SURRENDER! The Jig Is Up, the New Green Deal Is Going Nowhere, and Reliable Energy Is the Future

The United Kingdom has just issued a blockbuster news release that speaks huge volumes regarding the impending collapse of the Green New Deal. That’s not what the release says of course, but that’s the message. Here it is:

The UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and US Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk have today (Monday 18 November) signed a new agreement while in Baku for climate talks that will help pool together billions of pounds worth of nuclear research and development – including the world’s leading academic institutions and nuclear innovators.

New technologies such as advanced modular reactors can help decarbonise heavy industry such as aviation fuel, hydrogen or advanced steel production, by providing low-carbon heat and power. They are also smaller and can be made in factories, making them quicker and cheaper to build.

This will support the commitment made last year at COP28 to triple nuclear energy capacity globally by 2050, with 31 countries signed up including the US and UK.

The UK is reversing a legacy of no nuclear being delivered and moving forward with its advanced nuclear reactor programme and Great British Nuclear’s small modular reactor competition, as well as continuing development of the Sizewell C project. New nuclear will help to secure thousands of good, skilled jobs and support energy independence beyond 2030.

This is a tacit admission of the following:

• The energy needs of our modern world are not going to be met with backward low-energy intensity technology depending on sunshine and breezes.

• The Green New Deal is achieving little or nothing and will never deliver anything of real value except as a supplementary source of energy to reliable baseload sources.

• The developing world doesn’t want the West’s dime store version of energy but, rather, the real thing.

• The citizenry is not buying the shallow promises of the Green New Deal in the face of the rising energy prices and blackouts that have resulted from it.

• The public is not interested in deindustrialization, being forced into EVs, covering their landscapes with solar panels, or filling their seas with wind turbines.

• Things have changed with the re-election of Donald Trump who is giving the biggest Heisman ever to the whole global climate con.

Nuclear, of course, is the only place the green corporatists and ideologues can go in this situation and still keep the net zero fantasy going long enough to grab the money and power they have always sought from it. This maneuver is simply a move to add nuclear to the green mix, which will bring along a whole new bunch of grifters along similar to those who played Ohio politicians so effectively a couple of years ago. The hands are already out for green subsidies for nuclear.

This is not to say nuclear shouldn’t happen or even that this UK/US policy change isn’t warranted. It most certainly is, and nuclear must be a part of our energy future. But, nuclear energy is currently costly, and the regulatory environment is anything but friendly. This can and, I hope, will change but it isn’t going to happen quickly. Moreover, even then, the technology is not going to be appropriate in many situations due to inherent costs and other issues.

What this means, in turn, is that the return to nuclear is going to also lead to a return to fossil fuels. They are, of course, still doing roughly four-fifths of the job, but they became anathema in the minds of politically correct leaders following the siren call of the Green New Dealers. That is, until reality struck, in the form of the unwinding of the German Energiewende, deindustrialization and all that. The move to suddenly endorse nuclear is a step toward accepting the fact the Green New Deal just isn’t cutting it.

The next step in this grief process is going to be an acknowledgment nuclear alone isn’t going to cut it either. We need those coal plants, we must have more natural gas power plants and, we need more pipelines, and we are going nowhere without them. They are the most economical and readily available source of the energy we desperately need right now and they are going to happen because they must.

So, let’s celebrate this concession by the Green New Deal politicos. We are on the road back to energy sanity!

Hat Tip: Jo Nova

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