By Andy May
h/t Wim Röst
The Universidad de las Hespérides is in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco. The Hespérides are the nymphs of the evening and golden sunsets, so I imagine it is a beautiful location to travel to. Dr. Constable’s talk can be viewed in full here. The beginning is in Spanish, but they turn to English about 4 minutes in.
His talk is about our energy economy and how it has evolved over time. He makes the critical point that fossil fuels are a very high-quality energy source and have produced a very wealthy and high productivity world. As a result, the medieval hold that landowners had over the peasants of a feudal society was broken. Land ownership in the past controlled the food supply, since travel and food transport were prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Controlling food meant the landowners (lords and kings) controlled, and basically enslaved, the general population.
Fossil fuels broke that control and built our modern free societies. Previously, primary occupations, basically farming and mineral extraction, dominated employment. Tertiary occupations, like scientists, medical doctors, shop keepers; and secondary occupations like manufacturing and construction; were very small in 1600 but dominated employment in 1850. Why? Fossil fuels, especially coal.
During the industrial revolution, the use of coal grew rapidly, but the economy grew even faster. Coal was only a seed to that economic growth. Constable found that coal worked to insulate England from catastrophes, like bad harvest years, as it allowed for rapid and cheap transport of food. It created the English middle class between 1840 and 1890, a period when average household wealth quadrupled. Coal was a great equalizer of wealth, it brought it to many, many more people. The population of the English wealthy grew four times faster than population growth as a whole. From 1840 to 1885 crime decreased tremendously (70%).
Fossil fuels are a high-quality fuel. What happens if they are replaced with low quality (much lower density and lower value-add) renewable fuels, like wind and solar? The ratio of the non-energy economy to the energy sector reduces, as shown in the figure below.
What figure 1 says is that, relative to fossil fuels, the energy gained from wind and solar is much less than the energy required to build and operate the wind and solar facilities. Wind and solar are lower energy gain, and more expensive per unit of energy output. This means the rest of the economy must shrink.
Indeed, Constable mentions that there is a hinge point in the U.S. and other western economies in 2005 when it started to emphasize renewable energy. After 2005 U.S., Spanish, U.K., and EU energy consumption flatlined or has fallen. This is quite alarming because since overall energy consumption has fallen, energy consumption in all private sectors has fallen. Only the less productive public sector energy consumption has increased, think jetting to climate conferences.
In China, industrial energy growth is rapid, feeding their overall growth. In the U.S. it is the opposite, suggesting an overall economic decline. Dr. Constable believes that the West is conducting a very dangerous experiment. What will happen if energy consumption in the West declines and energy becomes much more expensive overall? Energy is the feedstock of wealth and prosperity, if its use declines, so will wealth and prosperity. He believes we are on a very dangerous road to travel.
This is a very thoughtful and important talk. I highly recommend watching it in full.
Dr. John Constable is the Energy director for the GWPF. He is the author of Europe’s Green Experiment, A Costly Failure.
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“feature, not bug”
-lords and kings
For the true believers non of this matters though. If a step backwards in time is necessary to save the planet- so be it. If a rapid radical reduction in population is necessary to “ save “ us it must take place. The true believers do not want to face economic reality ,so they cling to unreasonable expectations in terms of renewables.
John Oliver: “The true believers do not want to face economic reality ,so they cling to unreasonable expectations in terms of renewables.”
WR: All politicians and all scientists should support economic reality, short-term and long-term. It is not only their task, it is their responsibility. John Constable shows the long-term disaster that’s developing. Everyone should spend half an hour watching his video (from about 4.05 https://youtu.be/LYHRngcYyB8?t=257)
To understand the phenomenon you have to look at what the ‘true believers’ really advocate. Most discussions slide over this.
The rationale is to ‘save the planet’. The agenda however is entirely focused on the West, which does 25% and falling of global emissions. The true believers make no calls on India, China, Indonesia etc to reduce their rapidly rising emissions.
You have to look at in terms of the numbers. In 2045 the world will probably be doing about 45 billion tons a year if we all carry on roughly as now. The West, is currently doing around 10 billion, depending who you consider to be the West, out of about 37 billion total. All the rise of 8 billion is going to come from the other countries.
So the West gets its emissions down to, lets be heroic, 2 billion. Globally you still will have 37 billion or so of emissions.
Most people who advocate Net Zero for the West think that something under 5 billion is required. Ain’t going to happen, and the really interesting thing is, they are advocating nothing that will do it.
Do they really believe it? And if not why would they advocate what they do?
Figure ! is an inaccurate representation. NetZero is a fantasy. It actually takes more coal to make weather dependent generators and all the support infrastructure, think storage, than the coal they can replace.
Under the present NetZero policy, all human endeavour will be devoted to energy production and output will be in terminal decline. Heaps of coal is burnt to convert mined materials into weather dependent energy extractors that produce less energy than was contained in those heaps of coal.
At present US is immune to the consequences of its inflationary efforts because it costs nothing to make the dominant world currency. UK and Germany are better indicators of where the developed world is heading.
Rick Will: “UK and Germany are better indicators of where the developed world is heading”
WR: Indeed. It is not easy to reverse a once-settled trend because energy infrastructure is a long-term investment, and this one is having a long-term (deteriorating) effect on the economy.
‘Renewables’ is an irresponsible experiment.
But, but, but, the International Renewable Energy Agency say the world needs to deploy 1000GW of unreliable energy every year to stay on the 1.5C pathway (they lament that only 300GW was installed in 2022) and that the share of unreliables in electricity production should rise from 28% today to 68% by 2030 and 91% by 2050.
Surely they know what they are talking about? 🙂
China puts this impressive growth in the shade. China started burning serious amounts of coal around 1990. The GDP has increased from USD318 per capita to USD12.720 in 2022.
Watching the cricket World Cup in India also highlights India’s wealth now riding on coal; consumption trippling so far this century.
Let’s not forget the wealth Great Britain obtained from the rest of the world during Britain’s imperial century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#Britain's_imperial_century_(1815%E2%80%931914)
So, a part of that quadrupling had an external origin.
Watching the cricket World Cup in India tells me that complacency sets in after a period of success and the reality when exposed to real competition is often very brutal.
A problem for the England men’s cricket team and western economies in general.
Energy is just one of several issues “the West” is dealing with, or not dealing with.
Others include debt, uncontrolled in-migration, and social/cultural disruptions, including crime.
Unfortunately, many people now believe the government is untrustworthy. Issues are becoming more difficult to address. In the US, social security programs (incl. city, state, and national) are in financial trouble but the necessary discussions are being “kicked down the road”.
Energy, as discussed in this post, is currently a disaster.
John Hultquist: “Energy is just one of several issues (…) including crime”
WR: I agree. After traveling to many countries and spending some years ‘looking around” on very different continents, I discovered that ‘safety’ is a very important part of well-being. And I don’t just mean ‘safety on the street’. Economic security is of main importance. When the West jeopardizes its prosperity by making bad investments based on wrong assumptions about the climate, it is putting the well-being of its population at risk. ‘Not telling the truth about climate’ by scientists has put Western societies into a very vulnerable position. Avoiding open debate takes a high toll on future prosperity.
“uncontrolled in-migration”
I’m noticing that most politicians and most of the media- no longer use the term “illegal immigrants”, instead just calling them migrants. If someone moves from NY to FL, they’re a migrant. So it seems to me that people should use the term “illegal immigrants”- or illegals for short.
“Illegal Aliens” is the legal term in U.S. law.
Right, but that makes them sound scary! 🙂 But I never see that term anymore.
Yes, and these are really getting to be somewhat dangerous times. I have a hard time discussing “ net zero” or “ climate change” science in a vacuum anymore separating it out from politics and policy anymore. I just can’t do it.
I wonder how this is all going to turn out. We ( in the West”) seem to be off ing ourselves in every way imaginable. I look to history for an answer and I am not encouraged. Nations usually have a long slide down through political mismanagement until they become so weak and vulnerable and penetrated that they cannot withstand a military, economic or internal crisis.
Its the age-old “Salami Principle” writ large: Nobody notices a small slice off the whole salami loaf, but over time they become significant losses. Short-sighted Leftist politicians and their dupes in the general population cannot see the catastrophic future looming from such thinking related to our society, economy and energy systems. The rot, however, is now becoming apparent in all areas of human wellbeing.
It is interesting that a single event of Hamas atrocities has revealed the decades-long worldwide rot of Marxist Critical Theory and its consequential antisemitism and white hatred. Its penetration of U.S. institutions, especially education, is now clearly evident for all to see. This has been allowed to happen despite decades of warnings by astute observers.
America tends to fix itself, sooner or later. Churchill said, “that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else”. Not sure about the Europeans.
Government is and has always been “untrustworthy”.
The idea that government cares about people has killed more economies, and more people, than any other error in history.
While ruinables continue to…. make people (time) rich and (money) poor
headline:“”Recharge Industries: Britishvolt buyer failed to pay UK staff for months
(Recharge = The Australian buyout of the British Lithum-Onion battery maker)
BBC
Not so sure that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (LOL) is not actually working. It seems to be crippling the off shore wind industry and the EV industry both. Not building wind turbines and EV’s will save a lot of subsidy money. Maybe the government will decide not to barrow trillions and reduce the deficit instead. Ha, ha – just kidding – they never do that.
One of my family members a marine engineer took a design/ analysis contract with a British renewables group a while back. He never got paid for a a substantial part of his work. They kept stringing him along. In the end nothing. He seems to be very gun shy now about taking any work at all over there.
I think it’s a characteristic of the green renewables industry in general – lots of bright ideas and ideals, short on their own money. They exist purely to channel taxpayers money to private investors and there is sod all in between.
If you put all money, labor, and innovative power into renewables, at best this creates the same quantity of energy. The economy will not only shrink but important sectors like education, medical care, real science, housing, infrastructure, defense, etc., ALL will get less and not just a little bit. Even without a definite collapse of the economy. The following graph shows how this works out, look at the shrinking blue:
?resize=720%2C464&ssl=1
John does great job on these stark realities of energy and economy. Because he has been doing this for nearly 2 decades and understand the realities most politicains have absolutely NO understanding fo, mostly because they don’t want to listen, because that means they will know the lie they must vote for for their sinecure as elected charlatan for wherever. They don’t work for us.
I must remind people this is an old and true story. THis fraud is now decades old and still being made law in the West, by cynical civil servants enacting the frauulent climate based enrgy policies of the UN IPCC..
NOT in the developing nations that are part of te UN Agenda 21 plan to destroy our economies to profit theirs, in some bizarre and unnecessary marxist zero sum game, and to profit the global elites who profit from this transfer of wealth hence power from the masses to less democratic elites, in developed countries, where the people’s freedoms are being curtailed in the name of unnecessary and in fact regressive climate action by their own governments, passing laws which allows the activities of elites to be less controlled by any inconvenient democratic accountability to the people of these democracies.
Net zero is a clear fraud, because the truth follows the physics, not the politics.
When I came to this subject of energy reality, in 2008, H. Douglas Lightfoot gave a talk at the main UK IET in LOndon on this basic reality. The organised crime of UN created climate “science” was a second ac for me. PLEASE DO WATCH. It’s a reality master class, decades in the making.
Doug and others knew then. And spoke globally on the truth about energy. Because there is no other physics. I commend his movie to you.
IT doesn’t even mention climate change, because the best climate action to reduce CO2, a minor greenhouse gas with a trivial effect within the overall climate system, nis to transition to nuclear from fossil. The energy choices being imposed in it the name of reducing CO2 involve huge costs to almost no measurable effect . Something that is easy to prove without the need for computer model. As Doug makes supremely clear.
It is ultimately only the energy reality that matters, and that makes it clear there is only one way to transition off fossil fuel while still supporting increasing prosperity for the governed, and that us uniquely MORE intense, dispatchable and cheaper in fact nuclear energy. Any messing with over subsidised renewables that can’t diverts investment from what can to enrich charalatans by needlessly impoverishing those forced to pay by fraudulent law makers. Happening now in a country near you.
And this transition is wholly unnecessarily for at least a century, when fossil decline eventually comes. Not yet. Imposing expensive rationed intermittent enrgy now can only destroy our cheap plentiful energy economy, and empower the unsavoury political intent of elites to regain control of an over prosperous mass of people and their freedoms to share in the prosperity they are more and mpr enjoying through theri use of plentiful enrgy and the technologies that brings.. THe UN’s economic realignment Will soon reversed that. Uniform poverty for the controlled masses by imposing expensive rationed energy and curtailing the inconvenient freedoms they don’t like the mass of people having, that allow the mass of people earning the wealth and made to pay to question elites’ share of output.
All this climate action is to reverse this prosperity hence freedoms of the mass of people by controls justified in its name, based on no supportable energy science or economics, never mind climate “science” , that in fact they just had made up by corrupt academics such as Hanson, Mann, Marcot, Jones and other charlatans.
The Long term goal and, since Rio 1992, is to use the climate catastrophe lie to bring the inconveniently free and educated masses under the technologically enabled heel of the self appointed global elites, who alone will continue to enjoy the prosperity and freedoms of that technologically empowered life, by their laws, made in our name, justified by lies they paid to have contrived. You can’t nake it up, its in Agenda 21.
There is no climate emergency, because the observations of 44 years of satellite instrumentation of the oceans where climate is controlled show any change is small and does not measurably exceed the natural site change we have measured to have happened naturally in the past. IN addition, as above this simple rational reality of intense dispatchable hence cheap energy as the essential underpinning of any modern developed economy is unquestionable on the enrgy physics.
THis makes it overtly and quantifiably obvious that decarbonation is practically and numerically impossible without reversing 200 years of economic progress and can ONLY be done at any serious scale by a transition from fossil fuel to cheaper and more plentiful, unlimited nuclear electricity. Which is China’s plan, and India’s France already got there and are into phase 2. Sweden also (both nuclear and HYdro)
AS regard any weather based renewables the idea of supplying a significant proportion of the energy needed by a developed economy in this way is delusional. The cost of storage alone to support significant intermittency is simply unsupportable, and there is simply is not enough “renewable energy” in northern latitudes. That means a feudal level of energy and the economy and society that goes with it. The plan of our elites to dominate the mass of people by imposing energy poverty by law..
All these calculations are easy and absolute, not opinion. No such calculations are done by policy makers, because there is no benefit for the people forced to pay, only costs. IT is not for the people who are told they must pay and be controlled “for the good of all”. The opposite is the truth, self evidently.
Politicians enacting these laws count only the the payola from the subsidy rackets to their elites and cronies as a reward for destroying their own economies, by their laws. Back to the future does not work, because it’s based in a deliberate lie as regards climate change anyone numerate can quickly check, and defies the laws of physics as regards the development of the energy supply for any nation which wishes to continue to develop. CEng, CPHys, MBA
Very good.
Here is one new 2023 study that says that depending on the surface temperature and solar irradiance datasets that one uses, one can show anything from mostly human-caused warming to mostly natural warming.
‘Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850’
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e
The datasets are historical so there is not much that can be done about them.