“To get the same amount of energy from solar and wind that we now get from fossil fuels, we’re going to have to massively increase mining.
By more than 1000%.
This isn’t speculation. This is physics.”
This post is well worth your time, either through viewing the video presentation, or for a more devastating effect, via the transcript.
How an ideology can take such a fervent foothold and do so much damage to civilisation, at rapid pace, is perhaps, an inferior question to how the physics of UNreliables were/are so casually overlooked as to render current civilisation, inoperable.
Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.How Much Energy Will the World Need?
Video Transcript
We’re headed toward an exciting all-renewable energy future. Wind and solar will power the world of tomorrow.
And tomorrow isn’t far off!……..
…It’s time to wake up.
You’re having a dream.
Here’s the reality.
Oil, natural gas, and coal provide 84% of all the world’s energy. That’s down just two percentage points from twenty years ago.
And oil still powers nearly 97% of all global transportation.
Contrary to headlines claiming that we’re rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels, it’s just not happening. Two decades and five trillion dollars of governments “investing” in green energy and we’ve…
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of UNEP
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. – James Hansen (Former NASA-climate chief)
•
‘Green’ Germany is considering support for at least 10 foreign ‘dirty’ fossil fuel projects worth over €1 billion ($1.5B AUD), despite its pledge to end international funding for coal, oil and gas.
Nothing like an energy crisis to change sentiment!
Germany is considering support for at least 10 foreign fossil fuel projects worth over €1 billion ($1bn), despite its pledge to end international funding for coal, oil and gas.
In response to a parliamentary question from a left-wing German lawmaker, the state secretary at the ministry of economic affairs and climate action Udo Philipp said the government is considering 10 applications for export credit guarantees for fossil energy projects in Brazil, Iraq, Uzbekistan, the Dominican Republic and Cuba.
A breakdown of the projects accompanying the response shows that €419 million ($442m) or around 40% of the funding, could go to a single project in Brazil. Three of the projects totalling €340m ($359m) are located in Iraq and four are in Cuba.
Other fossil fuel projects could be under consideration by the German state-owned investment and development bank KfW. The bank does not disclose projects it hasn’t decided to support.
Germany was among 16 countries to sign a pledge at Cop26 in Glasgow last year to end international funding for fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022.
Ten have published policies showing how they will restrict funding to coal, oil and gas. But Germany has not adopted a policy because of internal divisions over exemptions for gas.
“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit. –– Warren Buffett
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” –– Top Google engineers
•
The ultimate irony of ironies?
After spending upwards of half a trillion euros of taxpayers money on useless UNreliables (windmills and mirrors), ‘green’ Germany is now resorting to bulldozing an Energiewende wind ‘farm’ in order to expand a ‘dirty’ brown (lignite) coal mine to keep the lights on.
What a hot mess this ‘green’ ideology has now become.
German energy company RWE has begun dismantling a small wind farm to make way for the expansion of an adjacent lignite coal mine, a move the company willingly acknowledges as “paradoxical”.
RWE has already dismantled one of the wind turbines at the Keyenberg wind park in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The remaining seven turbines are expected to be dismantled throughout next year, as RWE expands its operations at its Garzweiler coal mine.
“We realize this comes across as paradoxical,” RWE spokesperson Guido Steffen said in a statement. “But that is as matters stand.”
The driving factor behind the decision is the fear of energy shortages driven by the Russia invasion of Ukraine, and the lack of imported fossil gas from Russia.
RWE decided in late-September to reactivate three coal-fired power plants that were previously on standby. The three plants, each with a capacity of 300MW, would resume operations “to strengthening the security of supply in Germany during the energy crisis and to saving natural gas in electricity generation.”
During Orwellian (energy) times, it may be prudent to look to wiser heads for clarity.
“If a private enterprise is a failure, it closes down—unless it can get a government subsidy to keep it going; if a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. I challenge you to find exceptions.”
— Milton Friedman
“When the government makes loans or subsides to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”
— Henry Hazlitt
The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was being generous by describing interventionism’s nasty side-effects as “unintended.” Some younger interventionists are naïve, and know not what they do, but the older, street-smart captains of progressive politics understand the harms their policies entail. For them, the adverse consequences are features, not bugs.
The only downside is the risk of political retribution at the polls.
That’s the predicament in which the Biden administration now finds itself. It is also the theme of “Energy Inflation Was by Design,” a new report by supply-chain consultant Joseph Toomey.
[Synopsis is in previous post Energy Inflation Playbook]
President Biden and congressional Democrats want to replace fossil fuels with a “zero-carbon” energy system. Their
“In the four years I have been keeping these daily data records for wind generation, the power generated from all wind plants in Australia has never been lower than it was on this day. That total generated power of 15.74GWH gave wind an average for the day of 656MW, and that was at a daily operational Capacity Factor of just 6.66%, an absolutely pitiful result from 76 wind plants with a total Nameplate of 9854MW, and around 4500 individual wind turbines…”
This Post details the daily wind power generation data for the AEMO coverage area in Australia. For the background information, refer to the Introductory Post at this link.
Each image is shown here at a smaller size to fit on the page alongside the data for that day. If you click on each image, it will open on a new page and at a larger size so you can better see the detail.
Note also that on some days, there will be a scale change for the main wind power image, and that even though images may look similar in shape for the power generation black line on the graph when compared to other days, that scale (the total power shown on the left hand vertical axis) has been changed to show the graph at a larger size to better fit the image for that…
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. – James Hansen (Former NASA-climate chief)
•
Quality analysis from a quality journalist of the traditional Left, Chris Uhlmann.
Uhlmann’s well considered article ends here for mine …
“Germany stands as a stark testimony. It has spent more than €500 billion ($743 billion) transitioning its electricity system, boosting wind and solar to more than 45 per cent of generation since 2000. But it had to keep 89 per cent of its fossil-fired capacity to deal with the problems caused by calm, dark days. It now boasts Europe’s most expensive retail power and is strategically exposed because the country can’t function without imported gas.”
Electricity generation represents only 19 per cent of the world’s final global energy consumption.CREDIT:BLOOMBERG
“We have no readily deployable commercial-scale alternatives for energising the production of the four pillars of modern civilisation solely by electricity,” Smil writes.“This means that even with an abundant and reliable renewable electricity supply, we would still have to develop new large-scale processes to produce steel, ammonia, cement and plastics.”
The IEA notes that getting the world on track for net-zero emissions by 2050requires transition-related investment to rise to around $US4 trillion a year by 2030, “but only a minority of these investments immediately deliver zero emissions energy or energy services”.
The energy transition is inevitable, but it will be a lot harder than politicians, activists, service sector chief executives and billionaire energy hobbyists would have you believe. In trying to solve the current crisis, the political class should keep one thing in mind, no one ever won an election by promising to make voters colder, poorer and hungrier.
“An HTMR-100 cannot melt down. If the worst possible event were to occur, the reactor will just shut itself down. If all cooling stops, the reactor will heat up a bit for 24 hours and then over the next 4 to 5 days will just cool down with no incident. That is ‘walk away safe’.”
“Nuclear power is the future of mankind. The world’s electricity insecurity experienced since 2020 has shown the way forward with great clarity.”
Hear, hear.
Furthermore, nuclear is the only known efficient, reliable, continuous and truly ‘green’ energy technology:
• Zero CO2 emissions, if you believe that invisible trace gas and plant food CO2 is destroying the planet.
• Zero particulate (smog) pollution.
• The least land-intensive energy technology for both plant exposure and the mining required for key resource uranium.
• ~60 year lifespan.
A win, win for both the environment and for humanity.
The first two decades of the 21st Century will go down in history as a time of amazing world confusion about energy supplies, particularly electricity.
This is all due to electricity planning being done too much at a political policy level, and not by engineers and scientists. This in turn was linked to an inordinate fear of supposed man-induced climate change linked to fossil fuels, primarily driven by extreme green activist groups. Sadly, much scientific logic was trampled under the feet of street demonstrators, clamoring for Mother Nature’s natural energy: wind and solar.
The result has been soaring electricity prices in many countries, and power shortages leading to blackouts, resulting in major economic and social upheaval.
There has also been significant interference from European countries in the affairs of African and other countries around the world, insisting that developing countries adapt their energy usage…
“While America’s unabated movement toward electricity from breezes and sunshine have transferred the countries’ fossil fuel demands onto foreign countries, the data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that the growing demands of societies for petroleum-based liquid fuels will remain strong — and in fact grow — through at least 2050 as America, like much of the European Union, places more reliance on hostile foreign powers for its energy security.”
Not only is the climate-obsessed West suffering from a dangerous deficit of cheap, reliable energy, but also a deficit in reason, common sense, logic, and debate.
Putin has been emboldened to invade Ukraine, not because he’s a “murderer and a war criminal” but because the indolent and ideological West has become so weakened in their obsession with ridding the world of invisible, odourless trace gas and plant food, Carbon Dioxide.
Why attack Carbon dioxide? Because it’s the byproduct of ~80% of the world’s cheap, reliable energy supply — fossil fuels/thermal energy.
Control CO2 and you control the world and the lives and livelihoods of every single person on the planet.
This *is* the ClimateChange™️ agenda.
This is what it’s always been about — power and control over you.
China and Russia are great War historians of WWI and WWII, and know that the countries that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas, controls the world! Biden has done an excellent job of relinquishing “CONTROL” for the “green” materials to China, and relinquishing “CONTROL” of the crude oil to OPEC and Russia! God help America!
“Engineers have always played a leading role in the development of powerful adaptation technology. Engineering education should therefore stay far away from ideology-driven computer models. These models steer them in the wrong direction. That is my message to the Academies of Engineering and the Universities of Technology.”
I’ll take the undeniable power, safety and consistency of technical-based decisions made through reason, data and the scientific method (engineering) over politics, ideology, UN climate models and fact-free emotions any day.
Professor Guus Berkhout has published a challenge to the engineering community, to step up and make the Western energy transition work. He emphasizes that reliable and affordable energy is the key to future prosperity and well-being. So, if the transition fails then the Western world will fall back into poor economies without any power and authority. His opening call is pointed and clear:
“Experienced Engineers must take the lead in the Energy Transition. Green politicians made a big mess of the energy transition and climate scientists encouraged them with their computer models. Putin and Xi JinPing must have watched the self-destruction of the Western World with utter amazement and gratitude. Experienced engineers must pick up the pieces soonest.”
Berkhout says there are actually three distinct challenges, all engineering intensive. One is developing the technology needed for adaptation to climate change, whatever the cause of…
“Switching one’s energy dependence from oil supplies to China-controlled electrical energy equipment is foolish, bordering on insane, in strategic terms. Where are the senior security analysts in the US Department of Defense willing to point this out?”
Where are they? They are purposefully and actively weakening America, by design, by authority.
“Build Back Better” isn’t merely a slogan. They mean it.
The problem is, what does “better” actually mean? They haven’t told us yet, just as Marx (to his credit) warned that he had no idea what his theory of Marxism would portend for the future.
We all (now) know how Marxist doctrine has played out since — misery and death for all.
The United States Army has just published its climate strategy. In the foreword, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, holder of a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Williams College and a former civilian employee of the Department of Defense, proudly stated that:
“The army must adapt across our entire enterprise and purposefully pursue greenhouse gas mitigation strategies to reduce climate risks. If we do not take action now, across our installations, acquisition and logistics, and training, our options to mitigate these risks will become more constrained with each passing year.”
One might wonder why, as Russian troops invade the Ukraine and China ceaselessly builds up its air, surface and naval forces, the United States Army is turning its mighty attention to the goal of defeating carbon dioxide emissions. The Army’s former recruiting slogan, “Be…
By Anton Lang ~
By Dr. Kelvin Kemm ~
The result has been soaring electricity prices in many countries, and power shortages leading to blackouts, resulting in major economic and social upheaval.
By Ronald Stein ~
How is it possible that America has allowed itself to become so dependent on authoritarian countries like China, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War? The weaponization of energy by China and Russia have been extensively discussed in the three books co-authored by Ronald Stein and Todd Royal, including the 2022 Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy.
By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~
Berkhout says there are actually three distinct challenges, all engineering intensive. One is developing the technology needed for adaptation to climate change, whatever the cause of…
By Dr. Jay Lehr and Robert Lyman~
One might wonder why, as Russian troops invade the Ukraine and China ceaselessly builds up its air, surface and naval forces, the United States Army is turning its mighty attention to the goal of defeating carbon dioxide emissions. The Army’s former recruiting slogan, “Be…
Climatism 
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