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Green Energy Chickens Coming Home to RoostURL:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/f
oost-bruce-thornton/
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MAG
Green Energy Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Never in history has a civilization willfully embarked on destroying its own
material foundations.
Thu Jun 2, 2022
Bruce Thornton <https://www.frontpagemag.com/
"Net-zero carbon is a dangerous fantasy that in the West puts at risk our
economy and national security, and in the developing nations hinders their
ability to improve their economies and quality of life. If the war on carbon
conducted by states like California and New York, and by the current federal
administration continues, as soon as this summer we will see more damage
done to our economy and well-being, the wages of feckless and irrational
anti-carbon "green energy" delusions."-Bruce Thornton
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Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom
Center.
This year will graphically demonstrate the malign consequences of the
misguided efforts to replace cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy with
unreliable, inefficient "renewable" energy like wind and solar. Never in
history has a civilization willfully embarked on destroying its material
foundations, based solely on a hypothesis rather than scientifically
established fact.
The first red flag alerting us to this feckless policy appeared during
Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Much of Europe--the most aggressive nations in
replacing fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels--has grown
dependent on Russian exports to make up for the energy lost from shutting
down nuclear and coal-fired power plants. Since directly helping Ukraine by
fighting is politically impossible, sanctions were imposed on Russia's oil
and gas industries.
But sanctions severe enough to concentrate Putin's mind carried a political
cost as well as an economic one. So Europe is still buying Russian energy,
postponing tougher sanctions until the end of the year. The result has been
the embarrassing and dishonorable spectacle of European countries helping to
finance Russia's brutal war crimes. Indeed some have accepted Putin's
condition that purchases be made in rubles, thus mitigating the damage to
Russia's economy.
Here at home, warnings of electricity blackouts across the country this
summer have not slowed down many states' increased efforts to shutter
electrical plants powered by coal, natural gas, and nuclear fission. In New
York, Governor Kathy Holchul has announced the state's commitment to
enforcing a requirement that new power plants must achieve "zero on-site
greenhouse gas emissions for new construction no later than 2027." This
policy of wishful thinking follows New York's Climate Act of 2019, which
requires that all power generation comes from "green" sources by 2040,
including 70% from renewable energy by 2030.
In California, the California Political Review
<https://www.capoliticalreview
rical-grid-has-an-ev-problem/?
xFUG2wVCQ32s8zlv_nCUDo> reports, demolition of four dams will soon begin,
"with no replacement for the water and energy they provide." Compounding
this blunder, in two years the state's last nuclear power plant, which
provides 10% of the state's energy, will be shut down without any plans to
replace that loss. And even worse, the Democrats who run the state are
sticking with plans to banish gas-powered vehicles from the state by 2035,
replacing them with 8 million electric vehicles in a state already incapable
of keeping the lights on in hot weather or during wildfires that damage
transmission lines. According to one stud
<https://www.bcg.com/publicati
c-vehicles> y, achieving this goal of 30 million EVs would require electric
power companies with 2-3 million customers to invest between $1700 and $5800
in grid upgrades per vehicle, costs that will no doubt be passed along to
customers.
Adding insult to injury, rather than spending the state's surplus revenue
and remaining covid swag from the feds on preparing for this summer's
looming blackouts and water shortages, Gov. Newsome has proposed
<https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/0
lation-relief-package/> an $18.1 billion "Inflation Relief Package," a
grab-bag of giveaways including up to $800 in cash to registered vehicle
owners, free public transit, and subsidies for child care. Needless to say,
this new infusion of cash into the economy will do nothing to lower
inflation, and in fact will make it worse.
New York and California, however, are just following the lead of the federal
government. The Biden administration has been just as feckless in its drive
to eliminate fossil fuels and automobiles. It has shut down pipelines,
cancelled leases for drilling in federal lands and waters, and strangled the
petroleum industry with more regulations, even as the national average cost
of a gallon of gas approaches $5.
Yet our country possesses abundant energy resources and the technologies for
extraction such as fracking to produce all the cheap energy we need--if that
production was not thwarted by environmental lobbies, virtue-signaling
corporate boards, green subsidies grifters, and naïve nature-lovers who
promote government regulations that guarantee we will not have enough
energy, and that what we do have will be punitively expensive.
What makes these common "green energy" policies so astonishing is the lack
of "settled science" to justify them. Anthropogenic, Catastrophic Global
Warming adherents claim that additional atmospheric CO2 caused by humans
will, in a few decades, have effects devastating enough to destroy
civilization. This conclusion is buttressed by little more than computer
models that disagree with each other, and depend on data inputs that are
either fabricated or rife with confirmation bias.
But the problem is even worse than that. Even if what "greens" predict is
true, outside the West few countries trying to develop their economies are
going to give up cheap, abundant coal to generate electricity. China, India,
and Russia, the first, third, and fourth largest emitters of CO2, continue
to burn coal to generate energy, paying only lip-service to the West's
climate virtue-signaling and efforts to reduce emissions by switching to
"renewable" energy. This mean that even if the West eliminates all its
emissions, it will not be enough to stave off the predicted warming
apocalypse. But it will be sufficient for weakening, if not destroying,
Western economies.
Take the obsession with electric vehicles. Their batteries require
rare-earth elements like cobalt and lithium that have to be mined,
processed, and transported using diesel-powered machinery, bulldozers, and
trucks, which of course spew more CO2 into the atmosphere. The great
majority of these rare-earth elements are mined and processed outside the
West, especially in China and Congo. This creates a dangerous dependency on
geopolitical rivals and enemies.
Next, for electric cars to advance beyond a taxpayer subsidized novelty and
replace gas- or diesel-powered vehicles, electric grids will have to be
enlarged substantially, and charging stations will have to multiply.
Available, reliable electricity supplies will have to grow by orders of
magnitude presently unattainable. And batteries with much more storage
capability will need to be developed. Worse, our current most reliable
energy sources--nuclear and natural gas--which could help us reach those
goals are being proscribed and replaced with unreliable wind and solar
energy, which produce energy less than 20% of the time.
The issue is not just about more electricity for our cars and homes. As
Vaclav Smil, who believes in anthropogenic global warming, writes
<https://www.amazon.com/How-Wo
1_1?crid=3V52SU4HU90E1&keyword
refix=how+the+w%2Caps%2C252&sr
fuels have been the key to the creation of the modern world. Our amazing
physical infrastructure and technologies are the fruit of plastics,
concrete, and steel, all of which use fossil fuels in their production and
assembly into modern skyscrapers, highways, and transportation resources.
More critical are the improvements in growing and producing food-stuffs that
have lifted billions of people out of malnutrition and famine. This
achievement has been made possible by nitrogen, one of the basic
plant-foods, extracted from ammonia using natural gas. Nitrogen fertilizers
have increased crop yields and productivity per unit of land. And of course,
every phase of food production-- from tractors to container ships to diesel
trucks delivering food to grocery stores, and the factories that make all
those vehicles-- are powered by electricity generated by fossil fuels or
natural gas.
Smil illustrates how important nitrogen has been, and how critical fossil
fuels are in producing abundant food, by examining just three important
foods: bread, which give us carbohydrates; chicken (protein), and tomatoes
(Vitamin C). One medium-sized tomato, for example, requires four tablespoons
of diesel. "None of them," Smil writes, "could be produced so abundantly, so
reliably, and so affordably without considerable fossil fuel subsidies . . .
. [F]or now, and for the foreseeable future, we cannot feed the world
without relying on fossil fuels." Indeed, 20% today's energy supply goes to
producing food.
The same holds true for plastics, concrete, and steel, all of which rely on
fossil fuels for their production. As for replacing, in two or three
decades, fossil fuels with wind or solar--as of 2020 only 12% of our total
energy resources--that's a pipe dream. "Both the high relative share and the
scale of our dependence on fossil carbon," Smil writes, "make any rapid
substitutions impossible." The technologies for effecting this replacement
are at best in their infancy, and will require multiple decades of further
research and development before they can replace fossil fuels. So much for
net-zero carbon by 2050.
Moreover, pressuring the developing nations to substitute less reliable
"green energy" for coal, and thus cripple their economic development,
bespeaks the callous arrogance of the selfish rich. The affluent West can
reduce its use of fossil fuels, though not to the extent that we can do
without them altogether. "But," Smil writes, "that is not the case with the
more than 5 billion people whose energy consumption is a fraction" of that
in the affluent West, and "who need much more ammonia to raise their crop
yields to feed their increasing populations, and much more steel and cement
and plastics to build their essential infrastructures."
Net-zero carbon is a dangerous fantasy that in the West puts at risk our
economy and national security, and in the developing nations hinders their
ability to improve their economies and quality of life. If the war on carbon
conducted by states like California and New York, and by the current federal
administration continues, as soon as this summer we will see more damage
done to our economy and well-being, the wages of feckless and irrational
anti-carbon "green energy" delusions.
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