Europe’s Green Energy Basket Case Is Tim Flannery’s Dream

Posted: January 15, 2014 | Author: Jamie Spry | Filed under: Alarmism Debunked, Alarmist Predictions, Alarmists, Australia, BIG Government, Climate, Climate Alarmism, Climate Council, Climatism, Dud predictions, Environmentalism, Fact Check, Flannery, Global Warming Zealots, Govt Climate Agenda, Green Agenda, Green Energy, Pseudo-Science, Renewables, Solar, Tim Flannery, Wind Farms | Tags: Climate Commission, Climate Council, eco-activist, ecofacist, environment, Europe, Germany, Renewable energy, Spain, Tim Flannery, unreliables | 6 Comments

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong,
founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“
– Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“This planet is on course for a catastrophe.
The existence of Life itself is at stake.”
– Dr Tim Flannery,
Climate Council

he was wrong … Climate Council’s Tim Flannery predicted endless drought. Photo source : The Advertiser

•••

Tim Flannery, is the former Chief Commissioner of the disbanded Australian Climate Commission, setup by the former Gillard green Labor government. Flannery now heads up the privately funded Climate Council.

In 2007, amidst a relentless Australian drought, Flannery made this remarkable statement:

“So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that’s a real worry for the people in the bush.”

Within a year of making that now infamous prediction, the heaven’s opened, flooding the eastern board of Australia with monumental rainfall. Once again filling our dams and our river systems. Water storage in most major cities is now either at, or close to full capacity.

Australia By Cities – current water storage

Flannery’s persistent cries of never-ending drought were at best hyper-alarmist. At worst, his comments have inflicted untold financial misery on families and workers, costing them billions upon billions of dollars.

Before I detail the financial damage inflicted by Flannery’s alarmist intent, it is worth analysing the ‘climate mood’ around the time Flannery cut-loose with his dire drought prognostications…

•••

2007 marked the high-point of global warming climate change hysteria. One year before, Al Gore released his Academy Award winning movie “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Inconveniently for Al, by 2007 A British High Court judge cited 9 key errors in his alarmist and pseudoscientific movie. Judge Michael Burton ruled that the 9 errors had arisen “in the context of alarmism and exaggeration” in order to support Mr Gore’s thesis on global warming. Judge Burton noted the “apocalyptic vision” presented in the film was politically partisan and thus not an impartial scientific analysis of climate change. It was also ruled, a “political film.”

In order to be shown in British schools, Judge Burton ruled that 77 pages of supporting documentation would be required as reference material for students.

With the Academy Award, Gore also received a Nobel Peace Prize.

However, the damage was done and Gore’s silver-screen alarmist fraud swept the world gobbling up the gullible with catastrophic ease.

By now, there was little doubt that Earth was headed for thermageddon as Flannery spouted, “This planet is on course for a catastrophe. The existence of Life itself is at stake.”

•••

Enter the part of the story that annoys me the most about the over-sold, climate fiasco and the central issue that lends itself to the name of this site…

ALARMISM and its reckless financial burden

Flannery, in 2007 :

“Over the past 50 years southern Australia has lost about 20 per cent of its rainfall, and one cause is almost certainly global warming. Similar losses have been experienced in eastern Australia, and although the science is less certain it is probable that global warming is behind these losses too. But by far the most dangerous trend is the decline in the flow of Australian rivers: it has fallen by around 70 per cent in recent decades, so dams no longer fill even when it does rain…”

One only needs to click on the Bureau Of Meteorology’s rainfall page to discover the sheer nonsense of Flannery’s deluded rant :

*Even with 2010-2011 spike removed, the overall trend bears little resemblance to Flannery’s dire warnings.

Australian climate variability & change – Time series graphs – BoM

Here’s the kicker. In 2007, all eastern board states of Australia; QLD, NSW, VIC and SA were run by Labor government’s. Government’s sympathetic with big government, big regulations and the Greens twisted ideology of environmental extremism – though not an unpopular belief system at the height of anthropogenic global warming climate change hysteria, with no thanks to Gore’s mass-circulated doom flick.

Flannery, again, in 2007 :

“I believe the first thing Australians need to do is to stop worrying about “the drought” – which is transient – and start talking about the new climate… Australia is likely to lose its northern rainfall… In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.” 

By late 2007, the four Labor/Green allied state government’s, satisfied with Flannery’s pseudoscientific alarmism, began construction of $12 Billion worth of desalinisation plants.

On completion a few years later, ribbons were cut and the shiny new desals were ready to save Australia from drought ridden doom. Only problem ~ Australia’s eastern board water supplies were by then, and still are, very much full.

All four desalination plants, that were given birth to by Flannery’s global warming climate change, fear mongering, were mothballed, without producing a single drop of water.

Fourth desal plant mothballed. Billions more wasted | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Mothballed media :

• Mothballs at the ready for $1.8bn desal plant | The Australian
• The World Today – SA desal plant mothballed 05/10/2012
• New South Wales desalination plant deal to cost consumers $10 billion over 50 years – ABC News
• Water bills up $310 next year to pay for desalination plant, but French builder says it’s too big | Herald Sun
• How warmists cost us billions | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

The price of global warming alarmism is enormous.

Taxpayers gulled into spending billions of dollars on the back of global warming climate change alarmists, who persuaded politicians the rains would dry up.

•••

In September 2013, the Abbott conservative Government was swept into power in a landslide win. The public had simply had enough of six years of the big taxing, big spending Gillard/Rudd, ALP/Greens regimes. Australia was racked with debt and had nothing to show for it except a litany of failed green schemes scams and the $23/ton Carbon (dioxide) Tax.

In what was their first piece of official business, the Liberal coalition hastily sacked Chief Climate Commissioner Flannery and dismantled the fear-mongering, Carbon-Tax-PR-machine that was the Australian Climate Commission.

Flannery now heads a privately funded global warming climate change propaganda unit, the ‘Climate Council’. They spew out the usual alarmist weather reports blaming evil mankind on bush-fires and any summer heatwave that unseasonably rolls through Australia in summer.

Aside from scaring your children about the next 38 degree day in March, the Climate Council’s main aim is to demonise coal-fired power generation and its bi-product carbon dioxide pollution, and replace with renewable energy.

There shouldn’t be a sole on the planet who doesn’t eventually want a cheap, efficient, reliable, stand-alone, low impact ‘renewable’ energy source providing base-load power to the grid. However, it doesn’t take much objective research to work out that the current crop of renewable technology, namely wind and solar, even in their ‘advanced’ form, remain utterly useless and importantly, do little to reduce emissions.

The rush to embrace renewables “before the planet fries”, is placing a severe burden on households and industry as conventional fossil fuel sources are priced up to make expensive renewables competitive in the market place.

The billions who live with no electricity at all face an even bleaker future. With the proposed global switch to renewables, the most vulnerable are unable to access cheap efficient sources of energy such as coal-fired power, as organisations like the sustainability obsessed “World Bank” cutback funding for new coal-fire power in developing nations. 1.3 billion of the planets most needy, with no access to electricity at all, will remain in grinding poverty. Special thanks must be forwarded to the ever caring United Nations’ “Sustainability” agenda and their even more misanthropic  ‘don’t give the poor power because they might breed’ philosophy.

‘Feel-good’ renewable energy remains the domain of comfortable, western climate change elites, and truly are a token gesture to the folly of green madness.

See also : UN Carbon Regime Would Devastate Humanity | CACA

•••

Before we investigate what is going on in the world of renewable energy, it should be ascertained that the impetus behind the ‘renewable’ energy boondoggle explosion, is in reaction to 22 years of apparently ‘unprecedented’ global warming climate change from 1976-1998.

Renewables aim to stem the flow of evil carbon dioxide pollution, thus preventing the temperature of the globe from spiralling out of control.

By how much will the $trillions we have already spent change the temperature of the globe now and into the future? Nobody knows.

What we do know, is that over the past 17 years there has been no atmospheric global warming, or any statistically-significant warming for between 18 and 23 years, depending on which data set is used. A distinct lack of any warming evident, despite 35% of all human CO² emissions, since 1751, emitted over the same period.

According to RSS satellite measurements, for 17 years and 3 months, there has been no global warming climate change, at all :

Graph via WattsUpWithThat

Peer-Reviewed studies that confirm the lack of any recent global warming:

• Climate change: The case of the missing heat : Nature News & Comment
• Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998–2008
• Retrospective prediction of the global warming slowdown in the past decade
• Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years – Nature Climate Change 28/8/2013
• Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling – Nature Journal 28/8/2013
• Warmist scientists talk about no Global Warming
  

•••

Flannery’s Climate Council has endorsed a call by United Nation’s Climate Chief, Christiana Figueres for a ‘tripling’ of clean energy investment. Figueres says $1 Trillion a year (only) is required for the transformation needed to stay within 2°C of warming…(which will guarantee we avoid total human annihilation by 2100…fear…scare…fear…pay your carbon tithes here).

UN climate chief calls for tripling of clean energy investment

•••

Let’s now see how the “Clean Energy Revolution” is faring in Germany and Europe :

GERMANY IS A GREEN ENERGY BASKET CASE 

via JoanneNova

• German’s electricity bills have doubled since 2000. (Germans pay about 40c a KWH.)
• Up to 800,000 Germans have had their power cut off because they couldn’t pay their bills.
• Germany’s renewable energy levy rose from €14bn to €20bn in one year as wind and solar expanded. German households will pay a renewables surcharge of €7.2bn this year alone.
• Germany has more than half the worlds solar panels. They generated 40% of Germany’s peak electricity demand on June 6, but practically 0% during the darkest weeks of winter.
• Seimens closed it’s entire solar division, losing about €1bn. Bosch is getting out too, it has lost about €2.4bn.
• Solar investors have lost almost about €25bn in the past year. More than 5,000 companies associated with solar have closed since 2010.
• Germany has phased out nuclear, but is adding 20 coal fired stations. Gas power can’t compete with cheap coal or subsidized renewables and 20% of gas power plants are facing shutdown.
• Despite the river of money paid to renewables, emissions have risen in Germany for the last two years.

It’s a case of lose-lose all around, everyone — taxpayers, investors, renewables companies, gas companies — all lost. Waste and stupidity on a colossal scale.

The pattern is similar in the rest of the EU:

• Two weeks ago the Czech Government has decided to end all subsidies.
• Spain owes €126bn to renewable energy investors.
• In Spain more than 5,000 solar entrepreneurs face bankruptcy without the subsidies.
• EU leaders now officially list affordable energy as being more important than greenhouse emissions.

How much was lost from European manufacturing, to China, which could not compete? Investors are “pouring money into the US, where energy prices have fallen to one-third of those in the EU, thanks to the shale gas revolution.” 

 •••

In fact, the German green revolution has been so successful they have just ‘test-fired’ five new coal-fired power plants with a combined capacity of around 4 GW.

And just in case the wind stops blowing or the sun is blocked by clouds of evil man’s 12 parts per million colourless, odourless, trace gas carbon dioxide, rendering their half a trillion €uro investment in windmills and solar panels useless, Germany have another 15 coal plants planned to open by 2020.

German Coal Fired Power Stations Due to Open By 2020

Operator	Location	MW	Date Due	Status
Trianel	Lunen	750	2013	In Trial
EnBW	Karlsruhe	874	2013	In Construction
GDF	Wilhelmshaven	800	2013	In Construction
Steag	Duisberg	725	2013	In Construction
E.ON	Datteln	1055	2013	In Construction
RWE	Hamm	1600	2013	In Construction
Vattenfall	Hamburg	1640	2014	In Construction
GKM	Mannheim	911	2015	In Construction
MIBRAG	Profen	660	2020	A/W Approval
RWE	Niederaussem	1100	n/a	A/W Approval
GETEC	Buttel	800	n/a	A/W Approval
Dow	Stade	840	n/a	A/W Approval

BDEW, the German Energy Producers Association.

UPDATE

via Climate Change Dispatch :

Germany To Open 10 New Coal-Fired Power Stations

Written by Dr. Benny Peiser, GWPF, November 18 2013.

UPDATE

via NoTricksZone

German Chamber Of Industry and Commerce: Renewable Energy Driving Out 25% Of Industrial Companies

By P Gosselin on 6. September 2013

• In China, the true cost of Britain’s clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale
• Abound Solar’s Toxic Waste Highlights Enviro Hypocrisy on Pollution
• PEER REVIEW: Toxic health risks associated with rare earth metals extracted for use in solar PV’s and industrial wind turbines.
• PEER REVIEW: Lessons in wasting money: Use more wind and solar and… emit just as much CO2
• The dirty secret of Britain’s power madness: Polluting diesel generators built in secret by foreign companies to kick in when there’s no wind for turbines – and other insane but true eco-scandals
• Lessons in wasting money: Use more wind and solar and… emit just as much CO2 « JoNova
• Woodland Heists: Rising Energy Costs Drive Up Forest Thievery

Energy Related :

• Obama’s Energy Chief Hails Loss Of Taxpayer Billions A ‘terrific success’ | CACA
• Despite Climate Campaigners Efforts, Germany’s New Coal Boom Reaches Record Level | Watts Up With That?
• MUST READ : Germany out in the coal | Columnists | Opinion | Toronto Sun 
• Revealed: The EU’s great green U-turn on policy that is sending energy bills soaring across the continent
• Germany’s Massive Renewable Energy System Puts Out Only 7% Of It’s Rated Capacity in November!
• Europe Pulls The Plug On Its Green Energy Future
• MUST READ : The EU green hell
• The price of moral-vanity: A catalogue of Green economic disaster unfolds across Europe
• German Pols Now Demanding Energy Welfare For Its Citizens – 800,000 Have Had Their Electricity Cut Off!
• Australian emissions reductions target is undone by one week in China « JoNova

Climatism Links :

• Driessen : A Climate of Fear, Cash and Correctitude | CACA
• Global Warming Was Never About Science. It Was Always About Power And Money | CACA
• ‘Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life’ | CACA
• The Great Global Warming Climate Shift | CACA
• Richard Lindzen: Cool it on the climate | CACA
• The Truth About the Global Warming Agenda by Former NASA Climatologist | CACA
• When Hell Freezes Over | CACA
• ENVIRONMENTAL MUST READ : Bananas deadlier than Fukushima | CACA
• NATURE STUDY Confirms Global Warming Stopped 15 Years Ago
• Sea Level Rise slowed from 2004 – Deceleration, not acceleration as CO² rises | CACA
• State Of The Climate Report | CACA
• Bureaucratic Dioxide
• UTTER INSANITY: Spending $160b to cut the temperature by 0.00005 degrees

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