This year will graphically demonstrate the malign consequences of the misguided efforts to replace cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy with unreliable, inefficient "Renewable" energy like wind and solar.
Much of Europe-the most aggressive nations in replacing fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels-has grown dependent on Russian exports to make up for the energy lost from shutting down nuclear and coal-fired power plants.
In California, the California Political Review reports, demolition of four dams will soon begin, "With no replacement for the water and energy they provide." Compounding this blunder, in two years the state's last nuclear power plant, which provides 10% of the state's energy, will be shut down without any plans to replace that loss.
It has shut down pipelines, cancelled leases for drilling in federal lands and waters, and strangled the petroleum industry with more regulations, even as the national average cost of a gallon of gas approaches $5. Yet our country possesses abundant energy resources and the technologies for extraction such as fracking to produce all the cheap energy we need-if that production was not thwarted by environmental lobbies, virtue-signaling corporate boards, green subsidies grifters, and naïve nature-lovers who promote government regulations that guarantee we will not have enough energy, and that what we do have will be punitively expensive.
Worse, our current most reliable energy sources-nuclear and natural gas-which could help us reach those goals are being proscribed and replaced with unreliable wind and solar energy, which produce energy less than 20% of the time.
"None of them," Smil writes, "Could be produced so abundantly, so reliably, and so affordably without considerable fossil fuel subsidies .... [F]or now, and for the foreseeable future, we cannot feed the world without relying on fossil fuels." Indeed, 20% today's energy supply goes to producing food.
As for replacing, in two or three decades, fossil fuels with wind or solar-as of 2020 only 12% of our total energy resources-that's a pipe dream.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/green-energy-chickens-coming-home-roost-bruce-thornton/
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