Germany’s Energiewende – Lessons for Australia from Germany

In March 2017, the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy published a brochure announcing that the Energiewende, its renewable energy revolution, was ‘a success story’.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Energiewende (Grand Plan) has the goal of making Germany independent of fossil fuels in the long term. Coal, oil and gas were to be phased out, allowing drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. However, these goals have not even begun to be achieved.

The Energiewende was only driven forward in the electricity sector, which, accounts for only one-fifth of energy consumption. There were hardly any successes in the heating/cooling and transport sectors.

And so carbon dioxide emissions in Germany have been rising since 2009, even though well over a hundred billion euros have been spent on the expansion of solar and wind energy over the same period. The financial obligations undertaken in the process will continue to burden taxpayers for another two decades and will end up costing German consumers a total sum of around 550 billion euros.

Despite this enormous effort, security of supply is increasingly under threat. At the same time, people and the biosphere are suffering; wildlife protection has become subordinated to climate mitigation, even though the possibility of achieving the goals of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is becoming increasingly distant and the measures for the energy transition seem to become more and more questionable from a constitutional point of view.

800 regional associations in Germany commissioned a report on the achievements of the Grand Plan, supported by 24 German experts in all relevant fields.

“In this review we would like to inform a public debate and set out a reasonable course for energy policy in Germany.”

It details stark lessons for Australia. They have produced a very clear readable summary of all aspects of the German electricity disaster.

Read more: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/1-6-_kompendium-der-energiewende_englisch_1.pdf [PDF, 2.7 MB]

Source: https://www.vernunftkraft.de/

A Corollary of the Principle of Uniformitarianism

By Howard Dewhirst, Geologist

This document aims to contextualise the scientific debate concerning Climate Change (CC) and Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Examining Earth history, it is indisputable that CC has been operating for many hundreds of millions of years, in cycles that span many different time-scales (millennial-plus to decadal), all without human influence. Understanding the causative factors in past CC provides a solid basis for framing the present debate. AGW is a notion which says that human activities, notably the addition of CO₂ to the atmosphere, are causing an increase in the global heat budget. That higher-energy state of Earth’s environment it is argued sets the stage for damaging CC effects. Political and economic decisions have been influenced by this claim. Some of those decisions harm efforts to better the health and welfare of the world’s population, including both the poorest and those who are better off. If the CC and AGW arguments are incorrectly based, as we outline here, there is a need to re-consider those decisions.

CC in Earth History

• Paleo-temperature (of atmosphere and ocean) is taken as a proxy indicator of climate, since climate is a complex concept that includes precipitation amounts and patterns, wind, etc whose history and future cannot be extracted or classified in a satisfactory way
• Earth’s equatorial region has had a consistent temperature during the climate swings over hundreds of millions of years, but the polar areas have varied, thus altering the pole-to-equator gradient of heat energy, which is the principal driver of climate on the planet
• Causes of CC (changes in temperature gradients) are dominated by orbital and solar effects, with added signals from volcanoes (both dust and chemicals), tectonics and plate motions, and biological feedbacks
• Oceans (which cover ~70% of the planet) are the main heat reservoir, but with patterns of warmer and colder water distributions that reveal decadal and longer cyclicity that is not understood

Global Warming

• • Earth’s temperature has been generally rising since the end of the last ice age, with an apparent acceleration during the last century, but not since
  • Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have also been rising more uniformly, now reaching 410ppm or 0.04% of atmosphere
  • CO₂ has been identified as a ‘greenhouse gas’, based on an argument that it traps and reflects heat
  • The physics of CO₂ heat retention are over-stated, as only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (wavelengths of heat energies) can be captured by this molecule
  • Because CO₂ concentration is rising and is implicated in global warming, and because CO₂ is a by-product of combustion, energy sources from fossil fuels have been demonised – via social and political suppression of their use, and a push towards 100% renewable energy
  • There are three key challenges to the idea that CO₂ is the primary cause of GW:
    •    Long-term records of CO₂ and temperature show good correlation, but the CO₂ concentrations lag behind temperature increases by thousands of years. Thus, CO₂ increase is the consequence of rising ocean temperature, not the cause
    •    Numerical models of climate systems, which involve simplifying assumptions and methods that are associated with serious artefacts, consistently fail to ‘predict’ the known past temperature patterns. Such models cannot justify the suppression of hydrocarbon fuels.
    •    Average temperatures are no longer increasing despite the inexorable rise of CO₂

Human activities are not the driver of global warming (or cooling). Earth’s systems are governed by processes that operate over a wide range of time- and length-scales, many of which far exceed the usual scope of human perceptions. The demonization of carbon is scientifically unjustified.

Howard Dewhirst

Read the open letter: https://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/gsl-open-letter-dewhirst.pdf [PDF, 312 KB]

The Carbon Sense Coalition today came out in support of “lights out” during Earth Hour (Saturday 29th) but claimed the time should be renamed “Dark Hour” and suggested that consumers should also forgo the consumption of gasoline and diesel during this period.

The chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, claimed that consumers should spend the hour they sit in the dark with no transport, air conditioning or hot coffee, remembering the contribution that carbon fuels have made to modern society.
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By David Archibald

Do we live in a special time in which the laws of physics and nature are suspended? No, we do not. Can we expect relationships between the Sun’s activity and climate, that we can see in data going back several hundred years, to continue for at least another 20 years? With absolute certainty.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate that the Sun drives climate, and use that demonstrated relationship to predict the Earth’s climate to 2030. It is a prediction that differs from most in the public domain. It is a prediction of imminent cooling.

The full text continues in the PDF file (770KB):
www.carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/solar-cycle-24-implications-for-the-united-states-archibald.pdf

An audio version of this paper given at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is here: www.heartland.org/newyork08/audio/Monday/archibald.mp3

The Carbon Sense Coalition recommends that all policies on global warming should be based on the science and the evidence, not on unproven computer forecasts or media scare stories. We also submit that markets and private initiatives will achieve better, quicker and cheaper results than government departments, legislative coercion, targeted subsidies, or punitive taxation. Here is the full submission: www.carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/wilkins.pdf

Extract…
… Al Gore, the IPCC, and the vast majority of politicians in
the US and Europe argue that this [need to reduce CO2 emissions] is all established science. But I
am here to show that not only is this not established science, but that
the objective evidence available indicates that it is false.

Shocking isn’t it? You might ask, how can a lifelong Democrat
like myself reject my party’s position on global warming and join the
camp of the skeptics, virtually all of whom are Republicans or neocons.
Read the full article: www.carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/hertzberg.pdf[PDF, 655KB]

By Muriel Newman

“The climate change debate is forever shifting as science casts long shadows of doubt on the predictions of global catastrophe. The debate gathered a world-wide audience when climate alarmists gained control of the climate science agenda. Its popularisation has given it a political momentum that is proving difficult to halt.”

Read the full article as a PDF [31KB]. The original source is from The New Zealand Centre for Political Research: www.nzcpr.com/weekly124.htm.

The chairman of The Carbon Sense Coalition, Mr Viv Forbes, was recently (4th April 2008) interviewed by PRODOS. The interview may be listened to here: http://prodos.solidvox.com/?p=30

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on all farmers and those who eat farm products to raise their voices in opposition to the silly proposals of Australian and New Zealand governments to include emissions and motions from farm animals as a taxable carbon emission.

The chairman of “Carbon Sense” Mr Viv Forbes, claimed that New Zealand has already agreed to include farm animal emissions in their taxable emissions output and Prof Garnaut is also thinking of driving Australian farmers to the Kyoto bail for a similar milching.
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Greens hate individual freedom and private property. They dream of a centralised unelected global government, financed by taxes on developed nations and controlled by all the tentacles of the UN.

No longer is real pollution of our environment the main Green concern. The key slogan of the Green religion is “sustainable development”, with them defining what is sustainable.

Greens hate miners. They use nationalised parks, heritage areas, flora/fauna reserves, green bans, locked gates and land rights (for some) to close as much land as possible to explorers and miners – apparently resources should be locked away for some lucky distant future generation. And if some persistent explorer manages to prove a mineral deposit, greens will then strangle it in the approvals process using “death by delay”.

Greens hate farmers with their ploughs, fertilisers, crops and grazing animals. They want Aussie grazing land turned back to kangaroos and woody weeds. They plan to expel farmers and graziers from most land areas, with food produced in concentrated feedlots, factory farms, communal gardens and hydroponics.

Greens hate professional fishermen with their nets, lines and harpoons. Using the Great Barrier Reef as their poster-child, they plan to control the Coral Sea using marine parks, fishing quotas, bans and licences, leaving us to get seafood from foreign seas and factory fish farms.

Greens hate foresters and grass-farmers. They want every tree protected, even woody weeds taking over ancient treeless grasslands. Red meat and forest timber are “unsustainable”. Apparently they want us to live in houses made of recycled cardboard and plastic and eating fake steak and protein powder made from methane generated from decomposing rubbish dumps.

Greens despise the suburbs with their SUV’s, lawns, pools, rose gardens, manicured parks, ponies and golf courses. They prefer concentrated accommodation with people stacked-and-packed in high-rise cubic apartments, with state-controlled kindies in the basement, and with ring-roads of electric trams and driverless cars connecting apartments, schools, offices and shops.

Greens hate reliable grid power from coal, nuclear, oil, gas or hydro generators. Their “sustainable” option is part-time power from wind and solar with the inevitable blackouts and shortages needing more rules and rationing.

Greens lead the war on fracking and pipelines. The victims are energy consumers. The beneficiaries are Russian gas and Middle-east oil.

Greens think it is “sustainable” to uglify scenic hills with whining wind towers, power poles, transmission lines and access roads, and to clutter pleasant estuaries and shallow seas with more bird-slicing turbines. They think it is “sustainable” to keep smothering sunny flatlands under solar panels and filling the suburbs with extra power lines and batteries of toxic metals.

Greens think it is “sustainable” to clear forests for bio-mass to feed large wood-fired power stations, or for establishing biofuel plantations. They think it is “sustainable” to keep converting croplands from producing food for humans to producing ethanol for cars.

Greens hate free markets where prices are used to signal changing supply and demand. There is no room for fun, frills or luxuries in their “sustainable” world. They want to limit demand by imposing rationing on us wastrels – carbon ration cards, electricity rationing meters, water rationing, meat free days, diet cops and bans on fast foods and fizzy-drinks.

They also favour compulsory recycling of everything, no matter what that process costs in energy or resources. Surveillance cameras will keep watch on our “wasteful” habits.

None of this vast green religious agenda is compatible with individual freedom, constitutional rights or private property – and none of it makes any economic or climate sense.

The Despotic Green New World is coming. Climate alarm is the stalking horse, “sustainable development” is the war cry, and global government is the goal.

Read more, as well as:

• Planned Power Chaos
• Junk all Junkets
• “The Oceans will Boil”

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/green-dictatorship.pdf [PDF, 355 KB]