Germany is the poster child for killing the planet

Dominic Lawson is far too mild here, far too polite:

Now look at Germany, whose Energiewende policy trailblazed the switch from fossil fuels to wind power. On one day in 2019 wind power supplied almost 60 per cent of the country’s demand; on another day it could muster only 2.6 per cent. Cheap Russian gas seemed to be the ideal backup, but then ... well, you know the rest. Result: the German government has just authorised the removal of a wind farm that sits over untapped coal reserves, which the country now desperately needs to keep its industry going (and voters warm). RWE, which owns both the wind farm and the coalmine, explained: “We realise this comes across as paradoxical. But that is how matters stand.”

That is far too polite for this is the pathway, the technological one, that leads to that high end climate change outcome. The one where the ice caps melt, Flipper is broiled in the fumes of the last ice floe and AIEEE! we all die. Or, as the academic literature calls it, RCP 8.5.

As we’ve pointed out before, and as this paper discusses at length, what is required for this disaster to happen is the following. Please note that we’re not joking here. Nor are we making anything up. This is the underlying assumption which creates that entire runaway warming prediction. The world runs out of conventional oil and gas. The world refuses to use unconventional oil and gas - shales and fracking - and thereby turns to coal to power industrial society. Coal usage not only grows, it grows to more of total energy provision than it ever has done historically. That’s what produces the disaster.

What is Germany doing? Ah, you see the problem there then?

This is also why we’re so vehemently against planning - that detailed insistence by politics on what people may and must do - as a method of solving climate change rather than the Nobel-winning insistence from Bill Nordhaus that the way forward is to incorporate the externality into market prices and leave well alone.

For that more market oriented US is fracking and thereby not moving back to coal, that planned Germany is moving back to coal in the absence of conventional oil and gas. The planners are, in fact, creating the very scenario that the entire game is hoping to avoid. You know, spending €1 trillion and more on the Energiewende so as to increase the chances of Flipper being broiled?

The resaon we don’t want the planners anywhere near anything is because they make things worse. In this case, actually cause what it is that we are all trying to avoid.