Time to Stop Pretending Renewables Are Cheap

One trope that permeates the mass media and writings by ‘climate experts’ like Michael Mann and Bill McKibben is ‘cheap’ solar and wind energy.  - Tilak Doshi

• This is despite the debunking of the magical thinking of the ‘new’ energy economy by those who understand and respect the laws of physics and economics.

Another trope that has gained traction among green ideologues is the ‘primary energy fallacy’... 

But scratch beneath the surface, and this ‘fallacy’ reveals itself as little more than a sleight of hand, a convenient narrative to prop up costly and unreliable energy sources at the expense of economic rationality. 

Drawing on the incisive analyses of advocates of energy literacy such as Lars Schernikau and Ronald Stein, it’s clear that the real distortion lies in ignoring the full system-level costs and inefficiencies of wind and solar as well as the multiple uses of oil and gas as feedstock for myriad products...

• Selected materials required by electricity generation technology. Source: Schernikau based on Department of Energy, USA. See also here...