The rush to Big Green looks like a mistake

 Washington Examiner:

Soaring costs are driving many countries toward more of the fossil fuels they had sought to phase out, proving the aggressive shift toward green energy to be a luxury of peacetime.

The war in Ukraine caused a spike in oil and natural gas prices, which were already creeping up before Russia's invasion. Western governments have responded by pledging to spend even more, and faster, on scaling up renewable energy sources, but at the same time, they have committed to building more gas infrastructure and have sought to increase power generation from coal to displace gas demand and keep the industry running in the short term.

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The dilemma has been especially acute for Europe, where governments have been charging a carbon price since 2005 and where there is a strong commitment to a "green transition." The war has pitted its priorities of punishing Russia for the war, maintaining stable energy supplies, and aggressively phasing out coal directly against each other.

With the threat of gas shortages looming larger now that Russia has reduced flows to its largest customers, European leaders are readying new plans to burn more coal, forcing some governments into a position of bringing back shuttered plants and leaning on the emissions-heavy fuel longer than they had preferred.

Austria, which phased out coal in 2020, will reactivate at least one coal plant to be used under emergency conditions, while the Dutch government is lifting restrictions on power plants, enabling them to burn more coal.

The French, who are struggling with a shortage of power supply due to offline nuclear power plants in addition to gas market disruptions, are also considering keeping some coal plants available until 2024 rather than overseeing their retirements this year.

In neighboring Germany, Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, who has accused Russia of trying to disrupt the gas market by reducing flows, said Europe's largest economy will burn more coal this summer in response to generate electricity under a gas replacement regime the federal government is developing. The arrangement would run through the end of March 2024, Habeck said Sunday.

Germany also plans to incentivize the industry to consume less gas in order to direct gas imports to storage ahead of winter.

“This is painful, but it is sheer necessity in this situation to reduce gas consumption,” Habeck said.

The reversion to coal led European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to caution EU members against "backsliding on the dirty fossil fuels."

"It’s a fine line, and it’s not determined whether we are going to take the right turn," she said of Europe's response to the energy crisis.

Outside the European Union, the British government is working out a deal to keep a coal-fired plant, whose life was already extended once before, online through March 2023.

Camilla Fenning, program lead for the Fossil Fuel Transition team at environmental think tank E3G, said some coal phaseout plans have now hit "turbulence" but insisted these short-term measures are still congruent with the governments' overriding commitment to phase out coal by 2030.

"Although this might result in a short-term spike in coal, this must be seen in the context of a hard shift away from all fossil fuels," Fenning told the Washington Examiner. She said the headwinds coal in particular was facing before the war "haven’t just continued — they’ve become stronger."

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What Big Green has really accomplished is driving up the cost of energy and making things worse for consumers while having little positive impact on the environment.  Why the Europeans thought using Russian gas was the answer to not using their own resources is a puzzle.  The US under Biden has made similar mistakes as if using imported oil is less polluting than using domestic production.  In hindsight, it looks idiotic.