Anti-fossil-fuel climate policies increase energy prices, blackouts and death tolls
Climate policies promoted and imposed by Team Biden and Democrats are based on junk science, headline-grabbing scare stories, and computer models that create far-fetched “scenarios” asserting that fossil fuel use and emissions will cause Earth to warm by 4 degrees C (7 F) over the next 80 years, and cause Arctic warming that will bring colder winters.
Those dire predictions are used to justify more taxpayer-funded “research,” like a recent Columbia University “mortality cost of carbon” study that claims 83 million people (the population of Germany) “could be killed” this century by those rising planetary temperatures. Therefore we must take “immediate action” to “transform” our energy and economic systems, and replace oil, gas and coal with (millions of) wind turbines and (billions of) solar panels and backup batteries.
These policies are lethal for people and planet They would require mining on scales unprecedented in human history, much of it by slave and child laborers, and nearly all using fossil fuels - bringing massive habitat and wildlife losses, air and water pollution, and horrific human health and safety problems.
But since most of the mining, ore processing and manufacturing will occur in other countries, far from the USA, politicians and climateers can say this “alternative energy” is “clean and green.”
Worse, climate policies cause widespread “energy poverty” - energy prices rising above families’ ability to stay adequately warm (or cool) at reasonable cost, given their incomes. That means people die.
Modern housing and energy systems enable people to adapt to and survive even extreme heat and cold - even in Antarctica, which recently had the coldest winter temperatures ever recorded: -61C (-78 F). However, adaptation and survival become nigh impossible when government policies make it hard to heat or cool homes properly amid joblessness, inflation and soaring oil, natural gas, coal and electricity prices.
Indeed, it is often on the coldest and hottest days and nights, when heating or cooling are most essential, that winds blow at inadequate speeds to turn turbine blades and/or the sun shines with inadequate intensity on solar panels, to generate electricity. This (and wind and solar variability in general) results in recurrent blackouts and necessitates “backup” energy: coal, natural gas, diesel, hydroelectric or expensive battery systems, which significantly increase energy costs and worsen energy poverty, illness and death.
Proposed Biden/Democrat Green New Deal policies would require that still perfectly good natural gas furnaces, water heaters, ovens and stoves be replaced with costly heat pumps and electric appliances, powered by expensive, unreliable, weather-dependent wind and solar systems. They would necessitate installing charging stations for electric cars, upgrading home and neighborhood electrical systems to 220 volts, and having pricey battery “power walls” for backup power during increasingly frequent blackouts.
All this would cost trillions of dollars, with families and small businesses bearing the brunt.
Contrary to faulty global warming “research,” far more people die in cold weather than in hot summers. In the United States and Canada, cold causes 45 times more deaths per year than heat: 113,000 from cold versus 2,500 from heat. Worldwide, with air conditioning far less available in already hot countries than in the United States, some 1,700,000 people die annually from cold versus 300,000 from heat.
A 2014 Public Health England University College of London Institute of Health Equity report underscores how energy poverty severely, disproportionately and inequitably affects poor, elderly, fixed-income and minority families - resulting in numerous, needless illnesses, health problems and deaths.
Cold homes cause or exacerbate risks of asthma, bronchitis, flu, cardiovascular disease and other adverse health conditions. Cold temperatures also increase depression, anxiety and other mental health problems, intensifying medical and physical issues. Young children, older people, those with preexisting health conditions and other vulnerable groups are especially susceptible to hypothermia, illness and death.
The Health Equity Institute calculated that one-tenth of all “excess winter deaths” in England and Wales are directly attributable to fuel poverty, and 21% of excess winter deaths are attributable to the coldest 25% of homes. Between 1990 and 2014, researchers estimated, 30,000 to 40,000 people died each year who would not have perished if their homes hadn’t been so cold. US studies reach similar conclusions.
Adjusting for population, but not for colder winter temperatures in much of the USA (versus England and Wales), this is equivalent to some 170,000 to 230,000 excess winter deaths per year in the United States.
In 2019, 344,000 German families had their electricity cut off because they couldn’t pay their power bills.
Still worse, coal, oil, natural gas, electricity and home heating costs have skyrocketed since those English, US and German reports were prepared - because of shortsighted, climate-obsessed, callous policies.
Global demand for gas and coal surged as the world recovered from Covid - but Britain and Europe banned fracking for gas in their enormous shale deposits, Germany is shutting down its nuclear plants, Russia is playing politics with gas deliveries, and UK and EU wind turbines generated far less electricity in 2021 (way below their supposed, “nameplate capacity") due to unfavorable winds.
No wonder 65% of United Kingdom renters are struggling this year to pay their energy bills, 25% of Scots live in energy poverty, and 400,000 more UK households are on the brink of losing their gas and electricity provider before Christmas. Europe’s energy costs hit new records, and millions of UK households face 70% rise in energy bills. Excess winter death tolls will also likely set new records.
That’s happening in America too, as the Biden Administration stymies leasing, drilling, fracking and pipelines, and sends gasoline and food prices rocketing upward, amid the highest inflation rate in 39 years.
Climate policies will also exacerbate health risks in hospitals. At 13 cents per kilowatt-hour (average US business rate today) a 650,000-square-foot hospital building would pay about $2.5 million annually for electricity. At 27 cents per kWh (Britain’s pre-October average), the annual cost jumps to $5.2 million; at 39 cents per kWh (Germany’s earlier average), to $7.5 million! Those soaring costs would bring chillier conditions, employee layoffs, higher medical bills, reduced patient care, and more deaths.
Consider too that one-third of American families already had difficulty six years ago adequately heating and cooling their homes, and one-fifth of U.S. households had to reduce or forego food, medicine and other necessities to pay their energy bills. Even before COVID, low-income, Black, Hispanic and Native American families were spending a greater portion of their incomes on energy than average households.
Impacts on hard-pressed working families and people on fixed incomes would be just as harmful and disproportionate, as they too spend a greater portion of their limited incomes on energy.
Job destruction, energy poverty, illness and deaths would increase dramatically under anti-fossil-fuel policies mandated and imposed by the Biden Administration and fellow Democrats - in the name of fairness, equity and “climate justice.”
Those policies would also make America’s energy, economy, national security and foreign policy increasingly dependent on China - already the world’s biggest coal user and greenhouse gas emitter - in an increasingly dangerous world. That’s because China controls most of the metals and minerals required by “green” energy and modern transportation, communication and defense technologies.
This is The Real Climate Crisis. The ecological destruction and human death tolls should shock all of us.
They aren’t due to climate changes that are mostly natural, weather events that are no more frequent or extreme than over the previous century, or manmade global warming that exists almost solely in computer models that rely on junk-science greenhouse-gas hypotheses. The real climate crisis is due to policies that are being rammed through on the basis of false premises, fear-mongering and intolerance for fossil fuels.
Congress, courts, states and voters must act now, to reverse the damage that climate and “green” energy policies are having on our economy, jobs, health, well-being, wildlife and environment.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. Contact: pkdriessen@gmail.com
I have spend decades working on weather and climate attribution. We have with the data available been able to see cycles in the weather and global climate related to the sun and cycles in the ocean (likely related to the sun, our biggest source of energy for the atmospheric and oceanic systems). But since the 1960’s, most of the thinking increasingly was related to man’s activity, blaming cooling on the ‘human volcano’ (aerosols from burning of fuels) and warming on greenhouse gases.
Back in the early 1970s, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, the dean of American journalism, was warning about an “ice age.” Cronkite cited scientific claims that the Earth was cooling and “the full extent of the new ice age won’t be reached for 10,000 years.” (Climate Depot)
On September 11, 1972, Cronkite cited scientists’ predictions that there was a “new ice age” coming. He called that prediction from British scientist Hubert Lamb “a bit of bad news.”
“But then there is some good news,” Cronkite continued. “That while the weather may be just a little colder in the immediate years to come, the full extent of the new ice age won’t be reached for 10,000 years. And if you can stand any more good news, even then it won’t be as bad as the last ice age 60,000 years ago. Then New York, Cincinnati, St. Louis, were under 5,000 feet of ice. Presumably no traffic moved and school was let out for the day. And that’s the way it is, Monday, September 11, 1972.”
Lamb, the scientist Cronkite cited, was no fringe scientist. He founded the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. When he died, the CRU director called him “the greatest climatologist of his time,” according to the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He was also credited with establishing “climate change as a serious research subject.”
The late Cronkite is considered a “legendary journalist” and a pioneer in the field, which is why Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, said this footage was so important. Morano is a former staff member of U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee and producer of the upcoming global warming documentary Climate Hustle, released in 2015.
“Global warming activists have claimed for years that the 1970s global cooling scare never existed. They have tried to erase the inconvenient history which ironically blamed extreme weather like tornadoes, droughts, record cold and blizzards on global cooling,” said Morano.
Leonard Nimoy famous as Mr. Spock on Star Trek provided more detail on the thinking of the world’s best scientists at the time in a teaser overview and then a longer detailed story.
Unlike scientists often quoted by the media today, GWPF said that Lamb viewed the Earth’s climate as changing constantly and naturally. Unlike its founder, CRU now has a major role in spreading global warming alarmism. CBS said in 2009, CRU “wields outsize influence” in warming circles. The Climategate scandal centered around leaked documents and emails from that organization.
“Climate fear promoters switched effortlessly from global cooling fears in the 1970s to global warming fears in the 1980s. In the present day, the phrase ‘global warming’ has lost favor in favor of ‘climate change’ or ‘global climate disruption’ or even ‘global weirding,’ Morano added. “‘Settled science’ has never seemed so unsettled.”
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Watch: Flashback 1980 CBS News w/ Walter Cronkite warns of ‘greenhouse effect’ causing ‘disruptive changes’ in ‘50-70 years’ - Cites ‘16 degrees F’ warming & ‘goodbye Miami’ & ‘boating at foot of Capitol’.
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CBS News: “Researchers say increasingly large amounts of CO2 are accumulating in the atmosphere. They fear the earth will gradually become warmer causing as yet uncertain but possibly disruptive changes in the Earth’s climate 50 to 70 years from now.” ...
Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass) Senate Energy Committee: “It’s possible probable we really don’t know. But if it happens it means goodbye Miami, goodbye Corpus Christi, goodbye Sacramento, goodbye Boston—which obviously is much more of a concern. Goodbye New Orleans. Goodbye Charleston, Savannah, and Norfolk. On the positive side, it means that we could enjoy boating at the foot of the Capitol and fishing on the South Lawn.”
Gordon MacDonald, Mitre Corp Chief Scientist: “One model of climate the Jason climate model predicts that doubling carbon dioxide will result in August and Washington DC that are 9 degrees centigrade warmer or 16 degrees Fahrenheit than current summers but that the winters will only be 2 degrees centigrade warmer changes of this. Changes of this magnitude are very probably going to have a profound effect on agriculture, on all of the aspects of energy use and generation, and on water and land use.”
The average temperature at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station between April and September, a frigid minus 78 degrees (minus 61 Celsius), was the coldest on record, dating back to 1957. This was 4.5 degrees lower than the most recent 30-year average at this remote station, which is operated by United States Antarctic Program and administered by the National Science Foundation. The chill was exceptional, even for the coldest location on the planet.
Several ships trapped in ice after Arctic sea freezes early near Russia
An early and unexpected freeze has trapped at least 18 cargo ships in the Arctic Sea off the coast of Russia. Ice up to 30cm thick has formed across most of the Laptev Sea and East Siberian seas, according to the Barents Sea Observer, a Norwegian news site.
That comes after Dr Paul Tepes, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, said: “… As has been observed elsewhere in the world, ice loss in the region is accelerating. As the climate continues to warm, significant ice loss in the Russian Arctic will have clear impacts for sea level rise.”
The Antarctic Just had its coldest 6 months ever recorded.
In 2014 Nasa said Ice was the largest ever recorded. Ice at the Antarctic has only grown since then. Meanwhile Arctic Ice Is reaching its highest point in 20 years. According to the latest data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Arctic sea ice ‘volume’ has been on something of a tear in recent weeks - it is now tracking above all recent years and shows no signs of abating. It may hit a 30 year record before warmer weather hits…
This is just as it did last winter and spring. Here is how they spun it by attacking ‘deniers’ here. It is concerning because it is happening again as they are removing nuclear plants.
We often hear about the dangers of heat. But research shows cold is far more deadly than heat (10x more in Brazil, 20X more in South Africa. The authors estimate in 2019, “the average cold-attributable mortality exceeded heat-attributable mortality in all countries for which data were available.” Cold effects were most pronounced in China and in New Zealand.
Meanwhile, the UAH Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for November, 2021 was +0.08 deg. C, down substantially from the October, 2021 value of +0.37 deg. C. This is consistent with the La Nina rebound.
Virtually every month and year we see stories in the once reliable media and from formerly unbiased data centers that proclaim the warmest such period in the entire record back to 1895 or earlier (often 1850).
In the ADDENDUM to the Research Report entitled: On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding, Abridged Research Report, Dr. James P. Wallace III, Dr. (Honorary) Joseph S. D’Aleo, Dr. Craig D. Idso, June 2017 (here) provided ample evidence that the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data was invalidated for use in climate modeling and for any other climate change policy analysis purpose.
“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever - despite current claims of record setting warming. That is made even more true given that 71% of the earth’s surface is ocean and the only ocean data prior to the satellite era began in the 1970s was limited to ship routes mainly near land in the northern hemisphere.”
According to overseers of the long-term instrumental temperature data, the Southern Hemisphere record is “mostly made up”. This is due to an extremely limited number of available measurements both historically and even presently from Antarctica to the equatorial regions.
In 1981, NASA’s James Hansen et al reported that “Problems in obtaining a global temperature history are due to the uneven station distribution, with the Southern Hemisphere and ocean areas poorly represented."(Science, 28 August 1981, Volume 213, Number 4511(link))
In 1978, the New York Times reported there was too little temperature data from the Southern Hemisphere to draw any reliable conclusions. The report, prepared by German, Japanese and American specialists, appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of Nature, the British journal and stated that “Data from the Southern Hemisphere, particularly south of latitude 30 south, are so meager that reliable conclusions are not possible,” the report says. “Ships travel on well-established routes so that vast areas of ocean, are simply not traversed by ships at all, and even those that do, may not return weather data on route.”
This finding was amplified recently by MIT graduate Dr. Mototaka Nakamura in a book on “the sorry state of climate science” titled Confessions of a climate scientist: the global warming hypothesis is an unproven hypothesis.
He wrote: “The supposed measuring of global average temperatures from 1890 has been based on thermometer readouts barely covering 5 per cent of the globe until the satellite era began 40-50 years ago. We do not know how global climate has changed in the past century, all we know is some limited regional climate changes, such as in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.”
The National Academy of Science recognized this in their first attempt at determining a trend in temperature in the 1970s, which they limited to the Northern Hemisphere land areas. It showed a dramatic warming from the 1800s to around 1940 then a reversal ending in a matching cooling by the late 1970s when even the CIA wrote that the consensus of scientists we might be heading towards a dangerous new ice age.
The first real-time temperature trend tracking was in 1989 - and was the US only as the US had the best surface station network and urban contamination was accounted for.
Tom Karl whose paper in 1988 defined the UHI adjustment for the first version of USHCN (which was removed in version 2) wrote with Kukla and Gavin in a 1986 paper on Urban Warming: “MeteoSecular trends of surface air temperature computed predominantly from urban station data are likely to have a serious warm bias… The average difference between trends, urban siting vs. rural, amounts to an annual warming rate of 0.34C/decade. The reason why the warming rate is considerably higher may be that the rate may have increased after the 1950s, commensurate with the large recent growth in and around airports. Our results and those of others show that the urban growth inhomogeneity is serious and must be taken into account when assessing the reliability of temperature records.”
The NY Times reported the US Data failed to show warming trend predicted by Hansen in 1980.
Even in 1999, the temperature still trailed 1934 - James Hansen noted “The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year 1934.”
When the data centers were pressured to do the same with global data they faced a dilemma as station coverage was poor and station quality was unknown. The result without station quality control was a warming post 1980.
Even as the stations incorporated increased in number and coverage, their reliability became a challenge, with many large continents having a large percentage of missing months in the station data. That required the data centers to guess the missing data to get a monthly and then annual average.
You may be surprised to see that continues today. This required guesswork allows those whose job is to validate their models the opportunity to make adjustments in ways to confirm their biases. See the initial data regions in September 2018 that were filled in by algorithms. It includes in a large data void region a record warmth assessment (Heller 2018).
In our assessments, we found that each update cooled past years more and more which serves to make over time the trends more consistent with their model scenarios.
Here is the NASA GISS adaption of the NOAA GHCN data. Each update cools the past to make the trend upward more significant.
Even in areas with better data, station data was adjusted (corrupted) by the analysts to turn a cooling trend into the desired warming. We picked just three of many examples - one in Australia, the second in Iceland and the plot for the state of Maine.
For Australia, many examples have been uncovered including Darwin and here Amberley. Blue was the original data plot, red is the one after adjustment in Australia.
The NASA GISS plots for the Iceland raw and the adjusted data shows a cycle replaced by a linear warming ramp. The adjusted data was refuted by the Icelandic met department.
A new version of the US data appeared by 2010 and showed similar adjustments.
NOAAs Maine temperature trend was accessed in 2011 and again after 2013. The first showed no statistically significant trend from 1895 (-0.01F/decade) with the warmest year 1913. The second had a trend of +0.23F/decade with 1913 adjusted down almost 5F.
Climategate emails exposed the true state of the data bases used to drive global policy decisions. Their own developers and their chief scientist were exposed and forced to acknowledge the data flaws. Ian ‘Harry’ Harris, the lead CRU climate data programmer and analyst in the ‘Climategate’ emails admitted to “[The] hopeless state of their (CRU) data base. No uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found… There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations...and duplicates… Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!” http://www.di2.nu/foia/HARRY_READ_ME-0.html
The CRU scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil Jones after he thought the jig was up, made a candid admission on BBC that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years and it has cooled 0.12C/decade trend from 2002-2009. Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan.
Attempting to compile a ‘global mean temperature’ from such fragmentary, disorganized, error-ridden, geographically unbalanced ever-changing data with strong evidence of manipulation is more politically driven fraud than science.
As for the claims of increasing extremes - see a revealing fact check here.
The data supports the findings of the research mentioned above:
“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever - despite current claims of record setting warming.”
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As noted in my post this past Sunday, no amount of fake happy talk in the so-called “Glasgow Climate Pact” can obscure the obvious fact that nobody agreed to anything. To read the text of the “pact,” everybody claims to think that this whole “decarbonization” thing to “save the planet” is real. We’re all going to do something really, really significant, but it will be next year, or maybe the year after that. And meanwhile, nobody has made any remotely serious effort to cost this thing out. Are we talking about a ten percent increase in the cost of energy for this decarbonization project, or will it be a doubling, or maybe a tripling - or maybe even a multiplication by ten?
With tens of trillions of dollars at stake in the world economy, let alone the majority of humanity at risk of energy poverty, you would think that we would be far down the road toward detailed engineering studies of what the decarbonized energy world will look like and exactly how much it will cost. But it is exactly the opposite. Everywhere - or at least everywhere in the Western countries - government functionaries with degrees in English or Political Science (or maybe Gender Studies) issue edicts that carbon emissions will be reduced “50% by 2030” or “90% by 2050,” without any knowledge or understanding of how that may be accomplished.
So, as the costs of attempting to “transition” away from fossil fuels start to hit home, will anybody actually go through with the project? I think that the chance of that is about zero. China and India show how it works. To judge by their actions (rather than their words), they have long since figured out that solar and wind energy can’t succeed in running a modern economy, so they mouth empty platitudes to placate the Western zealots, make unenforceable promises that only come due after everyone is dead, and forge ahead with massive development of coal power. And even more telling are recent developments in Western jurisdictions. When the first hint arrives that fossil fuel restrictions are going to impose cost increases large enough for meaningful numbers of voters to notice, even the bluest of blue U.S. states take about three minutes to abandon their “decarbonization” promises.
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...perhaps most notable is what has happened in recent days in some of the bluest of blue U.S. jurisdictions. In 2010, some twelve Northeast states, plus the District of Columbia, entered into a kind of agreement to agree to form something called the “Transportation and Climate Initiative.” The language of the official document was all about “reducing greenhouse gas emissions”; but in practice this was from the get-go intended as a cap-and-trade scheme, which would use a restricted and decreasing supply of permits to gradually force up the price of transportation fuels (mostly gasoline), and thereby force the people to use less of them. The signatories to the initial document included all of the New England and Mid-Atlantic states.
The Boston Herald has a piece yesterday (November 18) summarizing the TCI program and its current status. First, as to the intent of the program and how it would work:
TCI would have capped carbon emissions by forcing fuel companies that exceeded limits to buy additional permits and invest those proceeds into green transportation and climate-resilient infrastructure. It aimed to reduce vehicle emissions by 26% by 2032.
Well, gasoline prices are now up about 50% since President Biden took office in January 2021. Perhaps you might think that the TCI states would be unable to contain their excitement, and would be plowing ahead to raise prices still further and force a rapid decline in consumption. But actually the opposite is occurring. First of all, only a handful out of the twelve original states plus DC moved forward to join the compact:
Initially, 12 states plus the District of Columbia were in talks to enter the agreement, but just Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and D.C. eventually signed a memorandum of understanding by December 2020.
And now, with gas prices rapidly rising, what politician wants to be seen as forcing them up still higher? So even the few deep-blue states that had joined TCI are now heading for the exits. The Herald reports that Connecticut pulled out of the compact on Tuesday (November 16); and yesterday (November 18) Massachusetts followed:
Gov. Charlie Baker has pulled the plug on a regional climate initiative that would have capped tailpipe emissions and was projected to hike gas prices at a time of record inflation, admitting the multi state-deal is “no longer the best solution.” He backs out of the Transportation and Climate Initiative just days after Connecticut did.
A Massachusetts group called Mass Fiscal Alliance calls it correctly:
“TCI is a regressive gas tax scheme that would have hurt (the) middle class and the working poor the most. It’s such wonderful news to see that Massachusetts families will not be forced to endure the economic hardship TCI would have imposed upon them,” said [Mass Fiscal Alliance] spokesperson, Paul Diego Craney.
Meanwhile, New York moves ahead with its ignorant bureaucrats issuing edicts for the end to fossil fuels a few years out. At this point the voters remain almost entirely unaware of what is coming. But when the costs start to hit home, will we actually stay the course? No, we won’t. It will be fun watching the process unfold.
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November 14, 2021
If you have been following the news at all for the past several weeks, you know that the latest gigantic UN “climate” conference, going by the name COP (Conference of Parties) 26, has been taking place in Glasgow, Scotland. Mercifully, it ended yesterday, Saturday, November 13. All of those hundreds of private jets have now flown home.
Every time one of these UN confabs takes place, you have to hold your breath fearing that some tremendously damaging result will emerge. But, reviewing the final outcome of this latest conference, my comment is that we climate realists have gotten about the best result we could have hoped for. If you read some mainstream news sources, you may well get exactly the opposite impression. So let me give my reasoning.
At this point, there are basically two paths that the world might take in the movement toward so-called “decarbonization” of the energy system:
Path 1 is the path of strict world socialism. Of course, this is the preferred path of climate activists and UN bureaucrats. In this scenario, the entire world is forced, through binding international agreements, into an energy straight jacket, mandating reduction and then elimination of the use of fossil fuels within two or three decades at most.
Path 2 is what happens when there are no compacts with material binding worldwide energy restrictions. On this path, everybody talks a good game about decarbonization but, lacking meaningful binding agreements, most of the countries, with most of the population, continue to pursue whatever energy system is most reliable and cost effective. In practice that almost inevitably means fossil fuels for most to all applications. Meanwhile, a small number of wealthy, small-population jurisdictions that somehow become obsessed with the perceived virtue of eliminating fossil fuels - likely examples being Germany, California, New York, the UK, and perhaps South Australia (aggregating about 2-3% of world population) - will push the limits of decarbonization and intermittent renewable energy sources. They will then be the guinea pigs for the rest of the world to find out whether a decarbonized energy system can be made to work, and at what cost.
The end of the COP26 conference has shown that we are not on Path 1, and are unlikely to go there.
The key difference between the two scenarios is what happens in the nearly inevitable circumstance where the new “decarbonized” energy system fails to work cost-effectively or reliably, leading to enormously increased prices, shortages, and/or frequent blackouts. On Path 1, when that happens, the world’s people get forced into universal energy poverty with no obvious way to escape, and the bureaucrats and left wing press undoubtedly find some way to blame oil companies or some other capitalist bogeymen for the disaster. On Path 2, the 97-98% of the world that has not committed energy suicide can sit back and observe while the guinea pigs self-destruct. Eventually, the people in the guinea pig jurisdictions will catch on that they are being forced to pay a multiple of a reasonable price, and for energy that does not work very well, and they will replace their politicians.
How long will it take for these suckers to catch on? It could take a long time. Note that California and Germany, with self-inflicted energy prices well above those of surrounding jurisdictions, continue to double down and vote for more of same. But then, they are very wealthy jurisdictions, and it is their own problem.
And by the way, if the guinea pigs succeed in decarbonizing at little to no cost in either money or reliability, I will be the first to congratulate them. But they won’t succeed.
So let’s take a look at the outcome of COP26, and consider where this is going. See MORE here.
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