By Paul Homewood
Emissions would come down. It would create a high skill, high wage economy. And it would reboot industry, accelerate productivity, and deliver a boost to growth. For years we have been told that moving to Net Zero would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and billions of euros, dollars and pounds have been thrown at the companies promising to make that happen.
But hold on. Now it turns out that the green jobs are disappearing at an accelerating pace – and the investment in creating them will have been squandered.
There should be plenty of money to be made from heat pumps, especially in a country such as Germany where the Greens are part of the coalition government, and where a relatively new, well-insulated housing stock makes them more than a match for older gas or oil boilers. And yet, it has turned out to be far from easy. According to the German business paper Handelsblatt Stiebel Eltron, one of the country’s largest pump manufacturers has this week been forced to announce job losses. The reason? Sales have been weaker than it expected. Despite generous subsidies for homeowners, and €18.6 million from the state to support production, the pumps are falling flat, with only 90,000 sold in the first half of this year against an official target for 2024 of 500,000.
The trouble is, that is far from an isolated example. Shares in the German battery manufacturer Varta are down by over 80 per cent so far this year, and there are warnings that the company may not survive after making heavy losses on energy storage unit for hybrid sports cars.The Belgium chemical group Umicore announced a €1.6 billion hit last month as slowing sales of EVs hit its battery material business, and it decided to postpone plans for a battery recycling plant. Siemens Energy has announced big losses on its unit that makes the giant wind turbines that were to be built across the countryside and along every coastline. And of course, all the major European auto manufacturers have had to scale back their plans for electric vehicles as sales disappoint, and high-quality, cheap Chinese models take whatever few orders there are.
The list goes on and on. The companies that poured billions into building the industrial infrastructure for the transition to Net Zero are running into trouble one by one.
It is not hard to work out what has gone so badly wrong. Governments have tried to pick winners, backing new technologies before they have proven themselves in the marketplace, and then doubling down on that up with quotas and subsidies even in the face of consumer indifference. Even worse, they have thrown their support behind the wrong businesses, rewarding companies that tick all the right climate change boxes, rather than waiting to see which ones can make the best product at the lowest possible cost. Industrial strategy, as so often in the past, has been a recipe for disaster.
Right, now we are seeing the entirely predictable consequences of that. Money is being wasted on an epic scale, right across the continent. No one should be in the least surprised if many of the green projects the British government has backed turn out to be hopelessly uneconomic as well, yet our energy secretary Ed Miliband, and the climate change fanatics who put constant pressure on the Government to reach Net Zero harder and faster, are intent on pouring even more money into what will inevitably be an even larger series of white elephants. In reality, the “well paid green jobs” are disappearing fast, replaced with poorly paid “green redundancies”. Governments will be left with a huge bill for a costly series of mistakes – and the unfortunate workers who thought they were being offered a lucrative career will have to find something else to do very quickly.
Telegraph article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/15/heat-pumps-could-bring-the-german-economy-
The Most Revolutionary Act 
Who’d a thunk government needs to stay out of the manufacturing business?
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I believe Alexander Hamilton made a big push for manufacturing when he was G. Washington’s first Treasury Secretary. For awhile, the US northeast depended on manufacturing of American produce, like cotton for textiles. Over the years, the US has slowly expanded westward, but always in the service of manufacturing, steel rails for railroads, timber for building and paper products, etc. Now the world is interconnected through the central bankers, who use the stock markets to use fake money to indebt everyone. Germany, originally the home of debt-backed currency, seems to have been caught in its own snare.
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Hamilton also pushed for a central bank. He basically worked for the money grubbers of foreign lands, mainly the city of London.
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Right-O, Papasha404. That was how he managed to fund the federal government. Through tariffs, and a tax on liquor. He also sold government stock in at least two banks, some to members of Congress. Hamilton was a British citizen, born on an island near St. Croix, and worked as a bookkeeper for his employer, who paid his passage and entre to New York with sacks of West Indies sugar.
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I think you should check out what Matthew Ehret has to say about Hamilton and why Aaron Burr (who was a British agent killed him). Hamilton didn’t favor private central banks (this is a fabrication). He favored federally generated credit (which he used to repay the states’ massive revolutionary war debts and to industrialize the US) and protective tariffs – and for this the British hated him.
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Hamilton wasn’t the only one who wanted the US to industrialize. One of the driving force behind the push for US independence was the British ban on manufacturing in the American colonies. Instead of allowing Americans to set up their own textile factories, they were forced to import textiles from Britain.
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Yes, Abigail Adams wrote in her diary that John would send Britih goods, like ribbons and lace, home with packages to her during the embargo on British goods before the Revolution. She would resell them for a profit. Benjamin Franklin went to the UK to hone his engraving skills for his printing business, after he left his apprenticeship with his abusive brother. He came back to set to his own print shop, then was able to get contracts with the Continental Congress to print paper money, and to become the new nation’s first postmaster. George Washington was a big fan, too of industrialization, because he grew uo lnext door to a lifelong mentor, Lord Fairfax, who taught him to ride horses, to shoot, and to survey his vast land holdings.
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Most of the western and five eyes governments are so out of touch with ordinary people because they live in an insular bubble of their own greedy, money grubbing and old boy clique they actually have no idea how the other half lives. They are the political elites far removed from reality, self absorbed and with no self awareness, all too often narcissists but very adept at lying – talking out of both sides of their mouths and totally motivated by self aggrandisement and enrichment. To whit I would draw your attention to the likes of Genocide Joe, Killery Clinton and an extensive list of names going back to the Adams, Justin Trudeau and Christia Freeland(prob. spelt that wrong)Bungling Boris, Keir Starver, (and everyone in between and prior)Angela Merkel, Olaf Schultz, Emanuell Macron, Ursula Von der Leyen, Vlodomir Zelensky(still very much in love with himself)….Oh dear, the list is just too long to continue with, but sure you catch my drift.
I could just throw in the towel but I won’t, it might still come in useful.:)
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Well put, Mohandeer. I think this sums it up neatly.
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John Adams wrote, ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’
Not wanting to anger our Atheist friends let’s skip the religious part and just stick with moral. Unfortunately, today there is no morality in the American political system.
Are the founding fathers spinning in their graves?
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