The tragedy of all this is this: in none of the above cases is it hard to see what the resource costs and returns are. In almost all of them, windmills, solar electricity generation, tidal power, etc., they're simply not worth doing
by any sensible engineering measure you choose to apply.
They cost too much in scarce resources, or they use too much energy in manufacture/installation (an analogue for carbon emission usually), or they're either inherently short-lived or don't generate enough electricity, or it's too expensive to connect them into the grid (e.g. offshore turbines beyond the Hebrides). It's not a case of, "but if we do nothing...", because these things are actually making the problem worse.
Physics and maths don't lie, but politicians are corrupt, and those benefiting from the boom likewise (not necessarily different people). Meanwhile the public are short-sighted and desperate for
any reasonable investment in the present economic circumstances.
We can no more meet our emissions 'targets' by international treaty than we can fly by flapping our arms around. Well, we can, by reducing our economic activity to something close to Victorian Britain. Forget the new HST (irrespective of its value). Want to take a stagecoach from London to York instead? You better had, as you soon won't be
allowed to drive (unless you're rich, for whom the rules, as always, will be different). Our emissions targets are literally impossible to meet, and always were.
Economics? Of a madhouse! Just like quarrying away mountains, we won't ever be able to remove the scars on our landscape. We'll still have to build more gas, nuclear and even coal-fuelled power stations, or face electricity rationing. That's within ten years. All these 'green technologies' are doing is building an 'industry' we don't need, can't afford, and which is wasting precious resources in nonsense, literally. And when it dies, as it must, there'll even be people whining that 'jobs will be lost' so the government should keep it all going (I've heard that one already on Radio Four!).
Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that, however much we reduce the emissions here in the UK, the British 'carbon footprint' will continue to grow inexorably. We've offshored most manufacturing of consumer durables to China, who shows no sign of suddenly stopping production. We can no longer manage without cheap Chinese imports of, er, pretty much everything we use. And if we made it here... oops! Targets vanishing into the outer reaches of the solar system.
If you look at the official numbers about our own 'local' contribution to carbon emissions, the truth is damning. All this 'green' activity supposedly intends to save only a small percentage of what we emit. Yet what we emit now is less than two percent of the global amount.
Daily figures on the contribution of renewables to the grid show it in last winter at around 0.1% of consumption - yup, 1/1000 of what we consume. It's hard to average a very bumpy curve, but reasonably it's around 2% of average demand - not that that helps*. As I type, today it's at a 'healthy' 0.9% (mainly wind - solar is not recorded separately). "Biomass" generation is almost three times as much.
And all of the above,
all of it, is predicated on dodgy pseudo-science: the idea that releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is damaging the environment at a significantly fast level. This is not proven. It is not 'settled science' at all, and, if anything, re-examination of what little (and poor) data we have is showing no correlation at all between what we've been doing and what the climate is doing to us.
I'm not saying it's not changing. The argument, on which trillions of pounds are being spent by bureaucrats and politicians on our behalf, is about
causality: is it dangerously abnormal, but more crucially, are we to blame? If the answer to either question is "no" then this money is entirely wasted, as is all the environmental damage we're doing, ironically to 'save' the environment.
There's a lot of bad stuff humans do, for sure, but if this isn't a problem our actions can fix, either because we aren't responsible (possibly the sun is), or our 'fix' is actually making things worse, then surely we shouldn't be doing it?
You can guess the conclusion I've come to.
Meanwhile, some people, of course, are getting
very rich through all this. My modest proposal is that we research diligently who these people are...
... and then string 'em up on their own windmills.
Nedd Ludd.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
*although it can produce that amount, because it's not reliable (constant), all wind and solar generation has to be backed by conventional systems on standby. Unless someone implements huge-scale energy storage (and there's an environmentalist's paradox!), that situation will obtain forever.
