No, the UK’s energy woes have not really been caused by net zero
The United Kingdom has a bit of a retro vibe to it right now – and I don’t mean the fashion or music.
Long queues at petrol stations, empty supermarket shelves and soaring electricity bills are evoking memories of the dark, trying days of the 1970s. While Prime Minister Boris Johnson is trying to play down the seriousness of the situation, nobody can say with certainty that things won’t get even worse.
For [Australian PM] Scott Morrison, the timing is far from helpful. As his government embarks on a fraught internal debate over whether to take a net-zero emissions policy to the COP26 climate summit in November, some MPs are seeking to frame the energy and transport crisis in Britain as a cautionary tale on why taking tougher action on climate change is a bad idea.
Nationals senator Matt Canavan already had a crack at it on Monday by attempting to link a picture of a depleted supermarket shelf to the net-zero agenda. Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce says Britain has “completely botched” its transition away from coal. And a group of Conservative MPs in Britain also hopes a potential winter of discontent will force Johnson to scale back his green agenda.
But the truth is the UK’s woes have not been caused by decarbonisation. If anything, the turmoil might actually help make the case for a more rapid transition away from fossil fuels.
The crisis squeezing Britain consists of three main problems, and two of them have absolutely nothing to do with climate policy. The supermarket shortages and the long lines at petrol stations are instead down to a simple lack of truck drivers. Without them, goods can’t get to the stores and fuel can’t be delivered to the bowser. Panic buying has only made things worse.
Thousands of service stations across Britain have run dry with a truck delivery shortage sparking panic the nation is running out of petrol.
The Road Haulage Association believes there’s a shortage of about 100,000 drivers in the UK. Thousands of foreign drivers have gone home because of Brexit and more because of coronavirus. The pandemic has also caused a huge backlog for driver testing, and the shortages have been exacerbated by a growing number of truckies retiring.
None of those facts stopped Canavan, a former cabinet minister and economist, from tweeting a picture of empty supermarket shelves with the words ‘Net Zero Emissions...’. Even Canavan’s own colleague, Liberal MP Jason Falinski, can’t let such deception pass without challenge.
“This has been a fundamental feature of the debate in Australia from day one – misappropriation of cause and effect,” Falinski says.
“The mistake made in the past is that those kinds of claims have been allowed to go on unchecked. I think it’s important now that people actually stand up and say, ‘look, there is no relationship between this and the thing you’re arguing against’.”
The transport crisis will probably ease over the coming weeks but the more serious problem revolves around skyrocketing natural gas prices. Unlike Australia, where gas represents a fraction of the overall energy mix, in Britain it makes up nearly 40 per cent. About 85 per cent of homes use gas central heating.
Industry group Oil and Gas UK says wholesale prices have surged 250 per cent since January and a whopping 70 per cent since August alone.
But market forces – not government climate policy – are chiefly to blame. Surging global demand driven by the post-lockdown recovery, lower supply from Russia, fierce bidding for liquefied natural gas by Asia, and Europe’s cold 2020-21 winter has put real pressure on reserves and supply. A fire affecting a key undersea cable used to import electricity from France hasn’t made things any easier.
The UK hasn’t helped itself by storing much less gas than other nations in Europe. However Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, who has responsibility for energy policy, says this is a “red herring”.
“There’s no way that any storage in the world will mitigate a quadrupling of the gas price in four months, as we’ve seen,” he told MPs. “The answer to this is getting more diverse sources of supply, more diverse sources of electricity, through non-carbon sources.”
In another complication, there has been a lack of wind to turn thousands of turbines in the North Sea, right when the gas shortage meant renewables were really needed. This is not ideal, but far from the primary cause of the price rises causing so much grief for voters.
That honour rests with the increasing difficulty of importing scarce supplies. And if that doesn’t make the case for a carefully managed increase in domestic renewable capacity and storage – and not a decrease as Canavan and others like to argue – what will?
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‘New Yorker’ Mag Pushes Activist Who Calls for ‘Intelligent Sabotage’ to Push Climate Change Agenda
The New Yorker recently featured a left-wing, enviro activist who said that activists should perpetrate “intelligent sabotage” to destroy infrastructure to force governments to institute the radical climate change agenda.
“Andreas Malm insists that the environmental movement rethink its roots in nonviolence and instead embrace ‘intelligent sabotage,’” the New Yorker’s description of the Malm interview states.
Malm, who is a professor from Lund University, tells the New Yorker interviewer that he supports “a call for escalation, a call for the movement to diversify its tactics and move away from an exclusive focus on polite, gentle and perfectly peaceful civil disobedience.”
“I am recommending that the movement continues with mass action and civil disobedience, but also opens up for property destruction,” the extremist environut added.
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Malm went on to insist that destroying property is “morally legitimate” to advance the leftist, pro-communist movement.
“If people in that region were to attack the construction equipment or blow up the pipeline before it’s completed, I would be all in favor of that. I don’t see how that property damage could be considered morally illegitimate given what we know of the consequence of such projects,” Malm continued.
This is a typical leftist, here. Every one of these hard ore leftists support political violence and terrorism. And even when they pretend that they don’t also support murder, they always do when all is said and done.
Regardless, it is impossible to destroy property and at the same time assure that no people are hurt or killed.
And these leftists know it.
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Ford Announces Surprise $11 Billion Investment in Electric Cars
The Ford Motor Co. gave the auto industry a jolt Monday with word that it plans to spend $11.4 billion on new production sites in Tennessee and Kentucky where it plans to build electric pickup trucks and cars — and the batteries to power them — on a massive scale.
It will also create 11,000 jobs in the two states that have struggled to recover from the collapse of the coal industry.
Ford projected that by 2030, some 40 percent of his company’s vehicles will be electric. He vowed to make believers out of the skeptics who fear a switch to electric from internal combustion engines means sacrificing power.
Ford Executive Bill Chair suggested that even law enforcement would be involved in the transition.
“I actually don’t think it’ll be that hard once, once they see what these vehicles can do,” Ford said. “For instance, they’re faster than lightning, so to speak off the line, they’re very quick, faster than anything else that’s out there.”
The new battery-powered Ford Mustang Mach-E, which can go from zero to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds, is going to be road-tested by the Michigan State Police, he said.
So, even though these cars will be fundamentally different from the vehicles our parents and grandparents grew up with, they’re still going to be fun.
https://flagandcross.com/shocker-ford-announces-surprise-11-billion-investment-in-electric-cars/
*******************************************Surging wind industry faces its own green dilemma: landfills
Wind turbines have become a vital source of global green energy but their makers increasingly face an environmental conundrum of their own: how to recycle them.
The European Union's share of electricity from wind power has grown from less than 1% in 2000, when the continent began to curb fossil fuels, to more than 16% today.
As the first wave of windmills reach the end of their lives, ten of thousands of blades are being stacked and buried in landfill sites where they will take centuries to decompose.
Spanish turbine maker Siemens Gamesa this week launched what it called a "game changer" - the first recyclable blades, which use a technology that allows their carbon and glass fibres to be reused in products like screen monitors or car parts.
"We have reached a major milestone in a society that puts care for the environment at its heart," said Andreas Nauen, chief executive of Siemens Gamesa, which expects the blades to become the industry standard.
Europe is the world's second largest producer of wind-generated electricity, making up about 30% of the global capacity, compared to China's 39%, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, an industry trade association.
LANDFILL
Wind Europe, a Brussels-based trade association which promotes the use of wind power in Europe, expects 52,000 blades a year to need disposal by 2030, up from about 1,000 today.
"The public want to be reassured that wind energy is fully sustainable and fully circular," said WindEurope's chief executive, Giles Dickson, describing Siemens Gamesa's new recyclable blade as a "significant breakthrough".
While wind turbine blades are not especially toxic, the resulting landfill, if improperly handled, may contribute to dangerous environmental impacts, including the pollution of land and waterways.
All forms of energy have some environmental cost but renewables, almost by definition, cause less damage to the planet, said Martin Gerhardt, Siemens Gamesa's offshore wind chief.
"If you look at oil wells and the spills or if you consider ... methane leaks, compared to the fossil industries, wind is the lesser problem," he said.
Wind power is one of the cleanest forms of energy, with a carbon footprint 99% lower than coal and 75% less than solar, according to a study by Bernstein Research, a U.S.-based research and brokerage firm.
Its emissions come mainly from the production of iron and steel used in turbines and concrete for windmill foundations.
If these were mitigated by techniques such as carbon capture and storage - where carbon dioxide is buried underground - "you'd be able to cut out the carbon footprint completely," said Deepa Venkateswaran, the study's author.
CHALLENGE
The growing mountains of waste created by old blades has become a rallying point for groups opposed to wind turbines, which they also say are noisy and spoil the countryside.
But landfill is likely to remain the preferred disposal option because it is the cheapest, said Eric Waeyenbergh, advocacy manager at Geocycle, a sustainable waste management firm.
"If you just throw it in the landfill, this is the cheapest price you can have when you're dismantling the windmill. And that's a problem because there's no mandatory recycling or recovery obligation," he said.
Geocycle and WindEurope are lobbying for landfills to be banned across Europe where only four countries - Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland - have outlawed the landfilling of composite materials, such as wind turbine blades.
Geocycle co-runs a cement kiln in Germany, with building industry giant Lafarge, which is partly fuelled by burning thousands of tons of old wind turbines, which create less carbon dioxide than fossil fuels.
Recyclable blades can also be ground up for use in products such as rearview car mirrors and insulation panels, or heat-treated to create materials for roof light panels and gutters.
However, industry groups say these techniques are not currently available at commercial scale or at a price that would make them viable alternatives to landfill.
David Romero Vindel, co-founder of Reciclalia, which cuts and shreds turbine blades for recycling as carbon fibre yarn and fabric, said a landfill ban would help his firm.
"We need the EU to push the sector in this direction of recycling," he said.
Vivian Loonela, a spokeswoman for the European Commission said it will review its landfill policies in 2024.
"The recycling of (windmill) composite fraction remains a challenge due to the low value of the recycled product and the relatively small amount of waste (produced), which does not stimulate the recycling markets," she said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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