The parallel media has been reporting on several instances where adopters of the all-electric future appear to have swallowed a red pill. Net Zero is not so much an emissions goal as a result for investors, so they are talking their green elsewhere.
Just as the quarterly reporting season revealed crippling losses for wind power and EV’s, so it is with Solar energy.
The general US S&P shares index gained 15% this year but The Invesco Solar ETF (Fund) which invests in solar energy stocks around the world — fell by a dire 40%. Even the US “Inflation Reduction Act” couldn’t save the solar sector. As finances tighten with rising interest rates, apparently solar panel orders are among the first to be cancelled.
This collapse is despite the ongoing support of tax dollars from government subsidies, price support, and new project funding: the government’s gold-digging, green-energy trophy wife. At first, she was the darling of Net Zero, but she has maxed out the credit cards and overextended her spending. All while “hubby” was dumping trillions into foreign wars.
The American economy isn’t the only one in the world, but when it struggles, the world feels it and the Bidenistas have been waterboarding Uncle Sam, and it has wide-ranging side effects.
Some of the worst performers in the whole US share market are solar shares, with SolarEdge and Enphase losing 70% each this year. A few weeks ago, the CEO of SolarEdge said revenues this quarter were about half of what was expected. He blamed “unexpected cancellations” from European distributors. But US demand was down too. Indeed, the bad news started in California, the largest market in the US, when the government slashed home solar “net metering” payments in April by about 75%. Suddenly, it was going to take 10 years to pay off the panels. Solar panels were a luxury item.
Inflation is beating the crap out of everyone. Overextended governments are looking for revenue to fill fiscal potholes. Cutting off the trophy wife is easier than making hard decisions about streamlining government. Austerity that is not limited to marketplace meddling. When the economic rubber hits the road, those people fretting about the imagined harms of a government shutdown will be the first to shut down anything and everything to keep their glorious government funded.
At the same time, Middle America’s misguided belief that humans are responsible for climate change is having a collapse of its own.
According to the results of new survey, there’s been a sizeable shift in just the last five years in the percentage of Americans who believe humans are the primary driver of climate change as opposed to natural changes in the environment.
Though three-quarters of Americans believe climate change is happening, only 49% say it’s mostly or entirely precipitated by human activity — an 11% drop since 2018.
Digging into the demographics, the falloff was most pronounced among Democrats and independents. In 2018, 72% of Democrats said climate change is mostly or entirely a result of human activities; in 2023, that figure fell to 60%. For independents, the decline was even steeper: from 61% in 2018 to 42% in 2023.
Creeping doubt about humans’ impact on climate could be affecting the choices people are making, or not making, to reduce their carbon footprint.
The shift is not huge, but it is meaningful, driven by a handful of crap sandwiches. To get there from here, they will have to sacrifice. They will have infrastructure in their backyard. The Green Dream/nightmare requires tens of thousands of acres of “infrastructure” to create intermittent power that needs more infrastructure to get to you.
And you’ll have to pay for it. Or, you can harden the grid and support natural gas, cleaner coal, oil, hydro, and nuclear -almost none of which you will pay and whose generation will save you money compared to so-called green alternatives. A fact that isn’t presumed to have penetrated the collective consciousness but could.
Investors are skittish, EV makers are pausing expansions, and developers are backing out of projects. As the rats jump ship, Mr. Mrs. and Miss America must step up to ensure that the politicians don’t decide to spend even more of your money on a scheme no one else wants. That happens in the voting booth and in numbers sufficient to prevent the vote-by-mail fraudsters from stuffing the ballot box.
