Tag Archives: climate hysteric

COP 28: Climate Hysteric Peter Kalmus Has the Sads

From Watts Up With That?

In the latest episode of what could be mistaken for a satirical comedy, Dr. Peter Kalmus, a self-proclaimed climate activist and NASA scientist, has expressed his dismay over the recent COP28 summit. His opinion piece, “COP Out: Wrapping Up a Useless Climate Summit That Should Fool Nobody,” reads like a script from a dystopian drama where the villains are fossil fuels, and the heroes are, well, apparently not the attendees of COP28.

Kalmus paints a picture of COP28 as a grand assembly of the world’s elite, jetting in on their private planes to a petrostate, to discuss the perils of the very industry that fueled their arrival. The irony is so thick here that one could cut it with a knife. The summit, according to Kalmus, was nothing more than a stage for the fossil fuel industry to make “dirty side deals”.

Some wealthy humans flew on private jets to the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate, for a two-week meeting. Many of these humans work for the fossil fuel industry. The petrostate leveraged its host status for dirty side deals to expand fossil fuels. There was a session on sustainable megayacht ownership.

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/cop-out-wrapping-up-a-useless-climate-summit-that-should-fool-nobody-opinion/ar-AA1lHi6U?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=ad9c0e089b12489a875e5a576bcb4cf5&ei=24

The appointment of Sultan al-Jaber, a fossil fuel CEO, as the presiding official of a climate summit is akin to putting a fox in charge of the henhouse, suggests Kalmus. His portrayal of al-Jaber’s promises to continue investing in oil and expanding fossil fuels post-summit paints a picture of a mustache-twirling villain, gleefully plotting the world’s demise.

The presiding official was a fossil fuel CEO, Sultan al-Jaber, who, days earlier, had said some anti-science, denialist garbage-words. Two days after the meeting ended, he promised that his oil corporation will continue investing in oil and expanding fossil fuels. OPEC, in a joint statement with the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, congratulated the UAE on the “positive outcome” for the fossil fuel industry.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/cop-out-wrapping-up-a-useless-climate-summit-that-should-fool-nobody-opinion/ar-AA1lHi6U?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=ad9c0e089b12489a875e5a576bcb4cf5&ei=24

Kalmus doesn’t hold back in his apocalyptic vision of a world ravaged by global heating, with floods, fires, and broken systems. The fossil fuel industry and industrial animal agriculture are the chief architects of this impending doom. One might expect a superhero to swoop in any moment now to save the day, but alas, this is the real world, and Kalmus seems to believe we’re fresh out of caped crusaders.

We are all in grave danger from global heating, which appears to be accelerating, is irreversible, and is driving all the flooding and heat and fires. It’s caused almost entirely by the fossil fuel industry, with industrial animal agriculture in second place.

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/cop-out-wrapping-up-a-useless-climate-summit-that-should-fool-nobody-opinion/ar-AA1lHi6U?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=ad9c0e089b12489a875e5a576bcb4cf5&ei=24

The COP28’s 21-page “global stocktake” is ridiculed as too little, too late. Kalmus is appalled that it took thirty years just to mention fossil fuels in a COP decision text. The stocktake’s call for transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems is dismissed as nonbinding, unquantitative, and insincere. It’s as if Kalmus expected a binding global treaty to be signed then and there, magically solving all climate issues.

The wealthy fossil-fuel-industry-influenced humans at COP28 produced 21 pages called the “global stocktake.” The stocktake mentions “fossil fuels” once, on page 4. People who wish to argue that COP28 wasn’t a complete failure have been calling this “historic.” And technically it is, because fossil fuels have never been mentioned in a COP decision text.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/cop-out-wrapping-up-a-useless-climate-summit-that-should-fool-nobody-opinion/ar-AA1lHi6U?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=ad9c0e089b12489a875e5a576bcb4cf5&ei=24

The loss and damage pledges from rich nations, amounting to $700 million, are scoffed at as grossly inadequate. Kalmus compares the United States’ pledge of less than $20 million to the budget of an average high school, highlighting the disparity between the scale of the problem and the response.

In Kalmus’s eyes, COP28 was nothing short of a spectacular failure, a charade that serves only to perpetuate the status quo. He calls for a new international summit and fossil fuel treaty system, free from the influence of the fossil fuel industry. His solution? A stronger climate movement and a ban on the fossil fuel industry from negotiations.

We need to start by agreeing that COP28, like other COPs, was a complete failure. Claiming that it was somehow not a failure, clinging to bits of false hope, generates a powerful illusion that business as usual can continue. We’ve been doing this for 30 years now. The possibility of keeping heating to under 1.5 degrees C has been squandered. If we cling to false hope that it’s working, we will keep doing it, year after year, making no progress. This is what the fossil fuel industry wants; this is how we lose a planet.

We then need to establish an international summit and fossil fuel treaty system that isn’t broken under the weight of fossil fuel industry corruption. To do this, we need to ban the fossil fuel industry from the negotiations, and doing this will require a stronger climate movement. Every single one of us can work, in our own way, to make the movement stronger. Be a climate activist: join with other climate activists—we’re not hard to find—and take risks. It’s up to us.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/cop-out-wrapping-up-a-useless-climate-summit-that-should-fool-nobody-opinion/ar-AA1lHi6U?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=ad9c0e089b12489a875e5a576bcb4cf5&ei=24

Lab-Grown Meat Suffers Significant Setback With Shocking New Scientific Findings

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Lab grown cultured meat concept for artificial in vitro cell culture meat production with frozen packed raw beef meat with made up red label

Earlier this year, the Grocery Gazette reported that the UK was set to be a world-leading developer of lab-grown meat. In the recent past, Guardian climate hysteric George Monbiot claimed lab-grown food “will soon destroy farming – and save the planet”. Alas, such boosterism is being challenged by hard facts. Lab-grown meat is up to 25 times worse for the environment since it needs ‘pharmaceutical-grade’ production to make it fit for human consumption. In particular, there is a need to remove endotoxin from the cultured mix, a substance that in concentrations as low as one billionth of a gram per millilitrie can reduce human IVF pregnancy success rate by up to four fold.

These are the startling conclusions of ground-breaking work recently published by a group of chemists and food scientists from the University of California. It turns out that ‘pharma to food’ production is a significant technological challenge. The major problem with lab meat is that it uses growth organisms that have to be highly purified to help animal cells multiply. Compared with environmental savings on land, water and greenhouses gases, the whole bio-process is noted to be “orders of magnitude” higher than rearing the actual animal.

“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said co-author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. The study found that even across scenarios using lower pharma standards, efficient beef production outperforms cultured meat within a range from four to 25 times. This suggests that investment to advance more ‘climate-friendly’ beef production may yield greater reductions in emissions.

The route to New Zero is littered with improbable technologies that promise much – and give endless opportunities for virtue signalling – but deliver little. While many countries press ahead with plans to destroy conventional animal husbandry, the options for new ways of actually feeding populations look thin on the ground. To be fair to Monbiot, he has picked up on the problems of lab meat, noting in a recent blog post that “the more I’ve read about cultured meat and fish, and the more I’ve come to appreciate the phenomenal complexities involved… the more I doubt this vision will come to pass”. Always the worrier, Monbiot asks, “How can mass starvation best be averted”? Not removing the 337.18 million tonnes of global meat production in favour of flaky factory solutions might be a start.

The California study could throw a major stick into the spokes of the lab-grown meat bandwagon, which to date has had a largely uncritical mainstream media ride. Grocery Gazette’s cheer-leading report noted that the sector was predicted to “rapidly increase its market share within the food industry”. Research was quoted suggesting cell cultured meat was expected to make up almost quarter of global meat consumption by 2035.

The authors in California acknowledge that lab-grown meat ventures have attracted around $2 billion of investment to date. Early reports on feasibility were bullish with some predicting a 60-70% displacement of beef by 2030-2040. But of late, sentiment has waned with more conservative estimates noting a 0.5% share of meat products by 2030. As noted, the huge problem in producing lab meat is the presence of endotoxin which is said have a variety of side effects including harm to in vitro fertilisation. In pharmaceutical labs, animal cell culture is traditional done with endotoxin having been removed. There are many ways to remove the unwanted substance, but the use of these refinement methods “contributes significantly to the economic and environmental costs associated with pharmaceutical products since they are both energy and resource intensive”.

The study also highlights concerns about past scientific consideration of lab-grown meat. There is said to be “high levels of uncertainty in their results and the lack of accounting for endotoxin removal”. It is further noted that despite researchers “clearly reporting high levels of uncertainty”, the results were often cited as clear evidence for the sustainability of lab-grown meat.

So a much-touted green Frankenstein food solution – arguably to a problem only promoted in alarmist circles – looks to be biting the dust, sweeping away a billion or two of credulous capital in the process. As the authors note, investing in scaling this technology “before solving key issues like developing an environmentally friendly method for endotoxin removal… would be counter to the environmental goals which this sector has espoused”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.