As promised (or as threatened, if you prefer), President Biden has made quick moves to advance the “greening” of America. Or, more accurately, to satiate the green lobby, an unholy alliance of ignorant virtucrats and corporate rent-seekers. He killed the Keystone XL pipeline (and 11,000 jobs), he banned new gas and oil leases (and fracking) on public lands, he’s rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, and he’s looking to kill federal oil subsidies (though sorting this out properly requires savant-level understanding of our tax code). He’s revealed a $2T environmental plan that aims to eliminate the entire carbon energy sector in 14 years. And that’s just in the first week of his administration. Before he continues to repeat his “millions of new jobs” claim, perhaps someone should read to him Frédéric Bastiat’s Parable Of The Broken Window.
Biden put climate matters at the front of his agenda, in no small part due to the socialists’ pushing their Green New Deal (a catchy title that merges two economically destructive ideas into a Frankenstein’s monster of a plan). That these plans will accomplish far more that has nothing to do with global warming than actual remediation is both deliberate and a tragedy.
Consider the desire to kill off the fracking revolution. And a “revolution” it is:
- It brought energy independence to a nation that was held hostage by its reliance on Middle East oil for decades (and proved Obama spectacularly wrong).
- It enabled America to actually reduce her carbon emissions (not just slow the rate of increase, as China has laughably promised), and do so faster than pledged in the Paris accord (gas produces less than half the carbon dioxide per unit energy that coal does).
- It is offering immediate domestic health benefits (particulate emissions kill 15,000 a year; gas produces orders of magnitude lower particulates and sulphur than coal).
- It has created jobs – real jobs, not government-funded make-work, and done so in many long-depressed regions of the country (Pennsylvania’s northern tier is booming thanks to fracking. New York’s southern tier, which sits on the same Marcellus Shale, remains stagnant thanks to Governor Cuomo’s fracking ban).
All for… what?
Tipping the economic scale toward wind and solar? If they were economically competitive, they’d not need the scale tipped.
Saving groundwater? Fracking has been deemed safe by countless reputable organizations.
Eliminating dirty energy? Our energy needs aren’t going to go away simply by banning production. Slowing the fracking boom means we’ll be falling back onto dirtier forms of carbon energy (cough cough coal), no matter the aspirations that wind and solar will make up the shortfall (here’s a secret: wind and solar need backup base capacity, typically offered by gas turbines that can be ramped up and down easily).
Reducing carbon emissions? Herein lies the farce.
Nothing America does in that regard in this fashion will make a hill-of-beans difference to global atmospheric carbon (John Kerry, hardly a climate skeptic, said so out loud). While we reduce our emissions (thanks again, fracking), much of the rest of the world is producing more carbon than ever, and that’s going to continue. The BRICS nations, in particular, aren’t going to decarbonize their economies the way Biden insists we will and must (and, as the West steps away from carbon energy, it’ll simply become that much cheaper for the rest of the world, further incentivizing its use). China will continue to increase emissions, with only a (rescindable) promise to hit a peak by 2030, and if you believe she’s going to abide by that promise, you’re just kidding yourself. Ditto for the rest of the BRICS. Most nations are already lagging their Paris Accord commitments (which are voluntary, by the way), and it’s acknowledged that 70% of Accord nations will need external financial assistance to approach their pledges.
And there it is: this is about OPM (Other People’s Money), as always. The Paris Accords, like our Green New Deal and most other such programs, are more about wealth transfers, power and control, and economic bludgeoning than they are about saving the planet. This is further demonstrated by a couple additional points: that no one’s talking about nuclear power (the greenest of all), that geo-engineering research, which would obviate the need for global decarbonization and allow the West to address issues without complete compliance (and, I’d bet, more cheaply), is not being funded, and that many don’t want either of these green initiatives because they’d make it less necessary for people to alter their behaviors, and less easy to leverage global warming for the purposes of power and control. Indeed, “green” is interlaced with a desire to “move away” from capitalism (and presumably to the ideology that murdered a couple hundred million people last century).
When parsed analytically, the Left’s “green” plans fall apart in the context of their stated purpose. How much of this is ignorance, how much is deliberate misdirection, and how much is self-delusion is tough to say. What’s easier to conclude is that they’re able to do all this stuff because the public is deeply ignorant of all that I’ve written here.
Much of that ignorance is to be expected. After all, relying on experts is how society functions. Specialization and division of labor are fundamental to productive societies (Leonard Read’s I, Pencil should be required reading for every school kid); no one can be expert in everything.
Unfortunately, those in whom we’ve invested our trust have failed us, leaving us (collectively) vulnerable to misinformation and outright deceit. We abet this bad behavior by our tribalism and groupthink, wherein we are more apt to believe what we’re told by people of our team, simply because they’re of our team. And, we perpetuate this when we reject “emperor has no clothes” revelations in favor of our cognitive biases.
So, because the Left has declared itself concerned with global warming and the need to mitigate it, left-leaning voters go along with, and even defend, all that they’re told needs to be done, including a terribly counterproductive ban on fracking. That fracking (and carbon energy production in general) is a “red state” thing only reinforces this tribal blindness, as do the sign-carriers (making a sign and carrying it around conveys absolutely no additional expertise on a subject, by the way) with whom some identify.
I’ve long applied a particular litmus test for global warming discussions: Anyone who purports to be concerned about anthropogenic climate change and who wants action taken, and doesn’t open the conversation with “more nuclear power,” is either ignorant (as in under-informed, mis-informed, or dis-informed), lazily virtue-signaling, or pursuing other (hidden) goals. Anyone who hears my advocacy of nuclear power and replies “Three Mile Island!,” “Fukushima!,” “Chernobyl!!,” or “Nuclear Waste!,” (as if anyone who knows anything about nuclear power hasn’t heard and refuted these countless times) is similarly ignorant of the facts. And, by virtue of thinking that this elementary-school level of erudition qualifies as a legitimate rebuttal, further demonstrates the dilettante’s unseriousness.
Fortunately, all this ignorance is easily cured, especially nowadays with the world’s body of knowledge literally at one’s fingertips. All it takes is a bit of will and enough clear-headedness to look past the spoon-fed stuff.
Until a big chunk of the population exercises that will, however, we will be foist upon by politicians and hucksters (but I repeat myself) who play to our emotions in order to advance their true agendas: power and payola.
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Its a shame that the broadcast news won’t do some reporting on Nuclear Safety.There are some good YouTube Videos on it.
I think the Greens think if carbon sources of energy are shut down then effort will be put into solar and wind and a solution will be found. They look at the past break throughs and see the Manhattan Project, Apollo, and more recent Space X etc. and think that can happen with green energy. I think the breakthrough on green energy is like Fusion it will always be Thirty Years away. which brings up the other problem even with a breakthrough it will take time to implement, but i guess we can learn to live with brownouts.
The need is for energy storage, and that is a big hill to climb. NOt to mention it will need rare Earth metals, but I guess strip mining etc. is okay for that.
I think you’re being optimistic in the Greens’ depth of thought on this. This is all about self-righteousness, and it’s rooted in part in that lazy and age old conspiratorial attitude that “good” energy is being suppressed by Big Oil, for one thing. There’s no economic calculus involved, and when you try to bring it up, the loudmouths shout stuff about “economics don’t matter if there’s no more planet.”
Which is idiocy, of course, with apologies to actual idiots. They simply trust that their team leaders have figured out that wind and solar can be made to work if they simply push the right buttons, and that there won’t be much noticeable impact on their lives.
That last big may actually be true – most of these folks are well-to-do, and wouldn’t suffer that much if their electricity bills doubled. In fact, they might even enjoy that, because they’d feel they’re “doing good” by paying more.
As for nuclear, the word from on high is that it is Bad, and the facts don’t matter. Nuclear-Bad sells *very* well, because our deepest fears are of things we don’t know or understand, and it takes some time to understand nuclear power, the true safety record, the realities of TMI, Fukushima, etc.
So, the Press makes money pitching Nuclear-Bad, people who are too lazy to educate themselves fall for it because it’s “their” Press that’s telling them Nuclear-Bad, and politicians look like they “care” by saying Nuclear-Bad.
BTW, if you haven’t seen Pandora’s Promise, I highly recommend it.
Greetings from ‘nuclear banned’ Australia!
As it happens. I’ve amused myself for the past decade or so assembling a number of interactive bits of software about the weather whereby your average citizen may check things out for themselves – a few brave ones do. In the process I worked out that there’s a certain mindset that is terrified of the weather – the dire, future climate-changed ‘End of the World’ variety – and, by and large, these people are terrified to look at good news as, I suspect, it might unbalance their egos – or something.
In the process of assembling the bits and pieces, I discovered what is going on right now about the development of ‘modern’ nuclear, about which most people know absolutely nothing. Indeed, a very normal reaction to it is exactly the same as climate alarmism and, most recently, the coronavirus panic. (And it’s fascinating to see the bureaucratic response to this pandemic, depending on the colour [note correct Australian spelling!] of the government of the day. Indeed, I’ve been collecting a lot of information about this: http://www.galileomovement.com.au/media/ACOVID19Overview2.pdf, and it has become quite clear that the same forces are at work with this!)
In the last few weeks I’ve assembled a little PDF about nuclear, rather like a slide show, with a few links here and there, designed not to ‘blow people’s brains’, and to keep the message simple. Should they wish to know more, then there’s a Part 2. (You might not be that surprised at what you might find in Part2!)
I’d be most interested in any observations you might make about it as I’m hoping that something like this let loose here, and aimed especially at our propagandised Youth, might lead in the first instance to an un-banning of nuclear technology and also start to do some serious damage to the climate change FRAUD.
http://www.galileomovement.com.au/media/SaveThePlanetStart.pdf
Michael, hello.
Thanks for the comments, and I will check them out.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the facts regarding global warming are no longer relevant – the West has decided it’s going to act as if the catastrophic predictions are Gospel, and Corporate America is moving en masse toward Green.
So, rather than argue my “lukewarmist” views, I argue for remedies that will be less economically ruinous and less spitting-in-the-wind pointless. Nuclear is part of those arguments (and I’ve been a nuclear proponent for pretty much my entire life).
I expect that nuclear power will remain out of favor until people start experiencing the down sides of forced decarbonization in favor of wind/solar, as the latter fail to produce as promised. Then, we *may* see softening, with more favorable press coverage and a few more politicians seeing the light.
“economics don’t matter if there’s no more planet.” The planet does not matter if there are no people
Indeed.
http://www.therootsofliberty.com/the-earth-doesnt-care
Fwd: Some Recent Energy & Environmental News – 2/8/21
Peter, John Droz reprinted your piece. Steve
The Cockroaches my disagree.
Peter, I feel that we are fighting a hopeless battle. Thanks to social media, we are now living in a world where a Yuppie accountant who has never sat in a science classroom since grade school is a more credible authority on what is and is not possible with the electrical grid than is a degreed electrical engineer with over four decades of work experience in that field. As much as I would like to think otherwise, I fear the only way the masses are going to learn is when their power ration is six hours of electricity per day, and that is only if the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. I feel sorry for my grandchildren’s future energy poverty, but at least I tried to tell them.
Unfortunately, I think you’re right, in that the only way out of this is through pain. Avoidable pain, but, to quote a famous wizard, “the burned hand teaches best.”
Peter:
Excellent and accurate observations. I’m a physicist and national energy expert. My website is WiseEnergy.org. My biggest beef in this area is that Conservative allies do not work well together — where the situation on the Left is the opposite. Please email me!