With formidable doublespeak, Greenpeace tries to square this circle by saying that renewables are both competitive and need subsidies for many years after 2020: “Wind and solar energy are at the point of becoming really competitive with fossil fuels, but failure to support them for another few years will result in huge losses of potential jobs.”
That is a claim we’ve heard many times since the 1970s – just a few more years of subsidies, and we’ll be off. In 1976 Lovins told us that “a largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed in the United States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic.” And it still isn’t.
Truth is, wind and solar PV will be trivial contributions to global energy for the next quarter century. The International Energy Agency estimates that today just about 0.5 per cent of global energy comes from solar and wind (see graphic below). Even in 2040, even if everyone does everything they’ve promised at the Paris climate summit, the world will get just 2.4% of its energy from solar and wind.
these jokers still ignore the fact that these giant wind turbines cannot be made or maintained without the use of fossil fuels. the level of stupidity surrounding this green nonsense is becoming tiresome.
there is also a serious disconnect when Canada brings in 25,000 CO2 spewing immigrants that we have feed, clothe and house. I guess these folks don’t add to C02 emissions, they must be magic. as I keep saying we have become so stupid we don’t deserve to be here.
Wind power will never be mainstream, it’s just physics.
The Energy or power density of wind can never be enough to power a first world country. You can cover half of some countries in windmills and still not have enough power plus you still need conventional back up.
Pushing wind power is just plain insane.
Stop the nonsense now.
http://www.theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/257481/why-power-density-matters
It’s quite obvious that this whole scam is about crony capitalism at it’s worst. Liberals and their friends finding a new way to tax the poor to enrich themselves.
“huge losses of potential jobs”
What’s a potential job – one that might be created if The Green Blob can scam even more money out of tax/ratepayers via government?
My wife and I drove by an electrical generating “WIND FARM” in southwestern Ontario yesterday, there was NO WIND blowing and guess what?
The BIG FANS were all sitting very still!
The electricity generated in the Province OF ONTARIO was EITHER HYDRO OR NUCLEAR-LY PRODUCED, NOT BY WIND!
Geez!
I seriously doubt that the perpetrators of the biggest fraud in human history will ever be brought to account.
In the school my oldest grandchildren go to the teachers are teaching them that AGW is real and that oil is bad. Thank goodness my grandkids have been taught to think for themselves and argue back using Bjorn’s arguments.
There are now signs near the wind turbines in Grey County that warn of “turbine shedding”…
On the drive to Elora I noticed a new expensive looking house with an array of solar panels covering the entire roof. Funny thing was the house (and therefore the solar panels) faces west. During the winter the sun will be at ninety degrees to the solar panels for almost the entire day.
Ontario’s power production as of 1PM (to give solar a fair hand, which is more than greenies do for their oppponents):
NUCLEAR Total 63.6%
GAS Total 6.7%
HYDRO Total 24.5%
WIND Total 4.5%
SOLAR Total 0.4%
BIOFUEL Total 0.4%
As the UK has just seen a report that is calling for a 40 to 55% gap in power production when they mothball their nukes, and you must know that this is where the Lieberals are going…yikes.
Rekated, more info about NASA cooking the books to get their “warmest year ever” year after year. This is beyond absurd — and even more absurd that so many people are taken in by this garbage :
http://tgrule.com/2016/01/28/agw-more-information-about-cooking-of-books-not-the-planet/:
Enlightened parents should go after those schools. Brainwashing by educators is not acceptable in a free country. The job of teachers is to teach children how to think for themselves. The AGW scam would make a wonderful case study of what happens when people do not think for themselves. I am sure one day it will be used for that.
Its the physics stupid. http://www.energytribune.com/2771/understanding-e-mc2#sthash.XlCUUDcN.cUlkHcjG.dpbs
Since wind and sun, like oil “belongs to everyone” as we’ve been so repeatedly told, I’d say it’s time that instead of paying subsidies we start charging royalties to the wind and solar companies for the energy they’re harvesting. Let’s see how long they last once we start doing that.
“Even in 2040, even if everyone does everything they’ve promised at the Paris climate summit, the world will get just 2.4% of its energy from solar and wind.”
No matter, CAGW rent seekers will continue to derive 100% of their reputation, prestige and taxpayer funded income from the “renewable” energy scam.
Wind will never, ever be viable because it is simply too flawed as a power source, while solar has potential, it is still at least decades away from any significant replacement of nuclear, hydroelectric or any other traditional infrastructure energy source.
So we are left with oil and the temerity of those who back its jobs, prosperity and energy independence.
“Potential jobs” might be those destroyed in the private sector by taxing away productive factors to give to climate change con artists amongst other unproductive factors (aka subsidies), to promote energy technologies that take from but never add to economic output. Government is poor at picking winners but losers are good at picking government.
Of course there’s the ideology. “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” – Ronald Reagan. He understood Hayek’s “fatal conceit” that applies to statists like Trudeau & Obama.
No we are not “a part of government” because we choose it, nor is it true business owners “didn’t build that,” (roads & other public infrastructure) because that dishonest argument ignores that only taxes could “build that” since government has no wealth of its own, it must take that from the citizen, though that doesn’t stop the apparatchiks from becoming personally wealthy off taxation. That flawed nonsense feeds garbage like CAGW theory. Frankly any economic theory that supports and enhances statism would be seen as a highest priority by socialists.
Taxation naturally and inevitably reduces national output, regardless of their SJW/Marxist motivations. That’s why government must be limited rather than the leviathan of irresponsible government we have now with dishonest &/or naïve politicians foisting the idiotic idea that ever increasing taxation and public “enterprise” makes our lives better. Contrary experience is abundant and irrefutable given any application of common sense, which is now a superpower apparently. There is no escaping this economic reality, except with false narratives, concocted data and wishful thinking.
There was a time when that might have been true, when economies were immature and needed government help to fund the institutions of freedom and prosperity (fire, police, military, etc) more readily than civil society and spontaneous order. Those days are long past, now government is a parasite on society for the most part imho. Then again it’s easier to throw others’ money at “problems” rather than thinking them through along with solutions, except reduced output means eventually socialists run out of others’ money. Evidence anyone?
“Tax changes that are made to promote long-run growth, or to reduce an inherited budget deficit, in contrast, are undertaken for reasons essentially unrelated to other factors influencing output. Thus, examining the behavior of output following these relatively exogenous tax changes is likely to provide more reliable estimates of the output effects of tax changes. The results of this more reliable test indicate that tax changes have very large effects: an exogenous tax increase of 1 percent of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly 2 to 3 percent.”
http://www.nber.org/digest/mar08/w13264.html
Wind and solar are fine for off-grid hippies, but they don’t scale-up to grid system applications. Nuclear works all the time even when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, which is more often than not.
Thorium fueled nuclear is the only viable energy source that can replace fossil fuels for electricity generation. No new technology required, just do it.
Unfortunately in a world where ‘leaders’ make decisions based on media popularity, stupidity always rules, and problems just get bigger instead of being solved.
This brainwashing of all things leftist and more recently AGW thrown in has been going on for decades. The vast majority of people are blissfully unaware. And we wonder why our universities have become nothing but Komsomnol breeding grounds.
if it was possible to power Toronto with wind turbines you would need a wind farm the size of PEI and sustained winds 24/7/365. that is a complete impossibility.
So true. The wholesale, universal brainwashing of our children is astounding. The single best thing I did when raising my children was teaching them to think for themselves. They learned to detect extreme bias in their teachers at an early age. They learned to independently research facts before drinking the kool-aid. I find it ironic that the generation whose credo was “Question Authority” has taken complete power … and changed their credo to “Obey Authority”. Otherwise known as “The Science is settled”