On the contrary, they entrench fossil fuels.
The failed reactionary effort to make our energy supplies dependent on the weather was never about attacking fossil fuels. It was always about attacking the only sustainable infinitely expandable form of energy there is, nuclear energy.
The Germans didn't shut their coal and gas plants when they started building wind turbines. Instead they threw tons of money to Putin to buy gas and finance his Imperialistic wars, notably against Ukraine, a nuclear powered country. The Germans shut their nuclear plants and embraced coal. Their carbon intensity is atrocious.
The belief on our end of the political spectrum that so called "renewable energy" is sustainable and that it has something to do with arresting the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is nonsense. It's not even "renewable" owing to the mass intensity, never mind the land intensity and the unreliability.
Over the last year, (2024) the fossil fuel loving Germans, despite their "renewable energy" fig leaf, have a carbon intensity of 334 grams CO2/kWh, compared to France's 33 grams CO2/kWh. Almost 50 years ago France did the exact opposite of what the Germans did in the 21st century: They shut their fossil fuel plants, including their coal plants and built nuclear plants.
Electricity Map Yearly
We have spent over 5 trillion dollars on solar and wind crap in the last 10 years, all of which will need to be replaced in 20 years.
It made not even a weak dent in the disastrous rise in the rate of accumulations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere. In fact, with the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered each year on solar and wind beginning in the 21st century, things have only gotten worse faster. The following graphic below shows this:
Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
I have shown that the axis on which the sinusoidal annual variations are superimposed is roughly quadratic, deriving an crude model equation for it:
A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.
Let's do something very, very, very crude, just as an illustration with the understanding that it is unsophisticated but may be illustrative:
As of this writing, I have been a member of DU for 19 years and 240 days, which works out in decimal years to 19.658 years. This means the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change is 0.04 ppm/yr^2 for my tenure here. (A disturbing fact is that the second derivative for seven years of similar data running from April of 1993 to April of 2000 showed a second derivative of 0.03 ppm/yr^2; the third derivative is also positive, but I'll ignore that for now.) If these trends continue, this suggests that “by 2050,” 28 years from now, using the language that bourgeois assholes in organizations like Greenpeace use to suggest the outbreak of a “renewable energy” nirvana, the rate of change, the first derivative, will be on the order of 3.6 ppm/year. Using very simple calculus, integrating the observed second derivative twice, using the boundary conditions – the current data - to determine the integration constants, one obtains a quadratic equation (0.04)t^2+(2.45)t+ 419.71 = c where t is the number of years after 2022 and c is the concentration at the year in question.
If one looks at the data collected at the Mauna Loa displayed graphically, one can see that the curve is not exactly linear, but has a quadratic aspect somewhat hidden by the small coefficient (0.04) of the squared term:
This admittedly crude "model" roughly suggests that the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide concentrations, given the trend, will be around 520 ppm “by 2050,” in 28 years, passing, by solving the resultant quadratic equation, somewhere around 500 ppm around 2046, just 24 years from now.
I’ll be dead then, but while I’m living the realization of what we are doing to future humanity fills me with existential horror.
The post from which this text come is from 2022. I keep a spreadsheet of weekly averages of carbon dioxide concentrations from the (threatened) Mauna Loa CO2 observatory, updating it regularly and occasionally comment on it at DU, usually when new records are set, as they are every spring, each record greater than that of the previous year.
Here's the most recent one from May of this year:
New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 430.86 ppm
Sometime after 2019, when I addressed the lifetime of wind turbines, big and small, I began adding the crude quadratic equation to the file, using the data obtained for each week.
The model now predicts we will reach 500 ppm by 2044, 19 years from now, and will be at 522 ppm, by 2050.
From the data there is no evidence, none, zero, that throwing trillions of dollars at trashing wilderness to make industrial parks for wind turbines has had any effect on climate change. Zip. Nada.
When we lie to ourselves we are not the only people we hurt. This particular lie, that a reactionary return to so called "renewable energy" has something to do with climate change, we are hurting all future generations, and indeed all living things.
It's why I often conclude posts thus:
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Have a nice evening.
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