Large-scale wind and solar farms require at least 10 times as much land per unit as coal- and natural gas-fired power plants, including the land used to produce and transport the fossil fuels, research shows. But only a fraction of all land is suitable for development. One site might have the wrong slope for solar panels, while another area might be home to an endangered species that development could doom. If developers pick the wrong site, they risk undermining goals of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law that offers billions of dollars worth of tax credits for renewable energy projects nationwide.
Links tagged “energy”
- Biden’s Highway Safety Pick Has A Long History Of Pushing To Crack Down On Americans’ Appliances
- Biden Energy Dept Starts Crackdown On Dishwashers (27% less power & 34% less water) to ‘combat the climate crisis’
Granholm said the administration is “using all of the tools at our disposal to save Americans money while promoting innovations that will reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis.” New dishwashers imported into the United States beginning in 2027 would have to consume 27% less power and use 34% less water, while more compact models would need to implement a 22% power reduction and an 11% water use reduction, according to an analysis of the proposal released by Bloomberg Law.
- The inhumanity of the green agenda: The ‘sustainability’ regime is impoverishing the world – ‘Live in ever smaller dwelling units, less mobility, & to endure more costly’ energy
JOEL KOTKIN author of the new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates. ... In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and green activists see having fewer people on the planet as a key priority. ... They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.
The shift to electric cars is certainly no win for the West’s working and middle classes. But it is an enormous boon to China, which enjoys a huge lead in the production of batteries and rare-earth elements needed to make EVs, and which also figure prominently in wind turbines and solar panels. ...
Many of these folk make their living from producing food and basic necessities, or from hauling these things around. Factory workers, truck drivers and farmers, all slated for massive green regulatory onslaughts, see sustainability very differently than the urban corporate elites and their woke employees. As the French gilets jaunes protesters put it bluntly: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.’ ...
No surprise then that blue-collar workers are not so enthusiastic about the green agenda. Just one per cent, according to a new Monmouth poll, consider climate as their main concern. A new Gallup poll shows that just two per cent of working-class respondents say they currently own an electric vehicle and a mere nine per cent say they are ‘seriously considering’ purchasing one. ... Developing countries are home to roughly 3.5 billion people with no reliable access to electricity.
- Wash Post: ‘Large-scale wind & solar farms require at least 10 times as much land per unit as coal- & natural gas-fired power plants’
WaPo: America's energy transition hinges on decisions about land use, report says. There’s an often-overlooked aspect of America’s energy transition: It will require a lot of land. That means decisions about land use could have a profound impact on the speed and scale of the nation’s shift to clean energy, according to an analysis shared first with The Climate 202 by the ICF Climate Center, a climate research group within global consulting firm ICF.
- Conservative watchdogs highlight ‘alarming’ surge in whale deaths as wind farms grow off NY, NJ coasts – ‘Guerrilla-style ad campaign’ with plane carrying banner — ‘SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG’
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Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.” “‘’Damn the whales, full speed ahead’ seems to be the official policy of the Biden administration when it comes to the construction of offshore wind,” Rucker said in a statement. “The White House seems to remain unfazed and fixated on implementing its reckless ‘net zero’ energy agenda.” “Let’s hope some court steps in to, at a minimum, place an injunction against any continued offshore wind energy development until proper environmental studies can be conducted,” he added.
- EPA to Propose First Controls on CO2 Emissions From Power Plants – ‘Will be 1st time fed gov’t has limited CO2 from existing power plants’
NYT: "Mr. Biden has said that he is willing to use his executive authority to act on global warming..."
- Biden’s ‘Green’ Policies Are Following Europe Straight Into The Dark
- Heat pumps epitomize the economic folly of net zero – Benefits trivial compared to massive scale of expenditures required
- Energy Dysphoria: The working class isn’t down with the green transition’
In a new Monmouth poll, just one percent of working-class (noncollege) voters in an open-ended question identify climate change as the biggest concern facing their family. ...did anyone ask the working class whether they wanted to sign up in the climate change army? ... In a new Gallup poll, just 2 percent of working-class respondents say they currently own an electric vehicle and a mere 9 percent say they are “seriously considering” purchasing one. ...
I just don’t see how you can get the working class to support a clean energy transition unless it becomes more of a crusade for abundant, cheap, reliable energy and less about the cultural commitment of college-educated Democrats to an economy built around wind, solar, and electric vehicles no matter the cost.
- Elon Musk’s Plan Claims a World Without Coal or Oil Saves Trillions – Converting world to entirely clean energy will require $10 trillion worth of investment, compared to a cost $14 trillion to stay on fossil fuels
Converting the world to entirely clean energy will require $10 trillion worth of investment, but continuing to rely on fossil fuels would cost about $14 trillion, according to Elon Musk. A massive build-out of solar-panel factories and metal refineries are required over the next 20 years to deliver renewable-power generation and electricity-storage capacity needed to power the global economy entirely with carbon-free energy, Tesla Inc. said in its Master Plan Part 3 published Thursday. The white paper fleshes out the details of Musk’s vision for a world without fossil fuels.
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Climate Depot's Morano: "Elon Musk is living in a green energy fantasy utopian vision. Much like 2 weeks to flatten the curve, we are told just $10 trillion to transition our energy to so-called renewables. Perhaps Elon Musk is trying to win back some positive media after advocating for free speech on Twitter and taking hits and all his various business enterprises. The Way Forward is to use technology and cheap reliable energy to build America's economy, not derail our entire Economy based on a fantasy of green energy based on a premise of a climate crisis. Renewables dig the earth. Not in a 1970s Brady Bunch way, but literally dig deep into the Earth for Rare Earth mining. Green energy reliability and prosperity is always just around the corner - - in this case -- a $10 trillion dollar corner."
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Robert Bryce analysis: Elon’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Battery Math - Tesla's "Master Plan" for weather-dependent renewables will require 960 years of Gigafactory battery output. - "Gobsmackingly silly" - "Someone at Tesla might think about investing in a calculator."
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Climate ‘scam’: An ‘all-encompassing fraud’ with ‘authoritarians & corporatists bent on achieving even more centralized political power & economic wealth’
Ed Ring: What is actually beyond debate is not that we are in a climate crisis but that if we don’t stop destroying our conventional energy economy, we are going to be in a civilizational crisis. Energy is the foundation of everything—prosperity, freedom, upward mobility, national wealth, individual economic independence, functional water and transportation infrastructure, commercial-scale agriculture, mining, and industry. Without energy, it all goes dark. And “renewables” are not even remotely capable of replacing oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric power. It’s impossible. The only people who think renewables are capable of replacing conventional energy are either uninformed, innumerate, or corrupt. Period. ...
Were America’s oil and gas companies simply supposed to believe all these nascent theories and shut down? What exactly should they have done, back in the mid-1960s, to cope with this allegedly looming climate emergency? Were solar panels and wind turbines ready for rapid deployment back then? Of course not, especially since solar panels from China, and wind turbines from Germany, are still not capable of providing more than a small fraction of the energy we need. The real crime, if you want to call it that, isn’t that oil and gas companies questioned climate change theories back in the 1960s or ’70s. It’s that they’re accepting them now.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger Wants to ‘Rephrase’ Climate Change: ‘No One Gives a S–t About That’ – “Let’s go & rephrase this…really tell people we’re talking about pollution. Pollution creates climate change, and pollution kills.”
Flashback: Schwarzenegger touts ‘air-drying your clothes for 6 months to save 700 pounds of carbon dioxide’ -- While daily commuting to Gov. mansion via private jet
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What climate ‘crisis?! Record World Cereal Outputs Forecast for 2023/24
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Watch: Fmr. Rep. Michele Bachmann at WHO Meeting in Geneva – Previews pandemic lockdowns & medical tyranny