It’s official. Reliance on wind-power in Ireland is a recipe for a climate-disaster. This is not according to the Donald Trump Oil Fracking Lobby of Climate Change Deniers, but according to Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency. Though of course, the EPA didn’t put it quite like that. Instead, employing rather more spin than can be seen in a great many of the frozen wind-turbines off the south-east coast, the EPA clarioned the news that Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions were down by 6.8 per cent last year, the lowest in three decades.
Naturally, the environmentalist lobby – which also goes by the name “environment correspondents” – re-trumpeted the fake news, and none more so than George Lee on RTE. “The star-performing sector was energy where emissions were down 21.6%,” made possible by “an enormous contribution from wind and solar ….”
That is utterly untrue. That “enormous contribution” from wind constituted just 33.7% of the total energy created in Ireland, being an increase of only 0.6% over the previous year. Yes, and that’s Lee’s “star-performing sector”. Natural gas (at 44.3%) accounted for over 10% more of our internally-generated electricity than did wind. Effectively concealed in all this was our reliance on imported energy via interconnectors at 9.5%. Also concealed was that the 6.8% fall in emissions followed two years of increased emissions in 2021 and 2022.
In The Irish Times, Kevin O’Sullivan did his best to outLee Lee. The EPA report, he declared, “indicates a move towards reducing carbon emissions at the scale and pace required to meet [Ireland’s] climate ambition of a 51 per cent reduction by 2030″. Again, untrue. The Report was, in its understated way, profoundly pessimistic about any possibilities of Ireland achieving its own objective of that reduction of 51% from the emissions of 2018, all EU targets for the past three years having been missed. The Report adds: “…the overall national climate objectives of a 51% reduction by 2030 will not be achieved unless all sectors meet (their) targets…”
This is where the road gets rocky. These targets include reductions in emissions from electricity of 75%, transport (which far from being reduced were up last year) by 50% and residential building by 51%: across the board by 2030, or 8.3% a year. And last year, even our largely phoney and much much-trumpeted 6.8% reduction (because 2021 and 2022 had increased levels of greenhouse gas emissions) fell short of the annual target by 1.5%. And how long until 2030? Slightly more time than has elapsed since some Chinese genius concocted the Covid virus.
So what’s going on? Why are the media taking at face value the spin that all annual reports usually contain? Why bother having journalists at all if they merely trot out press releases from source, rather than examining the facts contained in the substantive reports?
Of course, this is a small and credulous society: merely because Catholicism has gone down the tubes does not mean that people are more questioning of government pronouncements about anything, though the recent referendum-rejections give some hope that Official Ireland does not always get its way. But nonetheless, Official Ireland still mouths vapid and wildly inaccurate platitudes about windfarms, which will, we are assured, completely free of charge, pluck watts from the wind and propel them to our homes to power our toaster, our central heating and our cars.
This is not true. It has never been true. It will never be true. Dependence on the wind is as sensible as dependence on the potato, with the same outcome.
We are also massaging our figures by concealing the truth about the electricity that we import through interconnectors. Some of this will be gas-generated, the emissions from which should clearly be attributed to Ireland, which it is not at the moment. Some is nuclear, and of course, when in government the Green Party outlawed any examination of the nuclear-power option in Ireland, even though imported nuclear power from France and Britain keeps their offices in Leinster House warm and lit. Last May 21, the demand for electricity stood at 4848 MW, while renewable (namely wind) supplied only 59MW, or just 12%, a virtual repeat of January, when renewables produced under 12%, and Galway underwent the coldest January for thirty years, hitting -7 degrees. How did we survive this? With electricity from Britain and France. Yes, in other words, Sanctimonious Hypocrisy, just as in the dear old dead days of Catholic Ireland.
We have become a parasite-state living off the cream generated by other societies, and not just in energy. Our “Naval Service” is inferior to Nepal’s and so the Royal Navy defends our waters and our undersea cables, our Air Corps runs free flying-classes for Ryanair’s future pilots while the RAF protects our airspace, and the Army has been so undermined by political interference that it would probably lose a war with a covey of nonagenarian nuns in Nenagh. Our state accounts are a vast international Ponzi scheme of creative-accounting conducted with taxation-mirrors and charm, understood only by a cackling mad gnome living beneath the Matterhorn, for which a day of reckoning will surely come, as will inevitably the multi-billion-plus fine from the EU.
Moreover, nothing that mankind does to the climate can match the mischief that nature naturally does. The eruptions last week of Etna and Stromboli probably undid all the CO2 emission-reductions in Europe over the past decade, even before we consider the deranged galaxy of toxins that is Siberia. Its landmass of several million square miles is seeping methane in unquantifiably vast amounts, much of it having been imprisoned in the Palaeozoic of around five hundred million years ago. This is the original fossil fuel, which regularly explodes through the permafrost like small nuclear bombs. Methane is also more than eighty times more “warming” than our modest and much-vilified CO2, thus making Ireland’s contribution to global warming seem like a butterfly-fart on a windswept Alp, as of course does China’s two hundred new coal-fired power stations, as does India’s….et cetera.
Professor Nikolas Froitzheim, a Gloomologist at the University of Bonn, declares that analysing the Siberian data might make the difference between a catastrophe and an apocalypse: or in Irish terms. the equivalent of death either by famine or by starvation, take your pick. Hmmm, let me think now……
Meanwhile a worm found deep in the permafrost was recently revived, presumably with a rather gallantly-administered kiss-of-life from a veterinarian nurse called Karen. Now regularly doing hearty morning press-ups, the worm is believed to be 44,000 years old: not quite sure how they know that – probably by cutting it in half and counting the rings before Karen super-glued it back together again. That’s the good news: the bad is that scientists fear that lethal viruses slumbering in Siberia’s permafrost might similarly emerge any day now, garrotting poor Karen in the lab before slipping past security and wiping out all of humankind, slowly and in hideous agony: ah, hello COVID-24.
