Time magazine recently announced Zelenksy as their “Person of the Year”. Fair enough: they’ve previously honoured Hitler, Stalin, and Bill Clinton (twice!). But another magazine, Politico, has nominated his opposite, Vladimir Putin, as No. 1 in the Green Class of 2023. Putin beat out Finnish PM Mette Frederikson for the top spot. Greta Thunberg has found yet another class she’s not even in.
So, how did big, bad Vlad become the planet’s leading climate saviour?
By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not — clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security.
In other words, Donald Trump was right, and the smirking Germans were wrong, when he pointed out that they were dangerously dependent on Russian gas.
In a classic case of trying to put a ludicrously positive spin on disaster, the EU is trying to claim that they’re doing just great without all that nasty Russian gas that used to keep their lights on and their factories running.
“Renewables give us the freedom to choose an energy source that is clean, cheap, reliable, and ours,” EU Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans said less than two weeks after Putin’s tanks rolled in.
Politico
Which is a bit like saying that the earthquake is a golden opportunity to build a new house.
Except that they’re replacing a modern, warm, comfortable house with a rickety pile of wattle-and-daub.
Because, spin aside, how’s this wonderful freedom of renewable energy working out in reality.
So far, the results are, to say the least, unencouraging. Euroland has been thrust into an epic energy crisis with electricity rationing, power outages, $10 a gallon gas and citizens encouraged by governments to use candles for lights and burning wood for heating purposes.
Citizens are facing a stark choice between freezing or starving. At the same time, they’re being locked into their immediate community for the first time since serfdom was abolished. Business groups are warning that Europe is facing permanent de-industrialisation.
“It’s a return to the Dark Ages in Europe — and the climate change lobby is loving the return to chaos and mayhem.”
This might be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. The government in France has now warned of acute energy shortages this winter with drastic steps to conserve. As one publication put it, Paris, the City of Lights, may have to turn off the lights in the weeks and months ahead if it’s a cold winter.
Officials in Paris have decreed that local authorities must prepare power outage plans “that would reduce consumption of electricity by up to 38%.” Wait, there’s more: “The French government said it was working alongside the Ministry of Education to develop plans to close schools in the mornings if the area is to be impacted by rolling blackouts.”
And France still has nuclear power — unlike Germany.
Germany’s energy shortage is so severe that one of the fastest-growing energy sectors is coal. That’s because the Germans have declared war on natural gas, so because of the self-inflicted energy crisis, they are forced to use an energy source that emits more greenhouse gases. Wood is also becoming a major source of heating homes. The Dark Ages are back.
Then there is the calamity that is unfolding in Switzerland. This is a country that is anything but a heavy-handed socialist state, but now thanks to the “energy state of emergency,” which is the norm in Europe, the Swiss government has announced it will ban the use of electric cars for “nonessential” journeys. At the same time, it is encouraging people to take the train to shop for their groceries, but it has admitted that train service may also be disrupted.
That’s not all. The government is also drawing up plans for dealing with blackouts that include reducing store hours by up to two hours per day, heating systems in nightclubs to be turned off and other buildings to be heated to no more than 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Online streaming services and game consoles could be banned. Christmas lights might be turned off, and all sports stadiums and leisure facilities could be closed.
Fox Bangor
To paraphrase an emancipated American slave, Europe has been set free to freeze.
All of this brings us to a stark reality. Europe has gone all-in on wind and solar power, and the experiment has failed miserably. These fringe energy sources don’t work and aren’t scalable for industrial economies. And the more it doesn’t work, the more it requires police state interventions with fascistic controls over the economy and personal behaviour.
In the meantime, Politico is lying harder than an old edition of Pravda insisting that the USSR is a worker’s paradise, while those wicked Americans are rolling in the misery of the proletariat.
Although to be fair to the ghosts of Pravda, Joe Biden is working on it…