Reality bites.
And, how many more taxpayer-trillions need to be torched at the alter of ClimateChange™️, scarring the land with useless, industrial eco-crucifixes and mirrors, before the suicidal ‘fog of Green’ clears?
Drax power station, generating 7% of Britain’s needs, is partly converted to burning imported woodchips. Staying warm, or even alive, takes priority over tedious climate dogma. Energy policy related to electricity generation is exposed as pitifully inadequate when the wind dies down and the days are short. The demise of cold spells in winter has been greatly exaggerated.
– – –
Emergency plans to fire up old coal plants have been triggered by National Grid as cold weather sparked fears of a supply shortage, says Energy Live News.
Two coal-fired generation units at Drax power station in Yorkshire have been instructed to be warmed up and ready for potential usage today.
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
“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…
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers
“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
“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 (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
A MUST READ for all policy makers if they have any respect for the families, workers and the most vulnerable in their communities whose lives are being broken as a consequence of the mad rush into feel-good UNreliables – wind and solar ‘power’…
Here in Minnesota, we are enduring a brutal stretch of weather. The temperature hasn’t gotten above zero in the last three days, with lows approaching -30. And that is in the Twin Cities, in the southern part of the state. Yesterday central Minnesota experienced a natural gas “brownout,” as Xcel Energy advised customers to turn thermostats down to 60 degrees and avoid using hot water. Xcel put up some customers in hotels. Why?
Because the wind wasn’t blowing. Utilities pair natural gas plants with wind farms, in order to burn gas, which can be ramped up and down more quickly than coal, when the wind isn’t blowing.
Which raises the question: since natural gas is reliable, why do we need the wind farms? The answer is, we don’t. When the wind isn’t blowing–as it wasn’t yesterday–natural gas supplies the electricity. It also heats homes, and with bitter cold temperatures and no wind, there wasn’t enough natural gas to go around. The resulting “brownout” has been a political shock in Minnesota.
[W]ind is producing only four percent of electricity in the MISO region, of which Minnesota is a part.
While that’s not good, what’s worse is wind is only utilizing 24 percent of its installed capacity, and who knows how this will fluctuate throughout the course of the day.
Coal, on the other hand, is churning out 45 percent of our power, nuclear is providing 13 percent, and natural gas is providing 26 percent of our electricity.
This is exactly why the renewable energy lobby’s dream of shutting down coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants and “replacing” them with wind and solar is a fairy tale. It simply cannot happen, because we never know if and when the wind will blow or the sun will shine when we need it most.
“But the wind is always blowing somewhere” ~ a renewable energy lobbyist
Renewable energy apologists often argue that although the wind may not be blowing in your neighborhood, it’s blowing, somewhere. All we have to do, they argue, is build wind turbines and transmission lines all over the country so we can have renewable energy everywhere. It turns out this old chestnut is also completely wrong.
For example, the wind isn’t blowing in North Dakota or South Dakota, where more than 1,800 MW (a massive amount) of wind projects are operating or planned, at massive cost, by Minnesota electric companies.
In fact, the wind isn’t blowing anywhere.
Just look at California, the state that is consistently the most self-congratulating about how “green” they are. Wind is operating a 3 percent of installed capacity, solar is operating at 12 percent, natural gas is running wide open, and California is importing a whopping 27 percent of its electricity from Nevada and Arizona.
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Days like today perfectly illustrate why intermittent, unreliable sources of energy like wind and solar would have no place in our energy system if they were not mandated by politicians, showered with federal subsidies, and lining the pockets of regulated utilities that are guaranteed to profit off wind and solar farms whether they are generating electricity, or not.
Isaac’s real-world message is starting to break through, at least here in Minnesota. Tomorrow morning the Star Tribune is running Isaac’s op-ed headlined “Bitter cold shows reliable energy sources are critical.”
Lawmakers considering doubling Minnesota’s renewable energy mandate to 50 percent by 2030 should use this week’s weather as a moment to reconsider their plans to lean so heavily on wind and solar.
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[C]oal-fired power plants provided 45 percent of MISO’s power and nuclear provided 13 percent — most of this from Minnesota’s Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear plants (which we should keep open, by the way). Natural gas provided 26 percent of our electricity use at that time, and the remainder was imported from Canada and other U.S. states.
Natural gas also heated the homes of approximately 66 percent of Minnesotans this week, by far the most for any home heating fuel, but there wasn’t enough gas to combat the frigid temperatures.
Because of the extreme cold, Xcel Energy urged its natural gas customers in Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton and Isanti to reduce the settings on their thermostats, first down to 60 degrees, then to 63, through Thursday morning to conserve enough natural gas to prevent a widespread shortage as temperatures remained 14 below zero. Some Xcel customers in the Princeton area lost gas service, and Xcel reserved rooms for them in nearby hotels.
This week’s urgent notice from Xcel to conserve natural gas shows there is real danger in putting all of our eggs into the renewables-plus-natural gas basket. At a minimum, pursuing a grid powered entirely by solar, wind and natural gas would require more natural gas pipeline capacity, which is likely to be opposed by the factions that are currently challenging the replacement of the Line 3 pipeline.
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If Minnesota lawmakers are sincere in their belief that we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions as soon as possible, they must lift Minnesota’s ban on new nuclear power plants, which has been in place since 1994.
Not only would nuclear power plants be essentially guaranteed to run in minus-24-degree weather, but a forthcoming study by American Experiment has found that new nuclear power plants could not only achieve a lower emissions rate by 2030, but also save Minnesota $30.2 billion through 2050.
Stay tuned. We will release that report in two weeks. I think it will be a bombshell, not only in Minnesota but in other states that are fecklessly mandating ever-higher utilization of intermittent, unreliable, inefficient “green” energy.
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers
“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
“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 (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
***
VICTORIA and South Australia, the two southern Australian states who have taken the most ambitious reckless and ruinous position on UNreliables – wind and solar – were put to the test yesterday as temperatures soared into the 40’s. The result was a perfect failure on the two basic metrics of ‘1st-world’ energy supply – cost and reliability.
VICTORIAN wholesale prices surged to $14,500 per megawatt hour, where prices used to average less than $40 per megawatt hour…
SOME 200,000 Victorian’s didn’t have the ‘pleasure’ of paying $14,500 / MWh, instead they were supplied blackouts, brownouts and load-shedding as the chronic undersupply of ‘real’ power – fossil fuels – was realised…
“More than 200,000 Victorian households had their power cut off yesterday in a bid to protect the state’s energy system from shutting down, as the Andrews government was forced to admit there was not enough power to keep up with soaring demand in sweltering summer heat.”
AFTER tens of $BILLIONS spent on symbolic ‘green energy’ – wind only managed to supply a pathetic 4.2% and solar (on a hot, sunny day) 11.4% of demand at 1:30PM as temperatures peaked at 42.8C…
ANDREWS government was forced to admit there was not enough power to keep up with soaring demand…
1500 MW of vital coal-fired baseload power unable to be called upon when needed most after the energy-vandals of the current Labor (socialist) government forced the shut-down of the Hazlewood coal-fired power plant in 2017.
“DIRTY” Fossil Fuels (Diesel And Gas) To The Rescue, Again!
ONE of the twisted ironies of the insane ‘green’ energy revolution is that it’s always “dirty” fossil fuels that come to the rescue of weather-dependent UNreliables.
MORE wind and solar doesn’t fix the fatal dependency on intermittent sunshine and breezes, rather the exact thing that they are designed to replace does – “dirty” coal and gas!
UNRELIABLES advocates bang-on on about “wind and solar now cheaper than fossil fuels”. This may be true when they are generating at full capacity, when the wind is blowing just right and the sun is shining. But, as the old sailors say “the wind is free, but everything else costs money.”
“EVERYTHING else” being the energy duplication and 24/7/365 backup costs associated with hydrocarbon energy – coal and gas. Dispatchable energy that is either supplying baseload or idling while wind and sun conditions are favourable for supply. And of course the massive cost to the consumer of green energy subsidies that are necessary to keep wind and solar competitive.
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MOTHER NATURE To The Rescue!
Mother Nature stepped in where the UNreliables-obsessed Labor government’s failed ‘green’ energy could not…
“A cool change that swept across Melbourne about 2pm dropped the temperature 12C in 30 minutes, easing demand for power and bringing an end to load-shedding outages in the ensuing hour.”
ANDREW BOLT on yesterdays green ‘energy’ fiasco – a taste of things to come as global warming theory-obsessed Australian governments pander the U.N. climate gods and install more economy, grid and job destroying UNreliables…
VICTORIANS SWEAT THROUGH A GREAT GREEN HOAX
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Lily D’Ambrosio, Victoria’s warmist Minister for Energy, in 2017 claimed Labor was helping to “deliver affordable, sustainable and renewable energy”.
— Lily D'Ambrosio MP (@LilyDAmbrosioMP) July 13, 2017
All three promises were broken yesterday.
Affordable? Victoria actually had wholesale power prices hit $14,500 per megawatt hour – when prices used to average less than $40.
Sustainable? Wind power generators on Thursday delivered a feeble 3.8 per cent of the state’s power, thanks to fickle winds. They could not deliver when needed most.
Reliable? Victoria – which helped drive the giant Hazelwood coal-fired generator out of business – ran short of electricity in the heat wave, and suffered blackouts that hit 200,000 homes and premises, even after it ordered big power users like the Portland smelter to shut down.
Why does Victoria, sitting on hundreds of years of supply of coal and big gas reserves, have an electricity system that can no longer deliver enough electricity?
Why? Because it bought the great global warming scare, and spent billions on unreliable green power instead of on a steady generator that would pump out all the power we need – and when we need it. It made coal-fired generators unprofitable, and told vast untruths about the great future of green power.
And for what? For pure symbolism. No cuts Australia makes to emissions will affect global warming, which has turned out to be nothing like the catastrophe that was predicted.
Global warming politicians are causing far more damage than global warming is every likely to. Yet who dares call them out?
BUT, here is the ultimate craziness – all the money, all the wrecking of views, all the lost jobs through higher electricity prices and all the blackouts – all the pain for nothing. The apparent effect on global temperatures so incredibly small, nobody would notice.
(Climate sceptics/rationalists still waitin’ for that “big oil” cheque to arrive in the mail!)
Help us to hit back against the bombardment of climate lies costing our communities, economies and livelihoods far, far too much.
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“Only two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity.” – Albert Einstein
WATCH…
“The collusion between wind energy and government disgusts me. If the Federal Production Tax Credit for wind energy didn’t exist, you would not see another industrial wind energy turbine built.”– Warren Buffet
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THE entire rationale for wind turbines is to stop global warming climate change by reducing the amount of CO2 being returned to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.
THE energy required for a helicopter to de-ice all the blades on a wind farm must outweigh any supposed saving in CO2 by a factor of 100 or more. Notwithstanding that no wind farm has saved a gram of CO2 due to construction and the necessary spinning reserve.
THE attached picture, taken from a wind farm in Sweden, is a metaphor for the complete insanity of the mad rush into useless UNreliables – wind and solar. Symbolic ‘energy’ gestures to the folly of ‘green’ madness that fail both physically and financially wherever installed.
THIS one photo alone sums up the collective era of eco-stupidity that we live in today, where rational thought, logic, reason and commonsense has been gleefully abandoned for enormous amounts of public money with valuable resources needlessly sacrificed.
“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
“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 (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
***
WESTERN climate-theory-obsessed politicians continue their ruinous and costly obsession with wind and solar ‘energy’. ‘UNreliables‘ that repeatedly fail the environment, communities and economies wherever installed.
ALICE Friedemann of ‘Energy Skeptic‘ meticulously lays out 41 reasons that expose the colossal flaws of the mad rush into wind ‘power’ as a genuine replacement for fossil fuels and/or nuclear power. Economy and job-destroying, anti-energy policy initiatives undertaken by all-too-many in our current ruling class that defy all logic, reason and common sense based on easily verifiable data and on-the-ground evidence.
Preface. Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable. Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will crush it and permeate it with toxic chemicals to extract the metal from the ore, the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.
Here are the topics covered below in this long post:
Windmills require petroleum every single step of their life cycle. If they can’t replicate themselves using wind turbine generated electricity, they are not sustainable
SCALE. Too many windmills needed to replace fossil fuels
SCALE. Wind turbines can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossils
Not enough rare earth metals and enormous amounts of cement, steel, and other materials required
Not enough dispatchable power to balance wind intermittency and unreliability
Wind blows seasonally, so for much of there year there wouldn’t be enough wind
When too much wind is blowing for the grid to handle, it has to be curtailed and/or drives electricity prices to zero, driving natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plants out of business
The best wind areas will never be developed
The Grid Can’t Handle Wind Power without natural gas, which is finite
The role of the grid is to keep the supply of power steady and predictable. Wind does the opposite, at some point of penetration it may become impossible to keep the grid from crashing.
The grid blacks out when the supply of power varies too much. Eventually too much wind penetration will crash the grid.
Windmills wouldn’t be built without huge subsidies and tax breaks
Tremendous environmental damage from mining material for windmills
Not enough time to scale wind up
The best wind is too high or remote to capture
Too many turbines could affect Earth’s climate negatively
Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant global warming. A Harvard study raises questions about just how much wind should be part of a climate solution
Less wind can be captured than thought (see Max Planck Society)
Wind is only strong enough to justify windmills in a few regions
The electric grid needs to be much larger than it is now
Wind blows the strongest when customer demand is the weakest
No utility scale energy storage in sight
Wind Power surges harm industrial customers
Energy returned on Energy Invested is negative
Windmills take up too much space
Wind Turbines break down too often
Large-scale wind energy slows down winds and reduces turbine efficiencies
Offshore Wind Farms likely to be destroyed by Hurricanes
The costs of lightning damage are too high
Wind doesn’t reduce CO2
Turbines increase the cost of farming
Offshore Windmills battered by waves, wind, ice, corrosion, a hazard to ships and ecosystems
Wind turbines are far more expensive than they appear to be
Wind turbines are already going out of business and fewer built in Europe
TRANSPORTATION LIMITATIONS: Windmills are so huge they’ve reached the limits of land transportation by truck or rail
Windmills may only last 12 to 15 years, or at best 20 years
Not In My Back Yard – NIMBYism
Lack of a skilled and technical workforce
Wind only produces electricity, what we face is a liquid fuels crisis
Wind has a low capacity Factor
Dead bugs and salt reduce wind power generation by 20 to 30%
Small windmills too expensive, too noisy, unreliable, and height restricted
“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
“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 (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
AN extremely inconvenient insight into the monumental amount of “dirty” fossil fuel derivatives required to manufacture, install and maintain so-called “green”, “clean” and “renewable” industrial wind turbines…
(Climatism images, links and bolds added)
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To Get Wind Power You Need Oil
Each wind turbine embodies a whole lot of petrochemicals and fossil-fuel energy
WIND turbines are the most visible symbols of the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be, the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels.
Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages [pdf] 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations,250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.
If wind-generated electricity were to supply 25 percent of global demand by 2030 (forecast [pdf] to reach about 30 petawatt-hours), then even with a high average capacity factor of 35 percent, the aggregate installed wind power of about 2.5 terawatts would require roughly 450 million metric tons of steel. And that’s without counting the metal for towers, wires, and transformers for the new high-voltage transmission links that would be needed to connect it all to the grid.
A lot of energy goes into making steel. Sintered or pelletized iron ore is smelted in blast furnaces, charged with coke made from coal, and receives infusions of powdered coal and natural gas. Pig iron is decarbonized in basic oxygen furnaces. Then steel goes through continuous casting processes (which turn molten steel directly into the rough shape of the final product). Steel used in turbine construction embodies typically about 35 gigajoules per metric ton.
To make the steel required for wind turbines that might operate by 2030, you’d need fossil fuels equivalent to more than 600 million metric tons of coal.
A 5-MW turbine has three roughly 60-meter-long airfoils, each weighing about 15 metric tons. They have light balsa or foam cores and outer laminations made mostly from glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy or polyester resins. The glass is made by melting silicon dioxide and other mineral oxides in furnaces fired by natural gas. The resins begin with ethylene derived from light hydrocarbons, most commonly the products of naphtha cracking, liquefied petroleum gas, or the ethane in natural gas.
Rotor blade structure
The final fiber-reinforced composite embodies on the order of 170 GJ/t. Therefore, to get 2.5 TW of installed wind power by 2030, we would need an aggregate rotor mass of about 23 million metric tons, incorporating the equivalent of about 90 million metric tons of crude oil. And when all is in place, the entire structure must be waterproofed with resins whose synthesis starts with ethylene. Another required oil product is lubricant, for the turbine gearboxes, which has to be changed periodically during the machine’s two-decade lifetime.
Wind Turbine Gearbox
Undoubtedly, a well-sited and well-built wind turbine would generate as much energy as it embodies in less than a year. However, all of it will be in the form of intermittent electricity—while its production, installation, and maintenance remain critically dependent on specific fossil energies. Moreover, for most of these energies—coke for iron-ore smelting, coal and petroleum coke to fuel cement kilns, naphtha and natural gas as feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of plastics and the making of fiberglass, diesel fuel for ships, trucks, and construction machinery, lubricants for gearboxes—we have no nonfossil substitutes that would be readily available on the requisite large commercial scales.
Wind Industry Crude Oil Mining
For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.
This article appears in the March 2016 print issue as “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine.”
“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 (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
“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
***
WESTERN climate-theory-obsessed politicians continue their ruinous obsession with wind and solar ‘energy’. Unreliables that fail dismally wherever installed.
THIS article out of American Thinker brutally exposes the vast scam that allows these symbolic gestures to the folly of green madness to thrive and somehow survive.
Green energy is an incredible money-making scam. The promoters of green energy make billions of dollars promoting dumb energy schemes that are completely useless.
What makes the scam extremely clever is that the scammers have convinced the public that the purpose of their scam is to improve the environment. The scammers pretend to be earnest environmental advocates.
Any really good scam needs endorsements from authoritative-sounding sources. In the case of green energy, the authoritative sources are in on the scam. The beneficiaries of the green energy scam go way beyond the wind and solar industries.
Non-profit environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, need to be seen as fighting against an urgent looming catastrophe. If they don’t have something dreadful to fight against, no one is going to join their organizations or give them money.
Global warming, allegedly caused by carbon dioxide, is the looming catastrophe and green energy is the solution. When the globe failed to warm they renamed the looming catastrophic climate change in place of global warming.
Now they blame every instance of bad weather on climate change created by burning coal and oil. What were formerly acts of God are now the fault of the oil and coal companies.
Scientists are a special interest group largely financed by the federal government. Global warming is a magnificent gift to the science industry.
The industry has been corrupted by pathological science that is primarily intended to increase the flow of money from Washington. Science directed toward discovering the truth is out of fashion.
The many scientists that are global warming skeptics don’t exist as far as the science industry is concerned.
Government agencies, and the politicians that give the agencies money, have embraced the threat of climate change.
It gives them something to do that is more noble, even romantic than highways and making the trains run on time. The government spends billions on subsidizing wind and solar energy.
Ironically, electric utility companies love wind and solar green energy. They know perfectly well that wind and solar are useless because wind and solar generate electricity erratically and have to be backed up by reliable conventional electric generating plants.
The only economic benefit is the fuel saved in the backup plants when wind or solar is actually generating electricity. But the cost of the wind or solar electricity is much higher than the benefit of fuel saved.
Thus, the more wind or solar that you have, the more money you lose. But, electric utilities are regulated by public utility commissions. The amount of profit they are allowed is calculated as a fraction of the utilities’ capital investment.
So, the utilities want to make capital investments, even if those investments are wind and solar plants that waste money on a grand scale. The electricity consumers bear the cost and the utilities are allowed a larger profit.
In some parts of the country rooftop solar is fashionable. Homeowners who install rooftop solar often save money because the reduction in the cost of electricity from the utility is greater than the cost of solar electricity.
These homeowners brag to their friends about how clever they are, and the purveyors of rooftop solar place advertisements claiming that rooftop solar is cheaper than buying electricity from the electric company.
This is part of the scam. Rooftop solar is profitable because it is heavily subsidized and because the electric utility is forced, by the governmental authorities, to provide a connection to back up the solar without compensating remuneration.
The real cost of rooftop solar electricity, exclusive of subsidies, is around 30-cents per kilowatt-hour and the real benefit is around two cents per kilowatt hour from fuel saved in the utility’s backup plants.
The subsidy, financed by taxpayers and electricity consumers, is greater than ninety percent.
Hundreds of thousands of homeowners, under the delusion that they have discovered cheaper electricity, are walking and talking advertisements for solar energy.
The biggest victim of the green energy scam is the public in general. Everybody pays more taxes and pays more for energy as a consequence of the scam.
But the waste of billions of dollars may not be noticeable when spread over the 320 million Americans.
The public has been exposed to relentless propaganda promoting green energy as beneficial and less expensive.
The public is the greatest victim, but most people don’t know that they are being victimized, so there is little incentive to organize against the scam.
There are certain other victims such as the coal industry and coal miners. But these groups mostly don’t understand that they are victimized by a scam.
Due to the propaganda, they may actually believe that burning coal is undesirable and dangerous. Thus, they lack a clear mandate to organize against the scam. (Modern coal generating plants are environmentally clean.)
The manufacturers of fossil fuel generating plants are beneficiaries, not victims. Wind and solar don’t reduce the demand for fossil fuel plants because wind and solar have to be backed up by traditional plants.
A campaign against coal, by the Sierra Club, has resulted in the closing of many coal plants. The closed plants are typically replaced by new natural gas plants.
Due to the strain imposed on the electric grid by erratic wind and solar, there are many commercial opportunities for upgrading the traditional components of the electricity grid.
Rather than hurting the manufacturers of fossil fuel generating equipment, the green energy movement actually helps them.
The green energy scam is the perfect scam because the beneficiaries include many influential individuals and institutions, while the victims are dispersed among large numbers of unorganized people.
The few concentrated groups of victims, like coal miners, are psychologically handicapped by propaganda that has convinced them that they, rather than the scammers, are at fault.
Wind and solar are truly useless, like having a 6th toe or an appendix. A detailed exposition on the uselessness of wind and solar is given in my book – Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy.
Green energy is often justified on the grounds that it reduces carbon dioxide emissions and thus prevents global warming. Of course, global warming, now called climate change, is itself a scam.
The science on which the predictions of global warming doom are based is incredibly weak. But, the weak science is presented as if it is reliable by self-interested parties.
In any case, wind and solar are very expensive methods of reducing CO2 emissions. Other, far more practical, strategies for reducing CO2 emissions are available.
Anyone who criticizes the green energy scam is ruthlessly attacked. Critics are often accused of being in the pay of fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel companies are too timid to risk the wrath of the green movement, so they hardly ever give money to the critics of the green movement.
A favorite line of attack is to accuse the critics of using tobacco company tactics to cover up the danger from using fossil fuels.
Critics are often depicted as being mental cases, as when Al Gore said that critics of his global warming promotions were like people who think the moon landing was filmed in a Hollywood studio or think that the Earth is flat.
James Hansen, often considered that father of the global warming movement suggested that executives of fossil fuel companies should be sent to jail for crimes against humanity.
Green energy is the perfect scam because it is disguised as a do-good movement and the victims are dispersed, unorganized and disarmed by propaganda.
Green energy is endorsed by government agencies, environmental non-profits, and scientific groups.
These are people that are often seen as sources of reliable information but that, in reality, work to promote their own parochial interests. This is a scam that needs to be exposed.
Norman Rogers is the author of the book Dumb Energy and writes often about political and environmental issues.
BORDER between Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Guess which country contains eco-criminals that can afford to use fossil fuels, and which country contains nature-lovers who are dependent on natural renewable organic biomass for energy?
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HAITI is almost 99% deforested, as they rely almost entirely on natural ‘biomass’ (wood) for domestic and industrial fuels and building materials.
On the other side, the forests of the fossil fuel burning, eco-terrorists – the Dominican Republic – remain lush and green :
NASA Satellite : Haiti – Dominican Republic Border (CNN)
EMBRACE the UN’s draconian climate regulations by pursuing the mad rush into unreliables – wind and solar – and join Haiti in the race to energy poverty and environmental devastation.
Fuel-poverty stricken German’s are already robbing forests for wood to heat their homes in winter, unable to pay for radically priced ‘green’ energy :
AFTER hundreds of €BILLIONS of taxpayer’s hard-earned money spent on sunshine and breezes, Germany’s Energiewende program has been exposed as a catastrophic failure, with carbon dioxide emissions higher now than in 2009, the year before massively subsidised ‘green’ energy was signed into German law!
GERMAN emissions last year were actually higher than in 2009, and have been on the rise again since 2014.
NUCLEAR power is still supplying 12% of Germany’s power. When this is finally phased out in a few years time, the country will be more reliant on fossil fuels than ever :
GERMANY’S RECORD COAL BOOM
The ‘green’ dream is on ice as a ‘coal frenzy’ grips Europe and unreliables lose their attraction:
With Greenpeace successfully forcing the shutdown of nuclear power, and keeping out fracking for gas, what’s left? A boom in coal. In fact, over the next two years Germany will build 10 new power plants for hard coal. Europe is in a coal frenzy, building power plants and opening up new mines, practically every month. It might sound odd that a boom in German coal is the result of Greenpeace’s political success. –Ezra Levant, Toronto Sun, 7 January 2014
Drax power station, generating 7% of Britain’s needs, is partly converted to burning imported woodchips.
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…
Climatism 
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