The Politicization of Energy Policy Needs to Stop
Climate science should be void of politics and more scientific. According to the Global Climate Intelligence Group, energy policy should begin:
“Addressing the uncertainties and exaggerations in predicting global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures” says the Global Climate Intelligence Group.
In the U.S. and European Union (EU) politicizing climate change has taken on a religious fervor that is the shibboleth of energy policies. Geological records and archives clearly show the earth’s climate has varied. As an example, approximately 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) era “saw average global temps as high as 73-degrees Fahrenheit.” This was before humans began populating earth about 100,000 years ago.
Or ponder the Little Ice Age, which ended around 1850. Is it surprising then that we are warming? Climate change isn’t a scam, since climates are constantly changing. Climate action or deciding whether or not man is causing anthropogenic global warming is where the debate should take place. Trillions of dollars are being spent with no positive influence on emissions, pollution, or the climate since “nature as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming.”
Understanding the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate modeling is another point of contention distorting energy policies in the U.S. and globally. These models have repeatedly overestimated the amount of anthropogenic warming. The gap is far and wide between what is understood about the climate and the modeled outcomes.
The IPCC has done a good job revealing warming is lower than previously thought, models are inadequate for setting energy policy void of politics, CO2 is food for plants and the earth (Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore’s Twitter feed is a must-read on CO2), and natural disasters are not increasing (see Bjorn Lomberg’s work on this issue).
Let’s have a real discussion within the U.S. Congress, Presidency, United Nations, EU, and G7 as a starting point for deciding what are the causal effects of greenhouse gases and who is going to pay? Climates turn cooler and warmer in cycles that last centuries. Believing wind turbines and solar panels backstopped by utility-scale energy storage systems is void of serious discussions and plans for billions of people globally without reliable electricity. Renewables being the solution for rising emissions under current technological constraints are imagined benefits, which simply don’t exist.
Energy and climate policies should be based on economic realities and the basics of energy for over 350 million people in the U.S. and a world needing to provide energy and electricity for a growing population. Energy has to meet five pillars: abundant, affordable, reliable, scalable, and flexible; otherwise it is a fad like green hydrogen with a current price tag of $11 trillion to implement and needing all current global electrical generation for viability.
The reasons the sun and the wind are a disastrous choice for energy policy is simply this – while they are abundant – they aren’t reliable since the sun and wind are intermittent. Neither are they scalable, affordable, or flexible.
Renewables aren’t viable without billions spent yearly on government subsidies and mandates. Eliminate government assistance and watch the solar, wind, biomass, biodiesel, and hydrogen industries innovate like never before. The Texas grid collapse revealed this fact -- the wind and sun cannot outperform coal, natural gas, and nuclear for baseload electricity requirements under extreme weather conditions. Politics over factual energy and electricity policies cost lives.
This continued energy politicization in the U.S. and EU wholeheartedly endorsing the Paris Climate Accords and Green New Deal (GND) are baseless without understanding that the U.S., the largest economy in the history of mankind, representing 4 percent of the world’s population (330 million vs 7.8 billion) could cease to exist, and global emissions will still explode in the coming years and decades ahead over the population and economic growth of China, India, and Africa. China’s new five-year plan alone uses more coal than ever before derails all emission elimination policies by the West.
But still the green energy exploiters continue their quest, because science and energy policies are no longer being used for mankind’s betterment – instead these are now tools of exaggeration of illiberal concepts over factual, proven energy policies.
Environmentalism becomes identity politics with fraudulent claims and blackouts the inevitable outcomes. The better alternative is no longer having energy policies and discussion denigrate into personal politics and ideological belief systems over sound engineering, physics, chemistry, math, macroeconomics, and the five pillars of energy and electricity reliability.
Image: Pixabay