By Jo Nova
Chris Wright, the United States Secretary of Energy, marvels that people can spend so much to achieve so little:
“Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.” — 13 min
“The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year.”
It’s so nice to hear grownups talking:
Some extracts of his interview:
The tale of a remarkable transition from energy importer to energy exporter:
“Look at what’s happened in the United States. We’ve tripled liquids production in less than two decades. We are by far the world’s largest producer. We’ve more than doubled natural gas production, and it’s still growing fast.
This is phenomenal. Lower costs, lower prices — it has transformed the world. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the U.S. shale revolution and what all of you have done.
Total energy use in the US is still 72% oil and gas:
“One thing you never hear about: total primary energy consumption in the United States — over 72% now comes from just two energy sources: oil and natural gas. Record-high market share, in addition to record volumes. That doesn’t sound like a dying industry I’ve been hearing about for the last 15 years.
But when you roll over to the electricity sector, it’s a very different story.
In oil and gas production we’ve seen declining capital intensity, increasing efficiencies, and surging production. In electricity? Surging investment — gigantic amounts of money flowing in — and what’s the net result?
Almost no growth in electricity production, but significant growth in electricity prices.
The world isn’t going to copy the UK and Germany (or Australia):
“If you make electricity more expensive, and people don’t know where policy is heading, energy-intensive industry leaves your country. The United Kingdom and Germany are experts at that.
Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.
That is not a winning model. That is not what the world is going to duplicate.
We spend $10 trillion dollars to convert about 6% of global energy to solar and wind power:
Our industry is about physics, numbers, math — but when it comes to climate change, we check rationality at the door.
It’s only about decarbonizing and claiming we’re in the middle of an energy transition. I think we’re actually in the midst of the greatest malinvestment in human history.
Globally, about $10 trillion has been invested nominally in fighting climate change. What did we get for $10 trillion?
About 6% of global energy comes from these sources after $10 trillion of investment — and everywhere penetration is high, prices have gone up and industry has left.
If you close a factory in the Midlands and move it to Asia where it runs on coal, then ship the goods on diesel ships — that’s not fighting climate change. That’s de-industrializing your nation.
Oil, gas, and coal run the world. Full stop.
At the time of the Yom Kippur War, 85% of global energy came from hydrocarbons. That crisis launched the energy transition movement over 50 years ago.
Today? 85% hydrocarbons.
Let’s engage with reality. Oil, gas, and coal run the world. Full stop.
You can’t make a wind turbine, a solar panel, or a nuclear power plant without massive amounts of oil, gas, and coal. That’s how the world works.
The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year…
Electricity should be getting cheaper:
For a century, electricity got cheaper and more reliable. We reversed that. Now it’s more expensive and less reliable.
If current trends continue, by 2030 blackouts could be 100 times more common.
Half the states have renewable portfolio standards. Those states have over 50% higher electricity prices than states without them.
If you do crazy things, you get bad results. See Germany. See the UK. See California.
Energy costs should be rising lower than inflation:
States with renewable portfolio standards have seen electricity prices increase at twice the rate of inflation. States that don’t have RPSs — unfortunately they also had increasing nominal electricity prices — but below the rate of inflation.
We should be seeing trends in electricity prices way below inflation.
The biggest source of electricity in the United States by far is natural gas. What has the price of natural gas done over the last 10 or 20 years? It’s plummeted. What has availability done? It’s surged.
More demand for electricity makes electricity cheaper
When people worry that AI demand will push up costs, Chris Wright points out that the US states that have grown their electricity output have also reduced their price of electricity. (Presumably this is because the states that depend on industry and manufacturing build serious generators instead of dancing around the renewable maypole.)
If you plot states that have grown their output of electricity — meaning re-industrialization or new demand — the faster the growth in demand for electricity, the lower the rise in price.
North Dakota is the champion: over 30% growth in electricity output, and electricity prices have actually declined. All the other states that have had flat or below-inflation price increases have had growing production of electricity.
And the champions on the other end — California, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland — that have had skyrocketing electricity prices: all of them produce less electricity today than they did five years ago.
There is something prosaic about ministerial titles in the USA. Chris Wright, is the Secretary of Energy and knows exactly what his primary task is, unlike the Australian Minister for Coal, Oil, Gas, Corals, Koalas and Weather Control.
h/t Scott
In every case, the enemy pushing up electricity prices is fake man made CO2 driven rapid Global Warming. Now after 38 years of rapid warming, melting glaciers, rising sea levels and climate panic, there is no sign of abnormal weather or rising seas or vanishing polar bears. It is now China is waging economic war on the world, producing 40% of all CO2 when only 18% of the world population. Climate Change is making them rich and undermining their enemies. Real war was the Wuhan Flu, but it was only a field test of their potential, supported fully by the UN.
Then you add self flagellating countries like the UK, Germany and Australia, driven into the ground by blatantly communist Green parties who among other achievements destroyed rare earth mining around the world. And now allowing the massive import of millions of utterly incompatible, immiscible people who call assimilation racism and quickly destroy the societies which provide free and even priority social services. The Somali populations of Minnesota and Ohio are a total disgrace, 90% on instant welfare. And suitcases stuffed with stolen millions in cash being openly sent home to fund communist Islamic causes. With the full knowledge of loyal friends of Beijing such as Governor Tim Walz, a man who publicly prefers Chinese communist government and nearly made VP of the United States. Why?
The War on the West is well underway. And wiping out manufacturing is the first move. Manufacturing is the conversion of materials to products like cars and tanks and ships and toasters using cheap energy. Then agriculture. Ably supported by people who hate open democracy and America, like billionaire George Soros and son.
This war is the only reason Climate Change exists. Like the Wuhan Flu, it is wholeheartedly supported by the blatantly China controlled communist United Nations. And unelected governments around the world including the EU.
But the resurgence of America under Donald Trump is really upsetting the world order and the useful idiots like stooges Kamala Harris and officially retarded Tim Walz and Mitch McConnell and Keir Starmer and Anthony Albanese, aka Albo Akbar (stolen from yesterday’s comments. Thanks). As for Chinese communist Penny So Wong, it’s hard to improve on the name.
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You said it! In a nutshell. Great summary!
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Was the first move not the sly infiltration of the education system – not only at universities, but at teacher-training colleges, so indoctrinating teachers – even back in the late 60s and early 70s [if no earlier] – with the socialist ethos?
Much followed from that – a lot consequential …
In the UK, not a few ‘Conservative’ MPs express views that are not conservative – nor Conservative as I understand it.
Some may be simply mis-informed, I suppose, but some seem to be actual leftists.
Ms. Badenoch has a lot of work ahead – to succeed, she needs to purge the Tories of the Brezhnevites – then win an election; and then deal with the Blob.
Maybe she is making careful notes of D.J. Trump’s actions – I certainly hope so.
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The “common” sense of Mr Wright will certainly offend the perpetually offended of the Left and their associated useful idiots, the Greens.
But Mr Wright is right. The great Industrial Revolution was based on Coal and Oil and those economies that have tried to move away from fossil fuels have been de-industrialised and seen electricity prices rise. To use the old cliche, this is not Rocket Science, it is the lived reality here in Australia, yet we still have our Minister for Energy and Climate Change saying Wind and Solar are the cheapest form of electricity generation. Perhaps he forgets/omits to mention that it is the most expensive to supply/connect to the grid.
Bowen certainly checked his rationality at some door he passed through in his life. May well have been his local ALP Branch door.
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“The largest energy reserves in the world are in the hands of the adversaries of the U.S.”
U.S. to U.N.
I guess that the “adversaries” are those who think that the ratio of 13 barrels: 3 barrels is not working for them.
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In a stunning departure from world practice, every member of the Trump cabinet (Executive Board?)
is competent and effective. The Democrats are pulling out all the stops to prevent further appointments in the executive
and judiciary lest all of government begin to operate in a way that will expose Blue State administrations as
the foolish and expensive farces they are.
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Some of those “blue” state governments are well past “foolish”.
They are tap-dancing with TREASON.
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It is also staggering that many of the most competent people have defected from the Democrats or were previously opponents of Trump. Like Elon Musk, J.D.Vance, R.F.Kennedy and many more. As Kennedy said, he did not leave the Democrat party, it left him. A bit like the Liberal party in Australia chasing the Green and Muslim vote and had a hard time deciding to oppose the YES vote. About the only party which even pretends to represent Australia is Pauline Hanson’s party, which leaves Albo Akbar in charge.
And Labor is no longer the party of workers, but the party of Communists like Albo and Daniel Andrews, deceitful absolute dictators who are many times past their level of competence. Communism is a way for mediocre people to rise to power they could never earn. What was very odd that so many Jewish people were extremely left and are only now seeing they are backing the new Stalins, the Hitlers. Beware anyone else calling someone a Nazi. These are almost universally the Nazis like the black shirted AntiFA. And in Australia and America, I think the Jewish vote is changing. The gloves are off for Albo. Like the theatres, they think they can live without Jewish influence and cash, but that’s another story.
But I continually warn here of the massive hidden CO2 taxes in Australia, the 2001 RET but the 2023 Safeguard Mechanism, a 35% tax on CO2, currently at 10%. It means armageddon for all manufacturing, transport, agriculture. Secret deals are being done today with the big smelters of Bluescope and Gupta and Alco to keep the jobs with taxpayer subsidies while their cash goes to China for windmills and gifts to third world dictatorships. And no one says a thing or the deals are off. That’s criminal deceit, extortion, theft by our elected government on an incredible scale. No one knows anything.
Albanese and friends are spending massive amounts off budget and claiming the budget is balanced. The lies from Australian governments are amazing.
And at no stage in all of this is anyone measuring how much all this pain is reducing Carbon Dioxide, because that’s physically impossible. It’s the vapour pressure of a dissolved gas. But the fact that people talk about ’emissions and not CO2 is a dead giveaway that they could not care less about changing actual CO2. Lowering growth of total atmospheric CO2 is not the objective, just a deceitful fantasy. Crippling Australia is. And the idea that Australia can change world CO2 on its own is beyond stupidity to wilful deceit while most scientists fear for their jobs and say nothing.
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I am still shocked that Prime Minister John Howard when I asked him publicly about Climate Change said he was ‘agnostic’. If he did not believe it, why did his government steal tens of billions of dollars from the public with the incredible RET scheme. It was so successful in stealing money outside taxation that it was copied in the UK.
Governments have no right to steal money, order anyone to pay someone else for nothing, worthless carbon credits. It’s against every democratic precedent since Magna Carta. And every government since Howard has stolen countless billions for ‘Climate Change’ without any accountability. And the press say nothing. For a cause in which no one including John Howard really believes. And for which no science argument has ever been made in Parliament. We are just told to obey the unelected politicians in the United Nations, the greatest con job in world history.
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And the whole hoax of CO2 driven Climate Change is not mentioned by Chris Wright. He sticks to tangibles. What is a disgrace is that America which had 30,000 qualified scientists personally sign the Oregon Petition last century calling man made CO2 driven Global Warming science nonsense is just ignored. A survey of US scientists would show that most scientists do not believe a word of it. But the only survey was cooked by John Cook to argue that 97% of scientists agreed and people think that is real?
So the greatest malinvestment in human history is based on something which is nonsense, not science and has been nonsense for 38 years. And the president of the US calls it a Chinese hoax. But it still continues? Why?
Christ Wright simply points out that whatever the objectives were at the start of this transformation in energy, nothing has changed and nothing has been achieved. But how do you stop the nonsense?
Perhaps the US government could have a national science debate on CO2 driven Climate Change and publish the result? This whole thing has never been proven by anyone. And no one in government cares.
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“So the greatest malinvestment in human history is based on something which is nonsense, not science and has been nonsense for 38 years. And the president of the US calls it a Chinese hoax. But it still continues? Why?”
Two reasons:
It is a nifty way of funding socialism.
It’s a belief system. (science has a become another belief system)
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See also: Robert Heinlein.
“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him”.
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TdeF writes that “most scientists fear for their jobs and say nothing.”
I am a scientist who has said a great deal since I started on global warming’s poor science in 1992. The problem is that few people listened or acted as I outlined for a better society.
When you examine it more deeply, a body of people exerting pressure such as sacking to shut up dissent is acting illegally. A blatant example is dismissal of medical doctors for promoting or prescribing Ivermectin for ailments including COVID-19. Another is refusing work functions for people who did not accept COVID-19 “vaccine” injections.
Why have we seen no prosecutions of the bandits who created/enforced these illegal job constraints? Can a lawyer explain if redress has been prevented?
There is an obvious danger. If these bandits go unpunished, future gates will be opened for more me-too copycats with malicious bent. Do we really want a society in which more nasty people can threaten in this way?
Geoff S
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Geoff I understand. Most of the scientists who say so much are well retired. The entire CO2 Coalition. My favorite commentators like Lord Monkton, Ian Plimer. Teams like Prof Carl Otto Weiss. White haired warriors all.
I meant most scientists fear for their jobs implies they currently have jobs. And young families, mortgages, worries. The entire CSIRO for example, 6,000 people and not a sceptic? The BOM? How many meteorologists work independently of the government?
Not everyone agrees with their management. And in the YES vote, the entire union of scientists in Australia, 37,000 were represented by the head of the Union, a former journalist from the AGE who had led a campaign for the aboriginal rights and the case for YES. Not the individual members.
On the non science group, the late Keith Windschuttle was amazing, recanting his younger Marxist opinions and wrote great books like The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. But after he was financially independent and could not lose employment.
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Yes, if your job, and your pension, are at risk, it is difficult – practically, putting food on the table – to go against ‘Management’ – who may not be ‘Believers’, but who also have needs [and desires] that certainly can be met by agreeing with the funders [the Minister, The Soros, the lefty ‘chariddees’ that seem to pay good money for very little etc.].
It is important to realise that ‘many’ of them are human, and – perhaps – caught up the whole nonsense.
Yes, they ‘should’ seek to break free.
Easier said than done, sometimes …
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The extreme left learned everything from their management of the human-caused global warming con. It learned fear was the ideal spur to inducing belief. Fear induced to the point that those with minimal familiarity with science, statistical maths and the scientific method had no defence. Keep feeding the fear despite patently obvious failures of forecasting is all that is needed to reinforce the false narrative. People still believe in fairies when they lack the tools to do otherwise. Especially after our education system has rolled them up.
Most people I know express real belief in this climate tale. It’s reinforced every day, morning and night by the BOM’s psychologically driven use of coloured temperature charts. Australia keeps burning routinely every summer. ‘It must be true’! The contrarian stories are totally censored out.
There is now too much professional reputational and pecuniary investment by governments, big business, the legal profession and Courts and official science sites now making reversal a form of mass personal, electoral and business suicide. Note Trump’s action of bowing out, calling it for what it is – a scam – is treated by most western democracies in silence.
They are all aware of the entire mess they have brought their nations to by plain ignorance,stupidity and no doubt the greedy international idea of taking control of the western nations. We’ve seen many ex politicians flock to the UN to be part of the big deal. This can never be explained away nor forgiven. Hence there is no desire to open up a debate on the climate with Trump.
The risks from truthful exposure would be too destructive to these individuals. They bowed to Soros!
However the methodology is perfected and we saw it used extensively in the COVID era. We shall see it again IMO as the move to split our communities into disunity continues. Albanese has tried it but been caught out because he didn’t inject the fear campaign against the jews before the real truth was exposed by the massacre. Especially by an Islamic person seeking to save everyone – primarily celebrating jews – from being shot. The quietly, quietly policy on the attacks on the synagogues and the antisemitic marches, throwing in ‘islamaphobia’ whenever criticism threatened, was publicly and humiliatingly exposed.
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Thanks again to Jo for providing us the link to Wrights’ knowledge and understanding about energy and the data.
But B O Bowen is clueless and can’t even add up very simple sums and ditto the Greens, Teals etc and unfortunately most of the more stupid Aussie voters.
Unfortunately, our kids today can have years of “education” and still BELIEVE B O Bowen’s lunacy about toxic , unreliable, super expensive W & S.
How do we get the average Aussie voter to spend a few minutes online and check the data for themselves? To me this seems an impossible task.
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Nev, it is the impossible task. The left having control for at least 50 years over the education, (brainwashing) mas/mis/mal-information communications we’re shot. It will take the mother of all catastrophes before it reverses, and still then there will remain millions of “True Believers”.
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If Australia hadn’t have mal-invested billions in wind and solar (and desal plants) and caused the shut down of industry with expensive energy and other Government mismanagement, just imagine where’d we be.
We’d still be a rich industrial country plus a tiny fraction of that money could have been used to drought-proof and flood-proof Australia as well as irrigate vast areas.
Instead, the Left and their slave army of useful idiots sacrificed Australia to their beloved Gaia and China.
Without an effective Opposition Party which we don’t have, Australia is probably not fixable now, and with such massive debt not for a very long time, if ever, even if we got a decent leader.
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One Nation just polled level with the LNP half of the Uniparty (23%) – expect all sorts of dirty political tricks from the Uniparty to try and discredit ON and Hanson. I expect disaffected LNP voters, and possibly disaffected LNP MPs (a la Barnaby), to abandon the LNP and joint the groundswell of support for ON. Interesting times ahead…..
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Next they will be calling Pauline a populist. Strange but I always believed the popular vote won elections; that is the politician that best represented the wishes of the constituents won. That is not always the case in our preferential voting system. I have watched many an election night coverage and thought my guy was well in front but to be defeated by the ALP and Greens adding their votes together. It demonstrates just how stupid the Liberal Party is that it ignores preference swaps with One Nation. They are frightened by Labor claims of being far right yet Labor is far left and depends on the communists (Greens) to form government.
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Australia’s de-industrialisation is really getting into gear. The solar and wind farms are no longer economic. They were built to supply industrial demand but those industries were getting by when they could buy electricity at $40/WMh. I know because I was buying electricity at those prices for heavy industry. In Tasmania, there were long term arrangements for $20/MWh that were still current in the 1990s..
The wholesale price of coal fired generation bottomed in 2003 at $23/MWh for lignite fired and $26/MWh for coal fired. Last year the average price for lignite was $92/MWh and coal $110/MWh.
We now have less coal plant that is being run inefficiently and essentially replaced by rooftops that do not work at night and drop off in winter. They are an option for domestic and low intensity commercial operations to avoid the high grid prices but there is no way surplus rooftop power is going to supply smelters with economic electricity.
We have stupid grid managers guaranteeing profit to attract more grid scale wind and solar at tax payer expense – all secret deals. The grid is gradually being socialised at very high cost to guarantee Australia’s economic demise.
AND all because Australian taxpayers support an incompetent rabble that claim to be its centre of industrial research. Mythical climate science for a mythical belief that CO2 is the only factor that controls the weather.
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Communism on blatant display – socialise the costs while privatising the profits for the chosen (self-appointed) elites. The plebs can eat cake, surely……….
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I, for one am astounded at the figures you state Rick. What a cluster#### that their political fools installed by left voters have caused.
I firmly believe we as a country are looking straight down the barrel of common blackouts well before 2030 if this rabble is allowed to continue. The lies that BO Bowen and albosleaze vomit up drive division thru the population.
The world developed positively from horse and cart to motorised vehicles because motor vehicles provided an advantage, but ruinables provide backward momentum.
No wonder industry, when forced to put up with spiralling energy costs and the demands of militant unions has deserted Australia.
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The only way out for Australia is One Nation. The two popular options are radical left or radical left sympathisers. They support the UN global terrorist agenda without question.
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The latest poling has One Nation ahead of the coalition and closing in on Labor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3igZRscHpc
Get with the wave for change and sanity – Vote One Nation.
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One of the comments on the video I linked to points out that there is really only two options now:
One Nation or Islamic Nation
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Wow thanks Jo. What a hard hitting factual domestic & global energy industry synopsis from Chris Wright! Can’t help but compare this intelligence & energy industry experience with our Australian energy minister….groan
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The Australian Government has encouraged or even forced superannuation (retirement) funds to “invest” in wind and solar in a big way. Trillions of dollars.
The biggest mal-investment in Australian history and a destroyer of national wealth.
What happens when wind and solar inevitably collapses no matter what the Government does to prop up such failing “investments”?
Australians are deluding themselves.
We are already living on borrowed money. National Debt now well over $2.2 trillion and the Government keeps spending without limit with no restraint and no Opposition Party to stop them.
Plus we keep importing unskilled, anti-Western people who will never be net wealth producers, only destroyers.
It absolutely will not end well.
http://australiandebtclock.com.au/
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Speaking about uncovering massive tax payer-funded, government disinformation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxZ4GOF1ag
And, it is going to get a LOT worse as we trudge reluctantly towards the next Feral election. (Assuming such an event is actually on the schedule; See the recent shenanigans in the Untidy Kingdom).
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Excellent video. Highly recommended.
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I wonder what happens when everyone signs up for this “free” lunchtime electricity and there’s a mad scramble for everyone to get their batteries charged for the rest of the day, all at the same time. And what happens on cloudy days? You’d actually have to have battery charge for at least a few days if not more, all charged within a few hours.
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It’s a bit like the increasing forms of information. Misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. When you put a “mal” in front of any word it means it has malicious intent. So malinvestment is malicious adverse investment for nefarious means. Which means the people organizing that malinvestment are evil.
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We should never forget that Energy Security guarantees our National Security.
And toxic, unreliable W & S only generates for W = 2.9 months and S = 1.8 months of every year and has to be replaced every 15 to 20 years.
Anyway why would any sane govt want to destroy thousands of klms of our pristine wilderness areas over and over again and forever?
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Can you imagine the amount of oil that China burnt to demonstrate its military might in the recent air and sea exercise off Taiwan. No wonder they are concerned about USA controlling Venezuelan oil production.
Can you imagine what would happen to the plebs in Europe if their governments keep feeding the Ukranian war effort against Russia. Norway is the only European country that produces any oil in quantity above domestic needs.
Pete Hegseth had a go at reporters wanting to make a big deal of the amount of oil that went into Maduro’s capture. Hegseth pointed out that they do not ask question about the amount of oil needed to police the Atlantic Ocean Mediterranean or Indian Ocean.
There are not many military vehicles running on solar panels. Maybe a few in space.
A non-nuclear war will only last as long as there is fuel derived from oil.
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… and in addition to not working particularly well, the wind and solar industry are dominated by Chinese equipment/software that are a serious threat to any grid they are a part of. Not only because of intermittency, but because of potential backdoors built into them so the Chinese have access to that grid, and can shut it down or overload it at will.
I suspect that is the real reason China has bet so heavily on dominating the renewables manufacturing industry. Making money and getting the west to cripple their own grids was an added benefit, but gaining the ability to send their adversaries back to the stone age any time they want to was the main reason. And no nation has made itself more vulnerable to such an attack than Australia. All that rooftop solar getting shut down simultaneously
would have you guys scrambling to buy candles and coal stoves.
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” the ability to send their adversaries back to the stone age ”
Well, I was thinking the 17th Century …
The UK would need to learn, quick smart, how to build [wood, canvas, manila rope] ships; the three field rotation for agriculture [the solar panels complicate … a bit!]; muskets and bayonets [they’ll stop the Muscovy hordes, won’t they!]; and perhaps a little native steel making [oh, yes, coal, and iron ore, mining. Again].
And small beer, as our water won’t be palatable … oh, yes, and dunnies. Cess pits …
But SUr StUrMUr, U-turn King of U-rope, is on the case.
If you’re getting cash from the Government, you still won’t need to work.
The rest of us will [I hope] not need to feed those folk …
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I hpoe some adviser is reading this to black out bowen,i dont think he comprehends any printed or written word.
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Solar is far and away the cheapest source of energy. We can’t keep burning hydrocarbons because the resultant CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
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True, and there would be no life on Earth without it. But it is not very useful for producing electrical energy because it only works when the sun shines at ground level and there is not much of that in Europe right now or ay winter. I doubt anyone would survive a winter in Germany if the country only relied on solar panels.
I hope this gives you some clue why your comment is stupid. If you do not get it, then look for any solar panels producing electricity in this video taken at Munich:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gaaZNQH1gY
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Rooftop solar might well be the “cheapest source of energy”, but that is because its transmission costs are minimal.
Industrial scale solar (and wind, we don’t see many rooftop wind generators) are expensive because while the sun and wind sources might be free, they require huge land areas, which are well away from large users, and thus require long transmission lines. The cost of those will be reflected in network charges, which are gradually becoming ever larger shares of electricity accounts.
And that puts aside as cost free the massive destruction of farmland and bushland (much of which is the habitat of endangered species).
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Show me the ACTUAL energy equations for solar and “wind”.
The “investment” is astronomical.
See also: the ACTUAL cost of decommissioning them after ten years.
Tried to recycle the giant blades from a “wind-power” tower lately? “Discrete burial” seems to be the “preferred” solution. And the stuff inside the Chinese glass sandwich of a solar panel? Are you feeling lucky?? And how much of the planet is ‘dug up” for the interesting materials in them?
There is an old bit of Science Fiction wisdom, (Robert Heinlein, I think), that has its own mnemonic:
Of course, there is the nuclear option. Thorium reactors? “Micro” reactors like the Canadian “CANDU” model
Nuclear is ruthlessly demonized by the usual suspects. (Excludes Chinese facilities and those of their “friends). Note, Oz is NOT on the nuclear “friends” list; funny, that”. China can strip-mine our resources, politicians and churnalists with impunity, so, what is the REAL game? Are we the “lifeboat for when the ecological vultures come home to roost in the “Central Kingdom”?
“tanstaafl”
There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”
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2 comments by Simon and both untrue.
Firstly, solar might be cheaper (in smaller cases) e.g. outback phone points but joining it up for people elsewhere to use costs money.
Secondly, we can’t keep burning hydrocarbons? Why not? About 86% of human emissions are from those countries who aren’t going to reduce them.
Why not produce some evidence that extra CO2 causes warming. e.g. why was the Late Ordovician ice age when the CO2 level was around 1500 p.p.m.? Or that the 400-430,000 years ago or the one about 130,000 years ago had at least parts of the Greenland kilometre ice melting away when the CO2 was below 300 p.p.m.?
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The most costly energy is the energy you don’t have when you need it. It only provides energy when the sun is shining and, even during those limited hours, that is variable due to weather conditions.
What is the cost of solar when you include making it part of a reliable electrical source. Such as adding in the storage, or building a the fossil fuel or nuclear generators that can respond to demand.
Let’s be real when we talk about the cheapest source of energy. The discussion of energy cost is a whole of network discussion, including reliable on demand supply. There is no way the cost of two systems is cheaper than one.
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… and utterly useless for pretty much everything other than electrification, which is only about 20%-25% of total energy expenditure. For the other 75%-80%, it’s as useful as teats on a bull.
edit: I’d also add that nuclear would be cheaper than solar if it were regulated like solar. The only reason nuclear is expensive is because the regulatory environment makes it that way. The anti-nuclear craze of the 1960s/70s nearly killed off the best technology for reducing CO2 emissions.
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PS, further to my earlier comment, new research has identified that some 73% of tracked “global warming” has resulted from increasing population in urban and suburban centres, and in rural population centres, causing greater urban heat island effects to be measured.
Adjust for that and CO2 has been a very weak contributor.
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[A link to said research would be good. Thanks. – Raquel]
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ALL real climate change can be sheeted to the Sun and Earth’s relationship to it. The only enduring impact of increased CO2 that impacts the climate is productivity of the biosphere.
Climate change and even weather can be reasonably predicted by the annual changes in solar intensity across the seasons.
I predicted above trend snowfall in the NH this winter and that is now on track. I also predicted the slow start because wet precipitation would precede the dry type at low altitudes prone to snow.
Europe is gripped by weather chaos as snow-hit France sees 1,000km traffic jams and people start skiing in Paris while hundreds of flights are cancelled in Holland amid Arctic storm
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15437937/Brit-tourists-face-weather-chaos-Europe-flights-cancelled-snow-Paris-traffic-jams-Arctic-storm-Costa-del-Sol-floods.html
Anchorage Alaska has set two consecutive days of snowfall records this month.
A winter storm brought back-to-back records to Anchorage on Monday and Tuesday as the steady accumulation of powdery snow stacked up to new maximums for each date.
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/anchorage/2026/01/06/anchorage-snowfall-sets-daily-record-as-winter-storm-continues/
Juneau set a new record for the month of December.
So the climate clowns who claimed children would not know what snow is were dreadfully WRONG.
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Solar is far and away the cheapest source of energy.
Perhaps true depending on WHERE the cost is measured. And what the alternatives cost in the same location.
Which is why perhaps residential roof top solar is so attractive. There are no distribution costs (well between your panels and your meter box) to speak of and most of the cost of grid supplied power is distribution costs not generation cost.
Conclusion: Your statement is mis-information due to significant omissions of required information.
That the sun is shining may be a true statement. Just not HERE.
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Cheapest intermittent energy that delivers more than is needed when not needed and zero or too little when it is needed
And based on wholesale pricing the bids to supply daily always pay all suppliers the highest bid amount to assist renewables profitability but constant base load generators are interrupted when renewables can supply resulting in ever increasing retail price for electricity, plus service to property hidden charges, and power station generators effectively penalised as they are pushed out.
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“Solar is far and away the cheapest source of energy.”
Only if one ignores actual system costs. If your claim were correct, AU ought to have some of the lowest electricity costs in the world.
The actual cost of solar electricity, inclusive of all associated costs , is some 1,548 USD / MWh for Germany, 418 for Texas USA , as compared to AUD 30 for lignite coal cost / MWh in AU. Or, in today’s values, some 20 USD/MWh.
So tell us all, Simon, in what way is Solar the cheapest source of energy on any scale, at any place, at any time, by any measure.
I’ll wait for your valid references with bated breath.
See LFSCOE, Idel, https://iaee2021online.org/download/contribution/fullpaper/1145/1145_fullpaper_20210326_222336.pdf
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Simon has to be a bot. No human could be so dense.
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“No human can so dense”
In Australia I estimate at least 32% to be so (plus preferences).
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I entered a full comment detailing how off-grid rooftop solar + battery is estimated at 23% more expensive than grid for urban households, the point being that this is a relatively uncontaminated comparison (duck curve effect, etc). The comment hit a technical snag and disappeared. Grrr. I’m not going to key it all again, so you will have to make do with this one.
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Rumor has it that rural grid connections (even with distribution lines on property) in WA are well into 5 figure numbers.
And even with spreading the cost over a subdivision it would add substantially to the lot costs.
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in sunny Queensland, in 2010, a ten Km “grid commection for a farm was quoted at 175K.
For somewhat less than that, the primary producer in question installed a 25Kw system with “steerable” panels, a serious bank of the proper batteries, and a heavy-duty pure sinewave inverter. Hello, bog-standard white-goods and lighting
They also kept some of the old 32V system as “backup” AND a portable 3-phase generator, the primary task of which is to power a monster Lincoln welder.
“Power to the People”: Indeed.
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Tres simplistic Simon. Your usual selective recognition of issues.
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Now tell everyone about night time solar.
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Bumped from late yesterday
FWIW
“IN ANY CIVILIZED SOCIETY THE PRICE OF ENERGY IS THE DRIVER OF AFFORDABILITY: If affordability really matters, then let’s look at electricity.”
“If affordability really matters, then let’s look at electricity”
Concludes
“But with electricity, they actually can change things. They can alter the sources of power they use in their state and drop the costs of electricity for everyone, including the very poor, who pay a higher percentage of their income toward electricity than the wealthy.
They won’t, though.”
https://tomknighton.substack.com/p/if-affordability-really-matters-then
https://instapundit.com/768174/#disqus_thread
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Malinvestment a perfect term for what has been going on
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Just imagine that we only discovered Wind and Solar energy today and the selling points would be…….
Wind doesn’t generate for about 76% of every year and Solar doesn’t generate for 85% of every year.
Batteries would work for a few hours until they go flat.
Therefore, you’d need proper BASE-LOAD energy back up like Gas to support W & S for W =76% of every year and S =85% of every year. Repeat every year.
Then you’d have to replace the toxic W & S every 15 to 20 years and bury the entire TOXIC mess in the ground and repeat again and again until 2100.
Of course you’d also have to destroy thousands of Klms of wilderness areas as well.
The cost would be horrendous and many blackouts would have to be endured every year.
Wonderful selling points I must say( SARC), but here we are in the 21st century and I guess we’ll just have to suffer the consequences?
Certainly, China and Russia etc will be very pleased.
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Germans who went from wanting the perfect race, to now wanting the perfect weather. When will they learn?
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Raquel
Ask and ye shall receive
Our Urban Heat Island Paper Has Been Published (Roy Spencer, 15 May)
It took the better part of two years to satisfy the reviewers, but finally our paper Urban Heat Island Effects in U.S. Summer Surface Temperature Data, 1895-2023 has been published in the AMS Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.
The bottom line was that 65% of the U.S. linear warming trend between 1895 and 2023 was due to increasing population density at the suburban and urban stations; 8% of the warming was due to urbanization at rural stations. Most of that UHI effect warming occurred before 1970.
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Raquel
More details, from Roy Spence’s blog.
Home/Blog
Latest v6.1 Global Temp. Anomaly (December ’25: +0.30°C)
Our Urban Heat Island Paper Has Been Published
May 15th, 2025 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
It took the better part of two years to satisfy the reviewers, but finally our paper Urban Heat Island Effects in U.S. Summer Surface Temperature Data, 1895�2023 has been published in the AMS Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.
To quickly summarize, we used the average temperature differences between nearby GHCN stations and related those to population density (PD) differences between stations. Why population density? Well, PD datasets are global, and one of the PD datasets goes back to the early 1800s, so we can compute how the UHI effect has changed over time. The effect of PD on UHI temperature is strongly nonlinear, so we had to account for that, too. (The strongest rate of warming occurs when population just starts to increase beyond wilderness conditions, and it mostly stabilizes at very high population densities; This has been known since Oke’s original 1973 study).
We then created a dataset of UHI warming versus time at the gridpoint level by calibrating population density increases in terms of temperature increase.
The bottom line was that 65% of the U.S. linear warming trend between 1895 and 2023 was due to increasing population density at the suburban and urban stations; 8% of the warming was due to urbanization at rural stations. Most of that UHI effect warming occurred before 1970.
But this does not necessarily translate into NOAA’s official temperature record being corrupted at these levels. Read on…
What Does This Mean for Urbanization Effects in the Official U.S. Temperature Record?
That’s a good question, and I don’t have a good answer.
One of the reviewers, who seemed to know a lot about the homogenization technique used by NOAA, said the homogenized data could not be used for our study because the UHI-trends are mostly removed from those data. (Homogenization looks at year-to-year [time domain] temperature changes at neighboring stations, not the spatial temperature differences [space domain] like we do). So, we were forced to use the raw (not homogenized) U.S. summertime GHCN daily average ([Tmax+Tmin]/2) data for the study. One of the surprising things that reviewer claimed was that homogenization warms the past at currently urbanized stations to make their less-urbanized early history just as warm as today.
So, I emphasize: In our study, it was the raw (unadjusted) data which had a substantial UHI warming influence. This isn’t surprising.
But that reviewer of the paper said most of the spurious UHI warming effect has been removed by the homogenization process, which constitutes the official temperature record as reported by NOAA. I am not convinced of this, and at least one recent paper claims that homogenization does not actually correct the urban trends to look like rural trends, but instead it does “urban blending” of the data. As a result, which trends are “preferred” by that statistical procedure are based upon a sort of “statistical voting” process (my terminology here, which might not be accurate).
So, it remains to be seen just how much spurious UHI effect there is in the official, homogenized land-based temperature trends. The jury is still out on that.
Of course, if sufficient rural stations can be found to do land-based temperature monitoring, I still like Anthony Watts’ approach of simply not using suburban and urban sites for long-term trends. Nevertheless, most people live in urbanized areas, so it’s still important to quantify just how much of those “record hot” temperatures we hear about in cities are simply due to urbanization effects. I think our approach gets us a step closer to answering that question.
Is Population Density the Best Way to Do This?
We used PD data because there are now global datasets, and at least one of them extends centuries into the past. But, since we use population density in our study, we cannot account for additional UHI effects due to increased prosperity even when population has stabilized.
For example, even if population density no longer increases over time in some urban areas, there have likely been increases in air conditioning use, with more stores and more parking lots, as wealth has increased since, say, the 1970s. We have started using a Landsat-based dataset of “impervious surfaces” to try to get at part of this issue, but those data only go back to the mid-1970s. But it will be a start.
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Another new study has found that sea Levels were much higher around East Antarctica about 8 thousand years ago and SLs are at the lowest point today.
Thirty meters higher than today would be the highest I’ve read about from any of the early Holocene Sea Level studies.
https://notrickszone.com/2025/12/19/new-study-8000-years-ago-relative-sea-level-was-30-meters-higher-than-today-across-east-antarctica/
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Relative sea-level, not (just) global. Isostatic rebound continues, though I don’t think the penguins will need oxygen masks any time soon.
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The AI bubble is pushing too many limits that can’t be pushed without breaking, and those depending on the continued growth of that bubble need to read this article by Jay Valentine, from the Fractal Computing Substack: The Black Swan Event About To Hit A.I.
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Sounds lot like the monologue from the Landman TV series. I guess because its just reality.
I wonder where mankind might be if we had spent trillions and those all the associated human endeavour on things useful and productive.
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DRILL BABY DRILL — THEN DRILL MORE BABY MORE!!!
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Miliband Net Zero to cost UK £4.5Trillion (plus the rest!)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15452411/The-staggering-cost-Ed-Milibands-Net-Zero-drive-finally-revealed.html
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Further Miliband cost shocks. Climate Change Committee sums don’t add up.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15457839/figures-Ed-Milibands-Net-Zero-dream-BILLIONS.html
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