"Green" policies are destroying this country

KiA Sportage diesel weighs 1.6 tonnes.

KiA Nero Ev with 64kw battery weighs 1.7 tonnes

Smaller cars would weigh less whether in BEV or ICE configuration

We can't predict the weather 5 days from now with more than 70% accuracy due to the number of variables and that's with relatively known trends and behaviours. Yet we're supposed to believe that future projections are sufficiently accurate despite the complex interactions and significant variability?

You can't predict the exact weather in a specific location a week in advance, but we can make predictions about the weather with very high confidence. Eh, It will almost certainly be colder on average this October in Ireland than it was in August.

The reason weather is chaotic is because individual systems feed off each other, creating uncertainties when tracking these chain reactions over time. But the climate is not weather, it's not chaotic in the same way because the overall drivers of the climate are stronger than the individual weather events.

The climate drives the weather, the weather doesn't drive the climate. Heat and the earth's rotation drives atmospheric weather systems, and heat and salinity drive the oceanic currents that also transport heat around the planet. These can be mapped and modelled and while they're not simple, they're not as chaotic as weather systems are on human timescales. There is much more inertia in global climate giving us ample opportunity to fine tune our models to account for the most important variables, but we still acknowledge that there is uncertainty about how the climate will react to the increasing energy we are adding.

The irony here is palpable. You admit that people can avoid death from cold by burning fuel ... yet that's exactly what you want to take away from them! Electrification of heating is a major Green goal. Just a few posts back I linked you a podcast where an entire city of millions of people -- who encounter freezing conditions every year -- are to be cast on the tender mercies of a grid that can't support them. Now you're telling me that electricity grids should never be depended upon in periods of high demand?

Billions of people depend on grid stability for their very lives. But you don't seem to have a problem with experimenting on them with crackpot energy schemes when it suits you. It can't be easy being a Green. You have to pretend you care about people who might die from "global boiling". Yet you also can't acknowledge that hundreds of millions have always lived with miserable temperature extremes -- people for whom massive increases in energy use are their only route to the comforts you take for granted.

Ah yes, that little catch-all phrase "the science is clear". It's a euphemism for "I'm about to make an outrageous assertion without evidence, and if you don't accept it you're a science denier who can't be reasoned with". The problem is, when I search the literature I can find claims about tens of millions, hundreds of millions (Myers), a billion (UN Org. for Migration), 1.2 billion (Inst. for Economics and Peace), 2 billion (Cornell University) -- the numbers are all over the place. Is that what you call "clear science"? They all trace their lineage back to one 1993 paper (Myers, 1993, “Environmental Refugees in a Globally Warmed World.” BioScience, vol. 43, no. 11, 1993, pp. 752–61). The original paper admitted to being highly speculative, but now it is mainstream to claim that not only are vast levels of climate displacement certain, it's already happening.

Unfortunately for these claims:

Or perhaps you would like it straight from the IPCC horse's mouth, from the AR4 report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability:

You can read much more on all this here:

There's a reason I asked you to cite both power and energy in claims about battery storage. Of course people are building lots of battery storage. You can make a fortune by shifting small amounts of energy from periods of low demand to periods of high demand, even within a single day. As your own article says: "Developers can buy electricity for around $20 per megawatt-hour earlier in the day when it is plentiful, then sell that power back to the grid when supply is more limited for as much as $5,000 per megawatt-hour in the late afternoon". It's hardly surprising that private money is flocking to such ventures.

Figures on total energy stored are always harder to come by. Your article makes one oblique reference:

That's not battery storage -- that's all forms of storage. The total storage added in a calendar quarter by a country with 60 times our population is equal to less than one hour of peak demand in Ireland. We'd need 50 years of current US storage additions to get us through a cold winter's week when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

Unfortunately the same story is replicating around the world -- Greens making completely unsubstantiated claims about the viability of technologies that just can't hack it. Renewables are not cheaper than fossil fuels, even on a standalone basis. When you add in the extra grid and storage requirements ... well I'd like to say they are vastly more expensive, but it's worse than that: the technologies literally don't exist.

I know his verbage is unreadable, so it's not swaying anyone.

Wasn't allowed to post links so a few screenshots

Go away with EV being green planet savior scam.

A new study has found that tens of millions of people worldwide are now exposed to toxic water runoff as a direct result of "green" metals mining operations.The reckless transition to "clean" energy has created an environmental disaster of epic proportions, the paper reveals.

In just the few short years that green energy has been a thing, harvesting it has already caused more ecological damage to the planet than has the more than 150 years' worth of drilling and mining for earth-based "fossil" fuels that has occurred since the industrial revolution.

What this means, of course, is that green energy is anything but clean, and is certainly not good for the environment. By comparison, earth-based fuels are much safer for the environment, not to mention cheaper and much more reliable for economic strength and prosperity.

All in all, some 23 million people worldwide – this is more than the number of people who live in the entire state of Florida – as well as 5.72 million heads of livestock; more than 16 million acres of irrigated farmland; and nearly 300,000 miles worth of rivers are all now contaminated by toxic byproducts of clean energy mining operations.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg6704

"Guess what doesn't work when the electricity goes off? Your central heating system."

?? Our heating system works fine when the electricity goes, thank you very much. We use solid fuel stoves burning renewable firewood and coal, grand heat and with a natural circulation of water from the boiler to radiators upstairs. You don't know much about how many rural houses are heated traditionally??

It's a complex problem, but just goes to show that stopping abusing a natural system is often not enough to solve the problems of pollution.

We still have heavily polluted soils from the simple fact that we put lead in our petrol - that will never go away. Just one example of so many unforseen consequences of accepting pollution.

This platform is terrible for responding to long posts because I can't even copy from the original post to respond individually on a mobile device, but now that I'm on a laptop, I can respond to some of your points in more detail

The Numbers are not as 'all over the place' as you claim. You mentioned Myers figure at '10s of Millions' when he later said 200 million displaced by 2050, and your claim that all of the subsequent estimates on displacement are based on this original paper is also false, there have been many independent studies that used different methodologies to estimate the likely number of people who will be displaced due to climate change, including this one

Groundswell Report (worldbank.org) which puts the number at 215 million, and that only includes internally displaced people from 6 regions, not including the total number of climate refugees who will move across borders covering the whole world

The reason for the variation in the numbers across studies is, because the estimates are all based on scenarios, different timeframes, looking at different catchment areas and with different criteria for what counts as displacement, and the scenarios dependent on multiple factors, including how much warming we allow to occur, and how much resources are spent on mitigation where possible. If we limit warming to 1.5c or 2c (unlikely at this point) then the number of displaced people will be much lower than if we allow the warming to creep up to 3c and beyond

Rather than me point at studies that show hundreds of millions of people will be displaced of which there are many, instead of you claiming I am making 'outrageous assertions without evidence', can you find me a single study from a reputable source that says climate change of 3c will not result in hundreds of millions of displaced people?

And the claim that there are vast numbers of displacement already happening is not misleading. There are already happening, with 32 million people displaced in 2022 directly related to weather events. Not all of them are permanently displaced, but this is just in one year, and we're a long way from 2050 yet.

On Energy storage:

How does this count as a rebuttal to my point? It is very profitable to buy energy when the price is high, and sell it when the price is low

This is exactly why BESS is exploding and we will see more and more storage coming online in the coming years.

As more and more variable renewable power comes on stream, this storage will serve as a valuable intermediary between demand and supply. We'll get away from 'Baseload' power vs Peak power, and we'll see renewable power being stored and sold as needed to meet demand. This will push Thermal plants completely out of the day to day grid operations but they will still play a role in long term backup, where they can be activated for the 10% or 5% of the time when storage is not enough. Eventually the demand and supply will balance out in the short term, and then large profits will be available for longer term storage until even long term energy storage becomes cheaper than keeping thermal plants on standby for the rarer and rarer times when they will be needed.

Asking for raw figures in terms of how many MW we need, or MWh is not really useful because the numbers are absolutely enormous, and that makes it seem like a mammoth task, but the numbers are enormous no matter how you look at it. If you told someone 60 years ago a single thermal plant would have to burn 40 thousand tonnes of coal a day to provide 2gw of electricity, they might have told you that's too much and it can't be done... well, now we're trying to replace those impossible feats of engineering with a more sustainable model, instead of burning millions of tonnes of fuel a year, we need to install millions of tonnes worth of BESS facilities, and then use that infrastructure to provide grid services for decades to come.

A vast estate they were given freely by the Land Commission, in other cases bought by the state who wiped the eyes of local people who couldn't put up large money for tracts that came for sale.

The bogs then drained and raped of all resources. Now cut away, worthless and this body now using public funding to greenwash their sins and generate new revenue streams.