Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – the famous quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein should be the unofficial motto of COP27, say Jordan Peterson and Bjørn Lomborg in the Telegraph.
Global CO2 emissions have kept increasing since the world’s nations first committed to rein in climate change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – despite dozens of climate summits and the global climate agreements struck in Kyoto and Paris. This is the case, once again, in 2022, when we will collectively set a new emissions record. While rich countries increasingly promise draconian cuts (and then generally backtrack, as they import huge amounts of oil, gas and coal to save their citizens from energy poverty, as they have done most recently to address the current energy crisis), most of the future emissions will come from the currently poorer countries in Asia and Africa, as they power their climb out of abject poverty.
In the previous 10 years, the world has focused more on remediating climate change than ever before. Despite this, we are not achieving anything, although no shortage of money has been wasted. In a surprisingly honest review of climate policies, the UN revealed a “lost decade”: The report found that it couldn’t tell the difference between what has happened and a world that adopted no new climate policies since 2005. Consider that: all those climate summits and grandiose promises – all that expense and trouble – and no measurable difference whatsoever.
This state of affairs is unsurprising, unfortunately, because today’s renewable energy sources have two big problems. First, they occupy a vast amount of space, often displacing nature: replacing a square yard of a gas-fired power plant requires 73 square yards of solar panels, 239 square yards of on-shore wind turbines, or an astonishing 6,000 square yards of biomass. One study found that the United States would have to devote a land area four times the size of the United Kingdom to ‘clean power’ to fulfill President Biden’s promise of a carbon-free economy by 2050.
Second – and of even greater importance – the two renewable energy technologies favoured by the vast majority of environmental activists are intermittent or unreliable. Solar energy simply isn’t produced when it is overcast or at nighttime. Wind energy requires a breeze. We are often told by green energy boosters that wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels. At best, that is only true when the wind is blowing, or the sun is shining. On a windless, dark night, the cost of wind and solar power rises to the infinite.
It is for such reasons that it is deeply misleading (although highly convenient) to compare the energy costs of wind or solar to fossil fuels only when it is windy and sunny. It is also important to note that since all solar energy is sold at essentially the same time (when the sun is up and shining), its value drops dramatically. When solar reaches 30% market share in California, as one study revealed, it loses two-thirds of its value.
Furthermore: because modern societies require 24 hours of non-stop power, backup is not optional – and that means reliance on fossil fuels, when there’s no sun or wind. As more solar and wind is introduced, moreover, fossil fuel backups become ever more expensive as they offer their services for fewer hours, to produce the necessary return on capital. And what of batteries? Globally, we have battery storage with the current capacity to store one minute and 15 seconds of the world’s electricity consumption. And that problem will not be ameliorated soon – even by 2030, global batteries will only cover less than 11 minutes of the global electricity consumption.
And these are just the problems with moving electricity away from fossil fuel. Electricity constitutes just 19% of total energy use, Peterson and Lomborg explain. “We’re far further behind in developing solutions for agriculture, manufacturing, construction, and transportation.” The most supposedly advanced of these solutions is electric vehicles, yet despite massive subsidies, “just 1.4% of cars globally are electric, and that number is not going up quickly,” they say. “The Biden Administration itself estimates that battery-electric cars will make up less than 10% of total U.S. automobile stock – by 2050.”
Peterson and Lomborg propose a new approach based on investment in innovation and simply not being in such a hurry. “Finding the breakthroughs that will power the rest of the 21st century could require a decade, or it could take four. But no other genuine solutions beckon, and we have already had three decades of spectacular failure pursuing the policies that are currently in place.”
Worth reading in full.
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Net Zero Expensive Exercise in Futility
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One begins to wonder whether “net zero” isn’t about what they say it’s about. The similarities to covid are striking. Of course there are dummies who believe this cobblers, but there are also serious men and women well versed in this stuff who must know it’s crackpot rubbish who are lying through their teeth.
Net zero = nil carbon = no more humans.
And all of this still assumes that minute quantities of anthropogenic CO2 release, rather than the 96% coming from natural sources, as well as CH4 coming from cows rather than microbial and insect- derived plant degredation are the sole causes of climate change.
“Moronic” doesn’t come close to describing those pushing this rubbish or the mindless followers of the cult.
The people pushing it aren’t morons. They are using this as the lever to sweep away our entrepreneurial capitalism economies in favour of totalitarianism. The followers are indeed ‘mindless’…but they have a purpose. The greatest purpose there is, to save the planet from the stupid people like us from destroying our habitat for ever.
Partly true Neil.
Our current PM and energy minister don’t have half a brain between them, though the WEF/Gates/UN axis of evil are the true evil geniuses behind the show.
I think you must recognize that many people want it to be true, and that is why the climate cult thrives. The cult followers are tortured rather than mindless. So many feel that something is wrong, something has to be wrong, to account for how they feel about their lives, their futures, the horror of the looming shade. Not everyone is a miserable sod like this. But those who are find that the news that the world is wicked, and people must totally change how they live to redeem it, makes them feel a lot better. Undermining that belief threatens to plunge them back into misery, and that is why they cling to their doom narratives so aggressively and fiercely. The only placation they will accept is that the world is wicked and coming to an end for some other reason. You got a perfect illustration of this in the early 80s when the same end-of-the-world-is-nigh nutters flipped overnight from global cooling to global warming.
I certainly don’t buy the narrative of catastrophic man-made climate change, but I am going to query your 96% figure. The implication of your statement is that only 4% of CO2 in the atmosphere is due to man, whereas my understanding is that almost all of the increase from 280 ppm in 1850 to 410 ppm now is due to fossil fuels, which would suggest that around 30% is due to man. I attach a diagram which purports to illustrate this point. The CO2 that nature emits (from the ocean and vegetation) is balanced by natural absorptions (again by the ocean and vegetation), but if you look solely at the emission side of the equation, man is indeed responsible for only 4%.
The correct figure for the human contribution to total CO2 emissions is 4%, or slightly under. The UK contributes 1% of the human total, which is 0.04% of the total total. The scale of the futility of UK net zero is staggering.
We must do our bit, though. How else can we tell the Chinese to get rid of their 1,200 coal-fired power stations unless we get rid of our 3?
We are essentially offshoring our manufacturing along with the jobs and the prosperity and all it achieves is displacing the emissions to the East.
Not net zero, it’s eugenics 2.0.
Fossil fuels is a gigantic lie and myth. The 2nd most abundant sources on this planet are gas and oil They self generate. Your dead f*ing cat on your lawn does not turn into a fossil and is not compressed into oil over trillions of years. Rockefeller propaganda lie from the 1890s. But why don’t you know this? Our Western world is not ‘modern’ in many ways but deeply pagan and primitive (see Rona). The Russians, (oh no not Vlad the Droner), discovered long ago the self regeneration and abiotic process of ‘carbon fuel’ (which contradicts Rockefeller’s organic lie). So you will never know about it. Another world philosophical view shattered. Heads implode. Now lets discuss the moon landings with 1960s tech zooming through 30.000 of the radiation belt shall we….https://www.gasresources.net/
The abiogenenic petroleum hypothesis is an interesting one. Not sure how true it is, but very interesting nonetheless.
I would be very interested to know how true this abiotic theory is, because it’s a pretty strong argument to have in one’s armoury, if true.
You can clearly see the effect of each successive COP on CO2 emissions
Or to put it in the words of Paul Daniels – not a lot.
It’s about COntrol. Not CO2.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – ”
If Desmet’s doctoral thesis is correct “85% of published scientific papers have non-repeatable results”. So by their own standards they can’t be insane!
Has anyone seen a “Pillar Box”? ——Yep, we all have seen them, so we know they exist. How about an “Elephant”? Yep, we have all seen them on TV or at the zoo so we know they exist. ——How about “Climate Change”? eh,eh well but wait a second what is meant by “Climate Change”? Climate Change is changes to climate allegedly caused by human beings and our industrial activities etc, but has anyone seen it? Or do they see a storm or flood and simply assume they are seeing it? The real answer is that no one has seen climate change. You cannot look out of your living room window and see the climate changing. You cannot see something that apparently started 160 years ago or so where the alleged global temperature (whatever that is supposed to mean) has only risen 0.8C, which would actually make the temperature of earth quite stable. —–So it turns out that “Climate Change” is really just anything at all that it’s proponents say it is. It is warmer, it is colder, it is wetter, it is drier, it is more storms, more floods and droughts and every other thing imaginable. But lets be clear, when everything that happens is because of your theory then you are not indulging in science. When whatever it is that you claim cannot be falsified then you are not indulging in science. So if “climate change” is something we cannot see and it is something that isn’t “science”, then what is it? —-It is a tool of a political agenda. That agenda is “Sustainable Development” and it is, as George Chirac said some years ago ” A genuine component of world government”.—–As climatoligist Judith Curry said, “Sure, all things being equal, CO2 may cause a little bit of warming but all things in earths climate are NOT equal”. So everything we hear about this “climate change” that no one can see, is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for which no evidence exists. There is no evidence that CO2 is causing or will cause dangerous changes to climate, and computer models that project this apocalypse are evidence of NOTHING, because they are full of assumptions, speculations and guesses in support of the politics. So what is this really about if it isn’t about global warming? Here is a clue ——-“One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore. We redistribute the worlds wealth via climate policy”—- Edenhoffer (lead Author IPCC). And if you listen to what is being said about COP27 on TV you will hear the participants talk about agreements between richer countries and poorer countries. —-Wake up people you are being played. This has virtually nothing to do with the climate.
What we really need is to release the Kraken: Nikola Tesla’s free energy devices.