There is no market for power that cannot be delivered on demand. Which is why, in the absence of subsidies, there wouldn’t be a solar panel or wind turbine in sight. Sure, there are remote locations where a solar panel hooked up to a system of batteries and diesel generators make perfect economic sense.

Here though, we’re talking about the large-scale solar plants which are increasingly carpeting the countryside, from horizon to horizon.

The value of a power generator as a business asset ordinarily depends upon the value of the power it generates. With wind and solar, however, it’s all about the subsidies they generate.

Tom Shepstone takes a look at the sale of a large-scale solar plant in New Jersey, which reveals what an enormous scam the solar power generation business really is.

Solar Farm Sale Reveals Green Energy Sorcery
Natural Gas Now
Tom Shepstone
16 September 2021

A…

By Dean Cheng ~

For the last several weeks, tensions have roiled the Taiwan Straits. China has sent ever larger numbers of combat aircraft across the center line of the straits and into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, compelling their Taiwanese counterparts to respond.

The intricate ballet of dispatching multiple types of aircraft from different airbases, coordinating their flight profiles, fuel states, and altitudes, isn’t some ad hoc activity. These are extensively planned operations.

Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a business forum with Italian and Chinese businessmen at Quirinale Palace on March 22, 2019, in Rome. (Photo: Alessandra Benedetti – Corbis/Getty Images)

One goal of these provocations is to intimidate the people of Taiwan and their government. Like Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe at the United Nations, Chinese PresidentXi Jinping is warning Taiwan, “We can bury you!”

ButXi has another motive. The Chinese Communist Party will…

ByDuggan Flanakin ~

Remember that historic battle over teaching sex education in the public schools? One side demanded that any teaching on sex other than “Just say No!” was outside the lines, while the other side argued that too many teens were saying “Yes” anyway.

Today’s green police believe they have the moral authority to dictate public policy on human uses of energy – that when “EDF button” speaks, people had better listen.

Just last month Dan Welsby and some fellow graduates of the University College – London declared in a tome in the renowned journal Nature that, “most of the world’s remaining fossil fuels” are “unextractable in a 1.5^o C world” and “must remain in the ground if we want even half a chance at meeting our climate goals.”

Politicians and pundits alike praised the report for its bluntness, but does anyone else really care about holding…

Decommissioning wind turbines at the end of their economic lifespan (which is around 10 to 15 years, not the 25 years touted by the wind industry) is one of those phenomenally expensive exercises that the wind power outfit itself will never willingly pay for.

Already past their use-by date, thousands of these things around the world have just been left as rusting monuments to ‘green’ energy stupidity.

The standard corporate structures used by wind power outfits involve a parent company, usually structured as a holding company – NextTerror Ltd, say – with a subsidiary that takes on the name of the wind farm – Mount Misery Pty Ltd. The subsidiary is lumbered with all the current debts and other liabilities, which are loaded up in such a way as to exceed its assets (as long as the wind farm is operating, the parent sees that sufficient cash flushes through the…

ByDuggan Flanakin ~

Politics makes strange bedfellows and even stranger divorces. Take the Chinese boycott of Australian coal, which began about a year ago. China is upset over Australia’s assertions that China was at fault for the COVID-19 pandemic and egregious human rights violations. [China in response accused the U.S., Australia, and NATO of human rights violations in Afghanistan.]

A year later, Australia is getting record high prices for its coal, while China is suffering through shortages of its primary fuel for electric power generation. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the market price for Australian metallurgical coal has risen from about $US100 per metric ton to $US220 per ton, while Chinese steel mills, barred from buying Australian coal, are paying up to $US440 per ton for lower grade metallurgical coal from other nations.

Business columnist Stephen Bartholomeusz explains that Australian coal producers found new buyers in Japan…

By Tim Graham ~

In the last few years, Facebook has become Public Enemy #1 in the media’s imagination, and Mark Zuckerberg is suddenly the creepy James Bond villain. Celebrated PBS filmmaker Ken Burns even ranted on a podcast that Zuckerberg was an “enemy of the state” who should be in jail.

After Facebook went down for six hours on October 4, CBS late-night “comedian” Stephen Colbert joked “Facebook did not say what might be causing the outage. Now, I’m no computer expert, but my theory is: A just God?”

It does not matter one iota that Facebook employees donated 90 percent of their political money to the Democrats in the last cycle. Or that Zuckerberg donated $400 million to a “civic integrity” group that funded election monitors and health measures at the polls in 2020. It doesn’t matter how many Facebook posts they censored to please the Left before…

By Paul Driessen ~

Book reviews usually tell people, buy this new hardback. This article advises, don’t bother reading Silent Earth, much less purchasing a copy; it’s mostly a junk-science, anti-technology screed.

Dave Goulson’s book expands on Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s polemic against pesticides that helped rid Europe and the USA of deadly malaria, and now protect crops that require so much land, water, work, fertilizer and energy to grow and harvest that we dare not sacrifice them to hordes of hungry insects.

Carson falsely blamed DDT for her cancer – and launched the practice of using conjecture, poetic prose, hyperbole and even fraud, instead of evidence-based science, to advance environmentalist agendas. The Environmental Defense Fund used her book to drive its campaign to ban DDT and give environmentalists “a level of authority they never had before.”

The EPA ban led to the deaths of millions of…

By Jarrett Stepman ~

Is Australia turning authoritarian?

As COVID-19 cases in Australia increased over the past few months due to the delta variant, we’ve seen images of mass protests alongside police and military crackdowns.

The Australian military has been unleashed in Sydney to enforce draconian lockdowns and extreme restrictions on travel. Officials often have unevenly and arbitrarily enforced these restrictions.

More Australians embrace a view of collective security in which rights are simply grants of privilege by state authorities. Pictured: Police tackle a protester Sept. 25 at St. Kilda in Melbourne, Australia, during a rally protesting COVID-19 lockdowns. (Photo: William West/AFP/Getty Images)

John Fund at National Review laid out how absurd things have become Down Under.

“In Victoria, Premier Dan Andrews has promised to ‘lock out’ the unvaccinated from the economy, while New South Wales has made the shot mandatory for public-sector workers,” Fund wrote. “But politicians are…

By Anthony B Kim ~

In his recent commentary titled “Reimagining A More Resilient UN System With Taiwan In It,” Taiwan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jaushieh Joseph Wu presented a case for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the global body.

Wu said, “Taiwan’s effective response to the pandemic, its rapid capacity expansion to meet global supply chain demand, and its substantive assistance toward partner countries around the world all stand as compelling reasons for Taiwan to play a constructive role in the [United Nations] system.”

Taiwan and the U.S. have become strong partners that share powerful commitments to the values of democracy, the rule of law, and free markets. Pictured: Taipei 101 is the 11th-tallest building in the world and the tallest in Taiwan. (Photo: kecl/Getty Images)

Indeed, from a broader foreign policy perspective, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shows why the United States should be in the business of…