Why Extinction Rebellion seems so nuts - "One of my favourite political events this year was the Battle of Canning Town. This was the moment when Extinction Rebellion decided to send its painfully middle-class agitators to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work. What could go wrong? Quite a lot, it turned out. There were many wonderful moments. The two posh greens who climbed on top of a Tube train at Canning Town were mocked and eventually dragged down. A commuter can be heard branding one of the protesters a ‘ponytail weirdo’. Elsewhere on the Tube system that day, commuters pointed out that the London Underground is run on electricity and is therefore pretty eco-friendly. ‘Are you that fucking stupid?’, one asked a smug-looking couple of XR agitators. ‘No wonder you can’t get jobs…’ But the best moment came during the Battle of Canning Town, during that clash between working people and eco-elitists, when one of the commuters shouted at the protesters: ‘The world is not coming to an end!’ I thought that was brilliant. This woman was just trying to get to her job and yet she found herself having to act as the voice of reason against the new hysteria. And she rose to the occasion wonderfully. She said what many of us know to be true: humankind does not face extinction. The reason I admire the Battle of Canning Town is that it represented a potential turning point in modern green politics. It was really the first time in a long time that eco-hysteria was subjected to public judgement, to democratic rebuke, to the rational scepticism of the people. For far too long green ideology has been insulated from public challenge and public debate and this has allowed it to become increasingly eccentric and even unhinged. The Battle of Canning Town represented a reasoned, bottom-up pushback against the protected hysteria of modern environmentalism. This is the thing I find most fascinating about Extinction Rebellion: its very name is a lie. Those two words themselves are untrue. Humankind does not face extinction, and all reasonable people know this. We know that there is nothing in the IPCC reports – which themselves are often over-the-top – to justify XR’s harebrained claims that we have 12 years to save the planet, and if we fail billions of people will die. They’ve just made this up. As for the second word – ‘rebellion’ – this is a lie, too. Extinction Rebellion is not a rebellion. Rather, its ideology and misanthropy are entirely in keeping with the outlook of mainstream politics and popular culture... Extinction Rebellion is not an edgy, radical movement. It is the militant wing of capitalist society’s loss of faith in itself... it expresses the same old incorrect, disproven claims of conservationism and environmentalism that have been doing the rounds for decades... it does this in an increasingly intemperate, morally unanchored and even apocalyptic fashion... XR makes the same fundamental mistake as every naturalist misanthrope in history. It views population growth and humanity’s use of resources as variable and everything else, most notably human ingenuity, as fixed. This means its basic maths, not to mention its morality, is wrong. It means XR makes the same mistake as Thomas Malthus did, and as the early 20th-century eugenicists did, and as 1970s eco-extremists did. It sees humankind as merely a consuming force, never as a producing or imaginative one... Its language is, to be frank, deranged. It says Africa is on fire, which is a lie. It says billions of humans will die in the next few years, which is not true. It says we are running out of resources – another myth. The linguistic shifts are remarkable. Greens have gone from talking about climate change to climate emergency to climate breakdown to climate catastrophe. These are not scientific terms; they are moralistic terms that express a fearful and often quite unstable view of humanity’s impact on the planet. Why is XR like this? Because for too long green thinking has been insulated from debate and confrontation. Censorship has been deployed to deflect criticism from the green ideology. Anyone who raises questions about eco-misanthropy is branded a climate-change denier and efforts will be made to expel him or her from public life... Censorship is the midwife of stupidity, and more importantly of dogmatism. When religious or political or moral ideologies are insulated from critique, they become dogmas."
An establishment rebellion - "London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has acquired a number of artefacts associated with Extinction Rebellion (XR), the protest group campaigning to reduce Britain’s carbon emissions to ‘net zero’ by 2025. Apparently, just nine months since Extinction Rebellion’s first public stunt, its paraphernalia deserves to be housed alongside some of the world’s best art and design works of the past 5,000 years. It is hard to think of any supposedly radical protest movement in history that has been so readily embraced by the establishment as Extinction Rebellion. And the love-bombing isn’t just coming from the usual luvvies like Dame Emma Thompson and activist celebs like Lily Cole and Charlotte Church. Recently, XR attracted the attention of wealthy philanthropists. Last month, three wealthy Americans (one of whose family wealth comes from the oil industry) donated nearly £500,000 to XR and vowed to raise millions more. Other wealthy backers include a hedge-fund manager, who remains anonymous. Then, there is the literary establishment – from heavyweight authors like Margaret Atwood and Phillip Pullman to big-name publishers like Penguin, it has thrown its weight behind Extinction Rebellion, too... The reason for this establishment love-in is that Extinction Rebellion represents no rebellion at all. It has the appearance of a rebellion, certainly – protesters glue their hands to buildings, block roads and get themselves arrested. But the message is one that affirms and flatters establishment opinion rather than challenging it. Parliament, for instance, was quick to heed XR’s demand to declare a ‘climate emergency’. More significantly, the group’s main aim of reducing UK emissions to ‘net zero’ is one that is shared not only by the Conservative government, but also by MPs of all stripes. The ‘net zero’ target for 2050 was nodded through parliament with just an hour and a half of debate and without a single vote needing to be cast. XR is only more impatient in its demand, calling for a 2025 deadline. Many have tried to compare Extinction Rebellion’s climate crusade with past movements for progressive change. Justifying the V&A’s decision to acquire Extinction Rebellion artefacts, senior curator Corinna Gardner compared their punchy colour palette to that of the Suffragettes. Similarly, XR leader Roger Hallam claims his protesting is in the ‘tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King’. These comparisons are delusional, pretentious and insulting. But they unwittingly highlight something important. Whether it was the Chartists, the Suffragettes, the civil-rights movement, or the gay-rights movement, these genuinely progressive campaigns were all despised by the elite at the time. These were campaigns that sought to expand human freedom, to wrest rights and resources from the establishment. By contrast, environmentalist campaigns like Extinction Rebellion are, by their very nature, against freedom. They seek to place new limits on human activity: on industry, on economic growth, on our travel, on our diets, and on childbirth. For many years, the great and the good have been in broad agreement that something must be done about climate change. But they also seem to agree that the bulk of the costs should not be shouldered by them. Only last week, celebrities, business leaders and politicians descended on Sicily for the 7th annual Google Camp, which this year was dedicated to tackling climate change. After arriving in their private jets, mega yachts and sports cars, delegates were treated to a lecture on climate change by Prince Harry, who delivered it in his bare feet. Earlier this year, 1,500 individual private jets flew to Davos. The highlight of the summit was a conversation between Prince William and Sir David Attenborough… on climate change. The establishment only seems to care about ‘pollution’ when it is ordinary people doing the polluting. It is always cheap flights, cheap food and cheap fashion which cause the most consternation among environmentalists. In turn, climate change presents the establishment with an opportunity to manage the little people’s habits, tastes and aspirations."
Extinction Rebellion's Sir David Attenborough stunt is a monumental own-goal - "Robert Conquest, the 20th century British historian, set down three laws of politics. The first was that everyone is conservative about what he (or she) knows best. The second was that any organisation not explicitly Right-wing sooner or later becomes Left-wing. The law that rings truest of all today, however, is the third, which is that the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it’s controlled by a cabal of its enemies... The history of the Labour Party, for example, makes much more sense if you assume that, in 2015, the party was hijacked not by Marxists, but by undercover Tories in fake beards. The plot required extraordinary dedication and stamina, but in December last year it ended in triumphant success. Equally, the current row over free school meals makes more sense if you assume that many Tory MPs are actually undercover Marxists. By deliberately making the most ridiculous possible objections to extending free school meals, these infiltrators aim to make the Right look as clueless about poverty as the Left always claims. On Sky News the other morning, for instance, a supposed Tory minister going by the name of Nadhim Zahawi claimed that what the poorest children really wanted wasn’t food, it was “activities”... The most self-defeating organisation of our times, however, must be Extinction Rebellion. Its stunts are so counter-productive, they might have been devised by people hellbent on tarnishing the environmentalist cause. Take its latest masterclass in public relations. On Sunday, a gang of Extinction Rebellion activists strode round, uninvited, to Sir David Attenborough’s house – to tell him he was undermining their fight against climate change. In an interview a few weeks earlier, Sir David had politely ventured to suggest that, while he shared Extinction Rebellion’s anxiety about climate change, breaking the law wasn’t necessarily the optimal way to win public support. The group criticised his comments at the time. But now activists had decided to go further, by confronting him in person. Unfortunately for them, however, Sir David wasn’t able to come to the door – because, as his daughter explained to them, he’s 94 years old, and is a little bit concerned about a bug that’s going round. So the activists left Sir David a letter, pompously informing him that he risked “contributing to the erasure of the voices and sacrifices of front-line Earth protectors”. They also left him a delightful gift: a little olive tree, decorated with photographs of murdered environmentalists... "How about we pointlessly harass the best-loved man in the country in the middle of a pandemic?”... It’s not as if the Attenborough incident is some one-off misjudgment. The evidence shows a consistent pattern of foot-in-mouth imbecility. Remember the time last autumn when Extinction Rebellion attempted to halt the London Underground? Seriously – an environmental group, discouraging people from using public transport. Imagine the brainstorming meeting for that one: “Today: wreck the Tube. Tomorrow: smash up a wind farm and set light to a recycling plant.” Then there was the stunt from earlier this year, when they blockaded the printing presses that produce several national newspapers, including this one. Curiously enough, this action did not earn Extinction Rebellion many glowing reviews in the press. It was also roundly condemned in Parliament – although it did at least win the endorsement of the SNP’s Kenny MacAskill. These activists, he told the Commons, weren’t enemies of free speech. They were simply “a group of young people” who “care about the environment”. Fair enough, I suppose. Maybe during next year’s Holyrood elections a group of unionists could block the printing of SNP leaflets. Purely to help the environment, of course. Think of all the trees it would save. Of course, you might argue that Extinction Rebellion activists wouldn’t consider any of their stunts to be own goals, because they have no interest in being popular. They aren’t trying to win over their critics through charm and sweet reason. They’re radicals, who believe that the only way to make the world do their bidding is to cause as much disruption as possible. This may well be their thinking."
Extinction Rebellion’s attack on the City is lazy and misguided - "What the tone-deaf protesters fail to understand is that much of the population has great sympathy with climate change, racial injustice, and other progressive causes. What most people won’t tolerate however, is vandalism, violence or other mindless acts of criminal behaviour being carried out in the name of said causes... There’s never a good time to be punching someone’s windows in but these latest virtue-signalling stunts are all the more bizarre in the current environment. It may not fit well with the narrow, one-sided agenda of the eco-fascists but it’s a fact that the City, and big business more broadly, are already taking great strides to change the way they operate in an attempt to address climate change. So much so that it’s not completely crazy to imagine that someone senior at Barclays might even be prepared to engage in a civilised discussion about the future of the planet with the very people that have been vandalising their premises. They might even be willing to listen to suggestions as to how they could tackle the issue more effectively. After all, they’re used to hearing it from shareholders by now. Anecdotally, chairman say that environmental, social, and governance issues now take up most of their time. And the results are already there for everyone to see, including in the banking industry where HSBC has announced it will have severed all ties with coal producers by 2040 precisely because of pressure from investors. Or how about Unilever? Under green-evangelist boss Alan Jope it has promised zero carbon emissions from its own operations and to halve the emissions from its supply chain by 2030. Even Exxon Mobil, a company that Greenpeace and others accuse of undermining efforts to combat climate change, has bowed to pressure. The oil giant has appointed Jeffrey Ubben, a Wall Street hedge fund tycoon with a green agenda to its board to lead the company’s sustainability efforts."
Andrew Neil shuts down Extinction Rebellion founder in fiery clash - "Andrew Neil has clashed with the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam over the protest groups' position towards China. The veteran broadcaster challenged the activist over the disruptive tactics the climate group has used in the UK over recent years. Mr Neil accused Extinction Rebellion of looking to "disrupt life in Britain" while never mentioning the role of China in polluting the planet with fossil fuels."
If you're not actually primarily concerned about the climate, ignoring non-Western countries is what you'd do - and that is what most environmentalists do
Extinction Rebellion's clueless doom-mongering is finally getting the scrutiny it deserves - "Extinction Rebellion is a doomsday cult, devoid of any association with reality In normal circumstances, when someone tells you that billions of people are about to die you laugh in their face. Not only have Extinction Rebellion been allowed to shut down our streets and waste police resources, they've received an overwhelmingly sympathetic hearing from the luvvie media establishment. Yet could the tide, finally, be turning as the public tires of the relentless disruption? A YouGov poll released earlier this week found over half of the public oppose Extinction Rebellion’s aim to “shut down London”. Only around a third were in support. Most importantly, their dangerous ideas are finally being challenged. Yesterday the BBC’s most talented interviewer Andrew Neil took an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson called Zion Lights to task. Lights said Extinction Rebellion “listen(s) to the experts” but “we think it’s a lot worse”. With characteristic precision, Neil exposed her ignorance and lack of willingness to engage on any solutions. Yet this kind of creative licence about the impacts of climate change is far too common, and often goes unchallenged. Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam has claimed: “we’re facing mass starvation in the next ten years, social collapse, the possible extinction of the human race.” These assertions, which went unchallenged when voiced on the BBC’s HARDTalk, are totally nonsensical and unsupported by scientific evidence. They make children unnecessarily anxious about their future. Even the most extreme, worst-case scenarios pained by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) go nowhere near these claims... This is the work of thousands of the world’s top scientists in the field. Climate activists used to accuse sceptics of ignoring the science. How the tables have turned. Yet Extinction Rebellion activists must paint an absurd scenario to justify their equally absurd goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2025. Extinction Rebellion activists decline to explain how they would achieve this, because it would take a range of extreme policies. It would require the immediate abandonment of non-renewable technologies, prompting higher energy prices and, inevitably, pensioners dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes during winter. It would mean severely limiting or even outright banning overseas family holidays and far fewer flights to transport essential life-saving medicines. It would mean rationing or probably outlawing meat and banning non-electric cars. It would prevent the developing world from industrialising, leaving millions in abject, extreme poverty. Importantly and most inconveniently for Extinction Rebellion, their plans would make us much poorer. Unlike their beliefs, we have evidence to support what being poorer actually means: less ability to adapt to climate changes and extreme weather events in the future. The richer we are, the more capable we are of adapting, which is why deaths from extreme weather events have plummeted by 90 per cent over the last century at a time of rising emissions. What is most revealing and disturbing about the likes of Extinction Rebellion is their explicit willingness to use climate change to justify eco-socialism. Hallam has said that we’re heading for a “catastrophe” if there is not “fundamental change in the structure of the global economy”. It’s perhaps no surprise that old-style socialists like Jeremy Corbyn — who used to complain about Thatcher shutting down coal mines—are happy to jump on the eco-socialist bandwagon. They see it as a neat excuse for seizing control of the economy."
Why are the cops so soft on eco-protesters? - "‘If you’ve got any questions at all, just ask. And if any of you are in any discomfort or need anything just let me know and we’ll try and sort you out in a nice way.’ You might assume that this lovely message was delivered by a particularly attentive cabin-crew member in the lengthy preamble before a flight. Or perhaps it came from a kindly nurse as she started a shift on a new ward. No, this caring little speech was delivered by a police officer on the M25 yesterday. She had been tasked with dealing with a bunch of eco-psychos who had blockaded the motorway, causing huge disruption to thousands of drivers. Supposedly, she was giving them their ‘final warning’, as if they were just a bunch of unruly schoolchildren. The group, made up of supporters of Insulate Britain, which is an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, sat across the motorway. They made countless people late for work. One stalled driver complained that he would lose his job. Another, whose daughter was in labour, was on her way to pick up her grandchild. But the police were unmoved by the plight of these people. Instead, they engaged politely with the protesters, offering to care for their needs and to make them feel comfortable. After seeing that copper give her spiel, I almost expected her to fetch a tray of tea and biscuits, or some cushions. Sure, there are laws that make it difficult for the police to arrest eco-crazies like this. Police often have to send in specialist officers to bring down people who are hiding ‘at height’ on scaffolding, for example. But many of us would rather that the police behaved like the commuters at the Battle of Canning Town in 2019, who took the job of clearing Extinction Rebellion protesters into their own hands. Red tape also dictates that officers must verbally warn protesters that they are facing arrest before they actually arrest them. So to get around this, experienced climate protesters just play extremely loud music or put in ear plugs. ‘Sorry officer, I didn’t hear you.’ But police cannot hide behind the statutes and edicts that make their work difficult. All too often, they are simply too deferential towards disruptors of a green bent. They forget about the people being harmed by these ridiculous stunts. Officers give eco-protesters plenty of time to cause huge disruption, when what’s needed is immediate arrest. Even more embarrassingly, some of the protesters who were eventually arrested yesterday had also been nicked on Monday, when Insulate Britain last blocked the M25. They were released, even though they said they would do the same thing again – which they then did, less than 48 hours later. Maybe it’s not surprising that the police were so generous to those losers on the M25. Last year, a judge reportedly lauded the actions of some Extinction Rebellion protesters at the very moment he was supposed to be sentencing them... when Extinction Rebellion protesters returned to London’s streets last month, the Metropolitan Police issued a statement saying the activists were championing an ‘important cause’. The whole establishment is in on the act, so we can’t be too surprised when the rank-and-file follow suit. As always, it’s ordinary people who suffer."
Why is Extinction Rebellion protesting against gender-critical feminists? - "Following the activities of groups trying to ‘save the planet’ is not an easy task these days. Since the summer of 2018, we have been introduced to Extinction Rebellion (XR), Animal Rebellion, Ocean Rebellion, Money Rebellion, Roads Rebellion, Youth Rebellion (there’s a bit of a theme here), Insulate Britain and the newest kid on the block, Just Stop Oil... Step forward Extinction Rebellion Bristol, which this week found its USP – shutting down meetings of women’s rights activists... Why would XR want to step into this minefield? The group started out with three core demands: to ‘tell the truth’ about what its activists see as a ‘climate emergency’, to ‘act now’ to remedy the situation, and to create citizens’ assemblies to decide how their demands should be implemented. Political movements traditionally find success by appealing to the widest number of people in the broadest manner possible. A generation ago, the anti-Poll Tax campaign flourished precisely because it opposed a tax that was seen as unfair. It tended not to get bogged down in detailed discussions about how to finance local-authority spending. Anti-fascist groups like the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s or Anti-Fascist Action in the 1980s and 1990s succeeded by physically disrupting the activities of fascist organisations, without necessarily developing a detailed programme to defeat such groups politically. For some time now, there have been indications that certain XR groups have wider political ambitions and interests than those three initial demands suggest. XR Tower Hamlets... ‘The government must implement a just transition to an ecologically balanced society, prioritising the needs and voices of the most vulnerable and redressing the past and present global inequalities caused by centuries of colonial, gender and class exploitation, while upholding all species’ rights to life.’
XR Leeds goes further, keeping the three existing demands, but inserting above them a ‘demand zero’:
'We demand a just transition to an ecologically balanced, zero-carbon economy that prioritises the needs of the most vulnerable and redresses the inequalities in our society caused by centuries of colonial, gender and class exploitation.’"
How to know that the moral panic over the environment isn't really motivated by the environment
Topless XR protester announces she's taking break after 'trolling' and 'misogyny' - "Laura Amherst, the Extinction Rebellion activist who hit headlines around the world with her nearly-nude protests, has announced that she is taking a break from social media to focus on what’s really important to her – her family and her activism. In a tearful Instagram video, she said that she had "pushed herself to the limit of what she can do" and was experiencing a lot of trolling and misogynistic comments from other Instagram users, as well as "harsh" penalties from the social media platform itself... She said that the most important thing was to focus on environmental concerns, saying that if there wasn’t a habitable planet for her daughter to live in 10 or 20 years from now then there was "no real point going on"."
Ironic, given that the "trolling" is a response to her trolling
Weird, leftists tell us that if you use social media you have no right to complain about the platform rules
How odd that she doesn't remember that 10-20 years ago we were told that in 10-20 years time the planet wouldn't be habitable
XR is not a protest group, but a vanity project for a liberal middle class that soon won’t exist at all - "The generally tired and narcissistic aspect of this protest, which harkens back to the larger yet equally ineffectual Occupy movement, speaks to XR being more of a kind of performance art – a media spectacle or late-stage ritual to keep a certain cultural subset of the society in a state of placated nostalgia. The activists in this movement do not emanate any sense of genuine rebellion, many of them resembling a gang of JK Rowling enthusiasts protesting during their corporate-cubicle lunch break. They have a desire to feel like effective ‘activists’, but they will ultimately affect nothing, being generally 50 years too late. The older demographic in XT – ageing 90s pseudo-hippies – seem to be enthusiastically reliving a final chance to act superior. By ignoring a changed world in which they are ever-more obsolete, a nostalgic and public ‘giving out’ can make them feel that they are still doing good and ‘fighting the man’. However, the apparent system tolerance for XR is itself a likely indicator that the group is, in fact, working for ‘the man’. Genuine rebels are almost never treated as media darlings. While environmentalism is a crucial issue and very dear to my heart, the game XR is playing – permitted public protest – sidesteps the various wider issues which is making its supporters a redundant identity, a vanishing class: the liberal middle-class. Or maybe they aren’t oblivious? Perhaps even as the shadow of the final curtain looms over them, their only true desire is to perform one last ‘awareness-raising flash mob’ for a pet cause?... Real protest movements in the UK today are not about environmental issues, which along with other genuine concerns have taken a backseat to corporate-backed BLM riots or LGBTQ+ causes, including monument removal and vandalism. There is no meaningful protest of consumerism, or Wall Street, or globalism, or the system of industrial mass-production. Soon we shall not just see the vanishing of middle-class Harry Potterites – there will be no middle-class at all. There will be billionaires, and there will be pod-people (techno-serfs). This strange alliance of the megacorps and high-finance world with social justice street protests is virtually the polar opposite of 1960s-2000s era anti-consumerist environmental activism. It is confusing for anyone who takes a close look at it, until they realize that it is merely system power pushing from both ends. Any activism from the middle class that fails or refuses to see the walls closing in from either side is ultimately performing a futile dance."
Facebook - "Economic policy matters 17 times as much as climate policy for malnutrition WHO research shows climate change makes malnutrition worse. Even entirely getting rid of global warming saves 100,000/yr in 2050 But moving from low to high growth economy saves 1,700,000"
One cope I got from a climate change hystericist was that economics was just like astrology. Of course, upon seeing my recounting of part of the long history of failed predictions of environmental doom, he just doubled down
Study finds cleaner air leads to more Atlantic hurricanes
Damn climate change!
In an Engineering group on Facebook people were very upset about this
Shifts to renewable energy can drive up energy poverty, study finds - "Their findings, published recently in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, support previous claims by researchers who argue that renewable energy consumption may be indirectly driving energy poverty. Energy poverty is when a household has no or inadequate access to energy services such as heating, cooling, lighting, and use of appliances due to a combination of factors: low income, increasing utility rates, and inefficient buildings and appliances... "People who are just making ends meet and can barely afford their energy bills will make a choice between food and their energy," McGee said. "We don't think of energy as a human right when it actually is. The things that consume the most energy in your household -- heating, cooling, refrigeration -- are the things you absolutely need.""
Renewable Energy is Not Cheaper After All - "if wind is as affordable as they claim, removing targeted subsidies and mandates should cause them no distress... Clark closes out her letter by referring to Lazard Investment Bank’s analysis of energy markets, and its preferred metric for measuring the relative costs of energy options, the LCOE (levelized cost of electricity). Of course, she claims that “the lowest-cost energy” just happens to be the sources she wants built – wind and solar. While Lazard’s metric has some uses, it is also widely recognized as a confusing, or incomplete, method of comparing renewable energy, an intermittent energy resource, with more predictable and reliable generation sources. For example, a November 2017 Berkeley Labs study on the “Impacts of Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) on Bulk Power System Assets, Pricing, and Costs,” says that “comparing the LCOE of different technologies that provide varying services is misleading.” For example, you can’t use the same measure to weigh the value of a small natural gas turbine to a large nuclear facility, or renewable energy – a variable resource – to more reliable coal plants. Doing so gives the perception that they are able to provide the same service. The study goes on to explain that the more renewable generation facilities you build, the more it costs the system to make up for their variability, and the less value they provide to electricity markets. To determine the real price of renewable energy, or its ability to replace nuclear or fossil fuels, you must account for the high costs imposed by its variable nature. One example is the cost of many new transmission lines that link distant renewable generation installations to the electrical grid. You also need to include the construction of “fast ramping” natural gas plants, battery storage units or pumped hydroelectric facilities that can come online quickly to supply electricity when variable renewables suddenly cut out, as when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining."
The environmentalists are going to be very upset since the OECD is not the only organisation which points out that more renewable energy means more expensive energy
Where Do Wind Turbines Go To Die? - "when the giant turbines come down, they can leave a lot of waste behind. The steel towers can be recycled, but the fiberglass blades typically end up in landfills."
Diesel Driven: World’s First “Net-Zero” Wind Power/Pumped Hydro System A Dismal Failure - "The climate/RE cult’s latest mantra “net-zero”, apparently means wind and solar connected to batteries or pumped hydro. The notion has it that wind and solar’s hopeless intermittency can be overcome by a few TWh’s worth of giant lithium-ion batteries or, where geography and hydrology permit, pumped hydro systems. The latter model involves using wind and solar to pump water uphill into turkey’s nest dams so that, when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, hydro power will merrily fill the inevitable daily gaps in wind/solar power production and keep the grid up and running. Well, that’s the story, anyway... a large-scale wind and pumped hydro experiment has been playing out on an island in the Atlantic, El Hierro (one of the Canary Islands, controlled by Spain) over the last 7 years. Turns out that, rather than being able to rely exclusively on wind power – backed up with pumped hydro to smooth out the rougher patches – the island remains heavily dependent on ‘dirty’ diesel generators to keep the lights on."
Maine voters reject Hydro-Quebec power transmission line - "Mainers voted on Tuesday to reject a US$1 billion project to bring hydropower from Quebec into New England, after a years-long battle that pitted clean energy advocates against locals seeking to preserve the state’s pristine woodlands. The fight over the so-called New England Clean Energy Connect project reflects the difficulty that developers face nationwide in siting new transmission lines. Many more of these must be built in the coming decades to modernize the nation’s creaking grid systems and connect far-flung renewable energy sources to population centres."
North America needs an energy revolution now more than ever - "Quebec’s proposal to build a $1-billion transmission line to carry additional hydro-electric power to markets in New England was rejected. Ironically, many of the anti-development organizations that opposed the transmission line also opposed the XL oil pipeline from Alberta to southern refineries and others through British Columbia... “In one of the great ironies of modern Canadian life, a country with plentiful oil reserves has imported $488 billion in foreign oil since 1988. This is so, despite the presence of one of the world’s largest oil reserves from Newfoundland to British Columbia (their offshore reserves) to onshore deposits on the Prairies. Quebec has imported over $228 billion in foreign oil since 1988 — far more than any other province.""
Ironically, if the delusion of "renewable" solar and wind energy replacing fossil fuels is ever to become remotely feasible, power transmission over a wide area to mitigate intermittency is needed. Good luck with natural disasters severing power lines though
What If We Had Subsidized Nuclear Power Like Renewables? - "the data is clear: despite nuclear's damaged reputation, clouded by a few high-profile accidents, nuclear power kills fewer people per electricity produced than any other energy source. It is also the most reliable. Nuclear's capacity factor, a measure of how often a power plant is producing energy at full capacity over a certain period of time, is the highest by far – almost double that of coal and more than triple that of solar. And nuclear is clean, producing no carbon emissions. Though its radioactive waste often attracts negative press, coal plants actually create more. Moreover, all of the waste that America's nuclear power plants have collectively produced in a half-century could fit on one football field. This is because nuclear is incredibly efficient. In the U.S., just 55 nuclear power plants produce 20% of the country's electricity! It takes nearly 2,000 natural gas plants to produce 40 percent. What's holding back nuclear power in the U.S. and Europe are regulations, political will, and cost. The latest data suggests that nuclear is now the most expensive form of electricity apart from gas peaking plants used to provide power at times of high demand. Calculating the cost of nuclear energy is complex, but the vast majority of it is wrapped up in initial construction. Operating costs, including uranium fuel, maintenance, decommissioning, and waste disposal, are actually quite low. This suggests that relaxing regulations, investing in nuclear research, and instituting a meager carbon tax could quickly make nuclear power more attractive to stakeholders, easing the significant up-front costs to realize monetary, health, and environmental benefits in the long run... lately, renewable energy has been the main beneficiary of the government's benevolence, receiving more than three times as federal incentives as oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear combined, and 27 times as much as nuclear energy, between 2011 and 2016. These investments have quickly driven down the costs of wind and solar to the point where these sources of energy are now the cheapest in most locations. Imagine if nuclear power had received the governmental largesse of renewables? It would almost certainly be cheaper and safer than it is now, and the world might be in a much better situation in regards to energy stability and climate change. A little over six years ago, a study in PLoS ONE reported that the world could replace fossil fuel electricity with nuclear power in just 25 years simply by building nuclear power plants as fast as Sweden did in the 1960s and 70s, cutting worldwide human carbon emissions by half in the process. The world has predictably dithered. Now we are left in an untenable position: intermittent renewables aren't ready to power the world without a smarter grid or significant energy storage, electricity prices are volatile, demand is rising as more of humanity escapes from poverty, and the climate is rapidly warming"
Weird. Environmentalists claim that fossil fuels receive more subsidies than "renewables"
Led by France, 10 EU countries call on Brussels to label nuclear energy as green source - "A group of ten EU countries, led by France, have asked the European Commission to recognise nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source that should be part of the bloc's decades-long transition towards climate neutrality. Tapping into Europe's ongoing energy crunch, the countries make the case for nuclear energy as a "key affordable, stable and independent energy source" that could protect EU consumers from being "exposed to the volatility of prices"... A report from the Commission's research unit released earlier this year indicates Brussels could eventually side with the pro-nuclear team. The paper says greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear plants are "comparable" to those released by hydropower and wind, an assessment shared by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United States Department of Energy."
Of course, environmentalists make the ludicrous claim that because of storage and mining, nuclear carbon emissions are very high
Nuclear Waste: Ideas vs Reality - "My friend’s insight reflects the actual data of radiation leak scenarios quite well. The risks associated with nuclear waste have been studied thoroughly. However, that data is rarely brought up – even by the fiercely anti-nuclear organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. One might ask oneself why. Why won’t the large activist organisations use the data to highlight what actually could happen with nuclear waste?... the new reactors could run on existing nuclear waste. Phenomenal news! The new process could extract vastly much more energy from the existing waste, leaving only a fraction of the amount of radioactive waste left – which, to top it off, would only be radioactive for a few hundred years. Factoring in what I already knew about the safety of long-term storage, the weight of the emotionally uncomfortable waste-conundrum began to lift from my shoulders. It was clear to me that if we could get rid of nuclear waste, then we definitely should. So, the ultimate solution to nuclear waste was this: we should build new nuclear power plants!... I had considered nuclear waste in a vacuum. I had not thought we’d need to compare nuclear waste to any other type of waste resulting from other energy forms. Why should we? Those wastes were not as dangerous! The convenient idea of a ‘near zero risk’ scenario as an alternative to nuclear power, had been creeping somewhere in the back of my mind. But that zero-risk scenario does not exist. We can only put risks in proper context if we compare them to the risks of avoiding those risks. Our brains are wired to notice big, red, unusual, and alarming signals, while ignoring more mundane, unclear, gradual and constant risks. Air pollution? We breathe all the time and we’re still here. It doesn’t end up on the brain’s ‘red list’ the same way. Wind and solar tech with rare earth minerals, mining waste, future landfills sites stuffed with problematic elements? These wastes are also toxic, but they just don’t ring our bells. Mining of rare earth minerals and the toxic waste left over from that process (which is also radioactive, by the way) is an actual dystopian wasteland -level disaster in Baotou, China, at this very moment, but this does not really get on our radar. Mining operations, in fact, all result in harmful consequences to the environment, and the volumes of materials needed are a major factor in that impact. Nuclear’s material requirements per energy produced, and thus its mining waste, are considerably much lower than most other energy forms. If we talk about how we might safely handle these other types of wastes, our brain does not shut down and say ‘But what if? We just can’t take the risk!’... radiation is not exclusive to nuclear waste... We tend to think that if radioactive waste exists somewhere, its mere existence carries with it an immeasurable risk. But it is actually much harder for radioactive material to cause problems than we would imagine. For the radiation to cause any significant health problems, it needs to reach us in considerable dosage. It would have to get transported, somehow, while remaining in a highly enough concentrated form... our ideas about nuclear waste generally have very little to do with reality... Nuclear power is the only energy form which does collect and take permanent responsibility for all its waste products... even completely natural, near-ground stores of nuclear waste from natural fission reactors in West Africa, freely in contact with groundwater, have passively remained in perfect containment for soon two billion years."
There is a chart from Ecofys showing that nuclear is safer than biomass & solar energy
