Tilak Doshi
The Irrationality of Western Energy Policy
What led a country to start reducing domestic oil and gas production while promoting the use of imported wood – a wasteful and inefficient fuel – for power generation?
What led policymakers to close the last coal-fired power plant still in operation after nearly 150 years of using coal and within months arrive at a situation where blackout prevention notices must be issued to power generators?
Britain is not the only Western country to go down the path of deindustrialization and national economic suicide. Why is the energy policy of major Western countries influenced by magical and irrational thinking?
The Western world is in a hypnotic trance from 30 years of relentless propaganda pushing climate alarmism.
Energy Policy Chaos
Evidence abounds of the chaos wrought on energy policy in the West. It’s only fitting to start with Germany, the epicenter of green trance that makes policy there is hypnosis. This follows decades of worship in the Climate Church in the media and spouted by its intellectual chattering class.
Let’s start with the destruction of thousands of hectares of ancient Teutonic forest – the setting for the folktales of the Brothers Grimm – to make way for wind farms. The irony is lost on German green ideologues that their energy policy threatens endangered species of birds and bats as they sacrifice on the altar of Mother Gaia. Consecrating thousands of windmills crucifixes with arms of petroleum-based glass-fiber-reinforced polyester resin produced in Chinese furnaces fueled by coal or natural gas can seem particularly absurd to those who are not steeped in the miasma of green ideology.
Another example of Germany’s green madness includes shutting down nuclear power plants, only to allow dirty lignite power plants to come back online for German households to stay warm in the winter of 2022/23.
German commentator Pierre L. Gosselin published an article earlier this year that bluntly asked, “The ‘greener’ Germany is, the bloodier the economy. How much is the economy worth before it dies?” Adding to the economic gloom that has afflicted the country over the past two years, Reuters reported in July that the economy is expected to contract 0.2% in 2024 from the previous forecast of an anemic 0.3% growth. It beggars belief to call this contraction “unexpected” as cable news does when the link between high energy costs and deindustrialization has been widely discussed in the media.
Let’s go back to another absurdity. We recently learned that under the Scandinavian planners’ policy, dairy farmers in Denmark must pay an annual tax of 672 krone ($96) per cow “for the planet-warming emissions they produce.” This policy proposal comes as a result of widespread farmers’ protests in Europe that have been rising – across the length and breadth of the continent, from Sweden to Spain, Poland to Portugal – since they first started in the Netherlands in October 2019.
The Great European Peasant Revolt led to a landslide victory in March by the populist Peasant-Citizen Movement (BBB) in the Netherlands, putting the ruling party in the Senate. As a reaction to the left-wing green parties in government, farmers are an important part of the equation in the country’s political future. As part of the EU Green Deal to make agriculture consistent with “carbon neutral” by 2050, Brussels bureaucrats assured their citizens that farms will be more “sustainable”, “environmentally friendly” and “biodiverse.”
Perhaps the pride of the place is Ed Miliband (“Mad Ed”), the British Secretary of State for the oxymoronically named Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. The UK’s “net zero” policy, pursued by both Conservatives, in power for 14-years, and the new Labor government, has compromised the country’s energy security like nothing else. In Mad Ed’s short time in office, the country’s last coal plant and the Port Talbot steel mill closed, regulatory approval for solar farms was rushed through overwhelming local community objections, and the development of North Sea oil and gas fields was sacrificed. Unchallenged climate claims launched by Greenpeace.
Unsurprisingly, it was reported in July that Britain had fallen out of the top ten manufacturing countries for the first time. Mr Miliband’s decision not to challenge the legal action brought by Greenpeace has damaged the country’s investment environment. According to Brendon Long, director of research at investment firm Zeus Capital, Mr Miliband’s decision will put more investment in Britain at risk. He said: “London has fallen out of the top 10 capital markets in terms of money raised from initial public offerings. This may reflect that the financial market is increasingly concerned with the UK as a jurisdiction that respects and defends property rights and respects the sanctity of agreements made.
In fairness to Mad Ed, some of these developments had already taken place during the tenure of the previous Tory government. Instead, he has built a CV that would be the envy of the wildest left-wing Brussels bureaucrats. One can even ignore the weird cringe-worthy video of him singing and strumming his ukulele in front of a windmill.
But most egregious in the Labor government’s short record is the move to cut winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners while pledging almost £22bn for projects in unproven technology to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions. Rubbing salt into the wound, Ed Miliband confirmed in July that Labor would honor its £11.6bn pledge for overseas climate aid.
Not much better across the pond. President Biden has pledged to make climate change front and center of his administration’s policies throughout the administration. This has been followed by the duplicitously named Inflation Reduction Act that unleashed a debt-fueled tsunami of subsidies on favored “green” industries – solar, wind, EVs, batteries, hydrogen. I’ve written about Biden’s fragmented and contradictory energy policies elsewhere ( here , here and here ).
Model Not Fit For Purpose
The absurd and immiserating “zero” policies of the West implemented at great cost to ordinary working men and women are justified by the true believers of the Climate Church with the plea of ”climate crisis”. Mr Miliband and his friends will respond that if the house is on fire, you don’t set it on fire but do “whatever it takes”. Of course, the lockdown orders and vaccinations carried out by the “experts” in response to Covid will be offered as examples.
These twin hysteria – Covid and climate – are almost identical. Both from not fit-for-purpose and impossible to validate the computer model that escalated the alleged risk in flimsy notions. Not published 16Th The March 2020 bomb report by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, warned of 510,000 deaths in the country if the country did not immediately implement a strategy of Covid suppression.
On March 25, Ferguson predicted half a million fatalities in England set down to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction was credited to the UK lockdown, but it was only implemented for 2 days. previous. Then it was found that the model of Dr. Ferguson is not fit for purpose.
Just like the Ferguson model that pushed governments to implement a Covid lockdown affecting nearly 3 billion people on the planet, Professor Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” model is being used by the UN IPCC, the mainstream media and politicians to push for man-made global warming (now called climate. change -climate change or crisis) hysteria over the past two decades. But like Prof Ferguson’s model, Dr Mann’s work seems more in line with junk science.
Hysteria attracts governments, activist academics to raise research funds, and left-wing billionaire foundations that support the big corporations that are the climate industrial complex. The great essayist HL Mencken said of government: “The purpose of practical politics is to make the people anxious (and therefore tumultuously brought to safety) by threatening them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all illusions.”
But it would be naive to see the climate industrial complex as a vast conspiracy. Steve Koonin in his book Unsettled offers a more plausible explanation, seeing the “alignment of perspectives and self-reinforcing interests” devoted to promoting climate alarmism. So, the government is doing practical politics a la Mencken, hubristic academics “save the planet” with junk science and hyperbolic claims, NGOs and business cronies grift to hire regulations, intellectual virtue signals with luxurious beliefs and masses of followers know little but feel a lot.
This version of the article was published by The Daily Skeptic (https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/19/the-irrationality-of-western-energy-policies/)
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, former Forbes contributor, and member of the CO2 Coalition.
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