RUSH: This story I just saw, and I wanted to bring it to your attention. It’s from The Daily Caller. The headline: “Deadly London Tower Fire Fueled By ‘Green Energy’ Rules — London’s Grenfell Tower was made worse by government ‘green energy requirements’ that allowed fire to rapidly engulf the building Wednesday, leaving at least 17 people dead and scores more wounded or missing.
“While it’s unknown what sparked the fire, experts say that the cladding, or exterior insulation, created a chimney effect through which the fire rapidly spread upwards. The cladding was added to Grenfell’s exterior in 2015 as part of a $12.8 million retrofit. ‘I have never seen a fire that has engulfed an entire building like this in a career of more than 30 years,’ Matt Wrack, who heads the Fire Brigades Union, told The Telegraph. ‘It could be that this is the quest for sustainability trumping other concerns,’ echoed Dr. Jim Glockling of the Fire Protection Association. ‘There has been an emerging body of evidence surrounding some of the materials being used and now we have an appalling demonstration of what can happen,’ Glockling said.”
Wouldn’t that be — what, ironic — that the green crowd got in there and demanded a retrofit of this building to enforce sustainable green energy requirements, and the requirements ended up turning the whole building into a tinderbox? Green energy rules might have led to it.
I’m surprised this story even got out. Normally the Drive-Bys in the U.K. would want to suppress anything anybody out there happens to be saying about something like this. But, you know, it’s true, if you look in many areas where green, sustainable energy is being employed, like windmills are killing birds left and right and causing havoc in communities, and they’re not generating much power, and it’s a disaster.
The solar industry is an absolute disaster. The number of panels that you need to create so little electricity that you can’t really effectively run anything on them. If you have a cloudy day you’re sunk. And every one of these industries is wildly subsidized. They couldn’t make it on their own. There simply isn’t a market for these new sustainable green energy things, wind and solar. By that, I mean there’s no way to make a profit.
Even Elon Musk. Elon Musk has been subsidized to over $4 billion. I don’t know if the young tech crowd even knows it, but Elon Musk did not even found Tesla. Did you know that? You didn’t know that? No. He bought Tesla from its original founders. No, it’s not a big deal. I’m just pointing it out. It’s just a little known fact. But the point is even Musk has gotten over $4 billion in subsidies in order to make this electric car.
I hear people raving — Tim Cook at Apple the other day was somewhere and he was raving. Oh, Apple’s new product. Apple is trying to design software for an autonomous car, self-driving car. Cook announced that in an interview at Bloomberg. And let me tell you something as an aside. If Apple is developing the software and the mechanisms for a self-driving car, then you can bet Apple is also developing a car.
The one thing Apple does not do is build software for other people’s stuff. And this is an edict going all the way back to Steve Jobs. They’re gonna do an iPhone, they’re gonna own it all. They’re gonna own the hardware. They’re gonna own the software and they’re gonna eventually own as much in it as they can, and they are in the process of having their own chip division. The thing is Apple never writes software for somebody else’s hardware.
So if they’re building a system for a self-driving car then, by definition, Apple’s developing their own car as well. Where are they gonna test it? But, anyway, when he was doing this, he was talking about (paraphrasing), “Isn’t it such a pleasure to get in your electric car and never have to stop at a gas station. Never have to stop at a filling station. You get in your electric car and you drive down the road and every time you pass a gas station, you just wave at ’em knowing you never have to stop.”
Well, I mean, I guess that’s cool. But you do have to find some place to park your car for a number of hours to charge it up. The thing that I don’t get about the electric car — I actually get it. I just think it’s interesting to point out. Where do they think the batteries in these cars get their juice? When they plug those cars in to recharge the batteries, where’s the juice coming from? Ninety-nine out of a hundred places it’s coming from a coal-fired power plant.
They’re all opposed to coal. They’re opposed to coal because it’s dirty and it’s filthy and it pollutes and it’s a dark color. You don’t want it on your clothes, it’s icky. We don’t like coal, it’s horrible. And yet they couldn’t drive their electric cars without coal-fired power plants. They tell themselves they are somehow saving energy and they are developing renewable, clean energy, and yet it requires coal, clean coal or otherwise, in order to fire up the batteries in their cars so they can drive past gas stations and wave when they go by.
How do you rationalize that? How do you on one hand talk of how coal is yesterday’s news, you hate it, you despise it, it’s dirty, it’s filthy, and then you go out and design a revolutionary product that cannot operate without it? And then you never mention coal and you never mention conventional electricity. You just talk about your brand-new battery tech, which is basically charging in capacity, but there is no alternative way to get juice onto a battery that does not use a massive supply of electricity, which still in this country is created mostly by coal-fired power plants. I think it is gigantic hypocrisy.