It should be no surprise to our readers that socialists across the world would recognize an opportunity in the china-virus pandemic to further handicap the use of inexpensive dependable fossil fuels to raise the standard of living of the poorest of the world by forcing them to use only undependable expensive wind and solar energy. The pandemic has allowed a world wide experiment in socialism where governments have been able to exercise tyrannical power over their citizens.
On Thursday, July 9, the International Energy Agency (IEA) convened a huge on-line event, pictured above, misleadingly titled the Clean Energy Transitions Summit. It brought together government representatives of 40 of the world’s largest economies as well as developing nations, accounting for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Although IEA executive director Dr. Fatih Birol called the summit “the most important global event on energy and climate issues of 2020,” it was really just about politically-correct propaganda, with politicians boasting about how much ‘clean energy’ their nations are bringing on line.
Wind and solar power were the sources primarily promoted by the speakers on the call. We now know they are anything but clean. They are among the dirtiest and most environmentally damaging energy sources on the planet which were shown in the new documentary movie Planet For The Humans.
The IEA told us in advance of the conference call that, “discussions will be informed by the IEA’s World Energy Outlook Sustainable Recovery report.” And what did that document recommend? We need to “accelerate the growth of wind and solar PV [photovoltaics].”
Speaker after speaker on the call extolled the virtues of their nations’ energy policies focused on making great strides in the promotion of wind and solar. It didn’t seem to cross their minds that enabling an economic recovery from the COVID-19-induced shutdown will be difficult and expensive enough without their attempts to re-engineer the world’s energy infrastructure. We were told that we must return to a ‘new normal,’ one in which action on climate change is put front and center.
None of these folks were paying attention to what is happening in the world outside this on-line video call. Wind and solar power have failed to make a small dent in the fraction of world energy generated by fossil fuels. IEA’s own data shown below indicates that, despite interminable climate change agreements and the installation of 300,000 industrial wind turbines across the world, the fraction of world total primary energy supply derived from coal, natural gas and oil has remained steady at about 80% for decades.
That’s because, no matter how much governments might wish otherwise, and no matter how much tax-payer funded subsidies they pour into wind and solar power, no modern industrial society can operate on wind and solar power. They are simply too expensive and unreliable.
Planet For The Humans, the Michael Moore produced movie, was released for free to the general public on this year’s Earth Day, April 22. It reveals the extensive damage done to nature’s bio-systems when vast regions are converted into wind and solar power plants. The film shows open-pit mines gouged deep into the Earth to extract iron, aluminum, copper, and other minerals needed for these plants. Hundreds of tons of cement are required to anchor the base of the 300-500-foot-high industrial wind turbines which slaughter millions of birds and bats every year. And then there are untold tons of earth and rocks blasted with thousands of pounds of dynamite to extract relatively small amounts of rare earth metals, often produced with few environmental controls in China. This is what theClean Energy Transition Summit is demanding.
And, what is there in the background ready to take up the slack when the wind does not blow or the Sun does not shine? Fossil-fuel power plants, of course. Solar stations are, in reality, just a front for more, not less, fossil fuel plants. This is why you rarely find electric utilities opposing wind and solar as they know they get to build a new backup fossil fuel generating plant and then raise their charges for energy.
These socialist leaning countries on the phone conference now will have to deal with one of their own, Michael Shellenberger turning against them after nearly a quarter century of wrong headed environmental activism.
Shellenberger’s June 20, 2020 Forbes magazine article, “Democrats’ New Climate Plan Will Kill Endangered Species, Environmentalists Fear” puts the environment damage from industrial wind turbines in perspective/ He says “It is notable that many of the conservationists defending wildlife from industrial wind turbines and transmission lines view the Democrats’ refurbished Green New Deal and its call for the “rapid deployment” of wind and transmission lines not as a climate dream but rather as an ecological nightmare.”
And now, Shellenberger has driven a stake into the very heart of the environmental establishment with his new book, “APOCALYPSE NEVER: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” released on June 30. He writes:
“100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%. We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities…The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.”
It is my belief that the July 9, 2020, 40 country energy summit will backfire to benefit sensible energy production around the world. It openly declared itself on the side of irrational unproductive efforts that will worsen the plight of over a billion folks in the world who remain without electricity.