John Weber, whose excellent articles about the fossil fuels needed to make renewable energy I have published here before, led me to a Jo Nova item on her website titled Renewables industry collapsing in Europe. Nova is the penultimate climate denier, as you will quickly see if you visit the link to her blog. She based her entire article of the following interesting graph……:
When I see a chart like that, I don’t see the collapse of renewables…….. I see the collapse of Capitalism! The difference between Nova and I is that I am utterly convinced climate change will destroy civilisation and most of life on Earth as we know it, no matter how much renewable energy systems we build, whereas she thinks AGW is crap, and we’re wasting precious dollars propping up an unnecessary industry.
Now I don’t care how much money we ‘waste’, it’s all monopoly play money; but all the same that chart is interesting because we are continually told about how great Europe’s renewable energy systems are, how Denmark, or Germany, or [insert your favorite EU country here] generated 50% or 100% or whatever of its energy demand (when of course it’s only electricity demand) on some days, as if that was some great breakthrough…..
Nova makes interesting comments, like this……:
Here’s a detail that tells us how big the malinvestment is here. There are nearly half a million people in Europe working in wind and solar to generate expensive electricity:
Jobs are being lost as a result. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, employment in solar photovoltaics in Europe fell by more than a third to 165,000 jobs in 2013, the last year for which it has yet collated figures. Jobs in wind energy rose slightly, by more than 5% in 2013, to nearly 320,000 across the bloc, with more than half of these in Germany.
Imagine if those people were doing something useful?
Yes……. imagine if all those people were doing something useful, like ending consumption and running their own permaculture farms……!
Here’s $329 billion very committed dollars worth of vested interests pushing the Climate Scare. Unlike the fossil fuel industry their profits depend almost entirely on government policy.
As Oil Crashed, Renewables Attract Record $329 Billion
But does she mention the amount of fossil fuels subsidies…? Of course not!
Here is a chart of fossil fuels subsidies……:
Hmmmm…… looks like it’s double the renewables subsidies to me. And that chart is now 3 years old, I can’t help wondering if it’s not doing a cliff dive of its own…. oh wait, it IS!
There’s one thing Nova gets right…:
Whatever you do, don’t graph renewables output in actual megawatts. Don’t graph it in CO2 tons saved. Never ever even mention the number of global degrees of cooling.
The rest is pure bias on her part……
Damn the Matrix 