An Energy Crisis

2022 environmental activists are focused on a crusade to reduce carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels.  However, since 1850, we have seen great changes in our world and a corresponding increase in our quality of life as a direct result of energy.

Energy heats us in the winter.  It cools us in the summer.  We use energy to provide us clean water, indoor plumbing, and to pump water to our fields to grow food where none would otherwise exist.  We use energy to power our hospitals and their diagnostic equipment to save lives, and we use energy to power our manufacturing plants which provide life altering products and jobs and sustenance for millions. We have lights to extend our days and energy to power our computers, smart phones, and devices.

We travel great distances to amazing places.  Our lives are expanded beyond where we can walk or ride a horse. We no longer have to live in densely populated urban slums, can take fulfilling jobs, educate our children, and experience entertainment and open space all of which had been previously closed off to us because of the practical inability to get there.  Energy is good.

In the 3rd world countries, those in poverty yearn for the cheap energy that we enjoy to heat their homes and replace the wood and peat for cooking their food.  For these millions, energy is the way out of poverty and disease.

However, a biproduct of combustion and the energy it creates…. is carbon dioxide.  Carbon dioxide in combination with oxygen, it is a natural part of the circle of life. Is the essential life-providing substance for our food and plants. It is the breath we exhale, a byproduct of volcanos and forest fires which cleanse the lands for new growth.

So how did we get to the point where we have declared that carbon dioxide, a necessary component of our existence is evil?

Others no doubt can find other events to claim as the “beginning” of the environmental movement, but I would suggest the initiative of the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, who championed the Highway Beautification Act in 1965 which banned littering, limited billboards, outdoor advertising and junkyards along our highways that threatened to spoil the raw beauty of America. Who could disagree with that!  In honor of the environment, we all agreed to stop throwing our trash out of our car windows and put it in plastic bags for our own ultimate disposal.

This was followed a shortly by the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969 and the first Earth Day in 1970. The EPA was also established in 1970 followed by a series of laws to clean our environment.  We were horrified by the pollution of our rivers like the Love Canal in Buffalo and were transfixed when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. The Superfund Act and others were passed to manage our waste.

Early on, environmental protection matters were politicized.  Any attempt to create a balance was silenced.  You were either for the environment or not.  If not on board with 100% of the environmental policies of the day, you were for dirty air, dirty water and otherwise poisoning Americans, a divide that continues to this day.

In the early 1990s, environmental activists moved to eradicate a different type of element, one that occurred naturally, carbon dioxide.  The contention was that this life-giving gas was a pollutant which was caused the planet’s temperature to rise more than as a result of regular climate cycles.  We now had a new enemy “greenhouse gas emissions.”

In 1992, leaders of the world jetted to Rio De Janeiro for the Rio Earth Summit to adopt a series of international environmental agreements. This conference produced the United Nations Framework on climate change (UNFCCC-we love acronyms!)

This framework committed all nations to take steps to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

• establishing the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDRRC), recognizing that countries vary in their contributions to climate change and capacities to address it, so their obligations will likewise vary; (Translation…in order to get this Agreement, we all agree that we can do whatever we want) …and

• committing developed countries to assist developing countries in reducing emissions and coping with climate impacts. (Translation, developing countries don’t have enough money to feed their populations so if we want to eliminate carbon dioxide from these countries, someone else is going to have to pay for it.)

Thus began a principle that followed thorough the next 30 years of climate conferences; commitments to reduce greenhouse gases which weren’t binding and developing nations begging developed nations for money.

A further problem arose when the UNFCCC took effect. The scientific evidence to back up the basic premise that carbon dioxide was a pollutant was in its infancy.  Not to be deterred, the UNFCCC borrowed a line from the Montreal Protocol of 1987.  It bound member states to act in the interests of human safety “even in the face of scientific uncertainty”.

Governed by the Conference of Parties (COP…another acronym), it was decided the participants would meet annually with its members jetting around to great places in the world. This group will have its 27th world conference this year at the Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, International Convention Center in November.

In 1997 in Japan, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted at the third yearly conference. This protocol incorporated a series of “flexible mechanisms enabling developed countries to use emissions trading to achieve their targets more cost-effectively or in other words pay money to pollute and not have to actually reduce pollution.  President Clinton, never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification, knowing that he couldn’t get the votes for it.

Other countries proceeded to ratify the Kyoto Protocol which went into effect in 2005 and led to continuing a series of international agreements that no one ever complied with. As it became clear that the Kyoto Protocol wasn’t working, UNFCCC parties struggled to develop an alternative framework that would facilitate stronger action by all countries.

In 2009, the trip this time was to Copenhagen.  While the group was never able to come to an agreement, for the first time a compromise was reached to limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius.  The next year at the fun in the sun conference in Cancun Mexico, the parties did adopt the 2-degree goal without any apparent plan of whether this was achievable.

The world environmental globetrotters ultimately decided they wanted to go to Paris for COP 21. In December 2015, the “parties” adopted the infamous the Paris Accords. It left it to each country to decide its “nonbinding nationally determined contribution” (NDC) (another acronym). In other words, each country would make up its own non-binding goals for CO2 reduction and call it a day. The Agreement “called on countries” to strengthen their NDCs ever five years.  The reason that the Agreement called on countries to “strengthen their voluntary non-binding goals” was that the goals that they made up for themselves in 2015 would not have been sufficient to keep the temperature of the earth at 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.  Remember that?

President Obama did not seek Senate advice and consent for the Paris Treaty (since he knew he wasn’t going to get it) so he agreed to it unilaterally by executive action.

At the time and continuing to today, the Paris Climate Accord was only the first step toward limiting the planet to a 2-degree Celsius increase in temperature by 2100.  Further action was required.  The commitments made in 2015 were so minimal, that if all the countries would have abided by their Paris Climate Accord promises, climate models showed that the temperature of the planet would only have been reduced by .6 degrees Fahrenheit as compared to having done nothing.

In June 2017, Trump announced his intent to withdraw from the Paris Accords which quite frankly didn’t matter since only seven small unindustrialized countries out of 196 signatories had ever been on track to accomplish their voluntary Paris climate goals. Ironically, the US was actually reducing greenhouse gases rather than just talking about it like the rest of the world since coal plants were being replaced by cleaner natural gas units fueled with cheap natural gas as a result of fracking.

In the midst of the “resistance” movement to all things Trump, a political backlash occurred with some seventeen governors pledging that their states would continue to reduce carbon pollution and 466 US Mayors (17 in Colorado) vowed to adopt the Paris Climate accords for their own little communities. These entities began to move in various ways to limit carbon emissions even though the result of their efforts would have no measurable effect on the temperature of Planet Earth. Then on President Biden’s first day in office, he rejoined the non-binding Paris Climate Accords.

So, with all this flying around, conferencing, international statements of policies, aspirations, commitments, and protocols, what happened? 

Well, rational debate on the environment had long since been abandoned.  Global Warming became Climate Change when cold weather interfered with the warming narrative.  Climate became an “existential threat”.  Four in ten Americans believed that global warming would result in global human extinction. (It won’t).

In order to shut off debate, activists claimed that the “science was settled”.  (It wasn’t.) Those who deviated from any approved thought were labeled as “climate deniers”, linking them to the Nazis of the Jewish Holocaust.  As the hysteria increased, climate change was blamed for everything from hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, forest fires, hunger, cold spells, warm spells, the eradication of polar bears (they are doing fine) and having a bad day. (I made that last one up…kind of).

All of this hysteria stifled the debate not only on the cause and extent of man-made climate change, but also on the steps that needed to be taken to have remedy it.  At the time, with non-binding voluntary goals, there was only a downside to mount a vigorous defense.  The anti-carbon movement didn’t matter to most of us since voluntary efforts and commitments weren’t going to hurt of anyone. In essence, we looked the other way to save ourselves from the verbal abuse while climate COP conference participants vacationed in exotic parts of the world talking to themselves.

However, as time went on with the continued failure to achieve actual carbon reductions, true believer climate activists in Europe and the United States decided that even if the world was not going to act, they had “to do something”.

Flailing around for carbon targets, these activists waged war, first against open fires, then against coal, and recently against natural gas, methane (cow farts) and all forms of combustion which have provided benefits to mankind since the invention of fire.

Europe was the first to inflict pain on their societies. Under the influence of the Green parties, Europe had been trying to switch to a no carbon society (ban fire) for some time.   European states have essentially banned exploration for oil and gas despite the fact that according to estimates, Europe has more recoverable shale gas than the U.S. Many European countries have already closed all of their coal fired plants with the rest to be closed by 2030. While France has maintained but not expanded its nuclear capabilities, Germany closed all of its nuclear plants after the Fukushima, Japan accident. Europe claimed to lead the world in converting to renewable solar and wind energy. 

So how has that been working out?  After years of banning fracking for natural gas, closing coal fired and nuclear power plants, Europe became reliant on wind power and natural gas from Russia (not wanting to develop its own). However, in the last year, wind across Europe decreased by 15% creating energy shortages even before the Ukrainian war.  With the war in Ukraine and subsequent natural gas interruptions from Russia, an immediate energy crisis that would have eventually occurred anyway as Europe transitioned from reliable natural gas and coal to less reliable wind and solar. 

This summer, Europe has been trying to buy enough gas from diminished Russian and new alternate suppliers to get through next winter. Europe’s gas consumption went gone down 10% in August year over year, as the governments make slowing and shutting factories now a preference to cutting off power to hospitals and schools over the winter. As gas is being saved for the winter, manufacturing facilities and the jobs that they provide for Europeans have been slashed. Electricity prices have more than doubled this year. 

Unlike the US, Europe has relied on manufacturing and heavy industry to keep its economy chugging. Aluminum producers are finding themselves not able to renew their power contracts.  Aluminum companies need 15 MW hours to produce aluminum costing 9,000 Euros/ton but can only sell the metal for 2500 Euros/ton.  Lower output from European factories threatens to cascade through the supply chain as automakers have been hit both in their own dependence on natural gas and indirectly through supply issues such as shortages of glass which also requires a lot of energy to produce.

Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara International which uses gas as an ingredient has cut crop-boosting ammonia production by 65% across its European factories.

Even in food production, sugar factories, which are powered by natural gas, are at risk of closing, making it likely that large parts of the beet harvest will rot in the fields.

Last year 6% of individuals used wood to heat their homes.  Now, the wood is gone. In Poland, there are lines to buy coal. In the UK, 70% of restaurants are preparing to close for lack of heat in the winter.  In Germany, electricity currently costs 1000 Euros/MW hr where last week the price was 700 Euros/MW hr.  In France, electricity pricing increased 25% in one day.

Among the measures that European cities are instituting include turning off traffic lights, dimming lights on streets and stores, requiring the use of clotheslines rather than dryers, reducing shower times to 5 minutes, and prohibiting heating until the temperature is below 66 degrees and banning air conditioning until it hits 81. Unemployment will be rampant, and when winter comes, it won’t be enough.

Europe’s failed bet on wind and solar energy has cost them as many of the closed manufacturing facilities will never reopen causing massive unemployment for years to come.

In the United States, we can learn from the experience of Europe and its precipitous transition to solar and wind power or suffer to repeat it.

We are a just a few years behind Europe in strangling our fossil fuel industry and transitioning to wind and solar.  This transition is not due to efficiency or market demand for alternative energy, but solely because of because of government interference in the market.

The coal industry has been destroyed by our government imposing burdensome regulations on coal mining and coal fired power plants; creating emissions regulations which cannot be met.  To kick a dog while its down, in the recent Inflation Reduction Act, the Congress doubled the exercise tax on coal. 

The Biden administration has burdened the natural gas and fossil fuel industry by denying leasing of federal lands absent new expensive environmental reviews, increasing lease costs, and requiring burdensome monitoring equipment at oil and refinery facilities all while subsidizing inefficient wind and solar power with taxpayer dollars.

The sad truth is in our zeal to decarbonize the United States, our pitiful programs to reduce carbon dioxide will do nothing to affect the goal to reduce the temperature of the planet but will create immeasurable and avoidable suffering and poverty now.

To highlight the futility of our reduction of greenhouse gas efforts, The US has closed 360 coal fired power plants in recent years leaving only 170 remaining.  But as we prematurely closed inexpensive coal fired power plants to reduce carbon, China is planning to construct 240 new coal facilities with plant life expectancies of 50-70 years.  India has another 28 new coal plants currently being constructed with another 23 in preconstruction planning.

The promise of replacement wind or solar power for coal or natural gas power plants is an illusion.  Whereas conversion of coal plants to natural gas can occur on the same property which uses the same transmission lines to the same destinations, the time to convert a plant from coal to gas facilities with ultimate delivery of electricity to the consumer is relatively manageable.  With fracking and the explosion of natural gas supply, the transition could have been made without great cost to the consumer.  However, solar and wind facilities require extensive new lands to place their facilities. Since most are in remote rural areas, they also require expensive transmission facilities to be permitted and built to bring power to urban areas. In Colorado, Xcel Energy recently filed a rate case attempting to secure $2 billion in increased utility charges just to build transmission lines from its solar and wind facilities.

Wind and solar are proven inefficient technologies. The wind doesn’t blow all the time nor does the sun shine for 24 hours.  The promise of utility scale batteries to store power is a further illusion. If all the wind and solar would turn off at once, we have the battery capacity to run our country for 17 minutes.

We are taking more reliable energy generation offline than we are replacing while at the same time subsidizing electric cars and electric appliances which will require massive amounts of new electrical energy resources.

Following Europe, we are starting to see the cracks in the system.  There were deaths of 246 people attributed to the grid failure and lack of sufficient reliable energy production in Texas during the 2021 freeze.  We are seeing brown outs in California during the recent heatwave. During the same week that California announced that it was going to ban the purchase of gasoline vehicles in favor of electric vehicles in 2035, it asked consumers to turn their air conditioners off and not charge their EVs in order to save electricity and to prevent a blackout.  If California doesn’t have enough power now to charge the 5% of electric vehicles it currently has, how will it be able to charge all the EVs when gas vehicles are banned.

In Colorado, Xcel Energy seized control of 22,000 customers thermostats using their newly installed SMART meters to keep air conditioning off during the recent heat wave.

Electric utilities know that they cannot bring reliable power online quick enough to replace the current planned retirement of coal, gas and nuclear plants.  They are relying almost exclusively on Demand Side Management (i.e., cutting power to consumers) to assure that there is enough power to keep the grids online.

While prices of gasoline have skyrocketed in this country, we were told that it was a good reason to buy a $70,000 EV since operation of an EV was now cheaper than gasoline.  There has been no attempt by our government to lift the restrictions and regulations on the production and refining of gasoline which caused the price of gas to soar.  The current policy of the federal government and many state governments is to let the people suffer rather than impede unattainable climate goals.

The problem…well another problem with this expensive transition to wind and solar energy is that these energy sources are transitional themselves.  Wind power is only able to harness 25% of wind energy for electrical generation while the efficiency for solar is 23%.  It is only a matter of time before efficient energy generation from sources such as nuclear, hydrogen, or fusion will take their place.  Solar and wind energy is kind of like the utility version of the 8-track tape player.  We are spending trillions of dollars to create and prop up temporary wind and solar industries which will only be phased out when efficient sources of energy production will come online.

Not more than 10 years ago, policy makers were pushing “all of the above” energy generation for America.  All options were on the table; coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar.  Each would compete for the best and most efficient generation of power while technology advanced to develop even more efficient methods of power generation. However, policy makers by stoking climate alarmism have put their finger on the scale favoring wind and solar while demonstrating outright hostility to coal, natural gas and nuclear power, our most reliable energy production sources.

The stark realization is that wind and solar even if they were efficient sources of energy production could not replace coal, gas and nuclear power in time without major societal pain in the near term. if at all. Europeans have shown us the drastic consequences of that failed policy.  We are next.  Our pain is just beginning unless we change course.

We need to slow down, quit wasting massive resources to prop up an inefficient industry and put money into research and development of more promising reliable technologies. We need to take irrational regulatory shackles off of coal, oil and gas production and module nuclear technology until future technologies are ready to be implemented.

It has become apparent that if we want to reduce carbon dioxide to preindustrial levels, we will have to start thinking about living a preindustrial life.  The sad fact is that our decision makers even in an energy starved country won’t be the ones who suffer.  They have economic resources to pay $70,000 for electric vehicles or $900/MW hr. for electricity that should cost $10.  It is the people who they purport to represent who will suffer.  And suffer they will.