On Sunday Feb.4, a weekly news program aired in the Netherlands on the titled subject. H/T Climate Scepticism. The video clip is below with English subtitles. For those who prefer reading, I provide the substantial excerpts from the program with my bolds.

How many of you have Green Electricity? I will estimate 69%

And how much nationally? Oh, 69%!

So we are very average, and in a good way, because the climate is very important.

Let me ask: Green electricity comes from . . .?

Yes, electricity produced from windmills and solar panels.

Nearly 2/3 of the Dutch are using it. That’s the image.

Well I have green news and bad news.

The green news: Well done!

The bad news: It is all one big lie.

Time for the Green Electrical Shocks.

Shock #1: The green electricity from your socket is not green.

When I switched to green electricity I was very proud.

I thought, Yes, well done! The climate is getting warmer, but not any more thanks to me.

Well, that turned out to be untrue.

All producers deliver to one communal grid. Green and grey electricity all mix.

The electricity you use is always a mix of various sources.

OK. It actually makes sense not to have separate green and grey cables for every house.

So it means that of all electricity, 69% is produced in a sustainable way. But then:



Shock #2: Green Electricity is mostly fake.

Most of the green electricity we think we use comes from abroad.

You may think: So what. Green is green.

But that electricity doesn’t come from abroad, it stays abroad.

If you have green electricity at home, it may mean nothing more than that your supplier has bought “green electricity certificates”.

In Europe green electricity gets an official certificate,

Instead of selling on the electricity, they sell on those certificates.

Norway, with its hydro power, has a surplus of certificates.

Dutch suppliers buy them on a massive scale, while the electricity stays in Norway.

The idea was: if countries can sell those certificates, they can make money by producing more green electricity.

But the Norwegians don’t produce more green electricity.

But they do sell certificates.

The Dutch suppliers wave with those certificates, and say Look! Our grey electricity is green.

Only one country has produced green electricity: Norway.

But two countries take the credit.

Norway, because they produce green electricity, and the Netherlands because, on paper, we have green electricity. Get it? That’s a nice deal.

More and more countries sell those certificates. Italy is now the top supplier.

We buy fake green electricity from Italy, like some kind of Karma ham.

Now, let’s look again at the green electricity we all think we use.

So the real picture isn’t 69%. If you cancel the certificates, only 21% of electricity is really green.

Nowadays you can even order it separately if you don’t want to be part of that Norway certificates scam.

You may think: 21% green is still quite a lot. But it is time for:

Shock #3: Not all energy is electricity.

If you talk about the climate, you shouldn’t just consider electricity but all energy.

When you look at all energy, like factories, cars, trains, gas fires, then the share of consumer electricity is virtually nothing.

If you include everything in your calculation, it turns out that only 6% of all the energy we use in the Netherlands is green. It is a comedy, but wait:

Shock #4: Most green energy doesn’t come from sun or wind, like you might think.

Even the 6%, our last green hope, is fake. According to the CBS we are using more sun and wind energy, but most of the green energy is produced by the burning of biomass.

Ah, more than half of the 6% green energy is biomass.



Ridiculous. What is biomass really? It is organic materials that we encounter every day.

Like the content of a compost heap. How about maize leaves or hay?

The idea behind burning organic materials is that it will grow up again.

So CO2 is released when you burn it, but it will be absorbed again by new trees.

However, there is one problem. The forest grows very slowly and our power plants burn very fast.

This is the fatal flaw in the thinking about biomass. Power plants burn trees too fast, so my solution: slow fire. Disadvantage: it doesn’t exist. So this is our next shock.

Shock#5: Biomass isn’t all that sustainable.

It’s getting worse. There aren’t enough trees in the Netherlands for biomass.

We can’t do it on our own. We don’t have enough wood, so we get it from America.

In the USA forests are cut at a high rate, Trees are shredded and compressed into pellets.

These are shipped to the Netherlands and end up in the ovens of the coal plants.

It’s a disaster for the American forests, according to environmental groups.

So we transport American forests on diesel ships to Europe.

Then throw them in the oven because it officially counts as green energy.

Only because the CO2 released this way doesn’t count for our total emissions.

In reality biomass emits more CO2 than natural gas and coal.

These are laws of nature, no matter what European laws say.

At the bottom line, how much sustainable energy do we really have in the Netherlands?

Well, the only real green energy from windmills, solar panels etc. Is only 2.2%. of all the energy we use.

In Conclusion

So the fact that 2/3 of the audience and of all Dutch people use green electricity means absolutely nothing. It’s only 2.2%, and crazier still, the government says it should be at 14% by 2020.

They promised: to us, to Europe, to planet Earth: 14 instead of 2.2.

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.

They are only saving the climate on paper.

Summary Comment

As the stool above shows, the climate change package sits on three premises. The first is the science bit, consisting of an unproven claim that observed warming is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. The second part rests on impact studies from billions of research dollars spent uncovering any and all possible negatives from warming. And the third leg is climate policies showing how governments can “fight climate change.”

It is refreshing to see more and more articles by people reasoning about climate change/global warming and expressing rational positions. Increasingly, analysts are unbundling the package and questioning not only the science, but also pointing out positives from CO2 and warming. And as the Dutch telecast shows, ineffective government policies are also fair game.

More on flawed climate policies at Reasoning About Climate