Anyone who tells you that the world is going to go “Net Zero” any time soon is either an ignoramus or a liar. Doubly, trebly so, if they try and tell you that it will be cheap and easy.
Anyone who’s looked at the power bill or filled their car in the last year or so can easily see the fact of the cost and ease of “Net Zero”.
Anyone who doubts that fossil fuels are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and who thinks that ‘renewables’ are going to sweep the energy market, needs to pay more attention.
Global energy demand rose one per cent last year and record renewables growth did nothing to shift the dominance of fossil fuels, which still accounted for 82 per cent of supply, the industry’s Statistical Review of World Energy report said on Monday.
The fallacy of claims that renewables are poised to displace fossil fuels lies in a fundamental failure to understand – or a Pollyanna dedication to wishful thinking – two very important things.
First: even a 500 per cent increase in sweet stuff-all still remains sweet stuff-all.
The stubborn lead of oil, gas and coal products in covering most energy demand cemented itself in 2022 despite the largest ever increase in renewables capacity at a combined 266 gigawatts, with solar leading wind power growth, the report said.
Second: ‘installed capacity’ is an almost-meaningless figure. That’s because renewables are inescapably intermittent. Solar, at best, only works for half the time; even less in cloudy conditions. Wind only works when there’s actually wind. So-called ‘wind droughts’ can last for days or longer. So a wind farm with a theoretical ‘capacity’ of N gigawatts is never going to actually output that much – and quite often, nothing at all.
As for the utopian “Net Zero”:
“Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again,” said the president of the UK-based global industry body Energy Institute, Juliet Davenport.
“We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement.”
Reuters
Which is also mostly meaningless. The Paris Agreement allows the world’s biggest emitter, China, to go right on increasing its emissions. So, while New Zealand cripples its industry and agriculture in order to reduce its already-miniscule emissions by just another poofteenth, China is going to go right on belching the stuff out.
They must think the West is mad. Sadly, our entire, climate-deranged, media-political elite class seem determined to prove them right.
