Don't put your pension into Greens, Mrs Worthington…

Starting at the same price, there’s a 10 to 1 gap in investment performance

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

… Don’t put your pension into Greens. “Greens” are what the City boys in red suspenders with East End accents you could cut with a machete and Porsches you could scratch with a convenient latch-key call renewable-energy stocks.  See the chart:

As Bjørn Lomborg points out in a recent devastating graph, if you had been scared enough by the hockey-stick fable in the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report to invest $100 in Greens in 2002, you would now be the proud owner of $28, or quite a bit less than that after inflation.

But if you had followed Monckton’s Rule of Merry and Profitable Investment – listen very carefully to what the Government tells you, do the exact opposite, wait a decade or so, then collect in spades – you would have invested your $100 in oil and gas stocks. And you would now have a billfold crammed with $238, or 1000% more than the hapless investor in Greens.

These are remarkable figures. Oil and gas corporations have had to face ever higher taxes and ever tighter regulations in the name of Saving The Planet. Greens have been subsidized to levels so absurd they’re beyond Communist. Even with the millstone of taxation, regulation and ministerial hate-speech, oil and gas stocks have done well. Even with frequent epinephrine overdoses of taxpayer subsidy and paeans of official praise, Greens – as the red-suspenders brigade would put it – are down the toilet.

That is a remarkable contrast. Not the least reason for it is that all forms of so-called “renewable” energy are monstrously, irremediably inefficient. Currently, my favorite example is the sappy UK Government’s subsidies to new electric autos.

Typical gasoline-powered auto engines are approximately 27% efficient. Typical fossil-fueled generating stations are 50% efficient, transmission to end user is 67% efficient, battery charging is 90% efficient and the auto’s electric motor is 90% efficient, so that the fuel efficiency of an electric auto is – er – also 27%. However, the electric auto requires 30% more power per mile traveled to move the mass of its batteries.

CO2 emissions from domestic transport account for 24% of UK CO2 emissions, and cars, vans, and taxis represent 90% of road transport. Assuming 80% of fuel use is by these autos, they account for 19.2% of UK CO2 emissions. Conversion to electric power, 61% of which is generated by fossil fuels in the UK, would remit 39% of 19.2%, or 7.5%, of UK CO2 emissions.

However, the battery-weight penalty would be 30% of 19.2% of 61%, or 3.5%, of UK CO2 emissions. So the net saving from converting all UK cars, vans, and taxis to electricity would be just 4% of UK CO2 emissions, which are 1.72% of global CO2 emissions. Thus converting all UK autos to electricity would abate 0.07% of global CO2 emissions.

But at what cost?

The cost to the UK taxpayer of subsidizing the 30,000 electric cars, vans, and taxis bought in 2012 was a flat-rate subsidy of $8333 (£5000) for each vehicle and a further subsidy of about $350 (£210) in vehicle excise tax remitted, a total of $260.5 million. On that basis, the cost of subsidizing all 2,250,000 new autos sold each year would be $19.54 bn. Though the longevity of electric autos is 50% greater than that of internal-combustion autos, batteries must be completely replaced every few years at great cost, canceling the longevity advantage.

The considerable cost of using renewable energy to bring down the UK’s fossil-fueled generation fraction from the global mean 67% to 61% is not taken into account, though, strictly speaking, an appropriate share of the very large subsidy cost of renewable electricity generation should be assigned to electric vehicles.

By contrast, what is the cost of doing nothing?

The Stern Report on the economics of climate change says 3 Cº global warming this century would cost 0-3% of global GDP. We’re not going to get 3 Cº warming, or anything like it, so make that, say, 1% of GDP.

But the cost of making global warming go away by methods whose unit cost per Celsius degree of global warming abated is equivalent to that of the UK Government’s mad subsidy for electric autos works out at 74% of global GDP. So it is 74 times more expensive to act today than to adapt the day after tomorrow. Oops!

In fact, the cost-benefit ratio may be even worse than this. Now that both RSS and UAH have reported their satellite-derived monthly temperature anomalies for February 2014, the monthly Global Warming Prediction Index can be determined, based on the simple mean of the two datasets since January 2005.

The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report last year backdated the models’ projections to 2005, and reduced the central estimate of the next 30 years’ global warming by almost half from the equivalent of 2.3 Cº per century in the pre-final draft to the equivalent of 1.3 Cº per century in the final draft.

Even this much-reduced projection continues inexorably to diverge from the unexciting reality that global temperature has stabilized.

The brainier and more honest advocates of the official story-line know that events have rendered their demands for near-zero CO2 emissions no longer tenable.

Yet they continue to make their strident demands that the West should, in effect, shut itself down. They do so for the following interesting reason. They know that the high-sensitivity theory they said they were more sure about than anything else is nonsense. They know the world will warm by perhaps 1 Cº this century as a result of our activities, and that is all, and that is not a problem.

They also know that within not more than seven years the mean of all five global-temperature datasets may well show no global warming – at all – for 20 years. They know that if CO2 concentration continues to rise at anything like its present rate it will become obvious to all that they were spectacularly, egregiously, humiliatingly in error.

They have concluded, unsurprisingly but furtively, that their only way out is to insist that the science is even more settled than ever and that CO2 emissions must be cut even faster than before.

Then, when global temperature fails to rise as they now know it will fail to rise, they can say that the Pause has happened because CO2 emissions have been stabilized by the policies they so profitably demanded, rather than because the Pause would have happened anyway.

Indeed, one or two of the more flagrantly dishonest global warming crooks are already beginning to claim that the Pause is their doing. One has only to look at the ever-rising gray CO2 curve on the graph to see there is no truth in that.

However, the day of judgment is at hand. A fraud case is being quietly, painstakingly assembled, spanning three continents. When the last pieces of evidence have been carefully collected, half a dozen people will face trial for the serious, imprisonable offense of fraud by misrepresentation.

When that day comes, watch the rats who have over-promoted this profoundly damaging scare scurrying for cover in case they are next. Then, and only then, the scare will be over.

[ALL: Be aware that replies WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY go into the “Review” bin for specific moderator review IF they contain the word “fraud” … (or meet certain other criteria.)

Since, on this thread, it is VERY LIKELY that the “fraud” word will be used or referenced in many replies, EXPECT DELAYS for your replies until they are accepted. Mod Team]