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credit: inhabitat.com

One after another, Harris/Biden cabinet picks—most in positions having nothing whatever to do with meteorology or any branch of science–hysterically intone Climate Change is the greatest threat ever to threaten to extinguish mankind in 20 years, no…ten years…  no, no…any day now!  It’s nonsense on stilts of course, but it serves several essential D/S/C purposes.  It allows the Harris Administration to ignore actual threats such as China and Iran, and it’s an essential conduit for unrestricted spending.  After all, can we afford to be frugal when the very existence of the planet is at stake, when doom is around every corner and under every bed?!

Will we, the most technologically advanced civilization the world has ever known, fold up and die if the average temperature increases a few degrees?  Don’t we have air conditioning technology?  Doesn’t a generally warmer climate have the very great benefit of providing longer and more productive growing seasons?  Isn’t this a good thing, as we need to—you know—eat?

But what about the rise of the seas?!  Tragically, Barack Obama, the D/S/C Messiah, failed to stop any potential rise of the oceans, nor, according to Harris/Biden/etc. did he heal the planet.  We know, because they tell us with earnest fervor it still needs salvation as only they can deliver it.  So much for the efficacy of the “lightbringer.”  Will all the self-imagined elite/wealthy with costal villas–like the Lightbringer–abandon them, or will they use the “science” about which they are so enamored to deal with a few inches of sea rise?  If they can’t—or won’t—isn’t that an admission their supposed devotion to science is nothing more than political convenience?

Regardless, Harris/Biden plan to spend trillions to “fight” the threat of climate change.  It’s a topic I’ve often addressed, mostly to point out how the billions already spent have almost universally been double or triple flushed down the high-efficiency toilet.  One such example is the Tonopah Solar Plant, which I first addressed in February of 2014 in Frying Through The Air.  It was the story of a $2.2 billion dollar solar plant on five square miles of federal land outside Las Vegas.  I’ll get into its ultimate problem shortly, but the subject of that article was an unintended—but surely foreseeable—consequence: the intense heat beams created by the 350,000 mirrors flash fried any passing birds—hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, including endangered species—with a speed and efficiency that would make Col. Sanders envious.

Well of course! Who could possibly have foreseen that birds flying though massive beams of 1000° heat might be harmed?  Obviously the same is true of those technological, public policy, political geniuses that could not possibly foresee massive wind farms as what they actually are: avian Cuisinarts. [skip]

Perhaps Mr. Obama can sell his quick-frying method to Kentucky Fried Chicken?  And I’m sure KFC can branch out into more exotic fare, provided courtesy of Barack Obama, NRG Energy Inc., Google Inc. and BrightSource Energy Inc.  Heck, all those birds are just layin’ around the plant, pre-cooked.  That way the taxpayers might get some benefit from this latest energy boondoggle.

Ivanpah Solar Plant

Then there is the Ivanpah—I’ve no idea of the significance of the “pah” suffix—plant in the Mojave Desert in California near Nevada.  That particular solar power project is also a massive money pit:  

Readers, I’m sure, recall the never-ending controversy over the Ivanpah plant in the Mojave Desert, from displacing endangered species to threatening to crash commercial and private aircraft due to blinding glare, to massive cost overruns and energy production deficits, it has failed to live up to its utopian promise. Oh, have I mentioned that the plant obliterates hundreds of thousands of birds each year, including endangered species, that happen to fly through its laser-like beams of light? ZAP! And they drop, smoking and crispy, to the ground. Col. Sanders never fried ’em faster and better.  But the good news is, gentle readers, it’s even worse than we imagined:

‘A solar power plant at the center of the Obama administration’s push to reduce America’s carbon footprint by using millions of taxpayer dollars to promote green energy has its own carbon pollution problem.’

It seems the plant uses huge amounts of natural gas to “supplement” solar power when the sun isn’t shining, there is cloud cover or rain.  In other words, most of the time the “blinded by science” solar plant is actually an obscenely expensive natural gas plant with occasional solar back up, a reality government and the operators of the plant have, for some unfathomable reason, failed to tell the public.

Let us fast forward to the present, and the Daily Wire, for yet another report on the utter failure of the technology that is going to create millions of Green jobs and save the planet:

On Friday [12-11-20], The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote about another failure from the Obama era, this one costing taxpayers as much as $510 million. The company, Tonopah Solar Energy, operated the Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada, which received $737 million in guaranteed loans during the Obama administration. Tonopah was granted a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan in early December.

‘The plan includes a settlement with the Department of Energy that leaves taxpayers liable for as much as $234.68 million in outstanding debt, but the total public cost is even higher. Crescent Dunes also received an investment-tax credit, and the 2009 stimulus legislation allowed it to receive a cash payment in lieu of credit. In 2017 the plant received more than $275.6 million from Treasury under the Section 1603 program, which it used to service its outstanding liabilities. So taxpayers already gave Crescent Dunes cash to pay off its taxpayer-backed loans,’ the Journal reported.

It’s rather like the utter failure of Solyndra, which cost the taxpayers more than $500 billion.  That’s how much the Obama Administration admitted.  They wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, would they?

As the Journal reported, Crescent Dunes said it could use molten salt to retain heat from the sun to produce steam and generate power 24 hours a day, instead of just when the sun was shining. Those kinds of promises failed to get it financing from commercial lenders, but the Obama administration stepped in and provided the money.

So much for batteries.  Who could have imagined molten salt would do the trick instead?  Actually, no one with any sense.  It never worked:

To show just how much government agencies continue from one administration to the other, the Department of Energy kept propping up Crescent Dunes into the Trump administration. As the Journal pointed out, the solar plant suffered from construction delays, equipment failures, and frequent outages. It was expected ‘to produce up to 482,000 megawatt hours every year, but the plant hasn’t produced that much energy in its lifetime.’

How can that be?!  This is the technology of the future, the technology that is going to save the planet and power all the electric vehicles the Harris/Biden administration is going to force us to buy.  For additional information on other “transformative” green energy technologies that lost truck loads of cash without ever producing a single watt of power, and which destroyed rather than created jobs, take this link to an article from Tech Startups.com.

What then, are we to make of this?  What are we to make of the constant assurance doom awaits us all—actually it’s breathing down our necks as I write this—unless we absolutely destroy the American economy and impoverish Americans in a 2020 version of Richard Nixon’s: “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” tactic?

As we’ve discovered in the past several decades, the promise of virtually cost free electricity from wind and solar is, if not an outright scam, so close to one as to be virtually indistinguishable.  Even with huge government loans and outright subsidies, both continue to be laughably unreliable and not able to come close to fulfilling the promises of their developers.  They’re a huge, political money pit into which cash is thrown to the benefit of politically connected hustlers, only to have to later bring in dump trucks filled with taxpayer cash when their not-ready-for-prime-time ventures go bankrupt.

Does this mean we shouldn’t explore promising alternate energy sources?  Of course not, but they have to be self-supporting, and no more expensive than current power generation methods.  In addition, we absolutely have to be certain about their potential to replace contemporary, reliable technologies.   A large part of the problem is such technologies, rather than relying on actual, falsifiable science, are based entirely on D/S/C unicorn farts and fairy dust, which are always non-falsifiable.  Like every D/S/C policy they are perfect and infallible, so nothing can possibly prove them wrong.

When they inevitably fail, always at great fiscal and human cost, they didn’t really fail, because as it is ever with socialism/communism, true socialism/communism haven’t been tried yet.  The current crop of self-imagined elite socialist/communists are so much smarter, so much more special than any that came before them, they can do the same things and obtain entirely different results, because science, and shut up!

So when solar, wind, EVs and every other fevered, flop sweat green nightmare fail, it can only mean not enough money has been spent on them.  Or not enough time has passed for their wonders to become apparent.  Or they haven’t been given to an ungrateful public good and hard enough.  Or Normal Americans have been allowed to exist and oppose what they’re too stupid to know is not only good for them, but is their only salvation.  There are no other possible explanations for what might appear to be failure, but cannot possibly be failure, because socialist/communist policies can’t possibly be wrong.

This is why D/S/Cs refuse to so as much consider nuclear energy, which unlike their other articles of faith is actually a mature technology, which has been steadily progressing in cost effectiveness, safety and ease of construction and maintenance.  It’s the only viable, essentially pollution free, efficient and affordable power generation technology, but the opportunities for graft are far lower, and it’s not nearly flawed and expensive enough for D/S/Cs to embrace.

Oh well.  At least millions of birds, including endangered species, won’t be flash fried on the wing anymore.  That’s something, until the world ends in however many years it is from today.