Green Deal

At present we essentially have three distribution channels for energy: the filling-station network, gas pipes and power grids.

Dr. Peter F. Mayer, tkp.at (German)

The EU’s Green Deal, and also the UN with its 17 “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs), want to reduce this to a single infrastructure: the power grid. A failure of the electricity supply would therefore lead to a total failure of society’s energy supply.

According to Our World in Data, coal supplied 25% of all energy worldwide in 2022, and oil and gas a further 52%. The carbon we release in the process was originally obtained from carbon dioxide that was removed from the air by photosynthesis, buried deep and converted into coal and the other fossil fuels. With the introduction of this modern energy supply, food security rose considerably, and with it global life expectancy increased from 26 years around 1820 to 31 years around 1900 and to 66 years – or 78 years in industrialised countries – around 2000.

Over the centuries, new energy sources were added: wood, human slaves, draught animals, water wheels, windmills, coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower and nuclear power.

The reason for these additions was the advantages of the new energy sources over the old ones in terms of power, energy density, efficiency and cost. Populations adopted the new energy sources because they improved their standard of living and health. It is important to understand that this is an additive process that takes place gradually through the efforts of many individuals throughout society in many places.

At no time in human history has a relatively small elite taken the political decision to replace cheap, efficient forms of energy such as fossil fuels with inferior and more expensive technologies such as solar and wind energy. You cannot run public services on an energy source that consumes taxes instead of paying them, as Euan Mearns writes in BizPac Review.

The current so-called energy transition, however, is being forced on the masses by politicians through diktats and extensive handouts (of our money). Taxes are squandered, special interests are enriched, and citizens are burdened with expensive and unreliable energy supplies and a lower standard of living.

Converting all vehicles with combustion engines to electric drive alone would require an expansion of electricity generation and of the distribution grids by 65% of current capacity. This would involve horrendous costs that would make private motoring affordable only for a narrow upper class – not to mention the dangers we recently saw in the accident of an electric bus in Venice, in the Mestre district.

Practically everything we have – roads, buildings, cars, televisions, clothes, computers, aircraft, agriculture, education systems, health systems, military capabilities – exists thanks to fossil fuels. Their continued use and the further development of nuclear energy promise to improve the lives of billions of people. Yet the long rise of humanity – driven by natural incentives and governed by economic and physical laws – is being interrupted in frightening ways by misguided and self-serving people.

The dismantling of our current energy supply system could go down in human history as one of the greatest acts of economic, ecological and social vandalism. The motives of those behind it must be questioned.

The loss of three quarters of current energy sources – natural gas, oil and coal – would cause enormous price rises and shortages. Reducing three distribution networks to a single one would practically throw us back into pre-industrial times, with corresponding effects on life expectancy too.

Original article on tkp.at (German)

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