Posted on 03/15/2020 6:55:07 AM PDT by Kaslin
Berkeley, CA, Takoma Park, MD and other cities; California, Connecticut, New York, Virginia and other states; Germany, England and other countries; the European Union – all plan to banish oil, natural gas and coal within 10, 20 or 30 years. A number of US states have joined Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatives and proudly say We Are Still In ... the Paris climate treaty, no matter what President Trump says or does.
Forget the headlines and models, and look at hurricane, tornado, sea level and other historic records. There is no crisis, no unprecedented warming or weather events, certainly nothing that proves humans have replaced the powerful natural forces that have always driven climate changes and weather events.
But for now, let’s just examine their zero-carbon plans. How exactly will they make this happen? Where do they plan to get the turbines, panels and batteries? the raw materials to manufacture them? How do they plan to function as modern societies with pricey, erratic energy and frequent power disruptions?
How would they – or America, if the entire USA goes Green New Deal – handle a COVID-27 outbreak? How would they manufacture cars, airplanes, wind turbines, toilet paper, pharmaceuticals or much of anything else with intermittent energy? It hasn’t worked in Europe (see below), and it won’t work here.
Moreover, it’s not just replacing today’s coal and gas power plant megawatts. It’s doubling today’s electricity generation, because Green New Dealers want to replace all fossil fuel use: gasoline and diesel cars, trucks and buses, home and water heating, factory power, hospital emergency power, and more.
It’s tripling current megawatt generation, because they don’t like nuclear or hydroelectric power either, and they’ll need far more electricity to charge enough batteries to ensure backup power for all the fossil and other power they want to eliminate. That will require a lot of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.
Where do they plan to put all of them? Some of those states and countries have lots of rural land, wildlife habitats and shallow waters off their coasts that they can turn into huge industrial energy zones. But what are those self-righteous cities going to do? Where within their city limits do they plan to put dozens of 650-foot tall turbines and tens of thousands of panels? Or do they plan to just impose those facilities on their rural neighbors? Or tap into regional power grids and use electricity that someone else is generating – with coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, and maybe wind or solar? How will they separate “good” and “bad” electrons?
All of these GND cities and states will have to deal with frustrated rural families who don’t want the ruined scenery, desecrated ridgelines, dead birds and bats, maddening light flicker and excruciating infrasound that towering turbines would bring. Don’t want millions of rural acres blanketed with solar panels. Don’t want hundreds of miles of new high voltage transmission lines crossing their backyards. Don’t want their lands seized via eminent domain, virtually at the point of a gun if they still resist.
They don’t want the 25-50-100% higher household electricity bills, the soaring price tags for products and services that go with soaring electricity costs for every business, farm, factory and hospital. They don’t want more good manufacturing jobs destroyed by skyrocketing energy prices – and sent overseas.
Do Green New Deal politicians have the foggiest idea how many turbines, panels, batteries and miles of transmission lines they will need to replace all fossil fuels? How few years those energy systems last before they have to be replaced? Do they have any idea what they’re going to do with the defunct turbine blades and solar panels that can’t be recycled or burned? How many cubic miles of landfills they will need? Will communities want those landfills? Will urban pols just employ more eminent domain?
It would take hundreds of 850-foot-tall 12-MW offshore turbines to supply the green new world electricity demands of a major city – or thousands of 2- or 3-MW onshore turbines. Tens of millions of solar panels. Millions of acres of former crop, scenic and wildlife habitat land would be impacted. They’d need millions of half-ton 85-kWh Tesla battery packs as backup for a week of windless or sunless days.
Where do they intend to get the millions of tons of steel, copper, cobalt, lithium, aluminum, rare earths, carbon-fiberglass-plastic composites, limestone and other raw materials to build all those electricity generation and storage systems, and all the new transmission lines? Will they now support opening more US lands to mining? How do they plan to owHo
mine and process the materials without fossil fuels?
If the mining is not to take place here in United States, under our tough laws and regulations – then where exactly will it be done? In China and Russia? or maybe in Africa and South America, where many mines are operated by Chinese and Russian companies that don’t give a tinker’s damn about child labor, slave labor, workplace safety, air and water pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, mined land reclamation – or the soaring rates of lung, heart, skin and intestinal diseases, osteoporosis, cancers and other maladies.
All these squalid places and horrific stories are far away – out of sight, out of mind. Environmentalists love to say: Think globally; act locally. This would be a good time to start practicing that ethical code.
The more honest politicians promoting a GND future admit it would eliminate a lot of oil, gas, coal, petrochemical, manufacturing and other high-paying jobs. But, they claim, their (pseudo-)renewable energy world would create millions of new jobs. A look behind The Great Oz’s curtain is very revealing.
Coal-fired power plants generate 7,745 megawatt-hours of electricity per mine and power plant worker; natural gas generates 3,812 MWh per oil and gas field and utility worker. That super high efficiency and resultant low-cost electricity sustain millions of jobs in manufacturing and countless other industries.
In stark contrast, wind turbines produce a measly 836 MWh for every employee, while solar panels generated an abysmal 98 MWh per worker. Put another way, it takes 79 solar workers to produce the same amount of electricity as one coal worker or two natural gas workers. Not only will this expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent electricity kill millions of good American jobs; the GND wind and solar jobs will mostly be lower-wage positions installing, maintaining, repairing and replacing turbines and panels, and hauling huge dilapidated blades, panels, hulks and concrete foundations to monster landfills.
Residential electricity prices are already outrageous in New York (17¢ a kilowatt-hour), California (19¢ per kWh), Connecticut (20¢) and Hawaii (31¢) – versus 9¢ a kWh in Arkansas, Georgia and Oklahoma. Going 50-100% wind and solar would send family rates skyrocketing to German levels: 37¢ per kWh.
At the 8¢ per kWh it paid in 2019, Virginia’s Inova Fairfax Women’s and Children’s Hospital pays about $1.6 million annually for electricity (based on typical hospital costs per square foot). At California’s or Germany’s business rate (18¢ per kWh), hospitals like this would have to shell out an extra $2 million a year for electricity. That would mean employee layoffs, higher medical bills and reduced patient care.
How’s the vaunted transition to wind and solar actually working in Europe and Britain? In 2017, German families and businesses were pummeled by 172,000 localized blackouts. Last year, some 350,000 German families had their electricity cut off because they couldn’t pay their power bills. In Britain, millions of elderly people have to choose between heating and eating decent food; many spend their days in libraries to keep warm; and more than 3,000 die every year because they cannot heat their homes properly, making them more likely to succumb to respiratory, heart, flu or other diseases.
Across Europe, 11 million jobs are “at risk” because of an EU “green deal” that many say is suicidal. Meanwhile, China and India are still building coal and gas power plants, making products for the USA and Europe, creating jobs, and sending millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
GND politicians have dodged these issues for years – while steering billions of taxpayer dollars to the green activist groups, crony capitalists and industrialist rent-seekers that help keep them in office.
Even worse, they and their media allies have avoided the most glaring reality. The only way this energy and economic transformation will happen is through totalitarian government at the local, state and federal level: liberal urban voters and politicians against the rest of America. Those are the seeds of resentment, anger, societal division, endless litigation, and violence. We need to head that grim future off at the pass.
Just tell your “green” friends that isopropyl alcohol in hand sanitizer and disinfectants is made from propene, a by-product of oil and gas refining.
It is a good thing then that oil is not a fossil fuel
There is no such a thing as a fossil fuel
The largest non coal producer of electricity is nuclear.
I do not question his facts, particularly about the weather (it has not gotten worse). But there are benefits to using less diesel, in particular less particulate matter and NO2. There are also benefits to global warming like a lower risk of viral infection.
For the record
Note that the picture shown black “clouds” of smoke emanating from cooling towers. In fact, what’s emanating is WATER VAPOR! The picture has been altered to make the white vapor appear to be black.
As is the plastics used in the masks.
They don’t plan to ban fossil fuels. They plan to use the anti fossil fuels voters to get into office by telling them they want to ban fossil fuels.
They plan to take over the government and the constitution.
They could not care less about fossil fuels.
Face it - the world is going to be using “fossil fuels” as a store of energy until well into the 22nd Century, if not longer.
Most “fossil fuels” are in fact not fossil material at all, but are produced by other sometimes abiotic means. Coal probably has the most organic origin of any of the commonly used “fossil fuels” as it is largely from very deep accumulations of once-living organic matter that has been reduced to only the carbon constituents of the original deposit. And that took time, pressure, and thermal heat from the core of the earth.
Yes, it must have been a cold day.
There was a time when many Iowa towns situated on a river had a low-head dam and a hydroelectric plant. A lot of them were bought out and closed by power companies who used coal-fired generating plants, leaving the power house's foundation and the dam.
The GND has absolutely NOTHING to do with reducing pollution or saving the planet from destruction. It is all about POWER. Control anything and you have the power to ration or deprive the people who consume.
Forget who said it - Jefferson or Franklin; but it was sound advise then and now. “Those who would sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither.”
Tony is all over this like stink on chit.
His website:
https://realclimatescience.com/
And his youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/TonyHeller1
He nails it from every angle.
How will the greenies address the raw materials, the increased electric costs of green energy, the lost jobs?
The answer is these environmental nutcases won’t answer a single question. They will just do it because they are stupid enough to just do it. And they plan to do it full speed ahead.
The question becomes are we stupid enough to let them ruin our country like the Grermans did?
California, NY, Conn. are just getting started. They can screw it up much worse as they continue the economic destruction of their states.
individual states “honoring the Paris accord” is just a scam to rape their citizens wallets and the idiot rats in those states don’t even see it.
I don’t think they really want to ban fossil fuels. What they want to do is keep pushing smaller players out and buy up their assets and eventually own the market.
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