"Green" policies are destroying this country

Yet again, It needs to be pointed out the infrastructure does not exist at the scale needed (+ 600,000 heat pumps & 900,000 electric vehicles by 2030) to move everyone intended in government plans to electricity consumption as their primary means to use energy.

Back in June Temporary electricity generators to be bought to replace older power plants, but this week, Power demand must be reduced as emergency generators delayed (businesspost, paywall)

Water and electric shortages threaten delivery of thousands of houses (businesspost, paywall)

I advocate building our own domestic source of energy in the form of renewables. I advocate not wasting money on a dead technology.

It looks like mankind isn't going to do enough to stave off environmental disaster in most of the world, at least until it's too late. I guess every country will have to adapt.

"Climate action" policies by Western governments that deliberately reduce food production in countries that produce a food surplus will do more to cause starvation than climate ever will. Without petrochemical fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides, global agricultural output will plummet, they tell you it's only 25% in Ireland, they are ideologically committed and they are not going to stop at 25%, in fact they will do what Sri Lanka did unless removed from power. When measured organic farms produce lower yields AND are less energy efficient requiring more land and water to produce the same amount, nor is the food necessarily better quality.

Globally we are caught in a nasty loop of pandemic, war and famine at present.

1. Pandemic lockdowns destroy/disrupt global supply chains, bankrupt business, destroy life savings.
2. Pandemic spending drives cost push inflation.
3. Green energy policies create shortage of gas due to cold Spring & low wind, lead to fertiliser production being cut and price rises.
4. War disrupts destroys/disrupt global supply chains.
5. Food production and distribution are cut due to fertilizer shortages and blocked supply routes.
6. EU green new deal climate action policies increase energy prices and cut food production.
7. Countries in Africa and the Middle East that need food from the surplus production countries must do without, they can print money, they can't print grain and meat.
8. Order breaks down in those countries, driving migration into Europe.
9. Uncontrolled migration into Europe destabilises EU countries (current problems finding accommodation for Ukrainians in Ireland, in a country with affordable hosing problems being created by ECB negative interest rate policy since 2014, driving yield seeking investors into property.)
10. Existing domestic problems like housing affordability, that have their root in ECB/EU policies, combined with with actions of establishment vested interests become intolerable to the population, they vote SF.

Notice, none of the present significant global socio-economic problems have ANYTHING to do with climate change™, but they are impacted by climate action . . .

The near-unanimous consensus in the peer-reviewed literature from the dismal science of economics holds that attempting to mitigate global warming is so cost ineffective in comparison with the far lesser and later cost of focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of warming that little or no spending on climate action is justifiable today. It is often expressed by people on this thread pointing out that it does not matter what we do, China and India undo everything we sacrifice ourselves for. The correct policy to address a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing, and deep down the public knows this, it is why climate change™ consistently ranks at the bottom of public concerns. There are more pressing problems to resolve..

Not only do Greens have no clue what it will take to get to 100% renewables in the future (or whether it's possible), they have no clue what keeps the current world economy ticking. There are food and fuel protests across the world TODAY, from south Asia to central and south America. Every aspect of global food security depends on hydrocarbons, from farm mechanisation to fertiliser inputs to food transport.

Hydrocarbon supplies do not appear by magic. Every hydrocarbon province reaches maturity and eventually declines, leaving the world scrambling to make up the shortfall by new exploration and development. That requires continual massive inputs of money and ingenuity -- all of which are being discouraged by Green policies and investment disincentives in the developed world. Resources are being diverted to making energy less secure and more expensive. In the developed world people will struggle to keep their heads above water, but in the global south this is quite literally a disaster right now.

The 2022 Global Report on Food Crises makes grim reading. The number one cause of food scarcity is violence and armed conflict, including massive spillover from the Ukraine war. The second is economic shocks due to inflation and exacerbated by Covid-19. Weather events come in third. While all three factors feed into each other it would be difficult to attribute much, if any, of the problem to climate change. Weather extremes have always played a role in food insecurity, but the number of countries in which they were a decisive factor in food scarcity fell from fifteen to eight between 2020 and 2021. Of the four countries that have food scarcities in the "catastrophic" category, weather was a factor in only one of them, Madagascar.

In the 277 page report, the term "climate change" appears only seven times and never in the main body of the text. Three of the references are photo captions and an article on Sahel region future vulnerability to climate change, and three are references to an article entitled: " Food crisis in Madagascar is not caused by climate change, find scientists". The word "climate" in any context appears 26 times, while "weather" appears 175 times.

Ukraine is mentioned 122 times. According to the preface, "the war in Ukraine is supercharging a three-dimensional crisis – food, energy and finance – with devastating impacts on the world’s most vulnerable people, countries and economies". Of course the preface is written by Antonio Guterres, the UN's chief climate catastrophist, so there is also an obligatory mention of the "climate crisis" as a secondary factor:

Funnily enough, the report itself does not mention a climate crisis even once. Food scarcity, as always, is caused by armed conflict and is amplified by the inflation caused by loose monetary policies in the first world, and the curtailment of food and fossil fuel supplies due to the Ukraine war. Any rational person would conclude that we desperately need to replace the oil and gas shortfalls caused by that conflict. Only the Greens are cruel and cynical enough to use it as leverage to argue for their own nihilistic decarbonisation project. That's why I have for some time considered the Greens to be not just misguided, but evil.

Bjorn Lomberg is not a credible commentator on climate change and has been peddling his adaption bullshit for a decade at this stage. A real shill to the business as usual crowd.

I don’t know- put all the economy/ planning process on a crisis footing to get it sorted.

It’s either that or we risk blackouts.

If you think he is looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles maybe you could provide some counterarguments instead of peremptory dismissals. Whatever one thinks of Lomborg he provides facts and figures that are there to be challenged. He's no climate change denier, and a vegetarian to boot, so I can see why he makes Greens squirm.

And what's this "adaptation bullshit" you are talking about? We have 1.5 to 2°C of warming baked in, so adaptation is a necessity not an option. What Lomborg argues against is overextending ourselves on mitigation efforts today because a) the RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios that the IPCC focussed on up to AR5 are increasingly implausible (the IPCC agrees with this), b) money should be spent where it achieves the greatest return (a no-brainer), c) existing Green policies will not achieve their stated objectives and are barking up the wrong tree, d) we need to invest money into energy R&D to come up with real solutions (and if that sounds like "hopium", take a look at Green hopium on batteries which we know are not going to solve the problems).

I'd very much welcome seeing Lomborg's numbers strenuously tyre-kicked. It would give the Greens a chance to set out their own projections instead of just wringing their hands about the world bursting into flames next Tuesday week. Even if were true (and it isn't according to the science) it would not make Green policies the correct ones. You cannot fix the problems by spending yourself into oblivion on policies that don't work.

This is something you catastrophists don't seem to be able to get into your heads. Mitigation efforts that do not actually achieve their goals are worse than useless. They divert funds to Green elephants that could be better spent on increasing climate resilience. Intermittent renewables cannot possibly solve the problems of a world where energy demand is increasing at the pace it is. Reliable, cheap, baseload power is what is needed, not to mention that we will continue to need hydrocarbons for applications where there is no current substitute.

Green policies are simply incomprehensible. In Ireland we just spent more on our latest 0.4 GW of onshore wind than the Brits are spending on Hinkley Point nuclear! Why isn't there an outcry about this? The simple answer is the Greens don't care. When pragmatism goes out the window to be replaced by catastrophist ideology, costs -- and consequent human misery -- don't matter. The long and short of it is that Greens are anti-human.

Why wouldn't we take proven nuclear technology that we know works extraordinarily well and strive to make it dramatically cheaper? There is absolutely no doubt whatever that this can be done. Apart from anything else, it used to be cheaper before it was strangled by misguided environmental activism and red tape. A huge proportion of the cost of nuclear is bureaucracy. A Manhattan-style project to increase standardisation and modularisation would reduce both production and regulatory costs. Yes, it's a mountain to climb, but if the climate issue is the crisis that Greens claim then it is one of the few workable policy options.