A review of recent public opinion polls reveals that the public, when asked only about climate change, will agree overall that it’s a serious problem that demands action. When asked to rank climate change against other concerns, however, it comes well down the list. The implication is that the public really isn’t worried about climate change. Certainly the high level of public support that would be needed to implement an aggressive and highly disruptive transition to low-carbon energy, such as that called for by the Paris Agreement, does not exist. The climate change lobby is in fact losing the public support battle.
As illustrated in the inset, politicians pay a lot more attention to the results of climate change opinion polls than they do to climate change science. And since politicians are responsible for setting climate change policy a review of what climate change polls tell them becomes important. In this post I review the results of climate change polls from four countries – the US, the UK, Canada and Australia – along with two global polls. We begin with the global polls.
The Pew global poll
This poll was conducted in 2015 by the Pew Research Center, and republished in April this year. Responses were received from 43,435 people in 40 countries. The three main questions posed and the responses to them are summarized below:
Q32. In your view, is global climate change a very serious problem, somewhat serious, not too serious or not a problem?
Majorities in all 40 nations polled say climate change is a serious problem, and a global median of 54% believe it is a very serious problem.
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In 3Q 2018 Gorona del Viento (GdV) supplied 74.2 % of El Hierro’s electricity (95.4% in July) and 17.1% of its total energy consumption, up from 64.2% % and 14.8% in 2Q 2018. Since project startup in June 2015 GdV has supplied 46.5% of El Hierro’s electricity and 10.7% of its energy. In 3Q 2018 GdV supplied 100% of El Hierro’s electricity for a total of 45.6 days, with 18 days of continuous 100% generation during a sustained period of high winds from July 15 to August 1. Hydro continued to underperform, contributing only 6.1% of total 3Q generation. According to GdV the plant is now performing at its optimum level but is still not capable of supplying El Hierro with 100% renewable electricity – an admission of failure. Adding solar panels, enlarging the lower reservoir and EV storage are among the options now being considered.
The California legislature just passed Assembly Bill 100 (AB100), which according to the inset calls for “100% clean energy by 2045”. The brief review presented in this post shows that AB100, which targets electricity, not energy, will cut California’s greenhouse gas emissions by only about 16% even in the unlikely event its target is met. Its main impact will be to add to the regulatory overload from which California’s electricity providers already suffer. The fact that the bill was passed at all indicates that California legislators, as well as being unable to tell the difference between megawatts and megawatt-hours, are also unable to tell the difference between electricity and energy.
Growth in Li-ion batteries depends on a number of imponderables, such as how rapidly the world converts to electric vehicles, how quickly battery manufacturing capacity can be ramped up and where the electricity to power millions of EVs will come from. This post ignores these issues, concentrating instead on the question of whether the mining sector can increase production of the metals and minerals needed to support a high-battery-growth scenario without running out of reserves. The data are not good enough to reach a firm conclusion, but the main uncertainty seems to be whether cobalt production from the Congo, which presently supplies over half of global demand, can be relied on. Lithium and cobalt reserves will not be exhausted in the time frame considered (out to 2030) but will be close to it if no additional reserves are discovered. (Inset, lithium mine in Chile).
More than 35,000 homes and 600 businesses in Scotland have installed solar PV panels, but only because of lavish government subsidies. Now that these subsidies are being discontinued the question becomes whether solar PV in Scotland can stand on its own two feet. The data from operating PV arrays presented in this post show that the answer is a resounding “no”. With capacity factors of only 8-9% and seasonal generation ranges exceeding a factor of twelve, Scotland is in fact one of the worst places in Europe for solar, despite what its supporters claim.
This week’s lead story features YouTube, which is fighting what it considers to be the misinformation on videos posted by global warming dissenters with fact-checking boxes (inset), with the data sourced from Wikipedia. We continue with Saudi Arabia’s oil production – is it up or down?; the Saudi/Canada standoff; US LNG and Nord Stream 2; coal in Poland and China; nuclear in France and India; the Laos hydro dam collapse; Australia’s national energy guarantee; the hydrogen-to-ammonia “breakthrough”; renewables to power Blockchain; renewables and the UK capacity market; subsidies for UK SMRs; climate change to cause more windless periods and how to save the planet – give up meat.
Finally we have an article from a respected academic institution that highlights the prohibitive costs of going renewable with Li-ion battery storage backup. This article has received minimal publicity on the web, so here we give it a little more by making it our feature story. Then on to OPEC; the oil tanker crisis; Kuwait fracks in Canada; Azerbaijan gas; Rio Tinto exits coal; Russia fuels its offshore nuclear plant; Moorside nuclear in doubt; blackouts in South Africa; Australia’s National Energy Guarantee; peaking plants in Europe; an “alarming collapse” in UK renewable investment; 5,000 UK churches go renewable and how heatwaves increase deaths in UK but decrease them in Spain.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) recently published its 2018 inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to which the state achieved its goal of cutting GHG emissions below 1990 levels in 2016, four years in advance of the 2020 target date*. Gov. Jerry Brown claims that this proves that the state’s anti-carbon laws and regulations are “succeeding”, but are they really? Here we take a brief look at CARB’s data, concluding a) that success has not yet been achieved and b) that California’s long-term emissions targets remain as elusive as ever.
The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) was launched by then-chancellor George Osborne in October 2015 to “think dispassionately and independently about Britain’s long-term infrastructure needs in areas like transport, energy, communication, flood defence and the like.” Well, the NIC has now thought dispassionately and independently about energy and has concluded that the UK can meet its 2050 decarbonization goals with either a mostly nuclear or mostly renewable generation mix, but that “wind and solar could deliver the same generating capacity as nuclear for the same price, and would be a better choice because there was less risk”. Here we take a brief look at this renewables-beats-nuclear option to see whether it might work.
As expected, the £1.3 billion Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project was finally rejected by the UK government a few days ago. The question, however, is not why the project was rejected, but how it got this far in the first place. As reviewer 
The just-issued 
BP and the International Energy Agency (IEA) measure the contribution of renewables to the global energy mix in terms of primary energy consumed while the World Bank estimates it in terms of final energy consumed. All three give different results, with BP estimating a total renewables contribution of 9.5% in 2015 compared to IEA’s 13.7% and the World Bank’s 18.1%. The BP/IEA differences become larger when contributions are segregated by source (BP estimates almost three times as much energy from hydro as as IEA and IEA estimates four times as much energy from “other renewables” as BP). This post documents these discrepancies while making no attempt to say who is right and who is wrong – that would have to be the subject of another post. But it does raise the question of whether we really know how large a contribution renewables are making to the world’s energy mix.
On April 17, 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown 
Like a number of other remote island communities, The Cook Islands have decided to get rid of expensive diesel power and go to 100% solar within the next few years. To do this they are constructing solar arrays backed up with small amounts of Li-ion battery storage which they believe will overcome the solar intermittency problem. Once again, however, the planners have failed to recognize the prohibitive amounts of battery storage that will be required, and their plans are doomed to fail as a result. The only approach that has any chance of succeeding is to minimize storage requirements by installing far more solar capacity than is needed to meet demand (“overgeneration”), but this approach has problems of its own. (Inset- Rarotonga, the largest and most populous of the Cook Islands).
Have investors lost interest in “clean energy”?
A year ago, using data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), I put up a post discussing global “clean energy” investment between 1Q 2005 and 2Q 2017. BNEF has now published a new report adding a year of data through 2Q 2018 along with some more detailed graphics. This post reproduces some of the more interesting ones, with an emphasis on Europe.
First we will deal with the question of the inadequacy of clean energy funding. According to the BP Statistical Review global electricity demand in 2017 was 621 TWh higher than in 2016, an increase of 2.5%. Table 1 shows how this added demand was filled:
*Wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, waste, biofuels etc.
To decarbonize the world’s electricity sector and to meet emissions targets enough renewable generation must be added each year a) to cover increased global demand and b) to replace a significant amount of fossil fuel generation. Table 1, however, shows that the 307 TWh of renewable generation added in 2017 was enough to fill only about half of the increase in global demand.
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