"Green" policies are destroying this country

Your pension is buying into a fantastic green washing machine.

Your pension fund buys bogland or forest, works out how much carbon it can capture over a certain period, and then it sells those credits as a commodity to someone who wants to buy themselves green credentials.

Bogs are also extremely popular sites for wind farms as they tend to be flat and open so exposed to wind. Buy a bog now, lease it out to someone who wants to build an onshore wind farm, pure profit!

So if I'm a cement manufacturer using a great big dirty coal or tyre fired cement kiln, and I want to call myself 100% green, I work out my carbon footprint over the year based on what I burn.

If I buy enough carbon credits so that when I subtract them from my carbon footprint, the balance is 0, voila! I am now a 100% green cement plant! Just like that...

The same has been going on in electricity for years now where SSE Airtricity and Energia claim 100% green energy to all of their customers, yet between them they own almost twice as much fossil fired generating plant capacity as they do renewable.

The Irish grid is also one unified network that everyone collectively feeds into and then draws energy out from, it can't differentiate electricity from Moneypoint's coal plant versus power coming from a wind farm.

Thus, any shortfall can simply be covered by a Guarantee of Origin credit which can be traded openly on the global markets and once they buy enough to offset their fossil based power generation output - voila! 100% green electricity.

In the not so distant past, laws also banned contraception, divorce, same sex marriage, and the ability for women to continue working in the civil service once they got married.

Just like all of the above, opinion's change and laws thus change to reflect those opinions.

As we face into increasing risks of widespread rolling blackouts in the years ahead, all those hours sitting in the dark will give a lot of people time to reflect and question just what the hell we as a country are doing when we can't even keep the damn lights on.

From the latest COP27 statementvas reported by RTE:"While last year's climate summit had also agreed to call on countries to outright phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, this year's draft encourages efforts to "phase out and rationalise inefficient fossil fuel subsidies".

Catherine Abreu of the E3G non-profit worried that tweak to the language could represent a weakening of the goal.

"Instead of a reference to phasing out all fossil fuels we have an even weaker version of the language around coal and fossil fuel subsidies than we got last year," she said."..end of quote.

I totally agree but only on one particular point: we should phase out inefficient subsidies, both fossil AND renewables.

The irony is that they only mention inefficient fossil fuel subsidies ignoring the huge Green elephant in the room. Because everything Green is good, everything Black is bad. It really is that simple. And it makes things SO much easier and simpler, also great for educating children to raise awareness without having to think too much. That wasted thinking energy could be put to much better use in ACTION. Think less and do more=problem solved! And it works for everybody, children and anxious teenagers, politicians, the media, education. Isnt it great?!😉

Renewables are not even running to stand still with demand and the green plan is to add to that demand by electrifying transport, heating and everything under the sun. It`s the human equivalent of a dog chasing his tail.

I dont think nuclear will become a final solution, at least not before 2050 although nobody can truely foresee the technical progress and timeframe. It has and will have clear advantages in growth over unreliables like solar and wind of which we can be certain they wont work in the future by efficiency alone, never mind scale, land use etc .We might see a further 10% rise of unreliables in the context of total energy production for the near future in the west. A bit more wind here a bit more solar there but there is clearly a ceiling. Many countries already see the grid strained by moving fr coal/oil power stations to solar/wind even if it is just houses returning power to the grid. That is not sustainable. The stretched envelope analogy. Holland is a good example. They are seriously thinking of getting back to gas..

Im afraid engineers are a too technical bunch to have around a discussion table unless they work in the green tech industry themselves promoting their business. If they are not they must be advocates sponsored by the fossil fuel industry and can be dismissed. See how that works? You are either promoting green tech or the enemy. You cannot be a neutral and have to pick a team..with that mindset i will a priori be on the opposite side..

I see the Regulator just last month had a problem over that as well.

Figures published by the CRU show that 56% of the electricity sold here last year generated by renewables, when the actual proportion generated was 35%. According to the regulator, Irish suppliers buy E.U.- approved guaranteed green certificates of origin which allow them to count renewable electricity generated and used elsewhere in the European Economic Area as theirs.

From memory I seem to recall there was an Article by Conor Pope not long ago on the same double selling and counting with these certificated. The scams around this whole thing just keep growing with the E.U. becoming more and more complicit with dodgy green-washing bookkeeping massaging the figures to look better than they really are.