Dr. Benny Peiser at The Australian: Europe pulls the plug on its green future
Slowly but gradually, Europe is awakening to a green energy crisis, an economic and political debacle that is entirely self-inflicted.
The mainstream media, which used to encourage the renewables push enthusiastically, is beginning to sober up too. With more and more cracks beginning to appear, many newspapers are returning to their proper role as the fourth estate, exposing the pitfalls of Europe’s green-energy gamble and opening their pages for thorough analysis and debate. Today, European media is full of news and commentary about the problems of an ill-conceived strategy that is becoming increasingly shaky and divisive.
…
As country after country abandons, curtails or reneges on once-generous support for renewable energy, Europe is beginning to realise that its green energy strategy is dying on the vine. Green dreams are giving way to hard economic realities.
From: The Australian http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/europe-pulls-the-plug-on-its-green-future/story-e6frg8y6-1226694405337
also here: http://www.thegwpf.org/benny-peiser-europe-pulls-plug-green-future/
(Note: for the pirates of pendant – image updated to show EU style plug – Anthony)
Related articles
- Spain Cuts Green Energy Losses (blogs.the-american-interest.com)
- After UK embraces green energy, MPs baffled as to why energy prices doubled (junkscience.com)
- Newsbytes: Green Energy Disaster Sinks Siemens CEO (wattsupwiththat.com)
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The plug on the picture is American, though 🙂
There’s a pay-wall for the body of the main article on the Australian…
Dear Gene: I am a pedant, but you are a faster one.
@Gene, Hugh quite right, we only have a budget of $00000000.00 for art and special effects here at WUWT.
Anthony, I guess I am guilty of pedantry, but this was something else. This visualisation of an independently powerful metaphor looked like a very funny charade, and I couldn’t help. It made me laugh, and I thank you for that.
You can see the article at
http://www.thegwpf.org/benny-peiser-europe-pulls-plug-green-future/
@ur momisugly steve put this phrase into Google “Europe pulls the plug on its green future”, follow link. Opens the pay-wall.
Hello,
The plug in the image; a standard USA type, not European 2-pole type.
To all the green energy advocates in America:
So . . . hundreds of billions of Euros have been squandered, wasted, flushed down the Great Greenie Composting Toilet because Public Policy in Europe was highjacked by a group of political power craving environmentalists and grubby, funding desperate scientists who realized their First Class ticket on the Fame and Gravy train could be realized by abject fear mongering about human influences on the climate.
A disgraceful period in human history, one that will not be treated well by future historians.
Think of how much human good, human happiness that money could have purchased.
Think of how much real science, not the frothed up, torqued up, glued together hockey sticks or photo shopped polar bear pictures that currently disgraces the scientific community could have taken place if the science funding had not been hijacked by a small gang of morally vacuous scientists that are only good at creating hysteria and performing kindergarten level research.
Maybe now we’ll get some sense here in the USA and pull the plug on renewable mandates and subsidies, so that electric rates can be taken back down to what they would have been without the renewables. (Sorry, mein Fuehrer, we need LOW electric rates, not “sky high” rates – to ease the burdens on low-income people and make our manufacturing competitive – so that jobs can finally be created.)
Of course, it will be necessary to make the renewables people clean up the environmental mess they’ve made, at their expense – removing the turbines and solar arrays, cleaning up the pollution from them, restoring the habitats and landscapes they’ve destroyed.. We taxpayers and victims of their idiocy should not have to pick up the tab for that – they should.
Q: What is a green pirate of pendant’s favorite holiday?
A: Arrrghbor Day.
[Apologies.]
Don’t ever forget than many of the folks who initiated these grandiose failures made out like bandits when the taxpayer and investment funds were rolling in. Many are probably enjoying early retirements at levels of luxury that most WUWT readers will never experience.
hmmmm . . the GAO has numbers, but the White House seems to prefer appeasing Gaia.
“President Obama’s campaign promises of millions of green jobs haven’t materialized. A draft report by the Government Accountability Office found that the Labor Department’s $500 million program to train people for green jobs produced just 55 percent of its targeted job placements—and most of those jobs were not in the solar or biofuels industries.”
Only a true, hard core, committed, Kool Aide chugging Greene could consider that to be a successful program.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/08/08/the-brown-jobs-boom/
Kafka would be so proud of modern environmentalism.
Energy prices in Britain have risen $500 per year in order to subsidize a pre-industrial technology – wind power. Much of these subsidies go to rich landowners and foreign power companies with investors guaranteed returns of >10% per year for 20 years. It is complete madness. Even if we were to cover the whole of Wales and Cornwall in wind farms it would still only meet total electricity demand 70% of the time. The rest of the time when the wind doesn’t blow we would either freeze in darkness, or else fire up “spare” fossil fuel plants to blast CO2 into the atmosphere. This process is the same as accelerating and braking your car while driving your car. Fuel efficiency is blown away and gas prices rocket ! I estimate the net price of wind+gas ay 4 times more than nuclear(or coal) fuel costs.
Here’s another example over at Drudge of Europe thinking: http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/08/09/major-danish-daily-newspaper-warns-globe-may-be-on-path-to-little-ice-agemuch-colder-wintersdramatic-consequences/
Gene Selkov August 9, 2013 at 9:48 am
No it’s not; it’s Italian.
I must apologise to Anthony and to everybody who came late and missed the fun. I did not want to be mean, but because I was, inadvertently, now we have a new graphic with a Schuko plug, which is decidedly European. It came to life as an American plug next to a wall outlet of the same provenance bearing a European flag.
Surely there OUGHT to be a very important European politician who WANTS to believe that CAGW is a hoax.
If that were a real greeny plug it would have only one pin.
Re: failing green parasitic companies, Germany’s Solarworld only yesterday made its stockholders accept a whopping 95% cut in the value of their holdings, while creditors had to take a 55% haircut, to avoid immediate bankruptcy. Still the market is doubtful whether the outfit will survive.
We’re clearly in the endgame stage of the green cargo-cult. There aren’t enough lampposts.
The plug looks pretty much like a Schuko plug, pretty much universal as a 3-pin plug in Europe. Except the UK of course as we here know better.
This is sick and twisted. From the full article:
[My bolding]
It looks like the plug has cylindric pins, not flat as the US version, so it is an European grounded version. Due to the colour, this looks like the (new) power cords used for the electical heating of car engines. They used to be black.
There’s opportunity here, m’boys–
Kit Carruthers can buy one of these retired wind turbines and set it up next to his house in Scotland for domestic electricity generation.
One turbine down, thousands upon thousands to go.
What’s not to like?
I’ve been trying to warn people of the idiocy of “green energy” for decades. I’ve written articles, I’ve argued with people, I complained to our politicians.
One can see the light just from the physics!
All for naught, or so it has seemed.
The author of the article is correct. A free press is supposed to be the last line of defense against oppressive and tyrannical governments when the checks and balances between the Legislative, Executive and Juducial branches of government are corrupt and steal citizens’ rights of privacy, property and individual freedoms.
For too many decades, the press has simply acted as the government’s forth branch of propaganda. The alternative energy debacle is just a manifestation of the MSM’s complicity in destroying many countries’ industrial competitiveness, productivity, efficiency and economic growth by failing to report truthfully on governments’ destructive alternative energy programs, which have further impoverished the poor and obliterated job and economic growth.
More and more citizens-but still far too few– are finally seeing the gigantic disparity between to Utopia painted by the wordsmiths and talking heads of the MSM and the hell which they are being forced to endure.
It’s encouraging to see that some MSM journalists are finally starting to accept their huge responsibility of reporting the truth rather than simply advocating a political agenda.