98 Comments

"...We need a sober approach to decarbonizing our electric grid. If we are serious, we have to focus on energy sources that are low-carbon, mature, have high power density, and are scalable..."

We don't just need to decarbonise our electricity grid. That's less than half the battle!

It's about time you got your head around nuclear enabled hydrogen (NEH) to decarbonise all other sectors of energy use. This is how to do it:

https://colinmegson.substack.com/p/how-nuclear-enabled-hydrogen-neh

You can also drop the argument that the efforts of nations opting for Net Zero are cancelled out by fossil fuel deployment of China and India. Pick up on the fact that nuclear-enabled nations can save billions of $s per year and millions of premature deaths/vile illnesses per year by investing in advanced nuclear to rid themselves of the 'evils' of burning FFs.

It works a treat for the UK. Invest £22 billion every year and put £44 billion per year back into the UK economy every year, forevermore. Win-win-win: Healthier/wealthier/longer-lived citizens:

https://colinmegson.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-powering-the-uk-with-85e

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My first impulse on offshore wind was - there is no way this can be made to work - the cost to install and operate vastly exceed any possible amount of money you could get for the energy produced.

I noticed they were moving forward, my first hopeful thought was "well, they must have ironed out all those obvious technical flaws."

It never occurred to me they would move forward without fixing any of the obvious problems.

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If any Democrat is re-elected President along with control of Congress expect that all of this offshore wind will be resurrected, but this time with assured federal backstopping, not just tax credits, but actually paying for the delivered power, along with rate increases for ratepayers.

The current model isn't Soviet enough to drive leftist transformation to the implausible "net zero".

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My only disagreement is your assertion that "We need a sober approach to decarbonizing our electric grid." No, we need to deep-six all approaches to decarbonizing our electric grid. Just produce energy.

America spent billions of dollars cleaning up the real environmental risks of coal (think acid rain) and was moving in any event to even cleaner, exceptionally abundant fracked natural gas. Stop all the time-wasting and dig, baby, dig / drill, baby, drill.

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There is not a single country on the globe that has been able to create numerical growth and sustainable employment in the wind and solar renewables industry, and none of these projects were going to be any different.

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Okay free in the sense that nature gave it to us, but certainly not free to extract in terms of human labor.

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If money were truly backed with (linked to) oil, it would represent real value. But the more money is overprinted, the more it raises the dollar-denominated "cost" of energy in addition to and on top of increasing costs of extraction, processing, etc. Indeed "debt is a claim on future energy." I often say one day humanity will look back in perpetual horror and regret that so much cheap energy was squandered so quickly on so little.

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There is no reason to decarbonize our electric grid in the first place. Climate change is a myth with the sole purpose of creating tradable carbon credits so some people can get rich off the suffering of the rest of us.

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White House says Orsted remains 'committed' to US offshore wind

By Valerie Volcovici

November 6, 20233:34 PM PSTUpdated 3 days ago

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/white-house-says-orsted-remains-committed-us-offshore-wind-2023-11-06/

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Thank you for clarifying my erroneous comment. I’m sure it’s impossible for the whale scientists to know what killed them but if it quacks like a duck…

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Excellent essay; thank you. The demise of all industrial wind, off and on-shore can't come soon enough, especially for those of us here in southern MA/RI as we watch Vineyard Wind and South Fork Wind being constructed. Their "steel in the water" is a dagger in my heart. But, please, address the fact that—even though the offshore wind boondoggle is falling apart before our eyes—WHY does the federal government continue to auction and sell millions of ocean acreage for offshore wind development?

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Robert, We here at Thorium Alliance have been repeating a phrase we heard;

"Every Movement Starts Out as A Cause, Becomes a Business, And Winds Up A Fraud"

That is the NRDC, Sierra Club, Bulletin of Atomic Fear Mongering, Union of Clown Scientists . . .

these promoters of the green suicide cult don't believe their malarkey for one second,

they are simply paid to spout their blather to rope in more members through fear and blather.

THANK YOU, for pointing out the astounding hypocrisy...

BTW - Google had to abandon geothermal because of earthquakes, Now they abandon wind, I guess they really will try everything else before doing the one thing that works . . . Nuclear !

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The guilty are beyond embarrassment because they default to blaming the alleged conspiracy of lizard people in fossil. But it's useful to be reminded of how long and vociferously they've been spouting nonsense, especially against nuclear, even as they insist we've only a few years to save the planet.

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