The Aztecs Sacrificed Children To Placate The Climate Gods — Britain Isn’t Far Behind

Image credit: BBC

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As well as being notoriously cloudy, Britain needs its electricity much more in winter than summer, but solar power works exactly the other way round, due to inevitable seasonal daylight hours variations. Everyone knows that of course, but current leaders insist on ignoring such realities in pursuit of their net zero climate fantasies. As well as the loss of good farmland, how long the national grid system can survive these policies without ever failing has become a serious question. The costs linked to avoiding blackouts are rising all the time.
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Last week, Ed Miliband approved One Earth, Britain’s second-largest solar farm, says the Telegraph (via Climate Dispatch).

Spread across the Nottinghamshire-Lincolnshire border, it will have 740 megawatts of capacity and could power 200,000 homes. It followed approval for two more enormous solar farms, Peartree Hill in East Yorkshire and Dean Moor in Cumbria.

Britain is now carpeting farmland with glass panels at a startling speed, in pursuit of very ambitious solar power goals. All of which sounds worthy, even sensible, until you remember one salient fact.

A World Bank study ranks Britain second-to-last in the world for practical solar potential (only Ireland is worse); we are relatively dark, cloudy, and northerly.

Conversely, our mild climate and plentiful rain make us exceptionally good at growing grass and crops. We are therefore taking land that nature has optimized for food production and using it to harvest something much harder. It’s like Saudi Arabia converting oilfields into garden centres and watercress beds.
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Sometimes it feels as if Britain has gone uniquely mad. And we are certainly exceptional in our readiness to impose painful and expensive sacrifices upon ourselves at the altar of decarbonisation.

Yet I would argue that we are not quite unprecedented. One society in history matches us in self-harming madness: the Aztecs of ancient Mexico.

When drought loomed, Aztec priests gathered children – some bought from the poor, some the offspring of nobles – and carried them up the sacred mountains to be killed. The priests liked the children to weep as they went, because tears augured rain.
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You see the parallel. We, too, are told the end is nigh unless we suffer, and the more we suffer, the better.

Full article here.
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Talkshop footnote: As of yesterday Ed Miliband is the UK Foreign Secretary.