Cost Of Germany’s “Energiewende” To Soar To €31 Billion This Year Alone
Eurostat estimates that in 2015 carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel combustion increased by 0.7% in the European Union (EU), compared with the previous year. --European Commission, 3 May 2016
Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions increased by an estimated 10 million tonnes from 2014 to 2015, in a blow to the country’s claims to climate leadership. A 2011 decision to phase out nuclear power within a decade has seen dirty coal maintain a significant share of the energy mix. As a result, progress on emissions has slowed. A decrease in 2011 was followed by increases in 2012 and 2013. --Megan Darby, Climate Home, 14 Match 2016
According to the Institute of German Business (IW) the cost of Germany’s once highly touted “Energiewende” (transition to green energy) will soar to a whopping €31 billion ($35 billion) in 2016 alone, thus further burdening the already ailing German consumerThe Energiewende is morphing into a central planning folly of the scale matched only by the Venezuelan Chavez communists. --Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, 3 May 2016
Germany paid wind farms $548 million to switch off last year to prevent damage to the country’s electricity grid, according to a Thursday article in the German newspaper Wirtschaftswoche. Germany’s wind and solar power systems have provided too much power at unpredictable times, which damaged the power grid and made the system vulnerable to blackouts. To fix the problem, grid operators paid companies $548 million to shut their turbines down, according to a survey by Wirtschaftswoche of Germany’s largest power companies. --Andrew Follett, The Daily Caller, 29 April 2016
Energy matters to economic growth and general prosperity, but to what degree? Over the last thirty years a new view of the English ‘Industrial Revolution’ is beginning to take shape that suggests it matters much more than is allowed for in mainstream economics, a development that gives further reason for concern about global attempts to reduce emissions through the adoption of renewable energy. --John Constable, Global Warming Policy Forum, 1 May 2016
It's All Over: EU Scraps Green Transport Target Post-2020
Donald Trump's Election Would Derail Obama’s Paris Deal, Warns French Foreign Minister
EU laws requiring member states to use “at least 10%” renewable energy in transport will be scrapped after 2020, the European Commission confirmed, hoping to set aside a protracted controversy surrounding the environmental damage caused by biofuels. --Frédéric Simon, EurActiv.com, 4 May 2016
The election of Donald Trump would derail the landmark agreement on climate change reached in Paris last December, the architect of the accord has warned.Trump is now virtually certain to be the Republican candidate for president and has said “I am not a great believer in manmade climate change”, leading to fears he would attempt to unpick the historic agreement if he became president. Without naming Trump, the former French foreign minister Laurent Fabius told an audience in London: “Think about the impact of the coming US presidential elections. If a climate change denier was to be elected, it would threaten dramatically global action against climate disruption.” He said: “We must not think that everything is settled.” --Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, 4 May 2016
Yingli Green Energy Holding Co., once the world’s biggest solar manufacturer, plunged the most in more than seven months after signaling it may be teetering toward bankruptcy. Yingli declined 21 percent to $3.60 at the close in New York, the most since Sept. 29. That followed an 8.1 percent drop Friday after the Chinese solar company acknowledged “substantial doubt as to its ability to continue as a going concern.” “It looks like they are not getting bailed out and they will need to file for bankruptcy,” Gordon Johnson, an analyst at Axiom Capital Management, said in an e-mail Monday. --Joe Ryan, Bloomberg, 2 May 2016
Wind turbines and solar panels are a waste of money if Britain wants reliable low carbon electricity supplies through the winter, the late Professor Sir David MacKay said in his final interview. Prof MacKay, who served as chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change for five years until 2014, died from cancer last month. He criticised the “appalling delusion” that renewable sources of power could simply be scaled up and paired with battery storage to provide all the UK’s energy needs, citing the high costs and large areas of land that would be required. --Emily Gosden, The Daily Telegraph, 4 May 2016
Let’s ask what this abuse of probabilities is meant to accomplish. Like Pascal’s Wager, it is designed to make your ability to imagine a scary scenario — believe this or there will be horrible, horrible consequences — into an argument to stampede everyone into compliance. It is similar to the “strong” versions of the Precautionary Principle, where the mere ability to imagine negative consequences from a new technology compels you to ban it. This kind of Pascal’s-Wager-for-global-warming is part of a larger environmentalist program: a perverse attempt to take our sense of the actual risks and benefits for human life and turn it upside down. The overwhelming evidence is that industry, technology, and wealth decrease the chance of random natural events having catastrophic consequences by making us far better equipped to withstand these disasters. That’s what the environmentalists are trying to make us forget, in order to scare us into sacrificing those advantages to their new environmentalist religion. --Robert Tracinski, The Federalist, 3 May 2016
Before climate change, there was the population explosion. Predicting disaster for humanity and environmental doom became the means by which government power could be expanded, even if the record of such prophesies is dismal. The record of populist predictions about the evils of modern society is terrible. The most alarming predictions, which garner the most headlines and have the most impact on public policy, never come to pass. Perennial pessimism is nothing but paranoid neurosis. Prophesies about the catastrophes that would follow population growth have long been both shrill and high-profile. Yet they simply failed to materialise. The prophets of doom wish they would be quietly forgotten, and for the most part they have been. But they shouldn’t be, when the very same fearmongers remain in positions of influence or power. --Ivo Vegter, Daily Maverick,3 May 2016
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