Norway and the entire EU are in the midst of an energy transition, and absolutely all resources and money are dedicated to the green shift. One of the reasons this is so expensive is that the energy transition must be carried out at express speed, while maintaining the energy system throughout, so that society is not harmed. “The most frightening thing about the ‘green shift’ is not the problems, costs or uncertainty created by the climate goals. Nor is it the overconfidence that this should, can and will succeed, or the total lack of risk assessment.
No, the most frightening thing is the fact that a decarbonised energy system has never worked anywhere. Ever. Ever. Not even on a small scale. Ever. Anywhere on earth. Never. Ever. They have no successes to show for it, no science behind it, no research to back up their beliefs and no empirical evidence to point to. The energy transition we need to go through is a figment of their imagination. But that doesn’t stop governments from trying!
A political project based on obviousness, without foundation
Despite this undeniable fact, the elite are so confident that “green transition” can and will work that they even consider the debate to be both ridiculous and silly, wearing tinfoil hats. Just follow the science, spend enough money and commit enough resources without doubt or hesitation, and the whole world can cut all ties to fossil fuels and rely solely on wind and solar energy, with transmission cables, batteries, hydrogen and ammonia as energy carriers. Fait accompli; the matter is settled.
The mystery is where this totalitarian collective conviction comes from – because it has no foundation in reality. There are no concrete facts behind the gigantic «energy transition» we are in, towards a «smart grid» that is a great PowerPoint success, but that’s where it stops. «Green shift» is completely without empiricism and has no successes to point to. Ever, anywhere. Politicians are gambling the whole of society on a self-cultivated myth, and the myth doesn’t work, because green transition has never had any physical, technical, mathematical or logical prerequisites for working. And that’s why it fails.
The solutions that the government will spend hundreds of billions on in order to achieve its self-inflicted climate goals do not have the ability to achieve the goals. They are castles in the air created by collective free imagination. Society may well need to move away from fossil fuels, and you may well believe that cutting CO2 emissions is important, but that doesn’t make dysfunctional solutions work, does it? Panic, haste and obsession are not magic powders. Reality doesn’t work like that.
Climate science is about temperature, and does not prove that solar and wind power is the solution that can and will power society in the future. There is no connection between climate science and the purported solutions to the climate crisis. It’s a mental, academic and logical short-circuit – which no media will write about, because all media are driven by the same obsession: “We have to change, and this is the solution, because everyone says this is the solution.” And they are wrong.
The city that tried green transition – and failed
No small-scale public project was ever implemented before the green shift was adopted in 2015. The Paris Agreement called for an energy transition based on wind and solar power, and they had plenty of theoretical calculations and models showing that this was not only possible; «The Smart Grid» would be expensive, but obviously, it could be implemented quickly and create an abundance of cheaper energy than before. It was invented and adopted in the US in 2007, but even that decision was not based on actual results. It was purely a theoretical future.
Driven by this short-circuit, the city council of Broken Hill in New South Wales, Australia, decided in 2018 to become the country’s first carbon-free city by 2030. And it wasn’t just about money: Some $415 million was invested in solar, wind and battery projects within 50 miles of the city, theoretically providing enough electricity to power 117,000 homes, so why bother with coal power? But PowerPoint and theory are not the same thing. The system was expensive, unstable and still dependent on fossil fuels. It was also vulnerable:
In October, a storm hit the region and destroyed power lines that connect the city to electricity that can be sent from the New South Wales grid, plunging the entire city into a series of outages that lasted for days – no joke even in a hot country with relatively low electricity demand: Refrigerators in pharmacies failed and vital medicines were destroyed. Emergency aid had to be brought in by diesel lorries. Schools were closed and the freezers in grocery stores did not work, so large quantities of food were destroyed. As a result, food supplies also had to be trucked in.
Within weeks, power was restored from the national grid, but it was still unstable and as reliant on coal and diesel generators as before. The incident doesn’t show that energy transition works. It just shows how dangerous it is, even for a small town of 19,000 inhabitants – and this madness will be implemented throughout the EU and the world by 2050.
And it’s not just going to be trialled or tested: It MUST be implemented! We MUST! And when it doesn’t work, it just shows that we need to try EVEN harder. Because we live in an era where politicians, authorities and the media have seriously declared CO2 to be a more dangerous pollutant than nuclear waste. Self-induced mass hysteria is that dangerous, and that alluring.
Multiple renewable demonstration projects
The island of El Hierro, part of the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa, is home to around 11,000 people. They also embarked on an attempt to be powered 100 per cent by wind and pumped storage. The aim was never to demonstrate that an energy transition away from fossil fuels is possible, but rather to promote itself as a 100 per cent renewable energy island through EU grants and subsidies. To date, the island has never been able to run its grid for an entire year without backup from diesel generators.
A small-scale demonstration of the “renewables community” should be easy to implement, even though electricity only accounts for 20 per cent of the total energy a community consumes. But even that hasn’t been achieved by any city, island or community. Even Boulder, Colorado, with over 100,000 inhabitants, has been challenged to become a fossil-free city.
The Boulder City Council has considered banning natural gas connections in new construction, and has adopted aggressive emissions reduction targets. The city plans to reduce emissions by 70 per cent from where they were in 2018 by 2030, and it plans to reach net-zero by 2035 – in nine years. Part of that goal is to move to 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2030 – five years from now, and not just become “carbon neutral”. No, it’s been decided that the city will become “carbon positive” by 2040.
No results indicate that these goals relate to reality, which we also see here in Oslo and Norway. But worst of all is Svalbard, where politicians decided that both the coal mine and coal-fired power plant should be closed down even before the “green” alternative was in place. And still no-one can explain what kind of “renewable energy” will power Svarbard, nor when it will be in place. In the meantime, a battery bank has been built, and the diesel generators are running around the clock with long-distance diesel. It’s so embarrassing that nobody wants to talk about it.
Everyone is convinced, and failures inspire people to try harder
Despite the setbacks, Broken Hill in Australia has not been deterred from pursuing its net zero by 2030 goal. To help stabilise the city’s grid, it is building a 200 megawatt battery plant. According to the supplier, it will provide eight hours of power to the city. The plant is intended to replace the diesel-powered generators that currently provide backup power. What all this costs and how long it will last before everything needs to be renewed is lost in the fog of climate euphoria.
The most dangerous thing about such collective mass hysteria is that no negative results bite it: Any failure only proves that you need to intensify your efforts, whether you’re chasing fictional witches, fictional paedophile rings or fictional climate targets. It becomes a positive-feedback system fuelled by mindlessness and obsession: Just listen to what the director of strategy at Equinor says in their latest commercial:
– Our energy system is in many ways the heart of our society. You have fuel in your car, electricity in your mobile phone, heat in your house, or it’s used to cook food, and there’s heat in industrial processes. It is the very foundation of how we build the good life for people, and it is how we develop our society – by using energy. Now we’re going to transform our energy system, a system we’ve spent over a hundred years building, we’re now going to transform in 20-30 years.
As you can see, she understands how important and crucial energy is to society. Yet there is no reservation, caution, uncertainty, cost calculations or risk assessment involved in her speech. It’s totalitarian and utterly confident, based on words like we “shall” and we “must” – but no actual results.
– I know where we are going. We have a clear direction. It is possible to find new solutions, and there is the will to do so. That makes me optimistic. At the same time, I’m impatient, because there’s no doubt that we need to accelerate the pace of the energy transition to reach our goal on time.
.
Where does this overconfidence come from? Because if this energy transition was so obvious, why didn’t it happen a long time ago? Why have no cities or islands succeeded even 30 years ago? The strategy director doesn’t have any successes to point to either, and yet there is no doubt. And that’s not all: We need to accelerate something that has never worked, to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and is not at all urgent, to achieve something that is impossible.
That’s how dangerous mass hysteria is, because the people in positions of power are not immune to frenzy. As you can see.