A Xinjiang Re-education Camp | Wiki

By Jo Nova

Greens create slavery

What’s more important — freeing people in slave labor camps today or making the world one hundreth of a degree cooler a century from now? Oh the dilemma.

It’s just another unintended consequence on the road to Climate Heaven. If solar panels were actually efficient and competitive they’d make network electricity cheaper and theoretically, at least, there would be money to pay for real wages. Instead competition is cut-throat, and no country with a lot of solar panels can actually afford to make solar panels.

New Walk Free study shows Australia’s push for green transition exploits slave labour

By Jenna Clarke, The Australian

Leading Australian philanthropist Grace Forrest is warning ­Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen that the push for Australia’s green energy transition could force more people into slavery.

The comprehensive international study, five years in the making, shows Australia’s supply chains and products at risk of human exploitation for the first time, including solar panels which are imported from China at a cost of close to $2bn.

“For the first time, we have solar panels in our top five most vulnerable products of modern slavery. This is a confronting ­reality, one that speaks to compounding an intersecting crisis,” Ms Forrest told The Australian.vMs Forrest said. “You can‘t harm people to save the planet.”

If we cut back on slave made solar panels, where will the solar panels come from, and how much more will the forced energy transition cost?

No one else can compete with slave labour, and no one else has as much coal fired electricity.

China has cornered the solar panel market and supply lines. Squint closely to see “the rest of the world”…

Ironically, Grace Forrest, who founded “Walk Free” is funded by her father, billionaire Twiggy Forrest who wants to build the largest ever solar farm in the world in the Northern Territory. That may explain why she bizarrely  doesn’t believe in boycotts. Instead she wants a bigger government with more rules  (just a lighter version of slavery, eh?):

Hans van Leewen, AFR

…Walk Free boss Grace Forrest says that although consumers should shop carefully, the real onus for tackling the problem is not on them: it is on governments and businesses – which are not doing enough, despite the strictures of the five-year-old Modern Slavery Act.

She wants to see non-compliant companies hit with financial penalties. And she urges politicians not to worry about exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis, because paying exploited workers a fair wage would boost prices by as little as 1 per cent.

She said Walk Free did not support boycotts, and was not asking consumers to take responsibility for eradicating modern slavery. As with climate issues, the equivalent of greenwashing could make it too difficult for the individual shopper.

Magical thinkin’ — apparently businesses can do this without hurting consumers:

“We actually argue the business should absorb that cost, rather than it being for the consumer,” she told The Australian Financial Review while visiting London to launch Walk Free’s latest Global Slavery Index.

We presume she flew to London for the launch. Nice work if you can find a philanthropist to pay for the trip.

Slavery in other G20 countries means we all need more laws, and more lawyers

Somehow because there is slavery in China and it’s a G20 country, it follows that Canada and Australia need to bring in legislation and employ more bureaucrats.

“The fact is that 50 per cent of the world’s people living in modern slavery are residing in G20 countries,” she said. This statistic showed that the slavery problem was not just in poorer countries – “it’s over here, not over there”, as she put it.

“We would like to see an increase in legislation across the G20 countries. Canada has just announced this. Germany is going to see their example set across the EU in the coming years. We just need the political will now to step up and do that everywhere.”

Ms Forrest says “You can‘t harm people to save the planet.” Jo Nova says, “They are already harming people, and they probably won’t save anything.”

REFERENCE

GLOBAL SLAVERY INDEX, Walk Free

From Climate Realism

By Linnea Lueken

A recent Bloomberg article, titled “Exxon Says Reaching Net Zero Global Emissions by 2050 ‘Highly Unlikely’,” describes a regulatory filing Exxon Mobil Corporation made indicating that there would be significant risk associated with phasing out oil and gas production and use. Exxon and Glass Lewis, the advisor they referenced, are right. Getting rid of oil and gas in pursuit of Net-Zero emissions by 2050 would seriously impact the peoples’ standards of living globally.

According to Bloomberg, Exxon said “The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Net Zero Emissions scenario, which models a phaseout of most fossil fuels by 2050, has little bearing in reality[.]”

They go on to say that it is “highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE.”

Exxon’s representatives are correct. Multiple polls have shown that although majorities claim to claim to support “climate action,” once they see the actual price tag, they are far less enthusiastic. For example, a United Nations poll conducted in 2016, had climate change concerns coming in dead last.

Californians provides a good case study. As covered by Climate Realism, here, although California residents are often celebrated for their climate bona fides, when polled on support of a climate tax, their support fizzles. A California county board polled the public, looking for support for a tax increase of 0.25 percent to use for climate goals, and the poll failed to generate the two-thirds support they needed to pass the tax.

Europeans, who are generally happier with government climate initiatives, also don’t support those plans once they begin to directly impact their way of life. A recent YouGov poll of several thousand Europeans across different countries, found that most Europeans claimed to be worried about climate change. However, when the poll asked how much they were willing to sacrifice, support quickly waned. Most did not support limiting meat or dairy intake, paying more for electricity or energy efficient appliances, limiting how many children they have, or limiting or banning vehicles powered by internal combustion engines.

Since fossil fuel use is the backbone of all these parts of life, it makes sense to say that it is “highly unlikely” that a phaseout of fossil fuels will be supported once the masses realize what impact on the day-to-day it would have.

Restricting or eliminating the use of fossil fuels will undoubtedly lead to higher food prices, because every step of large-scale food production relies on them, and on byproducts from refining them. Fertilizers and pesticides are made as a byproduct of natural gas production, and plastics and other specialized materials are made from the byproducts of oil and gas refining. Large tractors run on diesel fuel; the steel necessary for heavy farm equipment is made using coal; transportation fuels get food from farm to table, the list goes on forever, and that’s just the agricultural industry. As Climate Realism has extensively covered, here, here, and here, for example, the food supply is already being threatened by efforts to ban the use of fossil fuels in agriculture.

Fossil fuels are even used in the mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, and construction of renewable electric power sources like wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries, and electric vehicles.

Exxon knows this, and should be encouraged to keep making these facts known. If voters were aware of the true costs of net-zero, the alarmist media and politicians may have a harder time forcing it on the public.

Linnea Lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”

Death and taxes are certainties, so is the fact that power prices soon rocket out-of-control, once your power needs depend on the weather. Ireland is no exception. More than €1.3 billion in subsidies has been thrown at wind power outfits in less than a decade, and with little to shown in return – unless, of course, the object was driving the cost of power into orbit. In which case the Irish have succeeded, with the latest bids for offshore wind power contracts hitting prices close to €150 per megawatt hour, three times the rates prevailing in neighbouring Scotland, and streets ahead of those elsewhere in Europe.

Mirin De Barra has the story below.

Ryan’s Much-Heralded Wind Energy Would be World’s Most Expensive at First Auction
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Mirin De Barra
8 May 2023

Last year, to great razzmatazz, Minister Eamon Ryan announced that opportunities to generate energy from Ireland’s wind was going to go to auction in 2023.

Going to auction means that a route to market would be established for an energy provider – typically in relation to renewable energy which is produced or largely subsidised by the state.

Potential bidders will compete against each other to provide renewable energy, with the government looking at the cost per megawatt hour proposed, and an emphasis on community involvement and benefit funds for communities.

Energypedia explains:

Project developers can then submit a bid to the auction, outlining their project proposal and stating the price per unit of electricity at which they will be able to realize their project. The government then evaluates the different offers, which are ranked and selected in order of increasing cost or price until a volume, or the budget limit is reached. Lastly, the best candidates are selected and the government signs a power purchasing agreement with the successful bidders

Back in 2022, the Minister couldn’t have sounded more excited.

It was “a massive step forward”, he claimed, not just for wind energy but for “Irish climate leadership” – with his Department adding that it was a “seminal moment for the delivery of offshore wind in Ireland.”

“The publication of these ORESS 1 Terms and Conditions is another massive step forward – for offshore wind, for Irish climate leadership and towards Ireland’s future as an international green energy hub,” Ryan said.

The first stage of this transformative auction will start before Christmas and it sets us on a path to powering many more of our homes and businesses from our own green energy resources over the coming years.”

Exciting stuff – and, coming at a time when Irish people were reeling from the cost of electricity, it sounded like good news indeed.

The Irish government has been investing in wind energy since 1992. Subsidies and other state transfers in regard to renewable energy in the 2011 to 2020 period alone amounted to more than €1.3 billion according to the CSO.

“Wind is Ireland’s oil,” said Micheál Martin told Davos last year. “Certainly, by the mid-2030s we want to be exporting energy.”

Ireland’s Renewable Energy Support scheme (RESS) says its aim is to “rely on competitive forces to achieve renewable energy ambitions at the lowest feasible cost to electricity customers while delivering technology diversity and significant community participation.”

But alas, the outcomes seem a little underwhelming, as reported this week in the Sunday Business Post by Lorcan Allen.

Ireland is set to unveil the world’s most expensive offshore wind prices this week when the government announces the results of its first ever offshore wind energy auction.

The price tag is expected to be close to €150 per megawatt hour, which is three times more expensive than the latest sale in Scotland and far higher than other European countries

If this bears out, the energy generated by the first wave of offshore wind farms in Ireland will be anything but cheap for consumers and will be on par with the unprecedented price of electricity last winter, which was made so expensive by record high gas prices.

The paper says that the latest offshore wind auction in Scotland “delivered projects at below €50/MWh – less than a third of the price Ireland could end up paying”.

It also notes that “none of the six offshore wind projects that have submitted bids to the first O-RESS auction have planning permission for their respective wind farms.”

Wind turbine manufacturers in Europe have faced increasing problems with input costs and supply chain issues, and those difficulties have fed into increased costs for wind energy providers.

Industry observers also say that inflation means that “costs are rising at a higher rate than prospective revenues”.

The reliability of wind energy is also an ongoing problem for energy provision, as is the as yet unsolved million-dollar question of how to store the energy once the wind stops blowing.

It may be an ill-wind that blows no good, but if this is an insight into the cost of renewable energy for the long-suffering Irish consumer then Ryan’s justification in rushing to close down peat stations because we could rely on renewables seems more like hot air than anything else.
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