Policies & Economics
The EU Green Hell
The European Union’s utopian scheme of transforming itself into a green energy powerhouse is faltering as its fantasy plan is colliding with reality. As the EU’s economic and financial crisis deepens and unemployment continues to rise, what used to be an almost all-embracing green consensus is beginning to disintegrate. The green folly was founded on two apocalyptic fears: firstly, that global warming was an urgent threat that needed to be prevented at all cost, and secondly, that the world was running out of fossil fuels, which meant that oil and gas would inexorably become ever more expensive. Both conjectures, however, turned out to be bogus.
The Performance of Wind Farms in the UK & Denmark
This study of wind farm performance shows that the normalised load factor for UK onshore wind farms declines from a peak of about 24% at age 1 to 15% at age 10 and 11% at age 15. The load factor for offshore wind farms in Denmark falls from 39% at age 0 to 15% at age 10. Few wind farms will operate for more than 12–15 years.
Ontario’s Power Trip: The failure of the Green Energy Act
The Ontario Green Energy Act (GEA) was proposed as both an environmental policy and a job-creation policy. Dr. Ross McKitrick says it is misguided on both scores. The GEA will raise electricity costs and decrease employment. In Ontario, residential wood-burning fireplaces emit 33 times, and dust from unpaved roads put nearly 130 times the amount of aerosols from coal-fired power generating plants into the air each year. The Clean Air Alliance claims Ontario’s coal-fired power plants cause 316 deaths per year. Using the same method for computing deaths, country-road dust kills 40,739 people per year, quite implausible considering there are only about 90,000 deaths from all causes in Ontario each year.
Which is Better for the Environment: Transit or Roads?
Compared with driving, rail transit is slow, inconvenient and expensive. In the USA, the average urban transit bus uses 120% of the energy used by the average passenger car per passenger-mile. Rail transit systems in many cities use much more energy per passenger-mile than cars.
Summary of the FoS Response to Canada's CO2 Reduction Plan
Here is a one-page summary of the Friends of Science response to Environment Canada's CO2 reduction plan, with a link to the submission.
