Get Real Alliance

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The GET REAL Alliance is a young advocacy group that is doing research on climate issues, providing insight and hoping to influence the climate debate towards a better and more positive solution.  We are glad you have found us but to be effective we need you to both signup on our website and follow us on social media.  Numbers matter in so many ways for an advocacy group.  We hope you will find our distinctive realistic look at climate and related issues compelling.  We offer a better way to prepare for the future than those who just advocate for cutting man’s emissions with no attempt to make the environment better.  By signing up on the website you will be on our mailing list and get newsletters and notification when the very disruptive book: GET REAL: A Positive solution to climate is out.  Believe it or not it lays out how America and the World can be carbon negative in just a few years while we still use oil and gas.  IF you are somewhat skeptical about the seriousness of the climate change issue rest assured our program actually solves other problems that are beyond dispute.  These include growing deserts, soil loss, declining nutrition and hunger.
 
Much of the answer lies beneath our feet in the soil.  We can see life on top of the land but fail to realize that it represents less than 10% of life on earth with the vast majority being in the soil.  The sad fact is that soil life is actually at a low level due to the demineralized nature of much soil along with man’s use of toxic chemicals in many areas.  The base of the soil life food chain is rock nutrients and carbohydrates from plant roots.  Adding needed rock nutrients to the soil boosts soil life if it is not killed by man.  You can learn more about remineralization at http://www.remineralize.org and please sign up for their newsletter and donate to them.  Remineralization is a key strategy to make the world carbon negative as it is proven to make the plants and soil sequester more carbon.  You can learn a lot more by being involved with us in promoting basalt rock dust remineralization.  Imagine a world where the nutrition of abundant food is better than the past instead of being drastically lower in key nutrients as it is today. 
 
Help us produce position papers and spread the word about our positive viewpoint by signing up, joining and ideally donating to proclaim the good news. Numbers count and will help us with donors who like to see growing support.  We are doomed to a dark future if current climate proposals are adopted which do nothing positive about saving the soil and only slow the rise of carbon dioxide.  This year we see what decades of bad forest management have wrought while some politicians carry on about climate change being responsible.  The GET REAL alliance advocates for a active bold program of restoring forests to health thru remineralization and removal of dead wood.  We need realism and that is what the words GET REAL advocate!!!  Join us in our fight.
 

Great Book to Get and Read

Michael Shellenberger

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I have been greatly enlightened by many books that give me a great perspective on issues.  I strongly recommend this book for its insights and analysis.  Written by a long time environmentalist who by research became aware that the current prescriptions for climate change are actually bad for the environment and humanity, this is a need to read.  

Here is a writeup about the book from the Environmental progress website.

Apocalypse Never may be the most important book on the environment ever written.”

— Tom Wigley, climate scientist, University of Adelaide, former senior scientist National Center for Atmospheric Research

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.

But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.

Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.

Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. Those who raise the alarm about food shortages oppose the expansion of fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors in poor nations. Those who raise the alarm about deforestation oppose concentrating agriculture. And those who raise the alarm about climate change oppose the two technologies that have most reduced emissions, natural gas and nuclear.

What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

Connect with Michael on Twitter @ShellenbergerMD

Misunderstanding of Climate Change and Bad Policies Being Proposed

Insights with David

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David talks about the misunderstanding of climate change and some of the bad policies being proposed

David Munson goes into detail and discusses the current climate crisis we’re facing. He also shares his concerns regarding the bad policies put in place, which David believes is due to the misunderstanding of the climate change issues.

Why California’s Climate Policies Are Causing Electricity Blackouts

California blackouts due to climate policy

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Millions of Californians were denied electrical power and thus air conditioning during a heatwave, raising the risk of heatstroke and death, particularly among the elderly and sick. 

The blackouts come at a time when people, particularly the elderly, are forced to remain indoors due to Covid-19.

At first, the state’s electrical grid operator last night asked customers to voluntarily reduce electricity use. But after power reserves fell to dangerous levels it declared a “Stage 3 emergency” cutting off power to people across the state at 6:30 pm.

The immediate reason for the black-outs was the failure of a 500-megawatt power plant and an out-of-service 750-megawatt unit not being available. “There is nothing nefarious going on here,” said a spokeswoman for California Independent System Operator (CAISO). “We are just trying to run the grid.” 

But the underlying reasons that California is experiencing rolling black-outs for the second time in less than a year stem from the state’s climate policies, which California policymakers have justified as necessary to prevent deaths from heatwaves. 

In October, Pacific Gas and Electric cut off power to homes across California to avoid starting forest fires. The utility and California’s leaders had over the previous decade diverted billions meant for grid maintenance to renewables. 

And yesterday, California had to impose rolling blackouts because it had failed to maintain sufficient reliable power from natural gas and nuclear plants, or pay in advance for enough guaranteed electricity imports from other states.

It may be that California’s utilities and their regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission, which is also controlled by Gov. Newsom, didn’t want to spend the extra money to guarantee the additional electricity out of fears of raising California’s electricity prices even more than they had already raised them.

California saw its electricity prices rise six times more than the rest of the United States from 2011 to 2019, due to its huge expansion of renewables. Republicans in the U.S. Congress point to that massive increase to challenge justifications by Democrats to spend $2 trillion on renewables in the name of climate change.

Even though the cost of solar panels declined dramatically between 2011 and 2019, their unreliable and weather-dependent nature meant that they imposed large new costs in the form of storage and transmission to keep electricity as reliable. California’s solar panels and farms were all turning off as the blackouts began, with no help available from the states to the East already in nightfall.

Electricity from solar goes away at the very moment when the demand for electricity rises. “The peak demand was steady in late hours,” said the spokesperson for CAISO, which is controlled by Gov. Gavin Newsom, “and we had thousands of megawatts of solar reducing their output as the sunset.”

The two blackouts in less than a year are strong evidence that the tens of billions that Californians have spent on renewables come with high human, economic, and environmental costs.

Last December, a report by done for PG&E concludedthat the utility’s customers could see blackouts double over the next 15 years and quadruple over the next 30.

California’s anti-nuclear policies also contributed to the blackouts. In 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown forced a nuclear power plant, San Onofre, in southern California to close.

Had San Onofre still been operating, there almost certainly would not have been blackouts on Friday as the reserve margin would have been significantly larger. The capacity of San Onofre was double that of the lost generation capacity that triggered the blackout.

California’s current and former large nuclear plants are located on the coast, which allows for their electricity to travel shorter distances, and through less-constrained transmission lines than the state’s industrial solar farms, to get to the coastal cities where electricity is in highest demand.

There has been very little electricity from wind during the summer heatwave in California and the broader western U.S., further driving up demand. In fact, the same weather pattern, a stable high-pressure bubble, is the cause of heatwaves, since it brought very low wind for days on end along with very high temperatures.

Things won’t be any better, and may be worse, in the winter, which produces far less solar electricity than the summer. Solar plus storage, an expensive attempt to fix problems like what led to this blackout, cannot help through long winters of low output.

California’s electricity prices will continue to rise if it continues to add more renewables to its grid, and goes forward with plans to shut down its last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, in 2025.

Had California spent an estimated $100 billion on nuclear instead of on wind and solar, it would have had enough energy to replace all fossil fuels in its in-state electricity mix.

To manage the increasingly unreliable grid, California will either need to keep its nuclear plant operating, build more natural gas plants, or pay ever more money annually to reserve emergency electricity supplies from its neighbors.

After the blackouts last October, Gov. Newsom attacked PG&E Corp. for “greed and mismanagement” and named a top aide, Ana Matosantos, to be his “energy czar.” 

“This is not the new normal, and this does not take 10 years to solve,” Newsom said. “The entire system needs to be reimagined.”

 

Source: Forbes