By Jo Nova
It’s so unfair, the wind is free, but who could have known we’d need metals, boats, cables, and magnets?
Governments waved their magic wands to declare the renewable transition would “bling” into existence, but they didn’t bother doing the sums on whether we could mine the vast resources in time, and what would happen to the prices of everything, if every other stupid fashion-obsessed western nation tried to do the same thing at the same time.
At the academic safe-space known as “The Conversion” Thomas York explains to baffled renewables fans why wind farm developers are mysteriously pulling out at the last minute. He doesn’t spell out the baby-nature of the economic reality, but we can read between the lines. The ship called The Infrastructure-Bill has arrived and it’s killing them: the price of steel, copper and aluminium has doubled and tripled; we can’t make the right boats fast enough to build the towers out at sea; everyone wants high-voltage cabling at the same time, and they all need the rare metals for the magnets, which are well, rare. Then, the delays in arranging all this mean the developers fall over their contract agreements timelines, so they […]
via JoNova
July 11, 2025 at 11:23PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 