Climate / Energy: What if we come back down to Earth?

Contributed by Drieu Godefridi © 2017

Belgian philosopher, jurist, author of “Le GIEC etMort; Vive le Science” (The IPCC is Dead: Long Live Science) published in English under the title “The IPCC: A Scientific Body?”

Important information has emerged in the field of energy, and yet it is as if European politicians ignore it. Judge for yourself based on just the following facts:

According to “Bloomberg New Energy Finance,” a news source favorable to renewable energies, investments in those energies in 2016 are in a free fall (-18%) compared to 2015, down even from 2014. The regression would be even more marked, if there were for not  “vanity projects” such as the pharaonic “solar” built in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. In the United Kingdom, the decline in renewable investment is 90%.

It should be noted that almost all investments in renewable / intermittent energy are dependent on public subsidies. Suppose those subsidies be withdrawn, and investment in the renewable will fall to nothing. This was the case in Spain after the 2008 crisis, this will be the case in other countries.

The question arises as to whether pension funds and other investors who are massively present in the renewable sector do not make a mistake by not fully disclosing to their customers the dependence of a whole sector on subsidies, and the scientific uncertainties on the human causation of climate change, which is the alleged raison d’etre for a ‘low carbon’ technology.

Secondly, emerging countries, of which China – which has emerged so well that it is now the world’s largest economy – invest heavily in energy, but in fossil fuel energy. The largest coal-fired power plants builders are now Chinese, 1600 new coal-fired power plants are being built (!), of which 700 by Chinese companies, often in countries that have scarcely burned coal to date (Pakistan, Egypt; source: http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-paris-is-dead-the-global-warming-deniers-have-won).

All this implies a 43% increase in coal capacity. At the same time countries of the West – and more and more Western Europe alone – are divestingfrom the fossil to the renewable. To put it bluntly: Asia is burning cheap energy, while Europe is inflicting upon herself a high energy price. Of course, this will have consequences on all fronts.

This information may surprise you. This is because the world of energy, and the image of it by the European press, have ceased to coincide. Reading the European press, the renewable energy for the past 20 years is the incarnation of the future and the fossil energies that of the past. In reality, fossil fuel energy has never fared so well, and it is on the fossil fuels, and not the renewable, that the emerging economies are bet

ting, after the Chinese giant. All this was predicted in 2014 by Samuele Furfari, expert at the European Commission, in a book with the provocative title Vive les energies fossiles! subtitled “The counter-revolution of energy” (March 2014).

Most notably, scientists from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have just published in one of the most prestigious science journals, Nature Geoscience, an article that recognizes that the IPCC models are wrong, and I quote these eminent scientists including Myles Allen of Oxford University: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models.” However, it is the entire renewable / intermittent energy and investment sector that depends on the “settled science” of the IPCC. In other words, if these models are false, nothing justifies the forced march of the Europeans towards the burdensome debt-load of subsidized renewable (intermittent) energy.

This is crucial information. Is it not time for European politics to take these factors into account, instead of persisting in what Jean-Pierre Schaeken describes as “The Utopia of Renewable Energy” (published by the Royal Academy, Brussels: May 2017)? 

Dernier article “Outcome of the Paris Accord: a re-founding act of American democracy?”, Arguments — Revue européenne de science, vol. 2, n°2, été 2017, http://revue-arguments.com/articles/index.php?id=78