At 72, I grew up in a suburban neighborhood, but my parents grew up on farms, not unlike Viv Forbes who grew up in Australia on a farm. Young people do not realize how fragile the technological society actually is, or how close they are to living as people have lived for centuries. Forbes, though, can tell us from first hand experience of the coming of electricity to their farm in the 1940s. Her story can be found at the American Thinker entitled A diesel in the shed. I urge you to read the whole thing.
When I was a kid living on a small dairy farm in Queensland, we relied on green energy -- horses and human muscles provided most motive power; firewood and beeswax candles supplied heat and light; a windmill pumped water and the sun provided solar energy for drying clothes and growing crops, vegies, and pastures. The only “non-green” energy used was a bit of kerosene for the kitchen lamp and the dairy lantern, and petrol for a small Ford utility for a trip to town every fortnight.
Our life changed dramatically when we put a diesel in the dairy. This single-cylinder engine drove the milking machines, the cream separator, and a small electricity generator, which charged 16 lead-acid two-volt batteries sitting on the veranda. This is the exact same diesel engine (built in Toowoomba) we had in our dairy in the late 1940s.
Our 32-volt DC system powered our “modern” marvel -- bright light at any time, in every room, at the touch of a switch.
You can see and hear that diesel engine at the highlighted link. It is noisy, but I am sure it was magnitudes better than they had before. It meant milking machines, which could service more cows and provide more milk. It meant electric light, which reduced the risk of fires. It meant electric pumps for water, thus reducing dependence on the wind. As I said, magnitudes of improvement in living standards.
But now, the green nazis have caused a backward push towards the stone ages:
There were no electric self-starters for diesels in those days -- just a heavy crank handle and a big flywheel. But all that effort, noise, and fumes were superseded when the house and the dairy got connected to clean silent “coal power by wire.” Suddenly the trusty “Southern Cross” diesel engines disappeared from Australian sheds and dairies.
In less than one lifetime, firewood, candles, horses, and kerosene were replaced by diesel and petrol engines plus clean, silent coal-powered electricity.
Today, after Aussies have enjoyed decades of abundant reliable cheap electricity from coal, green energy gambling has taken Australia back to that era which kept a diesel in the shed.
Green energy has a union that works to rules. If winds are too strong or too weak, they down tools and the turbines go silent. And their mates running the solar panels won’t work at night and also produce nothing on cloudy days. If we try to fill the gaps with battery power, where do we get the electricity to recharge the batteries and pump the hydro water back up the hill to keep the lights on?
The point of Forbes' piece is that the entire green energy scam is just that, a scam; a hoax. If wind could power everything, we would have already been doing it. It can't. And the fact is that the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth is (fortunately for us, as it turns out) woefully inadequate. If it were strong enough to power things like steel manufacturing, it would be too hot for us to live. There is no magic, no technological breakthroughs. Of course, if the green nazis don't like coal, gas, and petroleum, there is nuclear. Nuclear breakdown happens whether you put it to use or not. Putting it to good use provides energy without the carbon dioxide emissions. But again, that is really just a giant scam
Forbes closes with this:
Finally, our green media likes to feature some green energy enthusiast who is “off the grid.” But it usually emerges later in the show that there is a diesel in their shed too.
Those who remember the days of relying on a noisy, smelly diesel in the shed have no wish to be dragged back there by green zealots.I say "Amen."
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