by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
September 24, 2022
Good news, everybody! A new report from the eggheads at Oxford University assures us that switching to renewables will actually save us trillions of dollars!
You heard that right. It won't cost us trillions of dollars to build out a completely new global energy grid infrastructure based on technology that is still under development and then to switch the entire global economy onto it. No, don't be silly! It's going to save us trillions of dollars. TRILLIONS, I tell you!
Now, I know what some of you skeptical Corbett Reporteers out there are thinking: how can that be? After all, as The Manhattan Contrarian blog points out in a recent post on the "Cost of the Green Energy Transition," the disruption to the European gas supply caused by the Ukraine kerfuffle is already wreaking havoc on Europe's economy, with Germans bracing for a 13% rise in their regulated consumer gas bills this year and UK residents facing a near tripling of their own energy bills. And that's before the Great Resetters start shutting off the pipes for real and forcing the hoi polloi on to the wind/solar/unicorn fart "green" energy grid.
But why believe the actual economic pain you're experiencing (heating your own home this winter) when your Oxfordian overlords have big, fat reports (that no one will read) telling you how much money will be saved by switching over to a green energy grid? After all, the BBC and MSN and Nature World News are tripping all over themselves to repeat these findings unquestioningly, so who are you to bring up any of the pesky "facts" that contradict this comforting fairy tale?
Oh, OK, I'll drop the act. The latest Oxford study—along with the many similar pronouncements made in recent years that the transition onto the green energy grid will be painless (or even profitable)—is easily debunkable propaganda. But it is pernicious propaganda. It's designed to get the plebes to actively embrace their own enslavement in the name of saving Mother Earth, and—up to this point—it has been remarkably effective in that goal.
In truth, the green energy sustainable enslavement grid is a scam from top to bottom. But it is not simply a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream being sold to a gullible and ignorant public. It's worse than that. It is a carefully crafted lie that is designed to lead us into our new role as serfs on the neofeudal plantation in the coming green dystopia.
Want to know the details? Let's dig in.
The Green Energy Myth
I don't know if you've been paying attention these last few decades, but the usual cadre of crimatologists, "activists," sustainable enslavement-pushing banksters and corrupt politicians are desperately trying to sell the public on the idea that windmills, solar panels and unicorn farts are a magical pixie dust capable of transforming the human population from greedy, fat-cat crapitalists raping the planet for fun and profit into peace-loving, Kumbaya communists living in perfect harmony with nature.
Believe it or not, they're lying!
Take the latest Oxford study I referred to above, for instance. Bearing the title "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition," it starts by simply assuming the truth of the fundamental lie that the entire green myth is constructed upon: "Rapidly decarbonizing the global energy system is critical for addressing climate change."
This is, of course, not true, as I have demonstrated time and time and time and time and time and time and time again. (And again and again and again and again.)
But, after simply stating this bald-faced lie as fact, the Oxfordian boffins then have the gall to urinate on your face and tell you it's raining: "Compared to continuing with a fossil fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars—even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy."
As always, I encourage you to read the report for yourself to see how they fabricate the so-called "evidence" for this surprising "conclusion"—though I'm sure you can imagine most of their tricks before you even open the link. First, they abuse blatantly bias-prone models to "estimate" (read: make up) future energy system costs, which, they freely admit, "will change with time due to innovation, competition, public policy, concerns about climate change, and other factors."
Then, after gazing into their magical crystal ball and seeing whatever they want to see with regard to future costs, they use "probabilistic methods" to "view energy pathways through the lens of placing bets on technologies." I kid you not, this "empirically grounded" and totally "scientific" study tells us, in effect, that if we're betting men we should put all our chips on green . . . "green" energy, that is. Go on, read it for yourself.
But here's the rub: these types of "scientific" studies only come off as believable to the most credulous Joe Sixpacks and Jane Soccermoms out there, the type who get their news from CNN and believe everything Al Gore tells them. These pithy platitudes promising perfectly painless energy transitions—even when they are dressed up in the language of empiricism and bear the imprimatur of Oxford University—are not credible in the least to anyone with a technical background in these areas.
Indeed, the Oxford study and similar utopian predictions of green energy transitions rely on a stream of untenable assumptions and faulty logic. For example, as Manhattan Contrarian points out in his blog post on "Cost of the Green Energy Transition," the Oxford researchers take the downward price trend of lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries over the past two decades and extrapolate those figures out based on the assumption that they will continue falling indefinitely without limit. As the study even explicitly says, "We know of no empirical evidence supporting floor costs [on green technology deployment] and do not impose them."
This is so certifiably insane it's difficult to know where to begin. First, let's interrogate the actual economic argument here, shall we?
The researchers tip their hand when they show the current (2020) price of li-ion batteries as being about $100/kWh and "forecast" that it will drop to about $20/kWh by 2050. In actuality, the 2020 price for such batteries is (according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) about $350/kWh (see Figure ES-2), and those prices are predicted to drop to about $150/kWh by 2050. If that forecast is accurate, the actual 2050 price for li-ion batteries would still be 50% higher than the "current" price used in the Oxford study model.
The discrepancy between these figures, Manhattan Contrarian points out, "appears to lie mainly in elements of a real-world battery installation other than the core battery itself, like a building to house it, devices to convert AC to DC and back, grid connections, 'balance of plant,' and so forth." In other words, the study's authors didn't look in any way at the real-world cost of actually installing, connecting, using and maintaining these batteries; they simply looked at the raw cost of the battery itself and ignored the rest.
This methodology becomes even more problematic when you learn that Energy & Environmental Science actually published a study in 2018 estimating the real-world cost of installing and running a lithium-ion battery storage system capable of handling a US energy grid that ran on 80% wind and solar. Their conclusion? It would cost a staggering $2.5 trillion to get such a system up and running! Oddly, the Oxford study doesn't take these costs into account at all. They just tell you that the battery price will fall to $20/kWh and leave it at that.
And what of the materials required to construct these lithium-ion batteries and solar panels and windmills and other green energy components? In case you were under the impression that the components for these technologies just magically materialized out of fairy dust in an environmentally-friendly way and then disappeared back into the ether after these installations break down, here's a 72-minute reality check from Simon Michaux, an associate professor of geometallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland, in which he argues that:
The quantity of metal required to make just one generation of renewable tech units to replace fossil fuels, is much larger than first thought. Current mining production of these metals is not even close to meeting demand. Current reported mineral reserves are also not enough in size. Most concerning is copper as one of the flagged shortfalls. Exploration for more at required volumes will be difficult, with this seminar addressing these issues.
Perhaps this is why, in point of fact, lithium prices are surging right now, with prices tripling in the last year in places like China, not plummeting as the Oxford study predicts.
But the green energy myth goes well beyond the argument from economic impracticality.
It isn't just that, in direct contradiction to the hogwash put out by the Oxford researchers and their ilk, such a transition will not save us trillions of dollars but actually cost us trillions of dollars.
And it isn't just that—as country after country after country is now finding out—the transition to green energy production is pushing people further into poverty as they struggle to pay their increasing energy bills.
It's not even that the green energy transition is provably already putting a strain on power grids that are struggling to keep up with electricity demand.
It's that these "green" energy systems are not really green at all. In fact, wide-scale implementation of these renewable power technologies is actively harmful to the environment.
Take those lithium-ion batteries we examined earlier. The lithium for these batteries comes from a mining process that is wreaking untold havoc on habitats around the world. In Chile, for example, a full 65% of the water in the region surrounding the Salar de Atacama salt flat is being consumed by lithium miners, who require 500,000 gallons of water for every tonne of lithium produced. And in Tibet, a toxic chemical leak from a lithium mine caused a mass die-off of fish and livestock in a nearby villlage, sparking mass protests.
And that's to say nothing about the bevy of toxic materials found in solar panels that leach into the environment and will eventually need to be disposed of. Or the long-known fact that wind turbines "take a toll on birds," contributing to hundreds of thousands of avian deaths every year in the US alone. Or the oft-neglected environmental destruction that will come from clearing the millions of acres of land that will be required to run the solar and wind farms of the Oxfordians increasingly dystopian vision.
Are you starting to get the picture?
Yes, there is much more that could (and should!) be written about the green energy myth, but let's boil it down to a soundbite for those poor souls suffering from today's short attention span: So-called "green" energy is not about saving the planet. It's about controlling the planet.
The Green Energy Reality
I realize a certain portion of the population—having been programmed by half a century of over-the-top, anti-human propaganda—will have a single, predictable, knee-jerk reaction to anyone deconstructing the green energy myth: "You must be a Big Oil shill!"
It's particularly funny when the accusation is leveled at me, since I literally wrote the documentary on How Big Oil Conquered the World.
But even more to the point, I wrote the documentary on Why Big Oil Conquered the World, and those who have seen that documentary will know that the greatest trick the oligarchy ever pulled was convincing the public that all they were concerned with was oil. As those who delve deeply into the subject inevitably discover, the takeover of the world by these well-connected oiligarchs wasn't about oil at all. It was about power.
This is precisely why the Rockefellers have divested from oil and why Saudi Arabia is trying to pivot to their robot citizens and Neom nonsense and why BP and Exxon and all the other members of the oiligarchy are setting "net zero" pledges. It's because the green energy system of the future (and thus the global economy that relies on it) will be even more strictly controlled in the future, and those who are bringing this controlled, technocratic slave state of the future into reality are seeking to monopolize and control the resources of the earth.
To understand what is really happening here, we have to look past the low-level green energy propaganda that is meant for the fluoride-addled normies to lap up and look to the higher-level propaganda that is intended to bring the New World Order middle management up to speed on the new power paradigm. As usual, there's no better place to turn for precisely that type of propaganda than the pages of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. In a recent article on "The Green Upheaval," they plainly admit what the green energy push is really about: "Talk of a smooth transition to clean energy is fanciful: there is no way that the world can avoid major upheavals as it remakes the entire energy system, which is the lifeblood of the global economy and underpins the geopolitical order."
No, the green energy transition is not going to be a happy clappy cakewalk into a fantasy future, as the activists promise. And that particular rainbow will not lead to a multi-trillion-dollar pot of gold, as the Oxfordians promise. What it will do is radically upend the lives and livelihoods of every person on the planet by taking away the one thing that has done more than anything else in all of human history to empower the population to proclaim their independence from the oligarchs: access to cheap energy.
Yes, the renewable energy grid will utterly fail to provide the energy needed to power our modern postindustrial society. That's precisely the point. By making energy even more scarce, those with their hands on the energy spigot will have the ultimate control over society, deciding when, where and how to allocate scarce energy supplies to the public. Europeans who are wondering how they will be able to afford to heat their homes and businesses this winter are just starting to understand what this new "green" economy will really look like for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
It is not difficult to discern the contours of the world that these energy transition advocates are driving us towards. It is a world in which all of the things we take for granted—the ability to travel freely, to buy and sell independently, to heat our own homes and even to turn on a lightbulb—will be privileges carefully rationed by our neofeudal overlords.
Think you'll be able to control the thermostat in your own home once the new economic overlords have their "smart" "green" energy grid in place? Think again.
Think you'll be able to eat as you normally do once the green mafia is in power? Think again.
Think you'll be able to use your hard-earned digital energy credits to buy whatever you like or travel wherever you want in the technocratic tyranny of the future? Think again.
Welcome to the Green Leap Forward, where you will own nothing, live in a hovel, face the possibility of freezing to death every winter and struggle to make ends meet . . . but you'll be happy! After all, you'll be allowed to eat ze bugs and use the energy ration that the global government doles out for you each day. And if that's not enough, then you can keep warm by vigorously patting yourself on the back for helping protect humanity from the wrath of the weather gods. You're saving the earth!
Where We Go From Here
If you're here reading these words, then perhaps you already know where the green energy myth is taking us. You know about the Great Reset and Agenda 2030 and the push for a global technocracy.
You probably even know precisely how they're going to convince the public to go along with this insanity. You know about the "green" propaganda and the "sustainable development" scam, and you know that the climate scam will be the cornerstone for the global carbon tax that will be the backbone of the de facto global government.
Perhaps you take hope from the resistance to this green enslavement agenda that is appearing around the world. Perhaps you take comfort seeing the Dutch farmers and the Sri Lankan farmers and the Argentinian farmers and the Irish farmers and their farmer friends around the globe rising up. Perhaps you take heart knowing that, with so many livelihoods throughout the world being threatened by this sick, anti-human agenda, the agenda will be derailed. And perhaps you take pity on the slumbering masses who are finally starting to rise in protest on the streets of Prague and Leipzig and London.
The slumbering masses are awakening!
I, too, think that these movements are, overall, a positive development . . .
. . . but by themselves they are not enough. What are the farmers protesting for, after all? The right to dump glyphosate and other toxic chemicals on their GMO crops? And what are energy price protesters hoping to accomplish, exactly? Are they merely demanding that the government step in with more subsidies and price controls to ease the economic burden of the oh-so-necessary green energy transition?
No, unless and until we start confronting this myth at its roots, we will continue to plunge headlong into the dystopic nightmare of the Great Resetters and their ilk.
Yes, we do need an alternative energy system to power the economy of free humanity. We do need to abandon the system that chains our economic livelihood to the whims of the oil cartel and puts us at the mercy of the government-sanctioned energy cartel. We do need a decentralized system that takes advantage of every technological development for creating and storing our own power, so we can truly get off the grid.
But that is not what is being sold to us in the name of the green energy hoax. The pushers of the Agenda 2030 nightmare do not want us to be independent and free; they want us to be even more tightly controlled and surveilled than before.
Green energy is a scam. It has nothing to do with saving the planet. It has everything to do with artificially limiting our access to power and thus making the population more dependent than ever on the oligarchs and their systems of control. We must reject this racket and all of the pseudoscientific nonsense that is being used to push it on the public.
Spread the word. That's how you can really save the planet.