The destructive horror of green policies is finally dawning on important European politicians, trade union leaders and companies.
These include Volkswagen in Germany, Tata Steel in the UK, former Tory minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, and, perhaps most significant of all, Mario Draghi of the European Union (EU), who had been asked to write a report on Europe’s competitiveness. His report included this sentence: “We have reached the point where, without action, we will have to either compromise our welfare, our environment or our freedom”. He was referring mainly to the lunatic policy of “Net Zero”, where the political elite wants there to be no increase at all in CO2 emissions and wants to achieve this by extensive use of “renewable” energy, meaning wind and solar. He was wrong about having to “compromise … our environment”.
Rising CO2 is doing nothing but good, as we can see from the greening of the Earth because of it; above 150 ppm it has never been seen to have any effect on the climate. But he was right to warn of the economic disaster looming for Europe if it continues the suicidal quest for Net Zero.
Free energy is very expensive; clean energy is filthy; the Just Energy Transition (JET) is totally unjust; and green policies will ruin economies, damage the environment and benefit only a rich elite in the West, who will make fortunes by forcing tens of thousands of gargantuan but useless wind turbines and solar arrays upon us. It is the poor and the working classes who will suffer most – who are already suffering.
In Germany, Volkswagen, the world’s biggest car company by revenue (Toyota is bigger on number of vehicles sold), has announced it might be shutting down factories, laying off workers and scrapping job guarantees for its workers. This is because it is in deep financial trouble caused by several things, including competition from coal-burning China, but mainly because of the rocketing price of its electricity, caused by Germany’s mad energiewende, which consisted of shutting down her cheapest, safest source of electricity, nuclear power, and turning to the most expensive source of grid electricity known to man: solar and wind. By 2023, Germany had 69,450 MW of wind capacity (South Africa has a total capacity, from all energy sources, of about 50,000 MW).
Astronomical
The cost has been astronomical, not only from the gigantic turbines themselves but from the enormous subsidies and the huge cost of building environmentally blighting transmission lines from the windy north of Germany to the industry in the south. This has caused Germany to have some of the highest retail prices for electricity in Europe. It is forcing poor people into “energy poverty” and shutting down industries, deindustrialising Germany, at one stage probably the world’s leading industrial power. All of this in in pursuit of Net Zero and an irrational fear of nuclear power.
The energiewende was sparked off by the world’s most dramatic verification of nuclear safety, the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011. Nuclear opponents had been warning for years of the catastrophic consequences if things went wrong at a water-cooled, water-moderated nuclear power station. Well, everything went wrong at such a station at Fukushima Daiichi, on the north-east coast of Japan – and the result was that nobody was harmed by the subsequent release of radiation.
The station, designed in the 1960s, did not have a proper containment and was not designed against a 14-metre Tsunami, even though it was known that such an event had happened in the previous thousand years. This was thanks to the shocking dereliction of the Japanese licensing authority, who knew full well that Japan lies in probably the worst earthquake region on Earth. (South Africa is one of the best.) An offshore earthquake caused a 14-metre tsunami (“tidal wave”, by the older, no more illogical name), which struck the nuclear plant. It shut down automatically and safely, causing an immediate halt to fission.
However, decay heat, about 5% of total power, remained and had to be cooled by water pumps over the next month or so. The tsunami swept away the cables and controls of the pump motors, and stopped the cooling. The reactors over-heated, damaging them and causing a release of radiation. It was far too small to kill anyone but a large number of people died in the panic of the forced evacuation.
Plant safety
The lesson for Koeberg is two-fold. First, do nothing about increased plant safety from earthquakes. The tectonic plates in the Atlantic are moving apart, causing only minor quakes. (In Japan, they are moving towards each other, which is far more dangerous.) I am told that the biggest tsunami to reach the West coast of South Africa in the last thousand years was about 5 cm high (2 inches). Koeberg is designed against seven metres but could survive fourteen metres. The second lesson is to scrap the ridiculous Koeberg public emergency evacuation plan.
In Germany, which had much better-designed reactors than Fukushima’s and did not lie in a high earthquake zone, the lesson should have been to press for more nuclear power. Instead Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that nuclear would be phased out and replaced with “renewables”. The result was the economic and environmental disaster afflicting Germany now. To add irony to absurdity, she then authorised the building of new coal stations. (In his dismal debate against the awful Kamala Harris, Donald Trump remarked that the German energiewende had backed down a bit and returned somewhat to coal. This was true but, of course, Trump was too lazy to collect the data on the matter.)
While nobody suffered from the radiation from Fukushima, across the Yellow Sea in Mongolia, China, men, women and children were suffering terribly from the toxic wastes, which last thousands of millions of years, from the mines used to get the rare earth, neodymium, used in wind turbine generators in Germany. Two British investigative reporters visited Dalahai in Inner Mongolia, part of China, and made a report. Some extracts from it in 2011:
On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn. …
Rare earth metals
Vast fortunes are being amassed here in Inner Mongolia; the region has more than 90 per cent of the world’s legal reserves of rare earth metals, and specifically neodymium, the element needed to make the magnets in the most striking of green energy producers, wind turbines. …
At first it was just a hole in the ground,’ he says. ‘When it dried in the winter and summer, it turned into a black crust and children would play on it. Then one or two of them fell through and drowned in the sludge below. Since then, children have stayed away.’…
As more factories sprang up, the banks grew higher, the lake grew larger, and the stench and fumes grew more overwhelming.
‘It turned into a mountain that towered over us,’ says Mr Su. ‘Anything we planted just withered, then our animals started to sicken and die.’..
People too began to suffer. Dalahai villagers say their teeth began to fall out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages, and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases. Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed.
Official studies carried out five years ago in Dalahai village confirmed there were unusually high rates of cancer along with high rates of osteoporosis and skin and respiratory disease.
Very long time
This is the “clean energy” of wind. (I must point out that all non-radioactive elements last forever but I’m emphasizing that renewable wastes, too, last for a very long time.)
The UK is also suffering from de-industrialisation largely because of her pursuit of green energy. She has some of the best wind conditions offshore and has spent a fortune on wind turbines, but with the same dismal results as in Germany: rocketing electricity prices and grid failures.
Tata Steel has announced that two of the few remaining blast furnaces will be shutting down, with 2,500 job losses. Blast furnaces use coal to get iron from iron ore, and so soon the UK will be the first industrialised economy unable to make steel from ore. Instead she will have to rely on electric furnaces making steel from scrap, but soon high electricity prices will put paid to that too. The Tories were every bit as mad as Labour in this regard, both believing that Net Zero was more important than the prosperity of Britain, which they both seem happy to sacrifice.
Rees Mogg, who had been a Tory minister, now admits to the total folly of Tory energy policies when he was in power. So now industry and manufacturing will go from Britain and most of the EU to that champion of the greens, the world’s biggest coal user: China.
In pursuit of zero CO2 emissions, European countries will now ship their manufacturing and industrial jobs to the biggest emitter of CO2 in history. Using electricity from coal, and lots of it, China will make solar photovoltaic panels to sell to the West, and the Western elite will then congratulate themselves on their green credentials. China will also export to the West the manufactured goods, including motor cars, trains and tools, that the West became developed by making. While the working classes in the West might hate all this, the rich green elite will just love it. Green ideology is the ideology of the privileged Western ruling classes.
Excellent reactors
China is increasing her nuclear power capacity, although from a low base. She is building excellent reactors, some based on Western designs, but all of them safe, efficient, reliable and cheap. Because China has a programme of building reactors now and an experienced construction team, nuclear power there is very cheap. Again is it ironic that Germany shut down her excellent nuclear power stations but is now surrendering her manufacturing to China, which is growing her nuclear power rapidly.
South Africa is also de-industrialising but for different reasons – until now, that is. The ANC followed a programme of state control and racial engineering that was bound to lead to de-industrialisation. Its crippling of Eskom accelerated the process. But now, I regret to say, some politicians and most mainstream commentators want us to de-industrialise by following the German route of switching from coal and nuclear to wind and solar.
This is in spite of the expensive failure of our compulsory renewable energy program, the REIPPPP. Despite the fact that nuclear has always been cheap and reliable whenever there has been a continuous nuclear building programme and an experienced nuclear construction team, and despite the fact that solar and wind have never anywhere on Earth produced cheap, reliable, dispatchable electricity, there are still “energy experts” who say nuclear is unaffordable and renewables are the answer. I’m afraid that the DA is worse than the ANC on this, the only matter on which they are.
Own worst enemy
The West is its own worst enemy. It seems to have lost belief in itself and is experiencing something of a death wish. The West was founded on science and reason but is now surrendering to superstition and irrationalism. Climate alarm is the most dramatic example. The notion that rising CO2 is causing dangerous climate change is simple nonsense, easily disproved. But what is worse is that this nonsense threatens science. The greens want to replace scepticism, which is the basis of proper science, with blind faith in whatever the green high priests say. If you hear the curse, “Denialist!” or the claim that “97% of scientists” believe in climate alarm, then you know you are dealing with religion and not science. The 97% claim is a lie; the survey in question showed that over 99% of the papers looked at said that rising CO2 was not causing dangerous climate change.
Far worse, though, is the belief that you can do science by consensus. No good scientist in history ever said anything of the kind. No scientist in Galileo’s time said that “97% of scientists believe the Sun goes round the Earth”. Belief in green energy is purely based on faith. Sunshine and wind are free so the greens want us to ignore capital and operating costs and just believe that renewables are “free”. They want to believe that solar and wind are somehow very good and nuclear is somehow very bad. They cannot provide data to back this up but they can provide a lot of faith and passion. And so the West sinks into self-doubt and illogic.
But maybe the pendulum is swinging back. Maybe Mario Draghi and Rees-Mogg and the others in my opening paragraph are leading a new European renaissance. Let’s hope so.
[Image: Markus Distelrath from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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