Donald Trump continues to infuriate the intelligentsia by delivering on the things he promised to deliver when he ran for President (how dare he!?!). They collectively dismissed him as a presidential hopeful and are still seething at the fact that they failed to predict his triumph; or, rather, to have guaranteed his defeat.

Where the media class took him literally, but not seriously; the American voting public took him seriously, but not literally. Now the American President has given his critics even more reason to fume.

On Friday, Trump delivered on his promise to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement. That move makes perfect economic sense: reliable and affordable energy brings with it jobs, prosperity and wealth.

Except for those rent seekers who depend for their very existence upon the government mandates and subsidies that deem wind and solar power to be the only ‘solution’ to an overhyped ‘problem’.

Having lost the battle for hearts and minds, the wind industry is revealing its true character: a rabid wolf in sheep’s clothing; or, perhaps, an axe-weilding psychopath masquerading as a smarmy second-hand car salesman?

Now that communities are armed with the knowledge that wind power is the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time, it has become a little harder to gouge an endless sea of subsidies from those communities, while riding roughshod over their common law rights to sleep, live in and otherwise enjoy their homes and properties.

Having grown fat on billions of dollars worth of subsidies and tax breaks, the likes of NextEra are now launching legal action against local governments standing up for the communities that they represent. Standing between a wind power outfit and an endless stream of subsidies is like standing between the fat kid and his lunch; bound to end in conflict.

There is no justification for causing harm to your neighbour and plenty of good reasons to go out of your way not to give them grief. But, for some reason, the wind industry is guided by an entirely different ethic; just the reverse, in fact.

Having beguiled political enablers at all levels – and bribed those it couldn’t – in order gain its ‘licence’ to operate, the wind industry then sets out with a special kind of malice to destroy whole communities and, with merciless vigour, anyone from within them that has the temerity to fight back.

One such defender is Suzanna Jones. In this keenly observed piece, Suzanna plots the ethical trail that’s been marked out by wind power outfits in her native Vermont – a trail lower than a snake’s belly.

Our Experiment in Environmental Ethics
Caledonian Record
Suzanna Jones
22 May 22 2017
To the Editor:

Back…

competitionnoun: the activity or condition of striving to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others; an event or contest in which people take part in order to establish superiority or supremacy in a particular area; the person or people over whom one is attempting to establish one’s supremacy or superiority; the opposition.

The well-chewed ‘chestnut, about wind power being cheaper than coal or gas-fired power is a nonsense. For a start, the Operations and Maintenance costs of running wind turbines is in the order of $24 for every MWh dispatched – see our post here and this from our favourite whipping boys, Infigen:

The wind might be ‘free’, but wind power is anything but.

Then there is the fiction that wind power is actually ‘competing’ with conventional generation sources.

In every ‘competition’ in life, the ‘competitors’ are required to line up together, at the…

Australia’s Renewable Energy policy is an economic suicide pact, from which there is no escape.

The result of that winning combination of greed, ignorance and downright stupidity, the Renewable Energy Target has destroyed businesses and is set to destroy whole industries.

Manufacturers, miners and mineral processors are screaming blue murder as they watch once reliable and affordable power supplies destroyed by ideologically driven lunatics wedded to the delusion that sunshine and breezes actually provide meaningful power.

Australia’s telecommunications businesses are not immune from the insanity.

Telstra, in its former incarnations as Telecom and before that the Post Master General was a government owned monopoly, that set up and ran Australia’s telephone system. More recently, Telstra has moved into the provision of internet services and digital media streaming to households.

Having been privatised in several stages, Telstra – a commercialised government business enterprise – enjoys market dominance as a result of…

That the wind industry is responsible for havoc and chaos is not news to STT followers, but normally it’s rocketing power prices, wrecking power markets and grids and ruining communities that springs to mind.

In this case, the mayhem arose even before the blades started spinning in some dimwit’s back paddock.

Driver is crushed by Wind Turbine blade after it spins across German autobahn when delivery truck crashes
Daily Mail
Gareth Davies
17 May 2017

A lorry was crushed by the blade of a 62m wind turbine which went spinning across the German autobahn after a transporter truck crashed.

Autobahn 33 was closed just outside Bielefeld, between Hanover and Dortmund, when the truck carrying the 16-ton wind turbine was rear-ended by another vehicle.

It sent the enormous blade across the carriageway where it ploughed into vehicles and a lorry belonging to cargo logistics company Koch International – which is based…

Subsidising wind power: throwing money into a bottomless pit …

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Matt Ridley defines pragmatism and common sense. If – as the wind cult constantly exhorts us – generating power without generating CO2 emissions is the object, then wind power offers no solution. Matt correctly points out the path to CO2 reductions in the power sector involves gas, for now, and investing in an atomic future.

That conclusion rests on the simple fact that, despite hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars being thrown at wind power generation capacity, the combined total global output is risibly trivial. Using 2014 figures, to the nearest whole number, wind power provided ZERO% of the world’s energy consumption.

Here’s Matt’s latest effort (with a few pics added by STT).

Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy
The Spectator
Matt Ridley
13 May 2017

We urgently need to stop the…

Californian carpet-bagger, Elon Musk has been threatening South Australia with a plan to scoop up at least $150 million of the $550 million its hapless Labor government is about to squander on non-fixes for its self-inflicted wind power disaster.

So no time like the present to reflect on just how ‘green’ is SA’s plan to squander mega-$millions on Musk’s mega-battery.

For the record, there is no grid-scale battery storage system operating anywhere in the world; and when we say ‘grid-scale’ we mean capable of storing hundreds of MWhs, rather than the 20-100 MWh being touted by Tesla.

Also for the record, batteries do not generate power they simply store it; the power put into them has to come from some generation source at a cost, they take time to charge and discharge as fast as their operators permit. Moreover, as every mobile phone owner knows, batteries have a limited lifespan…