This is sure to set all the bunny-huggers' hair alight.
Study Confirms Donald Trump Is Right – ‘Clean’ Energy Is the Worst
Renewable energy is cripplingly expensive, hopelessly unreliable, massacres wildlife, destroys landscapes, destabilises the grid, harms indigenous peoples, and causes climate change. But apart from that it’s great, says a meticulous review published in the scientific journal Energies by a team of Irish and U.S.-based researchers.
Actually, the part about renewable energy being ‘great’ is a joke but the rest is true. The scholarly review – Energy and Climate Policy – An Evaluation of Climate Change Expenditure 2011-2018 – is probably the most thorough meta-analysis published on the so-called ‘clean energy’ sector. Its conclusion, though neutrally expressed, could scarcely be more damning:
…The reader may wonder whether the current proposed “zero-carbon” energy transition policies based predominantly on wind- and solar-generated electricity are truly the panacea that promoters of these technologies indicate.
It will confirm all President Donald Trump’s worst suspicions about renewable ‘clean’ energy and about utopian projects like the Green New Deal. But it will make grim reading for Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, the Prince of Wales, David Attenborough, the Pope, Leo Di Caprio and the rest of the rag bag of public figures who have sought to burnish their caring, eco-friendly credentials by championing ‘renewable energy’ as the best way to save the planet...
... According to the review, wind and solar are bad for a number of reasons – not least among them being the harm they do to the environment.
One of the rationales used for wind power is that it reduces man made climate change. But, in fact, the study shows, it actually causes climate change at a local level, changing wind patterns, temperatures, precipitation, even causing flash flooding.
In particular, recent years’ research has produced considerable theoretical and empirical evidence that wind turbines can have significant local or regional effects on climate. For example, Abbasi et al. (2016) explain that “large-scale wind farms with tall wind turbines can have an influence on the weather, possibly on climate, due to the combined effects of the wind velocity deficit they create, changes in the atmospheric turbulence pattern they cause, and landscape roughness they enhance”.
Green technologies are also incredibly resource-greedy. Part of the problem is their feeble ‘power density’ – which is the measurement of the amount of land required to produce a fixed amount of energy. By far the most power-dense form of energy is natural gas, followed by nuclear, oil and coal. Fossil fuels can produce large amounts of energy requiring little land. Renewables, by contrast, need huge amounts of land to produce relatively tiny quantities of energy. Fossil fuels produce on average about 1000 times more power for any given land surface area.
Renewables also require large quantities of minerals. Merely for the UK to fulfil Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s dream of making all cars in Britain electric by 2030 would, according to a group of experts led by Professor Richard Herrington, Head of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, require:
“…just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018 […] If we are to extrapolate this analysis to the currently projected estimate of 2 billion cars worldwide, based on 2018 figures, annual production would have to increase for neodymium and dysprosium by 70%, copper output would need to more than double and cobalt output would need to increase at least three and a half times for the entire period from now until 2050 to satisfy the demand”...