The Canadian political insider Hill Times, while excited that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the green transition will cost “no less than $3-trillion” a year, then conceded that the whole thing somehow might not be happening. Between ratification of the original Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and last year, consumption of hydrocarbon energy rose 56% even as the share of global energy from fossil fuels nudged down from 85.7% to 81.5%. And while some may say it’s hardly surprising that if governments all declare that things shall turn green they go red instead, it’s also because of a fundamental fact you can’t propagandize away: thus far green energy, for all its massive subsidies, has not taken off except rhetorically because it just can’t get the job done and we need energy to live.

Canary Media recently emailed us that “Numbers don’t lie” to hype a story about how “85% of new electricity built in 2023 came from renewables” and that:

“Last year, renewables accounted for nearly 86 percent of new electricity capacity worldwide, according to new data from the International Renewable Energy Agency.”

But the real lesson here is that it’s money ill-spent. Sure, if you dump enough public cash in, some power comes out. But not nearly enough, and at far too high a cost.

As Bjorn Lomborg put it bluntly in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline “The ‘Green Energy Transition’ That Wasn’t” and the deck “Governments push heavily subsidized renewables, but fossil-fuel use continues to increase even faster”, the true picture is not pretty:

“Despite extravagant hype, the green-energy transition from fossil fuels isn’t happening. Achieving a meaningful shift with current policies is too costly. We need to change policy direction entirely. Globally, we spent almost $2 trillion in 2023 to try to force an energy transition. Over the past decade, solar and wind energy use has soared to record levels. But that hasn’t reduced fossil-fuel use, which increased even more over the same period. Studies show that when countries add more renewable energy, it does little to replace coal, gas or oil. It simply adds to energy consumption.”

And at what cost? Even to modern governments, trillions of dollars is real money, though activists may fling them about in a trance-like state of bliss.

In this regard, in a weird way, there’s something of value in the recognition that the flood of public money into “alternatives” hasn’t really moved the needle. In a post in July the “Manhattan Contrarian” drew parallels between the Biden Administration’s mad rush into these currently inadequate technologies and Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” in 1958 which, he conceded, modern historical amnesia meant most younger people would need to be spoon-fed the details. (Including, speaking of spoons, that the result of this economically illiterate zealotry was immediate and catastrophic state-imposed famine.)

In targeting a much-touted “Community-Driven Solutions to Cut Climate Pollution Across America” he warned that:

“This new initiative is just one small piece of the vast economic waste of the falsely-named Inflation Reduction Act, with its multi-trillion dollars of subsidies for uneconomic projects.”

Which is exactly right and crucially pertinent. The rate of return on these things is way below that of, say, fracking. It’s why they need subsidies, and a specific example of the general point that anything that needs a subsidy doesn’t deserve one.

For Canada in particular, the Toronto Sun editorialized (h/t Gina Pappano):

“In 2022, Canada’s energy sector – dominated by fossil fuels – accounted for 11.8% of national GDP, or $309 billion, employed 290,300 Canadians directly and 405,800 indirectly for a total of 696,100 jobs.”

Kill that golden goose and you won’t have much luck boiling the bones and feathers for subsidies.

And another thing. The “Contrarian” claims credit, and we’re happy to give it, “for being the first person to demand a demonstration project to show how a zero emissions electrical grid is supposed to work, before trying to build such a thing for our entire population of three hundred million as involuntary guinea pigs.”

It really is amazing, or ought to be unless you are, say, a Maoist, to plunge into such a venture without first making sure it works. Nobody does industrial design that way… at least nobody risking their own money. And so it’s worth quoting his piece at some length because it underlines the arrogant recklessness of these climate-social engineers.

He notes that Congresswoman Harriet Hageman of Wyoming has actually publicly adopted his proposal:

“Ms. Hageman went public with her demand at a town hall held this past Tuesday, August 6, in Jackson, Wyoming. She proposed that the ultra-liberal town of Boulder, Colorado, step up as the potential guinea pig. Wyoming-based news source WyoFile had the story on August 7, with the headline ‘Hageman proposes a Boulder, Colorado, fossil-fuel-free experiment.’ Excerpt: ‘[Hageman] proposed a pilot project that would strip Boulder, Colorado, a progressive enclave, of its fossil fuel infrastructure – all to be replaced with windmills and solar panels on the city’s open space. ‘The pilot project is, you take out all their gas stations,’ she said to a crowd of about 70 people in the Teton County Library. ‘We take away all their internal combustion engines – cars. We take away all of their highways and streets, because that’s all oil-and-gas-produced.’...  ‘They’ve been a no-growth city for decades,’ Hageman said, ‘so they have a lot of open space around them. We fill out open space with windmills and solar panels, and we’ll see if we can actually run a city of 100,000 people [with] no fossil fuels whatsoever.’”

Now here’s the precious bit. The local crowd evidently got the point, and applauded. But then the reporter asked a Boulder City Councilman, Mark Wallach, for comment and he snarled:

“One of the things that makes people so leery of politics and politicians is when people make ridiculous suggestions like that. Nobody on the Boulder Council suggested we can do without all the fossil fuels at this point. We make efforts to do better – to recognize that climate change is real and we do things we can do to combat it.”

Bosh. They really are proposing it for everyone by 2050, which is now only 26 years away, and the idea isn’t to do nothing for 25 of them then cram desperately like some disorganized undergraduate in 2049. It’s to do what they’re now doing, but way, way faster and more expensively, and hope it somehow works. Somewhere else. Not in my constituents’ back yard. (As the Contrarian also notes, a genuine effort on El Hierro in the Canary Islands promised “100% renewable energy” but in 2023 got 35% from wind and solar, and 65% from a “backup” diesel generator.)

Actually Canary Media also hypes a plan by Xcel Energy in Colorado to switch homes to “clean heating – and fast” after an initial proposal to “spend heavily on hydrogen blending, biomethane, and certified natural gas” was spiked by “clean energy advocates”. They even admit that it’s an “important test case”. And indeed it is, meaning if it fails, someone somewhere should draw the obvious lesson.