Climate-Energy Hits The Wash, Rinse And Spin Cycle

By: Andrew_McKillop

WASH, RINSE AND SPIN
National weather forecasting organizations, most of which are members of the UN WMO (World Meteorological Organization) are obliged to toe the WMO party line – still rock solidly promoting “the new paradigm”. This dates from 25 years ago, and claims that human CO2 emissions are causing “dangerous global warming”. Not believing in this is not “new paradigm”.

Talking down and sidelining, then denying the real world always presents problems. For Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker, in April 1945, the stress of denying he had lost the war was so terrible he committed suicide – but not before causing an awful lot of trouble. World weather forecasting offices and agencies face the same problem of more and more difficult denial. Real world weather is simply not playing along with their fantasy talk, and the real world's denial of fantasy climate change and burning weather is already 10 years old. Ten years out of date.

The solution is Wash-Rinse-Spin the lies, half truths and bent statistics - and rapidly concoct an all-new paradigm, to save what can be salvaged from the wreckage.

THOSE 2 DANGEROUS DEGREES
Only since 2007 and its grandiosely titled “Fourth Assessment Report” (the jackpot Nobel Peace Prize winner) has the IPCC formally pushed the notion that whenever the Earth's atmosphere boasts 450 parts-per-million of CO2 (0.045%) this will automatically lead to world average temperatures rising by 2 degrees Celsius above the average temperatures of the year 1990. CO2 levels with massive media hoopla, have now reached 400.3 ppm. Average temperatures in many European countries, like the UK, have run at 1.5 – 3 degC below 1990 averages in March, April and May 2013. Getting to 2 degC above 1990 levels would need a 4 or 5 degC boost from present chilly levels and – awful sorry to say – this is simply not going to happen.

World average temperatures are far “off track” from achieving what they are supposed to achieve – constant lockstep automatic growth – with growing CO2 levels. What we have now and for 10 years “although we didn't know” is very simple to summarize:

• Declining average temperatures and rising CO2 levels.

Apart from embarassment for not well paid but nicely protected-from-reality academic scientists concocting their latest science journal work with at least 1 page of references for each page of tortured climate-correct prose, the political and business fallout from “the carbon paradigm” proving as valueless as the subprime mortgage bubble or Lehman Bros' bank is becoming very dangerous. Politicians and media talking heads are still obliged, and paid to stand up and say they know (not just believe) that carbon effluent is polluting the planet and “we” must ever-so-rapidly move to sustainable low carbon development forthwith. But this is only the start. They will soon break ranks and will stampede for the exit like proverbial elephants in a china shop!.

At this stage in the Wash cycle, the old lies are dissolved, and the Rinse cycle begins. The old lies are broken up, dissolved with enzyme-active detergents, and broken out of the mother doctrine fabric, ready to be rinsed away down the drain. All forgotten. After the spin cycle which is coming – soon – all will be clean and new!  From then on, the newest-latest approved gimmick fear theme can be promoted and with it, the parasites who feed off it.

THE SPIN CYCLE IS COMING
On 10 June, the UK ruling party Conservative MP at the centre of a green lobbying controversy, Tim Yeo announced he was going to “stand aside” from the chairmanship of the Energy and Climate Change Committee. The UK Parliamentary Standards Commission will investigate paid lobbying allegations against him. On 9 June, the UK Sunday Times reported that Yeo had boasted of “coaching” the managing director of a company before an appearance in front of the climate change select committee. He is also alleged to have offered to use his contacts, including ministers in private, to further the business interests of his “low carbon” clients.

Mr Yeo said the newspaper had made “a number of damaging allegations” which he totally rejected.

Mr Yeo has however declared that he has received more than £500 000 from green sector business interests since taking over the climate change and green energy committee chairmanship, according to the House of Parliament register of members’ interests.

When the logjam breaks, always-but-always the cockroaches flee. Declining handouts and subsidies to green-clean-low carbon are now the rule in all developed countries, meaning there is less fat to hand out and divide between the rightly named “players”. When or if public faith in the “low carbon paradigm” weakens, or disappears, the rout can only be massive.

Exactly like the Pentagon in the US, at exactly the same date – late 2008 – the European parliament voted for the now-famous “climate-energy package”, made law in the EU27 states by June 2009 to achieve a 20% share of renewable energy in all the energy it consumed. Since that time the economic blowback from 'saving the climate with renewables” has steadily mounted in Europe – even if the Pentagon can boast the F18 Green Hornet able to partly fly on biofuels after spending untold  billions of dollars of taxpayers' money.

Europe's attempt to position itself as the global leader in renewable energy, with Germany playing poster child is now giving way to facing economic realities: Europe is now considering standing back from some of its most outlandish green goals, for example the renewable fuel directive initially set as 10% of all European liquid fuels to be renewable-based by 2020, now set at about 6%, and declining.

The simple reason is the costs of renewable energy make European industry ever less competitive and as a direct result European industry is contracting and delocalizing, and shedding jobs. For not-well-paid but shielded from reality academics working up yet another climate change blockbuster article this is of course totally unimportant. They do not sleep in the street.

But in Germany, and other EU states this is now highly political. Fuel poverty does not adversely affect well-heated academics toasting their butts in a think tank, and when this hits as much as 20% of the entire population of a country the political blowback from ever-rising energy prices is sure and certain. This is now especially true in Germany, where some of Europe’s highest electricity prices have many companies considering jumping ship to cheaper locales like shale energy-rich America.

German businesspersons say the Energiewende will kill German industry. Power system experts worry about blackouts. Voters are reaching their tolerance limit on ever higher fuel bills. The chaos threat undermines Germany’s claim to efficiency, threatens its vaunted competitiveness and unfairly burdens households who unlike industry do not get rebates on the forced Energienwende surcharges added to their power bills. Britain's green energy chaos is now well known – and cross party support to halting the rout as soon as possible is now massive. Elsewhere in Europe, Spain's grave financial rout has been further intensified by its wild spending program on green energy through 2007-2012.

WHEN THE BUCK STOPS
The spin cycle starts when the buck stops.

Europe's poster child green energy hopeful, Germany, was thought of by political deciders as easily able to pay for the party, until the past three years. The cost of the mess was passed on to electricity users but household fuel bills have risen by 25% in 3 years to as much as 50% more than the EU27 average. Even worse, and fitting the “long term adjustment” fantasy tucked inside the climate-energy paradigm, where renewable energy supply contracts and prices are set for 20 years ahead, the problem will only, and can only get worse, until politicians pull the plug like they did in Spain, renege on all their previous commitments, and force tens of thousands of “family producers” of renewable energy into insolvency, lose their savings and livelihood, and swell the ranks of the New Poor.

Already a hot potato in German politics as the Sept 2013 general elections loom, the “true and final” costs of Energiewende to 2020 are now estimated at a minimum of 350 billion euros. How much more than that is even more political, but McKinsey Germany forecasts that on current commitments and technology trends, in the absence of politicians pulling the plug and entering the spin cycle, the final spending through 2012-2022  could easily exceed 600 billion euros – and how this can be financed is unknown. About the only common platform among German political parties, at this time, is to “Europeanize” the problem – shuffle the hot potato out and across the continent. Financing would then also be “Europeanized', joining and intensifying Europe's possibly terminal sovereign debt-and-deficit crisis.

Thank you Germany!

The real solution is to stop the drunken carousel in its tracks with spending freezes from now and for the rest of the decade. At the same time, Europe must consider developing its domestic shale energy reserves, and diverting government spending from all non-performing energy sources and systems. Simply due to Germany being so advanced in the energy transforming process, and rout, we can expect the first major signs to be German, showing the spin cycle is operating and the ideological logjam is broken. The bottom line is simple: Renewable energy isn’t ready for the primetime, and no amount of government subsidies or green pie-in-the-sky hopes are going to change that.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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