As we enter the year’s final phase, I am becoming more hopeful that 2023 may be remembered as an essential point in human civilization as the threat to critical and efficient energy supplies begins to recede.
Sweden’s government has ditched plans to go all-in on “green energy,” green-lighting the construction of new nuclear power plants. Fossil fuel giant Shell announced it was scaling back its energy transition plans to focus on . . . gas and oil! Specific wind farm projects began to topple due to strong economic headwinds because the cost of generating electricity was deemed too high.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his decision to open the North Sea to more oil and gas drilling. French President Emmanuel Macron is surrendering to reality and asked for a “regulatory pause.”. More recently, the US and the United Kingdom have committed to expanding nuclear energy, and offshore windfarm projects are going kaput.
Now comes intriguing confirmation that there may be an end to the mindless and unscientific promotion of green energy sooner rather than later. One of the climate crisis propaganda machines is closing its climate desk.
A deeper dig into the news background indicates the decision came from news management.
…[My] editor with whom I launched the climate desk 2.5 years ago was not part of the decision to cut the climate desk. This decision came from above his head. I will not elaborate on any of the reasons I have heard for why this decision is being made. It’s not my story to tell on a professional networking site. What I can say is that I found the news absolutely devastating, for myself personally and for the stories that won’t get told.
Meanwhile, green energy firms continue to collapse. Enviva, the world’s largest biomass energy company, is reported to be failing. The company’s model model, centered on converting trees to wood pellets to replace coal in energy production plants, makes one question the logic and reason behind asserting chopping down millions of trees to create pellets to replace coal was either “green” or “sustainable”.
Forest advocates — who have long decried the stark contrast between Enviva’s forest-friendly claims and its contributions to deforestation during a climate emergency, celebrated the company’s crisis and said they weren’t surprised by it.“Enviva built a business model based on environmental injustice [and] forest destruction,” the North Carolina-based Dogwood Alliance, an NGO, said in a statement. “The [wood pellet] industry operates on a model of greenwashing, bad climate science, large-scale clearcutting and cutting corners on community protections.”
The firm had many technical problems and expensive challenges, causing it to seep money faster than a maple tree seeps in the spring.
I also reported recently on a German energy company restructuring its business to mitigate losses from its windfarm units. Now, it is being reported that a green hydrogen project Westküste 100 in Heide, Germany, has been “halted prematurely”…due to a lack of economic viability.
Founded as part of WESTKÜSTE100 in August 2020, Raffinerie Heide, Ørsted Deutschland and Hynamics Deutschland – working in close coordination with the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK), as well as the Project Management Organisation, Projektträger Jülich – have been working together on the planning, construction and commissioning of a 30 MW electrolysis plant to produce green hydrogen using electricity from renewable energy sources.After intensive examination of all general conditions, the joint venture will not make a positive investment decision. This is due to the increased investment costs and the associated major economic risks….Jörg Kubitza, Managing Director of Ørsted in Germany, commented on the decision: “A project must be economically viable, and this was unfortunately not the case in this instance. We therefore arrived at the logical conclusion. For Ørsted, there is no doubt that hydrogen will play an important part in decarbonizing German industry – but the associated costs must be reasonable and a market needs to be established.”
I have long asserted that sensible energy plans focus on those forms of energy that are efficient, reliable, and economically viable for most people.
A trustworthy news media would have challenged climate crisis narratives rather than promoted them.
It’s a scientific fact that just because you wish something to be true, it doesn’t make it true. The green energy dominoes are collapsing quickly because they were placed based on lies, distortions, and data manipulations.
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