Having written There is No Climate Crisis, I find it useful/amusing/worrying (delete as appropriate) to see what nonsense the climate catastrophists are churning out. So I subscribe to a newsletter called Inside Climate News produced by a group of them.
The latest newsletter had an article claiming: “New Wind and Solar Are Cheaper Than the Costs to Operate All But One Coal-Fired Power Plant in the United States.“
That surprised me somewhat as countries like China and India, whose leaders aren’t worshippers of Saint Greta and the climate crazies, are ramping up coal use. Here’s a chart for China:
And here’s India:
And, in comparison, here’s the USA:
So is the USA’s energy policy being run by geniuses who realise that coal is too expensive to be economically viable? And are China and India being run by idiots who fail to appreciate the glories of solar and wind power?
In the article claiming that all but one U.S. coal-fired power station are more expensive than solar and wind, the writer does mention Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act: “New analysis shows that renewables beat existing coal plants 99% of the time, thanks to long-term trends and an assist from the Inflation Reduction Act.”
So let’s see what this “assist from the Inflation Reduction Act” is all about. Here’s a U.S. Treasury ‘Factsheet‘ about the Inflation Reduction Act.
In it we read that: “The U.S. Department of the Treasury will be at the forefront of implementation, delivering $270 billion in tax incentives as part of the $369 billion the Inflation Reduction Act dedicates to combating climate change.”
U.S. consumers spend about $1 trillion on energy each year including transport. I did a quick ‘back-of-a-fag-packet’ calculation. If the USA’s 123 million or so households spend around $4,000 a year each on energy (excluding transport) then that’s about $400 billion. Yet the inflation Reduction Act is spending a massive $369 billion subsidising supposed ‘renewables’, which are just a minor part of the USA’s energy use. In fact, wind and solar make up only about 3% of USA energy use:
Yet these almost negligible energy sources are getting $369 billion in subsidies – that’s almost as much as the $400 billion U.S. households pay for in total for energy each year. That’s rather more significant than the seemingly modest “assist from the Inflation Reduction Act” the Inside Climate News‘s writer mentions.
I have a feeling that this means $369 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money will be squandered on largely useless and horrifically-expensive and uneconomical solar and wind energy projects. And then by forgetting that so much money in subsidies has been poured into the bank accounts of wind and solar companies, the climate catastrophists can claim that wind and solar are cheaper for consumers than coal.
That brings us back to the claim made by Inside Climate News that “New Wind and Solar Are Cheaper Than the Costs to Operate All But One Coal-Fired Power Plant in the United States”.
It’s total and utter bilge, nonsense, rubbish like almost all the claims churned out to a gullible public by a compliant media desperately spewing out climate-catastrophist propaganda to prepare us for the colder, darker, more miserable future our rulers have in store for us.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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