Image Capture from Bjorn Lomborg’s video

Here’s a 16 minute video of Bjorn Lomborg, who very much agrees with Climate Change science, explaining why the shock-horror-scare tactics are bullshit, but also the problems with wind and solar power. I’ve timed the video to that part but the following transcript of that sectionis one of the most effective summaries I’ve seen of the problems with wind and solar:

You know how you’re constantly being told that solar and wind is incredibly cheap? We’ve all seen this graph of how solar and wind has come down dramatically over the last couple of decades and it’s now cheaper than ever and many people will tell you that solar and wind is some of the cheapest energy in the world, some of the cheapest electricity in the world.

They’re technically correct but they’re dramatically misleading you. Why?

Because it’s only cheaper when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. When it’s not, it’s the most expensive form of energy in the world because you can’t buy it for any amount of money. Solar and wind is not cheap when you need electricity 24/7

His graph above then shows the relation between electricity prices and the proportion of wind and solar power in national grids. Bottom line is that the higher the proportion the greater the price of electricity.

Those energy costs flow into negative impacts on industry, farming and people’s lives, making them and their nations poorer than otherwise would be, and he demonstrates earlier in the video why that is so important. Poorer nations cope less well with weather challenges, among other things, and as the world has steadily got wealthier in the last century deaths from weather events have basically collapsed, with a decline of 500 fold, from 5 million per year to about 10,000 globally.

All this has been covered by many people in many other forums over many years now but this is an excellent short summary:

  • All high-income countries are high-energy.
  • Climate policies drive up energy prices.
  • Wind and Solar are not cheap.
  • Climate policies drive down consumption (the Greens love this).
  • Climate policies drive down economic growth.

This is why I rolled my eyes in 2023 as National boasted about how they’d reform the Resource Management Act to allow wind and solar farms to be more easily and quickly built.