Siemens, Bosch, and Spain: Just Say No to Desertec

The ambitious plan to build huge solar power plants in North Africa to feed into the European power grid, has suffered some significant setbacks recently. Industrial giants Siemens and Bosch, as well as the government of Spain, are indicating that they are no longer interested in the expensive boondoggle.

An ambitious plan to provide 15% of Europe's power needs from solar plants in North Africa has run into trouble.

The Desertec initiative hoped to deliver electricity from a network of renewable energy sources to Europe via cables under the sea.

But in recent weeks, two big industrial backers have pulled out. And the Spanish government has baulked at signing an agreement to build solar power plants in Morocco.

...According to Dr Daniel Ayuk Mbi Egbe, a professor at the University of Linz in Austria and an expert on African solar resources, this is not good news.

"Siemens and Bosch are very big companies," he told BBC News, "if they don't want to support this initiative it is going to be difficult for Desertec.

...Prof Peter Droege is the head of Eurosolar, the European association for renewable energy: ... "I think it is struggling to find a reason to continue - It is clear it's lost its original purpose, it is looking for a new direction," he commented..._BBC

Grand and exorbitant schemes of this type do hold a certain appeal -- until one begins to look more closely at the details. Eventually it will dawn on almost everyone that such schemes are impractical, "feel-good" scams, run for the benefit of developers and administrators of the projects themselves. In the end, taxpayers always lose when forced to pay for intermittent unreliable sources of energy.

Global Coal Industry Booms: India and China Alone Adding 200 New Coal Plants

In the US, natural gas is replacing coal in new electricity generating power plants. As a result, CO2 emissions in the US have declined. In Europe, on the other hand, six times more coal units than natural gas units will be installed by 2015. You can imagine what that will do to Europe's carbon emissions.

But the true champions of coal are China and India, where 200 large new coal power plants will be built over the next few years. All of this while green faux environmentalists in western governments are working to institute ruinous carbon regulations on Europe, North America, and Oceania -- in the name of reducing global carbon emissions!

But another problem stood out. India relies on coal for 55 percent of its electric power and struggles to keep enough on hand.

Coal remains a critical component of the world’s energy supply despite its bad image. In China, demand for coal in 2010 resulted in a traffic jam 75 miles long caused by more than 10,000 trucks carrying supplies from Inner Mongolia. India is increasing coal imports.

So is Europe, as it takes advantage of lower coal prices in the United States. Higher-priced natural gas on the Continent is creating demand for more coal imports from the United States, where coal is taking a drubbing from less expensive natural gas.

...Coal is not subject to the vagaries of windless or sunless days, and can easily meet base-load demands of electricity consumers without interruption. So can nuclear power, but the nuclear industry is still reeling from the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan. Countries like Germany have turned away from nuclear reactors.

Global demand for coal is expected to grow to 8.9 billion tons by 2016 from 7.9 billion tons this year, with the bulk of new demand — about 700 million tons — coming from China, according to a Peabody Energy study. China is expected to add 240 gigawatts, the equivalent of adding about 160 new coal-fired plants to the 620 operating now, within four years. During that period, India will add an additional 70 gigawatts through more than 46 plants.

“If you poke your head outside of the U.S., coal-fired plants are being built left and right,” said William L. Burns, an energy analyst with Johnson Rice in New Orleans. “Coal is still the cheapest fuel source.” _NYT_via_GWPF

While the leadership of Europe, North America, and Oceania are suffering from carbon insanity, the leaders of China and India are not so deluded. They understand the critical importance of electrical power that does not turn off when the sun goes down or when the wind stops blowing. Modern industrial nations cannot run on the intermittent unreliable energy sources which Obama, Merkel, Gillard, and the others of similar mental turpitude tend to favour.

And please take note of the hypocrisy of the European governments that are willing to mortgage their economic and industrial futures on the backs of big wind and big solar for the sake of carbon reductions -- while at the same time building huge new coal power plants.

Modern societies cannot afford such stupid leaders as these, if they are to survive to reach the next level of abundance. But it seems that we may have reached a point of diminishing returns as far as democracy is concerned. When democracy becomes a rule of the mob which simply votes itself favours and sinecures, it is time for the more productive and competent to consider how to trim the fat and the dead weight.

As governments commit energy and industrial suicide via intermittent unreliables, and fall victim to carbon hysteria, their productive base tends to diminish. This increases instability in the overall system, and leads to chaotic shifts in foci of power and control.

Keep a close watch as things develop.

Looming Electricity Shortages in Europe

Industry observers last month expressed concern over a potential electricity supply crisis this winter because of a tighter nuclear supply scenario in Belgium, Germany and France.

After Germany closed some of its oldest nuclear reactors following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, another big blow to supply were cracks at Belgian nuclear reactors Tihange 2 and Doel 3, which have grounded 2,000 MW when Belgium would typically be a net exporter to France. _Reuters

The risk of freezing to death during a cold winter is many orders of magnitude higher than the risk of being harmed by a nuclear reactor. And yet Europe's leaders march steadfast toward the brink of the energy cliff, undeterred by the dangers and hardships that confront their citizens as a result of their actions.

Green dreams of intermittent unreiable wind and solar: they'll be the death of Europe yet.

Germany's Green Suicide

In the US northeast, long lines for food, water, cash, and fuels -- but no one lined up for wind turbines after Hurricane Sandy. Wind turbines are exorbitant luxuries -- the essence of inessentiality. In a disaster -- and in hard times -- the last thing you need to do is to waste money on intermittent unreliables.

And in the UK, the Energy Minister announced that no new onshore wind farms would be built:

So unreliable are wind turbines — thanks to the wind’s constant vagaries — that they are one of the most inefficient means of producing electricity ever devised. _Telegraph

Aside from the UK, can you explain Europe's headlong rush toward a green energy suicide? Can it all be explained by the pseudoscientific religion of carbon hysteria, or is something more sinister afoot?

We know that wealthy and politically-connected wind farm developers can reap a healthy return on investment, even if the wind farm never generates any electricity -- thanks to government subsidies, loan guarantees, tax breaks, mandates, etc etc. We know that political leaders can win votes and financial support / payoffs, by promising "clean energy."

Face it: there's a sucker born every minute.

Just try not to be one of them.

Without Obama, US Energy & Economic Prospects Improve

US President Obama has big plans for using the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to shut down a large number of US energy projects and enterprises. The EPA's destructive plans are already in the works, and will be enacted over the next few months even if Obama is defeated. Fortunately, a new Romney / Ryan administration would soon be on the job to shut down those shenanigans.

With a new US administration will come a new and brighter day for US energy -- with healthy add-on effects to the US economy at large. Here is a look at the big advantage that the US will have over Europe and East Asia -- if Obama is defeated:

Some fifty new projects have been unveiled in the US petrochemical industry. A $30bn investment blitz in underway in ethylene and fertilizer plants alone.

A study by the American Chemistry Council said the shale gas bonanza has reversed the fortunes of the chemical, plastics, aluminium, iron and steel, rubber, coated metals, and glass industries. "This was virtually unthinkable five years ago," said the body’s president, Cal Dooley.

...The revival of the chemical industry is a spin-off from the greater drama of America’s energy rebound, though a very big one. As many readers will have seen, the US energy department said last week that the country will produce 11.4m barrels a day (b/d) of oil, biofuels, and liquid hydrocarbons next year, almost as much as Saudi Arabia.

...America looks poised to become the world’s biggest producer in 2014. It will approach the Holy Grail of "energy independence" before the end of the decade. This is largely due to hydraulic fracturing - blasting rock with water jets - to extract shale gas and oil, though solar power and onshore wind are playing their part.

Europe is going in the opposite direction, drifting towards energy suicide. So is Japan as it shuts down its nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster. China is more hard-headed, as it needs to be. The country is adding 20m cars a year. Chinese oil imports are rising by an extra 0.5m b/d annually.

As of last week, US natural gas prices were roughly one third of European levels. The German chemicals group BASF said it had become impossible to match the US on production costs.

Asia is facing an even greater handicap as Japan soaks up supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to offset the closure of its nuclear power stations. Prices on the Pacific rim are near $15 per million British thermal units (BTU), compared to $3 in the US. _Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

H/T Anti-Green

If Obama is re-elected, all of those positive plans could easily come screeching to a halt, as the EPA moves to regulate the shale bonanza out of existence -- as well as a large number of other energy enterprises.

The green movement is composed largely of very impractical ideologues. They have achieved ascendancy in several governments of advanced nations -- including the US, Germany, Australia, and several others -- to a greater or lesser extent. Greens reject reliable forms of energy such as nuclear and hydrocarbons, in favour of the intermittent unreliables -- big wind and big solar.

If Europe does not find a way out of the green miasma of the energy starvationist lefty-Luddite greens, it will find itself growing demographically old in an environment of increasing energy scarcity. It is bad enough to grow old. But to grow old in the dark and cold -- that is a sad legacy for a once great continent.

Political Left Crucifies Itself on a Great Green Cross

The left-leaning newspaper, the Washington Post, recently published an atypically honest editorial look at the green energy dysfunction -- a malady that afflicts a large proportion of modern leftist politicians -- including Barack Obama, Al Gore, Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard, Francois Hollande, and more . . .

Green energy is not cost-competitive with traditional energy and won’t be for years. So it can’t work without either taxpayer subsidies, much of which accrue to “entrepreneurs” such as Gore, or higher prices for fossil energy — the brunt of which is borne by people of modest means.

Consider California’s “net metering” subsidy for solar-panel users. As the New York Times reported in June, the program hugely benefits well-off consumers who can afford to install photovoltaic panels. They get sun power for their homes — plus an excess supply that utilities must buy. Thus utilities must also pay to keep them on the grid. Those costs get passed along to everyone else — including low-income customers.

For a sense of where this may lead, look at Germany, whose crash program to replace nuclear power with wind and solar is boosting electricity rates. Der Spiegel reports that 200,000 long-term unemployed lost power in 2011 because they couldn’t pay their electric bills.

Democrats try to square this circle by talking up “green jobs,” but expensive electricity is bad for industry, as Germany is discovering. Fact is, subsidies for green energy do not so much create jobs as shift them around.

...Government, with its inevitable susceptibility to lobbying and favoritism, should not be picking winners and losers, whether through green subsidies or tax breaks for oil and gas.

It’s one thing to lose your job because a competing firm built a superior mouse trap; it’s quite another, justice-wise, to lose it because a competitor talked the government into taking its side. _Washington Post

The editorialist Charles Lane was explicitly singling out Al Gore as a corrupt recipient of green government favours -- to the tune of about $100 million.

But the great green dysfunction is infested by corrupt hypocrites such as Gore. Barack Obama himself is unlikely to be satisfied with any less of a big money payday than Al Gore received, after leaving office.

And yet, there is a limit to the degree to which a moribund economy can be scammed, after a certain point. Obama may find himself to be one of the victims of his own great green dysfunctional policies. He may have to settle for only $50 million, for starters.

Green Disaster Builds: Germans, Global Investors Hit

Germany faces power blackouts this winder

Under Germany's green Energiewende dysfunction, almost a million Germans can not afford to pay their energy bills.

And that is just the beginning, as Germans are faced with further electricity price explosions that will not quit.

The grand green energy crusade is beginning to run out of investors, as project after project crashes and burns. The green dysfunction has bankrupted investors from Spain to Denmark to China to the US.

Power grids are already vulnerable to hacking and cyber-attacks, due to poorly considered and vulnerable connectiveness with the global internet. But if green functionaries and activists are successful in turning power grids into vulnerability-infested "smart grids," problems with hackers and cyber-attacks are likely to grow exponentially.

Why are the world's advanced nations submitting vital energy infrastructures to these forms of masochistic dysfunction and creeping catastrophe? One big reason is the near-hysterical fear of greenhouse gas climate doom. But if recent temperatures are any guide, the Earth stopped warming over a decade ago. Of course the bureaucrats whose income and lifestyle depend upon maintaining a climate of alarmism will deny any attempts to hype or deceive.

But we know better.

The agenda of energy starvation embarked upon by Obama, Merkel, Gillard, the EU, etc. can only hurt consumers of energy, and overall economies -- with no tangible benefit. It is time for the people of those countries and unions to throw out the destructors in government, and overhaul the infrastructure of government as necessary to prevent such a disaster from re-occurring.

Guest Article: The Unlevel Playing Field for Energy

The following article is re-published from Geoffrey Style's Energy Outlook blog. It shines a penetrating light behind the facade that green energy activists have built to try to influence public and political opinion about the intermittent unreliable forms of green energy. Well worth reading.

An editorial in last weekend's Wall St. Journal led me to a recent analysis by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) summarizing the costs of the federal government's various "subsidies" for energy from different sources.  This is both useful and timely, since discussions of specific subsidies such as the expiring wind production tax credit inevitably lead to questions about how incentives for renewable energy compare to those for oil, gas, nuclear, and other more traditional sources.  As the Journal noted, the EIA stopped short of comparing these incentives on the basis of the relative productivity of different energy sources, but even without that it's still apparent that the category of new renewable electricity--excluding hydropower--received 21% of the federal energy benefits for 2010, while accounting for less than 3% of domestic energy production that year, when oil and gas, which provided 49% of US energy production, received less than 8% of these benefits.  Whether on an absolute or relative basis, renewables receive much more generous federal support than oil and gas.

Before digging further into the EIA's analysis, I should point out an important distinction between the federal expenses and incentives covered in the report and the externalities that are frequently conflated with them.  It is certainly true that many of these energy technologies involve significant impacts that aren't reflected in their market prices, and that the production and especially the consumption of fossil fuels create serious environmental and security externalities. However, to whatever extent federal subsidies address externalities they do so indirectly, at best, and in many cases inefficiently.  The focus of this posting, just like the EIA report's, is on the federal government's cash outlays and "tax expenditures"--deductions, credits, etc.--that have a direct bearing on the federal deficit and debt burden that are the subject of intense debate in this election cycle.

The tables in the report's executive summary reveal several key facts.  Between 2007 and 2010 federal energy subsidies in constant dollars more than doubled to $37.2 B, with most of the increase going to renewables and energy efficiency, except for a sizable bump in low-income energy assistance payments.   $14.8 B of the increase originated with the 2009 stimulus bill, none of which was directed at oil and gas, but which appropriated nearly $8 B to conservation and efficiency.  Overall, renewables received $14.7 B, split 55/45 between electricity and biofuels, while nuclear received $2.5 B and oil and gas $2.8 B.  The latter figure is lower than you'll see elsewhere, because among other incentives that the EIA chose to exclude from its analysis was the Section 199 deduction for manufacturers, which is budgeted at around $1 B/yr for oil and gas firms.  The logic behind that exclusion seems sound, because US manufacturers of biofuels, wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy equipment qualify for the same tax credit, and at a higher rate than oil companies.

I was also struck by the fact that oil and gas received just $70 million out of the more than $4 B spent on R&D. If there's one category in which federal expenditures on renewables should be expected to dwarf those for conventional energy, this is it, and they did so by a factor of more than 20 times.  (Coal R&D received more than $0.6 B, presumably for clean coal technologies.)

It's also the case that while the growth of renewable energy output from 2000-10 was dramatic, the relatively smaller net changes in oil and gas output in that period masked the substantial replacement of depleting resources that would have otherwise resulted in a large drop in output, especially for natural gas.  This is precisely the aspect of the mature oil and gas industry at which these federal incentives are aimed, to enable US projects to compete with the international opportunities to which many of these companies have access.

The authors of the report suggested caution in comparing the allocations of incentives to the energy produced by each technology, because some of these incentives were paid for projects still under construction and in some cases represented the front-loading of what would otherwise have been a 10-year stream of tax credits.  Fair enough.  Yet even with the conservative assumption that the entire $4.9 B of non-R&D subsidies for wind power in 2010 came in the form of cash grants in lieu of the 30% investment tax credit for new wind turbines that would produce for 20 years at a 30% capacity factor, that still equates to a subsidy of more than 16% of the average present wholesale value of all the electricity those turbines will produce, using prevailing industrial sector electricity prices as a proxy for wholesale prices.  By comparison, the $2.7 B of oil and gas tax incentives for 2010 represented just 1% of the wholesale value of US production of these fuels, before refining.

A serious debate about the appropriate level of US energy subsidies should begin with the facts, rather than with misperceptions. It should also focus first on the goals of such incentives, before jumping to the details of this tax credit vs. that one.  What do we want these measures to achieve?  If it's simply the promotion of energy production, then the current incentive system looks too heavily skewed in favor of renewables.  If it's jobs, then we should be realistic about how many can be added by such a capital-intensive sector.  If it's the promotion of both energy security and innovation, then at least parts of the current system look directionally right, though I'd argue that we'd benefit from spending more on renewable energy R&D and less on the deployment of mature-but-expensive technologies like wind.  However, if emissions and climate change are our primary concerns, then these incentives are not a terribly effective way to address them.  My own expectation is that regardless of whether the wind tax credit is extended for another year, most of the tax incentives that the EIA assessed here will eventually be swept away by tax reform focused on reducing corporate tax rates to improve US competitiveness, while eliminating loopholes to make the changes revenue-neutral.
_Geoffrey Styles in Energy Outlook

Geoffrey Styles is one of the better energy analysts, willing to look at the larger picture from multiple perspectives. His article above clearly illustrates the falseness of the claims about subsidies to the fossil fuels and nuclear industries so often made by green activists and special interests.

Out of curiosity, I visited some peak oil and green sites to gauge their reaction to Geoffrey Style's piece. Predictably, the groupthink circular jerkulars were outraged to think that anyone might be willing or able to think beyond the constrained limits of their own indoctrination.

But such places are populated by people with nothing important to do. As for the rest of us, we all have problems to solve, so we may as well get to it.

Spain's and Germany's Green Blunders;

RCE Solar Jacks Up German Electricity Prices

Spain's economy is in dire straits, in large part due to its government support and subsidies for big wind and big solar power.

During the first two years of his administration, President Barack Obama and top officials praised Spain as a successful model to create employment and improve energy security. So did everyone else, for that matter, but it’s time to heed the lessons.

For over a decade Spain has accumulated nearly 25 billion euro in debt –equivalent to more than half of the urgent capitalization needs of its distraught financial system- mostly in the form of subsidies for wind and solar energy.

...Spain’s generous subsidies already attracted more than twice as much installed capacity than its peak demand of 40 GW, and much cheaper fossil fuel and nuclear generators are being left idle to pay for renewable output. In this context, the country has no choice but to pull the plug on its renewable experiment. More than a decade of robust Spanish growth ended in 2008 as a construction boom went bust leaving millions without a job and as the global economic crisis further undermined the economy.

...Spain is the worst example, but not the only. A recent International Energy Agency outlook of renewable power this decade suggests how Spain’s model embodies the “wrongs” of unconditionally supporting the industry.

Now its renewable revision is going to eliminate thousands of jobs and billions in investment, and more critically become another agonizing drag on the economy.

Many countries overdid it, plain and simple. Renewable industries in OECD reached maturity and have become an economic drain, which is why countries are quietly backtracking, as the data shows. _EnergyTribune

These are sobering lessons for anyone who is paying attention. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the US Obama administration is paying attention to anything except those internal voices which never seem to waver or quieten.

Now, Germany is following the same devastating path that led Spain over the fiscal cliff. Even worse, Germany is shutting down its safe, affordable, and reliable nuclear plants in favour of exorbitantly expensive intermittent unreliables!

As far back as 1990, Germany enacted a feed-in tariff that guaranteed providers of solar electricity a price well above market level. Consequently, it has been very easy for solar producers to make a profit. The idea was to foster domestic industries but much of transfer has ended up going to Chinese firms.

The less obvious downside, however, is that consumers end up paying more for electricity. The high solar prices are averaged in with all other sources and consumers end up paying the bill, both as taxpayers and consumers.

... the German solar industry is about to suffer now that Germany has found it too expensive to maintain the feed-in tariffs. They say Spain has had a worse experience, with $50 billion in wind and solar-related debt now floating around the country. Spain's solar bubble, which soon popped, has played a large role in its overall debt crisis as well. _RCE

Denmark power customers pay the highest cost for energy in Europe, due largely to government support for big wind power.

Now it looks as if the UK may be tumbling down the same energy policy avalanche.

And if US President Obama is re-elected in November, you can expect his administration to double down on the stupid energy policies of Spain et al.

What is it about green politicians and bureaucrats that makes them so destructive to the countries they are supposed to serve?

Green Energy: A Bust in the US, Europe, ...

Instead of trying to pick winners and losers, the private sector message to the Government is clear—create a competitive marketplace with fair rules, no subsidies and turn the private sector loose.  The genius of America is our ability to continuously reinvent ourselves to adapt to change.  The failure of government is impeding that disruptive innovative change. _Private Sector -- Not Government -- Creating almost all new energy

The Obama administration has compiled a long list of investment losers. These green companies gone bust, are only the tip of the iceberg of funds misallocated by the Obama administration in pressing its destructive green agenda:

Abound Solar consumed $70 million of its $400 million Energy Department loan guarantee. The company, based in Loveland, Colo., blamed Chinese subsidy payments and European subsidy cuts for falling prices in its thin-film-panel sector. On July 2, Abound Solar filed for Chapter 7 liquidation and prepared to lock shop and fire its 125 employees.

Solar Trust envisioned Earth’s largest solar-power plant. DOE enthusiastically offered it a $2.1 billion loan guarantee in April 2011, provided that it raised private capital. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar attended the company’s groundbreaking in Blythe, Calif., and hailed “a historic moment in America’s new energy frontier.” Solar Trust missed DOE’s benchmarks, however, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on April 2.

Energy Conversion Devices, a solar-laminate supplier, received a $13.3 million stimulus tax credit in January 2010 to update its factory in Auburn Hills, Mich., and to hire some 600 people. ECD pleaded Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Valentine’s Day.

Ener1 received a $118.5 million DOE stimulus grant in August 2009. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Greenfield, Ind., to tour Ener1 on January 26, 2011. “Here at Ener1,” Biden said, “we’re going to harness electricity and bring it to the world, like Edison did more than a century ago.” The electric-car-battery company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on January 26, 2012, exactly one year after Biden’s visit.

Aptera Motors aspired to build three-wheel electric cars. DOE offered it a $150 million ATVM loan, conditioned on Aptera’s raising $150 million in non-government capital. Aptera never convinced private investors to finance glorified tricycles. So, on December 2, CEO Paul Wilber announced that “after years of focused effort to bring our products to the market, Aptera Motors is closing its doors, effective today.”

Massachusetts-based Beacon Power Corp. received a $43 million loan guarantee in October 2010 — DOE’s second such subsidy. The energy-storage concern declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 30, 2011.

Solyndra, the most notorious of Obama’s green-energy baubles, filed for bankruptcy on August 31, 2011. Taxpayers are liable for this solar-panel maker’s $535 million in loan guarantees — the first that DOE made under Obama.

In death, Solyndra has proved anything but green. As San Francisco’s KCBS-TV reported in April, Solyndra’s facility in Milpitas, Calif., features metal drums marked “hazardous waste.” Cadmium, lead, unidentified black chemicals, and othertoxins haunt the premises. A company called iStar said it would remove these poisons — as soon as Solyndra pays its bills.

Solyndra also discarded still-valuable solar-panel components, even though selling them could have generated capital to reimburse its creditors, including America’s taxpayers.

In June 2009, SpectraWatt scored a $500,000 grant from the PV Technology Pre-Incubator project of DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In June 2010, it received $150,000 from the National Science Foundation. Facing stiff Chinese competition, this solar-cell manufacturer closed its factory in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., and dismissed all of its 117 workers in April 2011. SpectraWatt filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on August 19, 2011.

Raser Technologies received a $33 million Treasury Department stimulus grant in February 2010. As its dreams of a geothermal plant in Beaver County, Utah, turned to steam, its payroll subsequently evaporated from 42 workers to 27 to 10. Raser declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2011.

Despite the bankruptcy of Mountain Plaza, Inc., in 2003, the EPA decided to inject$424,000 in stimulus funds for that Tennessee company’s “truck-stop electrification” technology. Nonetheless, Mountain Plaza again went bankrupt, on June 3, 2010. EPA officially awarded those funds twelve days later, despite Mountain Plaza’s insolvency and a related lawsuit. _TheGWPF

The same wasteful cycle of green investment and green collapse has occurred on an even larger scale in Europe -- and is likely to get much worse before it gets better.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government said it may have to scrap some of its targets for shifting the source of its electricity supply, a move that would water down a commitment to bolster renewable energy in Europe’s biggest economy. Economy Minister Philipp Roesler told today’s Bild newspaper that Germany may readjust targets linked to the plan to exit nuclear energy-generation by 2022 if jobs are threatened.—Bloomberg, 17 July 2012

 Prices for UN-backed carbon credits sank to a record low in morning trading on Wednesday after doubts emerged about European Commission plans to prop up the bloc’s ailing emissions trading market. Carbon prices have fallen to fresh lows at several points over the past nine months as a glut in the supply of EU credits has been exacerbated by sagging demand due to weak European economic conditions.—Pilita Clark and Jack Farchy,  Financial Times, 18 July 2012[

 The end of the world is not going to happen within our lifetimes. That’s the word from Justin Deering, author of The End of the World Delusion: How Doomsayers Endanger Society. “We’re bombarded with end-of-the-world scares practically everywhere you look,” Deering explains. Deering doesn’t care whether the claims arise from religious beliefs or scientific concerns. “It doesn’t matter to me whether they’re a preacher or a scientist, a shaman mystic or an expert researcher. If they’re saying the end is near, they’re wrong.”—Watts Up With That, 18 July 2012

_Benny Peiser

Obama's "investments" that failed, were actually largely payoffs to cronies who helped Obama get elected. If one looks closely enough, he is likely to find a similar political cronyism involved in all areas where green faux environmentalism overlaps with big money politics and government.

OPEC, Russia, and Green Dieoff.Orgy Biggest Losers in Coming Age of Energy

For nearly four decades, OPEC -- the cartel formally known as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries -- has been a major economic and geopolitical force in our collective lives, driving nations to war, otherwise self-respecting world leaders to genuflect, and economists to shudder....Russia's Vladimir Putin has strutted the global stage, bolstered by gas and oil profits, and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez has thumbed his nose at los Yanquis. _FP

And green dieoff.orgy fundamentalists have pushed governments to abandon reliable and clean forms of energy such as nuclear, in a gigantic, potentially catastrophic scam to force dependency upon exorbitantly expensive intermittent unreliable forms of energy such as big wind and big solar.

But something happened along the way to the great OPEC / Russia / Green dieoff.orgy celebration: humans discovered that clean and affordable energy was not nearly as scarce as they were being told by their green tainted leaders.

Still, one should never underestimate the ability of bad government to convert a great opportunity into an even greater problem. If greens cannot be removed from power, they are likely to continue to overtax, overregulate, and misallocate resources within their unfortunate jurisdictions.

A growing number of key energy analysts say that technological advances and high oil prices are leading to a revolution in global oil. Rather than petroleum scarcity, we are seeing into a flood of new oil supplies from some pretty surprising places, led by the United States and Canada, these analysts say. Rather than worrying about cantankerous petrocrats, we will need to prepare for an age of scrambled geopolitics in which who was up may be down, and countries previously on no one's A-list may suddenly be central global players.

One primary takeaway: North America seems likely to become self-sufficient in oil. "This will be a huge potential productivity shock to the U.S. economy," says Adam Sieminski, director of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a federal agency. "It could grow the economy, grow GDP, and strengthen the dollar." _FP

And what is true for North America, could also be true for multiple parts of Europe, South America, East Asia, the Levant, and even Africa.

The big losers are:

LOSERS

Unenlightened petrocrats: Oil prices could be lower and volatile in a world of surplus. So for states relying on a single economy such as oil or gas, "it is not a pretty picture," said Morse. He forecasts much political turmoil, and a struggle to keep market share. That includes Chàvez for sure, but could also jostle Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the allegedly corrupt president of Equatorial Guinea, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini.

Russia: Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations led the panelists, plus many audience members, in singling out Russia as a key loser since Putin shows no sign so far of genuine economic diversification. For his state budget to break even, Putin requires an estimated oil price of $117 a barrel. Right now it is 12 percent below that threshold, or about $103 a barrel. Struggling to make up the difference but with no tools other than oil and gas to do so, Putin seems headed for a tougher political experience than in his previous tenure as president in the 2000s, when he rode a wave of public popularity based on a growing and optimistic middle class. When Russians realize their living standard is static or diminishing, they will not be happy.

The green edifice: ...The bar was already high for green-tech companies to compete against the economics of fossil-fuel energy; with lower oil and gas prices, the bar rises higher....

OPEC: With prices dropping and competing supplies flowing from numerous new producers, OPEC will lose much relative influence, and may simply cease to be a pivotal economic player. "OPEC will descend into chaos as an organization," said John Hofmeister, former president of Shell USA. "They don't know now how much they are hated by the entire world. But they will find out as things unfold." ... _FP

Of course, if Barack Obama is re-elected president of the US, all bets are off. Obama's war against energy was necessarily curtailed by the need to win re-election. In a second term, no such constraints would be present. In such an event, expect an unending flurry of executive orders tailored to constrict the US energy sector and the US private sector in general.

If you think Obama's first term was a stagnant disgrace, wait until he has carte blanche to go off the rails in any direction he chooses.

The "Green Curse" Hitting Australia and Germany

Australia's carbon tax and renewable energy target are conspiring to wreak a perfect storm of green misery on Australian power utility customers. The article excerpted below only scratches the surface of the problem for Australia.

The operator of the eastern Australian grid, the Australian Energy Market Operator, has already announced that the average output of wind farms is about 30 per cent of installed capacity. But because wind is an intermittent energy source, AEMO will only count between 3 and 8 per cent of installed wind capacity towards the capacity it needs to keep on hand at all times.

This adds up to a lot of wind farms which have to be built almost in addition to the conventional, fossil fuel network. Because their output can vary wildly, wind farms have to be backed up by conventional generators kept on standby.

The backup generators will mainly be open-cycle gas turbines that can be powered up and down quickly, as opposed to the much larger and far more efficient closed-cycle gas turbines.

Enter the carbon tax, which is set at an internationally high price of $23, which will rise to $29 by 2015 before then probably falling to a $15 floor price. Even at $29, the price is still not high enough to force a switch to cleaner gas for baseload plants. But combined with the alternative energy target the overall result has been to discourage investment in baseload plants in favour of the least efficient ways of generating power; wind farms and open-cycle gas plants.

A further complication has been the splitting of the renewable energy target into a small-scale and large-scale target, with the small- scale target resulting in the installation of numerous, highly inefficient micro-scale photovoltaic systems.

This is all set to get worse. In dollar terms, of the $320 or so added annually to power bills by green initiatives, about $200 is due to the carbon tax and the rest due to renewable energy, according to some estimates. Renewable energy is set to increase its share of the costs, although to date voters have been in favour of this form of energy without realising how much it costs them.

All of this adds up to a looming policy disaster, which has to be sorted out quickly, by completely rethinking our approach

... _FR

We hear much more about Germany's energy woes, of course. Germany is the keystone of Europe, the driving force of the EU's economy and the central nexus of the European power grid.

We are learning -- bit by bit -- just how badly Germany's government has miscalculated in its headlong rush into the green quagmire...

Photovoltaics are threatening to become the costliest mistake in the history of German energy policy. Photovoltaic power plant operators and homeowners with solar panels on their rooftops are expected to pocket around €9 billion ($11.3 billion) this year, yet they contribute barely 4 percent of the country's power supply, and only erratically at that.

When night falls, all solar modules go offline in one fell swoop; in the winter, they barely generate power during the daytime. During the summer, meanwhile, they sometimes generate too much power around midday, without enough storage capacity to capture it all. The distribution network is also not laid out in a way that would allow the country's thousands of owners of photovoltaic arrays -- a term used to denote an installation of several panels working together -- to feed into the grid as well as draw power from it.

To keep the lights on, Germany ends up importing nuclear power from France and the Czech Republic. Grid operator Tennet even resorted to tapping an aging fossil fuel-fired power plant in Austria to compensate for shortages in solar power.

...subsidies for renewable energy, including an expansion of the power grid, will saddle energy consumers with costs well over €300 billion ($377 billion).

An environmental surcharge known as the EEG contribution, which is already added to German energy bills, will rise sharply. This renewable energy surcharge currently amounts to 3.59 cents per kilowatt hour. Chancellor Angela Merkel previously promised to cap it at 3.5 cents, but Erdmann's calculations show the EEG contribution jumping to "over 10 cents per kilowatt hour," or nearly three times what the chancellor pledged.

...Unfortunately, solar arrays provide peak performance only with maximum light exposure when the sun is at the perfect vertical angle and the modules at the ideal temperature -- in other words, under laboratory conditions. In reality, all of Germany's photovoltaic arrays together generate less power than two nuclear reactors. And they can't even replace those reactors unless they have enough storage capacity available. The figures on peak performance of photovoltaic arrays lead to misunderstandings, the German Physical Society writes in an expert opinion, stating, "Photovoltaics are fundamentally incapable of replacing any other type of power plant." Essentially, every solar array must be backed up with a conventional power plant as a reserve, creating an expensive double infrastructure. _Spiegel

H/T Earth's Energy blog

Intermittent unreliable forms of energy such as big wind and big solar, bring too many problems to the grid. Wise governments would be more concerned with the reliable and affordable provision of abundant power, and less concerned with the phantasms of doom dreamed up by tenured academics, government bureaucrats, and green ideologues of the lefty-Luddite dieoff.orgy persuasion.

Government policies are leading many western nations into a costly quagmire of de facto energy starvation.

Wise persons had best plan ahead for the predictable results of foolish government policies.

Xtra Special Bonus: This graphic-rich article describes the growing importance of electricity to European industry.

If -- as seems inevitable -- the growing use of intermittent unreliable sources of electrical energy in Europe drives overall costs of electricity up at the same time as such use drives the quality of European electricity downward, it can only be anticipated that industrial concerns which are currently situated within EU countries, will more often choose to re-locate elsewhere. (We have already seen the beginning of this unfortunate exodus.)

The Great and Devastating German Green Energy Folly

German electricity consumers are paying the second highest power rates in all of Europe, second only to Denmark. Germany is losing industrial plants to other countries with more reasonable electricity rates, and jobs are fleeing the country along with the plants.

What was the German government thinking in 2004, when it offered a subsidy, known as a feed-in tariff, that guaranteed investors as much as €0.57 per kilowatt-hour for the next two decades of photovoltaic generation? At the time, the average price for electricity from other sources was about €0.20/kWh; by comparison, the average U.S. electricity price in 2004 was 7.6 cents, or about €0.06/kWh. With subsidies like that, it was no wonder that Bavaria Solarpark was just the beginning of a rush to build photovoltaic plants in Germany. By the end of 2011, Germany’s PV installations had a capacity of nearly 25 gigawatts, which was more than a third of the global total. If you subsidize something enough, at first it can seem almost reasonable; only later does reality intervene. This past March, stung by the news that Germans were paying the second highest electricity rates in Europe, the German parliament voted to cut the various solar subsidies by up to 29 percent.

Such generous subsidies are by no means a German peculiarity. They have been the norm in the new world of renewable energies; only their targets differ. Spain also subsidized wind and PV generation before cutting its feed-in tariff for large installations by nearly 50 percent in 2010. China’s bene­fits to its wind-turbine makers were so generous that the United States complained about them to the World Trade Organization in December 2010. _Vaclav Smil in IEEE

Big wind and big solar are not economical without massive and ruinously expensive government subsidies, mandates, tax breaks, and other special favours -- often given to developers who happen to be political cronies of the party in power.

The most ardent supporters of solar, wind, and biomass argue that these sources can replace fossil fuels and create highly reliable, nonpolluting, carbon-free systems priced no higher than today’s cheapest coal-fired electricity generation, all in just a few decades. That would be soon enough to prevent the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide from its current level of 394 parts per million to more than 450 ppm—at which point, climatologists estimate, the average global temperature will rise by 2 °C. I wish all these promises would come true, but I think instead I’ll put my faith in clear-eyed technical assessments.

...But other analyses refute the claims of cheap wind electricity, and still others take into account the fact that photo­voltaic installations require not just cells but also frames, inverters, batteries, and labor. These associated expenses are not plummeting at all, and that is why the cost of electricity generated by residential solar systems in the United States has not changed dramatically since 2000. At that time the national mean was close to 40 U.S. cents per kilowatt­-hour, while the latest Solarbuzz data for 2012 show 28.91 cents per kilowatt-hour in sunny climates and 63.60 cents per kilowatt-­hour in cloudy ones. That’s still far more expensive than using fossil fuels, which in the United States cost between 11 and 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2011. The age of mass-scale, decentralized photovoltaic generation is not here yet. _Vaclav Smil in IEEE

Wind and solar power supporters invariably undestimate the costs of their favourite forms of energy, because they never take into account the costs of intermittency, or the costs of ancillary infrastructure which must be built to support and back up the intermittent unreliable forms of energy they prefer.

Projections of wind-power generation into the future have been misleadingly optimistic, because they are all based on initial increases from a minuscule base. So what if total global wind turbine capacity rose sixfold between 2001 and 2011? Such high growth rates are typical of systems in early stages of development, particularly when—as in this case—the growth has been driven primarily by subsidies.

And a new factor has been changing the prospects for wind and solar: the arrival of abundant supplies of natural gas extracted by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, from shales. Fracking is uncommon outside the United States and Canada at the moment, but it could be used in many countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, which also have large shale deposits. Some countries, such as France and Germany, have banned the technology for fear of possible environmental effects, but such concerns accompany all new energy technologies, even those touted for their environmental virtues. And natural gas can be used to generate electricity in particularly efficient ways. For example, combined-cycle gas plants exploit the heat leaving the gas turbine to produce steam and generate additional electricity using a steam turbine. What’s more, gas turbine modules with up to 60 megawatts of capacity can be up and running within a month of delivery, and they can be conveniently sited so as to feed their output into existing transmission lines.

The siting of massive wind farms is also becoming increasingly contentious—many people don’t like their look, object to their noise, or worry about their effect on migrating birds and bats [see “Fixing Wind Power’s Bat Problem,” in this issue]. This has become a problem even for some offshore projects. For example, a vast project off Martha’s Vineyard island, in Massachusetts, which was supposed to be the first offshore wind farm in the United States, has been stalled for years because of local opposition. The intermittence of the wind makes it hard to estimate how much electricity can be generated in a few days’ time, and the shortage of operating experience with large turbines introduces even greater uncertainty over the long term. We’ll just have to wait to see how reliable they’ll be over their supposed lifetimes of 20 to 30 years and how much repair and maintenance they will require.

And, of course, you can’t use wind turbines unless you’re prepared to hook them to the grid by building lots of additional high-voltage transmission lines, an expensive and typically legally challenging undertaking. _Vaclav Smil in IEEE

Germany is just beginning to pay the price for its impetuous descent into a reliance on intermittent unreliable green forms of energy. The final costs to Germany and Europe will by much higher than anyone -- even the most pessimistic analyst -- has yet anticipated.

And so, naturally, US President Obama wishes to take the United States down the same destructive energy decline as the greens in Europe have chosen. Obama had best hope that US voters do not catch on to his foolish agenda before the next US national election.

Razib Khan Looks at Peak Oil

Razib Khan is one of the founders of the renowned GNXP (Gene Expression) blog, and a prolific blogger on the Discover Magazine Blog "Gene Expression." Khan is trained in biochemistry, biology, and genetics, and despite his famous prickly nature, is a well-respected blogger on a wide range of topics.

Razib could not help but notice a recent brouhaha over oil price dynamics between the peak oil doom camp and energy analysts such as Leonardo Maugeri. He brings his unique insights into play in examining the situation:

Despite evolutionary ecology, the reality is that ecologists seem to be characterized by a mindset which posits limits to growth and a finite set of responses to the challenges of scarce resources. That is, the Malthusian paradigm. I bring this up because despite the similarities between ecology and economics it strikes me that ecologists often have a difficult time admitting that the parameters of the model which they think they have a good grasp of may not always be fixed.

Incentives and innovation can shift the dynamics radically. Consider George Monbiot’s about face on “peak oil,” We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all:

A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun. The constraints on oil supply over the past 10 years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

Maugeri’s analysis of projects in 23 countries suggests that global oil supplies are likely to rise by a net 17m barrels per day (to 110m) by 2020. This, he says, is “the largest potential addition to the world’s oil supply capacity since the 1980s”. The investments required to make this boom happen depend on a long-term price of $70 a barrel – the current cost of Brent crude is $95. Money is now flooding into new oil: a trillion dollars has been spent in the past two years; a record $600bn is lined up for 2012.

Let’s take Monbiot’s assertion as a given, that we are not entering an era of hydrocarbon scarcity. Why? As he outlines increasing demand, flat supply, and higher profits, stimulated exploration and innovation, generating more supply. This isn’t rocket science, critics of peak oil were pointing out this likelihood back in the mid-2000s. What this reminds me of is evolution. A eternal and circuitous race across a fluctuating ‘adaptive landscape,’ with fitness target constantly shifting.

Of course evolutionary process is not such that anything is possible. This is still science, and science has limits. But evolutionary process is often surprising in its ingenuity. Similarly, over the past 250 years or so human ingenuity has been surprising. This doesn’t mean we should bet on this lasting forever, the Malthusian condition has been the norm for almost all of human history. But, we should never forget the power of innovation and incentives when we consider policies at the intersection of the environment and economics. I don’t get irritated when the general public operates with Malthusian assumptions. But I do get irritated when biologists, and especially ecologists, seem to act as if human economic history since 1800 simply hadn’t happened. _Razib Khan in Discover

Amazing Shale Revolution

Monbiot (climate alarmist) on "A New Boom in Oil"

The NYT's Andy Revkin and his little green friends join the commiseration over the new energy supplies

Green academics, activists, journalists, bureaucrats, and politicians often get caught up in a fantasy world of models, imaginations, and nightmare scenarios which generally have nothing to do with the real world -- because they rarely subject their models to real world criticism and validation. Most ecologists of the green persuasion have very poor conceptions of the actual world as it is, and are almost always unprepared to deal with actual developments and real inflection points.

Climate alarmism is viewed scornfully by most competent scientists who do not make a living promulgating climate disaster porn. And yet it is the climate pornographers who are held before the public as the face of science in the rapidly building climate debate.

The same is true for peak oil doomerism. Those who make a living promoting peak oil doom have absolutely no doubt in their (public) minds as to what is coming. More objective analysts, on the other hand, see a wide range of possibilities for future supplies of energy, power, and fuels.

It will be a wild ride. For your own sake, don't limit your sweep of possibilities to those narrow ranges provided by vested interests of one type or another.

Beyond Energy Starvation: How Green Fanaticism Kills

As I write these lines, vast wildfires are sweeping through my home state of Colorado and other areas of the American west. Last week, two of my employees had to leave work early to rush home to evacuate their families from imminent danger. Hundreds of houses have already been destroyed, and thousands of acres of trees incinerated, and unknown myriads of wild animals burned alive. _Bob Zubrin

A Blind Agenda

Mr. Obama and Mr. Salazar are allowing the wildlands of the US west to burn in order to prove a point: They have the power to control access to energy, access to federal lands, the overall economic prosperity of the private sector, and what lands burn and what lands do not.

From DDT, to nuclear power, to fossil-fuel development, to genetically improved crops, the green movement has used the pretext of nonexistent or grossly exaggerated environmental hazards to block enterprises that would be of enormous benefit to people. _Bob Zubrin

The ongoing conflagration of the US wilderness could have been prevented, with wise land management, and with less of the green fanaticism displayed by Salazar y Obama.

This disaster was predictable, and promises to get worse. Over the past decade, from British Columbia to New Mexico, the world’s most rapid deforestation has been underway in the North American west, with an average of nearly six million acres of forest lost per year — roughly double the three million acres per year rate in Brazil. The culprits here, however, have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles, whose epidemic spread has turned over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition awaiting any spark to flare into catastrophe.

Yet while the global green movement has made a cause célèbre of the Amazon rain forest, they have done nothing to oppose those destroying our woods. Quite the contrary, they have been doing everything in their power to assist the wreckers. Indeed, over the past decade they have launched over a thousand lawsuits to block every attempt by the National Forest Service or others to take necessary counter measures. _Bob Zubrin

Beetle-killed logs make excellent timber. And if these dead trees -- and the infested intervening trees -- were logged and removed, wildfires would be confined to much smaller areas.

But an even worse mistake by Obama y Salazar in their green zeal: Pine beetles can be killed using a cheap and relatively safe -- but politically incorrect -- insecticide.

Of course, there is another tactic that could be used to save the forests, and that would be to use pesticides. For example, as long ago as the 1940s, it was shown that DDT is extremely effective in countering the Western Pine Beetle. Thus on pages 287-288 of Biology and Control of the Western Pine Beetle, US Department of Agriculture Forest Service Miscellaneous Publication 800, 1960, authors J.M. Miller and F.P. Kern report on numerous studies done in the period from 1944 through 1951 that showed 90 to 96% mortality within hours among pine beetles that came into momentary contact with trees that had been sprayed with 5% dilute DDT solutions.

However, the same environmental groups that have halted western logging regard the idea of using DDT to stop the pine beetle with near hysteria. Rachel Carson’s 1962 tome Silent Spring (which falsely argued that the vital pesticide DDT should be banned because it was killing the birds, when actually it was protecting them — and us — from insect-borne diseases) is virtually sacred scripture to the greens, and the successful campaign to ban DDT that followed from its promotion serves as the core of their proudest creation myth. In enshrining this myth, the anti-technology cult has chosen to heartlessly turn its head away from the massive amount of human misery it has caused through its narcissistic sacrifice of millions of African children to malaria. It must perforce regard the very idea that its object of hatred might be used to save our forests and their wildlife from incineration as nothing short of outright heresy.

From DDT, to nuclear power, to fossil-fuel development, to genetically improved crops, the green movement has used the pretext of nonexistent or grossly exaggerated environmental hazards to block enterprises that would be of enormous benefit to people. However, when faced with a real and catastrophic threat to the wild they have taken the other side — precisely because allowing the necessary protective measures would not constrain human liberty, but expand it, in however limited a way, and this would undermine the central purpose of the “environmentalist” exercise. _Bob Zubrin

Yet another way in which the Obama y Salazar regime is killing the wilderness, is by failing to utilise the most advanced tools of firefighting against the destructive forces.

It is bad enough that the faux environmentalist lefty Luddite green dieoff.orgiast drunken fools are choking the private sector with overregulation, overtaxation, and energy starvation. But when they intentionally devastate vast areas of wilderness in the name of faux environmental purity, ordinary people need to wake up.

Obama's Green Energy Policy Sinks Itself

Most intelligent people could have predicted that Obama's poorly considered green energy blitz would come to a bad end. But the Obama crew was hoping that it would stay above water at least until after the next election. No such luck.

The Obama Administration’s clean energy program is reminiscent of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. It is taking on water, the crew has no idea of what to do, and the band plays on.

Germany and other EU clean energy advocates are facing up to the reality that they can’t right their economies while heavily subsidizing the so called clean energies that are not commercially viable and are an economic dead weight. In spite of this, President Obama continues to push his clean energy program as the key to our economic future, job creation, and energy independence. Over a 3 year period, spending on so called clean energy technologies more than doubled–$17.9 billion in FY-2007 to $37.2 in FY-2010.

The environmental community and rent-seeker continue to support his policy but unfortunately, the analytical community has jumped ship.

...Technology and energy economics are the main drivers for determining when a new technology is commercially viable. People like the President who don’t care for fossil energy keep underestimating how strongly they are embedded in our economy because of economics and utility. Fracking has resulted in an abundance of natural gas that will slowly replace coal for power generation and will have a role as a transportation fuel. The current alternatives to gasoline and diesel for transportation are too costly with the current technology and no breakthroughs are on the horizon. _Fuel Fix

Obama's green energy blitz was all about paying back campaign bundlers, contributors, and supporters. It was never about jobs and it certainly was never about real energy -- at least as far as those who understood the fundamentals were concerned.

The world is full of poor jerks who are willing to follow a charismatic leader wherever he may go. Mass movements such as carbon hysteria, green dieoff.orgiasm, and peak oil doomerism all attest to that fact.

Never has there been a greater need for independent, competent, and intelligent humans, with the ingenuity to solve the many problems which have always presented themselves to humans since the beginning of the species.

Peak ingenuity, peak competent manpower -- those are the peaks we should be concerned about.

German Magazine FOCUS Warns Germans of Collapse

The people of Germany are not entirely unaware of the destructive course of energy starvation which its green leaders have plotted for the nation. And certainly economic and industrial leaders of Germany are beginning to understand that German politicians have thrown the nation's economy into the end game.

Betting the entire future of Germany -- and Europe -- on one huge throw of the green die, Germany's faux environmentalist politicians and bureaucrats have committed a crucial error of leadership. Their radical energy policies have endangered the very basis of modern life in Europe.

FOCUS... warns that Germany’s once super stable power grid, once a model of stability and reliability, is now on the brink of collapse.

...FOCUS reminds its readers that the big price driver is not “greedy” power companies, but government taxes and surcharges, which make up a whopping 45% of the price of electricity. In 1998 the 80 million or so Germans paid about €2.3 billion for various surcharges, taxes etc. on electricity. Today that figure is more than 1000% higher: €23.7 billion!

Not only the costs have become major obstacles, but also the technical feasibility of renewable energies is missing, especially wind and solar, which lack the infrastructure elements for taking the power to the markets that need them. These elements include power transmission lines, back-up energy systems for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, and power storage systems.

...If next winter turns out to be a harsh one and the power fails and leaves citizens out in the cold, then there are going to be lots of angry people. Germany’s social powder is tinder dry.

...One year ago Germany, in a fit of hysteria, ordered 8 nuclear power plants closed immediately and the remaining 9 closed by the year 2022. By 2050 it’s energy supply must be at least 80% supplied by renewable sources – costs be damned.

This has come to be knows as the German Energiewende or “energy transition”, roughly translated. And so the mad rush to renewable energy was on in earnest. Today, just a single year later, the high costs and insurmountable technical problems (we warned them) have spooked leaders and sparked a wave of uneasiness to sweep over the country.

...A FOCUS survey found that 41% of Germans flat out reject paying one cent more for renewables. In East Germany, that number jumps to 52%. Only a small minority of less than 10% could imagine paying $25 a month more.

German leaders are spooked by the spiralling out-of-control costs and government seizure now spreading though the energy sector. _FOCUS as excerpted in NoTricksZone

The article then quotes a number of German leaders expressing dismay at the dangerous path of Germany's energy policy.

H/T Global Warming Policy Foundation

Pitiful Germany: Who Can Save You Now?

Germany intends to produce 40% of its electric power from big wind and big solar by 2020 -- and 80% of its power from big green by 2050. German politicians say it will work. They are betting the entire country on it. The cost of Germany's great energy experiment -- Energiewende -- has risen to upwards of $250 billion over the next 8 years. That is about 7% of Germany's 2011 GDP. Electricity costs are already going up, and German electricity consumers must pay a 15% renewable-energy surcharge tax with every monthly bill.

Germany's government is betting its industry and its economy that green energy technologists can somehow pull a herd of rabbits out of a thimble, and save the day. Pathetic Germany: Who can save you now?

In 2010, the German government declared that it would undertake what has popularly come to be called an Energiewende—an energy turn, or energy revolution. This switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the most ambitious ever attempted by a heavily industrialized country: it aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by midcentury. The goal was challenging, but it was made somewhat easier by the fact that Germany already generated more than 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, which produces almost no greenhouse gases. Then last year, responding to public concern over the post-tsunami nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the eight oldest German nuclear plants shut down right away. A few months later, the government finalized a plan to shut the remaining nine by 2022. Now the Energiewende includes a turn away from Germany's biggest source of low-­carbon electricity.

To some German economists, the country's energy policy is simply wrong-headed. Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, is especially scathing. "The Energiewende is a turn into nowhere-land, because the green technologies are just not sufficient to provide a replacement for modern society's energy needs," he says. "It is wrong to shut down the atomic power plants, because this is a cheap source of energy, and wind and solar power are by no means able to provide a replacement. They are much more expensive, and the energy that comes out is of inferior quality. Energy-intensive industries will move out, and the competitiveness of the German manufacturing sector will be reduced or wages will be depressed." _TechnologyReview

The problems with Germany's plan are too many, too obvious, and too grave to dismiss. And yet that is exactly what Germany's politicians are doing, to the ultimate demise of the nation's industrial might and its economy. And when Germany goes, it will drag the rest of Europe down with it.

There is much about the current policy that arguably isn't logical. In the short term at least, the decision to close the nuclear plants means that the Energiewende will actually push utilities to rely more heavily on coal. Last year, for example, RWE fired up two long-planned new boilers at an existing facility near the Belgian border that burns the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all: brown lignite coal. Though these boilers are cleaner than the ones they're replacing, the coal plant is the largest of its kind in the world, and it's going full blast these days to keep up with power demand.

...Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners. Until large-scale, cheap storage is available, gas power plants, which can start up quickly and efficiently, will be the most practical way to cope with these situations. But there's little incentive to build such plants. Owners of gas plants meant to meet peak power needs can no longer count on running for a certain number of hours, since the need will no longer fall on predictable workday afternoons but come and go with the sun and wind. Says ­Ottmar ­Edenhofer, chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, "The design of the electricity market will change fundamentally. You have fluctuating demand, and at the same time a fluctuating supply. The linkage and the interplay in these two dimensions has become the subject of intense research. There could be new and emerging market failures." _TechnologyReview

Market failures? Certainly. But more importantly, power failures. As power blackouts and cascading failures become more common across Germany -- and thus across Europe -- Germans will find themselves immersed in the true experience of big green: Freezing or roasting in the dark.

Without enough cheap, reliable power to support the high-technology industry and the transportation system, Germany's economy—and that of Europe as a whole—could be in trouble. Already some German firms are building new manufacturing facilities elsewhere; for example, last year the chemical producer Wacker ­Chemie decided to build a polysilicon plant in Tennessee, partly because energy costs in Germany were so high. Weale says, "The quality of the supply would only have to deteriorate a little bit and it would be quite serious for this high-­technology industry. We've already seen, even without the lights going out, that industry is getting nervous." _TechnologyReview

Not long ago, German politicians were talking about having to spend $25 billion on new power infrastructure to facilitate new offshore wind installations and new solar power plants. Now, they are talking about up to $250 billion -- a significant portion of German GDP.

But in reality, German economists admit that no one knows how high the ultimate cost of the Energiewende will grow to be.

And in the end, what will Germany have? A former economic powerhouse of Europe, reduced to dependency upon intermittent unreliable forms of energy. A nation in demographic decline, stripped of its most profitable industrial producers -- because these producers could not depend upon Germany's power supply.

Rarely has a nation gone through the rapid ups and downs that Germany has undergone over the past century. It is not certain that the much depleted German character can survive the next collapse.

The Face of the Green Doomer EcoFascist Cult?

Green doomer eco-fascist cultists all follow similar guidelines: Slash the human population of the planet, although they themselves are unwilling to go first.. Blame free markets and western civilisation for most of the world's problems. Eschew all viable forms of large-scale energy in favour of those which are exorbitantly expensive and innately unreliable. Hate advanced technology, and want to push the world toward primitive lifestyles and global poverty. They are essentially anti-individual and pro-collective.

Members of any doomer cult will recognise the litany, whether from the climate change catastrophe cult, the peak oil doomer cult, the overpopulation doom cult, the global pollution doom cult, the biodiversity doom cult, etc.

Here is more from one of the horses' mouths:

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth .

We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.

A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

As is often the way with extremist central planners Linkola believes he knows what is best for each and every individual, as well as society as a whole:

Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic coutries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.

_azizonomics.com

H/T Zerohedge

This fellow is not actually so extreme, for a green. He may be a bit more honest and open about his convictions than most, but that is changing. Even the WWF -- which has written many of the supporting "studies" for the IPCC climate change reports -- has come out in support of policies which would ultimately result in a large scale human dieoff.

Is this also the face of the peak oil doomer cult? Certainly you find a lot of peak oil cult wankers fixated on doom porn, compulsively getting their doom fix whenever possible. It would be easy to assume that they actually want to see suburbia burning, that they would like to see the end of civilisation as we know it.

Not that most of the incompetent athols would survive very long after such an event.

Government Radiation Hysteria Contributes to Energy Starvation

This article is cross-posted from Al Fin blog

A recent study from MIT suggests that government guidelines to protect from low level radiation exposure may be verging on the the hysteric -- if not downright harmful.

The study, led by Bevin Engelward and Jacquelyn Yanch and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that when mice were exposed to radiation doses about 400 times greater than background levels for five weeks, no DNA damage could be detected. _MITNews

Life on Earth has always been exposed to variable levels of low level radiation. Background radiation has been a powerful driving force behind evolution, over the aeons.

Until now, governments have arbitrarily set radiation exposure limits, without basing them on realistic scientific studies. That may be about to change.

Until now, very few studies have measured the effects of low doses of radiation delivered over a long period of time. This study is the first to measure the genetic damage seen at a level as low as 400 times background (0.0002 centigray per minute, or 105 cGy in a year).

“Almost all radiation studies are done with one quick hit of radiation. That would cause a totally different biological outcome compared to long-term conditions,” says Engelward, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT.

...Background radiation comes from cosmic radiation and natural radioactive isotopes in the environment. These sources add up to about 0.3 cGy per year per person, on average.

“Exposure to low-dose-rate radiation is natural, and some people may even say essential for life. The question is, how high does the rate need to get before we need to worry about ill effects on our health?” Yanch says.

Previous studies have shown that a radiation level of 10.5 cGy, the total dose used in this study, does produce DNA damage if given all at once. However, for this study, the researchers spread the dose out over five weeks, using radioactive iodine as a source. The radiation emitted by the radioactive iodine is similar to that emitted by the damaged Fukushima reactor in Japan.

At the end of five weeks, the researchers tested for several types of DNA damage, using the most sensitive techniques available. Those types of damage fall into two major classes: base lesions, in which the structure of the DNA base (nucleotide) is altered, and breaks in the DNA strand. They found no significant increases in either type.

DNA damage occurs spontaneously even at background radiation levels, conservatively at a rate of about 10,000 changes per cell per day. Most of that damage is fixed by DNA repair systems within each cell. The researchers estimate that the amount of radiation used in this study produces an additional dozen lesions per cell per day, all of which appear to have been repaired.

Though the study ended after five weeks, Engelward believes the results would be the same for longer exposures. “My take on this is that this amount of radiation is not creating very many lesions to begin with, and you already have good DNA repair systems. My guess is that you could probably leave the mice there indefinitely and the damage wouldn’t be significant,” she says. _MITNews

What is the cost of government-instigated radiation hysteria? Look at how the world reacted to last year's tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Instead of focusing on the human tragedy of 30,000 human casualties, the media focus was on a nuclear power plant that lost power due to a poor design, discovered in hindsight, after an unanticipated natural disaster. And all of that, in spite of no one being killed or badly harmed from radiation exposure!

Advanced human societies are badly in need of reliable electrical power. The best source for that power is advanced nuclear reactors from gen III, gen IV, and beyond. But instead of pursuing an all out campaign of research and development to produce the needed electrical power generators, humans are retreating from the future in Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Italy, and more -- out of radiation hysteria.

It is time to return to a careful scientific study and to get away from hysterical herd behaviours, led by cynical governments and big money green organisations. That applies not only to nuclear hysteria, but to carbon hysteria, overpopulation hysteria, resource scarcity hysteria, and all the other forms of pseudoscientific hysteria that governments and the skankstream media love to torture the public with.

What Will Doomers Do When their Dooms Fail to Happen?

Many doomers -- particularly the thought-leaders of doom movements -- can be quite versatile and resourceful in the face of their many failed predictions. For those who make a living from doom, it helps to not only be clever, but to have an eye for the gullible rube, or sucker. Here is how doomer Paul Ehrlich has made a lucrative life from predicting countless dooms which never came to pass:

Ehrlich came to prominence in 1968 with the publication of his environmental blockbusterThe Population Bomb. The book’s central Malthusian thesis is that a growing population is unsustainable in a world of dwindling finite resources. As Malthus’ scenario failed to materialize, so too Ehrlich’s apocalyptic vision of hungry and dead bodies on the streets in the 1970s proved a total fiction. Not that this has deterred Ehrlich. He has continued to make a healthy living from a litany of population predictions – not one of which has come to pass.

The truth is that Ehrlich is the greatest failed prophet of our age. Yet amazingly, not only does he continue to collect his university stipend and pick up lucrative public appearance and book deals, for all his blatant failures, is still feted by the media. Take the journalistic drivel with which John Vidal’s Guardian article began at the end of April. Vidal’s interview announces Ehrlich as “the world’s most renowned population analyst”. So what track record of predictive success to date warrants such approbation? Ehrlich’s prophecies include:

That the battle to feed humanity was over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people, including Americans, were going to starve to death. (Of course, if eco-warriors butted out, GM foods could easily eradicate global hunger within a decade. But, in any event, food production is running well in excess of global population growth. To top it all, the obesity epidemic currently kills hundreds of thousands every year.)

England would not exist in the year 2000 (I just looked out of the window. It’s still here.)

“Smog disasters” would kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles in 1973.(Not only did it not happen, both cities continue to have the best air quality they have had in decades.)

In 1976, “before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity...in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” (Heard of the shale gas and oil revolutions that are set to last for hundreds of years and, beyond that, centuries of methane hydrates?)

In an Atlantic article in the late 1990s Ehrlich maintained that anyone who believed technology would provide the answers to the problem of scarcity was either a liar or a fool. (Heard of the technique of ‘hydraulic fracturing’ that has set in motion the energy game-changing shale revolution – not to mention deepwater reserves – facilitating century’s more of both gas and oil and cutting US gas prices by a quarter?)

In 1972 Ehrlich suggested adding a forced sterilization agent to “staple food” and to the water supply. (Shades of the SF movie Soylent Green? Would you trust any government who effectively ‘poisoned’ the food and water supply as part of a program of ‘forced sterilization’?)

All of Ehrlich’s solutions to his predictions are, of course, rooted in the need to overthrow democracy with a world government controlling and enforcing a global program of distribution of food and energy consumption. Ah yes, world domination – and a final solution. And if the very thought of this 1984-style one world government turns your liberty-loving stomach, consider what Ehrlich-esque policies have already achieved. In the 1950s the UN imposed a global ban on the use of DDT after environmentalists complained a few birds were accidently killed by DDT (actually through slight over-use of the chemical). DDT was singularly responsible for eradicating the world’s single greatest killer: malaria. As a direct result of the ban by the EPA in 1972, it is estimated that around a million people a year in sub-Saharan Africa alone die from the disease. The “solutions” of environmentalist visionaries should come with a global health warning attached.

No wonder Ehrlich has variously been referred to as “worse than Hitler” and “the Bernie Madoff of science”. To be fair, Ehrlich’s renewed concerns articulated in Vidal’s Guardian interview, about how the earth’s resources can sustain the 9 billion people predicted for 2050, was actually triggered by a new report from the Johnny-come-lately prophets-of-gloom at the Royal Society. Remember when the RS was the doyen of Newtonian empiricist real science? Not anymore. In a desperate bid to become appear “relevant” and justify its increasingly publicly-funded soaring price tag, the RS leadership is increasingly eschewing real science for speculative science.

Published in April 2012, the key recommendations of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet are thoroughly Malthusian. Like Ehrlich, the Royal Socity report is concerned about the Earth’s finite resources failing to keep up with population growth. It demands that developed and emerging economies (that’s everyone) “stabilise” and “reduce material consumption”. And, chiefly, that “reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership” to cut “fertility rates”. Pretty much your standard environmental doom and gloom – and based on an erroneous understanding of “finite resources”. As I have written elsewhere, the RS is developing a culture of anti-science by exchanging its empiricist soul for a mess of prophetic theory.

...No one would spend time publicly expounding preposterous prophetic theories that keep failing if there wasn’t a public appetite for them – and if there weren’t mega-bucks to be made in the speculative ‘futures’ market. Public speaking engagements, book tours, disaster movies, headline-grabbing articles majoring on apocalyptic and sensationalism and warnings are all money-spinning themes. Then there are the rewards of academia. In 1990 alone, even as the failed prophecies racked up, Ehrlich pocketed a cool $345,000 through winning the MacArthur Foundations’ “genius award” and another $60,000 being one half of an award from the Swedish Royal Academy of Science. “Genius” then, we must concede. Any butterfly specialist – which is what Ehrlich is – that can screw $400,000+ out of two international science academies must have some chutzpah. _GWPF

There is a sucker born every minute. Fortunately for purveyors of doom, many of these cognitive newborns are suckers for stories of doom. From carbon hysteria to resource depletion to overpopulation to global death from pollution, many people just want to see civilisation collapse, or to see their fellow man suffer.

The purveyors of doom, such as Ehrlich, are happy to find as many suckers as they can -- individuals or institutions. Stories of doom are easy to spin -- most of them are just recycled tales of earlier failed predictions, after all. They are making good livings from selling doom vomit, in other words. What a pleasant thought.