Author: Captain Obvious

Past blogs have pointed out that you can “bet against” NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center with very high confidence.  If they say it is going to be a higher-than-normal storm season you can rest assured that the exact opposite is pretty likely.  I have plotted predicted vs. actual storm statistics and they are very highly negatively correlated.  That should cause us to pause and question whether NOAA is able to predict anything… their models are clearly wrong.

And, once again they illustrated their inability this year with predicting and then seeing only 14 storms, 8 hurricanes, and only 2 major hurricanes.  Plus, if you check the actual storm paths you will see that some of the hurricanes, they say occurred would have never been discernable in the past since they only lasted for a few hours.  Poof… they showed up and were gone … nice to see them with high resolution radar but certainly not historically comparable to anything before this radar.

Even with this bias, the normal year would have 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes.  So, this year was very close to average.  Or, another way to summarize this past year was that it was milder than normal.  Now, that simply does not make news, now does it?

Do you remember least cost planning and how it was implemented in our energy supply system?  Do you remember that we considered both supply and demand side options, and made decisions on the long term, recognizing that there might be some near term more expensive items that, over time, would yield the best lowest cost options.

It was a rigorous analysis system that became the basis for regulatory proceedings.  There were gray areas where benefits were contestably uncertain, but the fact that it was a precise mathematical method offered everyone involved a transparent mechanism for negation and planning.  Yes, you could always second guess decisions after time passed, but it did offer some level of certainty to all involved.  That certainty offered utilities the ability to raise capital and be assured of cost recovery.

By contrast, we now live an uncertain world of carbon accountabilities, carbon credit uncertainties, and ESG abuse.  It is almost like we have transported ourselves back 150 years into the “wild wild west” once again with booms, busts, and almost half of the national currency being counterfeited.  Think about it:

If we accept that carbon dioxide release levels in the environment now replace the cost elements in this formula, we should be evaluating the energy alternative portfolio reflecting both the near term carbon emissions from these choices along with the longer-term estimates.  Under this type of thinking, beneficial electrification should be time phased: meaning promoting electrification in the short run may confound the end goal of carbon dioxide releases because the electricity today is far from green.

Therefore, banning internal combustion engines in cars makes no sense in the near term, and certainly not until and unless the electric grid is mostly carbon free.  Plus, when you consider that it can take 10-20 years before today’s high mileage EVs will ever have a net positive impact on carbon impact, all this push for EVs in the short run is escalating carbon dioxide releases.

Don’t you think it is high time we slowed down, stepped back from the edge, and took a cold hard look at our plans?  Why are we rushing to build our way out of the past rather than to also consider a softer path on the energy use side?

What’s really going on here?  Why haven’t we learned the lesson from the energy industry in the 1970s?

 

Perhaps the reason we use handshakes is to keep people from doing what this picture indicates: promising one thing and doing quite another.  The history for this superstition is a bit murky but all sources indicate it is a way of asking God’s forgiveness for telling a white lie.  While we males learn early on that answering the question, “does this dress make me look fat?” requires real care, the idea that answering a question where no harm is done by either avoiding the “truth” … in essence we are trying to protect the other person’s feelings.

We move away from a benign perspective when someone deliberately tells us one thing but has no intention of living up to the promise.  We often describe this by saying their actions speak louder than words.  Today’s greenwashing and virtue signaling prove this out.  We hear a lot of promises, but when we look at actual progress, we see the results coming up short.

Admittedly, some things can prove out of our control, so we promise based on our own heart’s intent, but we then run into the realities and unintended consequences.  Fair enough.  So, when you hear about large corporations making climate pledges, you should dig a bit deeper.  Here is a snippet from greenbiz.com summarizing climate promises:

“You might remember last year’s announcement from Cargill, ADM, Bunge & Co, in which they promised to finally work together as an industry to eliminate commodity-driven deforestation and align their supply chain emissions with a 1.5 degrees Celsius climate pathway. The latter requires going beyond forests to end all native vegetation conversion, which is notably absent in the trader’s work. The commodity companies pledged to publish a roadmap on how they would achieve these goals within a year. 

And so they did. Unfortunately, that’s the only promise they kept since the roadmap itself fails to deliver the expected commitments to end deforestation and align their business practices with Paris climate goals. 

In response to the roadmap, WWF’s U.S. president and CEO Carter Roberts wrote that it “demonstrates progress on palm oil and steps forward on beef but falls well short of what is needed on soy and falls short on expectations that the roadmap delivers what’s needed for a 1.5-degree future.”

You could just say this is human nature.  You could just imply that we now know more about how Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions must be calculated and disclosed so we can truly monetize the longer-term perspectives.  Or, you could admit that we simply do not have the commitment in the first place … aka, we are hoping that this issue simply goes away if we sound like we care.

We just went through midterms … with lots of promises being made to “reach across the isle” and to move forward together as Americans.  One can hope.  But, are we really ready to bury the hatchets and work together?

History indicates it takes an external crisis to bring people together.  9-11 did that for a while.  The general rule in all of life is that you need a “common enemy” to rally public opinion.  So, we have seen Germany, Russia and perhaps now China take on this image.  But, the reality is that we all must “see” this common enemy.  The root problem in my mind is that we are not looking.

 

Do you remember when COVID first hit and health professionals insisted we all work together to “bend the curve” or slow the growth so we would not overwhelm the health system?  We distanced, wore masks, and avoided large groups and to some extent we did slow the growth and total devastating impacts.  The curves tracking our progress did indicate we succeeded, but the notable exceptions were largely due to a belief that the government had no place telling us what to do in this, “land of the free and home of the brave.”

Even recently, I hear constant evidence that people are getting COVID again even after full vaccination and boosters after attending weddings, funerals, and large parties.  Even people who “isolate” themselves from general society fall prey to the occasional interaction with someone who is carrying the virus from a prior encounter with a carrier.  We know what to do, and even our vaccines are being invalidated by a disease that keeps mutating … it is what viruses do to survive.

It is interesting to see how other cultures approach this.  Totalitarian societies that track individual citizen movements shut down and purge the virus chemically to the extent they can.  Others simply suggest what people should do, and the citizens naturally do what they are told … without protest or fanfare.

But where is the anger over the origins for these maladies?  Why hasn’t the world come down on China like a ton of bricks for either weaponizing the virus in the lab and/or allowing unsafe “wet market” environments that breed them in the first place?

Are we that afraid of China?  Why are we left to “bend a curve” that is not a natural occurrence?  We know things like this are avoidable and, in this country, we act swiftly when we see an outbreak of anything in our food, water, or air systems.

If we are afraid of something as obvious as this, what hope do we have on a world stage of tackling long term existential questions that depend upon all of us working together toward a solution?  Today’s grandstanding, greenwashing, and ESG claims are a modern version of the great Shakespearian play Macbeth soliloquy:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Act 5, Scene 5

 

Haven’t you noticed that the level of alarming rhetoric has now replaced news reporting?  I used to joke that the advertisements for the evening news might ask: “Does homework cause cancer?  News at 7!”  The intent was clearly to make you watch the news, and sure enough, when you waited till the last story the answer was “no.”  Innocent fun just to get you to watch?  I think we all know the reason the alarmism has amped up. and it is summed up in the journalism adage: “if it bleeds, it leads”.

We now have crossed a line in my opinion.  If you read the attached article, you will see the headline from USA Today is: ‘Calm before the storm’: Health insurance costs set to spike after they stayed mostly flat in 2022, survey finds.  Focus on health insurance costs set to spike.  Doesn’t that worry you?  It worried me.

Then, read the story itself and you will find absolutely no supporting proof that anything of the sort is about to happen.  Sure, there are concerns about future price increases, but anyone who knows anything about health care understands that general inflation does not necessarily result in proportional price increases.  The article actually has a lot of very interesting information, but the title is alarmist.

If the article said: “Health insurance costs MAY increase due to inflation” it would have been a big yawn.  Inflation hits most things.  Spike?  That is much bigger than 8-10% increases.  Natural gas prices are set to spike for the multitude of reasons we all know.  We noticed this same misleading and offensive trend in creating headlines just days after hurricane Ian hit Fort Meyers putting more than 2 million customers out of service.  Headline:  500,000 Customers in West Florida Remain Out of Power. What about the incredible fact that 1.2 million customers had been restored?  Right, that would be too uplifting and honest. Nothing sufficiently alarming in that headline.

Watch the same pattern as you read anything about climate change being the cause of just about everything negative happening anywhere in the world….fires, floods, earthquakes, depletion of the ocean’s fish, which is more about overfishing than anything else.  In fact, I was a little surprised the media didn’t blame increases in health care on climate change … but they probably will in the future because they will want to shift the focus from a fact that defeats their predictions about climate change.  Do you remember when NOAH predicted this was going to be a much more severe storm season?  In fact, we are about to finish the hurricane season with much fewer storms than in the past.