Dozens of US coal plant closures delayed as green energy shift slows
As many as 40 US coal-fired power plants that were slated to shut will run for longer than expected, with operators delaying plans to retire them as supply-chain issues and reliability concerns slow the transition to greener energy.
The plants have almost 17 gigawatts of capacity, and some have pushed back their planned closures by as long as five years, according to Andrew Blumenfeld, director of data analytics at McCloskey by Opis. Consol Energy Inc., one of the largest US coal miners, cited the research in its third-quarter earnings report Tuesday as evidence that demand for coal remains robust.
The delays reveal headwinds for a large-scale shift to cleaner energy, said Blumenfeld. Some coal plants were supposed to be replaced by solar power, but renewables projects have had setbacks as clogged supply chains slow panel deliveries from China. In other cases, utilities or grid operators reconsidered closures to ensure that enough power would be available, especially during summers marked by extreme heat waves.
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It’s sinister and anti-human to stop growth
The absurd and sinister vogue for degrowth reflects a society that is repudiating the optimistic rationality that created modernity. The WEF produces crackpot views because the demoralised, post-truth, post-rational West has become a culture of cranks.
Last month’s prime minister, Liz Truss, came to grief because her fanatical belief in economic growth crashed the economy into a wall. While condemning her recklessness, many nevertheless sympathised with the goal of growing the economy to produce increased prosperity and progress. After all, who wouldn’t agree with that?
It turns out that plenty of people wouldn’t, including the World Economic Forum.
The WEF is an international, non-governmental lobbying organisation whose membership comprises political and business leaders and other global movers and shakers. Known for its annual talk-fest in the Swiss resort of Davos, its mission is to improve the world “by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”.
Those agendas involve concepts such as “sustainability”, “inclusion” and “stakeholder capitalism”, which its website suggests have been inspired by Greta Thunberg, the teenage green activist, who it says reminds us that the “environmental unsustainability” of the current economic system “represents a betrayal of future generations”.
The WEF is the target of tiresome conspiracy theorists who believe it dictates everything governments do that corresponds to the liberal internationalist and green agenda. A moment’s thought suggests this is implausible. The WEF, which is little more than a glorified talking shop, brings together participants from about 100 countries, many of which aren’t liberal, internationalist or green. But just because conspiracy theorists say silly things doesn’t mean the WEF isn’t also out to lunch.
Its new thing is something called “degrowth”. According to its website, this means shrinking the economy in order to use fewer of the world’s “dwindling resources” and combat climate change. It means no longer assuming that “growth is good”. You may think it’s good because it means progress, advancement, improvement. Tsk! Growth is apparently very, very bad — even though it has given the world everything from cancer treatments to indoor plumbing.
In The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler observes that degrowth would suppress innovation and lead to stagnation. Societies that don’t grow, he writes, eventually devolve into oppression, chaos, anarchy and then ruin.
Not at all, says the WEF; supporters of degrowth maintain it doesn’t mean “living in caves with candles”, just living a bit more simply.
No it doesn’t. Degrowth involves deindustrialisation. Indeed, the WEF implicitly blames industrialisation for climate change, citing the claim that man-made global warming started in the 1830s.
So much energy is expended on climate trends that the philosophical origins of modern environmentalism tend to be obscured. Curbing growth is, in fact, foundational to the environmental movement, whose agenda is central to the WEF’s preoccupations.
In the 1970s, while western politicians were promoting technological expansion and the consumer society, the dread of overpopulation was also rising. The environmental campaigners Barbara Ward and René Dubos, who wrote the framework for the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, argued that the Earth’s species depended upon a finite stock of raw natural materials. In the same year, the Club of Rome argued that natural resources couldn’t support rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100.
This all had its roots in the late 18th-century theory advanced by Thomas Malthus that population growth would outstrip food. This has been proved spectacularly wrong. Yet the WEF again channels Malthus by decrying “the myth of infinite growth” which must be curbed as natural resources “dwindle closer to their reasonable limits”.
Environmental apocalypse is, of course, the agenda of Cop27, next month’s UN climate change conference in Egypt. But it’s not the WEF that’s putting pressure on Rishi Sunak to change his decision to stay away. It’s because so many members of his own party have been swept up in this catastrophising, which has become unchallengeable and axiomatic for such a lot of people. This reflects a broader cultural shift that views modernity and progress as bad.
Western society, where industrialisation started and which drove progress and modernity, is said to be so mired in the original sins of whiteness and colonialism that it needs to be deconstructed and a new society created in its place. Critical race theory is intimately involved in upending progress, smashing the belief in achievement through merit, which is an engine of growth.
The shift has gone even further. Just as Malthusianism led to the horrors of eugenics — a progressive doctrine until the Nazi party gave it such lousy PR — so too the degrowth agenda is anti-human, based on the belief that the planet’s biggest problem is the human beings who people it. And the below-replacement western birth rate already suggests a culture that no longer wants to reproduce itself.
Halting economic growth wouldn’t just stop in its tracks the improvements in society that we all take for granted. Growth is a characteristic of the natural world. It is hardwired into us as human beings. To want to halt growth is akin to wanting to stop the world.
The absurd and sinister vogue for degrowth reflects a society that is repudiating the optimistic rationality that created modernity. The WEF produces crackpot views because the demoralised, post-truth, post-rational West has become a culture of cranks.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f14f03ca-595d-11ed-9b1f-f7c251e9dfdc
*************************************************Wishful thinking about wind and solar is going to come up against reality soon ... and there will be a world of pain in the awakening
This time last year one bitcoin was worth more than $98,000. Today it is worth just more than $32,000, a 60 per cent decrease in 12 months. If you were around or were involved with cryptocurrency communities a year ago, it was common to see and hear vainglorious claims about the potential of bitcoin to replace the US dollar, revolutionise the financial industry and save the world.
Much of that rhetoric has quietened after this year’s crash, which has wiped nearly $US2 trillion ($3.14 trillion) off the cryptocurrency market. But the pain felt by everyday retail investors who bought into the hype and risked (and lost) their savings remains real. Go online to Reddit forums and one can read stories posted by real people describing their investment in crypto as the biggest mistake of their life.
Story after story shows ordinary people glimpsing financial freedom, only for it all to vanish in a matter of hours during the crash. At one point during the market collapse this year, the top-voted post in the Reddit cryptocurrency forum was a link to a suicide prevention hotline.
In a recent podcast with psychologist Steven Pinker, respected 98-year-old investor Charlie Munger says the biggest mistakes he has made in his long career were born out of wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is the bias we succumb to when we are unable to separate what we want to be true from what actually is true and what is rational according to the evidence we have in front of us. At its core, wishful thinking is an inability to deal with reality as it is and an unwillingness to update our beliefs when new evidence emerges.
In financial bubbles, the wishful thinking of a single investor multiplies. When we invest in an asset or industry with all of our friends, and we all want the same investment to succeed, wishful thinking dovetails with conformity, creating what I call “wishful groupthink”. When wishful groupthink is infused with politics and ideology, it becomes cult-like, impervious to reason and impervious to new evidence.
The cryptocurrency bubble is one of many examples of wishful groupthink. Another is the overwhelming hype associated with renewable energy technologies, specifically wind and solar. While the scaling up of such projects in Australia is remarkable – and the increasing output of clean energy impressive – much of the ideological rhetoric remains overcooked, overhyped and downright irresponsible.
It is claimed by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and the teal independent MPs that renewable energies will a) reduce emissions and b) make Australia a “renewable energy superpower” while c) creating jobs and d) lowering power bills – all at the same time. It would be nice if this were true. And it is understandable that many people want this to be true. But reality has a way of making itself known, and much of this hype eventually will lead to pain.
The claim that the renewable energy industry will create a surplus of jobs (notwithstanding those jobs that will be lost when coalmines shut) lacks specificity. The assumption seems to be that once coalmines close, miners who may be used to living in one location, with families and community connections, suddenly will want to move from place to place as itinerant construction workers. Of course, this might happen. But it is by no means guaranteed. In reality, this is a risky bet. But our government presents it as a sure thing.
While the claims about job creation seem overhyped, the assertions that solar and wind will lower our electricity prices are far more irresponsible. It is true that renewable energy is cheap on sunny and windy days. But it is also true that on such days wind farms and solar panels deliver excess energy that stresses the electricity grid.
The 2016 blackout in South Australia was found to be caused partially by the shutdown of the state’s wind farms due to volatile weather, in particular excessive wind. So while solar and wind can deliver abundant energy at certain times, and while this abundant energy may be cheap, the mistake is to assume this translates into cheaper energy bills. It doesn’t because when the overall system is stressed, more intervention is needed, and more intervention naturally leads to higher prices. How could it not?
But what about batteries? Batteries are great, but they need to be built before we can use them and almost every country is scrambling to build batteries at the same time. This demand drives up prices. The idea that such costs will never be passed on to the consumer is fanciful.
Many claims about renewables, as with cryptocurrencies, sound grand in theory. String a few abstract concepts together, sprinkle with jargon, marinate in ideology and boom, a claim can sound plausible to the untrained listener. And while it may be true that we need to transition to renewables to meet our net-zero obligations, and that we can scale up solar and wind rapidly with enough government subsidy, this by no means guarantees cheaper power prices for consumers or ensures jobs for those bearing the brunt of the transition.
It would be better if our leaders, and the Energy Minister in particular, were honest with Australians about the pain and hardship our energy transition will bring. Given that the public is overwhelmingly supportive of action on climate change, this would be real leadership, which might be rewarded by the electorate. But concealing the difficulty and engaging in wishful thinking will lead only to more shock and anger down the track when promised outcomes fail to materialise.
As Munger says, to be rational we need to “recognise reality even when you don’t like it – especially when you don’t like it”.
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The Real Climate Cause
BY CORY BERNARDI
If you scratch at the mask of climate change zealots you'll inevitably reveal their inner socialist. I say 'inevitably' because the ethos behind the climate change agenda has nothing to do with saving the planet. It's all about enslaving mankind.
If you doubt that, the latest ravings of one of climate's useful idiots should be all the proof you need. Now I know Greta Thunberg has a mental illness and that we shouldn't take her proclamations seriously, but the global left consider her to be a messianic figure. They all hailed this climate influencer as the source of great wisdom.
In fact, such was the esteem the global Green elites held her in, they invited her to address the United Nations, the US Congress and the billionaires at Davos. She's still getting gigs and making money off of the climate malarky.
The latest effort was earlier this week promoting her new book at London's Royal Festival Hall. In the rarefied atmosphere of a carbon closed shop, dear Greta let her climate mask slip.
What it exposed was the manifesto of the unhinged socialist. Hers was a clarion call to overthrow capitalism because 'capitalism was the source of the climate crisis in the first place'. Capitalism was also a system of 'colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide' and of 'racist, oppressive extractionism'.
All the buzzwords from the global left regurgitated to adoring numbats.
She even accused the COP climate conferences as being a 'scam' and 'facilitating 'greenwashing, lying and cheating'.
That's one point I agree with her on.
Greta's apocalyptic view of the world is what truly underpins the global climate movement. Sure, there are lots paying lip service to the green agenda but when it comes to the global elite you always want to follow the money.
They are still buying waterfront mansions, flying private jets and chugging around in super yachts. They can do so because they invest in the green scams that government are throwing trillions of dollars at. Those dollars are clipped, banked and spent by the sanctimonious Green kings.
However, while some are chasing the money, the true Green zealot is trying to destroy what we know as civilisation.
They've even said as much. The mob from Extinction Rebellion (XR), they're the ones who glue themselves to roads, have admitted their movement isn't about the climate.
One of the co-founders, Stuart Basden, wrote an article that highlighted the real ethos behind these activists.
"And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back."
Apparently the problem is all to do with delusions attached to white-supremacy, patriarchy, eurocentrism, heteronormativity and class hierarchy.
If it sounds familiar it's because the Greens political party repeat the same mantra on every possible occasion. I can't help but think they are the ones suffering the real delusions
https://www.corybernardi.com.au/posts/the-real-climate-cause/
***************************************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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