Our leaders are doubling down on their energy blunders

 

As Europe faces a winter of skyrocketing natural gas prices driving millions of people unable to afford to heat their homes into energy poverty, it’s alarming how western leaders — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau among them — continue to take precisely the wrong message from what has happened.

 

Clouds are seen over the cooling tower of the nuclear power plant Isar 2 by the river Isar amid the energy crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Eschenbach near Landshut, Germany, Aug. 1, 2022. Photo by Ayhan Uyanik/File Pho /REUTERS

 

 

From Trudeau, to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other European leaders, to the Biden administration in the U.S., their misguided battle cry is the same.

 

It’s that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has dramatically curtailed natural gas exports to Europe, demonstrates the failure of western democracies to abandon fossil fuel energy quickly enough in favour of renewables, providing proof this transition must proceed faster than ever before.

 

The problem is this kind of thinking is exactly what got Europe into the energy mess it is now in, which has led to a global energy crisis raising the price of natural gas even in faraway Canada as winter approaches, while requiring European governments to massively subsidize the cost of fuel for heat.

 

The real policy failure, illustrated most dramatically by the German example, was recklessly moving away from proven and conventional forms of energy towards so-called renewables, with no regard for maintaining domestic energy production and security and naively relying on Russian imports.

 

Today, Germany’s dream of abandoning nuclear power and replacing it with wind and solar energy, backed up by imported Russian natural gas, has turned into an energy nightmare playing out globally.

 

Not only did Germany’s disastrous decision born of an irrational fear of nuclear power make no sense from a domestic security and economic standpoint, it made no sense from an environmental one, because nuclear power doesn’t produce greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change.

 

 

Now Germany is scrambling to make up for curtailed Russian natural gas imports by suspending its phase-out of nuclear energy and reactivating some of its coal-fired power plants which burn lignite, the most polluting and least energy efficient form of coal.

 

It also intends to speed up converting to renewable energy and build facilities to import liquid natural gas — which burns at half the carbon dioxide intensity of coal.

 

But that will take years to achieve and Germany’s over-reliance on intermittent wind and solar energy that cannot provide base load power to the electricity grid on demand, and that must be backed up by natural gas, is what got Germany into its current mess.

 

Germany and the European Union have tacitly admitted this by recently reclassifying nuclear power and natural gas as transitional forms of green energy — as have the G-7 nations of which Canada is a member.

 

  Nuclear power backed by natural gas — the latter of which is needed in any event to back up intermittent and unreliable wind and solar power — is the most effective and practical way we have to replace the use of coal to generate electricity.

 

Eliminating the use of coal to produce electricity globally is the single most effective and practical way we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

 

In the real world, the lesson of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has sparked a global energy crisis, is not that we need to move faster towards so-called renewable energy.

 

It is to reduce emissions by using conventional sources of energy such as non-emitting nuclear power and low-emitting natural gas, while ensuring domestic energy security instead, of relying on foreign dictators to provide it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Toronto Sun