Here in the U.S., the second Trump administration has largely pulled the plug on the suite of crazy energy policies marching under the banner of “fighting climate change.” But the same is not true in many other advanced-economy countries, for example Germany, Australia and the UK.

Consider the UK. In the 2024 election the voters gave a large parliamentary majority to the left-wing Labour Party. The resulting government has doubled down on the policies of Net Zero, fossil fuel suppression, and generating energy from “renewables.”

Convinced of their own correctness, and indeed righteousness, the government seeks to silence all dissent from its policies, characterizing disagreement as “misinformation” or “climate denial.”

Meanwhile, however, when it comes to actual energy production, reality keeps asserting itself.

I have been writing here for about a decade that wind and solar would inevitably prove to be far more expensive for producing useful electricity than other methods like fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro.

The reasons are not difficult to understand. Wind and solar, due to intermittency, are not capable of powering a full-time electrical grid on their own. To make the grid capable of fulfilling customer demand 24/7/365, wind and solar require large amounts of additional capital infrastructure — dispatchable back-up generation, energy storage, additional transmission capacity, and more. If wind and solar prove insufficient to eliminate dispatchable back-up generation, then you find yourself running (and paying for) two duplicative systems, when you could have had only one. Energy storage as a potential solution to intermittency turns out to be impossibly expensive. If the only back-up generation you can find that works is powered by fossil fuels, then you haven’t even succeeded in achieving zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector.

And yet we have been, and continue to be, subjected to a constant drumbeat of advocacy claiming that wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity. I’ll give you a few examples of that in a moment.

So who is right?

Before everything got disrupted by the attempt on President Trump’s life, I had written a post last week titled “Big Tech On The Path To Net Zero.”

That post looked at the most recently issued “sustainability” reports from Google, Microsoft and Meta, and noted that all three admit to going rapidly in the opposite direction from “net zero.” As their businesses grow in the direction of power-hungry data centers and AI, they inevitably require large incremental amounts of always-available electricity — the kind of electricity that wind and sun cannot provide. Lacking viable alternatives to fossil fuels, their “emissions” rise.

But, you might ask, how about Amazon and Apple?