Australia, UK, and now Germany realize wind is NOT cost/effective. When will Ontario wake up?

April 28, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Germany’s CO2 and energy policy – about to falter?

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Guest Blogger

Guest essay by Fred F. Mueller

On April 16th, 2014, a few quite remarkable statements were delivered during a discussion event at the premises of SMA Solar Technology AG, a leading German producer of photovoltaic panels and systems:

“The truth is that the Energy U-Turn (“Energiewende”, the German scheme aimed at pushing the “renewable” share of electricity production to 80 % by 2050) is about to fail”

“The truth is that under all aspects, we have underestimated the complexity of the “Energiewende”

“The noble aspiration of a decentralized energy supply, of self-sufficiency! This is of course utter madness”

“Anyway, most other countries in Europe think we are crazy”

Had this been one of the small albeit growing number of German “sceptics” casting doubt upon the XXL-sized politico-economical scam that has cost the German populace more than € 500 billion since its inception in 2000, it would not have gotten more than a footnote in the local press, crammed somewhere in between “horoscope” and “lost and found”. In fact, the media actually tried to keep a lid on the facts by giving them as little coverage as possible.

But the man at the speaker’s desk was Sigmar Gabriel, acting vice-chancellor of the German government, Secretary of Commerce with responsibility for the said „Energiewende” and chairman of the German social democrats (SPD), the second-largest political force in the country. Since December 2013, he is in charge of taming the runaway costs and growing security of supply risks that are unmasking the financial and technical nightmare of this ill-conceived project. In the past few months, he seems to have gotten some unpleasant insights causing him to admit the above-mentioned inconvenient truths when he was pushed too far by a number of aggressive lobbyists of the “renewable energy” sector. Gabriel, famous for his irascible temper that once already resulted in a heated verbal exchange with a top-dog TV journalist live on air, appears to have become quite candid when he vented his anger during the debate.

He must have realized his own political fate is in jeopardy because the task he has been assigned has conducted him into a situation that will inevitably result in failure. With respect to electric energy generation, Germany has painted itself into a corner. Since the introduction of the “Renewable Energy” law (EEG) in 2000 aimed at replacing coal and gas-fired as well as nuclear power generation by so-called renewable energy sources, the household price for electricity has jumped by more than 200 %. German customers now pay the second-highest electricity prices in Europe. At the same time, the task of stabilizing the grid against the massive erratic influx from solar and wind power plants that produce without regard for actual need has pushed the operators to their limits. Now already, with a combined share of just some 13 % of total electricity production, their unreliable input is massively imperiling the stability of the grid.

Conventional power plants – the most important units able to compensate these detrimental effects – are being pushed out of the market and shuttered at increasing rates. At the same time, Germany’s CO₂ output has not diminished because coal-fired units have had to take over from closed nuclear plants. Costs are set to rise further on a ballistic path while security of supply is in free fall. At the same time, Gabriel is subjected to intense pressure from a number of factions of the “renewable” energy sector asking for ever greater slices of a cake that cannot be financed much longer. Together with inconvenient truths about feasibility limits given to him by his technical staff, this pressure seems to have risen to a level that pushed him to lecture his harassers when their clamors transgressed his tolerance limit.

This rare incident where a leading politician loses control of his words to such a degree shows that the “crash boom bang” path the German way of mishandling energy policies has indeed reached a threshold where said politicians feel cornered and unable to uphold their usual “muddling through” approach. Long-ignored financial and technical rules re-emerge and will force the German political class to abandon their “renewable” energy strategy centering on solar and wind power generation. Since the only low CO₂ alternative – nuclear power – has been deviled by all political parties and the media beyond any chance of short-term oblivion, Germany will soon have to revert to coal for its power needs. And that in turn implies the country will have to abandon all aspirations to lower its CO₂ emissions. German politicians might soon find out that demonizing CO₂ is becoming a speedy path to ruining their career. And given the importance of the country within Europe and the pioneering role it claimed in the international crusade against climate change by limiting CO₂ emissions, this might well herald the start of a paradigm shift of epochal dimensions in the whole climate change debate.

Original TV clips (in German):

http://www.1730live.de/sigmar-gabriel-nimmt-in-kassel-stellung-zur-energiewende/
http://www.hr-online.de/website/archiv/hessenschau/hessenschau.jsp?t=20140417&type=v

Agenda 21 is NOT Sustainable!!!

April 27, 2014 / 1957chev / 1 Comment

The Sustainability Hoax

All over the country, city and regional governments are writing “sustainability plans,” which are supposedly aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While the goal may be laudable, for the most part these plans won’t significantly reduce emissions. However, they will certainly impose huge costs on urban residents and taxpayers.

From Lafayette, La., to the Twin Cities, to the San Francisco Bay area, the heart of the plans consists of a one-size-fits-all prescription: make costly transit improvements in major corridors and then subsidize the construction of high-density housing in those corridors so lots of people will have access to transit. This prescription not only demands a huge change in American lifestyles, but also offers no reason to think it will help save the planet.

“The transit-plus-density prescription imposes major costs on cities without significantly saving energy or reducing emissions.”

The Department of Energy, for example, has found that multifamily housing actually uses more energy (and therefore emits more greenhouse gases) per square foot than single-family homes. The only way multifamily housing would save energy would be if people accept smaller homes. A better solution is making single-family homes more energy efficient, which costs less and does not require the loss of privacy in multifamily housing.

Meanwhile, data from the Department of Transportation show that transit uses, on average, about the same amount of energy — and emits about the same amount of greenhouse gases — per passenger mile as the average car. Getting people out of their cars and onto transit won’t reduce emissions, but it will inconvenience a lot of people because transit is slow, expensive and inflexible.

Even if transit were truly greener than driving, the transit-plus-density solution doesn’t even reduce driving. Between 1980 and 2010, San Francisco Bay area population densities grew by more than 55 percent, and the region built more than 200 miles of rail transit lines and scores of high-density developments along those lines. Yet per capita transit ridership fell by a third while per capita driving increased by at least 5 percent.

Moreover, cars are rapidly becoming more energy efficient. It takes around 10 years (and huge amounts of energy) to plan and build a rail transit line, but 10 years from today the average car on the road will be at least 25 percent more fuel-efficient than cars today.

We can do a lot of things to emissions, but we have to ask whether they are cost-effective. It won’t do much good to reduce emissions if we bankrupt ourselves in the process, as our descendants will be too busy trying to survive to worry about the planet as a whole.

A 2007 report from McKinsey & Company suggests anything that costs more than about $50 per ton of abated emissions is a waste of money. Even using the optimistic assumptions built into sustainability plans, the transit-and-density strategy will cost thousands of dollars per ton — and it is more likely that it won’t reduce emissions at all.

While transit and density won’t significantly reduce emissions, it will have huge effects on cities. It will make traffic more congested and roadways less safe. It will make housing less affordable and increase other consumer costs. Besides, the increased tax burden will drive away jobs.

Population data clearly show that the fastest-growing urban areas are ones that have kept housing affordable by not using land-use regulation to impose lifestyle changes on their residents. For example, urban areas in Texas, which has some of the least restrictive land-use laws, are growing far faster than in California, which has some of the most restrictive laws.

Data also show that urban areas that spend more on transit grow more slowly. Of the nation’s 65 largest urban areas, the ones that spent the most on transit in the 1990s tended to grow slower in the 2000s than the ones that spent less. This doesn’t mean regions have to settle for poor-quality transit: in most places outside of New York City, buses can move as many people as fast and as comfortably as trains at a far lower cost.

In short, the transit-plus-density prescription imposes major costs on cities without significantly saving energy or reducing emissions. Nor does it cure obesity, end poverty, or bring about world peace, as some of its advocates seem to believe. Urban leaders need to be wary of people who propose policies that are anything but sustainable.

Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute and author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Everybody….fight hard, like the Aussies Do!!! We don’t need Wynne Power or Wind Power!!!

April 27, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Australia’s Wind Industry Finally Faces its “Waterloo”

April 27, 2014 by stopthesethings

He always seemed a little taller in the saddle.

During the latter part of the French Revolution a diminutive Corsican took charge of French affairs, installing himself as First Consul in 1799; and, in 1804, anointing himself French Emperor – adopting the tag Napoleon I.

The little Emperor bestrode Europe and – with his Grande Armée – from 1803 to 1815 generally gave his neighbours hell. His trip to Moscow in 1812 languished in the Russian winter snows – it wasn’t anywhere near the roaring success he’d planned for (although it did result in one or twothumping orchestra tunes – and a few very long and somewhat grimpieces of literature).

After his trip to Russia, his Grande Armée was defeated at Leipzig, Germany and in the Peninsular War at Vitoria, Spain – but still, the little Emperor fought on.

Napoleon’s self-confidence and belief in his own brilliance bordered on the maniacal – he lived and breathed hubris and hyperbole – and if he was worried that he had made an enemy of every European state, including the Super Power of the day, Great Britain, he didn’t show it.

But, eventually, the little Corsican’s luck ran out in June 1815 – near a little Belgian town called Waterloo. Napoleon ran smack bang into a grand coalition of forces under the command of the Duke of Wellington – backed up by a host of other Countries, including the massive Prussian army, commanded Gebhard von Blücher.

At Waterloo, Napoleon’s defeat was final and definitive – with the Corsican banished thereafter to rot on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Since then to meet one’s “Waterloo” – in common parlance – is to meet one’s final, insurmountable challenge and be defeated by it.

Well, the Australian wind industry has just got a glimpse of its Waterloo.

Last Wednesday, the Coalition’s Expert Panel – charged with the task of reviewing the Renewable Energy Target – held a meeting in Sydney, attended by representatives from peak business bodies, such as the Business Council of Australia; miners, like Rio Tinto; and serious (ie conventional) power generators. Along for the ride too were a bunch of rent-seekers from the wind and solar industries – including, of course, the Clean Energy Council – all desperate to keep the RET gravy train rolling.

The wind industry and its parasites reacted in fits of horror when the make up of the panel was announced back in February. The panel is headed up by Dick Warburton – former Reserve Bank board member and all-round friend of (real) business and industry – with Matt Zema, the chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator; Brian Fisher, the former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics; and Shirley In’t Veld, the former chief executive of Verve Energy in Western Australia making up the rest of a hard-hitting team (see our post here).

Dick “RET Slayer” Warburton spells it out.

At the time the make-up of the panel was announced, the wind industry had no real insight into just how bad things were about to get. All of that changed at last Wednesday’s meeting.

During the meeting, Dick Warburton – and other members of the panel – laid out precisely what the panel’s task is all about (and what it isn’t about) and gave some pretty strong hints about what its recommendations will ultimately be: none of it favourable to the wind industry.

The wind and solar industry representatives present descended into a state of panic stricken shock – one of STT’s operatives noted that Infigen’s boys left the meeting looking like “zombies”.

The eco-fascist bloggers that spin propaganda on behalf of the wind industry are crying foul – calling the review a “farce”; “rigged”; “biased”; with a “pre-determined outcome”.

STT puts their hysterical language down to the fact that they’re just working their way through the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

What really got their goat was the announcement that top-flight energy market consultants, ACIL Allen has been appointed by the panel to carry out the modelling for the review.

No fools, ACIL Allen – these boys are well and truly alive to the insane costs of the RET.

Back in 2012, they produced a report for Energy Australia which pointed out that the mandatory RET – with its current fixed target of 41,000 GW/h – would involve a subsidy of $53 billion, transferred from power consumers to wind power generators via Renewable Energy Certificates – a Federal Tax on all Australian power consumers. On the modelling done by Liberal MP, Angus “the Enforcer” Taylor – and privately confirmed by Origin Energy – ACIL Allen’s figure for the REC Tax is pretty close to the mark.

The wind industry’s cries of “farce”, “rigged” and “biased” fall just a little hollow, however, against the fact that Infigen & Co had pushed very, very hard for wind industry “friendly”, SKM to do the modelling for the review.

SKM has already performed $millions worth of engineering consultancy work for the wind industry and hopes to do tens of $millions more. It’s already tossed up a few pieces of wind industry backed drivel – pitched as hard-hitting “research” – but which are no more than the kind of fluff and guff you get from the Clean Energy Council. No surprises there. What’s that you say about “bias” and “pre-determined outcomes”? Apparently, it’s only an issue when the bias and outcome isn’t set to run in your favour.

During the meeting, the expert panel made it very clear what their mission is NOT about: the review has nothing to do with “climate change” (formerly known as “global warming” – until it stopped getting warmer 17 years ago); it has nothing to do with the spurious claims made by the wind industry about the creation of tens of thousands of “green” jobs; and it has nothing to do with modelling or measuring CO2 abatement.

On that last point, the panel flagged its position by implicitly rejecting the wind industry’s unsubstantiated claims about CO2 abatement. At one point, Dick Warburton made it plain that the review had nothing to do with CO2 emissions – and that the review was only concerned with the cost impacts of renewable energy in the electricity sector.

The panel told the meeting that its modelling will assume that there will be no carbon price between now and 2030 and no CO2 abatement target during that time – and that the modelling will assume that meeting the current 41,000 GW/h by 2020 is a physical impossibility – which it is.

Head spruiker for the Clean Energy Council, Russell “Rusty” Marsh addressed the meeting from the podium – while Infigen’s boys carped and whinged from the back of the room – banging on about “dangerous climate change” – mumbling about saving Polar Bears and Penguins – and bleating about the “wonders of wind” – much to the panel’s amusement.

Dick Warburton grinned through most of Rusty’s plea for RET mercy. It seems Rusty was squarely engaged in venting the first and third stages of his and his clients’ grief: “denial” and “bargaining”.

In a moment of pure desperation, the clowns from Infigen resorted to an effort to link the La Nina and El Nino weather patterns to giant fans – apparently the latter are the perfect solution to the former.

Although, we think it a little bit of a stretch to suggest that the continued maintenance of a massive stream of taxpayer/power consumer subsidies to an intermittent and unreliable power generation source – which cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions – might have a bearing on the movement of ocean currents in the Pacific – a phenomenon which predates human history.

Rusty – and the boys from Infigen – made a raft of other wild claims about the “benefits” of wind power – all of which were soundly dismissed by the panel as “too hard to model” (polite code for “patent nonsense”) – and that any such “benefits” amounted to nothing more than a “wealth transfer” from power consumers to wind farm operators. Ouch! No wonder Infigen’s boys shuffled out of the meeting looking like extras from the Night of the Living Dead.

Having woken up to the RET review panel’s true mission, the wind industry and its parasites have now been reduced to name-calling – tagging Dick Warburton “a climate change denier and pro-nuclear advocate”; former ABARE chief, Brian Fisher a “fossil fuel lobbyist”; and Shirley In’t Veld, a “front for big coal”.

Hardly the kind of approach that might help their “cause” you’d think, but hysterical responses are to be expected, as they work through the second stage of their grief: “anger”.

The noises made by the panel at the meeting last Wednesday clearly don’t bode well for the RET. Scrap the RET and the wind industry – on life support now – will, of course, die a quick and natural death.

The panel’s likely recommendations will find a Federal Parliament raring to lay waste to the most ludicrous energy policy ever devised. The great majority within the Coalition are keen to bring the rort to an end, seeing the RET for what it is: nothing more than “corporate welfare” on a massive scale.

Come July, the new Senate takes its place and the balance of power will be held by a bunch of arch-conservative newcomers – along with STT Champions, John Madigan and Nick Xenophon.

The newcomers include 3 Senators from the Jolly “Un-Green” Giant, Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party (PUP) – plus 1 – Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts’ Party, who has already done a deal to side with the PUP; Bob Day (Family First) from South Australia; and David Leyonhjelm (Liberal Democratic Party) from NSW. All of them have signalled that they are itching to help the Coalition ditch Labor’s Carbon Tax – and all of them have made noises that they’re just as keen to scrap the Renewable Energy Target, too.

From July, to get its legislation through the Senate, the Coalition will have to do business with the help of these 6 newcomers – and John Madigan and Nick Xenophon. With that line up, getting legislation scrapping the RET through the Senate will be a doddle.

With the RET review panel sharpening its axe – and the Parliamentary Planets about to align – things couldn’t look much worse for the wind industry. This, of course, couldn’t be happening to a nicer bunch of lads.

Expect to hear a whole lot more hysterical language from that quarter as the industry, its parasites and the Clean Energy Council work their way through the 5 stages of grief; the first of which is “denial”.

At Waterloo, even with his artillery captured, his troops in disarray and Wellington’s superior forces holding all the points of strategic importance, Napoleon tried to rally the last rump of his forces, flattering himself with the hope of the victory he knew was his.

It wasn’t, of course, to be – Napoleon had, finally, met his Waterloo.

From the noises made by the RET review panel last Wednesday, it appears the Australian wind industry is about to meet its very own Waterloo.

Even Emperors run out of luck, eventually.

I’m Sure the Alarmists will Blame “too much ice”, on Global Warming….

April 27, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Alaskan Polar Bears Threatened…By Too Much Spring Ice

April 25, 2014 – 4:09 PM

By Barbara Hollingsworth

Female polar bear with cubs. (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service/AP)

(CNSNews.com) – Five meters of ice– about 16 feet thick – is threatening the survival of polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea region along Alaska’s Arctic coast, according to Dr. Susan J. Crockford, an evolutionary biologist in British Columbia who has studied polar bears for most of her 35-year career.

That’s because the thick ice ridges could prevent ringed seals, the bears’ major prey, from creating breathing holes they need to survive in the frigid waters, Crockford told CNSNews.com.

“Prompted by reports of the heaviest sea ice conditions on the East Coast ‘in decades’ and news that ice on the Great Lakes is, for mid-April, the worst it’s been since records began, I took a close look at the ice thickness charts for the Arctic,” Crockford noted in her Polar Bear Science blog on April 18th.

“Sea ice charts aren’t a guarantee that this heavy spring ice phenomenon is developing in the Beaufort, but they could be a warning,” she wrote, noting that they “don’t bode well” for the Beaufort bears.

“What happens is that really thick ice moves in because currents and winds from Greenland and the Canadian islands push it against the shore,” Crockford told CNSNews.com.

“The male seals arrive in the area in early spring to set up breeding territories. They drill a hole through the ice to maintain breathing holes close to the shore. But there’s a limit. They can drill through two meters (about seven feet) of ice. But too much beyond that and they’re in trouble.”

Ringed seal (NOAA)

“The reason that’s important is that seals mate right after the pups, who are born in April, are weaned. So the male seal wants to be there, but he has to have breathing holes. If the ice is too thick, he has to move off someplace else,” she explained.

But this is the same time that female polar bears are just emerging with their newborn cubs from maternity dens either on or near the shore.

“When those bears come out of their dens in the spring, they need to find seals right away because they will have gone six months without eating,” Crockford said. “If there are no seals, they have to go further out, where there’s thinner ice.”

“Spring and early summer are really a critical time for polar bears. That’s when they need to eat as many seals as they can because that’s when they put on fat for the rest of the year. If they have trouble doing that in the spring, they’re in big trouble.”

There were comparably high levels of spring ice in the Beaufort Sea in 2004 and 2006, when bear counts were “one of the pieces of evidence used to have the bears listed as ‘threatened’ in the U.S.,” Crockford pointed out.

“Polar bear biologists were finding some bears quite thin and found a population decline,” she said, which they attributed to melting summer ice caused by global warming.

“But the biologists were not there to see the thick [spring] ice. All they saw was thin bears,” she pointed out. “They blamed the poor condition of the bears on summer ice, instead of acknowledging that it was likely the condition of the ice in the spring that was the cause of the problem.”

“Female [polar bears] with cubs having trouble feeding are one aspect of the repercussions of thick ice,” Crockford added. “The other repercussion is that other bears, instead of hanging around and starving, probably left the area. They could have gone to the Chukchi Sea, which is located between the U.S. and Russia near the Bering Strait.”

The international IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) conducted a polar bear population survey for the area in 2006. It reported a decline in the adult polar bear population and reduced cub survival rates, which was used to list the bears as a “threatened species” in the U.S. in 2008.

But the PBSG did not take into account the fact that polar bears “can just move” to other areas if their food supply is limited, Crockford told CNSNews.com. “If some of those bears were part of that count, it would look like they died,” she pointed out.

In its 2013 status update, released on February 14th, the PBSG repeated its 2006 “reduced” population estimate, putting the Southern Beaufort Sea at 1,526 bears and “declining due to a negative trend in sea ice conditions, particularly over the continental shelf, resulting from the continuing effects of climate warming.”

However, in what Crockford characterizes as an “astonishing admission,” the update also stated that “it is important to note that there is the potential for un-modeled spatial heterogeneity in mark-recapture sampling that could bias survival and abundance estimates. A thorough re-assessment of survival and abundance is underway and a final result is anticipated in 2014.”

“What’s shocking is that the PBSG have now admitted that the ‘movement of bears’ issue essentially invalidates the 2006 population estimate and the much-touted ‘reduced survival of cubs’,” Crockford said in a March 24th blog post.

“This is a cyclical pattern that is quite specific to that part of Alaska, which has been known about since the 1970s,” when wildlife biologists noticed “ten times as many seals as usual in the Chukchi Sea. There were more bears, too,” Crockford told CNSNews.com.

“It seems to happen every 10 years, so it should be expected by people who work in the area. And not just by people who study polar bears, but also people who study seals.”

“It looks like similar conditions are setting up now, and we know the timing is right,” she added. “We’re keeping an eye on it.”

We Have to Fight Agenda 21!

April 26, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Local communities face onslaught from self-anointed planners

April 25, 2014 by Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

A growing number of initiatives by elitist organizations, working hand-in-glove with local kindred spirits, is transforming once-self-governing communities into instruments of environmental political correctness.

Cloaked in the mantle of providing for “sustainable” or “livable” communities, these programs include such fashionable ideas as “open space,” “heritage areas,” “view sheds,” ”smart growth,” “clean energy,” and “combatting climate change,” – just to name a few.

What was once largely the domain of far-away UN conferences and obscure academic journals has now made its way to Main Street. Planning commissions, which have spread like wildfire over the past couple of decades and whose members are unelected, produce an endless array of schemes designed to micro-manage every aspect of commercial, residential, and recreational life. No town, no matter how small, is safe from the meddling of planners in and outside of government.

The Shadow of Agenda 21

The proliferation of efforts by green elites to mold communities in their own image is a consequence of the rise of the environmental movement – both in the U.S. and throughout the world. Those efforts received a substantial boost with the adoption of something called Agenda 21 at the conclusion of the June 3-14, 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment & Development in Rio de Janeiro. Agenda 21 is described by the UN Division on Sustainable Development as “a comprehensive plan of development to be taken globally, nationally, and locally by organizations of the United Nations Systems, Governments and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts (sic) on the environment.”

A 300-page document divided into 40 chapters, Agenda 21 has many goals, including changing consumption patterns, conserving biological diversity, protecting fragile environments and the atmosphere, and achieving more sustainable settlements. Agenda 21 provides a blueprint for the kinds of structural changes the proponents of sustainable development (a term left purposely vague) want to see take place.

Merely setting goals, however, was not enough; the task of implementing Agenda 21 fell to another UN body, the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). Founded in 1990, ICLEI is an association of local and regional governments as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) – all sharing a commitment to sustainable development. ICLEI’s membership currently numbers over 1200 cities, towns, counties, and NGOs in 84 countries. In the United States, 528 cities belong to ICLEI, including New York, Los Angeles, Dubuque, Iowa, and Arlington, Texas.

ICLEI’s U.S. website, www.icleyus.org, informs its visitors that $618 million in funding for grants and technical assistance is available for state, local, and tribal governments. The largess comes courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Energy, Interior, and Transportation and is be used for climate and energy initiatives aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Lest they have any doubts about the organization’s commitment to combatting climate change, visitors also can read about ICLEI’s new emissions-management software.

Another organization spreading the gospel of sustainable development is the appropriately named American Planning Association (APA). Founded in 1978, APA provided a ready-made vehicle for taking the goals of Agenda 21 to the local level. A forum for the exchange of views and proposals among urban and regional planners of every description, APA has state chapters throughout the country. In addition to its well-attended conferences, APA uses its website, www.planning.org, to get the message out. Its website, for example, touts the virtues of solar power and bike-sharing as ways communities can reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions.

When such “lofty” goals are adopted by local governments, they have real-world consequences for those on the receiving end of the elitists’ grand vision. Open space in a case in point. Thomas Sewell, senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, notes that open space comes at an enormous cost to perspective homeowners and those seeking affordable apartments to rent. “What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything,” he says. “Anybody who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet demand means that prices are going to rise,” he explains. “Housing is no exception.” (Washington Times, April 23, 2014)

The “Plantocracy”

Indeed, all across the country, the lives of ordinary citizens are under siege by the grandiose schemes of what we will call the “plantocracy.” Consider:

In Ohio, the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission (MVRPC) teamed up with the Montgomery County Commission, the Washington Township Board, and an assortment of NGO “stakeholders” to have a bike path added to a road-widening project. The bike path comes within seven feet of the front door of a local resident’s 164-year-old farm house. In July 2013, bulldozers flattened hedges and trees in front of the historic farm house to make way for the bike path. The owner of the property protested vehemently, but to no avail. An official with the MVRPC justified the bike path and the destruction to private property it wrought by saying, “Doing so reduces the amount of carbon and harmful emissions into the atmosphere so that our air is cleaner.” (Range, Winter 2013-14)
In Washington, a bill, HB 2386, introduced in the legislature would create the State Maritime Heritage Area that would include “all federal, state, local, and tribal lands that allow public access and are partly located within one-quarter mile land inward of the saltwater shoreline (of the Pacific Ocean)…” Language in the bill assures the public that nothing in the legislation “creates any regulatory jurisdiction or grants any regulatory authority to any government or other entity” or “abridges the rights of any owner of public or private property within the designated area,” or “established any legal rights or obligations, including in regards to any environmental or administrative review process involving land use.” Opponents of the legislation ask why, if the designation is so benign, does Maryland have a 19-member Maryland Heritage Authority and a 10-member board appointed by the governor to oversee the state’s heritage areas. The question is a reflection of the well-founded mistrust of such schemes on the part of ordinary citizens.
In Isle of Wight County, Virginia, local officials are trying to prohibit a farmer from allowing a disable friend from staying overnight on his property in an RV. County officials claim that the use of the RV constitutes an unauthorized “campground” in violation of local zoning ordinances. “Cases such as this one are becoming increasingly common across the country as overzealous government officials routinely enforce laws that undermine the very property rights that are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” says John Whitehead, president of the Charlottesville, Va.-based Rutherford Institute.

Defenders of Agenda 21 and ICLEI are quick to point out that they have no regulatory authority and cannot enforce any of their recommendations. That’s true. But once the genie is out of the bottle and finds its way into the rules, regulations, ordinances, “green” building codes, and land-use restrictions of local governments, what comes out does have the force of law behind it. The plantocracy, with all the interlocking relationships it has with well-funded and well-connected interests, is a beast that is roaming the countryside searching for its next prey.

About the Author: Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT.

– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2014/04/25/local-communities-face-onslaught-from-self-anointed-planners/?utm_source=CFACT+Updates&utm_campaign=b05c4876e2-E_Fact_Report4_25_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a28eaedb56-b05c4876e2-269737049#sthash.jD1YHElM.dpuf

Hydro Prices Forcing Businesses to Close.

April 26, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Business hit with massive hydro bill after smart meter installed

CTV London: Hydro horror story for business

A small business west of London is on the hook for thousands more than expected after installing a required smart meter. Kelda Yuen reports

CTV London: Green energy cause of rising costs?

As electricity prices in Ontario continue to rise, some businesses say their days in the province could be numbered. Scott Miller has more.

Last Updated Friday, April 25, 2014 6:47PM EDT

A small business owner west of London will have to pay more to find out if the smart meter installed before his hydro bills skyrocketed is faulty.

That was the total of the bill he received in Februrary. But for all of 2012 his bill was just over $13,000.

Lanuza blames the smart meter he was required to install, even though according to Hydro One “Sample testing of thousands of meters in the past six years has shown the meters to be 99.9 percent accurate.”

After contacting the company, Lanuza received a letter saying his meter was one of the faulty ones that needed to be replaced, but there was no mistake on his bill.

But Lanuza says “If I have a meter that there is a problem with that meter, how can I rely on that meter?!…And it has a problem, but they never told me what the problem is…they say it’s safety.”

Hydro One has admitted that smart meters have caused some over-billing, but the onus is on the customer to prove that they have been overbilled.

Lanuza has been told he will have to pay for the removal of his meter and the installation of a new one, if he wants his curret one tested for accuracy.

“The meter was installed and supplied by [Hydro One], why should I be paying for the cost of checking it?”

He has now spoken with a lawyer to try to get the situation resolved.

But in the meantime he’s agreed to pay the bill in monthly installments, for fear of having his hydro cut off.

“I have no other choice. I have to go for it, it’s not the money, it’s the principle,” he says.

His lawyer has drafted a letter of complaint to the indepent body Measurements Canada to challenge the accuracy of the meter.

Hydro One has told Lanuza that if he was in fact overbilled he will receive a full refund and be paid back the costs of having his meter removed and re-installed.

Hydro costs continue to climb for businesses

As the cost of hydro rises in Ontario – it is predicted to climb another 46 per cent over the next 10 years – business owners say they are not sure if they can stay in the province.

Martin Vogt owns EFS-plastics, a plastic re-processing facility in Listowel. He says his hydro bill has doubled in five years and now sits at $80,000 a month.

He says they pay $350,000 more per year for power than similar plants in Quebec or New York.

The Ontario PCs blame the Green Energy Act for pushing up prices. MPP Lisa MacLeod, PC Energy Critic, points at the massive subsidies for wind and solar power.

But those in the business of producing wind power say while the higher cost of green energy will eventually go down and stabilize, the cost of nuclear and other sources of energy are likely to go up.

Global Warming Alarmism….It’s a scam!!! A Sales Gimmick!

April 25, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Global Warming and Settled Science

By Andre Lofthus

The AGW community would have you believe that the science in favor of AGW is settled. As a professional scientist, a physicist with 40 years experience in aerospace and extensive knowledge of atmospheric physics, I can tell you that, indeed, the science is settled, but not the way the AGW extremists would have you believe. Atmospheric transmission measurements taken in the 1950s demonstrate conclusively that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere cannot be the cause of global warming if global warming even exists.

A basic principle of science is that correlation does not prove causation. Climate scientists are working overtime fudging temperature related data showing global warming over many decades that correlates with the industrial revolution and increasing use of carbon-based fuels. Climate scientists are boldly asserting that this correlation proves global warming is caused by increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

Real scientists would demand to know the physics of how increased CO2 in the atmosphere causes global warming. Is there any real physics behind this unsupported bold assertion? As I am about to explain, based on test data from the 1950s, there is not.

There are three points I want to make that fall in the categories of physics and atmospheric physics. First, molecules in the atmosphere absorb lightwaves over what are called spectral bands. The spectral band can be narrow, as small as a single wavelength, or broad, covering a continuum of wavelengths or frequencies. This molecular absorption causes increased vibration within the molecule exciting certain vibration modes. The physics of each molecule determine which wavelengths can be absorbed to excite internal vibrations. Spectral band absorption in the atmosphere can be quantified based on measurements over a certain distance through the atmosphere such as “90 per cent absorption in this spectral band over a distance of 300 meters at sea level through the atmosphere”.

The second point is not really atmospheric physics, but more fundamental. Objects like the earth emit a spectrum, or wavelength continuum, of radiation that is completely described by “Planck’s Law” of black body radiation, derived in the 1900 by Nobel-winning physicist Max Planck. That curve predicts the peak intensity of light from the sun in the visible spectral band, and the peak intensity of light emitted by the earth in the LWIR spectral band. Planck’s curve has been validated by experimental data for over a hundred years, and was a huge breakthrough for the physics community in the 20th Century.

The third point is that there are two spectral bands in which the CO2 molecule absorbs infrared radiation. The first band is in what is called the Medium Wave InfraRed (MWIR) spectrum, and the second spectral band is in the LWIR spectrum. Both bands are created by absorption of energy in a CO2 molecule to excite stretching and/or bending modes of vibration within the molecule. The MWIR band of absorption excites stretching vibration modes, and the LWIR band of absorption excites bending vibration modes.

Of these two bands, the LWIR band is the most important in the absorption of infrared radiation from the earth because it is centered in the LWIR where most of the energy radiated by the earth is located, and is at least 5 times wider than the MWIR band. The center wavelength of the LWIR absorption band for the CO2 molecule is 15 microns with a width of about 1 micron. By comparison, the center wavelength at which the maximum spectral radiant emittance occurs for the earth (based on Planck’s Law) is approximately 9.5 microns with significant amounts of energy contained in radiation with wavelengths that extend out to beyond 25 microns.

So, there is a spectral band centered at 15 micron where the CO2 molecules happily absorb radiating energy in the atmosphere to excite bending modes of vibration within each molecule. This band is in the LWIR where most of the radiation from the earth is contained, and has a spectral width of about 1 micron. This is a small but not insignificant portion of the more than 20 micron wide spectral band over which the earth radiates in the LWIR.

A reference book published by the Office of Naval Research, a department of the U.S. Navy, titled The Infrared Handbook was published in 1978 and is used as a bible by everyone I know in the IR community. Atmospheric transmission data at sea level is contained in this book based on measurements that were taken in the 1950 time frame, much before any recent increases in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. These particular measurements are over a path length of 300 meters, and cover the IR spectrum from short-wave infrared out to beyond 20 microns in the LWIR (see “Field Measurements of Atmospheric Transmission”). In the LWIR absorption band of CO2 (center wavelength of 15 microns) the transmission measured is 0.0 due to CO2 absorption. That is, total 100% absorption over 300 meters at sea level in the spectral absorption band of CO2 that would capture the most energy, or “heat”, being radiated by the earth’s surface.

Increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmospheric mixture of gasses present in the 1950s by burning fossil fuels or by bovine flatulence will not increase the measured absorption in the CO2 LWIR band above the 100% level that was measured and reported in The Infrared Handbook. You cannot get more than 100% absorption. It is not physically possible. And yet that appears to be the basis of the theory of “man made” global warming

The science of anthropogenic global warming is settled, and has been for decades. Just not the way the AGW alarmists would have you believe. Increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere cannot be the cause of global warming, if global warming even exists.

Ontario pension scheme, just another “Revenue Tool” for the Liberals?

April 24, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

No pension crisis, says Fraser Institute

Calls to expand CPP and create an Ontario pension program rely on misguided analysis.

April 24, 2014
by PLANT STAFF

VANCOUVER — Despite Ontario’s upcoming proposal for its own government pension program, there’s no retirement income crisis in Canada, says a report by the Fraser Institute.

The Canadian public policy think-tank says its study, The Reality of Retirement Income in Canada, finds that analysts, activists, and politicians who advocate for an expanded Canada Pension Plan (CPP), and its Quebec equivalent (QPP), base their arguments on several faulty assumptions, often overlooking all the resources available to Canadians in retirement.

“Proponents of a new government pension program for Ontario, and an expanded Canada Pension Plan, stoke fears of a looming crisis by claiming that Canadians aren’t saving enough for retirement. These claims blatantly ignore the ample resources available to Canadians when they retire,” said Philip Cross, study author and former chief economic analyst for Statistics Canada.

The study notes that focusing exclusively on the traditional “three pillars” of the pension system (Old Age Security, CPP/QPP, and voluntary pensions such as RRSPs) overlooks trillions of dollars in assets held by Canadians (in home equity and other savings) and their largely undocumented support from family and friends (financial or otherwise).

In addition to accumulating large sums of assets, Canadians are waiting longer to retire. One in four Canadians between 65 and 70 years old now remain in the workforce – an increase from roughly one in eight just 13 years ago. This delay in retirement allows more time to accumulate savings either inside the pension system (RRSPs) or outside the system (Tax Free Savings Accounts), and it postpones the drawing down of savings.

Finally, an expanded CPP (or newly-minted Ontario pension program) would require increased mandatory contributions from working Canadians that will likely reduce the amount of money Canadians invest voluntarily elsewhere.

While the study questions the necessity of an expanded mandatory pension system, it notes challenges that may currently exist, particularly for single seniors who never worked and aren’t eligible for CPP benefits. These Canadians often rely more heavily on Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) as sources of retirement income.

Download the study results here.

Fighting back Against Climate Alarmism!

April 24, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

GET REAL, GET ORGANISED AND FINISH IT.

Posted by Pointman on April 24, 2014 · 1 Comment

You may get offended or not by some of the things I’m going to say in this piece but they’ll get said nevertheless, so damn the torpedoes and full blog ahead. It’s the acid test of a real friendship to at times tell them they’re acting like a prat, and by the way, your bum really does look gigunda in that dress.

Anthony Watts recently ran a poll at WUWT that posed the question – “Is it time for an “official” climate skeptics organization, one that produces a policy statement, issues press releases, and provides educational guidance?”

I voted “yes” and I’d like to outline my reasons for doing so.

Any scattered and disparate opposition to an unjust law, policy or controversial issue which doesn’t get organised under some umbrella organisation is not only politically naïve but a consequently weak faction which doesn’t need to be taken seriously. More often than not, they’re comfortable in their armchairs living in their own deluded and secluded cloud cuckoo land.

There’s nicer ways of saying it but if want to be a force to be reckoned with, you have to get all ganged up. You seriously want to take on that exploitive employer, get unionised brothers and sisters. You want political change, form a lobby group. You don’t want that wind farm monstrosity blighting your life, start a local campaigning group. You want equal civil rights irrespective of the colour of your ass, start marching en masse. You want women to have the vote, get those bustles out of the drawing rooms and onto the streets as a mob waving placards and make the powers that be listen to you.

There’s simply no other way to get an issue onto the political agenda, and if you happen to think global warming isn’t a political thing, you pop that blue pill brother and dream on.

Give people a standard they can rally to and if the cause has real popular support, they’ll flock to it and become a bigger voice which will be heard despite any attempts to suppress it. Those attempts will just serve to strengthen group identity and make it a much more powerful force.

The deep primordial history of us as a species is all about getting together and cooperation. You might be rubbish at knapping a flint spearhead, but as long as one of the group can do that specialist thing, everyone is happy. Crap at tracking game? No matter, that runty kid over there is somehow brilliant at it. You might just be a spear carrier, but you know you play your part for the good of everyone else. That compulsion to gang up and work together is by now deeply embedded in our DNA. It’s been selected for. Without it, civilisation would fall apart in a day.

The worst thing you can ever do is sit in grumpy isolation doing nothing more than bitching away to a few cronies, and that’s exactly what’s all too common across the skeptic blogosphere. I call it the whinge and dump mentality and in the whole history of the human race, it’s never achieved anything other than being known as a complete bore to be avoided at all costs. Here they come – run away, run away!

As I look at the poll results to date, out of 2,683 votes cast, the response was 63% Yes, 24% No and the rest going for unsure. Scanning through the five hundred comments below the piece, a substantial majority expressed a “No” for various reasons. That’s an interesting dichotomy but an unsurprising one given the web dynamics of such a controversial issue as global warming.

There are just simply too many polarised people on either side who’ve spent years doing nothing more than venting spleen at each other. It’s become a social activity, a recreational pastime, a macho ego trip, a catharsis for a lot of tangential frustrations. Log in quickly, hurl an insult or two and surf onto the next brawl. Underneath the most combative blogs, out of hundreds of comments, barely a single digit percentage of the comments even reference the original blog topic, whatever it was.

That’s always forgotten in the light of the more important thing of continuing the niggling daggers drawn alley fights between the combatants that have raged on for years and will in all likelihood do the same for many more to come. If there’s a positive to such bad habits, I suppose the individuals in a sense are banding together for mutual support but underneath a blog rather than an organisation, and that’s an isolated waste of energy in what’s too often a never visited backwater as far as Joe Public is concerned.

Obviously, that’s not a characterisation of all people of either persuasion who comment on skeptic blogs but I think we all know it’s uncomfortably close to home in too many cases. What’s more interesting is to consider why a clear majority voted for some organisation as opposed to those who commented and were averse to any such thing.

If ever there was a graphic demonstration that the readers of blogs are quite a distinct grouping from those who choose to comment on a piece, that poll was it. It’s for that very reason that I exercise a zero-tolerance to trolling and although as a result I might only get twenty comments on a piece rather than two hundred of people intent on killing each other via the safe proxy of a keyboard, they’re usually twenty meaty ones. They’re my reward for writing the article and the viewpoints expressed very often round out the piece.

I’m target oriented, I got into this thing to win it, not to spend the next five years doing the same things like some obsessive compulsive stuck in a hopeless repetitive loop. The guerrilla phase served its purpose, but it’s high time for us to come out of the jungle, get organised and finish the thing off as a volunteer militia fighting it together. There’s no other way of putting some big tank tracks on the front lawns of governments around the world.

Global warming alarmism is going into the dustbin of history. It’s still got a fair amount of kicking and screaming to do but unless we ourselves get proactive in that endgame and are organised enough to have initiatives and policies already hammered out, we’ll be leaving those things to the tender mercies of those ephemera known as politicians. Make no mistake, it’s only a matter of time until they catch the popular sentiment and ride that bull to power, but entirely for their own selfish reasons and in the way they think it should be done.

I don’t care what particular form an umbrella organisation takes. I know it couldn’t address all my concerns, be led by people I totally like, perhaps not make the moves I would, become a liability at times, be a single target of focused attacks by the alarmists. I really don’t care.

It gets worse though. It’d be primarily a political organisation because it’d have to be and yes, that does mean dragging our hitherto pristine skirts through some muddy puddles, with the added discomfort of no pretty spiffing graphs or neat equations that nobody in the real world could make head nor tail of. And yes, some big fishies in our little pond might very well end up beached by events. There’ll always be casualties but the mission comes first, then the men. It’d never ring everyone’s bell but so what? I’d put on my I’m a big boy now long trousers and get stuck in.

The only shape any such organisation could take, and which I’d have a real objection to, is if it’s a thinly disguised lashup of coneheads who just know repacking and bombarding that tired bloke waiting in the drizzling rain for a bus home after a long day’s work with the REAL science is somehow going to make him get off it at Damascus. For God’s sake, give the poor bastard some credit, he already knows it’s a load of bollocks and at this point just needs nothing more than some decent leadership.

Yes, the science would always be a part of the package but we’ve tried that one to death and we are where we’ve been with that approach for a number of years, so it patently can never be the popular spearhead. Unpalatable as the idea might be, it really is high time for people to evolve out of some comfort zones.

Get it roughly, reasonably or even badly right and I’ll be content to chip flint spearheads or whatever I can usefully do to contribute. Just as long as most of us are moving forward together in some realistic manner.

©Pointman

Wind Power…..Good for NOTHING!

April 22, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Wind Power Costs send Germans back to the Stone Age

April 22, 2014 by stopthesethings 1 Comment

Power starved Germans take matters into their own hands.

If you’re going down to the German woods today, beware of a big surprise.

Although it won’t be cuddly Teddys with well-stocked picnic baskets and wonderful games to play – chances are it’ll be a power starved German armed with an axe, looking to filch a pile of timber to cook his bratwurst and warm his home.

In the last couple of posts we’ve looked at the social and economic disaster that is German renewables policy.

The Germans launched into massively subsidised wind and solar power with power prices rising 80 per cent in real terms in little over a decade. Unable to pay skyrocketing power bills, 800,000 German households have been disconnected from the grid – with that number growing by 300,000 each year. In addition, almost 7 million Germans are suffering “fuel poverty” – forced to choose between eating or heating.

Always a resourceful lot, power-starved Germans have grabbed their axes and have headed back to the woods in an effort to obtain that which their insane renewables policy denies: affordable energy. However, it seems their new timber-driven energy economy is premised on a “user-doesn’t-pay” model that has left German foresters unamused.

Here’s SpiegelOnline’s look at Germany’s return to the Stone Age.

Woodland Heists: Rising Energy Costs Drive Up Forest Thievery
Spiegel Online
Renuka Rayasam
17 January 2014

With energy costs escalating, more Germans are turning to wood burning stoves for heat. That, though, has also led to a rise in tree theft in the country’s forests. Woodsmen have become more watchful.

With snow blanketing the ground, it’s the perfect time of year to snuggle up in front of a fireplace. That, though, makes German foresters nervous. When the mercury falls, the theft of wood in the country’s woodlands goes up as people turn to cheaper ways to heat their homes.

“The forest is open for everyone to enter and people just think they can help themselves, but they can’t!” says Enno Rosenthal, head of the forest farmers association in the northeastern German state of Brandenburg. “Naturally, those log piles belong to someone and there is a lot of money and work that goes into them.”

The problem has been compounded this winter by rising energy costs. The Germany’s Renters Association estimates the heating costs will go up 22 percent this winter alone. A side effect is an increasing number of people turning to wood-burning stoves for warmth. Germans bought 400,000 such stoves in 2011, the German magazine FOCUS reported this week. It marks the continuation of a trend: The number of Germans buying heating devices that burn wood and coal has grown steadily since 2005, according to consumer research company GfK Group.

That increase in demand has now also boosted prices for wood, leading many to fuel their fires with theft.

Rosenthal said just last weekend someone stole an entire bundle of oak wood worth about €150 ($199) from a private forest in the town of Neuruppin outside of Berlin. “Many foresters come back to their wood piles and find them a little smaller or even gone,” he says.

A Gray Zone

About 10 percent of the firewood that comes out of Brandenburg’s forest every year is stolen, resulting in losses of about €500,000, Rosenthal estimates. In the southern German state of Bavaria some 5 percent is absconded with annually says Hans Bauer, head of the state’s forest owners association.

“A gray zone has developed,” says Rosenthal. “Normally if you sell sausages, you create a business and pay taxes, but with wood some people are laxer.” He says many people steal wood and then resell it via ads in the newspaper. Such sales, needless to say, tend to be of the under-the-table variety.

Other thieves are more spontaneous, says Bauer. Often people will just drive by a pile of wood and see it as invitation to steal, he says. “Drivers just stop, open up their trunks and put the wood in and drive off,” he says. “It’s that easy.”

Bauer says that a couple of years ago, a driver loaded up €2,000 worth of wood into a truck and drove off. He was eventually caught and paid a fine to the forest owner. But Bauer says such retribution is rare.

Extreme Measures

Bauer now advises foresters to keep wood deep in the forests away from busy thoroughfares and to make logs too large to fit in regular cars, keeping temptation for casual thieves at bay.

Often, however, even those measures aren’t enough. Rosenthal said that just a few years ago foresters would leave log piles in the forest for up to a year to dry. Now, though, he says they aren’t kept for more than a month before moving to more secure locales. “Keeping the wood under your own surveillance is the best protection,” says Rosenthal.

In the western German city of Hessisch Lichtenau other foresters are taking a more extreme approach, according to local daily theHessische/Niedersächsische Allegemeine. In recent years, two major tree heists have taken place in town and the state experiences losses of millions of euros as a result. The paper reports that now some foresters are outfitting log piles with GPS devices to track thieves.
Spiegel Online

With hundreds of thousands of (former) German power consumers with no power at all – millions struggling to pay for power – and no relief in sight – German foresters are fighting a losing battle. Deprive people of the basic necessities of life and they will do whatever it takes to replace them with the closest thing available.

Cooking a meal and warming a home were – until pretty recently – matters which Germans, no doubt, largely took for granted. Thanks to the insane cost of their renewable policy – for a substantial and growing number of German households – these basics are now beyond reach.

As we have pointed out before, the costs of wind power fall disproportionately on the poorest and most vulnerable in society (see our posts here and here).

What might make a few inner-city lefties feel good – for the few moments in their day (if ever) that they consider energy policy – carries with it the social cost of deprivation and exclusion that is a form of unjustified punishment. Access to affordable power is a matter of social equity: but social equity is now running a poor second to “green” ideology, as – thanks to the exorbitant cost of wind power – electricity has been turned into an “aspirational” good for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap.

With Australia following Germany’s lead on wind power policy, we’re well down the track to a return to the Stone Age. Australia’s “wind power capital”, South Australia (population 1.6 million) has more than 50,000 homes disconnected from the grid because they can no longer afford to pay their power bills – with more being cut-off daily. These people have taken to lighting their homes with candles – and cooking on wood stoves and barbeques. As to why South Australians suffer the highest power prices in the world (see our post here).

So, unless Australia scraps its insanely expensive, totally ineffective and, therefore, unsustainable Renewable Energy Target – like the Germans – we’ll be sharpening our axes and heading off on Stone Age timber gathering adventures of our own.

Wind power costs sends them back to the future.

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Wind Power Costs send Germans back to the Stone Age

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Wind Power Costs send Germans back to the Stone Age