James Delingpole has been slugging it out with lunatics from the Greenblob for more than a decade. Now, as the world wakes up to the scale and scope of the great wind power fraud, Slim Jim finds himself on the right side of history. Here he is letting the world know about it.
Why Renewables Are Doomed and Fossil Fuels Are the Future
Breitbart
James Delingpole
9 February 2017
We’re on the verge of a new energy revolution. Except it’s the exact opposite of the one the “experts” at places like BP, the International Energy Agency and – ahem – the Guardian are predicting.
For years we’ve been assured by politicians, energy industry specialists and green advocates that renewables such as wind and solar are getting more and more cost-competitive while dirty fossil fuels are so discredited and wrong and evil we’ll soon have to leave them in the ground.
But to believe this you’d have to believe in a world where Donald Trump and Brexit hadn’t happened; where taxpayers were still prepared to bankroll, ad infinitum, the expensive, inefficient, environmentally-damaging produce of favoured crony-capitalists; where no one had access on the internet to articles showing how the whole climate change industry is such a scam.
That world doesn’t exist.
This is why we need to take with a massive pinch of salt, for example, the latest BP Energy Outlook 2017 which claims that renewables are set to grow and grow over the next two decades:
Renewables in power are set to be the fastest growing source of energy – at 7.6% per year to 2035, more than quadrupling over the Outlook period. Renewables account for 40% of the growth in power generation, causing their share of global power to increase from 7% in 2015 to nearly 20% by 2035.
It’s why we should laugh to scorn articles like this one in Vox boasting about how the US solar industry employs more people than the US coal industry.
And why economics writers like the normally sensible Jeremy Warner do themselves no favours when they produce tosh like this in the op-ed columns of that once respectable newspaper The Daily Telegraph. In a piece with the virtue-signalling headline “Bad news, petrol heads; Trump or no Trump, the green revolution is coming to get you,” Warner claims:
Actually, it’s not the fossil fuel industry that needs invigorating. As even the BP Energy Outlook report admits, fossil fuels are doing just fine and will do for the foreseeable.
But while I’m sure the BP report is right about the growth of fossil fuels – we’ve got to get our energy from somewhere – it seems to me that its forecast for renewables comes from a mix of wishful thinking and heroic assumptions based on conditions that no longer exist.
First, let me deal with the wishful thinking part.
It is an unfortunate fact that over the last forty years, the Climate Industrial Complex – as Myron Ebell calls it – has slipped its slimy green tentacles into pretty much every institution you could name from government bodies like NASA and NOAA through our schools and universities and the mainstream media (BBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Guardian, Vanity Fair, the Times) even unto the Big Oil companies such as the people responsible for this energy report, BP.
If you can’t quite believe the last bit – and I don’t blame you: I too, as a BP shareholder would prefer BP to engage in its core business rather than promote green flummery – look at this interview given by Spencer Dale, the BP Group Chief Economist who produced the BP Energy Outlook Report.
The global energy industry – governments, regulators, resource owners, producers like BP – faces two massive challenges over the next 20-30 years. The first is to ensure that we use energy in a sustainable way consistent with the long-term health of the planet. At the same time, it’s important to make sure there are plentiful energy supplies for the fast-growing economies of the world – so that many hundreds of millions of people can be lifted out of low incomes, out of fuel poverty.
Paris was a significant step forward in addressing the first challenge. One of the messages from both our annual Energy Outlook and the BP Statistical Review of World Energy is the scale of the change that we will need to see to get close to achieving the goals set out in Paris – in terms of both energy efficiency and the fuel mix. That will require significant changes in policy, technology and consumer behaviour.
Your response on reading this eco-drivel is I hope the same as mine was: WTF???
Let me just repeat: Spencer Dale is the Chief Economist for one of the world’s biggest oil companies, responsible for one of the world’s most influential energy reports. Yet the way he talks about energy issues he might just as well be writing a press release for Greenpeace. This may be shocking but it really oughtn’t to be surprising. Most people in positions of authority have been required to think this way for decades. It’s what’s known as Groupthink: if you don’t observe the correct pieties, you don’t get promoted.
But consider, for a moment, what a toxic effect such groupthink has had on our ability to differentiate the true from the false, the realistic from the unrealistic, the rational from the lunatic in the key area of energy. If even the guy in charge of the BP Energy Report can’t be relied on to give an objective opinion, is it any wonder that our politicians and businessmen and financial institutions alike are prey to such muddled thinking?
Now for my second reason for believing that renewables are toast (well, toast-ish…: of course they’ll trundle on because too many people are making too much money and spending a fortune on lobbying): what I call the “heroic assumptions based on conditions that no longer exist.”
The key point that almost no one seems to understand about renewables, not even the energy “experts”, is that they’re only justifiable if you believe in the Climate Fairy.
There used to be another reason called “Peak Oil” – or “when fossil fuels run out” – but no one takes that one seriously any more. So the only reason we’re left with for putting up all those bat-chomping eco-crucifixes and bird-frying solar arrays is the notion that, somehow, they’re saving the planet by reducing “carbon” emissions.
No one would build these things otherwise because they’re just not commercially viable. The energy they produce is unreliable, unpredictable, intermittent, destabilising (prone to surges and lulls), environmentally damaging (from their huge concrete bases to their use of poisonous rare earth minerals), and very expensive. That’s why they have to be subsidised by taxpayers. And the only reason taxpayers subsidise them is because they’re forced to do so by government legislation which has been framed in the belief that this is a necessary measure to “combat climate change.”
So what happens when all these “heroic assumptions” cease to apply?
If man-made climate change ceases to be a “problem” that anyone takes seriously.
If the widespread harm done by renewables is recognised as being far greater than any illusory benefits.
If taxpayers become increasingly suspicious of the values of the liberal elite.
What would all this mean for the future of renewables?
Well this is no longer a hypothetical question because this is exactly what is happening.
More and more, renewables are being recognised as an environmental disaster, as a charter for troughers and rent-seekers, as a human health hazard, and as a serious threat to economic stability.
South Australia is the bellwether of this impending, renewables-driven economic disaster. As Paul Homewood reports, it now relies on wind power for 40 per cent of its electricity – a lunatic decision which has led to rationing, black outs and economic disruption. This won’t continue. South Australians simply won’t allow it to continue: they’re not cowed supplicants in some communist state but sophisticated consumers in a free market economy. Rationing and black outs just aren’t acceptable in such a culture, no matter how noble the intentions of the idiot leftist politicians who introduced all those carbon-reducing green schemes now are backfiring so badly and so predictably.
There is currently in much of the West a vast gulf between where government policy sits on the renewables issue and where reality lies. A good example of this is Britain’s largest power station Drax which has been encouraged by UK government policy introduced in the Labour era – but not opposed by David Cameron’s pretend-Conservatives – to stop using coal and instead burn wood chips, supposedly because they’re carbon neutral, “renewable” and therefore more eco-friendly.
Except in fact this policy has been appalling for the environment – how is it eco-friendly to chop down acres of North Carolina forest and ship them 3,800 miles to be burned for fuel? – and has done nothing to reduce CO2 levels.
It is symptomatic of the bizarre, looking glass world we inhabit that when Christopher Booker pointed this out in this Sunday Telegraph column, the CEO of Drax Dorothy Thompson felt able to reply with this letter:
But as Paul Homewood demonstrates here in some detail, many of these claims just aren’t true. The only reason that Dorothy Thompson can get away with them with even a hint of good conscience is simply that she is backed up by an apparatus of official lies.
As he notes, for example, in his reply to her letter:
Dorothy Thompson (Letters, 5th Feb) claims that Drax’s biomass plant makes carbon savings of 80%, compared with coal. However, this is based on EU accounting rules, which classify burning wood as “zero carbon”.
Drax’s own figures show that CO2 emissions from biomass are actually 12% greater than coal for each unit of electricity generated.
What’s going on at Drax is symptomatic of what’s going on across Western Industrial Civilisation from the US to Germany (where heavy industry, especially, has been crippled by the Energiewende – the wholesale, state-driven move towards renewables), from Canada to Britain, from Spain and Portugal (both all but bankrupted by renewables) to Australia (some of whose states – see above – are collapsing as a result of the renewables experiment).
Renewables have been imposed on every major economy by governments in thrall to the Green Blob and heartily taken up by the kind of corporatists and apparatchiks and “willing executioners” who tend to thrive in any corrupt system because they get the job done without asking any awkward questions.
Dorothy Thompson, for example, did not get where she is today by asking too many awkward questions. That’s why she is on a salary package in excess of £1.8 million: because when some awkward bugger questions whether it’s really a good idea to be using pre-industrial technology – wood-chips – to power the world’s fifth largest economy in the 21st century, she can come straight back with a letter to the Sunday Telegraph spouting the correct corporate bullshit.
Here’s the problem for la Thompson and the class she represents – a class which of course, embraces Davos Man, the Bilderbergers, the EU, the UN and the liberal elite so fiercely resistant to Donald Trump and Brexit: more and more of us know she’s talking bullshit.
Renewables do not work. They are a fail. They are an imposition on the consumer, based on a pack of lies invented by anti-capitalist green loons, embraced by corporate shysters, endorsed by ill-informed politicians, promulgated by politically motivated environment and energy correspondents who aren’t doing their job as journalists, and swallowed by brainwashed victims of a dumbed-down education system who are too thick to know better. They are unaffordable, environmentally destructive, morally wrong. The people who make money out of them should retire to their studies with a bottle of whisky and their service pistol and do the decent thing (except they won’t because they’re not decent people).
As you know I’m planning to put my money where my mouth is in an investment fund – Cool Futures – which plans to bet against renewables.
If you prefer to trust the experts at BP and the Guardian, you go right ahead. If those guys are experts then I’m proud not to be one.
All I ask is one simple question: if an industry can only exist because it’s dependent on subsidies and regulation, what do you think will happen to that industry if the public mood swings, a revolutionary spirit takes hold post Brexit and Donald Trump, and those subsidies are withdrawn and the regulation is removed?
Breitbart
STOP THESE THINGS 
The backdrop to the incursion of industrial wind in rural Ontario was the global economic collapse in 2008, which left farmers anxious about paying their debts and getting operating loans. When the wind companies aggressively pursued them, they ‘took the cookies’ as one leaseholder put it. and started boasting about their guaranteed incomes. To this day, the loss of that guaranteed income is the reason why they refuse to acknowledge that their neighbours are being harmed. In some cases their neighbours are members of their own family.
At the same time as this was happening, the provincial government funding to municipalities was steadily decreasing as costs were steadily rising, so paid and elected Reeves and Councillors, convinced that they were powerless to ‘push back’ at Queen’s Park because they had been stripped of their rights to object to the Green Energy Act, were desperate for money so they took the vibrancy funds.
When questioned about their lack of protection to the residents, they all suddenly became green ‘virtue signallers’, irregardless of their hypocritical lifestyles.
All the while propaganda from the mainstream media was relentlessly brainwashing everyone, using the IPCC flawed data to convince people that they had to pay for the investment of industrial wind in order to ‘save the planet’.
The pieces of this horrific puzzle are falling together…finally.
Here’s some Australia specific information that everyone needs to see:
“and growth exceeds what is harvested…”
now there’s a perpetual motion machine concept. Consider it takes at least a year for a tree to grow one of it’s baby branches and years to grow substantial limbs. Yet those burn up in a matter of minutes. It’s a ‘green’ Ponzi scheme.
Hi,
I started a PETITION “SA PREMIER JAY WEATHERILL : Demand the RESIGNATION of the Energy Minister for HIGH POWER PRICES CAUSING SA’s JOBS CRISIS and 15,000 household POWER DISCONNECTIONS, frequent POWER BLACKOUTS and the JULY 2016 POWER CRISIS” and wanted to see if you could help by adding your name.
Our goal is to reach 200 signatures and we need more support.
You can read more and sign the petition here:
https://www.change.org/p/sa-premier-jay-weatherill-demand-the-resignation-of-the-energy-minister-for-high-power-prices-causing-sa-s-jobs-crisis-and-also-15-000-household-power-disconnections-frequent-power-blackouts-and-the-july-2016-power-crisis?recruiter=135406845&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share_email_responsive
Please share this petition with anyone you think may be interested in signing it.
Thankyou for your time.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
A blistering MUST READ from the brilliant James Delingpole!
Some tasty takeouts:
“It is an unfortunate fact that over the last forty years, the Climate Industrial Complex – as Myron Ebell calls it – has slipped its slimy green tentacles into pretty much every institution you could name from government bodies like NASA and NOAA through our schools and universities and the mainstream media (BBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Guardian, Vanity Fair, the Times) even unto the Big Oil companies such as the people responsible for this energy report, BP.
“No one would build these things otherwise because they’re just not commercially viable. The energy they produce is unreliable, unpredictable, intermittent, destabilising (prone to surges and lulls), environmentally damaging (from their huge concrete bases to their use of poisonous rare earth minerals), and very expensive. That’s why they have to be subsidised by taxpayers. And the only reason taxpayers subsidise them is because they’re forced to do so by government legislation which has been framed in the belief that this is a necessary measure to “combat climate change.
“More and more, renewables are being recognised as an environmental disaster, as a charter for troughers and rent-seekers, as a human health hazard, and as a serious threat to economic stability.
“South Australia is the bellwether of this impending, renewables-driven economic disaster. As Paul Homewoodreports, it now relies on wind power for 40 per cent of its electricity – a lunatic decision which has led to rationing, black outs and economic disruption. This won’t continue. South Australians simply won’t allow it to continue: they’re not cowed supplicants in some communist state but sophisticated consumers in a free market economy. Rationing and black outs just aren’t acceptable in such a culture, no matter how noble the intentions of the idiot leftist politicians who introduced all those carbon-reducing green schemes now are backfiring so badly and so predictably.
“All I ask is one simple question: if an industry can only exist because it’s dependent on subsidies and regulation, what do you think will happen to that industry if the public mood swings, a revolutionary spirit takes hold post Brexit and Donald Trump, and those subsidies are withdrawn and the regulation is removed?”
As usual a well written explanation.
One thing I thought while reading it though when SA was mentioned was that it is not explained enough by anyone how much Blackouts cost businesses and the population.
The cost of loss of production, such as industry, canning, bottling, cement production and/or damaged machinery such as happened when steel or aluminium production suddenly grinds to a halt mid processing going cold and in the ‘pots’ or on the conveyor. There is the fresh and frozen foods that need to be destroyed because refrigeration is needed to ensure its safety. Dairy farms having to ditch freshly collected milk because the refrigeration has gone.
Shops and businesses having to close as there is no electricity to operate tills, computers, air-conditioning and security systems, let alone having to get emergency services in to release people trapped in lifts. What about traffic lights going out and the dangers that poses, what about the loss of telephone services due to back up battery systems running out. Hospitals having to cancel operations and trying to keep patients safe from ‘germs’ when air-conditioners fail due to back up generators running out of fuel and ambulances and other emergency vehicles not able to run because fuel pumps are not working.
Batteries have a finite operational life without electricity to re-charge them and reliance on electrical energy for things throughout out lives is immense – it is not just not being able to watch the TV or use a computer it about every aspect of our lives.
Reliance on an intermittent unreliable source of energy production, even IF it was ever able to be stored in batteries for a short while is incomprehensible in our modern world and for ANY Government to continue down the road of reliance on Wind and Solar they are surely going to destroy their peoples ability to live a modern life – and BANG will go the concept of any international co-operation each will be on its own.
Reblogged this on citizenpoweralliance.
Maybe the D.Tel or Times cd be persuaded to investigate for any covert financial benefits for parliamentary Parties and environmental “Charities” in UK for supporting the windpower scandal?
(c.f. the DTel scoops on MP improper expenses a few yrs ago)
The UK rail company DB Cargo UK is certainly feeling the full brunt of the UK energy policy and the Green Blob through the run down and closure of coal fired power stations.
DB Cargo plans to cut 893 jobs in face of ‘unprecedented’ market changes
Railway Gazette Oct 2016
UK: Deutsche Bahn subsidiary DB Cargo UK has announced changes to its business model and proposals to eliminate 893 roles in response to what it says are ‘rapid and unprecedented changes’ in the freight market.
The measures announced on October 17 include revising of the number and locations of operational sites, and further reductions in the locomotive and wagon fleets. No final decisions have been taken, and all proposals are subject to collective and individual consultations.
The company said the rail freight industry was facing a ‘dramatic decline’ in core markets such as coal. Government energy policy had resulted in the early closure of coal-fired power stations, with reduced running hours planned at those which remain from 2023 and complete phase out of all UK coal-fired power plants is planned by 2025. In the first nine months of 2016 DB Cargo UK ran 1 353 coal trains, a 78% reduction on the 6 163 in the same period in 2015.
UK steel volumes are also dropping at a much quicker rate than predicted, with the industry hit by high energy prices, the extra cost of climate change policies and competition from Asia. DB Cargo UK said there was ‘significant structural instability’ in the UK steel manufacturing sector, with closures and reductions in capacity. The number of steel trains run by DB Cargo UK in the first nine months was 5 820, down 33% from the 8 733 for the same period in 2015. However, the operator recognised that ‘overall UK steel demand remains stable’, adding that it was ‘continually exploring opportunities for growth within this important market sector’.
‘Responsible and successful businesses must evolve and reshape as their markets change and sometimes this means making tough decisions’, said DB Cargo UK Chief Executive Hans-Georg Werner on October 17. ‘Whilst this is a difficult time for all of us at DB Cargo UK, reshaping the company will enable us to build a business for the future and protect the majority of jobs. We are fully committed to supporting colleagues who may be at risk of redundancy.
‘We firmly believe in the future of rail freight in the UK. Our motorways and roads are becoming more congested and rail offers fast and clean supply chain solutions. Our new business strategy will ensure we are a perfect logistics partner of choice for customers across all sectors, including construction, automotive and intermodal, long into the future.’
DB Cargo UK said it was ‘proactively investing in key areas’, including the rollout of mobile devices to front line and management staff, and the launch of interactive applications to improve fuel efficiency. It plans to further enhance efficiency and service levels for its customers by introducing order-track-and-trace, end-to-end planning and proactive and pre-emptive service issue systems and technology.
Responding to the announcement, Mick Cash, General Secretary of the RMT trade union, said ‘this is devastating news brought on through a combination of cut-throat practices in the UK rail freight industry and a shocking lack of government support for this key section of our transport infrastructure.’ He said RMT’s executive would be meeting to consider its response, but ‘it is imperative right now that the government intervene to save skilled jobs in the rail freight industry which are being butchered before our eyes due to a lack of action to protect steel, coal and the rest of our manufacturing base.’
Mick Whelan, General Secretary of train drivers’ union ASLEF, said the redundancies, including 391 drivers, were ‘an individual tragedy for each man and woman who loses a job and a collective tragedy for our rail industry.’ He claimed the company ‘has been extraordinarily slow to adapt to changing conditions’, while ‘the government took the decisions that paved the way for the work to disappear and so it, too, must shoulder some of the blame.’
http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/freight/single-view/view/db-cargo-plans-to-cut-893-jobs-in-face-of-unprecedented-market-changes.html
Reblogged this on 4timesayear's Blog.
James, when I was in the wind business around 2000, it was noticeable that all the big players were oil companies like Shell and BP.
Far from being surprised – or indeed thinking they are jumping on some bandwagon – it’s they who created the bandwagon and got it going.
The reason is pretty easy if you think about it. If you get it into the mind of the consumer that oil is running out and that we all have to pay a lot more for it, then the oil companies can make a lot more profit off the same level of production.
In fact they love carbon taxes – because it puts all the blame of rising prices ON THE CONSUMER (supposedly because we burn oil, we’re the one “forcing” governments to impose taxes). And when energy prices rise – the same percentage creamed off profit – it much more money for the oilmen.
As with so much of this unreliables scam – just follow the money.
Reblogged this on Tallbloke's Talkshop and commented:
The tide is starting to turn, in America at least.