All the News that Fits the NetZero Narrative
Wait...You never told us free wind and solar would require costly transmission lines! Who knew?
Congressional Oversight
There is congressional oversight, and then there is congressional oversight—as in, how the F were we supposed to know? We simply propose. It’s someone else’s job to dispose.
One small problem: Congress neglected to include the cost of building the transmission lines that will be needed to transport the electricity from renewable (Read: intermittent, weather-dependent, unreliable and costly) source to where it is needed. One might think that the members who voted in favor of the bill would be embarrassed, but embarrassment or admitting error are not required of Congressmen. One can always simply pass another bill to correct the oversight, then claim that you were merely exercising your duty to provide oversight. Translation: we’ll just authorize more spending (of other people’s money).
That is precisely what Congress has done in the form of the Clean Electricity and Transmission Acceleration Act (CETA). The bill was introduced by Congressmen Sean Casten (D-IL) and Mike Levin (D-CA). Coincidentally or not, the two sponsors are from delegations representing two of the top three states losing population, Congressional representation and tax revenue.
Do not think, however, that Congress is incapable of learning from its mistakes. As Mark Glennon writes in Wirepoints:
Now, however, there’s widespread, bipartisan recognition that those projects are futile without transmission linking them into the electrical grid. Progressive economist Paul Krugman, for example, cheered the IRA but wrote despairingly in the New York Times that “we may need a third, bureaucratic miracle to fix the electricity grid and make this whole thing work.”
Casten, also an avid IRA supporter, now admits to the gravity of the problem saying that “80% of the clean energy progress we made with the Inflation Reduction Act will be lost unless we reform transmission and permitting.”
As incredible as this error of omission may seem to the layman, it is in a way not surprising. The mainstream press must assume much of blame for the general ignorance in regard to our electric grid, especially its growing fragility as we become overly reliant on what Meredith Angwin in her book Shorting the Grid calls the fatal trifecta: over-building renewables, over-reliance on just-in-time natural gas, and over-dependence on neighbors for imports.
Amber Alert: Wind and Solar
There is an excellent real object lesson happening right now during this most recent cold snap, but if one’s only source of information is mainstream media, the lesson will go largely untaught and therefore, unlearned. Both in Alberta, Canada, and Texas, wind and solar have been missing in action when they have been needed most. In fact, in Alberta, there were moments when wind and solar were producing exactly zero electricity. Maybe this is what is meant by NetZero.
The mainstream press is irresponsible for not covering these stories that go against the narrative of an all-electric, all-renewable utopia. This is where most people still get their news. People working full-time and having family responsibilities do not have time to seek out the whole story that is available through independent media.
The function of the legacy media should be to offer short, concise, accurate and balanced stories on important topics that people need to know about in order to make wise decisions. As it is, most citizens do not have an informed view of the controversial issues of the day, especially electricity and the electric grid. Most consumers of information only know what elite opinion-makers want them to know. As David Blackmon writes about the poor performance of wind and solar in critical situations:
It tells us the narrative fed to us by the renewables lobby and its cooperating media outlets like the Texas Tribune and Houston Chronicle about wind, solar and batteries saving the day is just so much propaganda. Even combined with #Hydropower, #ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) is only getting 6.7% contribution from renewables as the Texas public is waking up and demand is moving into one of its peak times of the day.
Stop the Press
It’s not only the periodicals cited by Blackmon that are guilty. There is a pandemic of elite institutional propaganda propagated by mainstream media, from The New York Times/Washington Post duopoly, to the Associated Press that accepts money from environmental organizations to push the NetZero fallacy, to smaller regional and local papers.
One such regional outlet that I follow is the Daily Herald that covers Chicago’s suburbs. As a weekly, the Arlington Herald was the local paper I grew up with. Over the years, it has absorbed other local papers and survived to be Chicago’s dominant suburban daily.
Although the paper runs a lot of AP stories, it boasts of its own environmental reporter. At first, I hoped that the paper would feature a unique, or at least balanced, point-of-view in its environmental stories. Alas, no. I might just as well be reading The New York Times and its pseudoscience section.
The paper does not disguise its bias on the climate change issue. A commentary introducing its new environmental reporter and acknowledging a grant from Report for America to help derfray the cost of its climate reporting is headlined:
With Report for America's help, Daily Herald to strengthen local climate coverage By Lisa Miner Deputy Managing Editor lminer@dailyherald.com
The Daily Herald is deepening its commitment to cover the local impact of climate change through a partnership with Report for America."We intend to cover climate as local news," Editor John Lampinen (now former editor, ed.) said. "That means covering all the things that are or will take place - all the ways our lives will be affected by climate change, but also all the ways our lives will be affected by the responses meant to mitigate that change. We intend to cover it the way we try to cover all types of news - big picture and local focus, the large stories and the small ones."
Report for America is a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities. The Daily Herald is part of an expanding network of about 270 newsrooms that benefit from the nonprofit's support.
When it is later disclosed that Report for America is supported by The Nature Conservancy, one can see that reporting on climate is not likely to include opposing points-of-view to the Nature Conservancy’s climatism agenda.
Jenny Whidden, the Daily Herald’s environmental reporter, is a competent writer and excellent propagandist for the climate catastrophist/renewable energy point-of-view. To its credit, the paper does run the following disclaimer under her byline stories.
• Jenny Whidden is a climate change and environment writer working with the Daily Herald through a partnership with Report For America supported by The Nature Conservancy. To help support her work with a tax-deductible donation, see dailyherald.com/rfa.
The results, however, are opinion pieces that are strongly biased while disguised as news stories. Climate change as existential threat and fossil fuels as inherent evils without benefits are a given. A recent story on a proposed wind farm in Lake Michigan provides an example:
(My emphasis throughout)
Great Lakes states have considered offshore wind as a potential power source for more than a decade, but a mixed bag of economic, environmental and engineering uncertainties have pumped the breaks on what some have long envisioned to be a golden ticket to clean energy in the Midwest and beyond…..Driving the legislation amid these challenges is the critical need to replace fossil fuel energy with clean electricity. Rep. Marcus Evans, the Chicago Democrat who introduced the legislation, cautioned that the bill simply would start the process — not guarantee a development….
“We have to use alternatives to fossil fuels in order to turn the corner on climate change, and I really believe that, for the long term, the health of the planet is at risk,” Walker said. “It's too big an issue just to walk away from alternatives.”
“All of these things we've dealt with in other areas and other places in the world,” Walker said. “The overriding concern across the board, given that this is a clean and safe energy source, is that we have to do everything we can to wean ourselves from fossil fuels.”
Note the biases: wind energy is clean energy; the need to replace fossil fuels is critical; climate change as existential threat is accepted as a given; wind is a clean and safe energy source, implying that fossil fuels and nuclear are not.
The delays and cost overruns associated with the project are chalked up to bureaucratic inefficiency and obduracy, and these are the only drawbacks. There is no mention of the downsides of wind power—that it is the least dense major source of energy, requiring huge amounts of materials, huge tracts of land (or water) and that, as we can see in the current situations in Alberta and Texas, cannot be depended upon in adverse weather conditions.
Nor is their mention of the requirement that wind energy be fully backed up by a reliable power source such as coal, natural gas or nuclear. Then there is the little matter of building transmission lines and building out the grid that are rarely mentioned. Given the latter fact, why build baseload power around wind and solar in the first place?
It is bad enough that ordinary citizens are uninformed or misinformed about renewables, but when members of Congress do not grasp basics such as that renewable sources of power still require high voltage transmission lines, then we have a problem, Houston Chronicle, et al.