The problem that John Droz alludes to, quite correctly is that coal-fired plants have a life expectancy of 20 to 40 years, while the false assumption is that wind turbines will have a life of 20 years as well.

What comes into the picture there is that the realistic levelized cost for wind turbines per kWh is much higher than the estimated cost figure used to promote them, primarily because the average life expectancy of wind turbines is much less then 20 years (more realistically 10 to 15 years).

On the other hand, coal-fired plants are being penalized in the cost calculations pertaining to them. A CO2 fee of $15 per ton of CO2 produced is being worked into the price of coal-fired generation, arbitrarily and for no logical reason other than that coal-fired generation needs to be made to look more expensive than it is.

Wikipedia has an article on that, Read it, and you will see how those two biases work in opposite way to make coal look less profitable and wind more so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#US_Department_of_Energy_estimates

CO2 is not a pollutant, it is a natural fertilizer. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric levels of CO2 cause any sort of problems, least of all global calamities; and that is aside from the fact that the total annual CO2 emissions from all man-made sources in the world only amount to 3.5 percent of total annual CO2 emissions. The other 96.5 percent of CO2 emissions come from natural sources. No amount of regulating and penalizing coal-fired power generating plants out of existence will make a dent into those proportions of natural to man-made emissions.

Aside from all of that, here in Alberta the price of electric energy fed into the transmission network floats nicely around 2.3 to 3.5 cents per kWh, and the generating companies make a handy profit on that, while shortages of wind power generation during times the wind doesn’t blow or blows too hard drive the price of electric energy to be fed into the transmission grid up to usually around $1.00 per kWh. Believe it or not, but you as the end consumer do pay for that. The price for that is averaged out through the rate you are being charged. In that fashion you pay without knowing a thing about it.

The difference between what the price is at the generating plant and what you see on your bill is for delivery, distribution, billing, profit margins for everyone bringing it to you, and, of course, the lion’s share of that difference is for taxes.

There you go, and you can have a nice feeling out of it all for saving the planet, even though no one can prove to you how making things much more expensive for you will save a planet that is doing quite well without that particular sort of attempt to save it from something that is not a problem. Still, if you are being made to pay for it through your nose, it must be good, right? (And so they tell you.)

That is truly surprising, because there is no doubt in my mind that the information at this blog, a blog that focuses on environmental issues affecting Lamont County in Alberta, Canada, is far more suitable for children than is some of the stuff they get to see on TV that is not even rated PG. And consider that until today, the f-word (feminism, that is) had been mention[ed] on this blog only one single time in a total of 453 articles and 58 comments.

Not a single individual, ever, whether from Lamont County or elsewhere has ever spoken or written a singe word of complaint to my wife or me about the blog at http://lce.foc.ca/

Go figure.

Perhaps the filtering/blocking is being done because the blog presents objective scientific facts and debunks some propaganda but man-oh-man, that is censorship in action!

I was born into and grew up in a totalitarian regime, the Hitler regime. I left Germany in 1962 with my family to spare my children the risk of enduring what my first wife, I, and our families of origin had had to endure. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would ever encounter such censorship in a free democratic country, but not just that.

The censorship is being imposed by multinational corporations of whom one, O2, has not even a presence in Canada, while the other, Symantec, is not a Canadian corporation and only has here what should be considered offices with sales reps.

Well, I guess that I must show that this blog, too, received the “O2/Symantec Recognition Award”. I’ll get to work on that right away. I would not want to waste a minute of being able to bask in the glory of that.

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi: The Whole CO2 “Argument Is Tiresome And Absurd…Warmists Living In A Fantasy World”

By P Gosselin on 7. April 2013

Joe Bastardi of weatherbell.com/ kindly took the time to write a comment, and so I think it deserves being upgraded to a post. It’s one whole semester of meteorology summed up (edited by PG)!

“Here’s the problem globally: We continue to dwell on temperatures in the Arctic and ignore the fact that it’s a natural cyclical distortion because the planet wobbles on its axis and has much more water in the southern hemisphere, and more land in the north. So there is an eternal search for a balance that can never be attained. It can only go back and forth. Think about it….” See the whole story

So, there is someone else who says in essence that we should not waste any money on trying to control CO2, that to do so is futile. There is far too much of it, and what Canada wants to capture and store, a tiny fraction of one percent of the 3.5 percent that are man-made, annually, won’t make a difference anyway, while no one else is planning to do anything comparable. It’s $1.3 billion wasted. A lot of fixes to the health-care system could be done with that.

The project is being mostly, two-thirds, taxpayer-funded; $745 million out of provincial and $120 million out of federal coffers. (See, “Carbon capture and storage project goes modular,” Edmonton Journal, April 5, 2013, p. D2; on-line version at http://www.edmontonjournal.com/search/Canada+wins+module+building+contract+Shell+Quest+carbon+capture+storage+project/8196912/story.html )

It is a useless but expensive exercise. First of all, it is not carbon but carbon-dioxide that is being captured and sequestered. Secondly, it will do virtually nothing (at least not anything that can ever be measured) to alleviate global warming (or climate change, as it is now called).

However, it is a nice but very expensive gesture for appeasing the Greens, showing them that the Albert Government under Allison Redford, with help from the federal government under Stephen Harper, spares no expense in implementing politically correct, taxpayer-funded solutions for “saving the planet”.

Other than that, CO2 is a natural fertilizer that has demonstrably contributed much to a substantial greening of the planet during the past 30 years. It seems that Shell, the Alberta government and the Canadian federal government don’t really like the planet all that much.

Still, here is a question that no one seems to have addressed as of now. Can we truly afford to remove massive amounts of oxygen from the air and pump them underground, to remove them from the atmosphere forever? Carbon-dioxide stands for CO2, for two molecules of oxygen for every molecule of carbon that is being blown down Mother Earth’s derriere.

Aside from all of that, have none of the people who so liberally spend our hard-earned dollars in the pursuit of useless efforts not heard yet that the global average temperature trend has been at a standstill for 16 years now? That is even though the puny 3.5 percent of man-made contributions to global annual CO2 emissions are still increasing, year after year. Yes, that is right. 96.5 percent of annual CO2 emissions come from natural sources, and there is nothing that Shell or anyone else can do about it.

That is not all. Higher taxes and higher costs of electric energy drive up the cost of mining, manufacturing, retailing and everything else involved to bring you consumer goods and services. The end consumers, and you are one of them, pay for all of the cost increases due to carbon capture and storage, including all of the additional profit margins and taxes that are being charged over and above that at all of the intermediate stages in the provisioning process of consumer goods and services.

Prof. Bob Carter states in an inerview by Vicky Kerrigan of ABC Darwin that there has been no measurable impact on global warming through man’s activities and that there has been no measurable global warming since 1998.

Change the world anyway

Oct 05, 2011 , 2:48 PM by Vicki Kerrigan

http://blogs.abc.net.au/nt/2011/10/change-the-world-anyway.html

To ease the increasing overcrowding in British jails following the loss of the American Colonies in the American War of Independence, the British established a new penal colony, which was the first European settlement in Australia, at Sydney Cove in January 1788. Captain James Cook had charted the east coast of the Australian continent in 1770. On 13 May 1787, the ‘First Fleet’ of eleven ships commenced a historic journey from Portsmouth, England to establish the first European settlement in Australia of 1,030 people including 736 convicts, livestock, grains, seeds, young plants and two years store of supplies.
They arrived on 19 January 1788 in Botany Bay, Australia. During the eight month journey: 104, 108

* The Fleet encountered squally tropical humid weather after passing the Equator into the Southern Hemisphere, resulting in a convict woman being crushed to death and one man being thrown overboard and drowned.

* After leaving Cape Town, South Africa on 13 November, the ships were blown off course in the Roaring Forties [below 40 degrees latitude south].

* Ferocious weather of violent summer storms of very strong gales and heavy seas battered the Fleet in the Southern Ocean between November and December 1787. The winds were so strong that they lost a topsail in December.

* Chilly temperatures as cold as England in December were recorded close to Christmas 1787 [the Southern Hemisphere’s summer].

* The Fleet was forced to slow down New Year’s Day when they encountered the strongest winds of the journey losing one man overboard and injuring the cattle on board.

* In the first week of January 1788, the Fleet sails past the southeast corner of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), into a violent thunderstorm and observe small patches of snow along the coastline during the height of summer.

* Sailing north up the coast of New South Wales against strong headwinds, many ships of the Fleet and its cargo of precious seedlings, were damaged by sudden squall of wind and very high seas in a severe storm on 10 January 1788. The squall was strong enough to split the mainsail on one ship and another ship lost its main yard carried away in the slings.

* Between 24 and 26 January 1788, a strong wind and huge seas buffeted ships sailing out of Botany Bay to the more suitable location of Port Jackson, where on 26 January 1788, a Union Jack flag, was planted to celebrate the beginning of European settlement in Australia.

(Ibid. p. 298)

__________

1789 A.D. – 1791 A.D. Australia.
During 1789-91, there was a drought in New South Wales, Australia.101

No rain is said to have fallen at Sydney, Australia between June to November 1790 and all the grass was dried up.103

In January and February 1791, there were several weeks of excessive heat, hot winds, birds dropped dead from trees and everything burnt up, streams of water supplying Sydney, Australia nearly dried up.103

On 27 December 1790, the temperature in Sydney, Australia reached 102° F (38.9° C) in the shade. Then on 10 and 11 January 1791, the temperature in Sydney reached 105° F (40.6° C). Great heat was experienced. In January 1791, the settlement was visited by myriads of flying foxes and birds that dropped from the trees dead due to the extreme heat. The heat continued into February. On February 12, the country around Rose Hill and Parramatta was on fire for many miles.103

On 10 and 11 February 1791 the temperature at Sydney, Australia, stood in the shade at 105° F (40.6° C).

The heat was so excessive at Parramatta, made worse by the bush fires, that immense numbers of the large fox-bats were seen to drop from the trees into the water, and many dropped dead on the wing. At Sydney about the harbor in many places the ground was found covered with small birds, some dead, others gasping for water. At Parramatta, an officer of the relief guard left the beat to find a drink of water, he had to walk several miles in a dry watercourse before he found it, many birds dropping dead at his feet.

The wind was northwest, and burned up everything before it. Persons whose business obliged them to go out declared that it was impossible to turn the face for five minutes to the wind.103
(Ibid. p 304)

_______________

However, I will not bother to quote more of such instances of extreme weather in Australia. Look for yourself on these pages: 309 (for the year 1792), 312 (for the year 1793), 314 (1795), 315 (1796 & 1797), 316 (1798-99), 317 (1796-97) and many more pages on which Australian weather extremes are shown.

Make it easier for yourself to find such pages. Search the document for “Australia”. There is not enough space here to quote all of the extremes shown for Australia. However, there is no doubt in my mind that ultimately none of them will prove to be as expensive and as economically devastating as will be the proposed Australian carbon tax.

Here is a link to a large slide show that was recently delivered in Australia to dampen the economy-breaking enthusiasm for the political but totally non-scientific craze of climate alarmisms designed to suck money out of our pockets: “A Cool Look at Global Warming“.

“The Deadly Cost of Malaria —And Not Using DDT,” by Marjorie Mazel Hecht
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Fall_2010/Books_Malaria.pdf

A review of, “Three Billion And Counting Los Angeles,” Frogbite Productions, 2010, DVD, 142 min.
Check http://www.threebillionandcounting.com for availability