Is there anything the Krazy Klimate Kult don’t make worse? Wind turbines – or “eco-crucifixes” as James Delingpole so eloquently calls them – drive up energy prices, destabilise power grids and mince wildlife by the millions. Climate politics enriches the already mega-wealthy at the expense of ordinary taxpayers and empowers the authoritarians at the cost of democracy. “Biofuels” have taken over formerly food-producing farmlands and seen some of the world’s poorest people violently driven off their lands by green-shirted imperialists. “Biomass” is a fancy euphemism for burning wood chopped down from boreal forests.
Then there’s “bioenergy”. Aww, doesn’t that sound all clean, green and hippy-huggy?
Billions more people could have difficulty accessing water if the world opts for a massive expansion in growing energy crops to fight climate change, research has found.
All this is being done with the blessing of Climate Alarmism Central.
The idea of growing crops and trees to absorb CO2 and capturing the carbon released when they are burned for energy is a central plank to most of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios for the negative emissions approaches needed to avoid the catastrophic impacts of more than 1.5°C of global warming.
Rule of thumb: if the IPCC approves, be very wary indeed.
But the technology, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), could prove a cure worse than the disease, at least when it comes to water stress.
Fabian Stenzel at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and his colleagues project that the water needed to irrigate enough energy crops to stay under the 1.5°C limit would leave 4.58 billion people experiencing high water stress by 2100 – up from 2.28 billion today. That is 300 million more people than a scenario in which BECCS isn’t used at scale and warming spirals to a devastating 3°C.
So, the IPCC’s “cure” is worse than even its most ridiculously alarmist “warming scenario”. Quelle surprise.
The analysis found high water stress, which is when the ratio of water demand to supply is more than 40 per cent, would expand to previously unstressed parts of the world due to the need for new BECCS crop plantations. South America and southern Africa would both be hit hard.
The upper-end projection of 4.58 billion affected people assumes a total of 6 million square kilometres of crops grown for BECCS, limited use of sustainable water and a global population reaching 9 billion by 2100.
Previous studies have warned that BECCS’s potential to mop up emissions may be limited because the enormous land it requires would affect food production and biodiversity.
New Scientist
Which is another massive problem with “bioenergy”: most of the crops proposed – grasses, mostly – have no food value. Just as “biofuels” have led to food crops like corn being used to power the smugmobiles of wealthy Californians rather than feeding poor people in the developing world, “bioenergy” would see food-growing land turned over to inedible grasses.
But, hey, if a few hundred million unimportant poor people starve or dehydrate to death, it’s all a win for Gaia. Think of the planet, selfish peasants.
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