There’s an important tool every consumer of news needs to keep handy in their bullshit detection kit: “If you never knew things were this bad, they probably aren’t”. Any time you hear an alarming and startling claim (“The Amazon is burning!”), it’s almost certainly a half-lie (at best) conjured up via misleading statistics.
The direct corollary of this is that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.
Case in point: The Guardian’s breathless reporting that “Renewable electricity overtakes fossil fuels in UK for first time”.
Renewable energy sources provided more electricity to UK homes and businesses than fossil fuels for the first time over the last quarter, according to new research.
Sounds like good news. Except…true to form, it’s too good to be true.
It is the first time that electricity from British windfarms, solar panels and renewable biomass plants has surpassed fossil fuels since the UK’s first power plant fired up in 1882.
theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/14/renewable-electricity-overtakes-fossil-fuels-in-uk-for-first-time
(Emphasis added)
The report is not only shockingly cherry-picked but it’s also deeply deceptive.
Note that it only refers to electricity generation. Electricity generation only accounts for a small part of the total energy consumption of the UK (for instance, just 30% of natural gas consumed is used to generate electricity). Of Britain’s total energy consumption, renewables and nuclear combined still only account for just 17%. So the bulk of Britain’s energy use is still fossil-fueled.
But that minority of energy consumption used to generate electricity is enormously important to ordinary people – and it’s here that the growth of renewables has come at a shocking cost. Especially to the poor.
Electricity prices have nearly tripled. One in five British rented households is in “energy poverty”. It’s estimated that energy poverty caused 5500 deaths in Britain last winter. This is from their own electricity regulator.
Britain is actually seeing very little result for the ostensible reason for all this misery: carbon dioxide emissions.
Note the Guardian’s renewables list of “windfarms, solar panels and renewable biomass”. “Biomass” is just a fancy euphemism for “burning wood”. They’re actually reverting to one of the oldest, most inefficient and dirty methods of producing energy, and calling it “green”.
Governments should stop wasting billions of euros in subsidising new biomass power plants and the conversion of existing power plants because it is unsustainable, the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) has said.
‘Burning wood does not produce very much energy. That means the net amount of CO2 which is released is greater than when burning coal or gas,’ EASAC researcher professor Louise Vet told the AD on Thursday.
Biomass is seen as sustainable because burned trees are replaced by new trees but, said Vet, it takes years or even decades before the same amount of CO2 is absorbed by new trees. ‘It’s a fantasy to think that burning biomass in one go in these vast quantities is sustainable’, Vet said.
Why is anyone buying the blatant lie that burning wood is “green”? Money. Lots of that sweet, sweet taxpayers’ money.
In the Netherlands no fewer than 628 biomass installations are being planned with a combined subsidy package of €11.4bn.
dutchnews.nl/news/2019/10/biomass-not-sustainable-subsidies-must-stop-say-european-scientists/
The same green Chicken Littles who worked themselves into a frenzy about the recent, totally normal dry season fires in the Amazon, are happily hacking down forests in America and Canada. Then they’re shipping them to Britain and Germany, where they’re euphemistically dubbed “biomass” and fed to the fires to generate electricity.
There’s some “green” logic for you.