The End of Green Dreams?

[Valin]

Power Line

Steven Hayward

Oct. 13 2021

Every day brings fresh news of the how the edifice of “green energy” has hit the wall. It turns out that when nations recognize they need more energy, they are all turning to . . . energy that actually works at scale.

And yet the Al Gores of the world persist:

Quote

Al Gore’s $36 Billion Fund Sees New Urgency to Cut Off Oil Money

Five years. That’s roughly how much time the investment universe has left to stop feeding capital to greenhouse-gas emitters before it’s too late, according to the co-founder of Generation Investment Management LLP.

David Blood, a long-time top executive at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s asset-management unit before starting an investment fund with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore more than 15 years ago, says that efforts over the past two decades to fight climate change are “not going to be enough.”

Five years. Good to know. Except I’m so old that I can remember when Al Gore said the Arctic Ocean would be ice free by 2013. That was back in 2009.*

Meanwhile, back in the real world, governments everywhere are facing shortages and soaring costs for electricity and are turning rapidly to . . . fossil fuels!......(Snip)

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[Geee]

The West’s Suicidal Energy Policies

Global warmists’ pipe-dreams and bad science.

 

History and common sense tell us that for a nation to survive, it must secure and control critical natural resources. In recent decades, Western nations have increasingly ignored this imperative in order to pursue dubious environmental goals dressed up as science, but more often the consequence of cultural ideals, political agendas, or profitable industries supported by government subsidies.

The current rise in the costs of energy in the U.S. and Europe is a flashing red light warning us that irresponsible energy policies are threatening the global economy, with dangerous consequences for our freedom, security, and way of life.

History provides us with examples of what happens to a state when it loses control of a critical resource. Ancient Athens depended on imported grain to feed its people. Recognizing the importance of foreign grain, the Athenians controlled the ports and sea-lanes that facilitated grain transport from the Black Sea region. Its dependence on those imports in fact led to its defeat by Sparta in the 27-year-long Peloponnesian War. Sparta’s naval victory at Aegospotamai at the mouth of the modern Dardanelles cut off Athenian imports from the Black Sea. Faced with starvation, the Athenians capitulated.

Twenty-two centuries later, the West faced a similar, though not as disastrous, challenge–– the 1973-74 Arab Oil Embargo. OPEC cut off imports of oil to the U.S. and other nations for supporting Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli, or Yom Kippur War. Dependent on imported oil, the U.S. faced the “oil shock”: gasoline prices rising 43%, gas rationing, long lines at gas-stations, a tripling of oil costs per barrel, stagflation, a stock market crash, and further damage to the global economy. The silver lining of this crisis was the development of policies and measures intended to wean the U.S. from its dependence on imported oil.

[Valin]

@Geee

“net zero” carbon

Once again I go back to An Evening with Michael Crichton in 2005

"According to Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller Institute, the industrialized nations have been decarbonizing their energy sources for 150 years, meaning that we are moving away from carbon toward hydrogen. In other words, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen decreases as you go from wood and hay, which is one to one, to coal, to oil, and finally to natural gas, where it’s one to four.

Here’s an illustration from one of Ausubel’s articles. The blue atoms are hydrogen and the dirty brown ones are carbon.

And you can see as we go from coal to oil to gas, natural gas, if there’s still any for sale, we are increasing the proportion of hydrogen to carbon. Ausubel expects this trend will continue through this century as we move toward what he imagines as a pure hydrogen energy system, without the assistance of lawyers and activists. Obviously, if a trend has been continuously operating since the days of Lincoln and Queen Victoria, it probably does not need the assistance of organizations like the Sierra Club and the NRDC, which are showing up about a hundred years too late.

Ausubel’s ideas are controversial to some, but not to websites like Sustainability Now. And this is again showing you the ratio of hydrogen and pure, clean blue to carbon and other various sources.

All right. So in summary, when I went back to look at old fears, the first thing I found was that newspapers were largely empty. The second thing I found was that the language was uniformly and excessively frightening. And the third thing I found was that a lot of advocacy was encouraging what was happening anyway."

 

 

[Valin]

The Narrative Speaks

Sky News

The low-lying nations worst-hit by climate change

How many times in the last 60 years have we heard this We're All Gonna Die stories? And yet here we are.