Plans for a huge expansion of the world’s largest windfarm, the London Array in the Thames Estuary, have been scrapped. The consortium running the project blame the abandonment of an additional 65 giant turbines on “various factors”, but especially the requirement for a 3-year study on the potential impact on birds. The Thames estuary site is a designated environmental Special Protection Area.
The decision represents a major blow to the coalition government’s renewable energy goals. Not least as it is the fifth major UK windfarm project to be scrapped or scaled back in just three months.
You really need to put this one under your O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas Hear my Prayer:
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2014/02/priorities/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=priorities&utm_reader=feedly
It kind of belongs in this thread too, but is a bit too delicious not to have a thread of its own.
The on the money lines are:
This is completely nuts. Surely Newsom knows that climate change is fueling drought and that the state’s own climate change assessment shows that as the planet warms, the state’s snowpack will decline. Former Energy Secretary Steven Chu explained it to the New York Times in 2007: ‘even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”’
Newsom is taking the right-wing line on the drought, claiming that if we just add more storage and conveyance (meaning tunnels and canals) then everything will be fine. But if the snowpack vanishes, it won’t matter how much new storage you build because there will not be enough water to fill it. It’s like opening a new savings account when your wages have been cut in half – having a new account isn’t going to solve your underlying problem.
But you know what would help? A bullet train powered by renewable electricity that reduces millions of tons of CO2 emissions.
The HUGE irony in all of this is that they very people who supposedly care the most about the environment are the ones who want these ugly wind farms everywhere. And the very people who supposedly care the least about the environment are the ones opposed to the environmental damage these ghastly wind farms cause.
As always, leftists are hypocrites. No different than Al Gore telling us the world is going to end due to CO2 while he jets around on private planes, dines at the finest restaurants, and shacks up in 5 star hotels.
Speaking of global warming nonsense, Steyn has a very good post up:
http://www.steynonline.com/6106/the-mann-i-love
and even more interesting he has filed his amended complaint and is counter-suing Mann for $10 million:
http://www.steynonline.com/documents/6109.pdf
This could get very interesting. I wasn’t sure at first how seriously Steyn was taking it, but now I think he is in it for real. If he beats Mann it will be epic.
Please consider posting Kate. Thanks.
A small victory on a scale of the WW II sinking of the Tirpitz. Long war ahead yet.
Good for Steyn. Hopefully he takes Mann to the cleaners.
Below is a copy/paste from a commentator “itzman” at Breitbart London on this story and is well worth reading and repeating.
“forcing German industries to turn to cheap coal use – ironically, much of it imported from America”
Germany is well able to supply its own coal needs – the largest user of lignite in the world. And Poland – a simple Reich march away – is awash with coal too.
Apart from that, pretty accurate summary.
Once you cut through the fluff and bollox, renewable energy reveals itself to be what it was conceived as, an expensive green cosmetic that has no tangible effect on global emissions levels, and is fearfully expensive to boot, too.
Politicians are swinging between being caught spending voters money to no good purpose, and not being seen to be ‘doing something’ about climate change.
Greens that are smart enough to do sums (there are one or two) that still ‘believe in climate change’ are firm advocates of nuclear power, which in terms of carbon reduction is 3-4 times better value for money than any renewable is. And becomes increasingly more cost effective at high renewable penetrations onto the grid.
Of course as the world enters a mild cooling phase, it will be interesting to see how long the climate change faith can be maintained.
For sure heavy rain is a sign of climate change. Historically its the harbinger of a cooling phase. How much energy has been lost to turn all that water vapour into rain? Like a fevered patient, the heat of the 90s is being sweated out by Nature’s thermostat, the water cycle.
No doubt the Carbonistas will somehow come up with an explanation, that global warming AND global cooling are ‘both signs of CO2 induced climate change’, but while you can fool most of the people for an extraordinarily long time, you can’t fool all of them forever.
And the net effect of UK flooding may well be to turn peoples opinions from trying to stop the unstoppable, to spending a little on dealing with whatever changes will inevitably happen. How long ago – 2010? – was it that we had a massive winter drought that was equally heralded as ‘climate change’ and a harbinger of yet more winter droughts and likley to see us short of groundwater that ‘might not ever be replaced’ Since then two shockingly cold winters, and a thoroughly wet summer. And now a thoroughly wet winter. And aquifers that haven’t fed springs in three decades now gushing out water into rivers that seldom flow at all. And yet their very existence shows they have, in the past..
Nature is no respector of climate models, it seems. Hardly surprising since the water cycle is simply brushed off as some ‘parameter’ that cant be modelled accurately.
No, the whole Green edifice is teetering on the edge of a Humpty moment.
The only variable is how much more money will be poured into it before its all seen as more or less a total waste.
If one tenth of the EU money that goes to climate change advocates had been spent on the army, and a dredgers, a lot of insurance companies (and pension funds) would be a lot happier
Someone in the British government has discovered that if you keep talking the talk, nobody will check to see if you spent money on walking the walk. You can speak like a watermellon, get elected by morons in big cities and still cancel windfarms! Awesome!
I have no idea why Kate has it out for Giant fans. Their ball team isn’t half bad.