China is one of the world’s largest food producers. Recently an acute power shortage there reduced food output. This sent markets into panic. Severe global food shortages and increased prices could follow.What caused China’s power shortage? Over-reliance on renewable energy. It led to insufficient and unreliable electricity generation. That harmed domestic food production and global food security.Many people condemn coal. They espouse “green” policies. But these lead to power blackouts. And … [Read more...]
Paris Panic: Governments Fail to Meet Their Climate Commitments, and Some Are Getting Farther Away
Political leaders and media personalities are fond of saying climate change poses an existential threat to humans and the planet. The weight of scientific evidence doesn’t support this oft-made claim, and national governments around the globe seem to acknowledge this by their actions.Despite what is reported almost daily in the mainstream media, data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no … [Read more...]
Toward a Renewable Chaos: Carbon Imperialism and Disadvantaged Smaller Nations
Net Zero, Climate Action, Build Back Better, and the Great Reset are some of the names for policies aimed at expediting the transition of the global energy sector from fossil fuel to renewable technology. The goal? Saving the planet from climate apocalypse.But there is a huge hurdle to make this transition a reality. Most of the world’s primary energy comes from coal, oil, and gas.Fossil fuels dominate the global energy sector, and there is a reason for that: they are reliable, abundant, and … [Read more...]
Renewable Failure and Renewable Threats to Wildlife Become a Global Norm
As the Paris climate agreement pushes for more and more renewable installments globally, reports of failure of installed renewables, especially wind and solar, are also becoming increasingly common.Nobody wishes for wind and solar to fail. After all, billions of dollars have been invested in them. I, like many others, desire to see renewables strengthen the existing energy infrastructure globally.Sadly, and inevitably, though, the drawbacks and limitations of wind and solar keep resurfacing, no … [Read more...]
What Do “Green Jobs” Produce?
Cornwall Alliance advisory board member H. Sterling Burnett published a good piece in the Washington Times recently that rebuts claims about "Green jobs" in two ways. Burnett points out that in response to President Donald Trump's saying one reason to withdraw from the Paris climate accord was that staying in would drive energy prices higher, causing the loss of 6.5 million industrial jobs by 2040, supporters of wind and solar energy claim that job gains in wind and solar energy production … [Read more...]
Can We Get There from Here?
A tourist asks an Irish old-timer, "How do I get to Dublin?" The old-timer responds, "Well, you can't get there from here." That's what came to my mind when I read Michael Kelly's brief paper "A Challenge for Renewable Energies," at the Global Warming Policy Forum. The gist: "In recent years the energy sector has accounted for about 9 per cent of global GDP, with the implication that the return on energy investment [ROEI] in the world economy is, approximately and as an average, about … [Read more...]
Solar: The Little Engine that Couldn’t
There are lots of dirty little secrets (though they're increasingly widely known!) about wind and solar power, the two darlings of "Green energy" lovers: high cost for low output, intermittency, production far below nameplate capacity, heavy dependence on subsidies, tendency for installations to lose efficient productive capacity long before they pay for themselves, chopped or incinerated birds, enormous waste of land, eyesores. But here's one about solar power I … [Read more...]
The Gory Facts about Solar vs. Coal Energy Employment
On Fox News Sunday with Mike Wallace June 4, former Vice President Al Gore said solar energy has created jobs 17 times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole. He also pointed out that solar now employs more people than coal. He saw those both as reasons to celebrate. The truth is the opposite. Why? Because solar jobs are a tragic waste of human labor. Gore's right that solar employs more than coal now---roughly twice as many. At the end of 2016, solar employed about 374,000, while … [Read more...]
Solar Impulse: Poster Child for the Impracticality of Solar Power
Solar energy has some legitimate uses in isolated cases, such as providing electricity where there is no other source available, and when you need it so badly you are willing to pay a premium, say, for use on your sailboat. But the inherent physics limitation to solar energy is that it is so diffuse (so little solar energy falls on each square meter of ground), the efficiency of conversion to electricity is so low (typically 15% or so), and it is so expensive to convert it to electricity with … [Read more...]
Did You Want Electricity with Your Fried Eagle?
Let's see now. The controversial Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, financed with $1.5 billion in federal loans, using sunlight reflected from 170,000 mirrors to heat boilers atop 450-foot-high towers, received on average $200 per megawatt-hour during summer months and $135 for the rest of the year but is likely to go bust. Meanwhile, PG&E pays $57 per megawatt-hour for power generated by more conventional solar plants, and $35 per megawatt-hour for power generated by natural gas … [Read more...]
