Green Dreams
By Mark P. Mills
What impact will Biden’s energy policies have on global climate?
The short answer: none. The key issue is unrelated to anyone’s opinion about global warming. What matters is whether the kinds of efforts proposed can arithmetically make any meaningful difference in world energy use. I emphasize “world.†Cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, for example, didn’t eliminate oil use. It just shifted where it’s shipped to, and how it’s shipped—somewhere else, and more expensively. And even if efforts to strangle Keystone’s output were successful, eliminating that much oil use wouldn’t change anything in the global context. For example, China plans to build more coal power plants that will, in carbon terms, equal about 20 Keystone Pipelines. And about one-third of those new coal plants are already under construction. That’s just China. Similar plans for more coal, and more oil, and more natural gas use are afoot in South Asia and the rest of the world.
The administration has proposed spending $2 trillion on its climate programs. Does this represent the true cost of “decarbonizing†energy production in the U.S.?
That’s not even close to the true cost, either directly or indirectly in terms of overall economic consequences. Looking just at the electric grid, which accounts for about one-third of America’s energy use, it would cost at least $5 trillion to build enough wind, solar, and battery systems to replace all the power plants that currently burn natural gas and coal. And, in broad economic terms, all that money will have been spent to produce the same quantity of the same product—kilowatt-hours. That kind of spending is the polar opposite of improving society’s productivity. This matters because increasing productivity is, as all economists know, the key to increasing society’s overall wealth. Even if such programs create jobs, and they would, we’d be putting more labor into producing the same output which, ultimately, is negative for economic growth.
https://co2coalition.org/2021/03/20/green-dreams/
