Share this
Mister Wong
Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Googlize this
Blinklist
Facebook
Wikio
Hear this text
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
They say a week is a long time in politics. In which case, I have been away from this blog for a long time. I apologise. In that time, the global warming scam has become yet more unravelled. A week is an even longer time in climate politics.
If someone had asked me back in October how long I thought the climate issue had left to run, I would have said years and years. Now it seems that climate nonsense – which has forced us to accept useless windfarms, the transformation of local government into a bunch of nagging nannies, changes to the way refuse is collected, higher fuel prices and higher taxes – is reaching its denouement. Though if we imagine these things will go away completely, overnight, we’re expecting too much. But between now and whenever that happens, climate activists such as those in Gordon’s, Nick, and Dave’s parties, will continue to haemorrhage credibility.
Meanwhile, there is stuff to be getting on with...
Windfarms are one of the things I hear from people most about. People living near them really hate these things. The discussion that’s had by the green Great and Good about how to save the planet, and strongly-worded statements about sceptics like me being “flat earthers” happens miles away from the places destroyed by giant turbines, where they make people’s lives a misery, yet make virtually zero difference to the UK’s emissions, let alone global emissions. We know that these things barely function, and are expensive. If there weren’t huge subsidies available to operators, there wouldn’t be any windfarms.
So how are these machines justified?
Like all climate policies, the basis for energy and climate polices lies in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They also come from reports commissioned by the government itself, such as the Stern Review, put together by economist Nicholas Stern.
As has been widely reported (see my previous post for links) both of these sources are currently under the microscope. Stern’s report has been widely debunked by better economists in the past, but Roger Pielke Jr has recently unearthed some new problems with it. Bob Ward, the Policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute, which is Chaired by Stern, has rushed to his boss’s defence. The IPCC report is being attacked from all directions, but one effort in particular caught my eye.
At the excellently titled blog, “There is No Frakking "Scientific Consensus" on Global Warming, Donna Laframboise has extracted all of the citations in the latest IPCC report that refer to Greenpeace.
As Laframboise asks, “Where does Greenpeace stop and the IPCC begin? Sometimes it's difficult to tell.”
And yet they seem to have much influence over the direction of energy policies in the UK.
But have you ever voted for Greenpeace?
A number of the citations in the IPCC report listed by Laframboise are joint projects between Greenpeace and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). These studies, she points out have been passed off as the work of ‘scientists’, to be included in the report from IPCC Working Group III, which examines the possible “Mitigation of Climate Change”. We need not say anything about Greenpeace’s contributions to science. They are activists, better known for their stunts, near-terrorist vandalism, and arrogance than their contributions to human knowledge. So what is the GWEC? In their own words...
“We are the global wind industry trade association, providing a credible and representative forum for the entire wind energy sector at the international level. Our mission is to ensure that wind power establishes itself as one of the world’s leading energy sources, providing substantial environmental and economic benefits.”
Oh, so no conflict of interest there then.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how environmentalists like Greenpeace make such a song and dance about ‘corporations taking over the world’ and ‘distorting the climate debate’. But when those corporations happen to be their mates, they are remarkably silent.
While having a poke around the IPCC reports, I found another citation from another bunch of wind-bags. This time it was the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). In their own words:
The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) is the voice of the wind industry, actively promoting the utilisation of wind power in Europe and worldwide. It is ideally situated in the Renewable Energy House in Brussels ensuring close proximity to European decision-makers.
Oh, so no conflict of interest there then.
The IPCC cite a report from EWEA, called “Large scale integration of wind energy in the European power supply”, which makes these extraordinary claims:
“A large contribution from wind energy to European power generation is feasible in the same order of magnitude as the individual contributions from the conventional technologies”
The capacity of European power systems to absorb significant amount of wind power is determined more by economics and regulatory rules than by technical or practical constraints. Already today a penetration of 20% of power from wind is feasible without posing any serious technical or practical problems.”
Let’s have a look at that first claim, that wind energy could supply as much power as conventional sources.
Here’s a graph of energy usage in the UK.
The line representing renewable includes all forms of renewable energy, not just wind.
We’d have to increase the amount of energy from renewable sources by about 5 times, to replace what we produce with nuclear – which is a technology we’ve allowed to go into decline. Four times as many windfarms would require four times as many subsidies to make them profitable for... oh, the wind energy companies who produced the report.
We know that wind isn’t viable. But for some reason, our government has swallowed the wind hype without a second thought. This is what happens when responsibility for policy making is outsourced to international bodies such as the IPCC.
