Obsession With Wind & Solar Accelerated Destruction of Australia Economy

The industrial revolution was all about harnessing cheap and reliable energy. Australia’s de-industrialisation has reversed that process. An obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar has sent Australian power prices through the roof.

Energy hungry businesses such as mining, mineral processing and manufacturing are watching their profit margins evaporate. Pretty soon those industries and the thousands of jobs they support will disappear, too.

The whole debacle started when a bunch of American rent-seeking carpetbaggers turned up in South Australia back in 2002 hoping to cash in on Australia’s brand-new Renewable Energy Target: How a Band of Criminals, Shysters & Chancers Conjured Up the Wind Industry in Australia

The premise, of course, was the story that the world would incinerate before our very eyes, if we didn’t carpet the entire country with windmills and solar panels.

The weather hasn’t changed much over the last 20 years, but over that period Australian power prices went from amongst the lowest in the world, to the highest. South Australia, its notorious wind and solar capital, suffers the world’s highest power prices, bar none.

To the fury of those that voted for the Coalition back in May, instead of attempting to reverse the process, the PM, Scott Morrison has just promised to throw another lazy billion dollars in subsidies and soft loans to wind and solar. A bit like pouring petrol on a raging fire, really.

With energy hungry Australian businesses on the brink and the PM pandering to the wind and sun cult, The Australian’s Terry McCrann spells out the stark and glaring choice.

We now have a very simple choice.

We can join the US — and effectively, also China — in walking away from the Fake Paris Climate Accord and begin the journey back to energy and indeed environmental and even more critical fundamental civilisational sanity.

Or we can join Professor Mickey Mouse and his 11,000 or so decidedly mixed assorted colleagues — curiously dubbed “scientists” by the media — and run screaming into the streets, crying “the sky is falling” and the “seas are rising” and so “oh, woe is us, we are all going to be squashed between”.

The lunacy of the world that we now live in was exactly captured by the gushingly hysterical — or should that be hysterically gushing? — coverage given right across the mainstream media to the fakest of fake news of the climate emergency proclaimed by this fakest of fake cohorts, and the almost zero coverage given to the formal commitment by the US to exit Paris.

I have to say I saw it both as incompetent and biased media as usual, while also being more than a tad surprised.

Surprised, as it wasn’t the springboard for another immediate eruption of the mass media hysteria, better known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I waited in vain for the first default to Godwin’s Law: indeed, not just comparing Trump to Hitler but how he was so much worse. After all, Hitler ‘‘only’’ killed tens of millions; Trump has sentenced untold billions to death, if not Gaia herself.

Yet there was clearly an apprehension that to even report what the US had done might give heart to those wicked climate unbelievers and indeed could even trigger copy-cats.

President Trump had avowed before his election he would take the US out of Paris. However, the Paris rules signed just days before his election in 2016 meant no country could exit for three years.

On the very first day that the US could formally move to withdraw — last Monday — it did. It will take effect on November 4 next year — the day after President Trump will almost certainly have been re-elected.

The two countries responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the entire world’s emissions of the plant-food and planet-greening carbon dioxide will effectively be out of Paris.

The US will be actually out and China, whose emissions are approaching double those of the US, will effectively be out. It is specifically mandated under Paris to keep increasing its emissions to 2030 — by which time, according to noted climate scientists like Greta Thunberg and the aforementioned Prof Mouse, it will be too late.

The great irony — and sheer, pathetic lunacy — of this is that the US out of Paris has actually been the country which has cut its emissions by more than any other in absolute CO2 volumes.

As the withdrawal statement noted, the US cut its CO2 emissions by 13 per cent from 2005 through 2017. It has also cut its emissions of real air pollutants — like the dirty bits of grit that the climate liars try to pretend is CO2 by calling it “carbon pollution” — by a thumping 74 per cent since 1974.

The reason is simple: prosperity, human health and better treatment of the environment are all based on the massively increased use over the centuries of coal, oil and gas.

The only thing that is going to stop China, while in Paris, increasing its emissions, or at the very most plateau them is the Chinese economy going back to a 1980s future.

Now various overexcited local climate loons — they might even have been among the 11,000 with the renowned Prof Mouse — were hailing mid-week that for the first time ever, for all of 10 minutes, renewables provided more than 50 per cent of the power into the national grid.

An amazing 24 per cent was coming from roof-top solar, some 16 per cent from wind, 9 per cent from large-scale solar and just enough from hydro, 2 per cent, to tip it over 50 per cent.

Hmm. What would happen, what happens every day, when the sun goes down? One-third of the grid’s power supply would — correction, will — evaporate.

And if the wind also didn’t blow? Another one-sixth would go missing in action. Suddenly that 51 per cent would become 2 per cent — at least, so long as there was water in the dams.

Oh right: I forgot: batteries will be included, including Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy “big battery”.

Well, that’s now going to cost $10bn; and that will get you all of perhaps 2 per cent of the power we need — until again, the water has all run down the hill and is waiting for the wind to blow to pump it up again.

You are going to need an awful lot of big Tesla batteries to make up for the 33 per cent that was coming from solar, and need it every day. Also, solar doesn’t just fall straight to zero at dusk, it falls away rapidly over the afternoon, assuming the sun has been shining in a cloudless sky.

But rest assured, once all those Tesla batteries kick in, they’ll probably be good enough to get us from, say, 7pm to 7.20pm. And then its lights — and everything else — out, North Korean (and California?) style.

We saw exactly this in the UK during the week. Wind there can produce more than 50 per cent of the power, when the wind is… Well it wasn’t for much of Wednesday and so was producing around 3 per cent.

The coal the UK supposedly got rid of had to kick in. Along with so-called biomass, the burning of even more CO2-releasing wood, the two were producing as much as four times as wind for most of the day.

Some 60 per cent or so was coming from CO2-emitting gas and 17 per cent from nuclear. That’s some renewable future.

Our choice: European style insanity or US and China-style reason and survival.

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