Net-zero Proposals – The Saltbush Club

Towns and States Don’t Want Green Energy

By Steve Goreham

Originally published in RealClear Energy.

Trump Administration actions to scale back renewable energy capture headlines, but citizens are also pushing back. Efforts to deploy wind and solar systems face a rising tide of opposition in towns, counties, and states. Mandates for electric vehicles and electric home appliances are being challenged. The combination of rising local opposition and Trump funding cuts threatens to end the transition to green energy.

The green energy revolution in the United States has run almost unopposed for the last two decades. Driven by the fear of human-caused global warming, federal regulators enacted an expanding array of incentives for renewables in the form of mandates, tax credits, loans, and subsidies. States added incentives to push for the adoption of wind, solar, electric vehicles, heat pumps, green hydrogen, and carbon dioxide (CO2) capture systems.

What is the Real Cost of Net Zero?

Australia is in the middle of an energy revolution, but it is a road to nowhere.

Weather dependent electricity has a huge cost – it is unpredictable, unreliable and is destroying and sterilising enormous tracts of farmland, hilltops and forests with solar panels, turbines and power lines. It is not cheap, not green, and not reliable.

Watch here Chris Uhlmann on Sky news as he outlines the energy disaster looming up for Australia.

PLANNING TO EXIT NET ZERO

By Rafe Champion

The government has initiated an enquiry into the market reforms that will be “fit for purpose” to support the suicidal net zero program.

That is the wrong question because the so-called transition from coal has run its course and we need to start planning an exit from net zero.

We need a plan well ahead in case a government comes to power with the desire to exit, only to find they are short on time and they have no idea what to do.

The plan will have to be sustained by a new narrative about energy that is based on realism and concern for the welfare of people and the planet. Let’s be energy realists and responsible stewards of the environment!

Energy realism rules in China and the rest of the developing world where they scramble for all the coal, oil, and gas they can get.

Meanwhile, the nations of the West emulate the mythical farmer who incrementally reduced the rations of his workhorse until it died.

We run down coal power and gas until there is not enough conventional power and parts of the grid will die on nights when there is little or no wind.

Read the author’s Spectator article: https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/champion-net-zero.pdf [PDF: 233 kB]

The original Spectator article (pay-walled): https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/looking-for-the-net-zero-exit-sign/

Original PDF from: https://www.flickerpower.com/images/Change_the_narrative_change_the_game___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf

The Looming Electrical Power Shortage

By Steve Goreham

Originally published in Washington Examiner.

People in developed nations take abundant electricity for granted. When asked where electricity comes from, most will point to their wall outlet. But many states in the US are headed for a serious and prolonged shortage of electrical power not seen in decades, driven by rising demand from the artificial intelligence revolution and mandates to adopt green energy.

For 20 years, US electrical power policy has been dominated by efforts to try to “mitigate” global warming, believed to be caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. In 2021, President Joe Biden called for achieving a 100% carbon-free electric sector by 2035. Twenty-three states have enacted statues or issued executive orders to achieve Net Zero electricity generation by 2050.

Laughs, lies and lights out

By John Mikkelsen

Oh the irony. Here I was reading our local Noosa newspaper last Saturday morning and laughing when the power started to blink off and on half a dozen times before finally cutting out completely and staying off for about five hours in our beachside suburb.

No lightning strike, no strong winds, just rain. Back to the newspaper and what I found unintentionally amusing – a long rambling letter from a local perpetual climate worrier attacking another correspondent for having the temerity and good sense to defend nuclear energy in the quest for “net zero”, then a regular column from Zero Emissions Noosa (ZEN) plugging its guide “ Rewiring Noosa – Electrify Everything”. This group, with the backing of our Noosa Shire Council, has far outdone even the most ambitious Green Dream Believers including the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris “Blackout’ Bowen, and his boss, PM Anthony (My Word is My Bond) Albanese.

The Net Zero Lemmings Rush

By Viv Forbes

Australia’s ALP/Green government and their media mates are using subsidies, taxes and propaganda in a suicidal attempt to move the whole country to 82% “renewable” energy by 2030 and “Net Zero Emissions by 2050”. Canny Aussies are buying diesel generators.

If they persist in their rush to Net Zero, we have a few “Net Zero” suggestions for them.

Net Zero Nonsense

By Bryan Leyland

Net Zero electricity by 2030 using wind and solar power is an impossible dream: the technologies and resources needed to carry it out don’t exist. (“Net Zero” means that we do not burn gas and coal for electricity generation except, maybe, in dry years.)

The report by the Interim Committee on Climate Change stated correctly that we would need fossil fuels for the foreseeable future to keep the lights on during windless nights and during dry hydro years. This report was shelved by the government and superseded by a Climate Commission report that had minimal (if any) input from experienced power system engineers.

Achieving Net Zero

By Viv Forbes

According to the clerics of the Green Cult, once we blow up our last coal mine, send all diesel engines to the wreckers, stop using concrete, reinvent sailing clippers, cover the grasslands with solar clutter and the hills with wind machines and then slaughter all of our cattle. . . global climate will become serene – not too warm, not too cold. Wild weather will cease, and there will be no more droughts, floods, cyclones or snow storms and no more plant and animal extinctions.

But the records written in the rocks tell a far different story about climate changes. Even when nature was in full control, it was not a serene place.

Long before the first steam engine puffed along the first railway, earth was periodically battered by natural disasters – earthquakes, tidal waves, pole shifts, magnetic reversals, volcanic eruptions, wild weather and droughts. Huge areas were covered by suffocating continents of ice, desert sands, massive flows of mud and lava, beds of salt and thick coal seams. Thousands of species disappeared including dinosaurs, mammoths and Australia’s megafauna.
Continue reading “Achieving Net Zero”

The Fatal Flaw of Net-Zero: EROI

By Nick Hubble

Renewable energy is not renewable, it is rebuildable. And the energy cost of building, rebuilding, and recycling means that renewable energy often does not provide enough electricity to sustain itself, let alone power civilisation.

The Australian Government has joined the global push to net-zero by 2050. Well, sort of global. But what does this really mean for us in practice? And is it even possible to achieve that goal?

Continue reading: https://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/the-fatal-flaw-of-net-zero-eroi/2023/03/11/

Biden’s Destructive “De-Growth” Policies on the road to Net Zero

Mark Levin explaines why President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for destroying the economy and why they want America reliant on foreign power.