Want to really help the poor or starving? STOP going "green"

Have you heard the Goracle just bought a new $9,000,000.00 USD home? (yep... 9 million...)

From "But now you know" post "Going green is bad for the environment" which discusses green myths about:

• government mandated recyclying
• bio-fuels
• hybrid cars
• forest fires
• styrofoam
• polluting power plants
• atmospheric uranium
• CFCs
• wetlands
• reforestation
• paper
• e-waste

"Trendy “Green” environmentalism is chock-full of urban legends, inductive reasoning, and pseudoscience that end up harming the environment, as well as being directly bad for the people pushed to conform.

That’s right, those things you feel guilty about not doing, or that you give in and do, even though they make you miserable, can actually be harming the planet."
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Last month I pointed out a few articles about how green jobs are waste of space, money and a lie.
If people really wanted to help the poor and starving people, they would STOP 'going green'...

From the "Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources":

Europe’s current policy and strategy for supporting the so-called “green jobs” or renewable energy dates back to 1997, and has become one of the principal justifications for U.S. “green jobs” proposals. Yet an examination of Europe’s experience reveals these policies to be terribly economically counterproductive.

This study is important for several reasons. First is that the Spanish experience is considered a leading example to be followed by many policy advocates and politicians.

This study marks the very first time a critical analysis of the actual performance and impact has been made. Most important, it demonstrates that the Spanish/EU-style “green jobs” agenda now being promoted in the U.S. in fact destroys jobs, detailing this in terms of jobs destroyed per job created and the net destruction per installed MW.

Raising energy costs kills. According to a Johns Hopkins study, replacing threefourths of U.S. coal-based energy with higher priced energy would lead to 150,000 extra premature deaths annually in the U.S. alone (Harvey Brenner, “Health Benefits of Low Cost Energy: An Econometric Case Study,” Environmental Manager, November 2005).

Reducing emissions, a major rationale for “green jobs” or reewables regimes, hits the poorest hardest. According to the recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by just 15% will cost the poorest quintile 3% of their annual household income, while benefiting the richest quintile (“Trade-Offs in Allocating Allowances for CO2 Emissions”, U.S. Congressional Budget Office,
Economic and Budget Issue Brief, April 25, 2007).
Raising energy costs loses jobs. According to a Penn State University study, replacing two-thirds of U.S. coal-based energy with higher-priced energy such as renewables, if possible, would cost almost 3 million jobs, and perhaps more than 4 million (Rose, A.Z., and Wei, D., “The Economic Impact of Coal Utilization and Displacement in the Continental United States, 2015,” Pennsylvania State University, July 2006)"

And more on "Why Alternative Power Is and Will Remain Useless" from ChicagoBoyz:

"A coal plant produces power around the clock and in all types of weather. To replace that functionality at POC, you have to build massive redundancy into the alternative power system. You can’t just stick up the number of wind turbines that on paper can crank out the same number of kilowatts generated by the coal plant. To compensate for the incessant variation in the wind, you have to put up at least three times that many turbines, in at least three different groups widely separated geographically. Even then it is far from certain you will have dependable power at POC. Every grid using significant amounts of wind power has suffered serious outages regardless of how large the dispersion of wind power. Solar power is even worse because it can under the best of conditions only produce power for around six hours a day. Half the time of course, it is dark and solar produces zero power at POC even when the solar panels are physically right above the POC.

Neither can we efficiently store solar and wind energy. The most effective method, thermal storage in molten salts, has only 20% recovery. That means to get 1 watt back out, you have to put five in. Worse, the storage system is more costly and complex than the alternative generators that produce the energy it stores.

A coal plant can operate anywhere, but since the alternative generators only work in certain locations, to replace the functionality of the coal plant you have to create a massive interconnected power grid to shift power from where nature provides the power to anywhere else a POC exists.

Let me emphasize this: In order to replace the functionality of a single 80-year-old coal plant anywhere in North America, you have to build a continent-spanning power grid that can efficiently and reliably transfer power from any single location in North America to any other location. The entire grid has to extend everywhere and work all of the time or it has no hope of providing power where and when you need it.

We have no such grid today, and it is not even certain that we could create such a grid at all given the severe problems of balancing such a massive system while its primary generator’s output goes up and down erratically as weather conditions change. Nobody has ever come close to creating such a grid and it might be physically impossible to do it.

Worse, it should be fairly obvious that such a grid would be very vulnerable to large-scale disasters such as ice storms, hurricanes, earthquakes etc. as well as presenting a tempting target for hackers. Remember, the entire grid has to function to switch power. It won’t be like today where we have a lot of largely isolated regional grids. A failure in Mississippi river valley will isolate the entire East Coast from power from power supplies in the Midwest and West.

Meanwhile, in the same scenario, our obsolete coal plant would keep chugging along cranking out power to the local grid.

To sum: Just to completely replace a single obsolete coal plant anywhere in the country, we have to reengineer the entire continent-wide power grid from the generators to the light bulbs.

And we have to do it all in one go. The non-alternative power system will have to remain online at full potential capacity to be able to step in and compensate for alternative power’s inability to provide power reliably at POC. We won’t be able to take any of the old plants off line without risking a fatal outage at some POC. We’ll have to build a massive parallel alternative system that will parasitize the non-alternative system until the alternative system reaches some critical size threshold that will allow the entire system to completely replace the functionality of a single 80-year-old coal plant.

This is never going to happen. It would take decades and by the time we got it done our grandchildren would be getting their power from feeding banana peels into their Mr. Fusions.

In the future, every time someone extols the supposed virtues of “alternative power” just ask them, “Can this system replace a single coal plant that uses 80-year-old technology?”

The honest answer will always be no. You most likely won’t get an honest answer but it will be interesting to see the expression on their face."

So IF you really want to help the poor and starving people on the earth: support mining COAL(& drill for more oil, continuee hydro and nuclear energy): and STOP the "green" madness...