Germany's green debt emergency
It looks like the government has found the most obvious solution to the problem: declare another state of emergency to allow more borrowing for the Green agenda.
While North American newspapers frown with concern at the resounding Dutch election victory of Geert Wilders, an arguably more interesting crisis in neighbouring Germany is being somewhat overlooked.
In 2021, Germany held a Bundestag election that led to an awkward coalition government, with participation from the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Euro-liberal Free Democrats (FDP). The FDP normally gets somewhere between five and 12 per cent of the vote in Germany, and more often than not is in a position to swing the national government either to the centre-left Social Democrats or the centre-right Christian Democrats.
This time out, the chairman of the Free Democrats, Christian Lindner, was handed the finance portfolio and promised to rein in the spending impulses of the Reds and the Greens.
The German Constitution has an unusual rule that was introduced in 2009: a “debt brake” that limits the federal deficit in any given year to 0.35 per cent of gross domestic product. This is a pretty tight limit, which can be waived only if there is a recession, or the government declares a public emergency. (The analogous figure for the Canadian federal government was 0.6 per cent for the second quarter of this year and 1.2 per cent for the first.)
The debt brake helped Germany (and Chancellor Angela Merkel) establish a reputation for marvellous fiscal rectitude in the decade after it was created. But the multiple blows heaped on German public finances by COVID and the Russo-Ukrainian war (when do we start capitalizing the W?) began to add up.
The previous German government declared an emergency in 2020 and created a coronavirus relief fund that was outside the envelope imposed by the debt brake. In December 2021, with lots of credit left in the COVID instrument, the new part-Green German government decided, hey, looks like we’ve got some free money we can invest in green energy measures.
It decided to put 60-billion euros (about C$90 billion) of the COVID fiscal room into encouraging electrified home heating and transport. But opposition politicians naturally saw this as an unconstitutional swindle and an abuse of emergency powers. The constitutional status of the debt brake allowed them to sue in federal court — and last week they won. Pretty resoundingly, as it happens.
This punched a huge hole in German finances, and on Tuesday a humiliated Lindner announced an immediate freeze on federal spending. Meanwhile, the coalition could no longer paper over its fundamental differences.
The Greens hate the debt brake and would like to see it eliminated — but the necessary constitutional change would require the support of two-thirds of the Bundestag, which ain’t happening. The Social Democrats, leading the coalition but floundering in the polls, are naturally reluctant to raise taxes to meet the crisis. Lindner and the Free Democrats would prefer to stand up for austerity, but not at the expense of their own popularity.
As of this writing, it looks like the triad has found the most obvious solution to the problem: declare another state of emergency to allow more borrowing for the Green agenda.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/germanys-green-debt-emergency
**********************************************The Dutch revolt against Net Zero
One of the big losers of this week’s Dutch elections, in which right-winger Geert Wilders romped to victory, was Frans Timmermans, leader of a newly formed alliance of the Labour and Green parties. Timmermans is best known internationally as the former vice-president of the European Commission, where he was the architect and face of the EU’s flagship climate policy, the European Green Deal. To fans, he was hailed as the EU’s ‘climate pope’. Yet it is no exaggeration to say his stringent climate targets are set to impoverish Europe.
It seems the European mainstream media are finally taking note of the disastrous consequences of Timmermans’s Net Zero zealotry. Last week, Politico warned that his EU climate policies could be about to set off a wave of deindustrialisation on a scale we haven’t seen in 50 years.
The report asked the question: ‘Does the architect of Europe’s Green Deal truly understand what he’s unleashed?’ The answer can only be a resounding ‘Yes’.
The truth is that Timmermans is simply indifferent to deindustrialisation in the EU. Indeed, as noted in Politico, he ‘has been candid about the cost of his revolution’ and has warned that ‘the journey will be harder on some than on others’. Back in 2020, Timmermans admitted to the European Parliament that his wild goose chase for Net Zero would be ‘bloody hard’.
So who, precisely, is Timmermans asking to make sacrifices? Most of the burden of his green schemes will fall on the working class – both through job losses from factory closures and from ever rising energy costs.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/24/the-dutch-revolt-against-net-zero/
*********************************************The Green Energy Wall gradually coming into focus
It’s been obvious for many years that electricity generation from the intermittent wind and sun would never work to power a modern economy. But how would the infeasibility of the proposed energy transition finally manifest itself to put an end to the madness?
A couple of years ago I began writing about the the upcoming “Renewable Energy Wall,” for example in this piece from December 2021 titled “Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Renewable Energy Wall?” I called for readers to place their bets as to which among various jurisdictions would be the first to recognize that it could never achieve the net zero goal. But what would be the aspects of reality that would put an end to further renewable development? Would it be the soaring costs? Or perhaps the spreading blackouts? Or maybe the voters wising up? Or maybe other things that nobody had yet guessed?
Over the past few weeks and months, several parts of the coming Green Energy Wall have started to come into focus. The two factors that are emerging most significantly at this early stage are (1) voters starting to catch on, and (2) the inability of wind and solar developers to deliver projects at costs that are at all workable for consumers.
In the voter category, many places, particularly in Europe, have long had an all-party political consensus in favor of “climate action,” or some such nonsensical slogan, thus making it almost impossible for citizens to use their vote to push for any kind of sensible energy policies. But suddenly that is changing. First we had Argentina a week ago electing as President an avowed climate skeptic, Javier Milei.
And then on Wednesday, the Netherlands followed suit, giving the biggest bloc of seats in its Parliament to the party of another avowed climate skeptic, Geert Wilders. Wilders’s Freedom Party delivered a drubbing to both the “center right” party of the current Prime Minister Mark Rutte, as well as to a Labor/Green coalition headed by Frans Timmermans, who is the European Commission’s Vice President and a face for the EU’s noxious climate agenda.
Euro News today has some quotes from the manifesto of the Freedom Party:
[T]he PVV manifesto . . . declares: "We have been made to fear climate change for decades... We must stop being afraid." “The climate is always changing, for centuries,” the document goes on to say. "When conditions change we adapt. We do this through sensible water management, by raising dykes when necessary and by making room for the river. But we stop the hysterical reduction of CO2, with which, as a small country, we wrongly think we can "save" the climate.” The manifesto also calls for more oil and gas extraction from the North Sea and keeping coal and gas power stations open.
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Some better ways to net zero
Australia’s ALP/Green government and their media mates are using subsidies, taxes, and propaganda in a lemming-style attempt to move the whole country to 82 per cent ‘renewable’ energy by 2030 and ‘Net Zero Emissions by 2050’. Canny Aussies are buying diesel generators.
If they persist in their rush to Net Zero, we have a few ‘Net Zero’ suggestions for them.
‘Net Zero Immigration’
Every migrant adds to Australia’s emissions by consuming food, electricity, transport fuels, and housing. Thus, to reach Net Zero emissions, the rest of us must be rationed further to cope with these additional emitters.
‘Net Zero Tourists’
Every tourist adds to our emissions for transport, food, electricity, and accommodation. To achieve Net Zero emissions in the face of millions of immigrants, tourists, and foreign students will need slick carbon accounting, or penury for the rest of us. Victoria’s Dan Andrews was accidentally right for once – he cancelled the Commonwealth Games.
‘Net Zero growth of welfare and the bureaucracy’
Net Zero will not allow us to import hundreds of foreign workers for our mines, factories, and farms while we maintain battalions of bureaucrats shuffling files in air-conditioned ivory towers in the capital cities. Nor can we accept growing armies of able-bodied idlers sipping green smoothies at the beach.
We must get all healthy Aussies into real jobs.
‘Net Zero growth in locked-up land’
Wind and solar energy are sterilising huge and growing areas of land to produce their intermittent electricity. This greatly reduces the land available to grazing, forestry, fishing, exploration, and mining.
It’s time to call a halt.
There must be a net zero increase in land devoted to national parks, marine parks, world heritage playgrounds, locked-up Native Title area, or carbon credit and green energy wastelands.
‘Net Zero lies about electric vehicles’
They have a fanciful plan to replace our petrol and diesel cars, trucks, dozers, and tractors with fleets of yet-to-be-built battery or hydrogen powered vehicles. Where are the fast-refuelling stations for them all? And who has counted the extra emissions to mine and refine the metals for batteries, electric motors, turbines, and power lines? And where will we get the extra electricity for overnight re-charging of battery-powered vehicles as coal generators close, the sun sets, and the wind drops? (They have discovered the answer in ever-green California – electric powered trucks are being recharged with diesel generators.)
‘No Subsidies for Hydrogen’
In this unplanned rush to all-green energy some extol the coming of hydrogen powered vehicles. To produce green hydrogen requires large amounts of electricity plus nine tonnes of water for every tonne of hydrogen produced by electrolysis. Some even think that it makes sense to use large amounts of electricity to desalinate sea water to make green hydrogen. Such a process is not even ‘net zero’. It is hugely energy negative. Obviously the main goal is to harvest green subsidies or votes.
‘No Subsidies for ‘Pumped Hydro’
Greens think taxpayers should fund giant dams and turbines to generate electricity when green energy is on strike – at night, on cloudy days, and during wind droughts.
Does that mean that Greens believe we can steal water from every river system for green energy stabilisation while reducing the water stored for towns, farms, and orchards?
Let’s have the first dam on the Franklyn River in Tasmania (they want to be ‘the battery of the nation’).
‘Full Accounting of all Emissions’
Who is counting all the emissions being generated to manufacture, transport, and erect an ugly intrusive spider-web of roads and power lines to collect intermittent solar and wind energy from mountains, flats, seas, and roof-tops? Where is the carbon and dollar accounting for the metals, concrete, and hydrocarbon fuels that are needed?
We must also count the emissions to manufacture and erect all their planned green energy stabilisation schemes involving pumped hydro and giant batteries. All of this is a dash into the unknown without a coherent plan of how it will all work, or its full cost.
‘We need a Climate-Exit Referendum’
We are locked into never-ending climate conferences and all the costs and eco-babble generated by Paris Climate Agreement.
They want us locked into 15 minute cities with bicycles, walking shoes, oat-milk coffee, and fake meat burgers while they jet off to a new well-fed tourist destination every year. We have copped these annual climate-fests for 26 years now. The last one catered for about 40,000 delegates and hangers-on for 2 weeks of talk-fest that achieved nothing useful (as usual).
Let’s have a Clexit (Climate Exit) Referendum and abandon all liabilities under the Kyoto and Paris Climate Agreements.
‘The Net Zero Prize’
Our reward for reaching our 2030 Net Zero Emissions targets will be a precarious population with industry operating on the whims of the weather and an angry, urbanised, locked-down population faced with food, fuel, and electricity rationing.
There is no global warming crisis, but Blackouts Bowen (Australia’s Minister for Climate Panics and Zero Energy) is determined to create an electricity crisis. Power grid failure will be followed quickly by failure of food and water supplies to cities. Hopefully Canberra, (Australia’s Green Capital) will be the first to suffer.
The rest of Australia must vote no to this dangerous Net Zero delusion.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/the-net-zero-lemmings-rush
**************************************************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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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