Contributor at Western Free Press
Nancy Thorner is a writer, cellist, and Tea Party activist based in suburban Chicago who writes regularly for Western Free Press, Illinois Review, and The Heartland Institute's Freedom Pub blog. Nancy is active in the following organizations: The Heartland Institute, Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, Illinois Family Institute, Family-Pac, Republican Assembly of Lake County, and the Women's Republican Club of Lake Forest/Lake Bluff.
Latest posts by Nancy Thorner (see all)
- Exposing the Fantasy of Wind and Solar Power to Fuel America’s Economy - September 8, 2022
- Biden to Forgive Student Loan Debt - August 24, 2022
- Do Americans Have Cause to Distrust the FBI? - August 19, 2022
As stated by Francis Menton, President of the American Friends of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, in his article posted at Gatestone Institute dated April 25, 2022, A Mostly wind-and Solar-powered U.S. Economy Is a Dangerous Fantasy. 
The Biden Administration’s proposed transition to “net zero” via wind and solar power is not only not easy but is a total fantasy. It likely cannot occur at all without dramatically undermining our economy, lifestyle and security, and it certainly cannot occur at anything remotely approaching reasonable cost. At some point, the ongoing forced transition will crash and burn.
Other salient points from Menton’s article:
- At the current time, the government is paying little to no significant attention to the energy storage problem. There is no detailed engineering plan of how to accomplish the transition. There are no detailed government-supported studies of how much storage will be needed, or of what technology can accomplish the job, or of cost.
- It gets worse. Ken Gregory calculated the cost of such a system as well over $100 trillion, before even getting to the question of whether battery technology exists that can store such amounts of energy for months on end and then discharge the energy over additional months. And even at that enormous cost, that calculation only applied to current levels of electricity consumption…. For purposes of comparison, the entire U.S. GDP is currently around $22 trillion per year.
Menton’s article ends with this thought: “No sane, let alone competent, government would ever be headed down this path.”
Meanwhile, this country is heading down a government-directed and coerced path of massively building wind turbines and solar panels, while forcing the closure of functioning power plants burning coal, oil, and natural gas.
Now consider the following essay by Eric Worrall, posted at the WSJ by James Freeman, Assistant editor, editorial page, The Wall Street Journal: Why the Renewable Energy Transition will Fail.
Claims that wind, solar, and [electrical vehicles] have reached cost parity with traditional energy sources or modes of transportation are not based on evidence. Even before the latest period of rising energy prices, Germany and Britain—both further down the grid transition path than the U.S.— have seen average electricity rates rise 60%–110% over the past two decades. The same pattern is visible in Australia and Canada. It’s also apparent in U.S. states and regions where mandates have resulted in grids with a higher share of wind/solar energy.
Lastly, review this article at City Journal: Wind Power is not the Answer.
The IPCC and climate-change activists love solar and wind energy, and far-left politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a wartime-style national mobilization to convert to 100 percent renewable-energy usage. But this credo ignores a fundamental truth: energy policy and land-use policy are inextricable.
Having been sold as a great source of “clean” energy, the reality is that wind energy’s expansion has been driven by federal subsidies and state-level mandates. Wind energy, cannot, and will not, meet a significant portion of our future energy needs because it requires too much land.
City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank.
Green energy policies in Europe, designed to rapidly shift the continent away from fossil fuel dependence, have contributed to soaring power prices in the region.
“In Germany, the EU’s largest economy, wind power alone accounted for the largest share of electricity production between 2019 and 2021. Due to its intermittent nature, heavy reliance on wind power has left Germany vulnerable when the wind produces less output than expected.”
Norwegian research firm Rystad Energy told FOX Business in an interview. “There have been all these closures of coal power plants.”
“If you have a system with a lot of solar and wind, you need some backup in the system,” he continued. “Until we find a better technical solution than natural gas, you need something to back it up and that is the role of coal and gas and also nuclear in Europe at the moment.”
As a further blow to Germany, Russia has cut off it’s natural-gas flow to Europe via the key Nord Stream 1 pipeline, saying supplies would not resume until the “collective West” lifts sanctions against Moscow.
“Russia supplies more than 40% of the natural gas used in central Europe, with the majority of that amount flowing through Nord Stream 1. Germany became increasingly reliant on that gas as they moved to eliminate their own coal-fired generation and nuclear plants.”
As a counter to the present energy crisis, recently Germany and France have opted to resume nuclear:
In this nation, Californians were urged not to charge electric vehicles or to use large appliances, even air conditioners, over the Labor Day weekend, as an expected heat wave could trigger blackouts because of the strain placed on the grid with increased energy demands.
Experts have warned that California’s power grid does not currently have the capability to add millions of electric vehicles that need charging to operate.
More about renewable wind power
The Intergovernmental Panel Warns that the “strongest greenhouse gas in the world is being emitted from wind turbines. More Harmful than CO2, it is sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). See story here.
Just what are wind turbine blades made of and how are they made and then disposed of? It turns out that it takes diesel fuel to mine, ship, and set up the blades. Blades also use all kinds of elements that have to be disposed of.
Turbines last about 20 – 25 years. Any object with moving parts will experience some wear and tear, just like your car; however,
Also, about 85 percent of turbine component materials—such as steel, copper wire, electronics, and gearing—can be recycled or reused.
Wind Systems magazine says of the 17 rare earths, a wind turbine uses about a ton of four of them: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium and even more copper. A single industrial-size wind turbine can require as much as three metric tons of copper.
These rare earths are rare and take a LOTS of energy to extract. Because the virtue signalers won’t let us mine rare earths actively here (We only have a few, eg. CA. and TX), it goes to dirty China, which uses diesel fuel. When electricity is needed, mostly coal is used.
Wind turbines also kill hundreds of thousands of birds. Their ultra-low level noise is also doing serious damage to other wildlife.
Other than that, wind turbines are just fine.
What if there is no climate emergency?
It turns out that the climate is always changing. As for humans, they play little-to-no role in temperatures and weather patterns. These are dictated by factors far outside the control of mankind.
This article, Thousands of scientists sign formal declaration: “There is no climate emergency”, dated Tuesday, August 23, 2022 by Ethan Huff states:
“A growing number of scientists and other professionals and experts are of the same mind that so-called “global warming” and other climate change fictions are just that: fiction.”
“At least 1,200 of them have signed on to the World Climate Declaration, which declares that there is no climate emergency, despite what corrupt governments and academic institutions claim.”
The political establishment and its official “science” outlets claim that it is a “settled” matter, but the World Climate Declaration specifies otherwise.
“Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever is one of the declaration’s signatories. He says that climate change dogmas are more religion than they are science. A full list of World Climate Declaration signatories is available here.”
Elon Musk speaks out
Even Elon Musk has figured things out. According to the Business Insider, Elon Musk has figured some things out. Not only has he figured out how to be the world’s richest man, he also can see that the world currently needs oil and gas and that anything to the contrary is nuts. Musk even shared that oil and gas are needed to avoid civilization from crumbling.
It also looks like “Mother Earth” isn’t cooperating with the climate hoaxers and global warmers. There is still September to go through, but this past August was tropical-storm-free for only the third time In 60 years.
“The temperature of the water must be over 78F (to a depth of 150 feet) for a hurricane to form. The surface temperature is in the 80’s. . . . but it is too cold at the lower depths.”
Conclusion
Simply stated, all evidence so far indicates that the increase in CO2 and the increase in temperature are not harmful for us or for nature, making the climate hysteria surrounding the topic totally unjustified.
Furthermore, the cure — getting rid of fossil fuels and replacing them with wind and solar before they are ready for prime time — will be far worse than the disease itself, climate change.
The truth about the climate can be found at ClimateScienceNews.com.
Also check out The Heartland Institute’s excellent information about Climate Change. Heartland is based in Arlington Heights, IL: https://www.heartland.org/topics/climate-change/index.ht
First published at Illinois Review.
