Pretty simple for the planet actually, as the following graph shows:

  • 8,500 coal plants need to stop burning coal.
  • We stop driving 1.4 billion cars.
  • Planes stop flying 100,000 times a day.
  • Stop eating tens of billions of animals per year.
  • Stop shipping stuff.

Yeah. That’ll happen.

Incidentally, as a sort of follow-up to the previous post on India landing a robot on the Moon’s South Pole, India’s power output grows at fastest pace in 33 years, fuelled by coal. Of course being Reuters they have to try and squeeze some bullshit in between the ugly facts:

India’s power generation grew at the fastest pace in over three decades in the just-ended fiscal year, a Reuters analysis of government data showed, fuelling a sharp surge in emissions as output from both coal-fired and renewable plants hit records.

Intense summer heatwaves, a colder-than-usual winter in northern India and an economic recovery led to a jump in electricity demand, forcing India to crank up output from coal plants and solar farms as it scrambled to avoid power cuts.

Did you spot it? You can’t “crank up output” from wind or solar farms the way you can from coal, gas or nuclear plants; the wind and sun are not at your discretion, but of course if they’d written that India had “cranked up” the wind and sun people would have laughed at them.

The rest of the article does have the ugly facts about an increase in coal-fired output by blabbing about all the renewable capacity they’re trying to add, after missing their 2022 target by 272% (64GW vs 175GW) and how it’s now 11.8% of capacity – the usual lie when the figure that counts is actual power generated.

Also worth watching the section of this video dealing with Britain’s energy policy as yet another example of the insanity that is Net Zero (video timed to start at 19m45s).

And I’ll just leave this chart here to add the China perspective (the little pie graph to the right is Britain’s output to scale).

More fun, this from Britain looking at the cost of replacing the current power system with, respectively, wind or solar or nuclear – and this is just for electricity amounting to 60% of total energy needs in the future. The solar is an off-the-planet solution based on the ideas of a Green scientist, Professor McKay, who suggested solar in the Sahara since it doesn’t work well in Britain with its northern latitudes and cloudy skies. But it doesn’t matter because none of this is being done anyway, in the sense that nobody is planning for this number of wind farms or nuclear power stations.

I’m pleased to see that the nuclear numbers fit with estimates I made on Kiwiblog back in 2010 where I figured that just to replace the coal-fired power plants of that time would require the world to build 12 nuclear power plants (each one twice the size of the average US nuclear plant) per month for a decade. Obviously a lot more coal-burning plants have been built since then and I don’t see a reactor build program of that scale anywhere, even in China.