Believing the unbelievable has consequences, sometimes very bad consequences. We expect our public officials to have IQs greater than shoe size and therefore to make wise decisions. That is increasingly not the case. And no political party (on the Left or Right) has a monopoly on stupidity. The British and their European allies are a case in point. If the coming winter is as harsh as the last one, they may run out of energy, not due to a real shortage but to compounding stupidity.
In the United Kingdom, prices for electricity are skyrocketing as their vast offshore wind installations are failing to deliver the power the British people were promised. And the reason is simple. The wind is not blowing as predicted. Less wind means less power. Politicians should be able to understand this. But they live in their own elite world where they begin to believe their own rhetoric. That is remarkably dangerous.
Politicians have been warned that renewables (wind and solar) are notoriously unreliable and must be backed up with a dependable source like quick-start natural gas power plants or hydroelectric power. The British have interconnected their power grid with the French grid, in the hope that France will be able to step up when British wind fails. The problem is that the connection to France caught fire the other day, and Britain was left to its own devices.
Coal-fired and nuclear power plants can also be used for backup but take a day to come up to steam. That means they have to be kept running, even when the wind is blowing, in order to be ready to assume the load quickly. Politicians seem unable to realize that such an operation is wasteful. It would be better to just scrap renewables and stay with reliable power. Forcing customers to pay for two power systems, with one sufficient, is foolish.
When British wind failed to live up to expectations, they turned to natural gas. But natural gas is in short supply across Europe and Britain, because they used so much to keep warm last winter; and the Russians are not shipping enough to allow them to be prepared for the coming winter. The United States is exporting 40% more Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) this year than last. But most of that is going to Asia.
The British solution has been to fire up old coal power plants and continue using their eight nuclear power plants. That may get them through the coming winter, as high prices for electricity depress demand. But the stark failure of their version of the Green New Deal will be an embarrassing backdrop for the UN Climate Conference (COP 26) scheduled to begin at the end of October in Glasgow, Scotland.
This is not even half the story. Why have the Conservatives or Tories allowed Britain to become dependent on the Russian bear and his natural gas? Bears are dangerous. This bear will surely sit on them whenever he wants his way. Or worse.
A few years ago, Britain had a bright future with substantial reserves of natural gas, enough to keep them electrified and warm for decades. It is the same shale gas that turned the United States back into an energy superpower, without significant environmental harm.
However, the British are not about to emulate our success, because they want to appear more virtuous. They would need to use a drilling technique called ‘fracking’ to recover the gas. Their Greenies have maligned fracking as contaminating ground water and causing earthquakes. But the “earthquakes” are completely insignificant, and drillers have long known how to drill through the ground water table to reach the oil and gas far below without contamination.
The Tories know this and should have moved ahead with fracking, because they have held power in Parliament for many years. They did not, believing that their wind installations would keep the lights on. They also wanted green bragging rights, by showing other countries how to shed fossil fuels and thereby solve the nonsensical “Climate Crisis.” Just stop using fossil fuels, without regard to consequences. All of the warnings they received from scientists and engineers were ignored. Politicians were convinced that they could defy the laws of science. It was just a matter of willpower.
Who helped British Greenies convince the Tories to take the plunge? The Russians very openly donated $95 million dollars to the Greenies to convince Britain to drop out of the gas business and leave it to them.
Not only did the Tories give up their own natural gas, but they enacted carbon taxes to make their fallback to coal prohibitively expensive. This means that they have effectively cutoff their escape route from the current crisis. With the price of electricity rising rapidly, they will likely see ‘Yellow Vest’ protests, as their most vulnerable have to make a choice between heat and food. French President Emanuel Macron suffered widespread protests when he tried to ‘save-the-planet’ by raising taxes on gasoline and diesel. He had to rescind those taxes to placate rioters. Will Prime Minister Boris Johnson experience the same?
A shortage of natural gas that is driving up prices is having other less obvious consequences that may prove serious. British steelmakers have shut down their operations. Two large British fertilizer plants that use natural gas as their feed-stock are no longer economically feasible and have shut down.
That not only leaves the British short of nitrogen fertilizer but short of an important byproduct: carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is essential to the meatpacking industry as well as to beverage manufacturers interested in keeping the fizz in beer and soda. And it is used to increase crop production in greenhouses. Will the British finally revolt if pubs run out of beer? Will they finally revolt if grocery stores run out of beef and tomatoes?
Not to be outdone, the Netherlands is shutting down the largest natural gas field in Europe, and Germany has suffered a doubling of their already astronomical power prices, because of their reliance on renewables. They boast the largest installed solar capacity in the world. For a country as far north as Alaska, that means essentially no solar electricity in winter and limited solar in summer with all their cloudy days. German power suppliers are in danger of going insolvent. What are the Europeans possibly thinking?
Perhaps the winter will be mild, and the British will squeak by with only higher electric and heating bills. What then? The Russians are not going to turn friendlier, and the wind is not going to blow harder. But the British already plan to scrap all of their remaining coal-fired power plants and five of their eight nuclear power plants by 2024.
One has to wonder if the Tories are simply tired of running the UK and want to give the Far Left Labour Party a chance to do worse. This is not a contest to do better. It is a contest to do worse.
Will the entire British energy industry collapse and fall into government hands? If it does, it will bring Britain back to the days before Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sold off large government businesses that were hopelessly inefficient. When she found herself in a desperate battle with British coal miners, she asked her ministers to find something wrong with coal, so she could move Britain to nuclear power. Her ministers came up with climate hysteria, namely Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming from man-made carbon dioxide. And the rest is history.
Be careful America. Climate stupidity is contagious and deadly, just like Covid.
Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He is one of the Directors of the CO2 Coalition and holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.
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