The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades - nay centuries - of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority - three quarters - is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.?

Even in rich countries playing with subsidized wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfill the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.

Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.

As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low-density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines - killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands - is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.

It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fiberglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal-mining output.

Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.

The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.

The truth is, if you want to power civilization with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which - thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing - are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.

And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer.

Spectator.co.uk/podcast
Matt Ridley discusses wind power

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How Soon Will Media Report Record Crop Production in our Warming World?

By James Taylor

Global warming alarmists and their media allies launched a new scare this week claiming global warming is causing crop failures and food shortages around the globe. In one of their biggest whoppers ever, the media are claiming global warming has displaced “millions” of farmers in India and is causing - or will soon cause - similar devastation to farmers and crops in Bangladesh, Syria, and Honduras. Objective evidence, however, decimates the assertion and shows crop yields continue to set annual records as growing seasons lengthen, frost events become less frequent, soil moisture improves, and more atmospheric carbon dioxide fertilizes crops and plant life.

A January 10 Google News search for “global warming” listed near the very top of its search results an article titled, “How soon will climate change force you to move?” by an outlet called Fast Company. Among other sensationalist climate claims, the article made the claims listed above about global warming, crop failures, and resulting forced migration. Fast Company, as it turns out, is trying to pull a fast one on you.

It is true that waxing and waning food production has been one of the most powerful components in the rise and fall of civilizations. At Katowice, Poland, during the United Nations COP24 climate meetings in November 2018, Heartland Institute senior fellow Dennis Avery powerfully showed that throughout history periods of increased crop yields have led to rising civilizations and expanding human populations. Conversely, periods of declining crop yields triggered the fall of civilizations and led to famine, death, and contracting human populations.

Importantly, Avery showed that periods of global warmth simulated the increased crop yields that led to expanding human populations. Periods of global cooling repressed crop yields and led to misery, death, and contracting human populations. The question is, has anything changed such that our modest present warming is causing declining crop production and resulting catastrophes?

Let’s first examine the claims regarding India. Fast Company claims “drought in some areas has forced millions of farmers to move.” For support, the article cites a Reuters article from July 2018 that interviews a failed farmer from India’s Madhya Pradesh state claiming global warming and poor rainfall caused his failure as a farmer and his relocation to metropolitan New Delhi. Poor rainfall “has caused repeated and widespread crop failures” Reuters claimed. In summary, Fast Company cites another news organization’s profile of a failed farmer to support its alarmist climate assertions.

However, crop data from India eviscerates the claim that global warming, through drought or any other mechanism, is causing rampant crop failure in India. The Indian government reports that Indian farmers produced a record amount of food grains in 2017-2018, topping the previous record that was set in 2016-2017. “The year 2017-18 had, in fact, witnessed record production of all major crops like Rice (112.91 MT), wheat (99.70 MT), coarse cereals (46.99 MT) and pulses (25.23 MT),” the Times of India reported, citing official government data.

Notably, favorable climate conditions - and most importantly, abundant rainfall - spurred the record crop production. “Backed by good monsoon rainfall last year, India had produced record 284.83 million tonnes of food grains in 2017-18 crop year,” Times of India observed.

The 2017-18 Indian crop year merely continued a longstanding trend of record crop production as our planet modestly warms. The international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports Indian farmers have successively set new records almost every year this decade.

The Fast Company and Reuters articles are not outliers. Global warming activists in the establishment media are always looking to find and interview somebody who blames their own personal shortcomings and misfortune on global warming. Scapegoating global warming is a convenient way for failed farmers and others to pass along the blame for their own personal failures. But if you are a farmer in India and you are a failure at your craft, you are the exception rather than the rule. The objective data show, without any room for debate, that crop production continues to improve and set records nearly every year as our modest global warming continues.

Perhaps Fast Company’s discredited claims about global warming, drought, and crop failures in India are an isolated error and the article was correct about its claims regarding other countries and regions. Actually, er, no.

According to agricultural economists at World Bank, as reported by CEIC Data, Bangladesh enjoyed record crop production in 2016, the last year for which data is available. The 2016 record beat out the previous record year - 2014 - and was preceded by the third highest production year - 2015. Do you see a pattern here? Crop production in Bangladesh is 33 percent higher than it was merely a decade ago. According to a World Bank report accompanying the 2016 data, “Bangladesh’s rural economy, and specifically agriculture, have been powerful drivers of poverty reduction in Bangladesh since 2000.”

How about Honduras? The International Food Policy Research Institute, citing official government data, documents that in 2016 - the most recent year for which there is data - Honduras achieved record production for each of its three staple food crops. Honduran farmers produce record amounts of rice, wheat, and maize. The 2016 record beat the previous record, set in 2015. The next most productive crop year was 2014, followed by 2013. Moreover, Coffee Bureau Intelligence reports that coffee drinkers and coffee farmers also have reason to rejoice - as Honduran coffee production is believed to have set new records in 2018. “Since 2014-2015, Honduras coffee production has increased by more than 12% per year,” Coffee Bureau Intelligence reports.

Syrian crop production also defies alarmist claims. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data show an approximately 50 percent increase in Syrian crop production since 1995. Moreover, the Arab Spring democracy uprisings in Syria and elsewhere, which climate alarmists ‘blame’ on global warming, occurred in 2011, a year in which Syria produced its eighth highest crop yields in history.

Fast Company cited four specific nations in support of its narrative that global warming is causing rampant crop failures, which in turn is causing mass migration. Objective data show, beyond dispute, that Fast Company’s claims are flat-out wrong. But in today’s agenda-driven media climate, don’t expect Fast Company, other media outlets, or Google News to post any corrections to the false reporting.

James Taylor (JTaylor@heartland.org) is senior fellow for environment and climate policy at The Heartland Institute.