Energy sanity is blowing in the wind

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 the – reaction to President 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 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, which is the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide by far; at 30% 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 which has committed under Paris to keep increasing its CO2 emissions out to 2030? The best-case 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. On the other hand, the RET is the absolute foundation of wind and solar.

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 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 target.

Australian power prices have more than doubled in the past 10 or so years. They are now something like double those in the US.

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.