Kool- Aid hangover
YOU’D have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the utterly insane – hysterical doesn’t begin to capture the sheer unbridled lunacy of it – reaction to President Donald Trump taking the US out of the Fake Paris Climate Accord.
Global Warming Kool- Aid drinkers – which, I would have to note, includes disturbing majorities of the developed world’s political, business and chattering class elites – had absolutely no difficulty with holding two exactly opposite views.
That on the one hand the President’s move – indeed, just the statement of the move – was instantly catastrophic. It single- handedly destroyed the global effort to halt global warming and would inevitably, all by itself, ultimately destroy the planet.
The Atlantic magazine, for example, headed its hysterical reaction: “Did Donald Trump Just Make the Planet Hotter?” Short, and complete, answer: no.
While on the other hand, the President’s move was dismissed as irrelevant. The anti- global warming project would go on regardless; the US would be the loser, left behind by the tide of history and the irreversible switch to so- called renewable forms of energy.
This triumphalism was captured in the hailing of China as the new “leader” in tackling climate change. You mean the China that is the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide by far; at 30 per cent of the global total, more than double that of the US? And, by the bye, around 25 times the level of Australia’s CO2 emissions?
You mean the China that has committed under Paris to keep increasing its CO2 emissions out to 2030? The “best- case” – read: calculated after a night on the Kool- Aid – estimates of China’s 2030 emissions are still increased by around “4- 5 Australias”.
Of course, the planet could always be saved by a total implosion of the Chinese economy; albeit that would not be such a great outcome for our economy more narrowly.
We see this totally incoherent nonsense also playing out in two diametrically opposite – and each, equally total nonsense – claims or demands.
On the one hand again, that wind and solar are now so cheap to produce electricity that investors are falling over themselves to build them: so much so that Australia’s mandatory Renewable Energy Target ( RET) will be easily met and indeed well exceeded. Yet on the other hand, that the RET is the absolute foundation of wind and solar; that if we didn’t force power companies to buy wind and solar- generated electricity, they wouldn’t. And by implication, nobody would invest in a single turbine.
Anyone claiming that new wind and solar plants are going to erupt across the Australian landscape has a pretty big difficulty with the most basic and simplest arithmetic.
In 2016, according to the Clean Energy Council, the amount of RET energy produced was just over half that of the 2020 mandatory target.
But, and it’s a big but that always gets pushed into the fine print by the wind and solar true believers, well over half of that production came from hydro. So that means the wind and solar contribution has to not just double, but nearly quadruple. And do so in just three years.
Further, note, that’s wind and solar output; which at best runs at around one- quarter of rated ( ha- ha) “capacity”; so you will need a massive completely undeliverable amount of new investment in wind and solar.
Investment, which only makes “sense” on the basis of mandating that power companies have to buy the erratic output. And then pass on the much increased cost to both consumer and business users of electricity.
Australian power prices have more than doubled over the last 10 or so years – and that means they are now something like double those in the US.
Further, most potently and punitively, this happened when we are just getting started on forcing the use of erratic, unreliable and expensive wind and solar. Think about how much more electricity prices are going to leap as more and more wind and solar is forced into the grid.
America has a president who said last week he won’t be doing that to US consumers and US business. We have a prime minister who deliberately doubled down on doing it to you.
Would the last power- using business in Australia please turn out the lights on the way out?