Canary Media warns that, according to polls, people are worried about rising utility bills. Then they add “The findings arrive as the Trump administration’s continued attacks on clean energy – and its support for coal and other fossil fuels – threaten to raise utility bills even higher, according to energy experts.” Experts being a term here meaning advocates. Meanwhile the evidence says the opposite. Bjorn Lomborg points out that “Data shows a strong correlation between more solar and wind and much higher energy prices…In a country with little or no solar and wind, the average electricity cost is ~11¢ per kWh. For every 10% of solar and wind, the cost increases by more than 4¢”. And of course anyone who doubts it can easily find out by betting on alternatives. Or rather any government can… betting their constituents’ money and futures.
As Lomborg writes, “Ask families in Germany and the UK what happens when more and more supposedly ‘cheap’ solar and wind power is added to the national power mix, and they can tell you by looking at their utility bills: It gets far more expensive.” So how much more evidence do we really need? And how much more suffering?
It’s not just that climate alarmists have spent so long insisting that “alternatives” are cheaper as well as cleaner, and to some extent that they’re cheaper because they’re cleaner, that it would be embarrassing to admit oops, heh heh, more expensive actually. It’s that they have to be, or a great deal of their reasoning on climate generally is wrong. But at some point if your worldview isn’t handling incoming data effectively, it bursts.
In Ontario, Parker Gallant’s tireless peering through the veil of energy price obscurity reveals that wind and solar are hideously expensive, even if citizens are having trouble seeing the source of the problem and the “conservative” government doesn’t care. But when they do, it will.
We have been saying for some years now that when the rubber hits the road, that burning smell is often climate clichés incinerated by the friction of the real world. And thus more and more governments that embraced Net Zero and its various policy implications when it was all just drawing-board stuff and prototypes are now recoiling at the results, from economic to geopolitical. As the Telegraph recently noted, “New Zealand abandons Jacinda Ardern’s net zero push”.
The hook was that it:
“has abandoned its pursuit of net zero by revoking a ban on drilling for oil and gas. The country’s government confirmed the shift in its latest budget this week, which unveiled plans to invest NZ$200m (£90m) in new offshore gas fields. The reversal marks an end to a policy announced by Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister, in 2018. She claimed at the time that ‘the world has moved on from fossil fuels’.”
Which is a comment worth replaying in your head because it’s actually quite a curious thing for her to have said. It wasn’t true statistically, and presumably she knew it or at any rate had staff in her own office and that of her ministers of energy or climate who could have looked it up. But it was somehow true because it was an aspiration.
Conceptually all the people she knew agreed that soon we wouldn’t use or need them, and it was good enough for her. Until her successors tried actually doing it instead of just preening about it. And revealingly, it was the Kiwi finance minister who took this measure. And even (they really are incorrigible) dangled massive subsidies before multinationals instead of just going with market forces.
Incidentally in Australia the state’s desperate lunge for cash from anywhere, quiiiiick, threatens to put a dent in the fantasy world of green startups. Which is hard to explain if they’re such a good deal.
Meanwhile the New Zealand resource minister seemed to cling to the tattered remnants of the dream, saying:
“We are focused on growing the New Zealand economy, creating jobs and increasing prosperity and resilience. Natural gas will continue to be critical in delivering secure and affordable energy for New Zealanders for at least the next 20 years.”
So see we will get to Net Zero waaaay out there in promiseland. Just not here in reality. And why not? Well, the Telegraph added:
“The decision to reverse the ban followed three years of rising energy prices that left 110,000 households unable to warm their homes, according to Consumer NZ, a non-profit advocate.”
Gosh. Someone tell Bjorn Lomborg. Oh, wait. He already knows.
