Filed under: Skeptics are winning.
The EU was always the leader in the Great Green Push, and announcements on Wednesday are an excellent sign. Both the media and politicians are finally coming around, dragged by reality. This is the good news. The bad news is it’s cost hundreds of billions, and there are still renewable targets when there shouldn’t be, but we are over the peak…
Today is a big day in Brussels as the EU has begun the gradual process of rolling back its bankrupting climate and green energy policies. Of course this modest climbdown is not the end of Europe’s climate hysteria that has dominated Brussels for 20 years. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the beginning of a much deeper retreat of its unilateral approach in coming years. –Benny Peiser, 22 January 2014
The talk is for an “ambitious” 40% target by 2030, but really this is about dropping the legally binding nature of the targets. So as usual in warmist politics, no one is up front and honest. It’s a face-saving move as the green reality falls.
European Commission to ditch legally-binding renewable energy targets
Climbdown on setting mandatory national targets, enforced in the EU courts, will be welcomed by Britain
“A 2009 EU directive set the objective of ensuring that 20pc of the energy used by 2020 should come from renewable sources. ”
“The binding target for renewable energy has probably had more impact on how power is generated and the bills paid by households in Britain than any other single piece of EU legislation.”
The media is turning around: more than half the stories in the UK are negative about renewables.
“A study by British public relations consultancy CCGroup analysed 138 articles about renewables published during July last year in the five most widely circulated British national newspapers: The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, which enjoy a combined daily circulation of about 6.5 million.
“The analysis revealed a number of trends in the reporting of renewable energy news,” the study found. “First and foremost, the temperature of the media’s sentiment toward the renewables industry is cold. More than 51 per cent of the 138 articles analysed were either negative or very negative toward the industry.”
More than 80 per cent of the articles appeared in broadsheet titles The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, the report says, “but 55 per cent of these articles were either negative or very negative about the industry”.
Two weeks ago, the Czech government decided to end all subsidies for new renewable energy projects at the end of this year.
Now that the Spanish government has dramatically curtailed these subsidies…
No country was in deeper than Germany
Germany has the most expensive energy, “26.8 euro cents (40c) a kilowatt hour”. It has half the world’s solar panels, but while they make up to 40% of the countries electricity in summer, they make nearly 0% in winter, when energy is most desperately needed. Germany is building 20 new coal plants, and its CO2 emissions are rising. This despite the enormous bill most electricity users are paying.
Finally the mainstream press is starting to report the real pain. Cons are always cloaked in good intentions. And this is no different. A stupendous swindle dressed up as being good for the poor and the planet has instead extracted money from the poor towards some of the wealthy. Nearly a million people have lost access to one of the most basic essential services, electricity, thereby rolling back one of the great advances of the last century.
Benny Peiser: “EU members states have spent about €600 billion ($882bn) on renewable energy projects since 2005, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Germany’s green energy transition alone may cost consumers up to €1 trillion by 2030, the German government recently warned.
These hundreds of billions are being paid by ordinary families and small and medium-sized businesses in what is undoubtedly one of the biggest wealth transfers from poor to rich in modern European history. Rising energy bills are dampening consumers’ spending, a poisonous development for a Continent struggling with a severe economic and financial crisis.
The German Association of Energy Consumers estimates that up to 800,000 Germans have had their power cut off ….
Some people have to chop wood again, while others are paid to produce and use inefficient unnecessary energy. Both Germans and Greeks are stealing wood to heat their homes.
“With snow blanketing the ground, it’s the perfect time of year to snuggle up in front of a fireplace. That, though, makes German foresters nervous. When the mercury falls, the theft of wood in the country’s woodlands goes up as people turn to cheaper ways to heat their homes.
Thanks to unrealistic Green ideas (and wasteful Keynsian currency management), real pollution is coming back. Now wood smog is a problem too, and forests are being plundered:
“In this winter of austerity and Depression-era unemployment, a fog of woodsmoke hangs over the Greek capital on cold nights.
It’s coming from the tens of thousands of fireplaces and wood-burning stoves Athenians are using to heat their homes. Most can no longer afford heating oil, the price of which has risen 40 percent since last year. The government also cut a fuel subsidy for low-income families earlier this month.
Some Greeks buy cheap firewood; others used their discarded Christmas trees as kindling. The most desperate are burning old furniture and raiding protected forests. Someone even hacked away the remains of a 3,000-year-old olive tree where Plato is said to have taught.
It’s the beginning of the end:
Benny Peiser: ” There can be little doubt Europe’s flagship climate policy has turned into an utter failure. In a realistic assessment of Europe’s policy shift, the International Energy Agency recently noted that “climate change has quite frankly slipped to the backburner of policy priorities”.
Germany’s green energy strategy is likely to change significantly after federal elections on September 22; Merkel has promised voters to drastically curtail the €20bn burden they have to pay renewable energy investors every year should she win.”
h/t GWPF