

Their models cost taxpayers billions of dollars and they want trillions more dollars for "transformations".

 

Michael Mann (of the infamous and repudiated “hockey stick” warming graphic in Al Gore’s science fiction movie), as well as other climate alarmists, were co-authors on the paper. 

The abstract continues: “Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, MODEL tropospheric warming is substantially greater than OBSERVED,” (Capital letters are mine for emphasis.)

In other words, their computer models substantially overestimated the global warming which has been observed in the real world.

 

Contrary to non-stop reports in mainstream media and government agencies, most scientists do not support the narrative that there is a climate crisis. Most of them are afraid to speak out, lest they be "cancelled"

That mainstream narrative is propaganda.

Instead, the real problems are the activist-proponents of a non-existent climate crisis, and their use of heavily-funded, fear-based propaganda, to indoctrinate citizens and children, essentially yelling fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire. 

Following this climate alarmist agenda is not a legitimate use of Hawai’i taxpayer resources.

 

There is no valid evidence of unprecedented global warming. 

Earth has been warmer in the past. 

Nor is there evidence, human-produced CO2 from burning fossil fuels causes statistically significant global warming. 

Furthermore, even if there were a significant global warming trend, though there is none,  there is solid evidence that warmer temperatures are better for all living things. Historically, civilizations, life, plants etc. thrive in warm periods. Cold kills.

 

Jamal Munshi, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Business Statistics concludes, "A key relationship in the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is that between annual fossil fuel emissions and annual changes in atmospheric CO2.

The proposed causation sequence is, annual fossil fuel emissions cause annual changes in atmospheric CO2, which in turn intensifies the atmosphere’s heat trapping property.

It is concluded, global warming is due to changes in atmospheric composition attributed to human activity and is therefore a human creation, and that therefore we must reduce or eliminate fossil fuel emissions to avoid climate catastrophe (Parmesan, 2003) (Stern, 2007) (IPCC, 2014) (Flannery, 2006) (Allen, 2009) (Gillett, 2013) (Meinshausen, 2009) (Canadell, 2007) (Solomon, 2009) (Stocker, 2013) (Rogelj, 2016).”

 

“A testable implication of the proposed causation sequence is, annual changes in atmospheric CO2 must be related to annual fossil fuel emissions at an annual time scale.

Our work is a test of this hypothesis.

We find that de-trended-correlation analysis of annual emissions and annual changes in atmospheric CO2 does not support the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, because no evidence is found that changes in atmospheric CO2 are related to fossil fuel emissions at an annual time scale.

These results are consistent with prior works, that found no evidence to relate the rate of warming to the rate of emissions

(Munshi, The Correlation between Emissions and Warming in the CET, 2017)

(Munshi, Long Term Temperature Trends in Daily Station Data: Australia, 2017)

(Munshi, Generational Fossil Fuel Emissions and Generational Warming: A Note, 2016)

(Munshi, Decadal Fossil Fuel Emissions and Decadal Warming: A Note, 2015)

(Munshi, Effective Sample Size of the Cumulative Values of a Time Series, 2016)

(Munshi, The Spuriousness of Correlations between Cumulative Values, 2016)."

link here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2997420

 

Briefly summarized, Professor Munshi’s expert work in statistical analysis shows, the trend of estimated CO2 emissions from fossil fuels is not statistically correlated with the trend of net global atmospheric CO2 concentration measured at the NOAA-Scripps Global Monitoring Lab at Mauna Loa when the trends are correctly analyzed. 

Since no correlation is detectable between these two trends, then CO2 from fossil fuels cannot be the cause of the net global CO2 concentration trend. 

This is unequivocal evidence, CO2 from fossil fuels cannot be the cause of the trend in increasing CO2 concentration, nor the cause of any other climate effects, which are co-variable with total atmospheric CO2 concentration. 

(A correlation does not prove a cause-and-effect relationship exists, however, there must be a correlation between the two trends, if a cause-and-effect relationship exists. There are no exceptions to this logic.)

 

Since the rate of change of fossil fuel CO2 emission is not forcing a detectable change in the rate of change of global atmospheric CO2 concentration, then fossil fuel CO2 emissions cannot be forcing global warming, cooling, greening, ocean acidity, climate change or any other climate variable which is a co-dependent variable with global CO2 concentration.

 

All water exposed to air, emits and absorbs CO2 (and other atmospheric gases) continuously.

The rates of CO2 absorption and emission change with temperature and with water surface area at a given temperature. 

Colder water absorbs CO2 faster than warmer water. 

Over 70% of the earth’s surface is ocean.

But even raindrops absorb and emit CO2. 

The source of the CO2 does not affect the continuous and simultaneous absorption and emission of CO2 from the surface. 

CO2 (and other atmospheric gas molecules) are continuously colliding with the surface of ocean and all exposed water surfaces and being absorbed. 

The rates of both absorption and emission are controlled by natural, chemical and physical processes, not by human CO2 emissions. 

The rate of CO2 gas dissolved in water surface versus CO2 gas above the surface of the water is an intensive property of matter, that is a physical property like the boiling point of water. 

The boiling point of water is not changed by adding more water. 

Analogously, an addition of human CO2 to air does not change the ratio of CO2 gas in ocean surface versus CO2 gas above that surface. 

Human additions or subtractions of CO2 to and from air only cause  temporary and local perturbations to CO2 concentration. 

The ratio of CO2 gas in water surface versus CO2 gas in air above that surface is rapidly restored for a given temperature. 

Additional CO2 is absorbed by the water surface. 

Also, any CO2 removed from air will be restored from a giant reservoir, the about 50 times greater CO2 concentration in ocean and water surfaces. 

It is futile, wasteful and harmful to remove CO2 from air.  More is needed for more flora and fauna growth. 

These ratios, known as Henry’s Law constants or coefficients, are easily found online or in reference books, used by chemists daily, and they have been reproduced thousands of times by experiments. 

Global atmospheric CO2 concentration today is the same as it would be, if humans never existed.  

 

This ICAP draft proposes a use of taxpayer money and public resources to solve a non-existing problem. 

Doing so would be a malfeasance, fueled by a greedy pursuit of federal and state subsidies. 

Be warned. 

If this proposal is enacted, eventually citizens of Hawai’i will seek legal action for damages against local government officials, commission and committee members, contractors, politicians, etc. for this malfeasant use of taxpayer funds.  

 

Why does this ICAP proposal rely on an un-elected, politically purposed, non-U.S. bureaucratic agency (UN IPCC) that does not do its own science? 

 

Have our Hawai'i island officials examined the real agenda of the UN IPCC? 

UN IPCC officials admit their agenda is not about the environment. 

Dr. Ottmar Endenhoffer, UN IPCC co-chair of Working Group 3, November 13, 2010, said, “We (UN-IPCC) redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…” “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore…”  

 

No one on our island voted to support the UN IPCC's alarmist agenda, nor to elect any member of the UN IPCC.  What is the legal justification to support these climate alarmists?

 

Do our Hawai'i island officials know how dangerous the UN IPCC, Net Zero, and this ICAP proposed plan are? 

These plans, actions, agreement and proposals are dangerous in many different ways to the health, survival and financial stability of Hawai'i individuals, families, businesses and farms.  

We would become dependent upon unreliable, variable energy sources, such as wind and solar which could be destroyed by weather events. 

These unreliable energy sources require grid-scale backup power plants, which means, Hawai’i electricity rates at 39.85 c/kWh, will increase. 

Already Hawai’i electricity rates are the highest in the U.S., 3x the U.S. average. 

This is not a sustainable plan, that would increase the cost of living in Hawai’i’s

A major reason for people to move away from the islands. 

 

If implemented, this plan will eventually destroy life as we know it here.

Living without fossil fuels would not be feasible. 

Subsidizing and encouraging large installations of solar panels is indirect payment of money to the Chinese communist party.

Most panels are made in communist China, and mostly made there by slave labor or near slave labor. 

And most of the minerals in solar panels come dominantly from China. 

Meanwhile communist China is building coal-fired energy plants at a fast pace. 

It is irresponsible and malfeasant to make this island's electric energy dependent upon a nation which is sworn to destroy the United States.

 

A less complicated example: Hawai'i encourages electric vehicles (EV).

But studies show, an electric vehicle must be driven for 100,000 kilometers before it recovers the CO2 produced to make the EV. 

Production of an EV produces an amount of CO2 in excess of the CO2 produced by a gasoline vehicle. 

The EV must be driven for 100,000 kilometers before its emissions are less than a gasoline vehicle.

Furthermore, driving 100,000 kilometers may take 10 years on Hawai'i for most families and within that time the very expensive lithium batteries will need to be replaced. 

CO2 is emitted in production of the batteries.  Thus the 100,000 kilometer crossover point where an EV emissions match a gasoline vehicle's emission is too low, because of battery replacement.

 

According to Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research think tank stated, “Producing a 75 kilowatt-hour battery for a Tesla Model 3, considered on the larger end of batteries for EVs, would result in the emission of 4,500 kilograms of CO2, if it was made at Tesla's battery factory in Nevada.

That’s the emissions equivalent to driving a gas-powered sedan for 1.4 years, at a yearly average distance of 12,000 miles,” Hausfather said. 

“If the battery were made in Asia, manufacturing it would produce 7,500 kg of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of driving a gasoline-powered sedan for 2.4 years.”

 

According to Bloomberg, communist China "dominates the lithium-ion battery supply chain."

The supply chain for minerals needed for EV batteries are dominated by China and developing countries

China controls:

41% of world cobalt mining

73% of cobalt refining

77% of cathodes for batteries

92% of anodes for batteries

66% of battery cell assembly

54% of EV assembly

 

And then there is the problem of disposing of the expired solar panels and used lithium car batteries on our island.

We already have a problem disposing of batteries and electronics. 

On the other hand, since CO2 from burning fossil fuels has no measurable effect on warming or on climate, then there is no good reason to allow EV's or solar panels to pollute our island and planet, and no reason to risk our safety, national security, freedom and financial stability by handing our hard-earned money to communist China.

The above examples are only a few of many examples. 

I will be happy to provide more examples to ICAP.

 

This draft ICAP plan proposes irresponsible, risky, expensive, and needless programs for Hawai'i island.

It should be rejected. 

But it is not surprising, because all of us have endured non-stop indoctrination by the media, and in schools for more than 30 years. 

In the scientific method, it is not the obligation or responsibility of skeptics or “deniers” to falsify or disprove hypotheses and theories proposed by climate scientists and political activists. 

It is the obligation and responsibility of people proposing such hypotheses and theories to present valid evidence and then to defend their hypotheses and theories. 

Proponents of human-cause global warming and climate change have failed to present the evidence despite the expense of billions of dollars of taxpayer money over many decades. 

Usually these proponents refuse to debate or answer their critics. 

It would be foolish for Hawai’i to support their non-scientific, political activities.

 

Note:  On May 16 and 17, 2023 there was a second paragraph in the Executive summary which the authors or editors have now removed. 

On May 16 and 17, I commented as follows, “These statements in this paragraph are false:”

However, human activities have created an enhanced greenhouse effect that causes unprecedented warming of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.

This warming triggers complex, cascading effects that jeopardize natural systems on Earth.

To restore balance to our natural system, we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions at the local level.” 

The authors or editors removed the entire paragraph and moved my comments presented above to where  they now appear at the end of the first sentence of the Executive Summary. 

That first sentence reads, “The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded in its most recent report that human activities have unequivocally caused global warming.”

 

I am pleased to see the that the island of Hawaii (Hawaii county) is reacting in near real time to comments to their proposed plan.

 

The long draft plan for Hawaii island is presented here: :  https://cohplanning.konveio.com/draft-integrated-climate-action-pla...

 

Regards,

Bud Bromley

Holualoa, Big Island Hawaii