START THE WEEK: How Much Is Just Hot Air (Climate)... by Wiggia

According to the lunatics in JSO (Just Stop Oil) this is happening now.

“If ever you wanted a prime example as to the gigantic con trick inflicted on us poor taxpayers that is the Green scam, then look no further than Drax. This conglomerate goes through the motions of pretending that it is beneficial to the planet whilst burning imported wood chips, sometimes manufactured by cutting down trees in Canada or the USA, whilst getting a huge subsidy of around £2 million a day. Not only that, the CEO of Drax managed to trouser upwards of £5 million last year as a reward for running this fake green company. That Drax exists is a testament to successive governments who have gone along with this con trick and particularly to the successive so-called energy ministers like Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and Ed Davy, who have , no doubt, done very well personally out of this. That these ministers are not locked up for fraud rather than prospering is a national disgrace but all you have to do nowadays is shout "green" and you can get away with almost anything.”

Drax also now own the logging company that supplies them. They say this is to offset when the green subsidies stop, but by then of course they will control the price of the wood pellets that Drax use.

This farce will then continue under the banner of green energy, despite the fact that the wood pellets produce as much CO2 as coal. Some say it also produces more airborne toxins as well, plus the moving of thousands of tons of pellets across oceans is hardly a green exercise, which when put together begs the question as to why we can’t use our own gas and coal resources until such time as so-called sustainable energy comes of age - and we are a long way from that.

I even heard a smug eco zealot talking about tidal wave power. That went out of favour some time ago when the costs were analysed and the fact that the tide has dead periods when it doesn’t move or hardly moves. It is no good talking about further storage to overcome these problems the cost is enormous and prohibitive, in the majority of cases.

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-dont-we-use-tidal-power-more

https://www.wired.com/story/how-green-are-wood-pellets-as-a-fuel-source/

But we are in a dire state regards energy supply. Once again decades of poor decision making by governments has come back to bite us in the backside. We have thrown away our ability to lead the world when we did with nuclear power decades ago. We close the only large gas storage facility and stop further gas exploration in the North Sea, rely on shipping gas in from the middle east and elsewhere when we could frack, stop a specialised coal mine from opening to supply industry and import the same from elsewhere and somehow believe that makes us green.

And become evermore reliant on intermittent wind and solar. It doesn’t matter how many wind farms you build, if the wind doesn’t blow there's no energy; yet the policy demands that all must change to electricity:

 

Despite the claims that more and more energy is supplied by wind power, the above shows how unreliable it is. The troughs out weigh the peaks by some margin; this will apply regardless of how many windmills are built.

All this has been repeated hundreds of times,. Does anyone actually take notice in the positions of power? It certainly does not look like it: the glacial approach to decision making is only matched by the glacial slide of the country into the second tier of world powers. Anyone believing we still have a top table say in the world's affairs is living in the previous century; energy wise, the century before that is where we are heading in the short to middle term.

I can see the time when a box of these…

... will become so valuable that the tulip mania that gripped Europe will return in the form of bidding for a box of matches, to provide light and create arson in order to stay warm. Far fetched? Maybe…