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The Project’s Fake News on German Energy

The BFD.

As I’ve written several times before, climate alarmists show an alarming tendency to be absolutely convinced about things which are not only completely false but easily shown to be so. Media climate alarmists more than anyone.

Not only have the legacy media almost completely surrendered to hysterical group-think but they’ve completely abandoned the most basic function of journalism: the rigorous pursuit of the facts. Instead, the legacy media are wall-to-wall “feelpinions”.

Perhaps the worst, at least in the antipodes, is that endlessly infuriating excrudescence of bien pensant leftist banality, The Project, and its perpetually irritating poster-boy, Waleed Aly.

There is stiff competition, especially from the public broadcasters, to provide the most woke and deceptive take on these issues. But no television program is more relentlessly woke, driven by feelpinions and committed to fake news than Channel 10’s The Project.

[…]Last week host Waleed Aly filed a report from Germany, portraying Europe’s largest economy as a renewable energy and climate action nirvana, contrasting it to Australia’s climate inaction dystopia, or some such.

As is his standard, Aly got nearly everything wrong.

Let’s start with this claim Germany is “about to” shut down brown-coal mining — in fact its aim is to close it down by 2038. On that basis Aly is “about to” turn 60 years old[…]

While Germany has stopped mining black coal, it still imports the stuff and burns it. A Deutsche Bank report on German energy imports notes that coal imports in 2018 were 39 per cent higher than 2000 levels.

In fact, no matter what its “aims”, there should be little confidence that Germany actually will close down either mining or burning coal in the near future. In fact, its coal use has increased since 2008.

The BFD. Germany’s coal use has been rising since 2009.
Which brings us to other energy imports; oil remains Germany’s largest, but it is challenged now by natural gas which is increasingly being used for home heating and electricity generation. The country’s electricity supplies are also supplemented by imported nuclear energy.

Even Germany’s “renewables” are doing little to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions. One of its key renewables is “biomass”: a fancy euphemism for burning wood. Which is even dirtier and far more inefficient than coal.

Germany’s Energy Mix: Dirty “biofuels” account one-third of its “renewables”. The BFD.

Germany hasn’t even been able to meet its vaunted “climate targets”.

Germany[…]according to a McKinsey study of its energy transition, won’t meet its 2020 targets. “If the pace of emission reduction from the past decade continues, Germany will hit its 2020 targets eight years late, and will only meet those for 2030 in 2046,” says the report.

So, still burning coal, burning wood and failing to even meet its own climate commitments. And, for all that, Germans are paying through the nose for less and less reliable power.

“The German power grid repeatedly faced critical situations in June of (2019): significant shortfalls in available power were detected on three separate days,” said McKinsey, explaining the situation will worsen[…]

“Today the electricity price for households is still about 45 per cent above the European average,” says the McKinsey report[…]International data site, Globalpetrolprices.com, shows German electricity prices are the highest of the major world economies.

theaustralian.com.au/business/media/greenleft-project-gets-it-wrong-on-german-power/

So Waleed Aly and The Project got almost everything wrong about facts which are easily verified with a few minutes’ internet searches. Yet this ignorant, fraudulent wokester has the chutzpah to sneer at Australia’s “political culture”.

This farrago of false opinion and fake news is supposedly the best the legacy media have to offer. Let the legacy media get their own house in order before they wag their fingers at anyone else.

But, hey, what would I know? I’ve never been hugged by Jacinda Ardern.

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