This is remarkable. A satirical Sunday news programme presented by Arjen Lubach, on a mainstream TV channel in the Netherlands, debunks the green energy con. It’s in Dutch of course, but there are English subtitles.

(Update: Scroll down to find new version of video)

Assuming the subtitles are accurate, he says that green energy is “all one big lie”. He exposes the lie with a series of Groene Schokken. Starting from a figure of 69% of Dutch households that use green electricity, he gradually eats away at that figure.

Schokk 1: There’s no such thing as a green energy supplier. OK, maybe not such a big schokk, but maybe some people do need to be told that there isn’t a special set of cables to your house that only connect to wind turbines and solar panels.

Schokk 2: Green energy is mostly fake. Suppliers merely buy green energy certificates, from countries such as Norway that have plenty of hydropower. This “scam” brings the 69% down to 21%.

Schokk 3: If you look at total energy use – transport, heating etc – rather than just electricity, the 21% figure drops to 6%.

Schokk 4: Most ‘green’ energy doesn’t come from wind or sun. Even that 6% figure is fake. Most of that ‘green’ energy comes from burning biomass. It takes a lot longer to grow a tree than to burn one.

Schokk 5: Biomass is not sustainable. Trees in America are chopped down, formed into pellets, shipped across the Atlantic and burnt. He challenges a government minister, who declares that biomass is sustainable, because this has been established by the European Commission.

The bottom line is that the proportion of genuinely green energy in the Netherlands is 2.2%, which he then contrasts with a government target of 14% by 2020, two years time.

“Instead of making a serious attempt to save the climate, they are only working on accounting tricks, like buying pieces of paper in Norway, and burning American forests.”

Of course, anyone who had been following, say, Bishop Hill for the last ten years, would not be schokked by all this, but it’s good to see it given 10 minutes on a major TV channel. It would never happen on the BBC of course, thanks to the zealotry of Harrabin and Attenborough and the policing of Ward and Hickman.

Update 9 Feb:

The video has mysteriously disappeared from YouTube. Fortunately Ron Clutz has transcribed most of what Lubach said.

Many of his other videos are still up at his YouTube page, including the one-minute weather forecast that came at the end of the green energy story. Interestingly there is a video from a week ago on censorship in which he says “The biggest trend that I foresee for 2018 is…. censorship.”

Apparently the video was removed from YouTube because it showed an incorrect logo (HT Vinny). At this page you can see an explanation and the edited video (go forward to about 15 minutes) but unfortunately that version does not have the English subtitles….

Video is now back at YouTube with English subtitles: