Delingpole: Biden’s Green New Deal Is an ‘Impossible Cluster****’

President Joe Biden’s Green New Deal is an ‘impossible clusterf***.’ You probably knew this already but below are the raw details.

If the world is to wean itself off fossil fuels and go “carbon neutral” by 2050, here is what might possibly need to be done:

To summarize: to get the world to zero emissions by 2050, our options are to build, commission, and bring on-line either:

• One 2.1 gigawatt (GW, 10⁹ watts) nuclear power plant each and every day until 2050, OR

• 3,000 two-megawatt (MW, 10⁶ watts) wind turbines each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every day and a half until 2050, assuming there’s not one turbine failure for any reason, OR

• 96 square miles (250 square kilometres) of solar panels each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every day and a half until 2050, assuming not one of the panels fails or is destroyed by hail or wind.

The calculations come courtesy of Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That? Feel free to check the math yourself. It is based on the following assumptions:

People generally have little idea just how much energy we get from fossil fuels. Figure 1 shows the global annual total and fossil energy consumption from 1880 to 2019, and extensions of both trends to the year 2050. I note that my rough estimate of 2050 total annual energy consumption (241 petawatt-hrs/year) is quite close to the World Energy Council’s business-as-usual 2050 estimate of 244 PWhr/yr.

More