More Bad News For The Anti-Energy, Green Greed Brigade

What do solar energy companies have in common with Second Lieutenants on the first day of the Somme? Yes, that's right. (H/T GWPF)

In Germany, especially, the attrition rate has been amazing. According to Reuters, no fewer than 5,000 German solar companies have gone bust in the last year, shedding around 20,000 jobs.

Workers in Germany's once booming solar energy industry face a shakeout of major proportions following declines in the price of solar panels over the past year.

Cuts in subsidies for solar energy, weaker demand for panels and fierce competition from cheaper Asian rivals are eating into what was once the world's biggest hub for the production of solar cells, taking the shine off an industry that was effectively born in Germany.

Well boo hoo. That's the price you pay for building an industry which should never have existed in the first place – and certainly wouldn't have done had it not been for the heavy subsidy programme launched a decade ago by the Schroeder-led Green/Social Democrat coalition.

Whenever I make this point, the menagerie of trolls who congregate below this blog go into paroxysms of self-righteous rage, accusing me of heartlessness. No, trolls: heartless is when governments confiscate money from taxpayers and squander it on creating fake (aka "green") jobs in fake industries which go bust the second the exchequer realises it no longer has enough money to keep them on the life support machine.

And though, as I've said before, I have a certain degree of sympathy for the workers who joined the solar industry in good faith, imagining it had – ho ho – a bright future and would provide them with a lasting career, I have none whatsoever for those at management/investment level. If people like Tom Singh, brother of Britain's third most-famous celebrity mathematician Simon Singh, end up getting their fingers badly burned by solar, well, caveat emptor. Presumably they must have done their due diligence. And if they did, it would have been perfectly clear that solar power is little more than a rent-seeker's charter: it does not – and quite possibly never will – create real value; it is obviously unsuited to northern climes; it is, like most renewable energy, yet another pernicious scheme by which wealth is transferred compulsorily from the poor into the pockets of the rich and cynical.

Something similar is happening to the European carbon trading industry. In November last year, you'll gleefully recall, the US Chicago Carbon Trading Exchange (CCX) collapsed when, in the space of two years, the carbon dioxide price fell from $7 a tonne to 7 cents a tonne. And where the US leads, Europe follows.

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