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Kai, This question brings into the focus the economics and the necessity of recycling what would otherwise be accumulating waste generated by human activity.I’m going to do something a little different, if for no other reason than to write something that might be interesting and even entertaining for some. I’m going to talk not only about the recycling of conventional waste but also something that is often overlooked, yet it is substantial, and that is the recycling of human excreta.Recycling SewageSo let’s discuss the recycling of sewage.I once entered a competition and put to a local council a proposal to recycle sewage that is presently treated by Sydney Water. It was unsuccessful. In fact it lost to another proposal that involved recycling concrete waste. I think mine was far more interesting but then I’m biased.To construct my proposal, I collaborated with:Sydney WaterSchool of Microbiology, UNSWMurray Cod Hatcheries – Wagga WaggaSchool of Microbiology, UNSWSchool of Mechanical and Manufacturing EngineeringCSIRO Division of EntomologyCSIRO Division of Water Resources and Land SciencesThe idea involved using a mixture of sewage and vegetable matter to feed a vermiculture operation. The worms from this would then be processed and fed to an aquaculture operation with the worm castings being dried, bagged and sold to farmers as fertiliser. Alternatively, if the biomass in which the worms were grown still had usable product left in it after the worms had been harvested, it could be washed with the washings becoming a liquid fertiliser and the remaining biomass being further processed for feeding to fish and later disposal as a fertiliser as well.There are a number of challenges concerning the processing of sewage with the end objective being to feed an aquaculture operation, some of which are:Effective treatment of feedstock to eliminate heavy metal and micro-biological contamination.Secondary processing of biomass to produce useful feedstock for fish, eg, production of yeasts or algae from biomass which can then be mixed with the worms to form a balanced nutritious fishfood.Automation of the vermiculture operation.Automation of the aquaculture operation.Automation of the fish processing.Selection of the correct species of fish to make a commercially viable operation.Minimisation of energy costs and the cost of capital works to sustain this operation.Inquiries and ResearchSchool of Microbiology - University of New South Wales. I approached and successfully enlisted the support of the School of Microbiology at the University of New South Wales, as represented by Professor Nicholas Ashbolt. The school had carried out PhD research into ways for breaking down sewage biomass. The School saw some potential in this project, not only because of the benefit it could do for society, but also because it could give rise further interesting PhD projects for the School’s students.Sydney Water. Accompanied by Professor Ashbolt, I had talks with Mr Peter Hope, Residuals Manager, of Sydney Water. The outcome of these talks was that:A new tertiary treatment works being built at Cronulla will provide around 80,000 tons of sewage cake per annum. This plant would also produce 250,000 tons of sterilised fresh water per annum which could be used for this operation.On the basis of what was known about the project, Sydney Water indicated they would support this enterprise provided there was no additional cost incurred by Sydney Water and preferably that there were cost savings in the present treatment and disposal of sewage.Waste management facilities on the Southern region of Sydney were able to provide a similar quantity of vegetable waste.CSIRO. The Division of Land Sciences, CSIRO, in Adelaide, at that time, was studying the beneficial effect of worms on agriculture. The person heading this study was Dr John Buckerfield. In discussions with him the following information was obtained:Worm castings have been found to have a significant beneficial effect on crops of all descriptions. Chemical analysis indicates castings do not contain a great quantity of conventional nutrient (ie, phosphate and nitrate) from a chemical point of view. It would appear that their beneficial effect derives from the bacteria they contain and which worms promote. Washings of worm castings appear to have a similar beneficial effect but obviously do not have the added benefit of worm casting in keeping moisture in the soil.The CSIRO had done tests spreading worm castings on vineyards and cotton plantations. In the case of the vineyards a 35 to 50% improvement in crop yield was experienced. The tests with the cotton plantations had also been carried out and the results showed that the trees had significantly more fruit and blossoms on them. The optimum spreading rate for worm castings was found to be 7 tonnes per hectare. One of the cotton plantations under test had an area of 52,000 hectares. It was evident from this that the demand for this worm casting would easily outweigh the capacity of proposed production facility to supply. There was no danger of being left with unused worm castings.One of the objectives of the CSIRO’s research at that time was to determine the commercial value of worm castings.Earthworm Recycling of Australia. ERA was a company in Melbourne specialising in breeding and selling earthworms. My research revealed that:About 50 tonne of organic matter is required to create 1 tonne of worms.8.6 kgs of worms will occupy 0.243 cu m of biomass.1 kg of worms consumes about 1 kg of material per day.Worms grow rapidly in size during their first 10 to 20 days of life. After that their consumption of material and their growth drops dramatically.Murray Cod Hatcheries. Murray Cod Hatcheries assisted me with my research into aquaculture. Fresh water fish provide a yield of between 0.7 and 1.7, that is, 0.7 tonnes of food can, with some species, produce 1 tonne of fish.Promotion of this Concept is not DifficultThis project has a number of laudable aims which will make it acceptable to government and constitute good public relations which, in turn, means a good probability of general acceptance by the wider community. These are:To provide employment, not only for young engineers and technicians, but also for the general community.To provide an opportunity for PhD research by students of the University of New South Wales.To develop environmentally friendly and economical ways of disposing of organic waste products.To establish a potentially lucrative industry which will reduce the stress presently being put upon the ocean ecology through the over-exploitation of fish stocks.Generate an export income from the application of high technology which could assist Australia’s balance of payments.Export of expertise to other countries in need of this technology; especially as part of Australia’s foreign aid programme.Some DeductionsPotential Output of the Farm. The fishfarm has the potential to produce the following:Fish Produce. On the basis of what is presently known, 160,000 tonnes of biomass should produce 3,200 tonnes of worms. If these are mixed with some form of cereal to provide a balanced fishfood, the resultant feedstock should be of the order of 7,000 tonnes. Working on a yield of 1.5:1 this should produce 4,600 tonnes of fish per annum. If the average wholesale price of fish is US$7.00 per kilogram then this equates to around US$32.0 million per year of revenue.Fertiliser. It is not expected that the worms will substantially decrease the size of the biomass. As a consequence, it is expected that there will be around 160,000 tonnes of fertiliser produced per year unless some of the biomass can be reprocessed such it is consumed as fishfodder. The fish excreta will also be useful as a fertiliser. It may be possible to mix the spent biomass with waste water to form a liquid fertiliser which could be sprayed on farmland. This potentially will produce around 400,000 tonnes of liquid fertiliser per annum. The CSIRO has confirmed and quantified the usefulness and value of this product as fertiliser. If one assumes it is sold for US$20 per tonne, the value of this product could be as much as US$8 million per annum.Facility Size. The size of the facility can be calculated by taking into account the amount of biomass that has to be held at any one time and the number of fish which will be held in the farm to produce an output of 12.6 tonnes of fish per day. For example, there will be a need to hold around 30 days of biomass at any one time. This amounts to 13,150 tonnes or about 13,150 cubic metres of waste. Spread to a depth of 0.5 metres this would occupy a space of about 2.6 hectares. Once offices, processing plant and fish tanks are taken into account, around 10 hectares should be needed to carry out this activity.Commercial Viability. This project appeared to be commercially attractive because:Cities are already burdened with the cost of treating sewage from which no income is generated. This project would treat sewage to the highest possible ecological standard whilst, at the same time, generating a substantial income and ameliorating other environmental concerns such as the depletion of natural fishstocks in the oceans.The biomass which will produce the worms for feedstock could be provided at very low cost and possibly free of charge.250,000 tonnes of fresh water from the sewage works could be provided free of charge as it is produced, with or without the this project, as a part of the necessary process of treating sewage.The land upon which the facility could be built should be cheap and may be obtainable by way of a government grant.The demand for fish for human consumption is increasing. There will always be a ready market for this produce.The waste-load created by the fish is high in phosphate and can be sold as fertiliser as can the worm waste.Conventional Treatment of Household Waste for the Purposes of RecyclingNow, onto the more mundane.There are now a number of facilities operating around the world that treat what is called a “multi-waste” stream and output electricity and useful products that can be economically recycled.This involves no sortation of household waste by householders and, being so, does not require multiple bins at domiciles, separate collection systems and it does not impose on householders the chore of separating their waste (which in community housing projects especially, they never do properly!). The elimination of sortation of waste saves the community and the municipality a great deal of time and money.In a multi-waste stream system, sortation is performed using automated systems such as:magnetic removal of ferrous metals,induction removal of diamagnetic metals,robotised visual recognition systems,gravimetric removal of glass and plastics, andhydrodynamic separation of sand and other heavy materials.Once economical separation has occurred, the remaining waste is dewatered and forced into a tube lined with manganese dioxide; the latter acting as a catalyst for oxidisation. The tube is heated to around 600C and during this process all carboniferous waste is reduced to CO and H2. This gas is then cooled with the heat energy being recycled into the process and the gas is used to drive engines which drive generators creating base-load electricity. The end product is a carbon and ash waste which can be used in tyre and cement manufacture respectively.These systems of waste treatment have been found to be economical and are significantly ecologically superior to dumping waste in landfill where there is always the risk of contamination of the water table and the gradual emission of toxic gases, such as dioxins, from the restored land which is often used for recreational facilities or housing.Final CommentIn this paper, I have covered two of the major areas of waste associated with humans and how this waste might be economically recycled.Humans, through the use of their intelligence, have grown in number far beyond what the natural environment would have allowed without the intervention of medicine, industrialisation, transportation, electricity, sewage, water treatment and reticulation, the rule of law and building construction.It is very important for the health of this planet and the continued existence of the human race that this same intelligence be directed to devising ways by which the waste streams may be closed so that there is, in the end, nil accumulating waste. If this is not done, then eventually the biosphere will not be able to cope and human life will be seriously impacted.

COST, INTERMITTENCY AND SEVERE WEATHER. Wind and solar power are the most expensive power because they must double up with fossil fuels lack of storage and to cover up intermittency so the lights can stay on. The public are fooled by the deceit of the industry that ignores the reality although Michael Moore figured it out. What has happened across the Northern Hemisphere this February with the massive winter snowstorm has exposed the frail reality of these old fashioned technologies.Coal Rescues Germany from Its Renewable FollyBY IERFEBRUARY 17, 2021Germany’s millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and its 30,000 wind turbines are doing nothing as the freezing weather has no wind resource to keep the turbines operating. Instead, the solar and wind units are drawing power from the grid powered mainly by coal to keep their internal workings from freezing up. Despite Germany being the poster child of Europe’s renewable future, the country’s Energiewende—transition to wind and solar power—is not working. The Germans have found that dependable, dispatchable coal can work in any weather and is the savior during these cold months. The plan is that Germany will have to rely more on natural gas from Russia, coal power from Poland and nuclear power from France, importing power along huge cables, instead of building a huge fleet of batteries to back up its intermittent renewable power.However, for this unreliability of wind and solar power during this year’s snowy and icy winter, German consumers paid $38 billion ($30.9 billion euros) in subsidies for its renewable energy growth in 2020, despite the financial needs of other sectors of its economy afflicted by the coronavirus pandemic. The renewable energy subsidy is paid directly by consumers in their electricity bills, helping make German residential retail power costs the highest across the European continent and 3 times higher than those of the United States. Americans need only triple their utility bills to get a sense of the burden Germany’s system places on its citizens. The U.S. economy is about 5 times the size of Germany’s, to compare relative expenditures for similar practices. The subsidy only raised renewable energy’s share of Germany’s electricity mix by 3 percentage points—from 43 percent in 2019 to 46 percent last year.Source: BloombergOver the next two years, the German government plans to take a third off the costs that consumers pay by using some of the nation’s budget to share the burden. The costs of the subsidy, known as Renewable Energy Law aid, are expected to peak in 2022-2023 before stabilizing. Germany switched to auctions to expand wind and solar capacity in 2017, abandoning the system of guaranteed feed-in tariffs for all new renewable projects to reduce the increasing expense burden.Joe Biden needs to use caution on his plans for a 100 percent carbon free electricity sector by 2035 and his carbon free U.S. energy sector by 2050 as Germany—the first country to take on the 100 percent carbon free electricity future in Europe—is failing in its ability to keep the lights on using solely carbon free power. Solar and wind power achieve less than half of the energy carbon sources achieve, despite massive subsidies.Europe’s Power Grid Avoids BlackoutExtremely cold weather caused power demand to surge across Western Europe on January 8 and the continent’s electricity network came close to a massive blackout. Europe’s grid, which is usually connected from Lisbon to Istanbul, split into two as the northwest and southeast regions struggled to keep the same frequency. The problem originated in Croatia due to a fault at a substation that caused overloading on other parts of Croatia’s grid. It led to the equivalent of 200,000 households losing power across Europe. Supply to industrial sites was cut in France and Italy.Source: BloombergAs Europe replaces large coal and nuclear stations with thousands of smaller wind and solar units and as sectors electrify via intermittent sources due to policy edicts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the possibility of blackouts is likely to become more frequent.Large amounts of intermittent electricity create huge swings in supply, which the grid has to be able to handle. European transmission grids need to stay at a frequency of 50 hertz to operate smoothly and any deviations can damage equipment that is connected. The frequency swings on January 8 were reduced within minutes, avoiding damage across the entire European high voltage network, which potentially could have caused blackouts for millions.Europe has not had a major blackout since 2006 when over 15 million households were out of power for hours. In 2019, there was another narrow escape when the frequency dropped dangerously low. Europe’s grid operators have put in automatic responses like splitting the network and triggering standby generation or demand reduction. Spinning turbines of thermal plants connected to the grid create kinetic energy called inertia which helps keep the network at the right frequency. The spinning cannot be created by wind turbines or solar panels.The European near-blackout shows that problems in one nation can rapidly cascade as states become more reliant on their neighbors for power. Continental Europe was separated into two areas due to outages of several transmission network elements in a very short time. Longer, harder to fix disturbances that rip across countries are a real threat.Europe is Not AloneIn Australia, wind power was blamed for a blackout in 2016 that cut supply to 850,000 homes. Australia was the first country to install a 100-megawatt mega battery in 2017, hoping that high-cost battery storage could be the solution.In California, where about a third of its generation is from renewables, record-breaking temperatures caused rolling blackouts as the state’s electricity supplies could not keep up with demand, particularly when solar plants stopped generating for the day and were 33-percent less effective due to the smoke from the state’s wildfires. Like Australia, California utilities are looking to large batteries to help solve the problem of intermittent electricity from wind and solar power, though the state also imports a large amount of power from neighboring states that were also having record-breaking temperatures this past summer and thus, not able to help with California’s energy demandConclusionCountries and states with a great deal of intermittent electricity from wind and solar power are having problems keeping the lights on when the weather does not cooperate. Germany had to turn to coal this past winter when freezing temperatures made its solar and wind units inoperable and it plans to import from neighboring countries to back-up its renewable electricity in the future, as its continues to retire its coal plants. Australia’s answer to its 2016 blackout caused by lack of wind power is to obtain high-cost batteries to store excess energy when the wind does not blow. California, which already imports electricity from neighboring states, got hit by record breaking temperatures and had to use rolling blackouts when the country’s solar and wind units could not meet demand. The state is also planning on using high-cost batteries to store its excess power for later use.Joe Biden’s plans are to put the United States into the same situation as Germany, Australia, and California by his campaign promises to make the U.S. electricity sector carbon free by 2035—10 years earlier than even California has planned—and the U.S. energy sector carbon free by 2050. Americans need to be aware of the situation that other countries are facing when they turn to intermittent renewables. The record so far is not good.Coal Rescues Germany from Its Renewable FollyWhat does this mean? ANSWER wind and solar are a failure to generate much needed grid electricity around the world.10 of 10 “highest-generating U.S. power plants were” not renewables.David Middleton / 22 hours ago September 25, 2020Guest “No energy transition for you!” by David MiddletonSEPTEMBER 25, 2020In 2019, 9 of the 10 highest-generating U.S. power plants were nuclear plantsAccording to U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data on power plant operations, 9 of the 10 U.S. power plants that generated the most electricity in 2019 were nuclear plants. These 10 plants generated a combined 230 million megawatthours (MWh) of electricity in 2019, accounting for 5.6% of all electricity generation in the United States. The makeup of power plants that generate the most electricity has shifted in the past 10 years from a mix of nuclear and coal plants to almost all nuclear in 2019.In 2010, the top 10 highest-generating power plants in the United States were a mix of nuclear and coal-fired generators. In 2010, coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation was 45%, compared with 23% in 2019. Decreased cost-competitiveness relative to other power resources, especially natural gas, has made coal less economical for electricity generation. Coal plants are also run at lower levels because of tighter air emission standards, which is the primary reason coal plants fell from the top 10.The Palo Verde, Browns Ferry, and Oconee nuclear power plants have consistently been among the 10 largest generators of electricity in the United States because they are the only nuclear plants with three reactor units, which gives them more generating capacity. A plant’s refueling and maintenance schedules may also affect annual electric power generation capacity. For example, Comanche Peak was one of the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2010 but was not one in 2019 because scheduled refueling and maintenance reduced plant availability in 2019.Electric power plants that have relatively large electricity generating capacities generally also operate at high capacity factors, or utilization rates. The capacity (the maximum amount of electricity a power plant can produce) of the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2019 ranged from 2,300 megawatts (MW) (Byron) to 3,937 MW (Palo Verde). Although these plants have a lower nameplate capacity than the Grand Coulee hydroelectric facility (6,809 MW of capacity) in Washington, they generate more electric power each year. Grand Coulee operated at a lower utilization rate and generated 16.6 million MWh of electricity in 2019.Nuclear power plants have the highest capacity factor of any energy source in the United States, at 94% fleet-wide in 2019, because nuclear plants generally operate around-the-clock until they are taken offline for maintenance or refueling. Capacity factors for the nine nuclear plants in the top 10 range from 89% (Browns Ferry) to 99% (Byron and Peach Bottom). Natural gas combined-cycle units have the second-highest capacity factor in the United States, at 57% fleet-wide in 2019. The natural gas plant that was among the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2019, West County Energy Center, operated at a capacity factor of 65%, slightly higher than the fleet-wide capacity factor.Almost all of the U.S. power plants that generated the most electricity in 2019 were in the eastern half of the country, and they tended to be close to areas with high electricity demand such as major cities or industrial production centers.More information about the fleet of power plants in the United States is available in the latest Annual Electric Generator Report, released on September 15, 2020.Principal contributor: Paul McArdleTags: nuclear, power plants, electricity, generationUS EIANatural gas combined cycle power plants can actually deliver 85% or better capacity factors, but generally aren’t operated 24/7 at full capacity.Over the same time period, renewables generation doubled in the US, due to “massive” solar and wind capacity additions. Despite this and the lack of nuclear power capacity additions…Top Ten Power Plants 2008Figure 1. 6 Nuclear generating stations and 4 coal-fired power plants.Top Ten Power Plants 2018Figure 2. 9 Nuclear generating stations and 1 natural gas-fired power plant.To paraphrase The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld:No Energy Transition for You!Figure 3. Can you spot wind and solar on this chart?Figure 3. Too fracking funny! US EIA10 of 10 “highest-generating U.S. power plants were” not renewables.Advancing subsidies for renewables is a deadly mistake when they cause heat poverty and brown outs that threaten hospital safety.Adelaide Hills pharmacist Kirrily Chambers forced to throw out medicine from the fridge after a blackout. Picture: Kelly Barnes/The AustralianWind and solar fail to replace fossil fuels and when added to the grid increase the cost causing fatalities from heat poverty. Also there is no grave problem of climate change because it is natural. The term climate change does not mean human caused global warming as words matter. Renewables are irrelevant to that debate because of their abysmal performance.Transition to wind and solar renewables makes electricity go up. :..people will die if this renewable energy idiocy continuesSolar and wind taking over the world We hear it all the time Only it is wrong Now: 0.8% 2040: 3.6%Wind Power: Unfolding Environmental Disaster – Entire Ecosystems CollapsingNovember 9, 2017 by stopthesethings 8 CommentsAs STT followers are well-aware, this site doesn’t mince its words: wind power is the greatest economic and environmental fraud in human history.Pull the subsidies, and this so-called ‘industry’ would disappear in a heartbeat.For the best part of 20 years, the wind cult has attempted to justify the hundreds of $billions squandered on subsidies for wind power, as being all for the greater good.Armchair environmentalists – who have never planted trees to prevent erosion on creek lines or dragged junk and gunk out of polluted waterways – claim ‘mission accomplished’, every time a new wind turbine whirls into (occasional) action.Obsequious charlatans (like Simon Holmes a Court) even encourage naïve and gullible virtue signallers into ‘investing’ in so-called community wind farms (see our post here). They never get their money back, but at least they can tell their mates at Getup! that they’ve done their bit for the environment.And yet, when the trifling amount of electricity generated by these things across the planet is compared with the grief caused to communities, neighbours and the environment itself, it’s hard for anyone gifted with our good friends, logic and reason, to make a case for wind power. Here’s why.Scientists: Expansion Of Wind Turbines ‘Likely To Lead To Extinction’ For Endangered Vulture SpeciesNo Tricks ZoneKenneth Richard5 October 2017When pondering the future of wind power and its ecological impacts, it is well worth re-considering this seminal analysis from Dr. Matt Ridley.[W]orld energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, […] it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area half the size of the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year.If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area half the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfill the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.The profound costs to wildlife of future-planning to expand wind energy to the levels demanded by “green” advocates — just to meet the world population’s additional energy demands with 350,000 more turbines each year — has been increasingly documented by scientists.The last remaining vulture species native to southeastern Europe is “likely” faced with extinction in the next few decades due to an “eight to ten times greater” mortality rate associated with the rapid expansion of wind energy projects in the region (Vasilakis et al., 2017).Bat species can be found dwelling in a wide variety of terrestrial habitats, including deserts and along sea coasts. Each species may play a fundamental role in its local ecosystem. For example, Kuntz et al., (2011) indicate that 528 different plant species rely on bat pollination and seed dispersal for sustainability. Boyles et al., (2011) estimated that by controlling pest populations (insects), the agricultural benefits of bats may reach $22.9 billion (U.S.D.) annually in the continental U.S. alone.In addition to White Nose Syndrome, deaths connected to collisions with wind turbines are now the leading cause of multiple mortality events in bats (O’Shea et al., 2016). Roughly 25% of North American bats are now classified at risk for extinction (Hammerson et al, 2017), in large part due to the explosion of wind turbines across the landscape. If the expansion of wind turbines continues at its current pace, the hoary bat population is projected to be reduced by 90% (Frick et al., 2017) within the next 50 years. As Hein and Schirmacher (2016) conclude, the “current and presumed future level of fatality [for bat populations] is considered to be unsustainable.”Even large mammals like the already endangered Portuguese wolf (“between 200 and 400 individuals” left) has had its reproduction rates reduced by the recent addition of nearly 1,000 new turbines in their shrinking habitat range (Ferrão da Costa et al., 2017 ).So what, exactly, are we gaining in exchange for increasingly endangering critically important wildlife species? Slightly above nothing.According to the IEA, wind energy provided for 0.39% of the world’s total energy demands as of 2013.At what point may we ask: Are the benefits of wind energy worth the ecological and wildlife costs?Wind Power: Unfolding Environmental Disaster – Entire Ecosystems CollapsingLawrence Solomon: Are solar and wind finally cheaper than fossil fuels? Not a chanceVirtually every major German solar producer has gone underA wind turbine spins amidst exhaust plumes from cooling towers at a coal-fired power station in Jaenschwalde, Germany.Getty ImagesLawrence SolomonApril 27, 2018“’Spectacular’ drop in renewable energy costs leads to record global boost,” The Guardian headline reported last year. “Clean Energy Is About to Become Cheaper Than Coal,” pronounced MIT’s Technology Review. “The cost of installing solar energy is going to plummet again,” echoed Grist, the environmental journal.Other sources declare that renewables are not only getting cheaper, they have already become cheaper than conventional power. The climate-crusading DeSmogBlog reports that “Falling Costs of Renewable Power Make (B.C.’s) Site C Dam Obsolete” and that “Coal Just Became Uneconomic in Canada.” It implores us to discover “What Canada Can Learn From Germany’s Renewable Revolution,” as does Energy Post, an authoritative European journal, which described “The spectacular success of the German Energiewende (energy transition).”Virtually every major German solar producer has gone underHere’s what Canada can learn from Germany, the poster child for the global warming movement. After the German government decided to reduce subsidies to the solar industry in 2012, the industry nose-dived. By this year, virtually every major German solar producer had gone under as new capacity declined by 90 per cent and new investment by 92 per cent. Some 80,000 workers — 70 per cent of the solar workforce — lost their jobs. Solar power’s market share is shrinking and solar panels, having outlived their usefulness, are being retired without being replaced.· Wind power faces a similar fate. Germany has some 29,000 wind turbines, almost all of which have been benefitting from a 20-year subsidy program that began in 2000. Starting in 2020, when subsidies run out for some 5,700 wind turbines, thousands of them each year will lose government support, making the continued operation of most of them uneconomic based on current market prices. To make matters worse, with many of the turbines failing and becoming uneconomic to maintain, they represent an environmental liability and pose the possibility of abandonment. No funds have been set aside to dispose of the blades, which are unrecyclable, or to remove the turbines’ 3,000-tonne reinforced concrete bases, which reach depths of 20 metres, making them a hazard to the aquifers they pierce.The cost to the German economy of its transition to renewables is estimated to reach 2 to 3 trillion euros by 2050Those who hoped that Germany’s newest coalition government would provide the renewable industries with a reprieve were disappointed last week when Germany’s new economic minister indicated that there would be no turning back. All told, the cost to the German economy of its much-vaunted energy transition to renewables is estimated to reach 2 to 3 trillion euros by 2050.Germany’s experience is being replicated throughout Europe — as subsidies fall, so does investment in wind turbines and solar plants, and so do jobs in these industries.As Warren Buffett said wind farms don’t make sense without the tax creditIn the real world of business and commerce, the cost of renewables makes them unaffordable without intervention by the state. As Warren Buffet explained in 2014, “on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”In the imagined world of politicians and environmental ideologues, renewables are not only affordable, they are inevitable. The difference in cost cited by those in the real and imagined worlds is called wishful thinking. This wishfulness is propped up through academic exercises that provide a stamp of authority on the ideologues’ beliefs.One method for proving that renewables have arrived is something called “levelized cost of electricity,” which the U.S. Energy Information Administration says is “often cited as a convenient summary measure of the overall competiveness of different generating technologies.” Environmentalists cite levelized costs as if you can take them to the bank, but they are really no more than predictions of what the costs of various technologies will be over subsequent decades. By assuming that costs of producing solar panels and wind turbines will drop and the costs of fossil fuels will rise over the 30-, 40- or 50-year lifetime of a new plant a utility must build, and describing those levelized costs as if they were current costs, studies state authoritatively that renewables have become cheaper than fossil fuels.Today’s claims that renewables are cheap and getting cheaper are familiar. They harken back to the first Earth Day in 1970, whose message of “New Energy for a New Era” was all about accelerating the transition to renewable energy worldwide. Then, as now, the belief in the viability of a renewable energy future was twinned with the conviction that fossil fuels, being finite, would inevitably become scarce and price themselves out of the market. To the ideologues’ never-ending dismay, peak oil never comes. Instead comes shale gas, shale oil, and peak renewables.Lawrence Solomon executive director of Toronto-based Energy [email protected] Grant Matkin ·In the real world of business and commerce, the cost of renewables makes them unaffordable without intervention by the state." The data supports this conclusion of Lawrence Solomon. Australia, Denmark, Germany and Italy are highest in electricity costs and wind and solar output: > 40 Euros / Kwh. US is lowest in renewables and lowest in electricity costs: 15 Euros / Kwh. In a paper for Energy Policy, Leon Hirth estimated that the economic value of wind and solar would decline significantly as they become a larger part of electricity supply.The reason? Their fundamentally unreliable nature. Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don’t need it, and not enough when they do.Solar and wind thus require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind on the European grid would decline 40 percent once it becomes 30 percent of electricity while the value of solar would drop by 50 percent when it got to just 15 percent.https://climatism.blog/.../climate-activist-if-solar-and.../http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-are-solar-and-wind-finally-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-not-a-chanceRenewable energy’s dreadful costs and awful electricityUnreliable capacity and excessively high costs make renewable energy nothing more than a ‘green’ idealogue’s dream. Subsidies are a great waste and are being abandoned around the world so market forces will be the death nell of this nonsense.12 DECEMBER 2018 - 13:55 ANDREW KENNYWind turbines are not the way to go, says Andrew Kenny, just ask Germany.Picture: THINKSTOCKSA is stumbling towards energy disaster. On top of Eskom’s failures comes the calamitous Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2018, a plan for ruinously expensive electricity. (The IRP 2018, drawn up by the department of energy, plans SA’s electricity supply.) The IRP is mad, based not on the real world but on a fantasy world of computer models.The IRP’s “least-cost option” is in fact the most expensive option possible, which has seen electricity costs soaring wherever it has been tried. This is a combination of wind, solar and imported gas. It was drawn up by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and supported by the IRP. It is a recipe for calamity.It seems strange that SA should forsake its own huge resources of reliable energy and depend on foreign sources. Worse is its reliance on unreliable solar and wind.South Australia actually did implement something like the CSIR’s “least-cost option”. It closed coal stations, built wind turbines and some solar plants, and supplemented them with natural gas, which Australia, unlike SA, has in abundance. The result was soaring electricity prices, reaching, at one point in July 2016, the astonishing figure of A$14,000/MWh (R140/kWh). Eskom’s average selling price is R0.89/kWh. The “least-cost solution” resulted momentarily in an electricity price more than 150 times Eskom’s. It would be worse here because we don’t have much gas.The renewable energy companies and the greens seem to have captured the department of energy (quite legally, quite differently from Gupta capture)It also caused two total blackouts for South Australia. In panic it ordered the world’s biggest battery from Elon Musk. Jaws dropped when people discovered how expensive it was and how inadequate (with 0.5% of the storage capacity of our Ingula Pumped Storage Scheme).The IRP and CSIR refuse to recognise the essential cost that makes renewables so expensive. Here is the key equation: cost of renewable electricity equals price paid by the system operator plus system costs.The system costs are the costs the grid operator, Eskom in our case, has to bear to accommodate the appalling fluctuations of wind and solar power so as to meet demand at all times. The renewable companies refuse to reveal their production figures but I have graphs of total renewable production since 2013, the beginning of renewable energy independent power producers (IPPS) procurement programme. The graphs are terrible, with violent, unpredictable ups and downs.In March 2018, power output varied from 3,000MW to 47MW. To stop this dreadful electricity shutting down the whole grid, Eskom must have back-up generators ramping up and down to match the renewables; it must have machines on “spinning reserve” (running below optimum power), and extra transmission lines. These cause system costs, which can be very expensive. The renewable companies don’t pay for them; Eskom does, and passes them on the South African public.NonsenseThe system costs, ignored by the IRP and CSIR, are one of the reasons their models are nonsense. They explain an apparent paradox. Week by week we hear that the prices of solar and wind electricity are coming down; but week by week we see electricity consumers around the world paying more as solar and wind are added to the grid. Denmark, with the world’s highest fraction of wind electricity, has just about the most expensive electricity in Europe. Germany, since it adopted the absurd Energiewende (phasing out nuclear and replacing it with wind and solar) has seen electricity costs soaring.The answer lies in the green desire for conquest. Nuclear power, as you can see driving past Koeberg, works in harmony with nature. The greens don’t like that. They want to conquer and dominate natureThe renewable energy IPP procurement programme, hailed by renewable companies as a huge success, has forced on SA its most expensive electricity ever — and its worst. Eskom’s last annual report, for the year ending 31 March 2018, revealed it was forced to pay 222c/kWh for the programme’s electricity compared with its selling price of 89c/kWh. But the system costs make it even more expensive.We get an idea how much more from the one renewable technology that does provide honest electricity and covers its own system costs. This is concentrated solar power (CSP) with storage, where sunshine heats up a working fluid, which is stored in tanks and used for making electricity for short periods when required. The latest such plants charge about 500c/kWh at peak times. So the best solar technology, with an award-winning project, in perhaps the world’s best solar sites, produces electricity at more than 10 times the cost of Koeberg and about five times the cost of new nuclear.Carbon dioxide realityAfter the procurement programme proved a failure, Lynne Brown, then public enterprises minister, ordered Eskom to sign up for a further 27 renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs), each lasting 20 years. Malusi Gigaba, then finance minister, endorsed her.Nuclear reduces carbon dioxide emissions; renewables don’t. The Energiewende has turned Germany into the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in Europe, because wind and solar, being so unreliable, had to be supplemented with fossil fuels, especially coal.Two reasons drive renewables: money and ideology. Renewable energy companies make a fortune when they persuade governments to force their utilities to buy their awful electricity.But why do the green ideologues love wind and solar? Not because of free energy, which is actually very expensive. Tides, waves, solar, wind and dissolved uranium in the sea can all provide free energy but, except for the uranium, it is always very costly to convert it into usable power. (Uranium from the sea would be naturally be replenished but it is cheaper to buy it from a commercial mine.)I think the answer lies in the green desire for conquest. Nuclear power, as you can see driving past Koeberg, works in harmony with nature. The greens don’t like that. They want to conquer and dominate nature. They love the idea of thousands of gigantic wind turbines and immense solar arrays dominating the landscape like new totems of command. Wind and solar rely entirely on coercion by the state, which the greens also love (in a free market nobody would buy wind or solar grid electricity).SA NEEDS TO DIVERSIFY ENERGY SOURCES TO DELIVERSA is not taking advantage of the clear lead the country has in solar and wind resources.OPINION 2 months agoThe renewable energy companies and the greens seem to have captured the department of energy (quite legally, quite differently from Gupta capture). If they get their way, the rest of us are going to suffer.Since 1994, Eskom has been wrecked by bad management, destructive ideology and corruption. Because it didn’t build stations timeously, the existing stations have been run into the ground and are failing. Its once excellent coal supply has been crippled. There is massive over-staffing and Eskom is plunging into debt. Seasonable rains threaten another fiasco to match January 2008, which shut down our gold mines.The last thing Eskom needs now is to be burdened by useless, very expensive renewable electricity. Recently, the parliamentary portfolio committee on energy, after listening to submissions on IRP 2018, recommended that coal and nuclear should remain in our energy mix. Perhaps a ray of hope for sanity.• Kenny is a professional engineer with degrees in physics, mathematics and mechanical engineering.Let’s look at the current picture, according to the Energy Information Administration.So-called renewables comprised just over 11% of U.S. energy consumption in 2017. Of the renewable sources, hydro, geothermal, and biomass aren’t going to grow enough to achieve any of the Green New Deal’s goals.Rep.-elect Ocasio-Cortez must be counting on wind and solar to power her plan. Together they supply just 3% of total energy consumed.If we confine the discussion to power generation, wind and solar comprise just 7.6% of the 4 trillion kilowatt-hour total. (Source: What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?)If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?Wind intermittency makes coal a necessary and expensive partnerMichael Shellenberger via ForbesOVER the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percentwhile the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.Electricity prices increased by:51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?Electricity prices increased by 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy.One hypothesis might be that while electricity from solar and wind became cheaper, other energy sources like coal, nuclear, and natural gas became more expensive, eliminating any savings, and raising the overall price of electricity.But, again, that’s not what happened.The price of natural gas declined by 72 percent in the U.S. between 2009 and 2016 due to the fracking revolution. In Europe, natural gas prices dropped by a little less than half over the same period.The price of nuclear and coal in those place during the same period was mostly flat.Electricity prices increased 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017.Another hypothesis might be that the closure of nuclear plants resulted in higher energy prices.Evidence for this hypothesis comes from the fact that nuclear energy leaders Illinois, France, Sweden and South Korea enjoy some of the cheapest electricity in the world.The facts are the most expensive retail electricity comes from countries with the most renewables!Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’February 18, 2019 by stopthesethings 21 CommentsBill says it’s time to stop jerking around with wind & solar.When the world’s richest entrepreneur says wind and solar will never work, it’s probably time to listen.Bill Gates made a fortune applying common sense to the untapped market of home computing. The meme has it that IBM’s CEO believed there was only a market for five computers in the entire world. Gates thought otherwise. Building a better system than any of his rivals and shrewdly working the marketplace, resulted in hundreds of millions hooked on PCs, Windows and Office. This is a man that knows a thing or two about systems and a lot about what it takes to satisfy the market.For almost a century, electricity generation and distribution were treated as a tightly integrated system: it was designed and built as one, and is meant to operate as designed. However, the chaotic delivery of wind and solar have all but trashed the electricity generation and delivery system, as we know it. Germany and South Australia are only the most obvious examples.During an interview at Stanford University late last year, Bill Gates attacks the idiots who believe that we’re all just a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future.Gates on renewables: How would Tokyo survive a 3 day typhoon with unreliable energy?Jo Nova BlogJo Nova14 February 2019Make no mistake, Bill Gates totally believes the climate change scare story but even he can see that renewables are not the answer, it’s not about the cost, it’s the reliability.He quotes Vaclav Smil:Here’s Toyko, 2p7 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.As Gates says: Let’s not jerk around. You’re multiple orders of magnitude — … — That’s nothing, that doesn’t solve the reliability problem.Bill GatesDuring storms, clouds cut solar panel productivity (unless hail destroys it) and wind turbines have to shut down in high winds.The whole interview was part of a presentation at Stanford late last year:Cheap renewables won’t stop global warming, says Bill GatesThe interview by Arun Majumdar, co-director of Stanford Energy’s Precourt Institute for Energy, which organized the conference, can be watched here.When financial analysts proposed rating companies on their CO2 output to drive down emissions, Gates was appalled by the idea that the climate and energy problem would be easy to solve. He asked them: “Do you guys on Wall Street have something in your desks that makes steel? Where is fertilizer, cement, plastic going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put in a spreadsheet?”“The idea that we have the current tools and it’s just because these utility people are evil people and if we could just beat on them and put (solar panels) on our rooftop—that is more of a block than climate denial,” Gates said. “The ‘climate is easy to solve’ group is our biggest problem.”If he only looked at the numbers in the climate science debate…Jo Nova BlogGreen New Deal? Wind Power ‘Dropped Off’ The Grid During Polar VortexAs Congress debates the Green New Deal, which calls for a massive increase in renewable energy use, new reports show wind energy “dropped off” as frigid Arctic air descended on the eastern U.S. earlier this year.“An earlier than expected drop in wind, primarily caused by cold weather cutoffs, increased risk of insufficiency for morning peak,” according to a report from the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which oversees electricity delivery across 15 states.The wind power shortfall triggered a “maximum generation event” on the morning of Jan. 30 when temperatures plummeted, MISO reported Wednesday of its handling of the historic cold that settled over the eastern U.S. in late January.Unplanned power outages were higher than past polar vortex events, MISO reported, much of it because wind turbines automatically shut off in the cold. Coal and natural gas plants ramped up production to meet the shortfall and keep the lights on.“This what happens when the government starts mandating and subsidizing inferior energy sources,” Dan Kish, a distinguished senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.Kish, a Green New Deal opponent, said the proposal would “double down with more ‘Rainbow Stew’ sources” that “don’t work when you need them the most.”Kish isn’t alone in his concern. Energy experts for years have been exploring the feasibility of integrating more solar and wind power onto the grid. The Green New Deal brought that debate to the forefront.While the Green New Deal doesn’t explicitly ban any fuel sources, it does call for achieving “net-zero” emissions within 10 years by “dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources.”The bill’s main champion, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said the Green New Deal was about “transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy,” at a press conference introducing the resolution in early February.Green New Deal supporters say wind and solar are necessary to fight global warming, but critics say increasingly relying on intermittent renewables poses a threat to grid reliability.The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a report Tuesday that detailed how “[w]ind generation dropped off … mainly caused by wind plants reaching their cold weather cutoff thresholds.”Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, based on MISO dataWind turbines are shut off when temperatures dip below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, as happened in the upper Midwest and Great Plains — an area often dubbed the “Saudi Arabia” of wind energy. On top of that, when it gets, say, minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit, there’s not much wind.EIA said that “wind accounted for an average of 5%, ranging from 5% to 15% on surrounding days” on Jan. 30, while “coal supplied about 41% of MISO’s load and natural gas supplied about 30%.”The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment, but the group did publish a blog post in February on the polar vortex.AWEA’s research director Michael Coggin said wind energy’s performance was “strong” during this year’s polar vortex. Coggin said high voltage power lines allowed wind power from the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic to send power westward.Read more at Daily CallerJanuary 21, 2019Why 'Green' Energy Is Futile, In One LessonAustralia’s poor left powerless by soaring prices and green energyIT’S 100 years ago next month that Lenin forced communism on to Russia, sending armed thugs to storm the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.Yet even though he, Stalin, Mao and Castro then put their people in chains and kept them poor, faith in Big Government is miraculously on the rise again in Australia.See, green is the new red. Global warming is the excuse that has brought back the commissars who love ordering people how to live, even down to the things they make and the prices they charge.All big parties share the blame. Even the Turnbull Government forces us with its renewable energy targets to use more electricity from the wind and solar plants it subsidises.True, this green power is expensive, unreliable and driving cheap coal-fired power stations out of business, leaving us dangerously short of electricity for summer.But the government now has an equally crazy $30 million scheme to fix that, too: it will bribe Australians with movie tickets and $25 vouchers to turn off their electricity when they most need it — like during a heatwave, when a million air conditioners are switched on.Movie tickets are a bribe only the poor would take.That’s a bribe only the poor will take. Would Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull really turn off the switches at his Point Piper mansion for two free tickets to Hoyts?And with power prices so high, the very poor would have little real choice. Conclusion: the poor will sweat so the rich may have air con.But it was actually Greens leader Richard Di Natale who last week took out the Lenin Prize for useful idiocy.Asked on the ABC about our soaring gas prices, Di Natale suggested a solution once found in a Soviet Five Year Plan: “The simple way of dealing with the problem … is government has got to step in and regulate prices.”Same deal with electricity prices, which Greens MP Adam Bandt has urged be “capped”.“Governments absolutely need to step in,” insisted Di Natale.“They can regulate prices. We’ve got a plan … We build battery storage technology. We get more solar and wind in the system …“It’s good for prices, it’s good for jobs and most of all, it’s good for the planet.”All lies, of course. Look at South Australia: the state with the most wind power has the world’s most expensive electricity and Australia’s worst unemployment.Adelaide’s Salamon family reading by candle and torch light during South Australia’s frequent blackouts.And it’s all for nothing, because our emissions are just too tiny.As Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has admitted, even if Australia ended all emissions from cars, power stations, factories and cows, the difference to the climate would be “virtually nothing”. But the difference to the economy would be devastating.To Commissar Di Natale, it all sounds simple: just force business to charge less for the product they risked a fortune to find, extract, market and transport. But which business would risk a dollar to find more gas if they were then forced to charge prices so low that they’d lose their shirts?Already, Labor and the Greens have frightened off investment in new coal-fired power stations or even in big upgrades to existing ones, which is why we now face summer blackouts.That’s dragged even the Turnbull Government into considering whether to itself finance a new coal-fired plant, just as Lenin would have done and as Nationals MPs now demand.But Labor last Saturday proposed its own Big Government fix. In a speech in South Australia, federal leader Bill Shorten actually praised the state government for having “climate-proofed” the electricity supply.Adelaide Hills pharmacist Kirrily Chambers forced to throw out medicine from the fridge after a blackout. Picture: Kelly Barnes/The AustralianNever mind that it’s left the state with power prices so high that businesses have been driven broke.Shorten on Saturday promised South Australia relief, but not by dropping his own lunatic promise to force all Australia by 2030 to take 50 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy.No, he simply promised more subsidies — a $1 billion Australian Manufacturing Future Fund to hand out cheap business loans no bank would risk.Shorten said this new fund for manufacturers would be like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which hands out cheap government loans for the kind of renewable energy schemes that have helped to destroy our electricity system.The circle is complete: Labor in effect promises to subsidise business to survive the electricity crisis caused by subsidising green power, while the Liberals subsidise the poor not to use it at all. Meanwhile, we all pay. And all for nothing.Only Big Government could cause such a dog-chases-tail circus. We didn’t learn from Lenin, did we?Andrew Bolt on energy crisis: Poor will be left powerless by soaring prices and green energy | Herald SunjamesmatkinwritingsNovember 2, 2017 at 7:09 amWhat a mess we have from the political distortion of climate science. The AGW theory is “thought experiment” dubbed “meritless conjectures” by major research relying on > 100 peer reviewed references. See http://www.scirp.org/journal/Pap...The alarmists have been duped by the hidden role of chance. See –https://www.academia.edu/3363839...https://climatism.wordpress.com/...RENEWABLES AND CLIMATE POLICY ARE ON A COLLISION COURSEDate: 09/12/18Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy EditorThose advocating climate change mitigation policy have hitherto wagered everything on the success of renewable energy technologies. The steadily accumulating data on energy and emissions over the period of intense policy commitment suggests that this gamble has not been successful. Pragmatic environmentalists will be asking whether sentimental attachment to wind and solar is standing in the way of an effective emissions reduction trajectory.For almost as long as there has been a climate policy, emissions reduction has been seen as dependent on the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Policies supporting this outcome are ubiquitous in the developed and developing world; markets have been coerced globally, with varying degrees of severity it is true, but with extraordinary force in the OECD states, and particularly in the European Union. The net result of several decades of such measures has been negligible. Consider, for example the global total primary energy mix since 1971, as recorded in the International Energy Agency datasets, the most recent discussion of which has just been published in the World Energy Outlook (2018):Figure 1: Global Total Primary Energy Supply: 1971–2015. Source: Redrawn by the author from International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2017 and 2018. IEA Notes: 1. World includes international aviation and international marine bunkers. 2. Peat and oil shale are aggregated with coal. 3. “Other” Includes geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat and other.It is perfectly true that the proportional increase in modern renewables, the “Other” category represented by the thin red line at the top of the chart is a significant multiple of the starting base, but even this increase is disappointing given the subsidies involved, and in any case it is almost completely swamped by the increase in overall energy consumption, and that of fossil fuels in particular. Renewables in total, modern renewables plus biofuels and waste and hydro, amounted to about 13% of Total Primary Energy in 1971, and in 2016 are almost unchanged at somewhat under 14%. Thirty years of deployment, almost half of that time under increasingly strong post-Kyoto policies, has seen the proportion of renewable energy in the world’s primary energy input creep up by about one percentage point.Furthermore, what is true at a global level is also true in every national jurisdiction of importance, with the exception that in the less economically vibrant parts of the developed world, including the EU and the UK, energy consumption is actually declining, largely due the transfer of much manufacturing to other parts of the world, principally China.It should therefore come as no surprise to anybody that emissions not only continue to rise, but have recently started to increase at the highest rate for several years, a point that is revealed in the latest release of the Global Carbon Budget, 2018, and can be conveniently illustrated in the chart derived from this paper’s data and published in the coverage of the Financial Times:Figure 2: Global Emissions 1960 to 2018. Source: Financial Times, 6 December 2018, drawn from Global Carbon Budget Report 2018.These dismal facts are producing the obtuse reaction that the current renewables dependent policies are insufficiently aggressive, or, to use the accepted jargon, ambitious, and that the world must try harder. The reaction of the BBC’s Matt McGrath may be typical. He asks: “Why are governments taking so long to take action?”.But this is a misplaced question. The plain reality is that the global market coercions, and related policy pressures favouring renewables are already intense and incessant, and have been so with growing intensity for over fifteen years. Many economies, large and small, have tried very hard indeed, but the global energy markets have barely moved. Why? Because the effort is wasted; the picked winners, the renewable technologies, remain stubbornly uneconomic, with the consequence that spontaneous, uncoerced and rapid adoption remains a dream.This is what policy failure looks like. At what point do those sincerely concerned to see prompt and sustainable emissions reductions begin to wonder whether the renewables industry is a liability and an obstacle to the aim of climate change mitigation?Instead of blaming lazy governments, or the irrational consumer, now rioting in the streets of Paris in protest at climate policy impositions on transport fuels, environmentalists and campaigning analysts might spend their time more fruitfully by reviewing the wisdom of the policies that they have pressed on decision-makers. In doing so they could reflect that climate change mitigation is in certain important respects no different from other insurance policies, and must therefore pass the same tests: Is the policy providing real cover and is the premium affordable and proportional to the risk?Since the rising trend in emissions leaves no doubt that the current policies have as yet provided no real insurance, discussion of affordability becomes in a sense academic, though we can note in passing that it is also true that the emissions abatement cost of renewables is so great that it exceeds even high end estimates of Social Cost of Carbon, meaning that the policies are more harmful than the climate change they set out to mitigate. – This is not only wasted effort, it is counterproductive to human welfare.It will take time for this evidence and reasoning to change minds. Many environmentalists have a sentimental attachment to renewable energy flows in spite of their evident thermodynamic inferiority as fuels. They see them as Goop energy, pure heavenly gifts, handed down, naturally, from a benevolent sun, as opposed to the dirty and artificial earthly products of the soil that are fossil fuels and nuclear. But such feelings must be set aside in the interest of practicality. Climate campaigners must now ask themselves which they prefer, renewables or the stable and long-term reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, for it is increasingly clear that they cannot have both. The renewables industry, the vested interests of Big Green, and the widely endorsed imperative for climate change mitigation cannot co-exist for much longer. One or the other, or perhaps both, has to give way.Renewables and Climate Policy Are On A Collision Course - The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)HEAT POVERTY RESEARCH BLAMES UK SUBSIDIES FOR 50% INCREASE IN FUEL.Elaine Morrall died in a freezing home – the state is tossing away people’s livesFrances Ryan‘Elaine Morrall’s body was found at her home in Runcorn wrapped up in a coat and scarf.’ Photograph: FacebookWhen Elaine Morrall’s body was found at her home in Runcorn this month, she was wrapped up in a coat and scarf. That Elaine was only 38 and has left four children behind are heartbreaking details to a case that has rightly been shared widely on social media. But one aspect is particularly haunting: Elaine’s home was cold because, unable to pay the bills, she only turned the heating on when her children came home from school.

Also please read:What can be done about mass immigration in Britain?The UK requires increased immigration in order to continue to function due to our ageing population. Our industries, welfare system, pensions and economy need more young workers imported from abroad.Immigrants pay much more in taxes than they take as benefits. The Economist found this to be true in 20071 and it is true today. 85% of the UK's migrants from the EU are in workOpen labour markets benefit entire economic regions. The opposite - the nationalist raising of labour barriers against foreigners - has the same effect as trade tariffs: to distort the market, reduce wage efficiency and harm the economy as a whole. Ironically, attempting to secure "local jobs for local residents" has the effect of shrinking the economy, therefore reducing the long-term number of overall jobs.3Our ageing population is putting massive strain on pensions and welfare4: this can only be helped by accepting working-age immigrants. In the last 35 years (up to 2007) the over-65s demographic group grew by 31%, the fastest of all age groupings5, whilst the under-16s shrunk from 26% to 19% of the total population5. "Each increase in life expectancy of one year adds about £12 billion to the aggregate pension liabilities of FTSE 100 companies"6. Pensions will continue to become increasingly costly, their benefits to be squeezed. Thankfully, most migrants are working-age (34 years old, on average in 20117) which helps keep the UK ratio of retirees-to-workers lower7. The occasional addition of new states to the EU bloc is met with a healthy influx of young workers, balancing the demographic scales and helping to keep welfare systems and pensions systems afloat.Cheap labourers work in industries that our population avoid such as construction and food processing8.The UK has twice as many job vacancies than jobseekers9 - over 700,000 vacancies (and growing) since 2014 summer10. The disparity between jobseekers and vacancies is largely a question of skill, location and motivation. A lack of employees slows the economy, but thankfully membership of the EU allows companies to very easily employ suitable staff from anywhere in the EU.The NHS:Nearly half the new doctors and nurses employed in the National Health Service have qualified abroad11 and we still have shortages of medical staff.Immigrants use fewer NHS services than Brits because they are younger12 and tend to go home before they age. Through taxes, they contribute (much) more to the NHS than they take. Obesity, smoking and drinking are much costlier to the NHS than immigration.Freedom Against Arbitrary Barriers: In the modern world, people are free to do as they please as long as they trespass against no laws. There is no reason to arbitrarily inhibit people's travel simply because locals do not like their culture.And two other points:The Island History of a Nation of Travellers: As a nation we are poor at learning languages, was founded by immigrants, and have an imperial history wherein we forced many to Britain as slaves13. We are inherently tied to migration. In 2010, 9% of Brits worked abroad14 and there are 1.3 million British expats in Europe15. So there is a horrible, ignorant and hypocritical bent to much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric used by some of our less reasonable compatriots.What do people think is the % of the UK that are EU immigrants? The average guess is 15 percent, but the real figure is 3.5%Source: Ipsos MORI poll (2016)16.Much of the UK is misled by sensationalist news articles on immigration17. Half of all Brits think that immigration is bad for the UK18 and even pro-European Brits think there are twice as many EU immigrants than there really are - which is 5% of the population16. The press rarely report positive news on UK - there are at least 30,000 British citizens claiming benefits in the EU, often receiving more generous payments than foreigners do in the UK19.2. Open Immigration and Free Labour Markets#bulgaria #hungary #ireland #poland #romania #slovakia #sweden #UKLabour-market barriers decrease the efficiency of business, leading to increased costs for all and market imbalances. This is for the same reason that trade tariffs disrupt markets in goods and services and make things more expensive. This is because as you limit the pool of possible workers, wages become inflated as employers find it harder to fill slots. To put it the opposite way around: free labour markets (allowing people to go and work wherever they want, like Brits working abroad) are good for the overall economy and aid overall stability. Two eminent trade economists, Kym Anderson of the University of Adelaide and Alan Winters of the University of Sussex, have calculated that if the proportion of foreign workers in rich countries increased to 3%, the world economy would improve by $675 billion a year by 2025, even after subtracting those who might use social-welfare benefits of their new countries20.Immigration of almost any kind boosts the economy. Immigrants contribute to the economy as workers and as consumers: paying for accommodation, goods and services, the same as all people. "A 2007 report by Pricewaterhouse Coopers concluded that a surge in migration has helped to lift Britain's growth rate above its long-term trend. ... [In] America, sustained economic growth partly reflects an ever-growing workforce"3.When Poland, Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU, some countries opened their borders immediately (whilst others imposed restrictions): The UK, Ireland and Sweden voluntarily embraced the new wave of migrants, and we demonstrably gained the greatest economic benefit as a result1. Even Migrationwatch, an anti-immigration lobby in the UK, concedes that immigrants have contributed "a few extra pence a week"3 to the average Briton. The real figure is somewhat higher and makes up a significant portion of the entire economy.Most migrants are in official employment and pay taxes. 85% of the UK's migrants from the EU are in work (2014)2. There are over 700,000 employment benefits claimants in the UK (2015), but despite outcry in the press, the vast majority are British. For example, only 10,730 come from Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia combined21. Compared to this, there are at least 30,000 British citizens claiming benefits in the EU, often receiving more generous payments than foreigners do in the UK21.Skills and education. Migrants tend to be working-age, meaning that the UK doesn't have to pay their education costs, but benefits from their existing skills and they are often better educated that the UK average - "while one-fifth of the home-grown population have degrees, one-third of migrants do"22.3. The State of UK Immigration as of the 2011 Census#germany #india #pakistan #poland #UKNearly 1 in 8 of the population of England and Wales was born abroad23 (note that many Brits are born abroad, such as children of military personal based in Germany and elsewhere).From 2001 to 2011, Poland, India and Pakistan were the highest countries of origin for UK immigrants23. Despite popular opinion that leaving the EU gives the UK more control over immigration, two of these countries are outside the EU so control has always sat squarely with UK Immigration Control: leaving the EU will make little difference, especially given the poor quality of the immigration control service that the UK has.Tolerance in a multicultural world: 12% of households in England and Wales contain members from more than one ethnic group.23Islam increased from 2.7% of the population to 4.8% since 2001. (See Religion in the United Kingdom: Diversity, Trends and Decline: 3. Census Results for 2011, and Comparison to 2001.)During the debate on the UK's membership of the EU, "remain" lobbyists pointed out that leaving the EU will not help us with immigration; other European countries that are not EU members and whom have the same level of development as the UK all have much higher immigration rates.Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland are all non-EU members within Europe who have higher immigration rates than the UK4. The Demographics Crises4.1. The Ageing Population of Britain#UKIn the last 35 years (up to 2007) the over-65s demographic group grew by 31%, the fastest of all age groupings5, whilst the under-16s shrunk from 26% to 19% of the total population5. It is easy to see that this results in a massive increase in the old-age population, combined with a shrinking working-age population.This type of demographic shift makes some sociologists and many economists edgy. The old-age dependency ratio is the number of old-age compared to working-age people. At present, it is approaching 1 in 4 and it has never been this high before, putting tremendous strain on pensions and welfare systems. It is difficult to adequately care for the old without enough workers. According to Eurostat:The UK's old-age dependency ratio in 2010 will be 24.7%. It will rise a few percent points per year, reaching 40.2% by 2050 (and still rising)4.It is rising throughout the European Union as a whole, from 25.9% in 2010 to 52.5% in 20504. This means that wages and prospects will increase in Europe, pulling away skilled workers from the UK.The solution is to increase the number of working-age immigrants.All developing countries are facing similar futures. It may be that the entire European continent and countries such as Japan will en masse enter into a new era of human history, with ageing (and then declining) populations, which will necessitate a whole new type of economy.For more on this and on world population, see: "The Overpopulation of the Earth" by Vexen Crabtree (2013).4.2. The Future of UK Pension Schemes Require Immigrant WorkersDue to the ageing populations of many Western countries4, the immigration of young adult workers will become essential if pensions schemes are going to last in to the future. My text The Overpopulation of the Earth (2013) discusses this issue:“In many Western countries and countries such as Japan, a post-industrial slow in the population growth has occurred. Populations are ageing. This means that over coming decades, the numbers of old people will continue to rise whilst the numbers of the young continue to decline. It is the first time in Human history that the age distribution of nations has threatened to become long-term top-heavy. What this means is a change in the entire way that society is structured. The young will have an excess of elders, rather than the old having an excess of youth. [...] Many companies and governments are feeling the increasing pressure of having larger numbers of pensioners. More and more people are drawing pensions, and fewer and fewer will be paying into pension schemes. Economists have long predicted that in modern countries, all pension schemes will collapse. It is not possible for one worker to pay for the pensions of three, or hardly even two, retired elders. Governments such as Britain's have implemented a gradual increase of the age of retirement to try and curb the collapse of pension schemes and to try to dam the exodus of workers from employment to retirement.”"The Overpopulation of the Earth" by Vexen Crabtree (2013)“Firms big and small are threatened by a fundamental demographic shift that most have yet to adjust to. Britain's pensioners are proving a hardier bunch than expected. On August 1st the actuaries' trade body adopted a new set of mortality tables drawing on data collected between 1999 and 2002. It forecasts yet another increase in life expectancy. In 1999 actuaries assumed that a British man retiring at 60 would on average live to the ripe old age of 84. They then raised their estimate in 2002 to 87. Now they figure he will live about six months longer. What is good news for ageing folk is bad news for those who support them. Each increase in life expectancy of one year adds about £12 billion to the aggregate pension liabilities of FTSE 100 companies, says Peter Thompkins of Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, an accounting firm. [...]Firms as a group are underestimating life expectancy. [...] Updating that estimate could well add more than £25 billion to the FTSE 100 deficit [...]. So it is not surprising that many companies are trying to reduce the risks of providing pensions by closing their final-salary schemes to new members (which three-quarters of FTSE 100 firms have already done) and, increasingly, to existing members.”The Economist24 (2006)64.3. Some Industries Rely on Immigrant Workforces, More Will in the Future#poland #UKThe UK depends, now, on immigrants to supply a workforce in multiple industries. "Over the past five years, nearly half the new doctors and nurses employed by Britain's National Health Service qualified abroad"11. This trend will continue and without increasing amounts of immigrants entire industries in the UK would collapse permanently. For now, new entrants into the European Union such as Poland offer healthy workforces to 'old' Europe. Europe's open borders allow the post-explosion countries to easily import workers. But, as the whole of Europe gradually enters the post-population-explosion era, more and more workers will have to come from Asia, South America and Africa. As yet, the increases are quite small and most immigrants come from within Europe, but in the future, Europe as a whole will be a hungry gobbler of young adults seeking work, from all over the developing world.The UK was the first "big European country ... to welcome workers from the EU's eight new members"8, and so far we have benefited greatly from them. The Highlands that surround Inverness in Scotland have witnessed renewed hope for local economies as a result of the badly needed influx of workers, as decade after decade large numbers of working-age young Scots have left the highlands, leaving a demographic hole in the population.“[The Poles] have flocked to the Highlands since May 2004 to do the low-paid jobs Scots have turned their noses up at for years, in tourism, construction and food processing. At Strathaird Salmon alone, more than one-third of the 400-strong workforce is Polish. [...] In a sparsely populated region that has been haemorrhaging young Scots since the 19th century, the eastern Europeans are welcome.”The Economist24 (2006)85. The Negative Attitude of Many British Towards Immigration5.1. Xenophobia and the Misinformed Masses#afghanistan #denmark #politics #racism #russia #single_issue_parties #UK #xenophobiaThe UK is a notable exception to the generally multicultural style of Europe. Despite being a very mixed country (London is the most diverse city on Earth) the central popularist culture of the UK is very intolerant of foreign-looking things. Different styles of dress, customs, religions and accents are all cruelly stereotyped especially by some 'trashy' and very popular news outlets. Over the last few decades such overt racism has mostly made itself absent, and things are getting better. Focal points of expressions of xenophobia are pubs and football matches, the two greatest shrines of trash culture.“Opinion polls consistently show that Britons are concerned about immigration, which they think is running out of control. [...] Television images of Afghans pouring into the Channel Tunnel particularly offended the island mentality. For the last three years, fewer would-be refugees have made it to Britain, thanks to better border security [...]. The number of asylum-seekers is now the lowest it has been for more than a decade. Oddly, though, public disquiet is as strong as ever.”The Economist (2006)25An Ipsos Mori poll in the summer of 2013 found that across multiple areas of popular opinion, including such hot topics as crime, benefit fraud and immigration, public opinion was in sync with the sensationalist headlines of cheap newspapers, rather than in sync with reality. People think that recent immigrants make up an astounding one third of the population (in reality, it is 13%). Non-whites are thought to make up 30% of the population. The reality is that only 11% of the British population is Asian or black. A few popularist media outlets - and pseudo-documentaries - have concentrated on the "waves" of immigrants who come to the UK in order to claim benefits, even though the vast majority come here to work, and go home when they're done (just as us Brits do when we work abroad). "The public think that £24 of every £100 of benefits is fraudulently claimed. Official estimates are that just 70 pence in every £100 is fraudulent". Across the board, people blame 'foreigners' for financial and social woes in a way that is often not actually racist, but is certainly very uninformed - and misinformed. They think that foreign aid is one of the top 3 three things the government spends money on - after a long series of misleading articles by the Daily Mail newspaper - and several anti-foreigner parties have campaigned with the policy that this has to end. But in reality, foreign aid makes up 1.1% of the budget, and lots of that goes to countries where we have a national interest in fostering stability anyway. These things really ought to be no issue at all, but numbers get inflated along with people's concerns and biases.Countries such as Denmark, Finland and Sweden all accept a higher rate of asylum seekers than the UK and yet these countries do not have the problems that many in the UK complain about. Denmark's rate of 74% makes our 43% look positively timid. Although papers such as the Daily Mail make it seem otherwise, the influx of Asylum Seekers is very low compared with skilled and employed immigrants. Some single-issue parties make themselves popular purely on an anti-immigration and anti-foreigner stance.“The National Front (NF), the British National Party (BNP), and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) are three well-known anti-immigration and anti-foreigner parties in the UK. They nestle alongside like-minded groups such as the English Defence League (EDL) and horrible thugs such as Combat 18. Leadership and membership swap between all these organisations relatively freely with most of them being offshoots of one-another. Some are merely drinking clubs for racists and who get an inordinate amount of attention from the media, whilst others (such as UKIP) have had genuine impact on the populace of the UK. They all have anti-EU policies. Their policies are dangerously shallow and single-minded. They appeal to nationalists of the most hateful and simple kind. On account of the long-term damage such parties do to the UK and to other European countries, Russia has been quietly and effectively supporting right-wing parties26,27 in order to further its own interest in a fractured Europe28.The average age that supporters of these parties left school is significantly lower than for other parties: 55% and 62% of UKIP and BNP supporters (respectively) left school at or before the age of 16; nearly double the average rate of the 4 main parties (at 32%). Possibly linked is the employment status of UKIP and BNP supporters which show an outstandingly high number of manual workers and unemployed, and the lowest proportion of professional and managerial workers.29”"Single Issue Parties are Dangerous: Against Nationalist and Ethnic Parties: 3.1. Anti-Immigration and Anti-Foreigner Parties Have a Lot in Common" by Vexen Crabtree (2006)The 2016 June referendum on the UK's membership of the EU has highlighted the popular concern about the EU's free-labour-market policy.Irresponsible popular newspapers such as The Daily Mail and The Sun have led long campaigns, resulting in widespread misconceptions and hostility to Europe, even though neither "troubles to keep a staff correspondent in Brussels" to see what is going on there. As a result of British prickliness "many EU countries are fed up with Britain and especially, with the Tories". In a democratic institution involving so many countries the only way to get what you want is to compromise, so senior Conservative leaders have expressed hope for a more harmonious relationship, including Mr Cameron and William Hague.30“Why is the Tory party so Eurosceptic? One answer is that it reflects public opinion. So the real question should be why so many of the British (and more specifically, the English) are so hostile to the European project. Eurobarometer polls consistently put Britain at or near the bottom of the heap in answers to such questions as whether EU membership is a good thing or how much trust people have in the EU institutions. The explanation for such views is to be found partly in the country's geography and history, partly in its experience as a member and partly in ignorance and prejudice. [...] Making things worse is a profound ignorance of what the EU does and how it works.”The Economist (2010)31One effect, because of the sensationalism of the press, is a massive exaggeration in the popular mind of how many EU immigrants there are in the UK. Even those who accept and embrace the EU (i.e. 'Remain' voters in the 2016 referendum) think there are twice as many EU immigrants as there really are:What do people think is the % of the UK that are EU immigrants? The average guess is 15 percent, but the real figure is 3.5%Source: Ipsos MORI poll (2016)16Europhobia is a compound effect of various elements of trash culture combined: xenophobia, adult ignorance, distrust of intellectuals and reliance on poor sources of news on politics.Text in this section taken from these pages:UK Trash Culture: 2.9. XenophobiaandSingle Issue Parties are Dangerous: Against Nationalist and Ethnic Parties.5.2. Some Newspapers' Bias on ImmigrationThe facts of economics and demographics take a hefty battering from the repeated sensationalist xenophobia of some of the UK's most popular newspapers.A Sunday Times internal investigative group called Insight was once given a directive to investigate immigration and asylum. "They found that it was true, as right-wingers had alleged, that the asylum process was in chaos; but they also found impressive evidence that immigration was good for the country" reports Nick Davies: "They were allowed to write only the first part of the story"17. This type of selection bias operates in full swing on hot topics such as immigration and skews the public's understanding of immigration issues.Take the Daily Mail's regurgitation of a report from The Economist24 about an increase in foreign workers in London. The Daily Mail randomly inserted negative (and untrue) commentary about asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, and distorted the facts to the point of complete falsehood.“The Economist report was almost entirely good news: the influx had given London the highest growth rate in the century; 67% of these foreign workers were from high-income countries; many of them were better educated than most Londoners; they were particularly diligent workers; and, by pushing up the price of houses, they had allowed a mass of Londoners to fulfill their dream of selling up and moving to the countryside which, in turn, had boosted the economy of rural towns. But in the hands of the Mail, this became bad news about the usual enemy.The Mail opened its story with two sentences which were 100% fiction: 'London has become the immigration capital of the world, according to a report. More foreigners are now setting in London than even New York or Los Angeles.' Nothing like that appeared in the Economist report. The story went on to insert a killer paragraph, which was also pure Daily Mail, based on nothing at all from The Economist: 'Hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants, as well as failed asylum seekers, have set up home in the capital in the past ten years.' [... The Mail continued, ] claiming that these foreigners were 'forcing many Londoners to flee the capital as property prices soar'.”"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)32,17Most migrant workers do their job and go home, paying taxes while here, and not even bothering to stay for pensions or the welfare of old age. The Daily Mail strikes fear into the populace with its inflated stories, misleading numbers and bias. People read the paper and get angry about immigration in general, furthering the type of trash culture attitude that makes people vote for anti-immigration single-issue parties, and buy the Daily Mail in the first place.“Nothing excuses this kind of journalism”Nick Davies (2008)17Another example from the Daily Mail concerned a court case. I return again to Nick Davies' critical analysis: "There was a court hearing which caught the Mail's eye. It could have been reported like this: 'A High Court judge yesterday moved to protect children who have fled from rape, murder and massacre in war zones. In a ruling which was welcomed by refugee groups and specialist lawyers, Mr Justice Burnton attacked local authorities have denied housing to refugee children simply because they could not prove they were under 18.' The Mail reported it like this: 'The beleaguered immigration system was dealt another blow yesterday when a High Court judge made it harder for officials to catch fraudulent young asylum seekers.'" (Davies (2008)17)A third example highlights that this type of news reporting infuses normal issues not otherwise directly related to immigration. "The Mail ran an investigation into the easy availability of false identity papers. They could have linked this to all kinds of people, who might want to cheat the system - professional fraudsters, benefit fiddlers, escaped prisoners, wanted criminals, runaway fathers, runaway sex offenders, undischarged bankrupts, defrocked priests, disqualified drivers and discredited journalists - but they focused the entire front-page story and inside spread on 'bogus asylum seekers and fanatics'."17.Fourthly, housing. This is an issue in a country as crowded as the UK. The law requires a higher standard of housing for old people, reports Nick Davies. However asylum seekers could still be housed in substandard accommodation. The Daily Mail reported the following shocker: 'WHAT KIND OF COUNTRY DO WE LIVE IN WHEN FRAIL OLD LADIES ARE TURNED OUT OF THEIR HOME TO MAKE WAY FOR FIT YOUNG ASYLUM SEEKERS' and 'WIDOWS ORDERED OUT, THEN ASYLUM SEEKERS MOVE IN'.17Some very popular papers report on immigration in entirely skewed and negative terms. The formula is that everything bad can be tied to immigration and foreigners; that both those groups are equated with fraudulent asylum seekers and illegal immigration. It is impossible to reach a sensible view of the truth by relying on the hot-blooded, xenophobic and misleading diatribes of some popular newspapers such as The Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and The Sun. How can the populace ever vote in elections wisely, when their understanding of migration is tainted with this type of horrible bias? The emotional response (even if followed up with more careful news reports seen elsewhere) is hard to replace with balanced tolerance. There is nothing to stop the papers endlessly peddling this type of trash: it sells because it panders to fear and ignorance, and in being sold, the papers increase those two wretched traits.For my extended and wider criticism of the negative role the mass media plays in the modern world, read:"The Worst of the Modern Mass Media" by Vexen Crabtree (2009)6. The Hypocrisy of British Islanders Who Complain About Immigration Whilst 9% of Brits Work Abroad#UKAn Island Nation of Ex-Slave-Owners: It is a truism that without immigration, island nations such as the UK simply wouldn't exist. Not only does denying the value of legal immigration deny our own history as an island, but, long after we were established as a people, we engaged ourselves fully in the slave trade, forcibly bringing thousands of foreigners into our midst13, many of whom were forced into poverty-stricken areas with poor employment where there were few prospects to emancipate themselves and make their ways home. We are not morally justified in now chastising the descendants of those that we forced to come here, any more than we be angry with our own ancestors for coming here to this island, as immigrants themselves. If an islander wants to remove immigrants, (s)he should probably start with removing hirself!Plenty of Brits Live and Work Abroad. The UK is an international country, with ties all over the world. In 2010, 9% of Brits worked abroad14 and there are 1.3 million British expats in Europe15. As we can go work in other countries, others can come work in ours. Economics isn't a zero-sum game, and wealth-building in the modern world requires an international labour force that comes and goes in two directions.If you argue that there should be fewer foreigners, then, you are also making that argument that we shouldn't be free to live and work abroad ourselves. This logical conclusion is nowhere argued for by anti-foreigner plebs, underlining the fact that their opinions are a result of emotional, and not moral, factual or logical considerations.7. Negative Effects of Immigration“It is in schools, public housing and doctors' surgeries that natives come face to face with migrants [and where] hostility to migrants seems strongest. Local councils in Britain complain that clinics and schools are overloaded and central government is slow to dish out help, and local police in areas with many immigrants blame foreigners for a rise in crime. [...] Crowding, although likely to cause resentment, results from the unexpected arrival of those migrants, with bureaucracies taking time to allocate resources to the right places. In itself, it does not prove that migrants are a drag on public services as a whole. Indeed, migrants often make a large contribution to the public purse.”Adam Roberts (2008)3The main problem is that the impact of migration is uneven. It is only natural that people with common interests choose to associate with one another and even to move to areas where they know their kinsfolk already live. But this creates infamous areas of cities which are much hated by natives, and slows down integration into wider society. Migrants often find that certain aspects of their lives become important to them, such as their religion. Adam Roberts warns us that those that "develop for the first time, perhaps as second-generation immigrants - a strong religious sense that cuts across any national loyalty may be the hardest of all to assimilate in broadly secular Western societies". These two factors have made the integration of Muslims a particular problem. As of yet, there are no particularly wise or liberal ways that seem likely to solve these types of problems.Links:"Islam and the West: Pluralism, Immigration and Danger" by Vexen Crabtree (2011) (has sections on Muslim immigration)8. Curbing Immigration and Nation-Building: New Laws on Citizenship, 2008-2010Several new measures have been introduced as the UK government is now trying to bring people together under agreement to a common set of British values. "The shift in opinion away from open borders has been matched by a move away from Britain's traditionally hands-off approach to identity. [... Even advocates of multiculturalism] concede the need for newcomers to learn to speak English and, to a degree, for values and institutions to bind together a diverse population. Much of this is happening: language tests, exams on life in Britain, citizenship ceremonies and a nascent idea of civic service for young people may, slowly, build a richer idea of citizenship. "Britain is engaged in a mild form of nation-building," says Mr Goodhart"14.English-speaking: As of 2010 Nov 29, the UK Border Agency now requires that immigrants demonstrate that they can speak English, even if they are a spouse of a British citizen33.A new points system: "Britain's new points system, which sets educational and other restrictions on non-EU immigrants, may have started to make a dent in the numbers [... and ] more importantly, the slower economy and weaker pound of recent years have cut inflows and encouraged some migrants in Britain to move on. The lion's share of immigration is from the EU and cannot be restricted"14.Age limit of 21: In 2008 Dec, the lower age limit at which you can import a spouse, and the lower age limit for an imported spouse, has been raised from 18 to 21. This was a move to stop forced marriages. "A moving force behind the new regulation is the Keighley MP Ann Cryer. She said: "Increasing the age at which people can invite or be invited to join a spouse will provide an opportunity for individuals to develop maturity and life skills which may allow them to resist the pressure of being forced into marriage. It will also provide an opportunity for young people to complete education and training