Why Do NATO States Commit Energy Hara Kiri ? | New Eastern Outlook
Why Do NATO States Commit Energy Hara Kiri ?
P 12.01.2022 U F. William Engdahl
There is a great paradox in the increasingly aggressive US and NATO military stance towards Russia, and China, when measured against the clearly suicidal national Green Agenda economic policies of the USA as well as the EU NATO states . An astonishing transformation of the economies of the world’s most advanced industrial economies is underway and gaining momentum. The heart of the transformation is energy, and the absurd demand for “zero carbon” energy by 2050 or before. To eliminate carbon from the energy industry is not at this time, or perhaps ever, possible. But the push for it will mean tearing apart the world’s most productive economies. Without a viable industrial energy base, NATO countries become a military joke. We cannot speak of “renewable” energy for solar, wind and battery storage. We must speak of Unreliable Energy. It is one of the most colossal scientific delusions in history.
On December 31 the new German coalition government shut down three of the remaining six nuclear power plants permanently. They did so at a point where natural gas in reserves were extremely low entering hard winter, and when any severe cold front could lead to power blackouts. Because of the German refusal to allow import of a second Russian gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, Germany is facing a 500% increase in the spot price of electricity compared with January 2021.
EU Energy Crisis Preplanned
In 2011 when Chancellor Merkel declared an early end to nuclear power, her infamous Energiewende, to phase out nuclear and go to renewable sources, 17 nuclear plants reliably supplied 25% of all electric power to the country. Now the remaining 3 plants must close by end 2022. At the same time the Green Energy agenda of the government since 2016 has closed 15.8 GigaWatts of coal generation as of January 2022. To make up for the fact that solar and wind, despite glowing propaganda, do not fill the gap, Germany’s electric grid must import significant electricity from EU neighbors France and Czech Republic, ironically much of it from their nuclear plants. Germany today has the highest electricity cost of any industrial nation as a result of the Energiewende.
There is now a problem with the supply of nuclear electricity from France. In December EDF the French state nuclear agency announced a total of four reactors would shut for inspection and repairs following discovery of corrosion damage. President Macron facing April elections is trying to play the nuclear champ in the EU opposing Germany’s strong anti-nuclear position. But the nuclear bridge is vulnerable and France is unlikely to make any major new investment in nuclear, despite recent claims, with plans to shut down twelve reactors in the next few years, along with coal, leaving both France and Germany vulnerable to future energy shortages. Macron’s France 2030 program calls for investing a pitiful $1.2 billion in small plant nuclear technology.
But the nuclear issue is not the only fly in the EU energy soup. Every aspect of the current EU energy plan is designed to wreck a modern industrial economy, and the architects who generously fund green think tanks like the Potsdam Institute in Germany know it. To bring wind and solar, the only two serious options being implemented, to replace coal, gas and nuclear, is simply said, not possible.
Wind Mills and Madness of Crowds
For Germany, a country with less than optimal sunshine, wind is the leading alternative. One problem with wind as the winter of 2021 dramatically showed, is that it does not always blow, and unpredictably so. That means blackouts or reliable backup, which means coal or natural gas as nuclear is being forced out. Wind mills are misleadingly rated in terms of gross theoretical capacity when states like Germany want to boast of renewable progress.
In reality what counts is actual electricity produced over time or what is called capacity factor or load factor. For solar, capacity factor is typically only about 25%. The sun in northern Europe or North America doesn’t shine 24 hours a day. Nor are skies always cloudless. Similarly wind doesn’t always blow and is hardly reliable. Germany boasts of 45% gross renewable energy but that hides the reality. Frauenhofer Institute in a 2021 study estimated Germany must install at least six to eight times present solar to reach 2045 100% carbon free goals, something the government refuses to estimate costs for, but private estimates are in the trillions. The report says from the present gross 54 GW solar capacity as much as 544 GW by 2045 is needed. That would mean a land space of 3,568,000 acres or 1.4 million hectares, more than 16,000 square kilometers of solid solar panels across the country. Add major wind stations to that. It is a suicide recipe.
The fraud of wind and solar as a sensible carbon free option is beginning to be realized. This January 5, Alberta Canada where the government is furiously building wind and solar sites, a severe cold day with temperatures near 45 F minus, Alberta’s 13 grid-connected solar facilities, rated at 736 megawatts, were contributing 58 megawatts to the grid. The 26 wind farms, with a combined rated capacity of 2,269 megawatts, was feeding the grid 18 megawatts. The total from renewables was a piddly 76 megawatts out of a theoretical 3,005 megawatts of supposedly green, renewable energy. Texas during the severe snow of February 2021 had similar problems with solar and wind as did Germany. Also when it snows solar farms are worthless.
As well to reach zero carbon from renewable sources huge acreages of land must be paved with solar reflectors or dedicated to wind farms. By one estimate, the amount of land needed to accommodate the 46,480 solar PV plants envisioned for the US is 650,720 square miles, almost 20% of the US lower 48 territories. This is the areas of Texas, California, Arizona and Nevada combined. Alone in the US state of Virginia a new green law, the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) has created an enormous rise in solar project applications to date for 780 square miles of solar slabs so far. As David Wojick points out, that is about 500,000 acres of countryside, farmland or forests destroyed and paved over with some 500 separate projects blanketing much of rural Virginia that will need a staggering 160 million solar panels, mostly from China and all destined to become hundreds of tons of toxic waste.
Millions of Jobs?
The Biden administration and Renewables czar John Kerry have falsely claimed their Green Agenda or Build Back Better will mean millions of new jobs. They omit to say the jobs will be in China which produces far the most solar panels, a near monopoly after they destroyed the USA and EU competition a decade ago with cheap subsidized panels Made in China. Similarly most of wind power is made in China by Chinese companies. Meanwhile China uses record volumes of coal and postpones its pledge for zero carbon a full decade after the EU and USA to 2060. They are not willing to jeopardize their industrial dominance to a climate theory based on fake data and lies that CO2 is about to destroy the planet. The German trade union federation DGB recently estimated that since 2011 that country had lost some 150,000 jobs in the renewable sector alone, mainly as China-made solar panels destroyed leading German solar companies. And Germany is the most green-crazy EU country. Because by definition the less energy-dense renewables of wind or solar drive basic electricity costs far higher, they kill more jobs in the overall economy than they ever add.
NATO Industrial Collapse
Because solar and wind are in reality far more costly than conventional hydrocarbon or nuclear electricity, they drive up overall cost of electric power to industry forcing many companies to close or move elsewhere. Only official statistical fraud hides this. Europe and North America will need huge volumes of steel and concrete to build the expected millions of solar panels or wind parks. That needs huge amounts of conventional coal or nuclear energy. How many E-car electric charging stations will be needed to home-charge 47 million German E-cars? How much more electric demand?
A significant Green Energy think tank in the US, RethinkX ,issued a propaganda study for renewables in 2021 titled Rethinking Energy 2020-2030: 100% Solar, Wind, and Batteries is Just the Beginning . Their answer to the problems of low capacity for wind and solar is to build 500% or even 1000% more than envisioned to make up for the low 25% capacity factor. They make the absurd claim, with no concrete proof that, “Our analysis shows that 100% clean electricity from the combination of solar, wind, and batteries (SWB) is both physically possible and economically affordable across the entire continental United States as well as the overwhelming majority of other populated regions of the world by 2030… this superabundance of clean energy output – which we call super power – will be available at near-zero marginal cost throughout much of the year .” That statement is presented without an iota of data or concrete scientific feasibility analysis, merely dogmatic assertion.
The late Canadian architect of the UN Agenda 21, Maurice Strong, a billionaire oil chum of David Rockefeller was Undersecretary of the United Nations and Secretary General of the June 1972 Stockholm Earth Day conference. He was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. He more than perhaps anyone else, is responsible for the de-industrialization agenda of the zero carbon “sustainable economy.” At the UN Rio Earth Summit in 1992 he openly stated the blunt agenda of the radical eugenics advocates such as Gates and Schwab: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about ?” That agenda is very much the Great Reset today.
War Now?
If the once-advanced, energy-intensive economies of NATO member countries in Europe and the USA continue on this suicidal journey, their ability to mount a convincing military defense or offense will become a mirage. Recently the corrupt German EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, declared that the high-tech German defense industry and its suppliers should not receive bank credit because they were not “green” or “sustainable” enough. Reportedly banks have already gotten the message. Along with oil and gas now defense production is targeted. Von der Leyen as German Defense Minister was widely blamed for allowing German defense to collapse to a catastrophic state.
In their now one-sided pursuit of their insane Agenda 2030 and Zero Carbon agenda, the Biden Administration and the EU are putting their industry on a deliberate road to destruction well before the end of this decade. Is this in turn driving the current NATO agenda towards Russia in Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia and now Kazakhstan? If the NATO Powers that Be know they will lack the basic in depth military industrial infrastructure in the near future, do they think it better to provoke a possible war with Russia now, to eliminate a potential resistor to their de-industrial agenda? Other than China, Russia holds the only potential to deal a devastating blow to NATO if provoked.
Mass Formation Psychosis or Madness of Crowds
In 1852 English historian Charles Mackay wrote a classic titled Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , giving a little-known insight to the mass hysteria behind the religious Great Crusades of the 12 th Century, the Witch Mania or the Dutch Tulip Mania and numerous other popular delusions. It is relevant to understand the global irrational rush to economic and political suicide.
The same key actors behind the mass COVID vaccine mandates for an unproven experimental genetic-altering vaccine and the ensuing lockdowns globally, including Bill Gates and Pope Francis, are behind the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum Great Reset and its UN Agenda 2030 green zero carbon madness, to get the world to accept unprecedented draconian economic measures.
This will require a docile and physically weak population to be railroaded, what Belgian psychology professor Dr. Mattias Desmet and Dr Robert Malone call Mass Formation Psychosis, a crowd psychosis, a kind of mass hypnosis that ignores reason. It is clear that both the myth of Global Warming and the corona pandemic agenda require such a mass hypnosis—an “extraordinary popular delusion.” Without the COVID fear hysteria we would never allow the Green Agenda to get so far that our very electric grids are on the verge of blackouts and our economies on verge of breakdown. The ultimate goal of both the COVID WHO pandemic and the Green Agenda is a march to Schwab’s dystopian Great Reset of the entire world economy to the benefit of a corporate dictatorship by a handful of global corporations like BlackRock or Google-Alphabet.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.