The Regressives 3: Barking at the Sun

Like cancer of the colon, “progressive” policies are the silent killer.

Most people don’t make a connection between all that idealistic hope and change shtick and the resulting devastated wasteland down the line.

Their ruinous spending policies, for example, tend to take decades to actually bankrupt a country. Similarly, their assault on the family, which really got going in the 1960s, is only now coming to its disastrous fruition.

Clearly, bringing a free, independent citizenry to its knees is not the work of a day.

But the liberal solution to climate change is the exception to this general progression from noble dreams to stark crisis. Other left wing campaigns have been able to appeal to our reason as well as our emotions. In the case of  the two causes above, for example, it’s easy to make the case for taxing the rich more heavily or not penalizing single mothers.

But the"progressive" approach to global warming will not only inevitably result in  the usual lefty desolate moonscape, but the lofty arguments themselves already look bonkers and indefensible from every angle. You’d have to be an intellectual to see any sense in them.

Recently, there have been a series of articles in the German liberal weekly, Spiegel, which for comic brilliance make Monty Python films look positively po-faced. The unintended genius has been to combine stark raving facts with a serious matter-of-fact tone.

The comic collection began in January with an article about solar power. In it they reveal that Germany has spent €100 billion on solar panels. But amazingly:

“The only thing that’s missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.”

€100 billion, or €100, 000, 000, 000 if you prefer. How could you spend €100 billion before you started to realize the problem. Germany is, in fact, a northern European country, prone to cloud cover.

In fact, solar power actually manages to provide about 3% of Germany’s needs, but because production is so sporadic much of it is lost and all solar production capacity must be backed up from non-renewable sources. All the attendant costs mean that the €100 billion investment far from reducing CO2 emissions, may actually increase them!

The only rational reason for installing solar panels in Germany is that the mad “progressive” government will pay you to do it. Or rather they make the average German pay for them by adding around €200 to their electricity bills in the form of a “green energy surcharge”.

I say the “average German’s” bill because the biggest industrial concerns were granted an opt-out of paying the green energy surcharge by threatening to depart to saner shores.

This is therefore a perfect regressive storm. Billions upon billions wasted, nothing achieved, and the poor suffer the most.

Same shit, different country.

 Across the North Sea in Britain, the liberal’s weapon of choice for self-flagellation is different. We’ve taken all those jibes about our cloudy weather to heart and even liberal intellectuals have conceded that solar may not be the optimum path for us.

So far, so rational.

But then we decided on our own £100 billion spending plan over eight years to install 30, 000 wind turbines. This was based on the seemingly reasonable premise that it is forever blowing a gale in the sceptered isle.

How’s that working out?

The 3,500 turbines so far installed are responsible for 0% of Britain’s electricity supply if you round the figure to the nearest whole number. But this rounding error (0.4% of electricity) doesn’t come cheap.

The man in the street has been easy to hoodwink about so called renewable energy, because the very name itself suggests that the electricity thus produced it is not only infinite, but free. However, in the real world the UK government can only persuade companies to erect these monuments to madness by offering them 100% more than standard electricity price for land based wind mills and 200% more for those precariously sited offshore.

The mathematically certain result is, of course, higher electricity prices, which recently went up a further 13%.

Last year the Guardian ran a story on fuel poverty. According to the article something like 8,000 people die each winter in the UK because they can’t afford to heat their homes.

The article, perhaps in a comedy competition with Spiegel, describes a demo outside the headquarters of EDF Energy in London. One particular paragraph shouldn’t be read with a full mouth:

“Many people at the “die-in” demo were climate change campaigners eager to highlight a fossil fuel-related issue. Samia Mitchell, a member of the Fuel Poverty Action Group, said: “Government and business are putting profits first and people’s lives second in deciding who gets to keep warm this winter.”

Maybe it’s a case of what psychologists call “projection” as the single biggest reason for fuel poverty in Britain is the government strong-arming us to pay much more for energy to fund the very renewables the climate change campaigners have so successfully lobbied for.

Unfortunately, thousands of deaths and tens of millions paying much more for power than they should is not all.

Wind turbines also manage to chop up thousands of birds of prey and bats each year. Curiously, if you conceive a sudden animus for falcons and decide to bag a few to display in your living room you’ll go to prison. But the wind companies have a free pass to kill on a factory-scale without a peep from the bunny-huggers.

Keeping up with the league table of "progressive" priorities is certainly a full-time business.

Beyond this, there is the fact that each turbine contains more than a tonne of an element called neodymium sourced exclusively from Inner Mongolia by boiling ores in acid leaving lakes of radioactive waste that make Chernobyl seem as pristine as the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge.

Finally, there is the fact that considering their costs of production, maintenance, and their sporadic output the ruthless truth is that scattering wind turbines across the realm will prevent very little if any CO2 getting emitted.

The good news, though, is that in recent negotiations with their coalition partners the merely deranged Conservative "progressives" managed to persuade their utterly demented Liberal "progressive" colleagues to drop their demand that all of Britain’s power be from renewable sources by 2030.

It’s enough to make you long for their old eat the rich rhetoric. At least the poor used to benefit, if only temporarily, from squeezing the wealthy.