Our most widespread, most destructive fantasy is a tantalizing shade of green. It is a blind, stubborn, juvenile fantasy.
Too many of us believe good intentions are enough. If our motives are wholesome, nothing bad can possibly happen.
If we support the climate change crusade, a ‘better world’ will miraculously emerge. Virtuous jobs. Cities transformed. Clean water. Fresh air. Healthy children.
But lovely-sounding crusades often only sound lovely. We reside, after all, in a flawed, grimy, difficult real world.
There are smart ways and dumb ways of achieving any goal. Our current responses to climate change are killing people. They’re impoverishing families. They’re also a monstrous waste of money.
A new academic paper tells us that, contrary to the rosy promises about solar power improving lives, the “shift from fossil fuels” to renewable energy “has virtually doubled the price of electricity,” increasing the risk poverty.
In what may be the understatement of the century, it concludes that the results “for society and economy have not been those expected or desired.”
The researchers examined data from 15 EU countries between 2005 and 2015.
They report that, following Germany’s lead, numerous other European Union nations rushed to subsidize solar power installations with obscene rates and 20-year contracts, even though this technology is “still inefficient, and geographical conditions are mostly unfavorable” in that part of the world.
In other words: a stupid idea spread like a virus, infecting nation after nation. In the rush to create the ‘better world’ that appears in the cartoon above, we made things worse. Regress rather than progress.
The bibliography at the end of that paper is impressive. Among the sources it cites is another analysis, published in 2012.
Titled Germany’s Solar Cell Promotion: An Unfolding Disaster, that report says Germany’s Renewable Energy Act has led to “explosive costs” in exchange for negligible environmental and employment benefits.
Regarding Germany’s heavily subsidized solar energy boom, the authors are caustic:
…this boom has proved to be a highly costly undertaking that does not confer any of the benefits that the advocates of renewable technologies claimed would arise.
Perhaps most poignantly, the predictions of employment creation have instead been contradicted by a series of bankruptcies in the [solar energy] manufacturing sector, with many of the job losses hitting the eastern part of the country, where unemployment is already relatively high…the government’s support of renewables is an outstanding example of misguided political intervention…that has had little to show for its purported benefits, such as greenhouse gas reductions.
It’s time to free ourselves from childish fantasy. It’s time to admit we inhabit a complicated, unpredictable universe full of fallible human beings. Creating a ‘better world’ requires rigorous thinking. It requires math.
Good intentions are not nearly good enough.
Read more at BigPicNews
Consider the huge footprint of these Green energy installations. Look at the picture atop this post. Squandered real estate potential. Raise those solar panels and put condominiums under them. Those wind turbines are perched on top of empty high rise towers. Fill them with apartments. Very efficient!
I wish that there was a way to force environmentalists to live in their green eyesores. THAT’S my green fantasy.
SONNYHILL, I agree with you, on making “environmentalists (and politicians) live in their green eyesores”, but they will have none of it. A few years ago, the Kennedy family, sued to keep wind turbines from being built just offshore, because it would spoil their view. Hypocrites, all!
I know. The lotus eaters living on the Scarborough Bluffs defeated wind turbines from spoiling their view. They like them in principle, just out of sight.
So how much land has been lost to the mad dreams of Eco-Wackos and the acres and acres of wind Turbines and Solar Panels how many Birds and Bats lost how many trees will be chopped down to make room for Wind Turbines and Solar Panels? Please tell me you sawdust for brains liberal Eco-Freaks
Great essay Donna. Keep up the good work.
The unfortunate thing is that no notice will be taken of Diana’s paper. The greens and their political followers are blind, deaf and stupid.
Countries that have move to renewable sources, such as wind turbines, their energy cost have sky rocketed. Denmark, Sweden and Finland have some of the highest energy cost, in the form of taxes, to consumers in the world, so much for low cost energy.
This article is a clear example of two things I often say on this web site. One, for liberals it doesn’t matter if their actions actually help a problem (of course with climate change there is no problem). What matters to them is that they feel good about something being done, even if it isn’t effective.
The other thing I often point out is that liberals are incapable of learning from the mistakes of others if doing so interferes with their political agendas. It is very clear that renewable energy is a failure in Europe. Yet there is currently a strong push to repeat that failure in the United States.
In the leftist ” mind ” or whatever passes for it :
Nothing induces mental orgasm more than the
Triumph of Form over Substance
The observed reality, not with standing.