How arson is caused by climate change is anybody’s guess, but when you’re paid to make tenuous or nonexistent connections, that will always be your default excuse.

Responsibility for the blazes in North Carolina and California falls squarely on human bad actors, whether it’s sloppy forest management or evildoers excited by watching the world burn.

But don’t tell that to Peter Sinclair, who has been turning up as a regular contributor to this fish wrap. He’s fully committed to his wind- and solar-power paymasters’ agenda to blame everything from forest fires to ice storms on human-caused climate change.

As an aside and in the interest of transparency and an antidote to flamboozery, those paymasters (by his public admission) include Invenergy, Apex Clean Energy, and ESA Solar.

In the middle of last week’s muddled attempt at a cogent argument is an attempt to discredit prescribed burns of underbrush and old forest growth with what is, I suppose, a rhetorical question: “[W]ill communities in threatened areas be willing to go along with the disruption, smoke, and inconvenience?” Given the alternatives, the answer would be a definitive yes, of course they would—an ounce of prevention and all that.

Instead, we’re led to believe that divesting from fossil fuels and converting exclusively to solar and wind power will rescue everyone from a climate change apocalypse.

Recent events in Germany present a reality check on so-called renewable energy. The Wall Street Journal stated last weekend that the country “invested so many of hundreds of billions of euros in its green energy transition over the years that no one can tally the precise amount.” Despite Germany’s massive budget-busting, the “lesson for the U.S.” is this: “Yet the share of wind and solar power in the country’s energy mix in the first quarter of this year managed to fail by a lot.”

The WSJ, citing a report released last week by the energy trade association BDEW, noted that renewables dropped from providing 56% of Germany’s electricity consumption in the first three quarters of 2024 to 47% in the last quarter of the year.

“The drop comes despite Germany’s continuing build-out of renewable generation,” the WSJ wrote. “The country has added 872 wind turbines with a capacity of 4.3 gigawatts since April 2024, yet wind-power output fell 16%. Ouch.”

The decrease in wind output isn’t the result of a conspiracy of a cadre of fossil fuel fanatics or the petroleum industry. The WSJ explained: “February and March were unusually wind-free, onshore and offshore. A lack of rain meant hydropower underperformed. March was sunnier than usual, which helped to boost solar-electricity output compared to a year earlier. But we’re talking about Germany in March. Relatively short daylight hours in a northern latitude meant this boost wasn’t enough to offset the decline in wind generation,”

How would Michigan be different?

Remember, wind turbines can’t handle the “higher wind speeds, some of the most extreme winds within the last four years,” according to Sinclair, quoting Consumer’s CEO Garrick Rochow. Constructing wind turbines won’t automatically bring down those excessive wind speeds.

The WSJ puts the final nail in Sinclair’s arguments for exclusive wind and solar when it states that Germany’s “climatic conditions happen regularly enough that the German language has a word for it: Dunkelflaute, or ‘dark stillness.’ It means renewables alone can’t power an advanced industrial economy, as even Berlin is starting to notice.”

Earlier this week, Spain, Portugal, and portions of France suffered what is being called the “first big blackout of the green energy era,” in which tens of millions of residents were left without electricity for more than a day. Even the trains were forced to cease operation.

The culprit was the inability to shed or export the excess solar electricity, another shortcoming of the obsession with renewables.

Bruce Edward Walker (walker.editorial@gmail.com) is a Morning Sun columnist.