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At least some of the media are making hay over the hypocrisy of the global elite arriving at Glasgow via 400 private jets to lecture us about CO2 emissions. The jets created such a shortage of parking slots that some were obliged to fly the extra 50-70km to Prestwick and Edinburgh just to park.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s $US180 billion man, flew in with his $US65 million Gulfstream to rendezvous with Prince Charles, who also arrived by private jet. Bezos had been partying in Turkey with Bill Gates on a rented super yacht, the Lana ($A3 million a week hire), with a few 150km side trips by helicopter.
Within several hours last Sunday week leaders from Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Mauritania and Kenya came in by private jets. World leaders do need secure transport, but as one blogger commented, “The fools could just stay home and shut up.”
The best one-liner about Glasgow to date is from an ex-No 10 Downing special adviser Steve Hilton writing in the Daily Mail: “A gigantic flatulent mess of incoherence and sanctimony”. One such specimen: ex-President Obama jetting in to tell teen demonstrators, “You need to help educate your parents and grandparents, your uncles and aunts, your teachers, your employers.” Sure, Barack, that makes sense.
But my tale today is not about the presidents and billionaires but the 40,000 bureaucrats, activists, grifters and useful idiots now jamming Glasgow accommodation and gabfests. They’re being told by the ridiculous Prince Charles that this is the “last chance saloon” to save the planet and humanity, as they were told at the first Conference of Parties at Berlin in 1995 and every other one of the annual gabfests since.
Meanwhile, human-caused CO2 emissions have continued to rise and emissions from China and India swamp any cuts the virtuous West chooses to make. Despite trillions wasted on renewables, the growth in their share of global electricity generation from 1998-2018 was a big fat zero, as the International Energy Agency conceded.[i]
A list of named official delegates to Glasgow has just surfaced. It’s called the Provisional List of Participants. The UN itself calls them “PLOPs”. The list always generates mirth. For example, at the COP22 in Marrakech five years ago, there was an all-time record of 1600 named attendees from one single country, Morocco.
Someone asked the BBC last week why Glasgow’s shenanigans can’t be run online. The BBC oracle replied that organisers did try to run the three-week preparatory conference in June online. The BBC explained,
Unfortunately, it didn’t go well – time-zone and technology challenges made it almost impossible for countries with limited resources, progress was limited and decisions were put off.
As a result, many developing nations have insisted on having an in-person COP. They feel that it is far easier for their voices to be ignored on a dodgy Zoom connection.
They also bring a lived experience of climate change that it is critical for rich countries to hear first-hand.
A sceptic colleague Geoff Chambers paraphrased the BBC: “You can hardly expect the leader of some small island state in some obscure time zone to get up at some unearthly hour to plead for his share of those hundred billion dollars on Zoom, can you?”
Not that these islands are actually threatened by rising oceans. Study after study finds these coral islands are expanding. Their erosion and salt damage stems from bad governance and women having far too many kids. Moreover, there are no hundred billion US dollars available. This was the amount the West pledged to be raised per annum from 2020 for the Third World, to atone for the West’s centuries’ of alleged climate crimes. China and India are currently demanding $US1 trillion for a compensation fund for struggling states like themselves.
The “Green Climate Fund” has to date approved $US8 billion of projects and disbursed a mere $US2 billion, including a paltry (relatively speaking) $US600 million last year. The internal jockeying within the Green Climate Fund is so intense that some board meetings have collapsed even before an agenda could be agreed. Mr trillion-spending Joe Biden can’t be bothered delivering half the US’s outstanding $US2 billion pledge to the Fund. (Australia put in $200 million, thanks to PM Malcolm Turnbull, and that’s it from us unless potential Prime Minister Albanese has a change of heart).
The latest PLOP doesn’t list the 14,000 non-government hangers-on at Glasgow. But googling for a few Ocker delegates, the loopy anti-capitalist Melbourne University Sustainable Society Institute has headlined, “MSSI on the road to COP26 Glasgow.” (Others go by air). MSSI delegate Dr Don Henry is an International Board Member of Gore’s Climate Reality Project. Gore has piled up a $US330 million fortune from his zero-CO2 hypocrisy.[ii]
The other MSSI delegate is Hon Dr Janine Felson. Her “Hon” had me stumped until I learned she was awarded the title of Ambassador by the Government of Belize in 2007. She also runs around within the bureaucratic mazes of the dismal Green Climate Fund, and represents cynical little States like Maldives and Tuvalu demanding millions for (not) getting drowned by ‘rising seas’ that aren’t rising.[iii]
Belize, known until 1981 as British Honduras, since you ask, is a central American basket-case (pop 400,000) a quarter the size of Tasmania with a useful sideline transhipping drug lords’ cocaine and cash. The CIA describes it thus:
Current concerns include the country’s heavy foreign debt burden, high crime rates, high unemployment combined with a majority youth population, growing involvement in the Mexican and South American drug trade, and one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in Central America.
The CIA adds that “corruption and official complicity in trafficking [of children and people] remained concerns, but no investigations, prosecutions, or convictions of government employees were reported (2020).”
Obviously, Belize slum-dwellers would view the 1degC of warming since 1900 as their top priority.
Hon Dr Felson’s diplomatic travails for Belize include helping to sort out the World Trade Organisation Banana Dispute of the 1990s (to do with EU banana-tariff bastardry), and Peter Sellers-style sabre rattling with Guatemala over borders.[iv]
This year Belize sent 33 delegates to Glasgow, about as many as Pakistan, New Zealand and Belarus combined.
Melbourne’s sister-cloister, ANU, has sent a CO2-spewing team of four to Glasgow, representing local indigenes and of course those non-drowning Pacific islanders. Delegate Dr Ian Fry, from ANU, is working out carbon rules sought by the islands to make the West deliver “real emissions reductions with rigour that stopped countries buying their way out of meeting goals.” Thanks, Ian. But since the Copenhagen COP debacle of 2009, I’ve had trouble taking Dr Fry seriously. Speaking as Tuvalu’s lead negotiator, Dr Fry told Copenhagen:
I am a humble and insignificant employee of the Environment Department of Tuvalu. This is not an ego trip. I have refused to undertake media interviews … I woke up this morning (stifled sob) crying (struggles to regain composure), and that’s not easy for a grown man to admit. (Emotional distress). The fate of my country rests in your hands. Thank you.
With difficulty, Dr Fry regained his composure and stricken delegates applauded. Among those deeply moved were an IPCC chair candidate, Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele, who confessed to being emotionally overcome. Later, some nark noticed that Fry was not from Tuvalu at all, in fact he was a lawyer from Queanbeyan, Canberra’s next-door neighbour and 150km from the ocean across rolling NSW hills. He’d also been a Greenpeace liaison officer. Enjoy Dr Fry’s speech here from 3 minutes.
Another ANU delegate will make the case for Fiji getting lots of climate funds for suffering CO2 damage. That’s odd because tropical cyclones/hurricanes have shown no rising trend (contrary to warmist propaganda) and there is no good evidence of sea level rise around Fiji,[v].
Another Ocker at Glasgow is Ben Oquist, executive director of the Australia Institute and a former Greens Party staffer. A man of many talents, Oquist can switch seamlessly from bagging the AUKUS submarines deal to healing the planet’s alleged fever.
A useful rule concerning Glasgow official delegations is, “The poorer the country, the bigger the delegation”. A quick scan reveals the Congo with 373 delegates, Ghana with 337, Sudan 236, Uganda 219, another entity called Congo 170 (that’s 543 all-up), Ivory Coast 169 (the same number as from the US), Malawi 138, Togo 128 and Gabon 125.
Burkina Faso suffers serious famine but not among the 109 delegates to Glasgow who are living it up there in good hotels. It knows the ropes, as it sent 100+ troughers to 2019’s COP25 at Madrid, including at least eight from a charity called Les Tresseurs de Cordes, or “String Braiders”. I wonder how much money was left for string braiding after deducting the Madrid travel costs. One of the world’s poorest states, Burkino Faso is afflicted with 3 million starving (total population, 22 million), Muslim terrorism, and a million internal refugees. Population pressures (not climate change) are causing over-grazing, desertification, and deforestation. Because 80 per cent of the population doesn’t have electricity, and what there is comes from fossil fuels, Burkino Faso is unlikely to sign up for Net Zero by 2050. The bright spot in Burkina Faso is its national anthem Le Ditanye (Victory), also known as Une Seule Nuit (One Single Night, not ‘one night stand’), and written by the country’s former president, an avid guitar player.
Equatorial Guinea (pop 1.4m, half the area of Tasmania) sent 28 to Glasgow. The latest CIA Factbook has this to say about the country:
Between 1968 and 1979, autocratic President Francisco MACIAS NGUEMA virtually destroyed all of the country’s political, economic, and social institutions before being deposed by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, in a coup. President Obiang has ruled since October 1979.
If my arithmetic is right, Mr Obiang has been running his country for 42 years. He scored a 94 per cent vote (for what that’s worth) in the latest election in 2016. Another family member is his vice-president, Teo Nguema, described by an African blogger as “[ferrying] his glamorous blonde girlfriends around Paris in his fleet of Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Bentley and Porsches. And did I mention he bought the original gloves Michael Jackson used to wear? Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, popularly known as Teo Nguema, is the most extravagant Vice President in Africa.” Another COP delegate in 2019 was Agriculture Minister Obiang, whom I assume is also family.
KnowledgeBank says: “Equatorial Guinea has become the richest country, per capita, in sub-Saharan Africa since the discovery of oil and natural gas reserves in the 1990s, yet the majority of its people remain extremely poor.”
Notwithstanding the country’s lavish per capita GDP, it remains best described in Donald Trump’s earthy way as a ‘sh-t hole’. The CIA describes the risk there from a plethora of horrid tropical diseases as “very high”, not to mention the world’s tenth-highest rate of HIV-AIDS. It has the world’s ninth-worst infant mortality rate of 63 deaths per 1000 (Australia: 3) and spends only 3 per cent of GDP on health (Australia: 10%). On the positive side, Equatorial Guinea has been little troubled by COVID, recording a mere 168 deaths so far — an achievement possibly due to the widespread distribution of ivermectin as a prophylactic and treatment for parasitic infections. The bad news is that Equatorial Guinea’s trafficking of children and women domestically and for export is world-class. But its green credentials are minimal as its prosperity (at least for the ruling class) is based on petroleum extraction and logging.
The Marshall islands (pop 60,000) sent 35 delegates to Glasgow (even more than 28 to Madrid). Palau (pop 18,000) sent 27 which probably sets the record for highest per capita junketeering. Palau’s president had told the UN about climate change being “a ticking time-bomb – no one knows when or where the next disaster will strike – but we are keenly aware that it can wipe out years of progress in a span of hours.” He seems to be talking about cyclones, which have always blown around the Pacific and are no worse globally today than they ever were. At the same forum, Tuvalu’s president worked his metaphors even harder:
We are but on one canoe for humanity, no one country must jump ship! We either must paddle together to keep us afloat and safe. Or allow the canoe to sink, and we all drown.
Since Tuvalu is expanding in area, the canoe is not really at risk.
It’s a pity we don’t know the green groups’ members at Glasgow yet. Among the odd groups at Madrid was Chant du Guépard dans le Désert with two delegates – it translates as “Song of the Leopard in the Desert”. A leopard wandered through our tourist tents one night when we were on safari in South Luanga, Zambia, a while back, and I’d have to say its “song” was not melodious – more a rasping, like sawing a log. I can’t find out just what this leopard-song group does climate-wise.
Continuing with Madrid COP’s lot, quite a large delegation of ten turned up from the Mom Loves Taiwan Association. Burundi sent 32, including a Church of England Climatologist (who said climate wasn’t a religion?). The Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation sent 20 delegates, and Workers of the World sent a team to finish off capitalism.
Nearly half of Cape Verde’s Madrid delegation of 27 were eco-feminists. One of the largest covens of feminists must have been The Women’s Environment and Development Organisation, with 51 delegates. Guessing at $10,000 unit travel costs, that’s half a million dollars. Purported environmental specialists like Friends of the Earth, WWF and Greenpeace blackened the sky with contrails to Madrid from their 50-100 delegates apiece.
At Glasgow this month, the only good news is that heaps of private climate hysterics couldn’t make it because of all the new red tape and COVID protocols. The Guardian lugubriously reported that two-thirds of Indigenes, trade unionists and youth strikers from the Cop26 Coalition gave up on their Glasgow plans.
The Climate Action Network and the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice were allocated between them just four tickets to negotiating rooms, and none for their polar bear puppets.
As one participant lamented, “It’s like trying to get into a late-night club – ‘Sorry mate, it’s full, one in, one out.’ The UK Government should reimburse all the thousands of people who paid to go to Glasgow and sit in hotel rooms.”
The UN organisers , apologising, encouraged attendees to do just that: stay in their hotels and watch stuff on-line. It all makes sense, doesn’t it.
Tony Thomas’s just-published “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from author at tthomas061@gmail.com or publisher Connor Court
[i] “Despite the impressive growth of solar and wind power, the overall share of clean energy sources in total electricity supply in 2018, at 36%, was the same as it was 20 years earlier because of the decline in nuclear. Halting that slide will be vital to stepping up the pace of the decarbonisation of electricity supply.”
[ii] An analysis by the National Center for Public Policy Research found that Gore’s Tennessee home “guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.” The electricity used just to heat Gore’s swimming pool would power six homes for a year.
[iii] The Maldives cabinet in 2009 donned scubas and met underwater in 2009 as propaganda for the Copenhagen COP. It’s since built villas and airports apace and the PR/journalist guy Mark Lynas who organised the underwater stunt has now become a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University, where he’s published a new paper claiming a 99.9% consensus for warming catastrophism.
[iv] In a masterpiece of euphemism Hon Dr Felson’s biography calls it “the Belize-Guatemala territorial differendum.”
[v] Suva tide gauges are unreliable but detailed work on the nearby Yasawa Island “provided a clear picture of the sea level changes during the last 500 years: a +70 cm higher sea level, a -50 cm lower sea level and a stable sea level (with some possible ups and downs) for the last 150-200 years. Most important; there is a clear absence of a present sea level rise.”
The Dutch tulip craze – many went broke. The South Sea Bubble – many went broke. Renewable energy – billionaires like Twiggy Forrest will make a few more billions , But only from taxpayer subsidies. Still, I suppose that, as Earthians, we are improving.
Tony – I was amused by the reference to a “PLOP”. I had the misfortune to see a Harold Pinter play in London in around 1981, the only memorable feature of which was some disgruntled cuckolded ? husband being referred to as a “Plop” – a man of no significance who could safely be ignored by everyone! It was certainly a pejorative term. It’s nice to see the UN using the term for their own people.
Tony,
My brain began to freeze while reading your article (‘brain cooling’?) so I almost had a heart attack when I misread the following:
“Between 1968 and 1979, autocratic Prime Minsters of Australia virtually destroyed all of the country’s political, economic, and social institutions before being deposed …”
I have not recovered as that statement remains true, although not in your article.
As the “climate crisis” is an entirely confected political scare campaign, readers here will be pleased to hear that The Guardian reports that the Australian government’s policy response to the climate crisis was ranked last in an assessment of 60 countries released at the global climate summit in Glasgow.
According to the Climate Change Performance Index report’s “independent” authors the Morrison government’s alleged lack of policies, high per capita greenhouse gas emissions, weak targets, low levels of renewables and high levels of energy use, saw the country given an overall ranking of 54 among individual countries. China, the world’s biggest emitter, was rated 33rd.
Encouragingly Australia’s resources minister, Keith Pitt, said this week the country would continue to produce as much coal as other countries will buy.
At the Cop26 talks, Australia has refused to sign a pledge to cut emissions of methane, dismissed calls to phase out coal and refused to change its 2030 targets. This would appear to be an eminently worthy and practical policy mix, and should be commended.
The COP has become an annual eco-religious ritual, with pageantry, apocalyptic revelations, moralistic sermons to mend our ways, the buying and selling of net-zero indulgences by virtue signalling elites, and assorted carpetbaggers and fraudsters touting green technology miracles.
“Suva tide gauges are unreliable but detailed work on the nearby Yasawa Island ‘provided a clear picture of the sea level changes during the last 500 years: a +70 cm higher sea level, a -50 cm lower sea level and a stable sea level (with some possible ups and downs) for the last 150-200 years. Most important; there is a clear absence of a present sea level rise.”
An amusing riposte to the COP, Tony; though I would not rule out it sooner or later being looked back on by the descendants of our participants here as a bit like a booze party up on the forecastle of the Titanic.
The Sea Level Research Group at the University of Colorado has long maintained the world’s best monitoring of sea-level, based not on tide gauges subject to isostasy and other distractions, but on satellite altimetry whose reference point is the centre of the Earth. According to that group, the world’s one ocean is rising at 3.3 +/- 0.4 mm/y, and the rise is accelerating at 0.098 +/- 0.025 mm/y^2. The rise is due to thermal expansion of sea water, the melting of glaciers and other ice, or both.
At that rate, our descendants will need scuba gear in order to attend a performance of The Pearl Fishers by Bizet at Sydney Opera House.
.
Such a Pearl Fishers performance would be entirely missable, Ian. The burning of the village inevitably being presented in terms of emitted carbon as a further indictment of the coal industry, not to mention the male love rivals discovering their mutual attraction and the joys of gender fluildity
While we’re on the Glasgow bean feast:
Charles Mackay (1814-1889) was a Scottish poet, journalist, and song writer. He was born in Perth, Scotland, and is best known for his classic “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. The classic guide to crowd psychology, financial folly and surprising superstition was first published in 1841.
Mackay covers many types of delusions, among them financial manias like the South Sea Company bubble of 1711-1720, the Mississippi Company bubble of 1719-1720, and the Dutch tulip mania of the early seventeenth century.
Other chapters are devoted to alchemists, scientists and pseudo scientists who attempted to turn base metals into gold. Mackay notes that many of these practitioners were themselves deluded, convinced that these feats could be performed if they discovered the correct old recipe or stumbled upon the right combination of ingredients.
There are also extensive treatments on the Crusades, Witch Mania and Trials and other forms of Mass Delusion.
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation.
During seasons of great pestilence, men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was come.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is the original guide to behavioural psychology – and how manias, follies and superstitions begin, spread and (eventually) pass.
Can you see a pattern here?
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Agreed what is needed is a good dose of honest indulgence.
Micheal, you’ve got to take your greens, their good for u.
I’m not sure ,but those on the left are very good at expressing mother nature’s recessive genes,- if one Paul Keating is anything to go by..
The simple fact is ,that it is the Krebs cycle that drives animal and plant life – not the shambolic ‘none sense’ that is Marxism (theft).
And it is the evolutionary genome ( justice)that gives expression to life as we know it, from Cyanobacteria to carbon loving – oxygen emitting (hating) plant life.
It is pure nature in her honest form that gives us the fractionated ( ratio) makeup of the atmosphere not the mutagenic gene that is Marxism.
It is the honest ( hearing / seeing) integrity in the evolutionary ( not revolutionary) process of creation that has made life and living possible here.
Evolution herself discards genomic expressions that are deleterious to sustaining life- mutant gene expression such as that ,that gives rise to Marxism always arrive at a dead end – natural Abortion or if you like progress to evolutionary abortion. The only socialist experiment that has actually stood the test of evolutionary integrity is truthful not deceitful.
Marxism is therefore doomed from the outset because it lacks truth and honesty.
Albert Einstein and Sir Issac Newton and all the Worlds great scientists and good scientists know that you cannot unmask or obtain truth( scientific) by expressing deceit( thou shall not steal, springs’ to mind), ( the truth).
Presently the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 419 ppm, this is 0.04 % of the makeup of the atmosphere- this is not unusual it is normal.
Atmospheric makeup-78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon , the remaining 0.1% is made up of trace gases of helium , hydrogen , neon , methane , krypton and water vapour. Of the trace remaining 0.1% ,0.04% of that is carbon dioxide- in other words carbon dioxide overall presence is a poofteenth of nothing (zip).
I will bring dishonesty back to the truth, the Late Dr T B Lynch gave us the truthful path for nothing( kind) it it the plant protein ‘Rubisco’ through evolutionary self regulation , increases its enzymic activity to meet ( justice) increased levels of atmospheric CO2, in doing so it increases the rate of plant growth- we see this as a bigger ,taller ,larger plant which is just another way of saying a bigger, taller, larger living organism of carbon.
In the process of storing carbon in making trees and plants, the plants exhaust more oxygen into the atmosphere- its that simple- the truth has absolutely, absolutely nothing to do with green politics. 0.04% is still 0.04 %.
SEA LEVEL RISE PRONOUNCED SEE LEVEL RISE
Port Darwin tidal range, maximum range 7.8m, a mean spring range of 5.5m, and a mean neap range of 1.9m ( Padovan, 1997).
ITS THE MAN IN THE MOON IAN.
A couple of recent quotes about climate change alarmism from James Delingpole seem appropriate here:
“Anyone who has looked into the subject honestly will have reached the inescapable conclusion that the Climate Industrial Complex is, with Big Pharma, the most corrupt and rapacious industry in the world; that the environmental scare stories being used to terrify us into submission are groundless; and that the only reason anyone believes otherwise is because over the last three or four decades the public has been brainwashed with a massive gaslighting operation embracing schools, universities, the bought-and-paid-for media, the institutions, Hollywood and big business. It’s a sign of how bad things have got that where 12 years ago I was able to break the Climategate scandal in the online section of the Daily Telegraph, and where I frequently wrote about the evils and dishonesty of the environmental movement in a range of publications including the Mail, the Express and the Spectator, there is now not a single mainstream media publication in the UK prepared to take a principled stand against eco-fascism.”
.
“The Climate Industrial Complex has grown so large and powerful it is now too big to fail. Impervious to logic, reason, or any kind of cost benefit analysis, the climate gravy train is a behemoth which crushes all before it; and which drowns out with its shrill wailings the voices of sensible, decent, informed scientists who want to debate the issue with common sense, proportion and factual evidence. The real purpose of the eco agenda is the same as it has always been: to feed the greed of a parasitical Malthusian elite which despises ordinary people and which, masking its bad intentions behind a cloak of environmental righteousness, uses green issues as a way of expanding and entrenching its power. This is why they turn up at these planet-saving events in their squadrons of carbon-belching private jets and their fleets of limousines: because they want us to know how little they care for our good opinion; to remind us that we are the little people and that they are our masters now.”
None of these world leaders seem to understand the enormity of the task of reaching net zero. It has been calculated that 120 BILLION tonnes of steel and cement will be required to build the necessary wind turbines. Much of this mining will be in sensitive areas and the smelting and manufacturing will require vast amount of reliable and affordable power. Has Twiggy realised that the extraction of hydrogen and its compression for transport and it’s movement will require far more energy than can be obtained by burning the stuff? Why not just use the electricity and forget the hydrogen? Of course there will be suckers like Morrison who will give Twiggy our money so he can gloat and make a quid. Maybe Morrison and Albo could ask the people of Australia what they think after an education from Ian Plimer et al. Tell them how much it is already costing the average man or woman and they would say no more.
I note the MacBot is back chanting the same mantra he has since the days of global cooling. Te old saying ‘nothing lasts forever’ does not apply to MacBot. Pick a subject, any subject and MacBot can relate it to sea level rise. I am building a home 1.8m above the high water mark (currently suspended due to the covid cult), so I have bet $1M that MacBot is wrong and will not be able to sail his yacht to my dinner table even in a century or two.
Tim Flannery has a place on the water up in the Hawkesbury- it’s all a big magical trick- follow the money. The bags under the eyeballs are always a tell tale sign.
Save the gay whales I say-absolute BS.
Whilst not wanting to detract from the grimly amusing polemical tone of this article, it does contain an erroneous observation which really should be set right. In the sixth paragraph, we have this:
“Despite trillions wasted on renewables, the growth in their share of global electricity generation from 1998-2018 was a big fat zero, as the International Energy Agency conceded.[i]”
This appears to imply that renewables have not actually increased their share in the global electricity generation market over the last 20 years, despite tapping into rivers of gold subsidies and incentives. This is incorrect. In fact, the growth of renewables in the global electricity generation mix over the past 20 years has been considerable, both in absolute terms, and in terms of total market share. (Some will rejoice at this, others wish for yet more spectacular growth, while others lament the waste of money. That is all beside the point when one is simply trying to get at the facts). This is borne out in the footnoted item, which reads:
“[i] “Despite the impressive growth of solar and wind power, the overall share of clean energy sources in total electricity supply in 2018, at 36%, was the same as it was 20 years earlier because of the decline in nuclear. Halting that slide will be vital to stepping up the pace of the decarbonisation of electricity supply.””
Here, “clean energy” refers to nuclear + renewables, not to renewables alone. Figure 7, page 12 in the referenced 2019 IEA report, “Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System”, clearly shows the two totalling about 36% of world electricity generation for the years 1998 and 2018.
A further potential for confusion is the treatment of hydroelectric power generation, which in the IEA report is included in the renewables category.
For energy tragics such as myself, the 2021 BP Statistical Review of World Energy provides a useful dataset that splits out all of the major electricity generation components. Note that the Review defines Renewables as electricity generated from wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and other minor sources (ie it excludes hydro). Using the Review data spreadsheet, a quick comparison of the global data for 1999 and 2019 (near enough to 1998/2018) shows the following % shares of “clean” electricity generated in the respective years:
For 1999 (total generation from all sources, including fossil fuels 14,918 TWh):
Nuclear 17%
Hydro 17%
Renewables 1%
For 2019 (total generation from all sources, including fossil fuels 27,000 TWh):
Nuclear 10%
Hydro 16%
Renewables 10%
Growth in electricity generated from Renewables in 2019 compared to 1999: 1300%
Whether all of this is a good or bad story may perhaps depend on one’s starting assumptions, but let us at least let the facts speak for themselves.