In poker if you are dealt a hand with a card missing that is a misdeal and the dealer must shuffle the deck and start again. The EU’s so-called Green Deal is just like that.
What is missing is any hint of a plan. The proponents of this planless nonsense gleefully admit they have no idea how to make it work. The fact is it can’t work.
The GD is nothing but a bunch of distant future targets for emission reductions. Target dates range from 2030 out to 2050, all of which are politically very comfortable. Nothing serious has to be done right now, so praise to all, we have a deal.
The warm fuzziness of this non-plan is evident in its proposed budget, which is a magically round 100 billion euros. It sounds like a lot of money, but spread out over 30 years it is just 3.3 billion a year.
This is chump change when it comes to restructuring the EU’s entire energy system, which is what the GD proposes to do. A 1,000 MW wind farm costs about a billion euros a year. Adding three of these farms a year would not even cover the retirement of the existing wind facilities that blight the EU landscape.
In fact disposing of the myriad of worn out existing wind farms will likely cost a lot more than this. To my knowledge the EU presently has no budget for this nasty business.
In short this 100 billion euros contributes nothing to decarbonizing the EU energy system. A few trillion euros might begin to approach the goal. I say approach because it simply can’t be done. The technology does not exist to decarbonize modern civilization. Nor can it be invented, developed and deployed in time to meet these absurd targets.
Keep in mind that this is just the usual climate emergency nonsense, which is driven by worthless computer models. The extreme targets are taken from the IPCC’s playbook for keeping future warming under a minuscule 0.5 degrees C (according to the hot computer models).
The control freak alarmists have morphed this tiny warming into the threshold of climate catastrophe. There is no scientific basis for this, not even in the hopped up IPCC reports. A half degree of warming, if it actually happened, would never be noticed.
As with the budget, the targets are wonderfully simple, reality not being a constraint. The nearest term target is truly bizarre. The 2030 emissions target is presently a 40% reduction from 1990 levels. The GD target raises this to a whopping 55%.
What makes this truly strange is that the EU’s environmental agency just issued a report saying the 40% target will be missed. They will be lucky to get to 30% as things are going.
This pretty well certifies the 55% as impossible, especially given the ponderous slowness with which energy technology must be deployed. Extreme measures would be called for and these are politically very unlikely, given the widespread anti-action demonstrations that are already occurring.
No wonder the GD proponents say they don’t know how to do it, because it can’t be done. Yet, they want to pass a law mandating it anyway. How crazy is that? Well crazy is where we are, when it comes to the climate emergency hysteria.
Hysterics are not known for sound judgement and the EU leadership is no exception. Fortunately 2030 is not far off so the nonsensical nature of this non-plan will soon show up. I give it five years at most.
The Green Deal is a card short and that card is reality. This game will be fun to watch.