While the story is still unfolding and Spanish officials have denied that renewables were the cause of the loss in frequency that shut down all electricity for some 60 million people in Spain and Portugal, several commentators and experts have now publicly come out and confess that the overwhelming reliance on solar at the time of the blackout was to blame.

The literal gaslighting by the increasingly irrelevant mainstream/corporate media was mostly sad. Amusingly, the author of the propaganda piece in Reuters tried to diffuse blame away from the green deities by saying that it wasn’t the renewable energy’s fault, but the “renewables in the modern grid.” Oh-kay.

Matt Levine, of Bloomberg “Money Stuff” fame, has repeatedly hypothesized that ESG—like so much else—was a low-interest rate phenomenon. Once rates and inflation started biting, people were quick to abandon virtue-signaling environment/social justice efforts.

"Here’s a prediction in light of the Spanish disaster: The green wave ... will suffer a similar fate."

When financial and economic factors bite, dreams (nightmares, really) of climate “crises” and their urgent policy proposals go away.

The green “transition” has achieved the sum total of almost nothing in the 30-odd years in which it has ruled the minds of intellectuals and politicians. Don’t believe me? Pull up a graph of the globe’s primary energy consumption by source and see for yourself.

In 1991, the year in which I was born—to take a year at random from the 1990s when the climate change crowd really got going—77.5 percent of energy consumption came from oil, gas, and coal. In 2023, after trillions spent in electrifying grids and putting up solar plants and subsidizing this or that green effort; after insane social and political efforts to fly less and eat sustainable and recycle plastic and on and on, that same number stands at 76.55 percent. Three decades of force, money, and propaganda and you haven’t even moved the needle.

Turns out, people want their energy, their cars, their stuff, their trips, and to survive for that matter.

The lesson when we look at the historical record of humanity and its relationship with the natural world is that we get more and better (cheaper, faster, safer, more stable); not worse or more expensive or less reliable.

In time, the full extent of the “green transition” will pass into historical curiosity of interest to nobody but sociologists and political historians. Good riddance.