Month: December 2023

Money wasted on solar and other ‘renewable’ energies could have been used to solve the housing crisis

By Michael Blair, Substack, Dec. 11, 2023

At the current state of the technology, about 80% of energy used to generate electricity through solar panels is lost to heat. The other 20% is captured in the form of electricity and converted to work. We can estimate how much quite readily.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says 179 Terawatt hours of electricity were generated from solar last year. Presumably that is ~20% of the energy reaching the solar panels that created that power.… Read more

Meeting the Paris climate promises would create benefits worth $4.5-trillion (in 2023 dollars), at an annual cost of $27-trillion. Each dollar spent will avoid 17 cents worth of climate damage.

By Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 30, 2023

World leaders have gathered in Dubai for another climate conference, which will no doubt yield heady promises along the lines of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to keep the global temperature’s rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. But they’d be wiser not to. New research shows how extravagant climate promises are far more wasteful than useful.… Read more

Solar and windmill plants are typically far from consumers, meaning we will need an additional 50 million miles of transmission lines, at a cost of trillions of dollars.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 20, 2023

The International Energy Agency said this week that 49.7 million miles of transmission lines—enough to wrap around the planet 2,000 times—will have to be built or replaced by 2040 to achieve the climate lobby’s net-zero emissions goal. This amounts to a plan for everyone to buy more metals from coal-fired plants in China.

Grid investment, the IEA report argues, is needed to carry additional renewable energy “as the world deploys more electric vehicles, installs more electric heating and cooling systems, and scales up hydrogen production using electrolysis.”… Read more

COP28 head says there is no realistic possibility of phasing out fossil fuels by 2050, unless we want to go back to living in caves

By Joe Oliver, National Post, Dec. 12, 2023

COP28, the 28th “Conference of the Parties,” the annual summit of climate-change catastrophists, spent much of its time debating the schedule for a fossil fuel phaseout. Its mission is to limit global warming to 1.5 C by 2050 compared to the start of the industrial age — which coincided with the end of the Little Ice Age, so temperature increases since then have been both natural and man-made.… Read more

Ending fossil fuel use will not keep temperatures below 1.5°C but could ruin our societies—it’s time politicians told the public the truth

By Tom Harris, National Post, Dec. 8, 2023

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre should take a page out of Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber’s playbook. Al Jaber is the president of COP28, currently underway in Dubai. Last month he laid bare important realities few conservative politicians dare bring up: though ending fossil-fuel use may well not prevent average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, any quick phaseout of coal, oil and natural gas certainly would ruin our societies.… Read more

Pursuing Net Zero is all cost for almost no benefit

By Bjorn Lom­borg, National Post, Dec. 1, 2023

The spectacle of another annual climate conference has just got underway in the United Arab Emirates. Like Kabuki theatre, performative set pieces lead from one to the other: politicians and celebrities arrive by private jets; speakers predict imminent doom; hectoring NGOS cast blame; political negotiations become fraught and inevitably go overtime; and finally: the signing of a new agreement that participants hope and pretend will make a difference.

This circus has repeated since the 1990s. Despite 27 previous conferences with iterations of ominous speeches and bold promises, global emissions have inexorably increased, punctuated just once, by the economic shutdown of COVID-19.… Read more