Joe Biden’s energy policies reduce domestic energy production and increase the cost of energy for our industries, resulting in factories moving overseas to where there are fewer limits on air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. They also make America more reliant on hostile foreign nations for our supplies of energy, notes the American Council on Science and Health.
As Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal laments, a “censorious report on National Public Radio…accuses Republican voters of being content to ‘do nothing’ about climate change. In fact, neither party proposes to do anything about climate change. Democrats propose to spend a lot more money doing nothing.”
In a May Senate hearing, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) managed to extract from the deputy energy secretary three critical admissions concerning emissions. One, the United States is currently responsible for only 13% of global carbon emissions, and we cannot control what China, India, or other countries do; two, it will cost an estimated $50 trillion to decarbonize the U.S. by 2050; and three, the feds do not know how many degrees of warming such spending might mitigate, unsurprising given the small fraction of emissions U.S. actions can affect.
We could stop right there because even a scintilla of common sense should cause anyone to be aghast at the enormous costs with only limited and uncertain benefits of our attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But let us pile on to leave no doubt that the climate policies being pursued by the current administration (and other strategies advocated by climate zealots) will do little for the Earth’s climate but will create shortages of energy, damage our economy as prices rise, reduce prosperity, and lead to military vulnerability as vast funds are consumed by decarbonization. Thereby, we would gift China an era of world dominance.
The first grand delusion is that electric vehicles will save the planet. In early August, electric bus maker Proterra filed for bankruptcy, flushing down the toilet $650 million of stockholder money, $6.5 billion of government grants, and $45,000 of subsidies for every bus it did sell. This follows the demise of several other electric vehicle companies.
These failures are not just attributable to overhyping electric vehicles, lack of natural demand, poor management, and inept allocation of capital by the government but also to the implausibility of the entire electric vehicle concept, especially the gross overestimation of the benefits of reducing emissions. And soon, we can expect massive additional subsidies for the Big Three automakers and other car companies as the profits from gasoline vehicles disappear.
When emissions from electric vehicle production (mainly the battery), plus emissions from the production of charging power, are counted, the environmental benefit is not achieved until far into the life cycle of the electric vehicle (77,000 miles with the E-Golf, by VW’s own admission). Statistics also show an electric vehicle average of 5,300 miles driven per year, so no net emissions savings are realized for over a decade after purchase. And those estimates do not account for the necessary massive expansion of charging infrastructure, the extra road wear from much heavier vehicles, or the disposal/recycling of batteries. Nor is there any widespread acknowledgment that cold or hot temperatures and other factors can cut the range (the interval between charging) by up to 40%, further pushing out net benefits to even higher mileage.
Then, there is the mirage of renewables (wind and solar) that fails to account for such factors as land use. Bloomberg estimates it would take a land area equal to four South Dakotas by 2050 to decarbonize with wind turbines. The energy density (watts per acre) for solar indicates a requirement for even more land than wind. There are many other virtually insurmountable issues with renewables, such as ecological impacts (e.g., birds killed by wind turbines) and the disposal of decommissioned solar and wind farms. Yet, renewables are the path of choice instead of nuclear power packaged in new, innovative forms. How does this make any sense?
Emphasizing the futility of our climate policies are their contradictions. President Joe Biden recently designated as a national monument the nation’s most productive area, a million acres, for mining uranium, making us dependent on Russia, Kazakhstan, and other unfriendly regimes, thereby damaging the promise of nuclear energy. We also strangle domestic oil production, which forces us to import oil with the associated emissions from tankers, which offsets other climate gains by producing 18 million tons of carbon dioxide per year at today’s importation levels.
The U.S. electric grid is also in jeopardy, due to Biden administration policies, as a recent article in Transformers Magazine illustrates.
As old power plants close, America’s power grid has become increasingly unreliable, according the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. faces the risk of of blackouts in the summer and during winter cold waves. Yet, President Biden has called for getting rid of coal plants, saying, “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America.” That could cause blackouts that kill hundreds or even thousands of people, as energy runs short. Blackouts already killed 200 people in 2021, as freezing people were left without power.
The problem is aggravated by the shutting down of coal and nuclear plants that provide badly needed power. As old power plants close, America’s power grid has become increasingly unreliable, according the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. faces the risk of of blackouts in the summer and during winter cold waves.
Yet, last November, President Biden called for getting rid of coal plants, saying, “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America.” That could cause blackouts that kill hundreds of people. Blackouts already killed 200 people in 2021, as freezing people were left without power. Yet, “there are 40 coal-fired power plants scheduled to be taken offline in the name of fighting climate change. No replacement sources for all of that juice have been proposed, to say nothing of having them come online,” notes Hot Air.
Closing coal-fired power plants could also exacerbate job losses in the energy sector. As Fox News notes, “A Department of Energy report published this summer showed massive job losses in the fuel industry following Biden’s presidential campaign where he pledged to lead the country away from fossil fuels.”
The Midwest is especially at risk of blackouts, because retirement of older plants has caused a decrease in electricity-generating capacity, even as the population continues to grow.
Biden has suggested that we could just use “wind and solar power” when coal plants close. But that is not a solution, because wind and solar energy are at the mercy of the weather, and are growing too slowly to immediately replace coal. As the liberal Brookings Institution notes, wind and solar projects can take over a decade to complete:
Most wind energy projects in the pipeline are stuck in the permitting phase, with just 21% of planned projects currently under construction…..Each of the federal permits [required] may take months or years to be approved. … The dizzying array of permits and other regulatory obstacles to renewable energy projects can create extremely long delays. Reports of 10-year or longer timelines for transmission lines are not uncommon, and both solar and wind projects face long permitting delays.
Moreover, as a leading German newspaper notes, “Sometimes the wind simply doesn’t blow, meaning the rotors remain idle and no power can be generated. A reliable power grid therefore requires additional forms of energy production and storage.”
As Forbes notes,
Solar and wind require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining….And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California, and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.
In addition to shutting down many coal plants, progressives have also shut some nuclear plants. That is unfortunate, because it is hard to beat nuclear power, from an environmental standpoint. It produces no air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions (just harmless steam). It results in fewer deaths per unit of energy produced than virtually all other forms of energy. And unlike wind or solar power, nuclear plants produce a constant, reliable flow of electricity regardless of whether the weather changes.
As Michael Shellenberger points out, “wind turbines…kill more people than nuclear plants.” Moreover, “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste.” As Yale University’s Steve Novella notes, “Nuclear waste can be dealt with, and the newer reactors produce less waste, and can even theoretically burn reprocessed waste from older plants.
Last month, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) vetoed a bill that would have lifted Illinois’ moratorium on new nuclear power plants. This may harm the environment, because studies show that nuclear power is best for the environment. The bill Pritzker vetoed, SB76, passed the Illinois legislature with bipartisan support.