Big Green's energy scam

 Bruce Thornton:

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 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 study, 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 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.
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Big Green and its supporters have been serially wrong in their condemnation of fossil fuels.  They should be ignored.