Will Biden-AOC energy policies do to Americans what UK climate obsession is doing to Brits?
Paul Driessen
Virginia enacted a Clean Economy Act; other states have implemented similar laws. AOC demands a national Green New Deal; President Biden is imposing one via executive decree. The United Kingdom is determined to reach Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions; the European Union is pursuing a Green Deal.
All these policies send energy prices rocketing upward, eliminating jobs and killing people. Instead of reducing emissions, they simply move them overseas, where they combine with massive air and water pollution, habitat destruction and wildlife decimation – as China and other countries burn more coal, oil and gas every year, to improve their people’s living standards … and to mine and process raw materials for the wind turbines, solar panels and battery modules they manufacture for climate-obsessed nations.
The net result: Progress toward global Net Zero is zero – worse than zero – and all the lost jobs, rising poverty, reduced living standards and policy-driven deaths are for nothing.
President Biden wants hydrocarbon-free electricity generation by 2035, and elimination of all fossil fuel extraction and use by 2050. That means no gasoline or diesel vehicles; no natural gas to power factories or heat, warm water and cook in homes, hospitals and businesses; no petrochemical feedstocks for fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals and thousands of other essential, everyday products.
All US energy will be provided by wind, solar and battery power – millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of battery modules, sprawling across continental United States and along its coasts. Petrochemicals will come from crops planted on millions of acres of former wildlife habitat.
To drive this extreme agenda, Team Biden has canceled pipelines, leases and permits; pressured banks to stop lending money for drilling; and issued scores of regulations that delay and drive up costs for fossil fuel projects – while making it easy for industrial-scale wind and solar installations to get permits. Prices for energy, transportation, food, services and used cars predictably shot up. Inflation and consumer prices reached 40-year highs.
Henry Hub natural gas prices doubled from $2.61 per mcf (thousand cubic feet or million BTUs) in November 2020 to $5.51 in October 2021, before falling to $4.75 in January 2022, as skyrocketing global prices spurred drilling, fracking and production on US state and private lands. Regular gasoline averaged $2.17 a gallon nationwide in 2020 – but hit $3.39/gal ($4.38 in California) in the same timeframe.
As Americans fret and fume over the needlessly high prices – and wonder what the future might hold – they can look to the UK and EU (a) to count their blessings for comparatively low prices today and (b) to ponder how continued climate-centric policies could impact American livelihoods and living standards.
Britain and continental Europe have already embraced a wind-and-solar future, closed coal and nuclear power plants, and banned fracking for the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath their feet, while North Sea production keeps falling. They have reaped the whirlwind from those callously inept policies.
(It is illuminating and ironic that Russian organizations finance many US, UK and EU anti-fracking disinformation campaigns, funneling funds through a Bermuda law firm, a shell company and the Sea Change Foundation to the Sierra Club, Climate Action Network and other groups.)
Britain and Europe’s vaunted wind turbines have been generating electricity at a dismal 14% of “nameplate capacity” – providing power three hours a day, one day a week, four days a month, in short spurts, at completely unpredictable times. Their wintertime solar power has been equally sporadic and unpredictable. No modern society can function on such energy.
The huge gaps have been plugged with gas- and coal-fired generation, with much of the gas coming from Russia and the USA. But Asia also wants the gas, and Russia is playing Ukraine/Nord Stream 2 pipeline politics with its gas, tightening supplies as demand soars. UK and EU home and business gas and electricity prices are in the stratosphere – five to ten times the Biden Era prices Americans are paying.
Luckily for families and businesses, Britain’s Office of Gas & Electric Markets (Ofgem) regulates how much utility companies can charge. But that often means keeping household, hospital, school and business energy prices well below the utilities’ actual costs – with predictable results.
Experts say the average annual household bill of £1,277 ($1,755) could surge to £1,865 ($2,530) when the current price cap is raised in April 2022 – for homes and apartments that are much smaller than US counterparts, in a climate with much less extreme summer and winter temperatures than in much of the United States. Annual bills could exceed £2,000 ($2,715) or much more at Ofgem’s August review.
National Energy Action says this could put more than 6 million UK households (nearly one-fourth of all households) in “fuel poverty” – unable to afford proper heat, and often having to choose between heating or eating, even when cold indoor temperatures put their health and lives at risk.
For families that want budgetary certainty, the average 12-month fixed deal for a typical household now costs almost £2,500 ($3,430). But the UK’s second-biggest energy supplier’s most recent fixed-rate offer is almost £4,200 ($5,750)! That’s because natural gas and electricity generation costs are expected to keep rising – and because utilities must pay wind turbine operators “constraint payments” to turn turbines off whenever they generate more power than the grid needs and can absorb!
The month-ahead natural gas price at the Dutch TTF hub (a European benchmark for trading gas) recently hit €93.3 ($107) per megawatt-hour. That’s $31 an mcf – more than six times the January 2022 Henry Hub price. Just a month earlier, the European day-ahead gas price reached $61 per mcf!
No wonder 30 UK energy suppliers went bankrupt by the end of 2021 – leaving families and businesses scrambling to find new suppliers, at skyrocketing prices for heating and cooking. When utilities cannot charge customers anywhere near operating costs, they go belly-up.
No wonder two-thirds of UK renters struggle to pay their energy bills, and 400,000 more UK households were in danger of losing their gas and electricity provider before last Christmas. People are “genuinely terrified” about rising energy costs. Excess winter energy-poverty death tolls are likely to set new records.
Health and living standards in Britain and Europe will likely get far worse. In addition to insane energy costs, wages and environmental regulation costs are much higher than in Asia. Ceramic, steel, aluminum, automotive and other energy-intensive companies and industries are becoming uncompetitive. Manufacturing, jobs, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are just moving to Asia.
Climate and energy politics, combined with fierce global demand, make it unlikely that Europe’s energy prices will go down. And while the EU recently voted to define natural gas and nuclear power as “sustainable,” acquiring affordable gas and building new nuclear plants will take years and be battled every step of the way. Rolling blackouts could become as common as in California.
British politicians “rail at energy costs” and argue about trimming them at the margins, says journalist Madeline Grant, perhaps by reducing the 5% VAT on energy or the 25% green-social subsidy levies on electricity bills. But they “dare not question the green policies” that cause energy price increases, end up taking no action, and then slap hefty new “pollution taxes” on gas and diesel vehicles.
Britain and Europe need to drill and frack their vast shale deposits. Having shut down their older nuclear plants, they must start building small modular reactors. The rest of the developed world needs to take similar actions – and not only because China, India and the rest of the developing world are not about to give up fossil fuels and rely on unreliable wind and solar power, but to save jobs and lives.
Otherwise, Britain’s Christmas just past will be its, Europe’s and America’s Christmas future, forever. Scrooge learned from Marley. Will Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, AOC and their lot learn from reality?
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
Relativity Theory =
Worldometers shows worldwide 4.79 tons per person globally China 7.38, India 1.91, USA 15.52. The U.S. is about 4x China plus India. The clouds are reversed. The biblical reference about motes, beams and eyes in Matthew 7 is applicable. We’re looking environmental colonialism square in the eye.
And together India and China have about 8x the population of the US. Fun with statistics! Got any more?
Dumbest metric ever, American emissions are dropping, production emissions -30%, consumption emissions -15% China’s emissions are growing, production emissions +250%, consumption emissions +234%, and the population of China is more than 4 times that of the US. (OurWorld In Data)
But, Dave,
Isn’t the CO2 really plant food?
Good for poor nations, trying to grow [most of] their own food?
And, if the world does warm half a degree, won’t that make crop-growing seasons a fraction longer – to general benefit?
Maybe some folk could have a Damascene conversion as Saul – later Paul – did.
Just suggesting ….
Auto
There is no cure for stupid, and the UK and the EU have been run by stupid politicians and bureaucrats for years.
The only cure is a hard one with Germany declining as an export power and uncompetitive, insular protectionist effects across the region. The Greens must get tagged directly for change to happen.
There’s cure. UK government is currently insane. You would be insane if you printed money and owned a bunch of companies and had to do nothing but benefit from other peoples economies through banks.
Uneducated insane people are running and ruining UK. And they are about to hustle nuclear power, Russia, in Europe, by vowing to deploy NATO in Baltic states and Ukraine.
We are literally on the brink of World War 3 right now (sorry for politics, this is truth).
It’s time for USA and Russia to admit that UK government is insane people with nuclear weapons, potentially causing next war.
These insane people in UK push anti-family , anti-male and racist anti-white laws.
It’s time for US and Russian military to get together and strip UK off nuclear weapons. Idiots with nukes are dangerous for the world’s peoples and peace.
Before a certain person from the North of England gets in. It’s Sunday before 8am, before demand gets up. Sunday having lowest demand of the week wind is supplying just over a quarter of demand.
In the East Midlands where I am we’ve had 3 days of freezing fog and the whole country has had high demand. The grid has had all sources going including coal, open cycle gas and pumped storage as wind struggled to produce less than 1GW at times.
Now Germany has shut down its nukes will the inter connectors still available for the next windless and cold spell?
On the plus side at least articles are appearing in the MSM if not the BBC questioning the viability of renewable energy. Although some say the solution is more of the same.
Some people just can’t understand when something doesn’t work more of the same isn’t going to help
Faced with a sinking ship, their solution is to pour in more water.
drednicolson
“Faced with a sinking ship, their solution is to pour in more water.”
“Faced with a sinking ship, their solution is to pour in more holy water.”
Fixed it, perhaps, recognising the essential religious nature of the ‘True Believers’.
But more water – of whatever holiness – doesn’t help a sinking ship!
Auto
It isn’t only the crazy Germans that are shutting down their reliable power generation in early winter. The celtic nations have done the same with Hunterston B
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/01/scottish-nuclear-plant-hunterston-b-shuts-down-after-46-years-in-operation/. With less reliable generation in Britain, and less in Germany, additional interconnectors will not have any excess electricity available to stabilise the grids.
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations
Source Page 11
I wonder just how well that self-enriching (@taxpayers expense) fellow of dubious parentage is getting on, don’t you just love Socialism, the promoters of it rarely seem to come from humble backgrounds, quite the opposite in reality!!! Never an Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorist around when you want one, they are so unreliable!!!
” …Socialism, the promoters of it rarely seem to come from humble backgrounds, quite the opposite in reality!!!”
______________________________________________________________
They are the Bolsheviks of 1918 and they’ve been with us all along. When the USSR collapsed, December 26th 1991, they didn’t go quietly into the night never to be seen again.
Religious people say, “It’s the work of the Devil.” As far as I know, that might be a reasonable assessment of reality.
Maurice Strong, Canadian, see
https://canadianpatriot.org/2020/11/25/maurice-strong-and-the-roots-of-the-great-reset-agenda/
All you need to know about climate politics, the IPCC, global warming, climate change, the effects of weather changes, and what it going on is detailed in the United Nations records of the “climate change” disaster, It was started by Maurice Strong, a self-retired Canadian oil baron, based on the 1972 United Nations “Conference on the Human Environment. It was later enhanced by the formation of the IPCC, Intergovermental Panel on Climate change.
The entire program was based on “human-caused” environmental change. None of the natural sources affecting climate need apply.
The program was established by the UN to increase the amount of funds the UN could raise by energizing the underdeveloped and dictatorial smaller countries.
It obviously been very successful from the UN’s point of view since program has given it a fairly sturdy world wide handle on billions of dollars and a large influence on the process.
Thank you for this incriminating evidence. The following website has appeared on here before and is a collation of many similar type thoughts including Strong’s lovely quote.
https://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html
To add to your example here are a couple:
‘It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.’ – Paul Watson (Greenpeace)
‘We routinely wrote scare stories…Our press reports were more or less true…We were out to whip the public into a frenzy about the environment.’ – Jim Sibbison (Environmental journalist, former public relations official for the Environmental Protection Agency)
‘The data don’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models.’ – Chris Folland (UK Met Office)
‘In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention….and thus the ‘real enemy, then, is humanity itself….believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is ‘a real one or….one invented for the purpose.’ – Club of Rome
And this from someone I used to think was a hero:
‘In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day.’ – Jacques Cousteau
To expand on Mr. Cousteau’s position and properly cite his comments:
One American tires the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshis. …Its terrible to have to say this.
World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.
-JACQUES COUSTEAU, UNESCO Courier, November 1991
The distribution of birth control devices and the imposition of mandatory abortion practices in the third world countries is now ecologically insufficient and unfairly out of world social balance.
The white, upper, and middle-class females of modern society are too healthy and fertile to be exempted from some imposed
regulation of international law or mandate. An American-born child is environmentally too expensive to maintain to his or her adulthood in a world economy. American women must be subjected to some manner of regulation beyond licensing and mandatory abortion practices.
Unconventional and extreme measures must be implemented and enforced by global U.N. mandate as it is deemed necessary. The bodies of these world eco-criminals should be commercially yielded for reintroduction in the world’s natural systemic food and nutrient chains, in order to restore a more natural biological balance and order to our Sacred Earth.
-JACQUES COUSTEAU, Speech at Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992
Seems Ol’ Jacques expected the 350,000 eliminated to be from one country in particular.
I guess “Ol’ Jacques” was not referring to himself when he said 350,000 people per day should be eliminated.
Add this : A 1992 reporter questioned him on French television talk show L’heure de Verite (“The Hour of Truth”) that “to eliminate diseases and suffering was a beautiful idea, but not beneficial in the longer term”.
Now see how 800,000 US citizens have died from COVID in 2 years, and wonder what his comment would be.
I wonder just how many of the current crop of career politicians know that your quote is correct., My guess is they would say “bullsh1t, there’s no way the Under Secretary would have said that”
A big problem is going to be who on earth to vote for at the next General Election, they are all as bad as the other with the same mind-set.
The Reform Party is the only one with a sensible energy policy, but are still only a very minority party.
I’m afraid sense won’t prevail until the train crash has occurred.
“I’m afraid sense won’t prevail until the train crash has occurred.”
That’s my opinion, too. Governments only act *after* the crisis happens.
“The Reform Party is the only one with a sensible energy policy, but are still only a very minority party.”
And will continue to be a very minority party as long as people won’t vote for them because of that. Time to start voting for ‘sensible’ instead of ‘not sensible but likely to win’.
They can do otherwise – look at all the crash bailouts from LTCM to Northern Wreck, to Lehman. And the 1929 crash.
See how FDR and Glass-Steagall with the RFC are the best known efforts to deal with crashes. China uses a Glass-Steagall bank separation combined with massive physical economic development – now where did they get that idea, I wonder.
You know Strong, is a Canadian communist, high school dropout (but a genius who made billions in mining) created UN’s UNFCC, Kyoto, and the IPCC and gave them their marching orders. His first was the Stockholm Conf on Enviro in 1970. Somehow, people seem blind to the meaning and means to achieve his result that were never hidden and were repeated by other UN officials in their own words. I try to raise them from time to time.
Stop trying to blame Russia for this. The blame lies entirely at home. Anti fracking protests are financed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other NGOs who are in turn financed by the Soros foundation and the governments who they lobby. They are enthusiastically supported by the useful idiots who are being propagandised by corrupt media organisations.
Russian gas is being delivered exactly as contracted for. It is entirely down to the fanaticism of european authorities that long term contracts are being replaced in order to purchase gas on the spot market. This is largely due, I would suggest, to the fact that because of the unreliability of renewables, they do not know how much gas to contract for, so buy as and when needed on the spot market.
Until we place 100% of the blame where it belongs, we can’t even begin to put right this unfolding disaster.
I should further add that Nord Stream 2 was completed in October and is ready to pipe much needed gas, but what’s happened? The EU won’t certify it until July. So how exactly is Russia throttling gas to Europe?
The good Victoria Nuland openly stated last week the US us trying to stop NordStream2 completely. Ukraine wildly claims it is behind this, and German Foreign Minister Baerbock is actively blocking NordStream 2. Add in the new EU energy spot-price model and one has a witches brew.
Now Gazprom is bringing Poland to EU court over gas price contracts.
The US is cashing a bonanza with LNG shipments to the EU in need! A Free Lunch, sorry, Free Trade!
On a poetic side, see the brand new movie clip of the Tragedy of Macbeth, where one famous actress plays all 3 witches at the cauldron. Timely release, I’ll say!
why does it take so long to certify a pipe?
It was certified, but a certain Bureaucrat after 4 years construction suddenly found a legal crumb (Swiss firm without German office). Here she is :
German WIWO – Business Week :
Nord Stream 2: Diese Frau entscheidet über Deutschlands heikelstes Projekt
Nord Stream 2: This woman decides on Germany’s most delicate project
https://www.wiwo.de/my/politik/deutschland/spitzenbeamtin-der-bundesnetzagentur-nord-stream-2-diese-frau-entscheidet-ueber-deutschlands-heikelstes-projekt/27946436.html?ticket=ST-2142624-dfPp3kLxKFRbUE4zRQ24-ap6
Missing there is the open declaration by US Undersecretary Victoria Nuland to stop NordStream 2 later . Have we a witches brew?
Perhaps the most important thing about Nordstream 2 is that (unlike existing gas pipelines from Russia to western Europe) it does not go through Ukraine. And you can see how the current Russian regime can use that to its own advantage in its game of seeing how far it can push the west while trying to rebuild the Russian empire.
Get ready for Holodomor v2 – starve them of energy rather than food.
And get ready for “Peace in our time” v2.
RIGHT ON!!
I’ve said it before but most people, politicians, academics, MSM and the general public do not know that renewable generation is not an equivelent or a replacement for conventuional generation.
There are the ususal ‘the wind doesn;t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine’ comments but it is far worse than that. Renewables are asynchronous generators where the grid needs synchronous generators to maintain frequency. (Frequency being the most important parameter on the grid as it measures demand and input which must balance at all times) The synchronous generators, gas , coal and hydro can keep the grid stable, but the greater the proportion of renewables connected make this job harder and harder. nor do renwables have any inertia, which also helps stability, much like a flywheel on the car engine.
Hopefully, for America, sense will return when President Biden is voted out? There are certainly a growing voice in the U.K. against net zero and our current Conservative Prime Minister (Who should surely be in the Green Party?) cannot survive much longer.
IIRC I seem to remember that there was a maximum of 20% of electricity to be generated from renewables if the grid was to remain stable.
I follow the UK and Texas grids fairly carefully. No matter how much solar and wind power they get the fraction from big spinning turbines, that is hydro and thermal sources, never falls below 35% and is usually over 40%.
I wish that were true. In some circumstances spinning mass is less than 30% and then we are treading on thin ice
We [in the UK] are completely screwed
But at least we don’t have. a Minnie Mouse sound alike!!
We have gas underfoot and under the sea and they will leave it there
There are a few lovely words buried inside a BBC article entitled ‘Why are gas prices so high’ (Natural gas, not petrol)
To my reading not only do they trash the notion of Global Warming but also they demolish (wind powered) renewable energy.
The article is here
The words that “tickle me” are:
Reasons for the increase include:
My reading:
Haven’t we just been told that the last 6 years have been the warmest evah – so why the cold winter?
Aren’t we constantly having it mashed into our faces the Climate Change is going to cause more ‘wild and windy weather’
Why the increased Chinese demand if they’re not using to manufacture (designed-in & built-in obsolescence and riddled with built in spyware) tat and junk for eager western consumers to buy – as required/demanded by Western Governments so they can cream off all the taxes, levies and tariffs attached to that junk and what effectively keeps the country afloat.
(Primarily so an alcoholic and permanently drunk ‘captain’ can cheerfully sail it over the top of the Niagara Falls)
Nothing, for me, highlights the sheer blindness, stupidity and magical thinking of Warmists than that.
Yet strangely, they are all ‘rocket grade scientists’ who perfectly understand the quantum mechanical processes involved when electromagnetic energy interacts with matter.
what are the words to describe what’s unfolding here…..
Climate change does cause more wild and windy weather… the UK is now frequently afflicted by it. We had a substantial power outage as a result of storm Arwen last year.
climate change does not eliminate winter by evenly warming up the winter months.
IPCC AR4 Chapter 10 Page 750
Temperature Extremes
“Almost everywhere, daily minimum temperatures are projected to increase faster than daily maximum temperatures, leading to a decrease in diurnal temperature range.”
____________________________________________________________
Hardly a recipe for wild and windy weather.
🤣🤣🤣
I’m seriously thinking about setting up a recovery home for deluded idiots like yourself to be deprogrammed once the CAGW Doomsday Death Cult has been proven to be a fantasy. There will be millions to be made. I’ll reserve you first place.
I can provide recreational outings for residents in open carriages drawn by unicorns.
I saw an article yesterday referring to a *real* unicorn, a dinosaur with one great big horn on its head.
You know when we accuse you of being a clueless alarmist troll…
“Recent data and trends in these phenomena are detailed in the 2018 State of the UK Climate Report (Kendon et al., 2019).
This report found that there is no compelling trend in maximum gust speeds recorded in the UK since 1969, measured as the number of days more than 20 weather stations recorded gust speeds above 40, 50 or 60 knots.
Changes in observation methods and instruments mean the data can only be reliably assessed back to 1969, while changes to the wind measurement network and the way gusts are measured mean the data should still be interpreted with caution, but there is nothing to suggest maximum wind speeds have persistently changed in recent decades.”
Met office UK.
Of course, if we weren’t so reliant on unreliables, the outage would never have happened would it, mate?
“Climate change does cause more wild and windy weather”
An unsubstantiated assertion by you, Griff. You have no evidence for any such thing, yet you declare it as fact. This is not science, Griff, it is pure speculation. But, you are not alone, all the alarmists do the same thing: They put forth unsubstantiated assertions and assumptions as established facts.
Just saying something is so, doesn’t necessarily make it so, Griff.
No evidence, Griff. You and the other alarmists couldn’t prove your claims if your lives depended on doing so. Quit scaring the children with scary climate change stories.
“ Climate change does cause more wild and windy weather”
You just can’t seem to get out of your own way
Before the narrative changed to “everything not only is worse but must be worse” and became climate Scientology, climate science understood that the earths climate is a heat pump moving heat from the equator to the poles, and so it’s the differential between those two locations that defines the climate and drives weather systems and their strength.
Based on logic, warming poles means LESS weather, less wind, which is what you are seeing.
But instead of trumpeting that you mindlessly promote the false idea that the weather must be worse, because that is your narrative.
As I always, all my pity goes out to you
On a typical winter Sunday afternoon, which can happen anytime between 1st November and 30th April the situation is
CCGT 15.70GW (41.55%)
Nuclear 5.41GW (14.32%)
Coal 0.67GW (1.77%)
Hydro 0.55GW (1.46%)
Biomass 2.97GW (7.86%)
Solar 0.60GW (1.59%)
Hydro 0.55GW (1.46%)
Wind 7.54GW (19.96%)
Then we are importing/exporting
French ICTs 1.95GW (5.16%)
Dutch ICT 0.81GW (2.14%)
Irish ICT -0.07GW (-0.19%)
E-W ICT -0.01GW (-0.03%)
Nemo ICT 0.68GW (1.80%)
Norway ICT 0.69GW (1.83%)
My challenge to you still stands, restrict your energy use to the performance of renewables, I’ll even relax the restrictions. We have about 25GW of wind and about 15GW of solar so 40GW of renewables*. So restrict your total energy consuption (heating, lighting, cooking, transport and food) to 20% of normal for today as an example.
When you do that I’ll believe that you’re actually worried about something or other.
*Drax and other wood burning doesn’t count
What is your funding source?
“Climate change does cause more wild and windy weather… the UK is now frequently afflicted by it.”
Utter garbage. The data does not show that at all.
I believe the half-truths in the article are aimed at diverting attention. The closure of the UK’s largest gas storage facility
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/centrica-to-close-uks-largest-gas-storage-facility/
(I have read elsewhere that extraction of the remaining gas would be over several years) along with having to import gas instead of fracking the plentiful reserves under our feet mean competing for those volatile supplies while demand is highest.
“what are the words to describe what’s unfolding here…..”
Insanity is the best description. People go mad in crowds, and have done so over the non-existent CO2 “crisis”.
The People have had help going mad from the Leftwing/Alarmist Propaganda Machine which has been spewing this unsubstantiated, unscientific nonsense for years.
Haven’t we just been told that the last 6 years have been the warmest evah – so why the cold winter? !!!!
What if unfolding all over the Earth is the effects of a Grand Solar Minimum. It started some 15 years ago, right on the time frame the Physicists predicted. Solar Cycle 24 was a virtual standstill with minimal warming. Cycle 25, just completed, was negative generating a fall in average temperatures, and the Solar minimum is expected to last at least 10-5 more years and likely until 2050.
Enjoy it! Years with poor crops. Cold temperatures. Common outbreaks of the cold Arctic jet stream causing weather like recent years all around the globe- famines, bad winters, shortages of heating fuels, lots of snow in winter, sporadic snow storms in the summer near the arctic circle. It may be a replay of the Maunder Minimum. Another Medieval Warm Period.
All of this is completely outside the scope of the IPCC and Climate Change science- which is mainly opinion, not science. It IS NOT human caused!
Gotcha Griff.
This ideological drive towards an unreliable energy future will create more victims than climate change™ ever could.
The UK is gaining jobs thanks to renewables – often in areas where the natural gas industry is in decline or which have seen economic decline (e.g. fishing ports).
We don’t have any crisis in supply; our renewables are perfectly predictable 24 hours in advance; we have multiple interconnectors to buy electricity from geographically diverse areas…
We don’t have a problem, except the international price of natural gas… which would be the same even if we produced more gas ourselves.
But we wouldn’t be buying international gas, griff
Our own gas would be a lot cheaper. – obviously
Renewables don’t work
Garbage as usual, the jobs gained are for the construction phase only and not for ongoing positions unless you are talking about cleaning snow from solar panels or burying non-recyclable wind turbine blades – you know, real highly skilled technical jobs.
In Griffie-poo land, every day is opposite day.
Bizarro World, where everything is backwards from the real world. That’s Griff’s world.
How can you be so damned stupid?
Years of reading the Guardian etc
yup., and listening to Labour politicians ‘more jobs = more money’
whereas the truth is that less jobs = more wealth = more money.
because people waste money working by and large – commuting, work suits, cost of running and office, cost of meals at work…let a machine do your job and take home the same pay for less waste of resources.
Wealth creation is what we want. how it gets distributed is down to politics.
Windmills do not create wealth – they simply redistribute it from the poor to the rich.
Windmills means more jobs for Chinese yards….
Yep proof that reading the Guardian rots your brain.
The Grifter is probably just looking at the pictures…
Prospect, the union which covers much of the sector, has found a 30% drop in renewable energy jobs between 2014 and 2017, as government cuts to incentives and support schemes started to bite. It also found investment in renewables in the UK more than halved between 2015 and 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/renewable-energy-jobs-in-uk-plunge-by-a-third
In Germany the number of jobs in unreliables halved between 2011 and 2018. In wind they fell from 108,000 in 2016 to 70,000 in 2018.
By 2026 up to 16GW of existing German wind farms will reach 20 years of age – the effective end of their life.
Yes, lots of redundancies in fishing ports as we have to let French fishing vessels pillage our waters or they’ll turn the interconnector off.
Grifftopia!
The UK is gaining jobs thanks to the new givernment policicy of employing peole to dig holes in the road and fill them up again.
I cannot believe that you are that stupid griff, increased employment does not equate to increased wealth. Renewables are amongst the lowest productivity technologies in terms of MWh per man hour, ever invented.
If you really want to increase employment, put all the unemployed on treadmills to generate power.
So it is the government responsible for all the increased number of potholes in out roads.
The only problem is that they haven’t yet got to the stage of filling them up again. /s
Griff, you misunderstand the difference between predictability and reliability.
Unreliables are predictably unreliable. If you can predict no power for 24 hours, that doesn’t solve the problem of having no power.
Wow, you just nailed it. It doesn’t help that you can predict no wind 24 hours in advance. That just means you can predict energy shortages 24 hours in advance. Who does that help? If you don’t have fossil fuel backup then you are sunk. And if you *do* have fossil fuel backup then why have all the unreliable generation in the first place?
“And if you *do* have fossil fuel backup then why have all the unreliable generation in the first place?”
Good question. Why build twice as much generating capacity as you need?
Griff, mate, I really don’t like saying this, but you really are clueless
Sigh
So many ridiculous thoughts. First the spot market isn’t the contract market
If you produce your own gas there is “more” gas dropping the price.
Gas you produce yourself is money spent at home vs importing from elsewhere, sending your dollars away.
A perfect example of your thinking is seen here in canada. We have all the oil we will ever need, but your climate insane brethren block construction of east/west pipelines and so eastern canada imports a million barrels a day by tanker from the Middle East
Every drop of which we could supply internal and not a dollar leaves canada
And so yes, canada is run by the Griff collective, too stupid for words
“We don’t have any crisis in supply;”
That’s a mighty big pile of sand that you have your head buried in.
The reason that the UK has a gas shortage and painfully high prices is down to our government and our financial institutions being so stupid as to listen to deluded environmentalists and stopping investments in much needed gas projects.
“renewables are perfectly predictable 24 hours in advance”
Yes indeed – it can be prefectly predicted that renewables will produce next to nothing, often for days on end. Then what do we use for power? Pixie dust? The stupidity here is nothing short of breathtaking.
This report might also be of interest- https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2021/10/Kalghatgi-Net-Zero-Challenges.pdf
Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory, similar to the Caribbean offshore financial Empire. See Shaxson’s 2018 Spider’s Web, the Second British Empire, based on a 2011 book Treasure Islands.
The film’s experts show that London has been able to drive deindustrialization of the American and European economies, particularly since London’s “Big Bang” financial deregulation of October 1986, which called the shots for trans-Atlantic bank deregulation.
Missing entirely in the Lead here is Marc Carney’s frank admission at COP26, a Bloomberg interview, of the ruthless. relentless, focus on $100 TRILLION. This Second British Empire is desperately bankrupt. The US is being looted to the bone. Russia and China refuse to rescue this fossil, hence the coluuuuuusion megaphone.
“This Second British Empire”
Can you expand on that?
Shaxson does a masterful job, the book also.
The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire | Documentary Film
Yeah, I hold quite a lot of BTC
Considering the sheer scale of the City of London’s secret financial empire, and that the Blockchain guys never mention it, look very carefully at what the Bank of England et. at. are planning – their own Central Bank Synthetic Currencies.
Remember FaceBook and Libra, now called Diem?
$100 Tn! No wonder the financial institutions want to be able to skim their 3% commission from it.
And the accountancy firms listed in that movie, KPMG,PwC,Deloitte…
I think its is fairly sad that our US cousins actually believe the crap the MSM pumps out about what UK people believe or embrace.
UK is and has been fighting a war against RenewableBollox™ for at least a decade. Whilst opinion is divided on ClimateChange™ its fairly solidly skeptical of windmills and solar panels, except amongst the Green and Wet behind the Ears brigade.
What is happening right now us that wherever you look, the word ‘nuclear’ is on everybodies lips, yea even unto the MSM.
COVID and the gas crisis and Boris impetuous puff about ‘net Zero’ has woken people up to the fact that its getting hard to get away without actually doing anything about CO2 reduction. And the cost of that is likely to be politically unacceptable which is why, as several MPs have pointed out quite stridently, no cost benefit analysis has been done on all the net zero policies.
Which is illegal.
Meanwhile in the EU, nuclear is being declared ‘renewable’, as is gas…
No. We have not embraced renewable nonsense. In fact we have just about had enough of it.
It is different in the USA – you have massive gas and coal resources left. You don’t have to face the nuclear issue yet.
That’s where the grass roots in the UK are at. The politicians and the media simply haven’t caught up.
GB also has massive coal resources left. Scotland alone has enough good quality coal to last for a couple of hundred years, and it can be turned into useable gas in the coal seam if necessary. Recoverable offshore oil is also still being discovered,
It is all a self induced catastrophe.
We could argue, Stephen. You say ‘self-induced’. I think it’s orchestrated.
But in either case, we surviving serfs-to-be are screwed.
Renewables have nameplate capacity and yet run at 20-25% overall. An intelligent human has a nameplate IQ of ~110 yet many politicians, greenies, and others run at 20-25% with logic circuits disabled, critical thinking skills non existent, observational skills limited etc.
Just my thinking:))
It is important to remember that PV and wind ratings are maximum values needed to calculate safety margins for system designs; they have very little relation to the amount energy that might be produced in actual use.
“Renewables have nameplate capacity and yet run at 20-25% overall.”
The real problem of renewables is the extended periods where they run at about 0% overall. For Solar, this is every night, for wind it is whenever a large high pressure system decides to turn up and hang around, with its associated light winds.
This means that it is necessary to have other sources of power to cover 100% of the electricity demand, which then must sit idle at times when the renewables do produce some power. So in terms of installed capacity, you have to pay twice over for your electricity system.
Add in the idea of switching all heating to use electricity and the idea of making all of our transport systems use electricity and you are building a system that will fail. The delusion knows no limits.
Split the problem up.
Say we used all unreliable solar. Do we go back to the candle and fireplace for light and heat at night?
Say we used all wind power. Do we go back to the candle and fireplace when significant areas of the US are becalmed?
How often does it happen that we have no sun and no wind? It was that way here in east central Kansas all night last night. Should I have broken out the candle and lanterns and slept under buffalo hides in 20F weather?
How many grid level batteries would it take to supply home heating for a region ALL NIGHT? Figure it for Brooklyn or Harlem.
It relentlessly staggers from bad to worse…
Quote:They’ve cost £11billion to install – so far – and are supposed to help us save money on our energy bills.
But the vastly expensive roll-out of smart energy meters is being described as a ‘waste of money’ – because the equipment will become obsolete.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-10405685/ALL-smart-meters-need-replaced.html
It is perhaps interesting that the guy who reads my electricity meter says that there is no way that he is going to install one in his own house because they are unreliable and also gives the electricity company control over your use.
You might say that ” he would say that ” to pritect his job. I don’t think so, there are plenty of job vacancies in GB at present.
This maxim is proven time and time again: When you need the power the most, renewables produce the least.
Indeed, energy stupidity aka EnStupid-19, has reached pandemic levels in the UK, in the EU, and is approaching it in the US. There is a vaccine for it – knowledge and truth, available here on WUWT and elsewhere, but many are ideologically opposed to it because well, they are STUPID. Reality is the herd immunity from EnStupid-19. It is a tough way to learn though.
Excellent piece.
Well done Driessen !!
Sad to think that less than a century ago, these people ran most of the civilized world.
They ran it into the ground. Talk about carbon capture!
From the article: “President Biden wants hydrocarbon-free electricity generation by 2035, and elimination of all fossil fuel extraction and use by 2050.”
President Biden won’t be president beyond 2024, so things may change between 2025 and 2035/2050.
I don’t think Biden’s “vision” is sustainable, even for a few years.
Biden is the Worst President Evah!. And he’s only been in office one year. His favorability ratings are at record lows.
We have the worst president evah!, and we also have the worst vice president evah! We have a serious lack of leadership and vision in our leadership. They are total incompetents, except when it comes to attacking their political opponents. At that, they are experts, of long practice. It’s the only thing that keeps them in the political game.
FJB
The only positive to the situation is that the entire democrat facade-fraud is exposed for all to see.
I live in a small flat with my wife in London. Our gas and electric charges have recently risen so that I will now be paying and extra £600 a year.
I’m lucky that I can (extremely reluctantly) absorb this cost. I have no idea how much extra a family of 4 in a 3 bedroom house is going to now be paying. The rise in prices will be crippling, particularly for people who are on low incomes.
For the last 30 years since this green scam began I have been saying the same thing: if the CAGW mob were just a bunch of unhinged scientists and daft far left hippies ranting in the MSM I wouldn’t care less. But it’s not just that: it is costing us all a hell of a lot of money and pushing people into poverty. The green scam is downright evil. I have no other words for it.
So when I see that f**king little pr*ck Attenborough, who has spent his whole life jetting around the world and has a carbon footprint bigger than most African countries, telling us all how we need to fly less, drive less, stop having children, and stop living our lives to the full I want to smack the old bast*rd in his sanctimonious little face.
Mods: I am allowed to have that expletive ridden rant?
Not a mod, but apply that generously to a lot of COP26 blatherers!
I would create green employment for you and I by paying us to stand with a 2×4 behind our favorite hypocrite (Attenborough, DiCaprio, gore, pick’em) and when they say something hypocritical you whack them upside the head.
It would be great exercise too, but tiring because you’d never be able to stop swinging.
Such foolish people that so many insist on listening to.
You’ve just created the first genuinely productive green jobs!
It’s entirely earned and appropriate where Attenborough is concerned.
It isn’t “ironic” that Russia is funding the organizations that are working to destroy the economy, it is a deliberate, strategic, policy.
Putin doesn’t want Europe’s economy destroyed, he needs the gas customers.
He just doesn’t want you to frack your own supplies
And Qatar too. As one of the top exporters of NG, they have been actively funding the anti-fracking alarmism in the US.
At the same time news was reporting that the U.S. was the leading exporter of Liquified Natural Gas, my power company added a large upcharge for the price of gas in my central Illinois town. Interconnected indeed.
Yeah, there is reason to fear brutal consequences of a cold winter in EU-UK that is the result of government ineptitude. This might spell the end of the climate neurosis. The Midterms this November might exorcise the demon in the US, too.
Regarding Russian supplies, the EU and UK were offered cheap gas last year, but this was for longterm supply, of course. It shouldn’t be news to a government that that’s how the market works. Because of the optics re global warming, the Glasgow cry-in, etc. it was refused. This automatically shifts you into the spot market, where high demand for fossil fuels fills the issue of supply and price with uncertainty. The EU excoriated Hungary and Serbia for signing up for long term cheap gas from Russia (4cents IIRC).
Ukraine is a different case. They stole and resold gas from the pipeline from Russia and never even paid for the gas they used. There is no way that a new pipeline is going to built through Ukraine as EU is demanding. Even the devil himself would be right to refuse it.
Does Europe really need the EU?
Yes.
It is of immense economic benefit (which is why Norway and Switzerland are in effect in the EU single market)
They also send terrorist Muslims to America.
If an American went to the UK, they would have zero chance of acquiring a weapon… but apparently anyone can get a gun in the USA as soon as they turn up?
We also have box cutters and knives.
Actually batteries don’t produce energy. They just store energy produced otherwise for future use.