IEA Prediction on Coal Growth as Compared to the Growth of All Renewables Combined.
Here, on the political left, we have bet the future of the planet on so called "renewable energy," to address the on going collapse of the planetary atmosphere: Nevertheless for the week beginning April 25, 2021, the average concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere, measured at the Mauna Loa observatory was 420.01 ppm, just 7 years and 11 months after it hit 400 ppm for the first time. (Week beginning 5/26/2013, 400.03 ppm, 9 years and one month after first hitting 380 ppm, 4/4/2004, 380.2).
That increase of 40 ppm took place in a little less time than I've been writing at DU. For the whole time I've been here, I've been hearing, albeit with increasing disbelief, how wonderful so called "renewable energy" is, how it's replacing nuclear energy and how we don't "need" nuclear energy. Lately there's been some after the fact lip service to how the so called "renewable energy" industry is driving the coal industry out of business.
Every year for the last 15 years or so, I've been able to download the World Energy Outlook put out each year by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Covid has restricted some of my literature access, in particular the 2020 World Energy Outlook full report.
Nevertheless, the IEA has teasers on their websites, littered with misleading and somewhat dishonest "percent talk." If you buy access to the full report, you can find units of energy however - the unfortunate unit MTOE (million tons oil equivalent) that can nevertheless be converted to the SI unit, Exajoule (EJ).
Here's the teaser page: Global Energy Review: Key Findings.
For all those folks who keep saying "Coal is Dead" and claiming that somehow the solar and wind industry has killed it, I quote:
The bold, which to me says all I need to know about fantasy and reality, was added by me.
The primary energy production of wind and solar energy combined has never matched the primary energy production of nuclear energy, albeit obscured by the lie that a solar farm which has a theoretical peak capacity of 1 GW but might reach that power output for a few seconds on a sunny summer solstice day is the equivalent of a nuclear plant with a peak capacity of 1 GW that operates continuously at or near that power level for years at a time, without shutting down.
Constrained by fear, ignorance, selective attention, and raw stupidity, the nuclear industry has never, not once, produced as much energy as the coal industry, although for the first time, the nuclear industry has grown beyond 30 EJ per year.
After half a century of wild cheering for it, and the expenditures of trillion dollar quantities of money on it, the solar industry produces 2 EJ per year.
World energy demand as of 2019 was about 603 EJ, dominated by dangerous oil, then dangerous coal, and then dangerous natural gas, followed by the combustion of biomass. The waste from these fuels, which nobody knows how to address, kills in the form of air pollution, about 7 million people per year. It is also driving climate change, with extreme weather adding to the death toll.
Don't worry be happy.
Go join Bill McKibben's 350.org, where you can hear about losing, oh, 70 ppm in some magic "renewable energy" future. He's been prattling on year after year after year, but hasn't learned to say the word "nuclear" lest he offend one of his bourgeois contributors.
History will not forgive us; nor should it.
Have a nice weekend.
