Tilak Doshi
The Irrationality of Western Energy Policies
What causes a country to begin phasing out domestic oil and gas production while promoting the use of imported wood, a wasteful and inefficient fuel, to generate electricity?
What led policymakers to close a country's last remaining operating coal-fired power plant after nearly 150 years of using coal, and within months reach a point where generators had to be issued blackout prevention notices?
Britain is by no means the only Western country to embark on the perverse path of deindustrialization and national economic suicide. Why are the energy policies of major Western countries full of whims and irrationality?
For 30 years, the Western world has been promoting climate alarmism and is in a trance.
Energy policy chaos
There is overwhelming evidence of confusion in Western energy policy. It is appropriate to begin with Germany, the epicenter of the green trance where policymakers have been hypnotized. This follows decades of media worship of the Climate Church, trumpeted by its intellectual chattering class.
Let’s start with the destruction of thousands of acres of ancient Teutonic forest—the setting for the Brothers Grimm folk tale—to make way for wind farms. Germany's green theorists miss the irony that their energy policies threaten endangered bird and bat species while being sacrificed on the altar of Mother Gaia. For those not steeped in the miasma of green ideology, it may seem particularly absurd to consecrate thousands of windmill crosses with petroleum-based fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin arms made in furnaces fueled by coal or natural gas in China .
Another example of Germany's green madness includes shutting down nuclear power plants and then approving the return of dirty lignite power plants to service to keep German households warm in the winter of 2022/23.
The German commentator Pierre L. Gosselin wrote an article earlier this year asking bluntly: “The more ‘green’ Germany becomes, the bloodier its economy will become. How much blood does an economy bleed before it dies? Reuters reported in July that the economy was expected to shrink by 0.2% in 2024, after previously forecasting a sluggish 0.3% growth, further exacerbating the country's economic downturn over the past two years. When the link between high energy costs and deindustrialization is widely discussed, it’s implausible to call it an “unexpected” contraction, as news lines do.
Let's look at other absurdities. We recently learned that, in the wisdom of Scandinavian planners, Danish dairy farmers must pay an annual tax of 672 kronor ($96) per cow “because of the earth-heating emissions they produce.” The policy proposal follows widespread farmer protests across Europe, which have escalated across the continent from Sweden to Spain and Poland to Portugal since first launching in the Netherlands in October 2019.
Europe's great peasant uprisings led to a shock victory for the populist Peasants' Citizen Movement (BBB) in the Netherlands in March, giving it a lead over the ruling party in the Senate. In reaction to the centre-left Greens in government, farmers have become an important part of the country's political future. As part of the EU Green Deal, which aims to make agriculture “carbon neutral” by 2050, officials in Brussels have assured citizens that their farms will become more “sustainable”, “environmentally friendly” and “biodiverse”.
Perhaps the proudest is Ed Miliband (“Crazy Ed”), the paradoxically named Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. The “net zero” policy implemented by the Conservative and New Labor governments in the UK for 14 years has caused unprecedented damage to the UK's energy security. During Crazy Ed's brief tenure, the country's last coal-fired power station and its Port Talbot steelworks were closed, regulators rushed to approve solar farms over the objections of local communities, and oil and gas field development in the North Sea was sacrificed. An undisputed climate lawsuit brought by Greenpeace.
As expected, it was reported in July that the UK had dropped out of the top ten manufacturing countries for the first time. Miliband's decision not to challenge a lawsuit brought by Greenpeace harms the country's investment climate. Brendon Long, research director at investment firm Zeus Capital, said Miliband's decision would put wider investments in the UK at risk. He said: “London has dropped out of the top 10 capital markets in terms of funds raised by IPOs. This may reflect financial markets' growing focus on the UK as a jurisdiction that values and defends property rights and respects the sanctity of agreements reached. Jurisdiction.
To be fair to Crazy Ed, some of these developments were already underway under the last Conservative government. Nonetheless, he has built a resume that would be the envy of even Brussels' craziest left-wing bureaucrats. One can even ignore the odd video of him singing and playing the ukulele in front of a windmill.
But the most shocking aspect of the Labor government’s short record is that it slashed winter fuel bills for millions of pensioners while committing almost £22bn to unproven technology projects to capture and store CO2 emissions. In July, Ed Miliband rubbed salt in the wound by insisting that Labor would meet its pledge to provide £11.6 billion in overseas climate aid.
Things weren't much better across the pond. President Biden has pledged to put climate change front and center in policy across the administration. It was followed by the dual-titled Inflation Reduction Act, which unleashed a debt-driven tsunami on favored “green” industries—solar, wind, electric vehicles, batteries, hydrogen— Make subsidies. I’ve written about Biden’s fragmented and contradictory energy policy elsewhere ( here , here , and here ).
Model not fit for purpose
These absurd and painful “net zero” policies in the West have come at a huge cost to ordinary workers, and true believers in the climate church use the “climate crisis” as an excuse to justify them. The response from the likes of Miliband is that when the house is on fire you don't do nothing but “whatever it takes”. No doubt the lockdown and vaccination directives imposed by “experts” on coronavirus will be used as examples.
The two hysterias of COVID-19 and climate have much in common. Both stem from unfit for purpose and unverifiable computer models that escalate alleged risks based on flimsy assumptions. Unpublished 16th In March 2020, Neil Ferguson, a professor at Imperial College London, published an explosive report warning that 510,000 people would die in the country if it did not immediately adopt a coronavirus suppression strategy.
By March 25, Ferguson had lowered his forecast of 500,000 deaths in the UK to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction of 25 times. . It was later discovered that Dr. Ferguson's model was not fit for purpose.
Just as Ferguson's model prompted governments to impose COVID-19 lockdowns on nearly 3 billion people around the world, Professor Michael Mann's “hockey stick” model is used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, mainstream media and politicians to promote man-made global warming ( Now called climate warming). But like Professor Ferguson's model, Dr. Mann's work seems more in line with junk science.
The hysteria has attracted governments, activist academics seeking research funding, and left-wing billionaire foundations supporting the vast enterprise that is the climate-industrial complex. The great essayist HL Mencken had this to say about government: “The whole purpose of realpolitik is to keep the populace on their toes (and therefore noisy) by threatening them with an endless series of great bogeymen (all of them imaginary). to be taken to a safe place).
But it would be naive to view the climate industrial complex as a vast conspiracy. In his book Unresolved, Steve Koonin offers a more plausible explanation, arguing that a “self-reinforcing alignment of opinions and interests” works to drive climate alarm. Therefore, governments take practical political action arrive Mencken, arrogant academics “saving the planet” with junk science and exaggerated claims, NGOs and crony businesses paying bribes to regulate rents, intellectuals virtue signaling with extravagant beliefs while a vast following knows little. Feel a lot of.
A version of this article was published by 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 Alliance.
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