By Vijay Jayaraj
Despite the fanfare surrounding wind and solar, the world’s dependency on fossil fuels is increasing. Last week, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said that the world is now “transitioning to coal.”
Saad al-Kaabi, Energy Minister of Qatar, says, “Many countries particularly in Europe which had been strong advocates of green energy and carbon-free future have made a sudden and sharp U-turn. Today, coal burning is once again on the rise reaching its highest levels since 2014.”
They are right. Global coal demand will reach an historic high in 2022, similar to 2013’s record levels. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “Global coal consumption is forecast to rise by 0.7 percent in 2022 to 8 billion tons…. Coal consumption in the European Union is expected to rise by seven percent in 2022 on top of last year’s 14 percent jump.”
Coal will continue to be a sought-after energy source as “rising gas prices after 2030 will make existing coal-fired generation more economic,” the IEA says. Global energy demand will grow by 47 percent from now through 2050, and oil is expected to be the major source of energy.
Analysts are projecting “a huge gas-to-coal fuel transition in power and industrial sectors” of Europe. Yes, not gas to renewables, but gas to coal. In fact, the European Union’s coal consumption grew 16 percent year-on-year for the first half of 2022. European countries imported 7.9 million tons of thermal coal in June, more than doubling year-on-year. Annual coal imports are expected to reach 100 million tons by the end of the year, the highest since 2017.
Even in the most developed economies of the West like Germany and the UK, fossil fuels continue to dominate as the only dependable source of energy. Germany is set to become the third highest importer of Indonesian coal in 2023, ranked just below coal-guzzling China and India.
AP says, “Coal, long treated as a legacy fuel in Europe, is now helping the continent safeguard its power supply and cope with the dramatic rise in natural gas prices caused by the war.” Rather than wind or solar, it is coal that is keeping the lights on in Europe.
Taking stock of the tremendous performance of coal, a Shaw and Partners senior analyst commented, “Who would have thought dirty ol’ coal would have been the best-performing equities in the last financial year? So far this financial year it’s also the best-performing sector.”
Given this reality, can the Western economies protect themselves from being victims of their own green policies that neither produce the required energy nor save the planet?
Many Western leaders are not ready to admit that this is a misery self-inflicted by their green-energy obsession that compromised the supply of fossil fuels.
The global green energy movement’s primary goal is to make economies transition to renewable sources of energy, a move that some believe will help save the planet from climate change. However, sources like wind, solar, and biomass are neither reliable nor affordable — nor even “renewable.” These indisputable facts were disregarded as western economies continued to make their so-called energy transition.
As a result, much of Europe, UK, and North America find themselves in an energy turmoil.
Instead of harvesting their abundance of fossil fuels, these economies are in state of lamentation, desperate for the procurement of the very fuel sources they once despised.
This week, the White House said it was concerned about a cut in oil production announced by OPEC, despite the Biden administration’s denigration of domestic oil. In Europe, leaders are livid over a gas shortage, another fossil fuel that they claim is bad for the planet.
Qatar’s Saad Al-Kaabi says that European ”green” policies are responsible for high energy prices and that leaders in the West “don’t have a plan.” Energy shortages have forced them to return to the most dependable sources — coal and oil. They are now scampering to ensure energy security for winter, when many believe likely that there will be power blackouts in the UK and Germany.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate with the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, England. He resides in Bengaluru, India.
This commentary was first published by the Washington Times, October 25, 2022
There is a shortage of unicorn farts to power the Energiewende and Net Zero.
Really, if they did not learn from South Australia, Texas, or El Hiero, they are just ignoring reality on wind and solar.
“they are just ignoring reality” We call them Liberals.
Liberals is just a code word that means socialists.
Yes, liberal sounds much to nice for these people.
Mr. Halla: A shortage? Really?! Or are we just leaving the precious unicorn gas in the ground?
it’s the 1970’s all over when coal comes to the rescue!
Cheap, dispatchable, reliable fuel should be enshrined in the Constitution and protected by multiple layers of boilerplate, now that even the numbies on the left are even coming to realize that energy is the fundamental foundation of human wellbeing and prosperity. It ranks with, air, water, food and shelter as an essential for survival for the individual and the species. Political messing with energy has the largest multiplier on costs to society and individuals. Political messing with agriculture should similarly be severely out of bounds.
A good reading of the Constitution clearly shows that the government has no power to control energy, education, food, and industry; there are a number of other unConstitutional agencies. Even the EPA soul die at the state level and no Federal level. For that matter, the Federal government has no right to “own” land that is not used for government and military uses. So, most of the Federal controlled lands in the western states are completely illegal. It only has the power to facilitate trade between the states, protect the country from foreign incursion, and also facilitate trade abroad.
I think you should write an article and post on this forum.
Every act of congress requires and enabling clause that references the constitutional authority to enact such legislation.
Almost every act has the commerce clause as justification based on a SCOTUS ruling in the 30s that is long overdue for overturning.
I would think it will take 2 or 3 truly conservative justices replacing Roberts and one or two of the libs to have enough justices with the intestinal fortitude to make such a ruling, since MOST of the welfare state will, by necessity, be dumped back on the states where such legislation belongs.
As I have posted in the past, a Republic of states must have enough variation in state government to justify people voting with their feet in numbers that will stop looney states from becoming ever more looney. BUT, the federal government essentially leveling the playing field by enacting all of the ENTITLEMENTS has mostly blurred the differences between the states even though some people, those who can afford to, ARE voting with their feet and leaving NY, Cali, Ill, etc. But imagine if RED states put an end to homelessness, welfare etc. by ending all the free money and this decreased their taxes even more. The freeloaders would be moving to the “blue” states while the productive would be moving to the “red” states in massive numbers.
Overturn one massively improper SCOTUS decision, and all of this could happen.. Also, elect a truly conservative president, a couple more conservatives replacing the RINO senators, and with the 50 + 1 vote threshold of reconciliation, all those entitlements could be eliminated in the name of balancing the budget.
Then end the income tax, go to The Fair Tax, and get the government out of our finances.
It will be interesting to see if the “world CO2” measurement on Mauna Loa shows a similar response to increasing fossil fuel usage as it did to decreased usage during covid. Which is nothing.
Here is a list of 19 names of the top coal baron billionaires of the 21st century. Notice how the greens never protest climate change in front of their houses.
Gautam Adani
Rinat Akhmetov
Kiki Barki
Warren Buffett
Chris Cline
Oleg Deripaska
Yao Junliang
Guo Jinshu
David Koch
Christian Leone
Hans Mende
Lakshmi Mital
Clive Palmer
Matt Ridley
Gina Rinehart
Nathaniel Rothschild
Wilbur Ross
Nathan Tinkler
John Turnbull
I picked three names on the list that I know.
Warren Buffett, investor
Wilbur Ross, investor
Matt Ridley (Greencoat Capital), investor
None of these three investors would I describe as “coal baron billionaires”
Therefore, I declare your list to be BS.
Think of Warren Buffet. He owns most of the shares of the railroads (BNSF) that deliver 300,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude to Louisiana for refining. That’s 300,000 barrels per day at ~$18 per barrel. $5million dollars per day. The Keystone pipeline would have moved those same barrels for half the price and double the safety. But it was cancelled for unexplained reasons by Joe Biden. I wonder if there are are any business dealing between Biden and Buffet? Naw!! Couldn’t happen. Or could it?
I know that but oil is not coal
Who owns the majority of railroads?
BNSF is 46 percent owned by Wall Street investment funds. At CSX, the figure is 35 percent; at Union Pacific, 34 percent; at Kansas City Southern, 33 percent; and at Norfolk Southern, 32 percent, according to Bloomberg News.
Buffet bought all his rail assets after a private meeting with Obama, oddly just before he canceled the Keystone for the first time. Strange coincidence.
What about Steyer? Biggest funder of China coal power plants. Coal baron enabler.
What we need is a list of the top 10 green-idiocy POLITICIANS in each country that can be called out, named and shamed, then work to remove or keep them from office.
The Greenies certainly do that to those they consider their “enemies”. We should too.
Gina Rinehart has iron ore mining and pastoral interests only. No oil or coal.Why include her?
It seems pointless making sense.
Only when we hit the buffers will they even stop to reflect – before going on.
I wonder how the greenie CAGW crowd maintains their composure when directly confronted with these types of Reality Checks? Skilled actors or Loonies?
Two recent reality checks I’ve confronted my liberal kids with:
Climate change activism is the ultimate lost cause. Throwing good money after bad is simply insane. Even if humanity had the ability to change the earth’s climate, who and how would someone be authorized to decide what the climate should be? Certainly not the corrupt bureaucrats of the UN or the WEF plutocrats.
CO2 in the atmosphere is not affected by our emissions. There is 50-fold CO2 in the oceans and ocean temperature controls how much is dissolved. Outgassing occurs with warming and is rather rapid. Redissolving of CO2 with cooling is slower.
Slight warming can easily double atmospheric CO2. The Mauna Loa CO2 record shows that the oceans have warmed slightly over the last 150 years. We also have to consider that part of the oceans are warming (releasing CO2) and other parts cooling (absorbing CO2) all year.
The sawtooth shape of the CO2 graph also shows that the half-life of CO2 is only about 5 years as it is clear that the Northern Hemisphere land masses soak up enough CO2 to be detectable, compared to the rather sparse land masses of the Southern Hemisphere.
In their self assured arrogance, the globalists and greens have played their hand. The old image of the poker player showing a winning hand only to be unexpectedly trumped by the only combination of cards that can beat them is manifesting itself.
An unexpected resistance to ESG began several years ago, quietly but now gaining momentum. Russia, intentionally or otherwise (and I take no sides in the conflict) has set the hare running as far as green policies go.
Biden has been a disaster and the whole world is watching his weird selection of gender confused individuals for the sake of optics global leaders are simply gobsmacked at. The UK political scene is embarrassing and squabbling over NetZero and fracking to save a country from freezing in the dark is principle to it. But like America, the globalist ambition of a borderless world is being unexpectedly resisted.
Much to their surprise people don’t just rollover for their ideologies.
It’ll be a long road back to normality but we’re getting there.
It’ll be a long road back to normality but we’re getting there.
And in the meantime who pays the price? Not the morons that have brought this on for sure!
A fired-up Neil Oliver tells it like it is.
https://youtu.be/39qBKjRll3c
The man has a gift for cutting to the chase. I agree with every word.
What a brilliant video!
I like the poker analogy, but its more like the poker player who shows their winning hand only to be trumped by every other hand at the table.
It’s all virtue signaling until the consequences come home.
Coal makes sense as the infrastructure is still there to use it. In middle Europe, at least.
But in the UK new fossil fuel infrastructure is not being created. This is not just due to green campaigners but mainly due to political weakness.
Fracking is banned again this week. The Tories voted to un-ban it last week. Un-banning was a flagship policy of the Tories’ growth strategy, 4 weeks ago. I said at the time that it was a pointless policy as no-one would invest in something that could be banned on the change of a Government.
People disagreed with me, not because I was expecting a General Election to change the Government but because they didn’t realise that politics affects investment.
The UK needs a strong Government with a democratic mandate from a Genral Election to get consistent policies. Only then can any investment occur. Whether that’s in coal, gas or tidal barrages will be learnt at the ballot box.
Karma
Karma is a *****
Oh, the irony. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
U.N. Secretary General back in September 2018….
“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.”
https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2018-09-10/secretary-generals-remarks-climate-change-delivered
***********
Meanwhile, the UAH satellite temperature record shows temps trending down since the El Nino peak in February 2016.
Secretary Guterres is sounding the climate alarmist party line more than ever today even though coal use is on the rise again. I just snicker every time he opens his mouth on these subjects.
I wish just some catastrophist, just one, would admit defeat when the world doesn’t end, just publicly admit the botched the prediction, and slither away. Or skip the admission; just slithering away would be good enough.
Or even admit that their previous tipping point of no return has passed because they miscalculated and they’ve got it right now. But they refuse to admit they even had a previous tipping point of no return.
Catastrophists tend to be narcissistic egotist catastrophists and incapable of admitting error, no matter how blatant their errors are.
What I am happy about is now we are going to see that, with “business as usual” and ignoring Catastrophic Anthro Global Warming, nothing bad will happen. Indeed, the globe is greening beautifully, Bengal tigers and polar bears are thriving and multiplying and we humans are heading for peak population and ever-widening prosperity by mid century.
We will know to ten decimal places what climate sensitivity is and be thrilled by its irrelevance. Climateers have known since ~2005 that T-anomaly forecasts turned out to be 300% too high.
They responded by massive fiddling of global temperatures to exaggerate global warming, and have put in motion “Terrorist Climate Policy” that, if fully
successful, would compete with fatality horrors of the 20th century. What they’ve accomplished already, even if it all stopped today, is grievous damage to the global economy, global agriculture, energy systems upon which all activities depend, and K-PhD education, all of which will require more than a few years of concentrated effort and investment to undo and rehabilitate.
Far from crisis, a golden age in progress toward “Garden of Eden Earth^тм”, with peak population by mid-century, and widening global prosperity was interrupted by the last gasps of moldy Malthusians, crony champagne socialists, and misanthropist eco-terrorists.
the Green weenies overplayed their hand and the public is not happy about freezing to death to fight an imaginary problem. Oh yeah, if they don’t starve to death first, that is.
Every Vijay Jayaraj article I have ever read (I read every one I find) was good or excellent, with not a bad one in the bunch. I try to read one dozen climate and energy articles every day, so that’s a big complement. I think we should praise good authors more often. Writing good articles is a lot more work than reading them
I agree. I’ve never read a bad Vijay Jayaraj article.
Black gold… Clean, green, renewable, reliable energy when and where it is demanded. That said, here is to the greening house effect.
“Oil, that is. Black Gold. Texas Tea.” 😃
(at about 00:11 on this clip)
Your remember. Fun.
And coal is black diamonds.
And diamonds are carbon, too!
And people… persons are carbon-based, three.
Symbolic irony that Germany is removing 8 large wind turbines to urgently expand a coal mine.
They should have listened to Naomi Seibt from the start when it comes to energy and climate.
On another site we discussed their age (2001) and the fact this removal is not likely much of a sacrifice.
Ja. Ja. More carbon is OK. But then what is causing the warmer earth?
https://breadonthewater.co.za/2022/08/02/global-warming-how-and-where
HenryP:
Henry, the answer to your question is as follows;
The Earth is warming because the quantities of Industrial SO2 aerosol emissions emitted into the atmosphere are being reduced (global Clean Air efforts, Net-Zero efforts)
The 2015-2016 El Nino warming was caused by a massive 29 million ton reduction in Chinese SO2 aerosol emissions; due to an edict to reduce air pollution.
(ALL El Ninos since 1850 have been due to temporary decreases in the levels of SO2 aerosols in the atmosphere, and all have ended when SO2 aerosol levels increased, primarily due to a volcanic eruption)..
SO2 aerosols are reflective, and cool the Earth;s surface, so that when their quantity is reduced, temperatures naturally rise. Unfortunately, the ONLY way to stop global warming is to stop reducing SO2 aerosol emissions.
And going nuclear will only make things worse, if they curtail the burning of fossil fuels.!.
..
Burl, what has caused the cooling from 2020 to today? Is more SO2 going into the atmosphere after 2020?
Tom Abbott:
The cooling from 2020 to today is caused by a ramp-up of SO2 aerosol emissions from China and India, apparently because of their heavy construction of new coal-fired power plants. See attached image.
This is the cause of the longest La Nina since Apr 1954-Aug 1956. Without it, temperatures, would be close to half a Degree C. higher, today.
Technically, fossil fuels are renewable. It just takes longer. Also, fossil fuels ultimately came from solar energy. It’s just been stored up in hydrocarbon form for millions of years. If they want to reduce their reliance on the carbon boogeyman, they should be all in for nuclear.
But the point isn’t about “carbon” or clean energy, it’s about sabotaging capitalism.
Capitalism only works when it’s free markets and governments stay out of picking winners and losers by subsidies. Consumers in a free market pick winners and losers by their pocket book as the majority will use the least expensive over the more expensive. Green Energy would have never become what it had without governments subsidizing them. As the more we have learned that CO2 does not have the effect/affect on climate nor weather, as was their narrative for a decade, more people are learning about it. Once the MSM starts telling the facts over the propaganda the green energy advocates are done for.
I always liked the 3 way battle..
Cost (price), Availability (timeliness), and Quality.
In terms of free market production, only two can be top priority while the other suffers.
eg. Back in my folks day they would save up to afford to pay for the best. These days millenials want it now for next to nothing.
I am currently reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger who puts a strong case for nuclear power, but points out that serially building such power plants using modular construction perhaps with incremental differences (he has mentions South Korea) works out cheaper than a staccato stop start approach.
He also emphasises the overestimate of the dangers of nuclear power compared with coal, and the death toll at Three mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, highlighting that more firefighters were killed in New York on September 11th than at Chernobyl.
But if there is lots of coal and gas—and there is—why do you need nuclear at all? Nuclear power didn’t emerge in the 1960s to prevent climate change, or even because we were going to run out of oil—that was later, in the 1970s. Nuclear was promoted because it looked on paper like it should have been cheaper—“too cheap to meter”, remember? Yes, coal pollutes the air but we used to use it for home heating and on the railways. We don’t anymore. There should be room now in the “air pollution budget” to use coal to generate electricity and in essential industrial use without killing people with smog. Sure, continue research on next-generation reactors but unless you get the regulatory and capital construction costs down, I don’t see them replacing coal and gas for electricity.
The amount of pollution today from coal with modern technology is much reduced from 50 years ago and the increase in CO2 could be much reduced by more extensive agriculture and greening in drier areas.
Well coal historically poluted the air, but that is no longer true with modern coal fired power plants. Scrubbers remove the vast majority of ash, there’s almost nothing left other than CO2 and water vapour coming out the stacks.
“too cheap to meter”
First used in 1954. Do you remember?
Those blaming the Ukraine war for rising gas prices are mindless blobs. The reason gas prices are up is because they (the green devils) insist on replacing gas with wind and solar. Wind and solar can not replace gas. They know that so they have done everything in their power to block the development of gas and generation with gas. They are 100% responsible for high priced gas. Putin is a punk, he had no business invading the Ukraine but he isn’t stupid. He knew that with the Europeans so dependent on his gas he could use gas as leverage and he is. The Europeans need to wise up and stop following the green devils, how long can they allow themselves to be screwed by the green devils before they grow a backbone and lash back
YAY!! 😃
“Xi’s speech restated China’s position that it will not end the
use of fossil fuels until enough sufficient, reliable non-emitting
energy sources are available to replace them.” (emphasis mine)
Xi just told us China won’t be going fully Nut 0 for a very, very
long time as RE isn’t reliable now or in the foreseeable future.
Yet, Western liberal leaders still pretend China’s going Net 0 soon.
Xi’s simple & straight forward plan is similar to what the West had
before the loony Greens took over & now refuse to adopt again!
Their idiocy is killing us, either because they’re cult zombies with
0 brain power or failure IS the plan!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/10/29/climate-change-weekly-451-green-energy-revolution-hits-energy-reality-wall/
Simpsons clip ‘brilliantly’ sums up the ‘renewable energy dilemma’
Ignoring Nuclear Power is stupid…………
Any Politician you meet should be asked whether they support FFS aka: Fossil Fuel Starvation. If the question is ducked the ask what they think NZE aka: Net Zero Emissions does.
The fired Twitter coders will need to learn to mine coal!
–Despite the fanfare surrounding wind and solar, the world’s dependency on fossil fuels is increasing. Last week, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said that the world is now “transitioning to coal.”–
Other than Europe, I wonder if China large constant amount of coal that it imports could be creating market for global coal mining.
Throwing the public a bone during a crisis won’t work in the long run until those politicians causing the problem are replaced with ones who support conventional energy.
This is the type of information that the mainstream media carefully avoids publicizing largely because the under-the-table funding they get from the environmentalist groups hinges on their downplaying reality. It also serves as a reminder that, despite all the subsidies given to wind and solar, renewables are nowhere near being able to supplant fossil fuels as reliable energy sources.
I sure do hope Greta Thunberg doesn’t hear about this. We don’t need any more lectures from deluded hobbits.
Liberals are slow learners.
For ‘slow’ read a rate of net zero!
You can’t beat natural gas. 735 days until the election. If we survive. Pray for Peace. America First. ULTRAMAGA.
Isn’t coal a biofuel since it comes from plants?
However, we need to get it right. Fossil fuel is really only coal. Gas and oil are renewable carbon sources derived from the planet’s core. It percolated upward from neutron repulsion decaying the core, which is a remnant of a past supernova. These nuclear reactions produce mainly carbon and hydrogen, which is why gas and oil are found virtually anywhere you drill deep enough. As methane percolated up through the molten planet, it loses some hydrogen and the carbons like together to form longer and more complicated chains, producing oil.
An oil source 7 to 12 thousand feet deep has NEVER been a swamp that was buried. The Russians have been trying to tell us for years that the elemental isotopic ratios of gas and oil are all wrong for being fossilized plant and animal remains.
What the activists and evil elite do not want to public to know is that gas and oil are renewable and that we also have loads of coal. What we do not have is much of the rare and heavy metals that go into wind turbines, solar panels, and massive battery installations. It’s simply impossible.
YOU CANNOT BUILD A RELIABLE ENERGY SUPPLY FROM UNRELIABLE ENERGY SOURCES.
They also are not interested in the public in even having reliable energy. They want a decreased standard of living and de-industrialized Western countries. These are evil people.
“AP says, “… the dramatic rise in natural gas prices caused by the war.””
The dramatic rise in natural gas prices caused by the stupidity of western politicians, rather, with special award call-outs to the Biden Regime of the Bifurcated States of America, the Trudeauan Democratic Republic of Canada, and whoever is prime minister this week in post-Lockean once-great Britain.
With at least occasional collusion by the AP, one might add.