Electric cars to save the world? Think again

The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction

As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium required could become a major issue in its own right.

Here’s a thoroughly modern riddle: what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river? The answer is lithium – the reactive alkali metal that powers our phones, tablets, laptops and electric cars.

In May 2016, hundreds of protestors threw dead fish onto the streets of Tagong, a town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. They had plucked them from the waters of the Liqi river, where a toxic chemical leak from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine had wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem. … Continue Reading →

Visits: 273

Lancet blasted for ‘sacrificing the poor’

The GWPF gives us a blockbusting new report from Mikko Paunio, an adjunct professor in general epidemiology at the University of Helsinki. Professor Paunio blasts the Lancet for a “gross distortion” of public health science. What follows is the Executive Summary (emphasis added). You can get the full paper here (pdf, 30 pp, 986 KB). – RT

The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, recently published two long commissioned reports, timed to coincide with 23rd Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the third UN Environment Assembly. The journal’s aim was to boost climate change mitigation and enhance a ‘Pollution-free World’ initiative in the name of public health. This paper gives examples of the biased, misleading and false health-based arguments that are made in these reports. Continue Reading →

Visits: 387

Give ’em a taste of kiwi-climate holiday reading

In the Herald this morning Rachel Stewart, a rottweiler journalist and climate alarmist, complains about being on the receiving end of all kinds of flak drawn by her opposition to dairy farming pollution.

Now I shall tear her reasoning to shreds in an amazingly entertaining contribution to your summer holiday reading. Continue Reading →

Visits: 137

Fear of mercury poisoning

free mercury

Lovely mercury. Just don’t eat it.

The environmental debate is so corrupted by politics and propaganda that facts are often distorted and exaggeration of risk is commonplace.

The vicious war on hydrocarbon fuels is a good example where certain substances are labelled “poison” or “pollution” when associated with coal utilisation, but blithely ignored in other areas. Continue Reading →

Visits: 119

Let’s come clean on “dirty” coal

Viv Forbes sent me this a few weeks ago and it got buried under my to-do pile. I don’t know how NZ coal compares with the Australian version he mentions, but there are several coal specialists who visit here – perhaps one of them might enlighten us. – Richard Treadgold

We are winning the war on man-made global warming.

But about half of the population still think that the carbon tax will do some good. Why? Because they think it is all about cleaning up “dirty coal”.

The seeds of public concern were sewn with Penny Wong’s Machiavellian linking of “carbon” and “pollution”. She was assisted by the gross stupidity of the coal industry leadership in promoting nonsense like carbon sequestration as a “clean coal” option. The public naturally assumed “if they need to spend billions to produce clean coal, obviously we are now using dirty coal. Continue Reading →

Visits: 56

BREAKING NEWS: Crude oil is natural

Oil spill

But wait, there’s more: it’s biodegradable too

Let us remind ourselves that the crude oil we recover from under our feet is neither foreign nor man-made, nor is it artificial. It is produced entirely by Mother Nature who occasionally spills it. Frequently spills it.

Ecosystems around the world have been dealing with these spills for millions of years. Certain bacteria rise to the occasion by eating it, although creatures poorly equipped to handle the oil can be killed.

The Earth looks after itself remarkably well no matter how we might frighten ourselves by imagining that it doesn’t.

The web site of Greenpeace UK summarises their opposition to petroleum fuels on the grounds of the carbon dioxide “pollution”: Continue Reading →

Visits: 86

Taking the chill off the Arctic

burning ice

What a joke, doctor

At the Huffington Post, “field biologist” Dr Reese Halter talks of the “unprecedented warming of our globe” and claims that “missing” Arctic sea ice is a “wake-up call.” He says the news of Arctic sea ice reaching its lowest point since the start of satellite observations in 1972 (actually 1979) is “outright heartbreaking.”

The heartbroken biologist meanders through observations on the climate, economics and some waffling, brainlessly misleading arguments against climatic scepticism. Continue Reading →

Visits: 45

Obama — more ignorant than we thought

President Obama is charming, credible and he fronts well, but he just revealed some of what truly lies within. It was a disturbing insight and I hope his advisors can amend his ignorance.

It was just last Tuesday — Barack Obama, at a White House press conference, was urging the House of Representatives to pass the Waxman-Markey bill, properly known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, when he let slip that he doesn’t know what carbon dioxide is. Continue Reading →

Visits: 71

Nobody really wants a new climate treaty

So, it’s official: the possibility of a replacement being hammered out for the Kyoto Treaty now appears remote.

It will be “physically impossible” to have a detailed deal to tackle climate change by this December’s summit in Copenhagen, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said on Wednesday in Bonn.

The “four tough nuts”, as he termed them, were proving extremely difficult to crack because, he said, the “delivery on four political essentials”, on which success in Copenhagen would depend, was turning out to be “impossible”. Continue Reading →

Visits: 101

Huge increase in the minuscule is still tiny

Last Wednesday the NZ Herald tried to shame New Zealand into more grown-up climate behaviour.

A body grandly known as the UN Climate Change Secretariat, a moniker which smoothly conveys an image of sponging up large amounts of cash for no earthly good, had just released figures showing “the growth in New Zealand’s emissions between 1990 and 2006 to be among the worst in the world’s industrialised nations.” Continue Reading →

Visits: 335

Shock! Horror! CO2 feeds us!

Written for TOOL Magazine, August 2008

Once upon a time, street-corner zealots shouting “the end is nigh” and warning us to abandon our sins did it for religious reasons. These days, zealots shout the same message with the same warning about sinning, but they do it for climatic reasons. Continue Reading →

Visits: 114

Why pick on carbon dioxide?

Environmentalists have educated society first to notice, then to condemn and finally to clean up pollution of air, water and land. But now activists focus on carbon dioxide because it warms the planet. We have been induced to fear what we actually prefer.

Improvements have been achieved over many decades, and it is wonderful that, for example, the United States pollutes a lot less than it used to, has a greater area in forests now than at the end of the 19th century and enjoys cleaner rivers, like many of the developed nations, including New Zealand. Continue Reading →

Visits: 100