New Quillette and RCE, Björn Peters talks Europe, American Crows in A-town

New pieces in Quillette & Real Clear Energy, Björn Peters talks about Europe's ongoing crisis, &...American Crows in Austin

A busy week catching up on writing, planning for upcoming travel, and recording podcasts. (I recorded three of them this week.) On Wednesday, I was pleased to lecture Tom Russo’s graduate-level class at George Washington University. The course title was “Global Energy Security.” I did the lecture via Zoom. The caption was “Energy Realism, Europe’s Energy Crisis, & The Future of Hydrocarbons.” I presented six energy realities in 45 minutes. I always like talking to college students. I see it as part of my job. Students today are inundated with a lot of hype about renewable energy and the “energy transition.” Thus, I like to provide hard numbers and graphics that introduce them to energy realism -- realism that’s based on hard numbers and facts. And of course, I’m continuing to do short (about a minute) videos, which I’m posting on TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. It has been a fun challenge to condense ideas to about a minute. And I believe my delivery is gradually  getting better. (In my dotage, I'm still auditioning for my daughter. If Mary says it's good, we post it. If she says it stinks, we don't.) Enough on that. It’s getting late on a Friday afternoon, so I’ll cut to the chase. Four items today:  

• Quillette: Hyping the Energy Transition

• RCE: Politico Europe’s disgusting ode to Putin

• Björn Peters on Europe’s “policy made” energy crisis

• American Crows at Commons Ford 

The image of the American Crow above is from J.J. Audubon’s Birds of America. 

On Tuesday, Quillette published my piece on the energy transition, or rather, the lack of evidence for that transition. It’s a piece I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And yes, it runs counter to the narrative being pushed by big NGOs and lots of politicians. But I spend a lot of time looking at energy numbers and trends and it is readily apparent that renewables, despite the hype, aren’t displacing significant quantities of hydrocarbons. Instead, they are being added to the existing energy mix. I began the piece this way: 

• We are in the midst of what some analysts are calling the “biggest global energy crisis in history.” But amid the crisis, which threatens to leave the European economy in ruins, plunge tens of millions of people into energy poverty, and result in widespread food shortages, one phrase continues to be used with astonishing regularity: “energy transition.”

• Indeed, the phrase is constantly used by NGOs, politicians, and the media. On its website, Friends of the Earth Europe says that the “world needs a rapid exit from all fossil fuels... part of that picture is the energy transition. We need a new, just energy system that is 100% renewable.” 

• During negotiations over the Inflation Reduction Act -- the $700 billion spending bill that was signed into law by President Biden in August -- an article written by three Washington Post reporters said the measure faced early opposition because it would “accelerate the country’s energy transition too quickly.” In July, the Sierra Club, the biggest climate-activist group in America, declared that “The right way forward is to double-down on the clean energy transition.” Meanwhile, BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment firm, says it is “committed to an inclusive, equitable, and prosperous transition” to “net-zero emissions.”  

• But there’s a problem: despite more than $2 trillion in spending on renewables over the past three decades, there is scant evidence that an energy transition is underway.

I concluded:

• In addition, the Biden administration is getting more vocal in its support of nuclear energy. Last month, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the U.S. is committed to re-establish itself “as a leader in nuclear energy, non-proliferation, and climate action.”  Again, that’s welcome news. But I’ll end with another quote from Smil, the distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba who has written more than 40 books about energy and other topics and has frequently warned about the difficulty of quitting hydrocarbons. In 2016, he wrote, “There is no evidence that the global primary energy transition has been accelerating during the recent decades.” He continued, “Even the fastest conceivable adoption of non-carbon energies will fall far short from eliminating fossil fuel combustion by the middle of the 21st century.” 

• What was true six years ago is still true now. There’s a superabundance of talk about the  energy transition. But the BP numbers show that – so far – the energy transition is still more hype than reality.  

Again, here’s a link. Please share it. 
 

I used this slide in my presentation to Tom Russo's class at GWU on Wednesday

On Wednesday, Real Clear Energy published my piece on Politico Europe’s outrageous inclusion of Vladimir Putin on the publication’s “green” list. I began: 

• In more than 30 years as a reporter, I have witnessed plenty of media puffery and mendacity. But last week’s inclusion by Politico Europe of Russian President  Vladimir Putin on their “Green 28” listranks as one of the most odious and disgusting examples of media misconduct I have ever seen. 

• The piece claims Putin is “the invader making the EU green,” and that by invading Ukraine, Putin has “achieved something generations of green campaigners could not – clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security.” 

• Before going further, it’s essential to put Putin’s invasion of Ukraine into context. According to a report published last month by the United Nations, at least 5,700 civilians have been killed and some 8,300 others have been injured. On October 3, three analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that more than 7.5 million Ukrainian refugees “have been registered outside of Ukraine. Poland and Germany have received the most refugees  -- over one million each.” 

I concluded:

• Instead of recognizing the staggering human and economic harm that Putin’s savage invasion of Ukraine has caused, Politico Europe claims that the invasion was well timed, coming two years after the European Union laid the “foundations of its Green Deal program for zeroing out emissions by 2050. That meant the policy machinery for a total remake of the European energy economy was already moving. All it needed was a nudge.”

• A “nudge”? Really? No matter how many times I read those last few sentences, I can barely believe that any journalist could be so obtuse. It’s telling that the piece on Putin doesn’t have a byline. After all, who would want to put their name on a piece that reduces such a savage conflict to a “nudge”?  

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left thousands of civilians dead or injured and turned more than seven million Ukrainians into refugees. This week, the Russian military has been targeting civilians and purposely shelling the country’s electric grid as part of an effort to inflict as much suffering as it can on the people of Ukraine. And yet, Politico Europe concludes its piece on Putin by casting the war as positive because it will mean that the “EU becomes greener, faster, than before Russian troops marched across the Ukrainian border.”

• This is shameful and repulsive. Politico Europe owes the public an immediate apology and a retraction.    

Again, here’s a link. 

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Björn Peters, co-founder and CFO of Dual Fluid Energy      

Björn Peters is a German physicist and energy economist, as well as the co-founder and CFO of the nuclear-energy startup, Dual Fluid Energy. In this episode, Peters, who lives outside Frankfurt, explains why Europe’s energy crisis is all “policy made,” why it’s wrong to blame Russia for the crisis, and how the push for weather-dependent renewables in Europe became “a goal in itself.” Peters also talks about why the world is about to go from hundreds of nuclear reactors to “tens of thousands,”  why SMRs must be scaled up quickly, and why Germany’s energy mistakes are “making life difficult” for other countries in Europe. 
 
Peters and I were introduced by our mutual friend, Mark Nelson, who told me I should have him on the podcast. I’m glad I did. It was a great conversation. It also went long, about 81 minutes. The audio and transcript of the podcast are on my website and all major podcast outlets. And as always, it’s also on YouTube. 

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A pair of American Crows at Commons Ford Ranch    

On Wednesday, I revisited one of my favorite birding spots in Austin, Commons Ford Ranch Metropolitan Park. I got there in the late afternoon with my pal, Mark, who is new to birdwatching. There wasn’t much activity. Very few birds were moving. We caught glimpses of what may have been warblers, but couldn’t make a positive identification. We also saw a couple of Northern Cardinals. After taking a leisurely amble around the park, we headed back to the car. As we got closer to the 4Runner, we noticed a pair of American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) on a power line. (The image above is a snapshot from the pages of my 1960-vintage copy of A Field Guides To the Birds of Texas by Roger Tory Peterson.) I’d heard the Crows calling during our walk but never saw them. 
 
So given Mark’s interest and relative inexperience at birding, it was good to have a species that’s fairly easy to observe. Mark and I spent maybe two minutes having a good look at the two Crows before they flew away. We discussed the similarity to Common Ravens but decided that these birds were definitely Crows. The key marker for me was the size of the bill, which is much larger on Ravens than on Crows. Here's what Wikipedia says about the American Crow:

• a large passerine bird species of the family Corvidae. It is a common bird found throughout much of North America...From beak to tail, an American Crow measures 40–50 cm (16–20 in), almost half of which is tail. Mass varies from about 300 to 600 g (11 to 21 oz). Males tend to be larger than females. The most usual call is CaaW!-CaaW!-CaaW!. Plumage is all black, with iridescent feathers. It looks much like other all-black corvids. They can be distinguished from the Common Raven (C. corax) because American crows are smaller; from the Fish Crow (C. ossifragus) because American crows do not hunch and fluff their throat feathers when they call; and from the Carrion Crow (C. corone) by size, as the carrion crow is larger and of a stockier build. They are very intelligent, and adaptable to human environments... Crows have been killed in large numbers by humans, both for recreation and as part of organized campaigns of extermination. In Canada, American crows have no protections, aside from Quebec which bans their hunting during the nesting season.

• Laws on their hunting vary throughout the United States. New Jersey allows for a limited hunting season, unless if they are agricultural pests in which case they may be killed. Oklahoma allows hunting even during the nesting season. In the first half of the 20th century, state-sponsored campaigns dynamited roosting areas, taking large numbers of crows. A campaign in Oklahoma from 1934 to 1945 dynamited 3.8 million birds. The effect on populations was negligible and damage to agricultural crops did not decrease, and thus the campaign was halted as ineffective. In a study taking data from 1917 to 1999, intentional killings were the overwhelming cause of death for crows, accounting for 68% of all recovered bird bands...

I hope y'all have a good weekend. 

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