As Australia, like most of the Western world, plunges deeper and deeper into an energy crisis, the green-left are plunging deeper and deeper into denial. The people most responsible for the calamitous situation — thousands of people in Britain alone are dying every year thanks to “energy poverty” — are not only steadfastly refusing to take responsibility, they’re militantly refusing to even admit what has gone wrong.
The idiot rich kids of the Teals almost grasped reality when they started demanding that more Australian gas be reserved for domestic use. Isn’t gas a fossil fuel? Why, after shrieking for years that we must abandon fossil fuels immediately, are the green-left suddenly squealing for fossil fuels?
Of course, like all demented dissonants, the Teals won’t admit that “renewables” are a bust. On the contrary, they’re doubling down and screeching for more renewables.
The old adage about insanity, and doing the same thing and expecting different results, comes to mind.
But even that’s not barking mad enough for these drooling loons. “We need to build more batteries!” they howl.
What these hooting howler monkeys never, ever talk about is just how much it would cost — or even if it would be remotely feasible — to build their nutty green utopia.
With that in mind, allow me to dust off some old back-of-the-envelope calculations from a while back.
At current rates of increase, world energy consumption by 2030 — the date demanded by the green-left for a total transition to “renewables” — will be 16,597.6 million tonnes of oil equivalent (MTOE).
Currently, just over 4% of that comes from “renewables”, with another 7% from hydro. But the green-left adamantly oppose new dams, and at recent growth rate, hydro will only account for barely 8% of energy by 2030.
That means we have 88% of that 16,597.6 MTOE to make up with wind and solar. What does that mean, in practical terms?
It means that every day we would have to build:
• 4,212 wind turbines, covering 2,878 square kilometres, or
• 557 square kilometres of solar panels.
I repeat: every day.
All up, that translates to 17,300,000 new wind turbines, covering 11,810,846 square kilometres. Just a bit less than the land area of the United States and India combined.
The equivalent 2,285,970 square kilometres of solar farm is almost modest, covering just Alaska and Texas combined.
Don’t forget the cost. The wind turbines would cost nearly US$60.5 trillion. Solar would cost even more: about US$63.9 trillion.
Oh, and they’d all have to be replaced within a decade or two.
Even after all that, there’s still the sticky problem that the wind doesn’t always blow or the sun always shine.
Sure, you could build more of Tesla’s giant South-Australian style batteries. Tesla’s battery supplies 129 megawatt-hours. By 2030, world consumption will be 193 trillion megawatt-hours. Even generously allowing that only half of that will need to be backed up at any one time, 750 million Tesla batteries. In the next ten years.
We would need to build more than 200, 000 Tesla batteries every day, for the next ten years.
This is quite obviously insanely impossible. So, why do the Climate Cultists keep pushing this delusional barrel? Partly because they are just that: cultists. You can bet your arse that not one single green-left loon has actually seen the above maths, let alone worked the sums for themselves.
But not everyone pushing the green-left barrow are ignorant and/or insane.
Some are just plain, venally, evilly, greedy.
Last year, The Economist constructed a portfolio of companies that would benefit from the world’s energy transition and estimated that these companies had a total market value of $US3.7 trillion. Tracking these companies’ economic performance, it found that since the start of 2020, they had performed twice as well as the S&P 500, with the “greenest 25% of firms (seeing) their share prices rise by 110%”. But the problem is, according to The Economist, that 30 per cent of these companies do not yet turn a profit.
The Australian
The “Net Zero” push is literally a scam. Like all scams, the greedy scum at the top will trouser fortunes, while the dupes who ran clucking after them are left with the arse out of their pants.
And the rest of us are left without power or able to afford spiralling petrol costs.