Hot Air on Energy

Ask a climatista who is the leader in climate action in Europe and you’re likely to get a word salad about Germany’s energiewende (“energy revolution”), which has seen the Fourth Reich spend something like $1 trillion Euros on “green” energy over the last 25 years. Worth mentioning in passing that when I visited Germany on an energy junket as a guest of the German government in 2008, every expert we met said that Germany couldn’t possibly meet its 2020 or 2030 greenhouse gas targets unless they kept their nuclear power, which the Green Party had demanded be phased out as a condition for joining the coalition government back then. And then came the Fukushima in 2011, and Germany’s very worst ever Chancellor-Without-a-Mustache decided to phrase out nuclear power even faster, apparently fearful of tsunamis from the Rhine River or something.

This is preface for this very cool two-minute animated map below from ElectricityMap of the carbon intensity of European electricity during 2019. A greener shade is low-carbon intensity, while a browner shade essentially means you use a lot of coal, like Poland, which uses coal proudly. You’ll notice right away that the countries that are consistently green are France, Sweden, and Norway, while Germany’s color fluctuates wildly as it has to bring on coal- and gas-fired electricity to back up its intermittent wind and solar power. What do France, Sweden, and Norway have in common? Lots of nuclear-powered electricity (also hydro in the case of Norway, but hydro is another power source the climatistas hate for some perverse reason). Above all, you see that Germany is a total cock-up, as the Brits like to say.

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