At the start of a recent televised debate between a left-wing activist and a scientist, the scientist addressed the moderator:
“I have just one question: are we permitted to employ logic?”
One could be forgiven for wishing that the “energy debate”, full as it is of very precise metrics like kilowatt hours, line voltages, transmission loss rates, and other manifestations of what have been known since the mid 1700’s as “the laws of physics”, could also include just a little bit of that logic stuff.
But as prominent American author and Hoover Institute economist Thomas Sowell remarks,
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good”.
It sounded good.
Afghani women should get lattes and yoga classes.
Biological men should be able to have babies too.
And we should let gentle breezes and rays of sunlight provide all the energy we ever need.
But physics, and the real world, are funny things. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just can’t wish them into working the way you feel they should:
A confederacy of dunces
Let’s look at the pantheon of prominent figures with conical white hats who are bent on forcing us back to pre-Industrial Age standards of living with our energy policy.
Dunce #1
Is serial policy disaster specialist Australian Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen. He is betting our entire way of life on intermittent renewables:
But then last week: BAM.
Reality, in the form of a major wind power expose by Dr. Wade Allison, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, delivered a punch in the face to Bowen’s windy emissions.
Professor Allison summarizes very succinctly:
“The plan dramatically to cut the combustion of fossil fuels was accepted at the 2015 Paris Conference. The instinctive reaction around the world has been to revert to ‘renewables’, the sources of energy, including wind, delivered intermittently by the power of the Sun”.
“Unfortunately, this power, attenuated by the huge distance that it must travel to reach the Earth, is extremely weak. That is why, before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, it was unable to provide the energy to sustain even a small global population with an acceptable standard of living”.
He continues with some moreinconvenient truthiness:
“That means to deliver the same power as Hinkley Point C (3200 millionwatts) by wind would require 5.5 millionsquare metres of turbine area”
Allison then gives some precise examples (WARNING Year 6 maths skills required):
For 8 days at the end of the month that 8.8 GW was not available for this time, presumably because the average wind speed halved. That much energy, 1600 GWh, is 1000 times the capacity of the world’s largest grid storage battery (1.6 GWh at Moss Landings, California).
Battery technology has its own problems. It can provide for laptops and other portable applications, even car batteries at up to 75 kWh, but larger batteries have problems with safety and mineral shortages. Batteries 20 million times larger are never going to be available and storage batteries will never make good the failure of offshore wind farms, even for a week. And the wind can drop for longer periods than that.
Dunce #2
Is Portuguese former president of Socialist InternationalU.N. Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres:
Senor Guterres is extremely unhappy with the current pace of deindustrialisation. His latest hysterics were lapped up by the global media:
Chaos worsening!
Sleepwalking to catastrophe!
Code red for humanity!
We can’t point fingers while the planet burns!
And his biggest whopper yet:
“Global CO2 emissions grew by six per cent to their highest levels in history”
Someone please get this man a web connection, with just a few mouse clicks he could find the chart below.
The line in purple is global CO2. Maybe in Portuguese the word “highest” actually means “lowest”?
A zoom in on the lower right of the same chart reveals the source of our current global hysteria, a tiny upward slant at the end of the lines (the blue line is the global temperature):
The U.N. now insists we are all going to boil because CO2 levels in the atmosphere have risen from 250 to 425 parts per million over the last 150 years.
Um…er. Another quick glance at the chart shows a previous deep Ice Age at ten times those levels:
And a rise in CO2 preceeded just *one* of six large temperature rises. In other words, can be claimed to havecausedit:
Wait! We’ll create some computer models
The scientific “climate models” driving this nonsense have had just one thing in common: they have all been uniformly wrong:
But you don’t need a computer model to discover the Earth’s temperature trajectory, you just need to drill into a glacier to find out what actually happened.
Which is what they did:
Oopsie. Quick, send in the screechers! Racist! Denier!
Even the left’s favourite monopolist megalomaniac billionaire Bill Gates isn’t buying a single one of the climate cult’s delusions:
Herr Gates realises that we’re being forced to buy a non-solution to a non-problem:
In case there is still any remaining doubt whatsoever, let’s look at how the global “green crusade” is going so far.
We have spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of tax- and rate-payer dollars so far on renewables ($960 billion in Europe alone) and this is the result:
Dunce #3
Adam Bandt, the ecoterrorist Greens Party leader currently holding the government hostage, should have a category all his own for dunciness. Grand Dunce Wizard, or something.
But let’s set the table for him before we award him the XL sized cap.
Australia TODAY has more installed renewables per capita THAN ANY OTHER NATION ON EARTH, 4X as many as the U.S. or the U.K. (Mystifyingly, Bandt and Albo declared last week that “the decade of doing nothing is over”).
But faced with this wet fish reality slap across the face, what does any self-respecting dunce worthy of the Grand Wizard title do?
Why he DOUBLES DOWN ON DUNCINESS of course.
It’s difficult to imagine that a sitting member of Parliament crowing publicly about severely damaging the nation and its citizens somehow is not detained immediately.
Would an MP cheering the Gallipoli disaster or the bombing of Darwin have been treated the same way?
In the field of destructive national blunders, it’s difficult to imagine worse economic self-sabotage than the “Safeguard Mechanism”.
So, the revamped Australian carbon tax called the Safeguard Mechanism does everything it isn’t supposed to. Gas and electricity prices will rise, climate targets will be harder to reach, the grid will get more unstable, and investors will run a mile now that new gas fields have to be “net zero” — meaning presumably they will have to buy carbon credits before they sell their first cubic meter of gas. The field of ineptitude even reaches overseas — with less gas for sale — our trading partners will just buy more coal.
Australia will spend even more billions to win a fashion contest at UN dinner parties and cool the world by 0.0 degrees C.
And the “carbon credits” the Safeguard Mechanism requires Australian businesses to buy by the billions were also in the news last week. And not in a good way:
For those trying to keep their lunch down by not reading the article, the gist is this:
“No one who buys a five-kilo pack of potatoes at the supermarket wants to end up only having one kilo,” said Jürg Füssler, a carbon market veteran who heads up environmental work at INFRAS, a research and consulting firm in Zurich, speaking broadly about the industry. “That’s what’s happening now. The basic market confidence is shattered.”
So in return for blackouts, lower living standards, higher taxes, higher energy prices, and more business closures, we get ZERO temperature reduction and ZERO carbon reduction.
The panel has voted. GRAND DUNCE WIZARD it is.
Dunce #4
Is not a person, it’s a political party. The Liberal Party of Australia.
Their leader Peter Dutton was on the news yesterday, bragging about how their green economic suicide policy was even better and faster than Labor’s.
The Liberal Party put us where we are today. Enough said.
Dunce #5
Dunce #5 is you.
Or maybe your co-worker, your spouse, your dentist, or your neighbour.
You have a choice. You can believe what the nice man on TV is telling you, or you can do two minutes of homework and find a chart like this:
Given the choice of poverty, blackouts, and collapse or putting down the clicker and contacting your MP with a piece of your mind, which is it going to be?
Thomas Sowell summarises:
“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
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