Groucho Marx was never more devastatingly accurate than when he observed that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies”. Groucho would have had a field day mocking the perilous nonsense of green politics, where the remedies are often not just wrong but even dangerous.
Not only does all the evidence suggest that green catastrophists are gravely misdiagnosing any possible threat from the mild warming period of the last century, but their favoured solution, green energy, is threatening to make things exponentially worse.
It’s the most powerful greenhouse gas known to humanity, and emissions have risen rapidly in recent years […] leaks of the little-known gas in the UK and the rest of the EU in 2017 were the equivalent of putting an extra 1.3 million cars on the road.
Levels are rising as an unintended consequence of the green energy boom.
The Beeb then does their best to gloss over that fact, by wittering that SF6 is “widely used in the electrical industry”. But the fact remains that renewable energy is placing unprecedented strain on power grids, necessitating the rollout of vast amounts of switchgear using SF6.
“As renewable projects are getting bigger and bigger, we have had to use it within wind turbines specifically,” said Costa Pirgousis, an engineer with Scottish Power Renewables on its new East Anglia wind farm, which doesn’t use SF6 in turbines.
“As we are putting in more and more turbines, we need more and more switchgear and, as a result, more SF6 is being introduced into big turbines off shore.”
This is disingenuous. The wind farm might not use SF6 in its turbines, but it uses it by the tank load in the switchgear used to protect the grid from the stop-and-start surges inherent in wind power.
South Australia’s catastrophic, state-wide blackout is a case in point of how renewables, wind, in particular, can crash whole systems. Although green advocates try to obscure the facts, by blaming collapsed pylons, which did happen, the fact is that the blackout was triggered before the pylons collapsed. The culprit was wind turbines fritzing out on an exceptionally windy day.
Concentrations [of SF6] in the atmosphere are very small right now, just a fraction of the amount of CO2 in the air.
However, the global installed base of SF6 is expected to grow by 75% by 2030.
Because of the demand for renewables in a market artificially distorted by government meddling.
Still, Greens refuse to admit their culpability, trying to shift the blame on to big, bad energy corporations.
“In the end, the electrical industry lobby was too strong and we had to give in to them,” said Dutch Green MEP Bas Eickhout […]
“The electric sector was very strong in arguing that if you want an energy transition, and you have to shift more to electricity, you will need more electric devices. And then you also will need more SF6.
“They used the argument that otherwise the energy transition would be slowed down […]”
Which was correct. The Greens just can’t admit that it’s their precious renewables which are causing soaring usage of this greenhouse gas on steroids.
“There is no real alternative that is proven,” said Prof Manu Haddad from the school of engineering at Cardiff University.
bbc.com/news/science-environment
Greens love to bang on about a supposed “precautionary principle”. This is the idea that you should never, ever do anything, least of all roll out a new technology, unless you’re absolutely, 100% sure it will have no harmful consequences whatsoever.
Unless it’s their sacred eco-crucifixes – which are proving to be very harmful indeed.