Utter lunacy: IEA’s fantasy future will waste trillions of dollars
The International Energy Agency has gone completely troppo and should be retitled the International Fantasy Agency after the release of its roadmap for the world to reach Net Zero by 2050.
Terry McCrann
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UTTER lunacy. Here’s a roadmap to take us straight back to the 18th century – and we’ve got to waste trillions of dollars to get there!
Once upon a time the International Energy Agency had the honest job of giving us the facts about energy – how much oil, gas, coal and nuclear power was produced and where, and how it was used.
After some decades now of drinking 150-proof Climate Change Kool-Aid, it’s gone completely troppo and should be retitled the International Fantasy Agency.
The now-IFA has just released a so-called “landmark special report”, which purports to chart a roadmap for the world to reach Net Zero (emissions of carbon dioxide) by 2050.
Cough, cough, did anyone in the IFA’s tax-free taxpayer-cosseted ivory tower in Paris bother to “ask” China?
That’s the China which already produces just under one-third of the entire global CO2 emissions and is promising to keep increasing them through 2030.
China has only said it will try – strictly no promises or commitments, mind you – to have the emissions “peak” by 2030.
That’s an unambiguous commitment to keep increasing them at least through 2030; that they might – only, might – stop rising.
But as for actually then fall? Yes, maybe in some alternative reality.
China’s has said it will “aim’ for net zero by 2060. Obviously you can take that “to the bank” – that’s the same bank that gives you mortgages to buy cheap harbour bridges.
But apart from having to take China’s not-promise to get to net zero by 2060 with more salt than there is in Lake Eyre, how does the reality of the world’s biggest emitter still pumping CO2 past 2050 equate with the world being net zero by 2050?
The IFA doesn’t tell us, apart from: here’s the roadmap; if everyone follows the roadmap (and heads for the 18th century); we’ll be at net zero.
This is taking the great economist’s joke around “assume a can-opener” to its ultimate ludicrous absurdity.
The joke goes: washed up in a group of survivors on a desert island with cans of food (before ring-pull tops), it’s the economist who solves the problem: assume a can-opener.
The IFA’s fantasy future assumes can-openers by the dozen, the many dozen.
All coal-fired power stations will be closed by 2040 – tell that, again, to China and the dozens of countries still building scores of them.
Indeed in developed countries, they’ll be closed by 2030. To stress, all of them.
By 2050 the world is supposed to get 90 per cent of its electricity from renewables – mostly solar and wind, with batteries galore – with the rest coming from nuclear.
So if you actually embrace all this, you should be embracing nuclear power stations in Australia – fat chance of that happening.
In a seeming commitment to – but actually yet more denial of – reality; this IFA report outlines the massive task to find and develop and manufacture the not-quite so green materials needed for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.
We’d need to be producing at least 40 times as much lithium each year as we do now; and at least 20 times as much nickel, to cite just a couple.
Can we find it all? Assume a can-opener.
Can we develop these new industries? Assume another can-opener?
Can it be done without causing massive environmental destruction? More can-openers.
And what about disposing of the solar panels and turbines when they wear out in 10-15 years – a difficult enough problem today and just imagine what it will be like when the world’s got 100 or more times the number?
More can-openers, can-openers, can-openers. The IFA will be handing them out wholesale.
All of them, of course, made in China, along with all those solar panels and turbines.
And all made, using coal-fired power.
And you pay for this shite.
Originally published as Utter lunacy: IEA’s fantasy future will waste trillions of dollars
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