https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3762043-europes-climate-obsession-could-prove-deadly/
The wind has died down again in Europe. Unless you’re selling kites or umbrellas, you probably don’t care.
But if you’re a public official, responsible for making sure your citizens stay warm this winter, you may be panicking. In the climate-obsessed European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK), where a decades-long war against fossil fuels caused a radical shift to unstable power sources and enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy chokehold, a growing dependence on wind power is again a source of anxiety.
As the Wall Street Journal reported recently: “wind speeds in Hamburg fell to around 5 meters a second, or about 11 miles an hour, according to the weather forecasting site windy.com.” That wind velocity is apparently the “minimum speed required for electricity generation.”
The Journal explains, “Speeds of around 15 meters a second, or 33 mph, are needed to produce maximum power generation.” Come again? The U.S. weather service declares winds of 31 mph to 63 mph “gale force”; so, all those wind towers being built on the continent and in the U.S. require massive wind speeds to be fully productive? Who knew?
The sad fact is our politicians don’t know, and neither, it seems, do the people running Europe. Even as European countries rush to destroy their economies by pandering to unrealistic climate goals, the U.S. ignores the devastating results.
EU countries have made every wrong turn imaginable in catering to their aggressive climate lobbies — making harmful decisions of exactly the kind being foisted onto Americans via the Biden White House. The climate zealots in the Biden administration, who have plugged global warming considerations into every policy plank of every federal agency, seem to have learned exactly nothing from Europe’s entirely self-inflicted woes.
Europe decided some years ago to move away from fossil fuels, banking on renewables like wind and solar power to supply an increasing portion of their energy needs. Incredibly, today the most-consumed renewable fuel on the continent is wood, which one team of climate scientists says “emits more CO2 emissions than coal.”