Solar fades as shale gas flares

Shale gas supplies may last 250 years and make renewables uneconomic

China reportedly has some two-thirds of the US$39-billion global market for solar panels, but it doesn’t use them very much. Why? Because they’re uneconomic.

The Chinese subsidize their manufacturers to take advantage of the ultra-expensive alternative energy forced on western consumers via feed-in tariffs. Smart for them, dumb for us, but since everybody is subsidizing renewables, it’s hard to condemn the Chinese. Indeed, the terms “solar panels” and “free trade” don’t belong in the same conceptual time zone, even if they are reportedly an issue at this week’s meetings in Washington between U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

There are far bigger issues here than policy hypocrisy. What happens to renewable energy when alarmist climate science collapses? And even if the ideological rearguard action drags on for years, what about the fact that shale gas is about to make renewables look even more ridiculous in terms of both economics and emissions?

The feed-in tariffs that the Chinese are so assiduously avoiding at home are analogous to the medieval scam of coin-clipping, only in reverse. Governments hope that if a small amount of ludicrously expensive renewable electricity is loaded onto consumers’ bills, they might not notice. The grand policy rationale behind this piece of economic self-mutilation is that alternatives will eventually yield a market bonanza, and any nation that has successfully promoted solar and wind “champions” will mop up all the business, as in the monopoly fantasies of Karl Marx.

This policy is nonsensical at many levels. Even if climate science is not entirely bogus, the costs of renewables are likely to do far more damage than bad weather. One of the biggest promoters of solar power, Spain, has already seen its subsidy system collapse.

Shale gas supplies may last 250 years and make renewables uneconomic

Shale gas supplies should last 1,000 years according to people here in Houston I have spoken with who are in the know about this topic.

Our economy could be fixed very quickly if we opened up access to shale and other known sources of energy and allowed the construction of new refineries. If we added a flat 20% income tax on top of that, abolished the IRS and then started selling off unneeded federal land, buildings and other assets we would be awash with prosperity. Money would flow in from all over the world to invest here. We would be able to restart our own manufacturing and once again start making things in America.

None of this will happen because those in Washington are actively and aggressively working to run the country in to the dirt. That is the only thing I can conclude because of their actions.

Some History:

Waldheim's Monster: United Nations' Ecofascist Programme

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By William Walter Kay

Intro

Three score and seven years ago the United Nations was founded primarily to advance the interests of English-speaking countries. Now the UN is primarily interested in conducting economic warfare on those countries. The tipping point in UN history roughly corresponds with Kurt Waldheim’s tenure as Secretary-General (1972-81). This essay draws upon: the recent reportage on the UN’s Global Ministerial Environmental Forum; the recently leaked Management Review of Environmental Governance within the United Nations System; the Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements; the websites of UN agencies, and other troves to sketch a portrait of the UN’s environmental programs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Environmentalism in the UN before Waldheim
Waldheim before he became UN Secretary General
Oberleutnant as Secretary-General 1972-1981
Waldheim and the European-centered UN
Environmentalism in the UN; Waldheim-era and Beyond
The 1986 Austrian Presidential Election
The UN System's Environmental Programs
The UN System and Multi-Lateral Environmental Agreements
United Nations Environment Programme
The 2008 Joint Inspection Unit Report
The 2009 Global Ministerial Environmental Forum
Fin de Siècle
Conclusion

Environmentalism in the UN before Waldheim

The UN was a New Year’s baby, 1942. With the “Declaration by the United Nations”, 26 countries allied to fight fascism. After WWII the Allies convened in San Francisco in April 1945 and formally re-launched the UN six months later. While the UN’s main aim was peace, its Charter also directed it to “employ international machinery for the promotion of economic and social advancement.” The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) was established to coordinate this activity. In 1947 ECOSOC founded the Economic Commission for Europe to aid European countries devastated by WWII. As British, French and Portuguese empires dissolved, scores of countries emerged with inadequate infrastructure. ECOSOC established regional economic commissions to aid these states. ECOSOC’s development budget was small and proposals to increase it were resisted by the USSR, which argued such activity was not the UN’s job. Until the 1960s ECOSOC mostly held conferences and conducted research. ECOSOC’s foray into aid was fraught with disagreements and morphed into a loose network of programs funded by ad hoc voluntary contributions. (1) “Development” had a conventional bricks-and-bridges meaning; “aid” often meant helping poor countries exploit their resources.

From the link at post #10:

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Conclusion

Kurt Waldheim was a former Brown-Shirt with an Iron Cross dangling from his lapel when he wrote a doctoral thesis deifying the Third Reich while simultaneously plotting war crimes which were actually carried out. Can you be more of a Nazi? So query: What’s a guy like that doing running the UN? Answer: he’s converting it into an environmental movement resource. The Stockholm Conference, the founding of UNEP, the start of the ozone hole and global warming scares, the global population control blitzes, the proliferation of multi-lateral environmental agreements, and the greening of many UN agencies, all date to his tenure. This is not to portray Waldheim as an eco-Horatio. Environmentalist appropriation of the UN slightly pre-dates his tenure. Installing Waldheim into the Secretary-General’s chair was a coup for the movement and a consequence of their growing clout. No one should be so naive as to think international environmentalism’s leaders were unaware of Waldheim’s past, or disapproving.

There was more to Nazism than anti-Semitism and militarism. A core ingredient was indigenous-ism – romanticizing the affinity between ethnicity and geography. A contemporary manifestation of this is the “anti-colonialism” emanating from Europe and purporting to assist Amazonian Indians, Australian Aborigines, etc. This anti-colonialism is an attack on the national sovereignty of Brazil, Canada, USA, Australia and other “colonial” countries. It serves the environmental movement by undermining economic development in the hinterland of these states. Half the UN’s founders were colonial states.

In 1942 the world was divided into two camps. The Axis powers controlled Continental Europe, Japan and areas of the western Pacific. The Allies’ sphere was the English-speaking world, South America and part of the USSR. The United Nations was 100% lodged in the Allied sphere. The UN’s purpose was to diplomatically isolate, and conduct economic warfare on, the Axis world and ultimately to impose regime changes on Germany, Japan, etc. Now the territories formerly under Axis control supply most of the money, staffing and head office locales for the UN. UN-led campaigns to suppress and retard development of the Americas and Australia, and campaigns to steer humanity away from abundant supplies of hydrocarbons, are economic warfare operations benefitting former Axis states. The socio-geographical pre-determination of fascism persists and underlies environmentalism.

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and UNEP were born months apart (1971-72). UNEP is the youngest and smallest of the triplets. The trio have identical ultra-green ideologies. Each are multinational in operation and globalist in outlook. They conduct joint campaigns. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth routinely quote UNEP as an authority. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are integrated into UNEP’s management. UNEP is every bit as much of a biased eco-activist group as is Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. UNEP launched “global warming” BEFORE the campaign was sanctioned by the UN General Assembly. The campaign’s policy goals – reducing the use of hydrocarbon fuels and expanding the world’s forests – were UNEP/Greenpeace/Friends of the Earth goals BEFORE the campaign. Scientistic factoids supporting the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis were harvested AFTER the alarm was sounded; after lavish funds were made available. Few people would pay heed to global warming if it were solely Greenpeace’s cause. The campaign depends on appropriation of UN imprimatur. The media acquiesces to and sustains the myth that UNEP and other UN agencies are honest brokers of scientific information with humanity’s best interests at heart.

Studying UN environmentalist efforts is an education on how large and institutionalized environmentalism has become. The image persists of environmentalism as an earnest, idealist grassroots protest movement. This is a media myth. True, the movement has its shock troops, its extremists, its radical flank, but these people are an exploitable flock amidst a much larger organizational field. The modern environmental movement encompasses several hundred state bureaucracies, over a thousand intergovernmental bodies and UN agencies, and tens of thousands of non-profit societies. The movement has built a constituency in the wind and solar power industries, in the international chemical cartel, in eco-tourism, in organic farming and food distribution, in environmental law firms, and in tens of thousands of other for-profit businesses. The movement has colonized the board rooms of scores of mass media firms, hundreds of philanthropic foundations and has established beach-heads in multiple faculties in every university. In spite of this, it retains crucial features of a social movement: it represents a marginalized solidarity network grasping for power.

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