After a surprising flip on climate by news agency Reuters, Jo Nova writes: what the world still urgently needs are real journalists and honest media. It needs accountable ministers, and bureaucrats that get sacked. If we don’t learn from the last mistakes, the next episode of parasitic loot-and-pillage is just around the corner.
Wow. Just Wow. Trump gets elected and Reuters realizes renewable energy is unrealistic
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
It is hard to believe, but it’s all there… the naked utter failure of solar and wind to reduce CO2, to reduce oil and gas, and to reduce prices. Edward Chancellor calls it a “resounding failure”. He has the devastating figures, and even the graph showing how countries with more renewables have more expensive electricity. He has another graph of the share market failure of renewables compared to the fossil fuel success, and he uses the words “tumbled” and “soared”. To grind it home, he explains how we just export our manufacturing to China which uses coal (is this news?). He calls Net Zero an “illusion” where we think we lower our emissions but we actually raise them overseas.
There is carnage among the sacred cows…
Climate policy requires a more realistic approach
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters Breakingviews) – The pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure. Despite trillions of dollars spent on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for over 80% of the world’s primary energy and a similar share of recent increases in energy consumption, according to The Energy Institute. Coal, oil and natural gas production are at record highs. Emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise inexorably. The financial markets were already losing confidence in the energy transition before Donald Trump returned to the White House. A more realistic approach to climate policy is urgently needed.
What they don’t say is that all this was unmistakably obvious for a decade or more, that thousands of engineers and scientists have been telling the world this would happen, and that Reuters wouldn’t report them, not even when they had a Nobel prize.
Solar and wind power have grown to a mere 3.5% of primary energy production. The levelised cost of renewable energy – which measures of the net present value of electricity produced over a plant’s lifetime – has declined sharply over the years. But this has not resulted into lower electricity prices. In fact, as the share of the energy mix provided by renewables has risen, electricity prices have tended to increase. That’s because wind and solar power are intermittent. Since storing energy in batteries is uneconomic, traditional sources of power are still needed as backup, which is expensive.
Why now? Because reality is making Reuters look stupid — it’s not the reality of high costs or blackouts, but the reality that Trump won, and set fire to the “transition” fantasy by dumping Paris, dropping subsidies, opening gas fields, and installing a corporate energy CEO as the US Energy Secretary. Chris Wright and JD Vance are dropping truth bombs in speeches that can’t be ignored. Word is spreading fast, and if Reuters don’t report this, they risk being turned into the same irrelevant wreckage the US mainstream media channels already are. As the US economy ramps up, other countries will have to let go of their green delusions in order to keep up. The game changed. There’s no point upping the ante in the UN-poker game if the main player has played a Royal Flush.
Even the graph! An actual graph!
Two graphs!
Presumably the owners of Reuters have sold out of their renewable stocks. (Readers here read about this trend in October 2023.)
So this is arse-covering, forgive the language, but this is also an escape clause for allies and believers
The owners of Reuters (whoever they are) — are presumably part of The Blob, since they have covered up its failures for decades, and gave millions to Hillary. This article is also an escape clause for allies and a warning to jump ship. It’s full of excuses — we were misled by an era of low interest rates; we had good intentions; we didn’t realize China made all our stuff with coal, you know, and Energy transitions take a very long time. What a shock!
The way Edward Chancellor writes, anyone could have got this wrong. Even the oil giants made mistakes, you know, and are now looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business. Never is there any question that say, National Energy Managers ought to have done their homework, or that Energy Ministers should have done due diligence before recklessly trying to transform electricity grids based on what Al Gore and a teenage girl told them to do:
Not long ago, investors worried that traditional energy companies would be left with “stranded assets” – oil and gas fields abandoned as demand for fossil fuels dried up. Yet earlier this month Shell (SHEL.L), opens new tab announced a near-$1 billion writedown for its investment in a wind project off the New Jersey coast. BP (BP.L), opens new tab is scrapping targets for increasing generation of renewable energy and cutting oil and gas production. As Lees writes, “across the sector, oil majors that shifted their portfolios to green energy are now realising their mistake and are looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business.”
The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels.The energy expert Vaclav Smil has likened the costs of the planned energy transition to those incurred by a nation fighting total war for decades on end. The era of zero interest rates created a sense that the supply of capital was infinite and its cost negligible. Rising interest rates dispelled that illusion. The economics of wind and solar power, with their large upfront investment costs and relatively low operating expenses, have been upended. Wood Mackenzie calculates that every 2 percentage point increase in the risk-free rate raises the levelised cost of renewable electricity by around 20%.
I’ve always said there will come a day when everyone says “I was always a skeptic”
This is the start of that normalization. It’s not the end, but it’s the beginning of the end in the energy battle.
But it’s not even the start of the science battle. They’re still “believers” of big-gov bad-science. The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels….
What the world still urgently needs are real journalists and honest media. It needs accountable Ministers, and bureaucrats that get sacked. If we don’t learn from the last mistakes, the next episode of parasitic loot-and-pillage is just around the corner.
And Reuters is still covering up for them.
Hat tip to Climate Depot
Illustration: Jo Nova