Generating occasional power at the whims of mother nature means wind and solar have no hope in hell of ever competing with ever-reliable nuclear power. In power generation ‘competing’ means being always on, always available and affordable for all.

Because wind generates power less than 30% of the time (on average) and solar generates power less than 25% of the time (on average), the suggestion that they are competitive with nuclear, coal or gas is risible. Worse still is the fact that wind power outfits can never tell their customers (with any meaningful advance warning) when they might be generating power, and there are dozens of occasions when they will be producing absolutely nothing at all, for days on end. Solar power outfits can at least point to the sun dipping over the horizon and forecast their expected output over the next 12 or 14 hours or so; namely ZERO.

In short, there really is no comparison.

In Australia (as elsewhere) policies were put into effect around 20 years ago that were deliberately designed to wreck the profitability of coal-fired power generators. Those policies have been a roaring success. Which brings us to nuclear power.

STT backs nuclear simply because it works. But it has the added advantage of not generating carbon dioxide gas emissions while generating power 24 x 365, irrespective of the weather.

Old-timers can argue until they’re blue in the face about the benefits of coal-fired power (obviously cheap and reliable). However, the fixation with carbon dioxide gas is likely to outlast the old-timers, which means the chances of Australia having another coal-fired power plant built in their lifetimes is almost nil.

What has changed in recent times, is that a younger generation are all in favour of nuclear power: recent polling shows something like 65% of 18 to 34-year-olds ready to back nuclear power generation in this country.

With an eye on the next election, the Liberal/National Coalition (currently in opposition) is keen to exploit the energy chaos consequent upon the Green/Labor Alliance’s obsession with subsidised wind and solar.

By backing nuclear power, the Coalition has the perfect opportunity to punish Labor and their running mates, the Greens. As Peta Credlin explains in the pieces below; the first from Sky News and the second from The Australian.

Peter Dutton can expect a ‘fight’ over nuclear energy: Peta Credlin
Sky News
Peta Credlin
9 March 2024

Sky News host Peta Credlin says if Opposition Leader Peter Dutton wanted a fight over nuclear energy, it “looks like he’s going to get it”.

“And that’s no bad thing for an Opposition,” she said.

“You certainly can’t beat an incumbent by just agreeing with them – as the Victorian Liberal Party needs to learn, and fast.

“Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that nuclear energy was fine for others but not for Australia.”

She said today, Treasurer Jim Chalmers “really unleashed on the Opposition”.

“I can’t speak for the Opposition Leader, but I reckon you can drive a truck through the government’s position.

Transcript

Peta Credlin:
Well, well, well, if Peter Dutton wanted a fight over nuclear energy, it looks like he’s going to get it. And that’s no bad thing for an opposition. You certainly can’t beat an incumbent by just agreeing with them, as the Victorian Liberal Party needs to learn and fast. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that nuclear energy was fine for others, but not for Australia. And today, the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, really unleashed on the coalition.

Jim Chalmers:
Peter Dutton is more interested in cheap and divisive politics than he is interested in cheap and reliable electricity, and we see that in this nuclear fantasy that he is engaged in. His proposal will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, take decades to build. I think most Australians recognise that our future is renewable, and that’s where our efforts and our attention must lie.

Peta Credlin:
Look, I can’t speak for the opposition leader, but I reckon you can drive a truck through the government’s position. First, there’s the lack of logic in saying that nuclear power tied up at a dock in a nuclear-powered submarine is okay, but it’s almost evil if it ever comes on land. Second, if renewables are so cheap, how come the more renewables we get into our system, the more expensive our power has become? Now, the obvious answer is that renewables are only cheap when the wind blows and the sun shines. Yet, we need power 24/7 if we’re to remain a first world economy. And batteries and pumped hydro and gas, well, they all cost a bomb, and that’s if they work as promised. And on batteries and pumped hydro, well, the jury is still out.

Third, as the world’s third-largest uranium exporter, how could we be squandering our natural advantages Chalmers wants to claim if we also use our own uranium here in Australia? Fourth, if nuclear really is a fantasy, how come nuclear provides 70% of the power in France, 20% of the power in Britain and America, and is already in use in 33 other countries? A further 15, too, are also looking at nuclear as the only proven way of delivering 24/7 power that’s almost 100% emissions-free.

Now, the hysteria coming from Labor suggests that they know Dutton’s onto something, and they’re trying to bluff him out of prosecuting the case. Just like they knew he was onto something when he took the position he did on the Voice, and Labor then mounted hysterical attacks, calling him a wrecker and worse until the votes came in. And he was right. On the side of the majority of Australians, and the Prime Minister was not. Now, on nuclear, if there’s no commercial case for it, then why have a ban? There’s no need for any prohibition. And if there is a commercial case for nuclear, well, let’s get the bans removed ASAP and then see what market options might emerge.

Now, certainly across the board, the public now think nuclear power should be on the table. Back in 2015, the public were evenly split on nuclear power, 40 for it, 40 against it, the rest undecided. By 2022, an IPA poll found that 53% of us supported the proposition that Australia should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions. Back then, just 23% of us were against it. And in the latest news poll out last month, we had 55% of Australians supporting the building of small modular reactors, and just 31% against.

As Peter Dutton pointed out today, it was the late Bob Hawke who first championed nuclear power in this country, saying in 2016 that, “Nuclear power,” he said, “would be a win for the environment and an essential part of attacking global warming.” Now, he’s not alone. There are plenty of other union leaders, especially those unions that depend on heavy industry. Well, they’re supporting nuclear power as well.

Daniel Walton:
If you look at it right now, I’ve been pragmatic about talking about nuclear energy before. I remain open and pragmatic to it and hopefully it can create some good AW jobs as well.

Paul Farrow:
When we’re looking for a long-term energy fix in this country, all options should be on the table.

Peta Credlin:
An Australian living legend, the electronics guru Dick Smith, well, he chimed in today saying that we could get nuclear power within six years and that Labor’s opposition to it was, and I quote, “Emotional and irrational.” Said Dick Smith, “There was simply no way you could run a country 100% on renewables.” Now, support for at least having the option of nuclear power on the table is not going to be enough on its own to win the election for the coalition. But it would be a strong start to the coalition’s positive policy agenda, and as a demonstration, that it knows being a small target won’t win against a first term government.

Also today, there was a minor reshuffle of the opposition front bench, and here’s a move I want you to note tonight. The replacement of the now retired Senator Marise Payne as shadow cabinet secretary with the super smart and driven James Paterson. Now, as you know, I reckon he’s one to watch. Now, I was previously the former shadow cabinet secretary under three opposition leaders, so I know how much the role is, in critical terms, important for the opposition. It’s about creating policy, holding ministers and the staffing machine to account to get the work done and costed and out to a deadline.

So I see this move from Dutton as demonstration that the coalition are well and truly up for the policy fight, that there will be at the next election, a real difference, I think, between Labor and the Liberals. No longer Labor-light under Dutton, finally something we hope that Conservatives will have to vote for, and perhaps, too, a new home for traditional working class Labor types. The ones that modern Labor has abandoned as they’ve moved further to the left and more woke.
Sky News

Peter Dutton must power ahead on nuclear policy
The Australian
Peta Credlin
7 March 2024

At last, there’s going to be an election fight over serious policy.

After a dismal decade when both sides were fighting over personalities and trying to scare voters about their opponents, finally, on a topic that matters, the Coalition is going to put an important positive proposition to the public: namely that the only way to get to net zero and keep the lights on is to have nuclear power as at least a serious option. And the Labor Party’s hysterical reaction shows Peter Dutton is on to something.

If the Opposition Leader wanted a fight over the nuclear energy policy that he’ll shortly announce, it seems he’s going to get it. And that’s no bad thing for an opposition. You certainly can’t beat an incumbent by just agreeing with it – as the Victorian Liberal Party needs to learn, and fast.

In response to the Coalition flagging the nuclear option, Anthony Albanese said nuclear energy was fine for others but not for us. And then Jim Chalmers really unleashed, claiming: “Peter Dutton’s nuclear fantasy is all about cheap and divisive politics, not cheap and reliable electricity.” Our future, he claimed, “will be increasingly powered by cheaper and cleaner renewable energy”. Nuclear, he said, “costs more, takes longer and squanders our natural advantages”.

Really?

Let’s look at the Treasurer’s claims. First, there’s the lack of logic in saying nuclear power is great tied up beside a dock in a nuclear-powered submarine (which Labor says it supports), but it’s almost evil if it ever comes on land.

Second, if renewables are so cheap, how come the more renewables we get into our system the more expensive our power becomes? The obvious answer is that renewables are cheap only when the wind blows and the sun shines, yet we need electricity 24/7 if we are to remain a First World economy.

Third, as the world’s third largest uranium exporter, how could we be squandering our natural advantage if we also use our own uranium here?

And fourth, if nuclear really is a fantasy, how come nuclear provides 70 per cent of France’s power, 20 per cent of America’s and 15 per cent of Britain’s and is already in use in 33 countries, with a further 15 nations also looking at nuclear as the only proven way of delivering 24/7 power that is almost 100 per cent emissions free, in a country with our geography?

Australia is the only G20 country with no plans for nuclear power. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and South Africa all have operating nuclear power plants. Indonesia has two small trial reactors and even Saudi Arabia is planning a nuclear industry to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

It’s true that many new nuclear power plants, such as Britain’s Hinkley C, are way behind schedule and way over budget. But what about the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro scheme, originally supposed to cost $2bn and be operational by 2022, that’s now expected to cost $12bn-plus and not become operational until 2029?

The scare campaign Labor will try to re-run, about a nuclear plant in your suburb, won’t work given that the Coalition’s plan is to put the nuclear plants on the sites of closed-down coal-fired power stations – which, incidentally, already have all the transmission infrastructure in place.

Besides, the Lucas Heights medical nuclear reactor in Sydney has been operating for a half-century within a kilometre of housing to no ill-effect. As well, there’s no fundamental reason why small modular reactors, such as those produced in factories and safely operational for decades in nuclear ships, can’t be reproduced on land.

The hyperbole now coming from Labor suggests they’re trying to bluff Dutton out of making a firm nuclear commitment. Just like they knew he was on to something when he took the position he did on the voice and Labor then mounted hysterical attacks on him as a wrecker. Until the votes came in and, unlike the Prime Minister, it turned out Dutton was actually on the side of most Australians.

On nuclear, if there’s no commercial case for it, then why persist with the ban because there’s no need for the prohibition? And if there is a commercial case for nuclear, let’s get the bans removed as soon as possible and see what market options may emerge.

Certainly, the public now thinks nuclear power should be an option. Back in 2015, the public was evenly split on nuclear power, with 40 per cent for and 40 per cent against. By 2022, an Institute of Public Affairs poll found 53 per cent support for the proposition that Australian should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions, with just 23 per cent against. And the latest Newspoll last month had 55 per cent support for building SMRs and just 31 per cent against.

As Dutton has noted, it was former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke who first championed nuclear power in this country, saying in 2016: “Nuclear power would be a win for the environment and an essential part of attacking global warming.” And he wasn’t alone.

There are plenty of union leaders, especially from those unions that depend on heavy industry that needs reliable 24/7 power, who’ve been supporters of nuclear energy too. And now another reputable business leader, Dick Smith, has chimed in, saying we could get nuclear power within six years and that Labor’s opposition to it is, quote, “emotional and irrational”. “There was simply no way you can run a country 100 per on renewables,” Smith said.

Support for at least having the option of nuclear energy is not going to be enough on its own to win the election for the Coalition but it would be a strong start to the Coalition’s positive policy. And a demonstration that it knows being a small target won’t win against a first-term government.

Of course, there will be a vast whispering campaign against nuclear power, driven by the subsidy-harvesting vested interests now behind the renewables push. It will be a much larger version of the long campaign against a western Sydney airport, largely driven by the established airport operator. That’s why it’s good that Dutton and his colleagues are already out in the open, arguing the case for nuclear now, giving voters plenty of time to assimilate the arguments for and against, as in the voice campaign. This is not something that can be sprung on the public at the last minute, like the Coalition’s super-for-housing policy that was announced only a week before the 2022 election.

There’s a lot more that the Coalition should start arguing in coming months, such as a bigger, better version of super for housing to give first-home buyers access to what’s their own money when they need it most; much lower immigration to take the upward pressure off housing costs and the downward pressure off wages, and to ensure that we really are getting the best migrants we can; a renewed emphasis on policies such as work for the dole to break the something-for-nothing entitlement mindset; an education system with more parental input and a more academically rigorous curriculum; a deregulation push to cut business costs; and a commitment to no new spending (other than on national security and economic infrastructure) that’s not funded by savings elsewhere, that should eventually make room for responsible tax cuts.

This will sharpen the difference between a Liberal-National Coalition that wants to grow the economy to ease the pressure on household budgets and a Labor Party addicted to woke gimmicks and handouts that can be paid for only by robbing Peter to pay Paul.

As I’ve said before, Labor-lite Liberals lose. By getting back squarely to centre-right polices and values, Dutton just may have a chance.
The Australian

From the DAILY CALLER

HAILEY GOMEZ

GENERAL ASSIGNMENT REPORTER

While electrical data centers and clean technology facilities have increased rapidly within the United States, it appears the country is still running short on time to find a solution to its decreasing power grid, according to a new report.

Multiple states across the U.S. have now set off alarms due to concerns as their industrial power struggles to keep up with demands, according to The Washington Post. In Georgia, the anticipated electricity usage over the next decade is expected to surge to 17 times its recent levels, reaching an all-time high demand. The largest utility in Arizona has also projected that by the end of the decade, its transmission capacity will be exceeded if major upgrades are not performed, the outlet reported.

Additionally, North Virginia and Texas are also facing challenges with their electrical power needs. To accommodate all planned and under-construction data centers, both Texas and North Virginia would require the power equivalent to several large nuclear power plants, according to The Washington Post. (RELATED: ‘Mugged By Reality’: Biden Opened The Door For Chinese EVs To Flood The US Before Moving To Cork It Up, Experts Say)

“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission Jason Shaw told the outlet. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”

While clean energy appears to be at odds with the power grid, the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has implemented strict regulations that have significantly shaped the country’s power grid. The EPA previously attempted to propose a requirement that would have required existing coal-fired power plants to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2024. Additionally, new and existing natural gas power plants would be required to make cuts to their greenhouse gas emissions depending on their size and usage.

However, the EPA recently adjusted their proposal in order to decrease their scope, as several officials previously warned President Joe Biden that the aggressive regulations had serious practical and legal flaws. Concerns regarding the suggested plans questioned the regulations to natural gas power plants that would mandate expensive technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and blended hydrogen.

Many have issued warnings to the Biden Administration regarding its intense push to transition the electrical grid to complete clean energy. Last June, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie spoke to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about the consequences America’s power grid could face if the U.S. continued to phase out fossil fuel infrastructure

“I think we’re heading for potentially very dire consequences, potentially catastrophic consequences in the United States in terms of the reliability of our grid, and I think that the basic reason is that we’re facing a shortfall of power supply,” Christie stated.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

From CLIMATE DEPOT

By Marc Morano

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/alternative-facts

BY ROGER PIELKE JR.

Excerpt: …[A]n excellent new essay by Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute2 published today by The New Atlantis, titled — Did Exxon Make it Rain Today?. Nordhaus does a nice job explaining that disasters occur at the confluence of an extreme event and an exposed and vulnerable society, but most attention these days is paid to extreme events, and climate change in particular:

What determines whether hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and wildfires amount to natural disasters or minor nuisances, though, is mostly not the relative intensity or frequency of the natural hazard but rather how many people are in harm’s way and how well protected they are against the climate’s extremes.

Infrastructure, institutions, and technology mediate the relationship between extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the costs that human societies bear as a result of them. . .

The implications of this point will be counterintuitive for many. Yes, there are many types of disasters, like hurricanes and floods, that are causing greater economic costs in many places than they used to. But this is almost entirely because the places that are most exposed to weather disasters have far more people and far more wealth in harm’s way than they used to. Even if there were no global warming, in other words, these areas would be much more at risk simply because they have much more to lose.

However, what I find really interesting about Nordhaus’ essay is his discussion of how we got to a point where leading journalists and scientists are seeking to deny these rather obvious conditions and instead, to focus obsessively on human-caused climate change, and specifically on the fossil fuel industry as bearing responsibility for increasing disaster costs, contrary to an overwhelming scientific consensus.

Nordhaus explains that climate advocates have a long history of trying to tie disasters to climate change, dating back decades:

Those efforts intensified after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, with Al Gore using it as a centerpiece in An Inconvenient Truth.3 A few years later, in 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists convened a gathering of environmental advocates, litigators, climate scientists, and opinion researchers in La Jolla, California. Their explicit purpose was to develop a public narrative connecting extreme weather events that were already happening, and the damages they were causing, with climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

The proceedings from that gathering, which were subsequently published in a report titled “Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control,” are revealing.

The IPCC, over decades of reports, has not concluded with high confidence that a signal of human caused climate change can be detected for most types of extreme weather, and especially those that result in the greatest impacts. That remains the case today.

For those wanting to promote climate action using contemporary disasters as a reason to act, the IPCC’s consistent conclusions — no matter how deeply buried in its reports — present a problem.

In a 2018 survey of environmental journalists … Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change.

So alternative facts needed to be created. Nordhaus explains:

Myles Allen, the climate scientist who is credited with creating the field of “extreme event attribution,” is described in the report as lamenting that “the scientific community has frequently been guilty of talking about the climate of the twenty-second century rather than what’s happening now.” Yet, he and other scientists at the gathering also acknowledged how difficult it is to identify the contributions of climate change to current extreme weather events. “If you want to have statistically significant results about what has already happened,” another scientist, Claudia Tebaldi, noted, “we are far from being able to say anything definitive because the signal is so often overwhelmed by noise.”

While much of the convening was ostensibly focused on litigation strategies, modeled on campaigns against the tobacco industry, the subtext of the entire conversation was how to raise the public salience of a risk that is diffuse, perceived to be far off in time and space, and associated with activities — the combustion of fossil fuels — that bring significant social benefits.

Nordhaus explains that a three-pronged strategy emerged from the 2012 meeting — lowering scientific standards (from those of the IPCC) to enable stronger claims, redefining the attribution of causality differently than the IPCC, and emphasizing the villainous nature of fossil fuel companies to give people an enemy:

During the meeting, Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard historian of science who popularized the connection between climate and tobacco, argued that scientists should use a different standard of proof for the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. “When we take these things to the public,” she argued, “we take a standard of evidence applied internally to science and use it externally.” But, she continued, the 95-percent confidence standard that scientists use “is not the Eleventh Commandment. There is nothing in nature that taught us that 95 percent is needed. That is a social convention.”

Others suggested that reframing the attribution of extreme weather to climate change could allow for stronger claims: rather than looking at whether there was any long-term detectable trend in extreme weather, scientists might instead focus on the degree to which climate change increased the likelihood of a given extreme event. And others believed that focusing legal strategies on a villain — fossil fuel companies conspiring to mislead the public about the danger of their product — would result in greater public acceptance of the claims that climate change was the cause of extreme weather.

As it happened, environmental advocates would pursue all of these strategies.

Nordhaus further explains that broader changes in the media occurred at a perfect time to boost these strategies aimed at creating a new narrative:

Not so long ago, news coverage needed to be credible to multiple audiences whose politics and values spanned a relatively broad spectrum of worldviews and values. But the proliferation of media outlets and platforms in recent decades, first with the rise of cable news and then the Internet, has increasingly fragmented media audiences.

Today, media outlets large and small compete in a far more crowded marketplace to reach much narrower segments of the population. This incentivizes them to tailor their content to the social and political values of their audiences and serve up spectacles that comport with the ideological preferences of the audiences they are trying to reach. For the audiences that elite legacy outlets such as the New York Times now almost exclusively cater to, that means producing a continual stream of catastrophic climate news.

I suspect that the only place that most of you reading this will encounter Nordhaus’ essay is right here at THB.4 Reporters on the “climate beat” know very well that acknowledging the existence of Nordhaus’ essay or the arguments he makes might offend the politics of their employers, readers, and colleagues.

Nordhaus explains that a large majority of environmental journalists refuse to engage narrative-challenging viewpoints (emphasis added):

Reporters and editors at these outlets are also well-aligned ideologically with their audiences. A national survey of political journalists and editors working for newspapers at the state and national level conducted in 2022 found that those identifying as Democrats outnumbered those identifying as Republicans by 10 to 1. A 2018 survey of environmental journalists by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that 70 percent reported trusting information from environmental advocacy organizations versus fewer than 10 percent from business groups. Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change.

From the DAILY SCEPTIC

BY CHRIS MORRISON

The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle. Who is opposing this massive destruction of the ancient forest teeming with wildlife with trees over 200 years old? Certainly not the Green party, now in power at national and local level. In fact the project is being led by local Hesse Green Minister Priska Hinz who is reported to have said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and the preservation of nature. It is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.”

There is some local press interest in Germany about the destruction of part of the forest that covers a 200 square kilometre area. Nevertheless, the mainstream media generally keep well away from covering environmental destruction when the Greens are doing it in the claimed cause of saving the planet. The BBC did cover the story under the headline ‘Battle over wind turbines in the land of Sleeping Beauty‘, but that was in 2013 when plans for the industrial development were first announced. It seems that the state-reliant broadcaster is less interested now that the Big Bad Wolf has finally made a meal of Little Red Riding Hood.

Pierre Gosselin, who runs the German-based science site No Tricks Zone, has been covering the outrage felt in a number of German quarters at the plans to destroy some of the Reinhardswald forest in the interest of inferior green technology. He feels the affair shows what an inefficient and costly scam green energy is. “It’s not cost-free, it’s full of corrupt and unresponsive politicians who no longer care about democracy, and it certainly doesn’t make the environment better. It’s a nasty juggernaut of waste, fraud, corruption and ecological degradation – with dead birds, turbine vibration sickness, strobe dizziness and landscape pollution,” he adds.

The Guardian has been curiously silent over the clearing of woodland to build wind turbines in Hesse. In 2020 it was less reticent about reporting on the construction of a 3 km highway in another Hessian forest at Dannenroder. Thousands of climate activists gathered on the site north of Frankfurt, it reported. Dannenroder tree-felling would be a catastrophe, environmental campaigners are reported to have said. “Some parts of this forest are 250 years old,” noted Nicola Uhde of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (Bund), “and there is simply not much of this kind of woodland around anymore.” At the time, the Guardian noted the fate of Dannenroder was a “litmus test for the Green party” which governed the state as part of a coalition. It seems to have been remiss in not suggesting such a test with the Reinhardswald deforestation. But then it seems none of the usual climate activists have been protesting about the loss of trees and wildlife habitat on this occasion.

The Daily Sceptic has reported on numerous recent examples where the lack of interest in ecological damage is a feature of green industrial development. Last month, we noted that one of India’s iconic large birds, the great Indian bustard, was on the verge of extinction due to the growth of electric power lines in its home area of the Thar desert. To reach global Net Zero, it has been estimated that new power lines equivalent to circling the globe 2,000 times will need to be built in the next few years.

Last October, we reported that wind farms in Tasmania had reduced the population of the endangered local wedge-tailed eagle to around 1,000 individuals. Across the world, millions of bats are being chewed by giant wind blades. Any animal that relies on wind currents for flight such as a large raptor is at risk of being sucked into the whirling machines. In California, the Democrat-controlled state Government recently relaxed controls on wildlife protections to allow permits to kill previously fully protected species for renewable infrastructure projects. Despite an increased risk to America’s national bird, the bald eagle, barely a peep of protest was recorded. Off America’s eastern coast, massive industrial parks are being constructed for wind turbines. It might be a coincidence that hundreds of whales have beached along the shore in recent years, but a more likely explanation is the deafening sonar noise, constant pile driving, extensive ocean building works and heavy shipping movements.

None of the above are likely to feature when the magic mirror is asked: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the greenest one of all?”

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.