Archives quotidiennes :

climate-debate, renewable energy

Destroying the environment to save it

by Ch. Rotter, May 31, 2020 in WUWT

Pseudo-green energy will wreak devastation, pretending to prevent exaggerated climate harm

Paul Driessen

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The infamous Vietnam era quotation may or may not have been uttered by an anonymous US Army major. It may have been misquoted, revised, apocryphal or invented. But it quickly morphed into an anti-war mantra that reflected attitudes of the time.

For Virginians and others forced to travel the path of “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy, it will redound in modern politics as “We had to destroy the environment in order to save it.”

Weeks after Governor Ralph Northam signed Virginia’s “Clean Economy Act,” which had been rushed through a partisan Democrat legislature, Dominion Energy Virginia announced it would reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To do so, the utility company will raise family, business, hospital and school electricity bills by 3% every year for the next ten years – as these customers and state and local governments struggle to climb out of the financial holes created by the ongoing Coronavirus lockdown.

Just as bad, renewable energy mandates and commitments from the new law and Dominion’s “integrated resource plan” will have major adverse impacts on Virginia and world environmental values. In reality, Virginia’s new “clean” economy exists only in fantasy land – and only if we ignore “clean” energy CO2 emissions, air and water pollution, and other environmental degradation around the world.

Dominion Energy plans to expand the state’s offshore wind, onshore solar and battery storage capacity by some 24,000 megawatts of new “renewable” energy by 2035, and far more after that. It will retain just 9,700 MW of existing natural gas generation, and only through 2045, build no new gas-fired units, and retire 6,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation. This will reduce in-state carbon dioxide emissions, but certainly won’t do so globally. The company intends to keep its four existing nuclear units operating.

To “replace” some of its abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel electricity, Dominion intends to build at least 31,400 megawatts of expensive, unreliable solar capacity by 2045. The company estimates that will require a land area some 25% larger than 250,000-acre Fairfax County, west of Washington, DC. That means Dominion Energy’s new solar facilities will blanket 490 square miles (313,000 acres) of beautiful croplands, scenic areas and habitats that now teem with wildlife.

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better to know...?

The Paris Accord now looks like a suicide note from Western democracies

by Craig Kelly, June1, 2020 in SpectatorAustralia

Number nine in Craig Kelly’s series 20 reasons why the Wuhan Flu is the final nail in the climate alarmists’ coffin.

It is now four and a half years since the euphoria of the Paris Climate Accord. At the time, United States President Obama hailed it as “a turning point for the world.” The then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon labelled it “a monumental success for the planet and its people.” 

And such was the exhilaration and excitement amongst the fourth estate after the Conference, my jesting comments (in an attempt to highlight the absurdity of the whole thing) were taken and reported seriously: “At home in Australia, there were more Kumbaya statements from local politicians. Leading the charge, Liberal MP Craig Kelly, seemingly overwhelmed with joy exclaimed ‘Hallelujah. The world is saved … The polar bears can sleep soundly tonight’.”

However, with the passage of the time and as the euphoria has died down, the world has had a chance to consider the devil in the detail. For under the Paris Climate Accord, Western nations have agreed to punish their economies, limit their growth, and incur tens of billions in unnecessary costs – all in the belief that this will somehow reduce the incidents of bad weather. 

While in contrast under Paris, the Chinese Communist Party has agreed to: “Achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030 and making best efforts to peak early ….. to create a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally developed and harmonious modern socialist country by the middle of this century.”

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