When I began this blog back in 2012, I had already studied up on the “climate change” issue. And I had already come to the conclusions that not only was the science of human-caused catastrophic global warming hogwash, but also that the proposed solution of replacing energy from fossil fuels with the wind and sun could never work at reasonable cost. My first post on the subject was on December 4, 2012.
But at that time there was almost no organized political opposition to the program to “save the planet” by transitioning to “green” energy. Here in the U.S., the Democrats were unanimous in their plans to replace fossil fuels, and Republicans mostly went along — some enthusiastically, others perhaps trying to slow things down a little. Indeed, when I began the blog, I had only recently attended a fundraiser for Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election (yes, I gave the guy money) where he chose to make his speech mostly about how he would fix the environment by promoting green energy. And over in Europe it was even crazier, with essentially no major political party in any country taking a position in opposition to the forced elimination of fossil fuels. The so-called “Energiewende” in Germany had kicked off in 2010, with essentially no significant political opposition.
I have long thought that the political situation would change, perhaps suddenly, when the costs and unworkability of the intermittent energy sources started to become more obvious. Meanwhile the Democrats have only become more zealous and extreme in their plans (now known as the “Green New Deal”), with loud support from the megaphones in the media and academia.
But meanwhile, after a long wait, the costs are bubbling to the surface, and the opposition is growing rapidly and headed toward critical mass. Today, some developments from the UK and US.
UK
The headline from today’s Times of London is “Britons facing biggest drop in living standards.” The lede:
In a bleak assessment of the year ahead, the Bank of England warned people that take-home pay would fall by five times the amount it did during the financial crisis of 2008. It will be the worst hit to real incomes since comparable records began in 1990.
Here is the front page with the picture of Chacellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak looking deeply concerned:
And what is the main cause of the drop in living standards? Soaring energy costs. The government had tried to conceal the costs of suppressing fossil fuels by imposing price caps on household energy bills, but that only resulted in dozens of the local suppliers going out of business. Now, the authorities are unable to hold to the price caps:
Ofgem, the energy regulator, announced yesterday that the price cap on energy bills for 22 million households would rise by 54 per cent from April. For most households the increase will be £693 to £1,971 a year, whereas the costs for 4.5 million with prepayment meters will rise by £708 to £2,017 on average.
The conservative newspapers, particularly the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, have completely figured out that soaring energy prices are a self-inflicted consequence of failed government fossil-fuel-suppression policies. Excerpts from an editorial in the Daily Mail today:
Successive governments ignored warnings about the insanity of having no long-term strategy to safeguard energy security. Now the chickens have come home to roost. How unnecessary this is. For Britain sits on an energy goldmine. We have vast unexploited reserves of oil, gas and shale. And we had the chance to expand nuclear power. But hypnotised by the apocalyptic alarmism of eco-activists, our politicians have pursued an aggressive green agenda, shunning these abundant power sources. It means we are left at the mercy of unreliable renewables and importing high-priced energy to stop the lights going out.
And from the Daily Telegraph, also today:
The big political question is whether the country is prepared to pay for net zero now that people can see the implications of a policy that will do nothing to combat global climate change for as long as the world’s biggest CO2 producers refuse to change their own practices.
Of course, the insane energy policies, at least for the moment, are being inflicted on the people by the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But by now many of the Tory back benchers have figured this out, and the demands to stop the insanity have even begun to seep up to the cabinet level. From another article in today’s Daily Telegraph:
A number of ministers have expressed concern that the pace of the planned switch to renewable energy is too fast and is increasing costs for consumers. They believe Britain should use more of its own gas in the short-term. . . . Cabinet ministers are increasingly uneasy about Downing Street’s focus on its net zero target and have warned that the cost of living crisis should be given more priority in the coming years.
OK, I have some news for these cabinet ministers: so-called “green” energy isn’t going to get any cheaper or more affordable or more useful if you merely slow down the transition. The problems of intermittency and need for full backup and/or storage are intractable and are not going to go away. But at least the effort to slow things down is a start. Next up: replacing Johnson. With all the other major UK parties having gone all in for “green” energy, the only route to rescue the country is via a Tory Party led by someone other than Johnson that puts an end to the “green” energy madness..
U.S.
In a post last week, I reported on how the insane push for “green” energy had infested even the major money managers in the U.S., led by Larry Fink of Black Rock, who were using their voting power to attempt to force large public companies to make “net zero” pledges. For years this trend has proceeded without significant pushback. But today a post at RealClearPolitics by Andy Puzder and Stephen Soukup reports that “Larry Fink’s Crusade Runs Into Resistance.” (You may remember Puzder as Trump’s first nominee for Labor Secretary, who did not get Senate confirmation.) Excerpt:
By year’s end, the resistance to ESG and woke capital had increased in size and variety. Everyone from shareholder activists to U.S. senators, state treasurers, legislators, and governors, as well as the former director of “sustainable investing” for BlackRock itself – were charting various forms of pushback against the newly woke masters of the financial universe.
Leading the charge are elected official in Republican-led states, with Texas, West Virginia and Florida in the forefront:
State officials, in particular, have started resisting. . . . Texas has enacted legislation banning companies that engage in political vendettas against oil and gas or gun companies from doing business with the state. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has asked the state’s comptroller to place BlackRock on this list of banned companies. West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore announced that the Board of Treasury Investments, which manages the state’s roughly $8 billion operating funds, will cease doing business with BlackRock because it embraces “‘net zero’ investment strategies” that harm the energy sector, “while increasing investments in Chinese companies.” “[T]o combat woke corporate ideology,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the trustees for the State Board of Administration voted to “clarify the state’s expectation that all fund managers should act solely in the financial interest of the state’s funds” and revoked “all proxy voting authority of outside fund managers,” including BlackRock.
It’s fair to say that at this point almost the entire Republican Party in Congress and state governments has caught on to the “green” energy scam. I say “almost” because I’m sure there are a few — like Romney — who have not. But unlike ten years ago, it’s no longer so easy for the left to intimidate potential opponents into silence with accusations that fossil fuels are “dirty” or that anyone questioning progressive climate dogma is a “denier.”
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This is a wonderful article. What is good about it is that this fellow steps back and looks at the big picture without getting mired down in endless technicalities of whether this view of science or another is proper. Most of us can’t understand all the specialty terms and math. The point is can wind and solar replace fossil fuels and nuclear? The answer is no. Not just that it can’t be done economically but it can’t be done period.
Yes, this is the point. It cannot be done, and therefore will not be done.
And this impossibility is what the Net Zero plans will run headfirst into. If they carry on as they are now, they will force everyone to electric cars and heat pumps, while at the same time reducing the amount of electricity available to power even existing demand.
The practical proof of this is found in the plans to put EV chargers on smart meters, so they can be turned off centrally. Heat pumps, its being hinted, will have to be the same.
The result is, obliging everyone to buy appliances which require electricity while at the same time refusing them the electricity they require.
And in fact increasing dependence on gas. Think about it. When you move electricity generation on a large scale to a high proportion of supply from wind, what you actually do is increase the demand for gas, because of intermittency.
When you convert from gasoline to electricity for EVs you are therefore in practice moving cars to gas power, because its gas that is mainly supplying what electricity there is. When you throw out oil or gas boilers and replace them with heat pumps, its still gas that is used to generate the electricity that they need.
This is a way of increasing gas dependence. Its sold as increasing reliance on electricity, but ask where the electricity comes from, and what supplies there are will be will be entirely dependent on gas, without which the grid will fall over in a few weeks.
Meanwhile there is increasing awareness in the Conservative Party that Net Zero is a disaster in the making.
I don’t know whether to share the author’s optimism that this is all coming to a head and an end. I think there’s a serious possibility that it will take a disaster for any of the political parties in the UK to turn. Yes, there are voices in the Conservative Party, just about the only ones in the UK, who are calling this craziness out. But for them to get a majority behind them? Its reasonable to doubt that it will happen in time to avert disaster.
Australia started getting rid of coal at the beginning of this century. This is what has been achieved:
https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=all&interval=1M
Back in 2000, coal was supplying 13.5GW average output. Last year it has dropped to 11GW.
If that trend was maintained, Australia could be coal free by 2108; all without nuclear.
Problem is the easy part has been done. Without very low cost storage, it becomes horrendously expensive to maintain this strategy.
Australia has close to the best solar resource of any country. Rooftop solar often outperform all the grid scale wind generators and rooftops have made grid scale solar uneconomic, even with current grid scale subsidies. The rooftops are more heavily subsidised.
And they have the grid instability to prove it
Reposting from below
As the Germans move back toward coal and as the world moves to more fossil fuels especially coal, I want Jane Fonda to survive and thrive so she can see what she has done with her demonization of nuclear.
Before she goes to her reward I want her to be aware of how much she is personally responsible for evil CO2 emissions.
“Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.”
William Shatner, Airplane 2
The Daily Mail said, “We have vast unexploited reserves of oil, gas and shale.”
Vast?? In the UK??
Not massive but fairly substantial. If we exploited those reserves we’d be energy secure for more than the next 50 years or so, easily enough time to build up a substantial nuclear infrastructure.
the call should be to change net zero to Nyet Zero.
One of the problems we have in the UK is the low intelligence of our elected representatives. Our MPs are, basically, thick. Look. Take three countries – China, Japan and the UK. China has more than 1,000 coal-fired power stations and is building 44 more this year. Japan, which is 1.6 times bigger than the UK, has 85 coal-fired power stations and is planning to build 22 more. The UK has three coal-fired power stations and plans to close all three. Now – of these three countries, which one is moving to a net zero economy? Yes, that’s right, it is the UK!
These facts are not hard to find. Here’s another. The UK’s contribution to CO2 levels in the atmosphere is 0.000012%. Again, pretty easy to work out. But they don’t.
Of course, another big problem in the UK is we have the BBC to contend with, a state-sponsored communications company that, via radio, television and the internet, pours socialist and ‘woke’ propaganda into every living room. Since it took the decision, in 2006, not to report global warming issues impartially it has frozen out all opposing news and views. For example, few people in Britain are aware that there has been no global warming for the last 7 years. The BBC never publishes the science (how could they?) just consistent messaging that unless we end the use of fossil fuels the earth will experience catastrophe.
Meanwhile in the UK we are suffering huge rises in energy costs – while having massive reserves of natural gas beneath our feet. There are signs that one or two Cabinet ministers are feeling their brain cells stirring as they realise the absurdity of the situation. But most MPs are just brain-dead – they literally lack the intelligence to understand the science, research for themselves. Most of our journalists are the same, even in the Telegraph, just pursuing ‘nodding dog’ journalism and not asking the most obvious questions. Britain, like much of the world, is in the grip of the latest mass delusion. Manmade climate change is a fact-free world religion. Logic has departed. All we can do is wait for the mania to subside.
For the benefit of non-Brits, our chancellor Sunak is rich. His wife is stinking rich. So when this idiot stands up and says that ‘We will have to get used to high energy prices’ it is an insult to virtually all of the UK population as the ‘we’ certainly does not include him.
If Trump taught the Republicans anything it was to take the fight to the Dems, don’t sit back and let them win. He called out the news media for what it is, “fake news”. The left hated him for it and still do. We can no longer let the left get away with their fakery, take it to them.
I note the Telegraph having an each way bet here:
“The big political question is whether the country is prepared to pay for net zero now that people can see the implications of a policy that will do nothing to combat global climate change for as long as the world’s biggest CO2 producers refuse to change their own practices.”
the correct statement would be:
“The big political question is whether the country is prepared to pay for net zero now that people can see the implications of a policy that will do nothing to alter natural climate change. even if was implemented globally”
There, fixed it for them.
P.S. What’s the going rate for an editor at a toilet paper printing works?