 We're going to start this episode with a question. Which developed country reduced its CO2 emissions the most in the last decade? Well, the answer may surprise you. It was a country that embraced fracking and that country was the United States of America. And the only reason it reduced its CO2 output was simply because the gas burned from fracking is extremely clean compared to other fossil fuels that are being burnt. So the replacement of a cleaner fossil fuel reduced the CO2. But of course, it's not a good thing to reduce the CO2. We need more of it. But as we know, the climate alarm is strived to reduce CO2. And they do this without knowing what the right CO2 level is, if there is such a thing. Yet the Western world is spending trillions on this aim of limiting CO2 and reducing it if possible. And they do this with absurd green energy policies. And we're going to deal with three of them in this video. The first is wind farms. The second is solar. And the third is biomass. All of these are aimed at reducing the CO2 output of the West. Because obviously the rest of the developing world, China and the rest, they actually just carry on as before. Whilst the developing Western nations make themselves more and more uncompetitive. So as we explore these three green energy policies, just keep in mind that there's no need for them in the first place. Because we really do not need to reduce CO2. Wind farms are bird, bat and insect chopping machines. A study in Germany showed the impact in just that country alone. But they are simply not environmentally friendly in many other ways. Though we're now going to explore. These windfans are absolutely massive. They go up to 140 metres high. That is much bigger than St Paul's Cathedral. And just the foundations needed to support one of these windfans is massive. And this hole here, which is the foundation for one, that is smaller than the 140 metre one. What you're seeing is already on top of a lot of concrete that's been laid. So the building of even the foundation, let alone the actual windvane, is a considerable amount to CO2. Just a transport of all the materials to these remote locations to build these things. Then as most of these wind farms have to be constructed in pretty remote areas. There's the power lines coming from those windvanes causing not only the production of an extra amount to CO2. But also destroying the visual immunity of the area. Then a study of 3,000 different wind turbines in Britain. Show they're actually wearing out in just 12 years. About half the expected life. And this has put the cost of wind turbines up considerably. Maintenance problems and costs are even worse when they're at sea. Then to compound matters, the blades in many other parts are simply not recyclable. So they have to go into landfill. And this landfill is enormous. All of these factors contribute to a very high output of CO2 in the manufacture, transport, construction, deconstruction and landfill of wind farms. There is a fierce debate about the carbon footprint of wind farms. But taking all these factors into account, including the landfill, the shorter life than expected. I think it is reasonable to assume that the planned 25 years, now being reduced to maybe half of that in many cases, means that the carbon footprint of wind farms is considerable. I believe it is doubtful whether it ever pays back its carbon footprint in terms of saved CO2. However, the real big problem is the intermittent nature of them. So we'll take a look at just how they fit in to the power grid. The power grid supply in the UK has a variable demand throughout the day and night. And it varies with different events, such as if there's a really big event they can get peaks, big sporting event they can get peaks, but they know how to manage this, so a lot of experience. And normally they meet this demand by what's called base load. The base load traditionally is nuclear and coal. Now with base load you cannot quickly change the power. So you can't change it to quickly meet the demand throughout the day or evening. Therefore you need something that's more flexible. And traditionally that's been supplied by gas powered fire stations. These are faster at being able to change the load and they take care of the peaks, as in this diagram. Yet even managing this way was difficult. So there was a search for the equivalent of a battery. Now battery power is completely out of the question. It's totally uneconomic to a grand scale. But there was such a thing like pump storage where at night when you've got lots of power you pump the water up a mountain and then you release it. And I happened to be the water resources engineer when Dinovic was built in Clamberis in the 1970s. It's empty part of a large lake, up a mountain to another lake. And it uses electricity to do that from the night time when it's already good base load going. So it uses otherwise unused base load maybe to pump it up the mountain. And then it releases it during the day at peak times. And this system can react in seconds and look upon it as a very fast reaction to peak demands. So the generating authority here is using more electricity than it actually gets back. But the price is worth it for the efficiency gain in the system. So how do wind farms fit into this? Well it's all to do with how they fit in to this basic concept of managing the electricity supply system and the efficiency losses that they cause. And one of the biggest costs associated with wind farms is the efficiency loss it creates inside the nation's power grid. With wind you do not know when it's going to blow and when it's going to stop. And then when it's going to blow hard and blow little and give less power. This intermittent nature of it when it's put into the national power grid on a massive scale causes serious issues. But at times in the whole of the UK you can have a high that basically produces no wind power or so little as to be negligible. So what is going to power the nation then? One thing a modern society like ours cannot do is simply cut off the power. So in this diagram it shows the amount of wind power being supplied and that can just die down to next to nothing. What is going to make up that difference? So by midnight in this diagram there's no wind. Basically the only way you can have wind power is to have alongside it power supplies that are reliable and predictable. But they also have to be flexible enough to be able to step in quickly and supply power. And that really does mean it has to be gas. It can't be nuclear or coal. It can't be any of the base ones. It has to be the variable one to be able to step in. So basically to have an intermittent supply like wind you need alongside it the power station that does exactly the same job. If you're going to factor in the cost of wind farms fully you also have to add on the cost of having to build gas power stations to replicate them. The problem becomes even worse when you consider that in this example the wind is blowing overnight. That is when you don't need the power and so you're having to pay for power coming in that you don't need. In other times it produces so much power that basically you have to start exporting it. And Germany for example which has got a lot of wind power has big problems. It can't have too much power it'll basically blow up the system. So what it has to do is export the energy below the cost of production just to get rid of it. And this is another cost of intermittent power. Basically intermittent power is a nightmare in power generation. And matter how cleverly people try to manage it and they do do their best it is still an issue. And as it grows as a percentage the issue gets bigger and bigger. As if the problems I've outlined weren't enough. The land use area is also another factor. The amount of space needed for wind turbines compared to say nuclear is showing relatively here. This is wind, solar and nuclear. And basically if you try to generate the UK's needs by just wind there isn't enough space to fit them all in. So we'll now stop looking at green wind farms and turn our attention to solar. That's right the manufacturer of solar panels produces a large quantity of toxic waste. In fact what is needed to build solar panels is very high quality coal. Which has to be used in great quantities to produce solar panels. Per unit of energy output. Solar panels produce 300 times more toxic waste than nuclear power. Now take an area the size of a football pitch. We're going to stack the waste on that area from nuclear and from solar for the same amount of energy. And as a basis we're going to take the 2016 world production of nuclear power. So in 25 years how much waste would there be to what height over that football field from nuclear? And it's pretty high. It's as high as the leaning tower of pizza. So how high would the waste be if it was from solar in that 25 year period? Well for the same amount of energy it would not be as high as Mount Everest. It'd be twice as high. That is almost twice the height that you fly out on those jets when on holiday. Contrary to popular belief lead and toxic cadmium can be washed out of solar panels in a matter of months by rain. And the manufacturer of solar panels emits actually one of the most potent greenhouse gases on earth. Which is nitrogen triofluoride. It's 17,200 times more of a greenhouse gas than CO2. It may surprise some, but solar panels require quite a lot of sun to be efficient. And a study into the CO2 footprint of the manufacturer and fitting of solar panels has concluded that above a certain latitude on earth they never pay back their CO2 footprint in their entire 25 year life. So places like the UK and Germany and so on are well above that. And therefore the manufacturer and production of fitting a CO2 besides being highly toxic in all sorts of ways that are not really being dealt with actually produce more CO2 than they save. And of course just like wind power, solar power especially in our country is anything but reliable and it's intermittent. And it's got all the same problems that I've explained with wind power in fitting into our power grid. Wrax power station is what we're going to feature here as the perfect example of the total irrationality of biomass. But first let's start with the history of coal. All coal was laid down at one time, about 360 million years ago. When trees evolved they created a new cell structure so when they died and fell on the ground there was nothing to eat them. Naturally the bugs and the microbes had a real hard job for 60 million years so trees just kept piling one on top of another forming the coal seams we know today. And in fact that 60 million year period is the only time in the world that coal was formed. Because after that 60 million period the bugs had wisened up to the whole situation and started eating the trees. So as they fell they gradually decay and they would not be buried to form coal. They had no new coal since then anywhere so there's only one lot of seams that was basically 60 million years of forest growth. And by the way trees and vegetation on earth was much grander then because of course there are much higher levels of CO2 and so vegetation was abundant on a scale we have not seen ourselves. So what we used to do is burn coal for power. Coal equals old wood but what biomass plants do like drags is they burn new wood. So let's go through the logic of this unlike other forms of green energy biomass plants are not intermittent. You know what power you're going to get when you need it. In effect they replace coal plants so what we are doing with biomass is burning new wood instead of old wood. So we have to chop down forests and supply some 37,000 tons of new wood every day. The whole of the UK is simply not capable of supplying anything like this figure. So don't worry we import it from mainly America and now with some from Russia. So we cut down the trees that are absorbing CO2. Now some of the Russian trees would take 150 years to grow back to where they were and start absorbing the CO2 at the same level. A lot of the American trees can be younger anything between 20 and 40 years is typical before you get to replace the CO2. So what you're doing now is taking a fuel and modern fuel and emitting CO2 and the amazing thing is when you burn new wood. It gives off at least as much CO2 as burning coal but probably more. 168,000 acres of woodland are at risk of being cut down just to supply one pellet facility in the USA and that wood is headed for the UK. This facility is the UK's biggest emitter of CO2. Burning more wood than any other facility in the world. And yet every day the UK taxpayers pour in 2.35 million to subsidize it. That's about three quarters of a billion a year. The alarmists claim it's CO2 neutral but for a start it's putting out at least as much CO2 at least as coal. And of course big machines have to cut down those forests. People have to be moved into those forests. Officers have to be set up. The whole industry has to be there to take the forest away. You have to build roads. You have to create offices. You have to create cantines. You have to do the whole thing that you normally do when managing people. And that wood has to be transported then across a long distance to a pellet plant where it's made into pellets. And that pellet plant uses a lot of energy to do that including heat to dry it. And then after the pellets are made it has to be shipped by train to a port to gain more CO2. And then it goes into a ship. And whether you know it or not big ships use almost like a treacle type of diesel. They only use normal diesel to start the engines but they actually run on very heavy treacle type diesel. And so then it has to come across the ocean to the east coast of the UK. Having done that trip with all its CO2 being emitted it then goes on a train with more CO2. And then it eventually arrives at the draft power station. Now all that CO2 is not being replaced. It's not being absorbed later on because the whole principle is that you plant new trees so that in 30, 40, 100 years or whatever it may be you're capturing the same amount of carbon as the trees that you cut down. But that's not really possible because of all the other CO2 emissions I've just explained. Also, and assuming you do plant the forests it can take 30, 40, even 100 years to replenish the CO2 capture of the forest you cut down. What about the climate emergency? Because in the meantime you've dramatically increased CO2 when people are telling us we've got a climate emergency. The Welsh government in the UK has declared a climate emergency over the next 10 or 12 years. So why are they substantially supporting the increase of CO2 during that period? It makes no sense at all. I'm sorry to say it but our politicians are fools. Their green energy policies substantially increase the amount of CO2. And whilst that doesn't bother me, in fact I welcome it, it's an extremely expensive operation they're engaged with which you, the taxpayer, are paying for. It is totally wasteful, doesn't achieve their objective and doesn't make any sense at all. So the old way you had the coal mine very near to the power station, you had a short train trip straight into the power station and you only have to transport half the weight because you get twice as much energy per kilogram out of coal than you do out of wood. Now I'm not alone in my views on this. Here 800 scientists from around the world petition the EU to stop biomass. In this report UK scientists found that biomass was a complete disaster for climate change and wanted it brought to a halt. They claimed it could take up to 100 years just to get back to the position that you were in before you cut the trees down. And that's without counting all the other extra emissions, that's just counting the burning of the pellets. The penny is beginning to drop in some quarters. Michael Moore produced a film, Planet of the Humans, that demolished the green energy industry. And Michael Schellenberger has been an environmentalist all his life but has now basically swapped sides. He's seen the light, heavily criticised the alarmist and in his new book Apocalypse Never is apologised for all the years of scare stories and alarmism. That is just not true and at least some are getting some sense in extinction and rebellion and leaving it to support nuclear power.