With gas prices on the rise, inflation out of control and Russia’s stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply on the front page, Americans are more aware than ever of the need for energy. However, critics allege that progressive climate alarmists are continuing their crusade to destroy our most affordable, reliable sources of energy and push “net zero” at all costs.
Climate policy analysts experts Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), and Francis Menton, president of the GWPF discussed these topics and others with Jason Isaac, director of Life: Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Isaac is a former four-term Texas legislator who frequently writes on energy-related topics.
The panel discussion was titled, “Net Zero or Zero Prosperity? Climate Costs and Solutions.”
Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
| The Federalist Society
Peiser began the discussion by painting a gloomy portrait.
“We are facing a severe energy cost crisis that is worse than the oil shock in the early 1970s,” he said. “Just to give you an indication just how bad the crisis is, natural gas prices in Europe are currently eight times higher than in the U.S. At the peak, there were about 15 times higher than the U.S.
“What does it mean if natural gas prices are eight times more expensive in Europe than they are here?" he asked "It means that the average household in Britain, their energy bill is doubling within 12 months and is likely to treble by the end of the year. In the average household, that’s roughly 100 pounds per year for the energy bills, this has gone up to 2,000 pounds and it's likely to go up to 3,000 pounds. That means roughly 25% of the British households will be unable to actually pay their energy bills."
Isaac said in 2018, 14% of U.S. families received a disconnect notice from a utility provider every year. That number could have grown worse in a time of rocketing inflation. He asked the panelists what has caused this rapid increase in utility prices.
“It’s a combination but the main driving force of high energy prices is that the European governments have decided to ban fracking, number one,” Peiser said. “All the shale basins in Europe are really just lying there. We know what the shale revolution has done in the US. We don’t have that in Europe.
"Also, European governments prioritize investment into renewables, which are very costly. In Germany the consumers have to pay 25 billion Euros per year in subsidies,” he said. “In Britain, it’s about $12 billion in subsidies, which are paid on energy bills. And most European countries have phased out coal, which has increased the demand for gas, and some are even phasing out nuclear energy like Germany. So most of the problems are self-inflicted. They are policy-driven.”
For years, policy was driven by a belief that the future was in renewables and all fossil fuel power generation should be phased out, Peiser said.
“The reality is now that they are desperate for oil and gas and coal,” he said. “The German government has said there are no more taboos. And in Germany, that means we’re going to burn a lot more coal.”
“They’re not subsidizing coal. No, they’re just allowing coal to replace gas because coal is cheaper than gas now,” Peiser said. “What options have they got to keep the lights on? And as I said, they’re absolutely desperate and in desperation they will burn anything they can to keep the lights on.”
Isaac said he wrote a piece in early 2022 pointing out that in the Northeast U.S., trash being burned was producing more electricity than renewables. It’s further proof that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” he said. “And there’s a bunch of U.S. policies that have put that in place and the reason that we have to do that.”
Biden: Uninformed or misinformed?
Menton said President Joe Biden appears to be either uninformed or misinformed on what batteries can do to provide power on a massive scale.
“Biden made a speech in which he said, in so many words, the problem that they’re having in Europe is they didn’t build enough renewables, that if they just built enough you’d have enough electricity," Menton said. "I think he clearly believes that for the United States, you just have to build enough renewables. Probably everybody in this audience knows that it doesn’t matter if you build a 1,000 or a million or a trillion windmills and solar panels. If it’s a calm night in January, that system is producing nothing, nothing whatsoever. There’s no amount of renewables that can change that. The only thing that can change that is storage.”
Menton said the people making vital decisions have to understand the reality of energy storage and what is available today and in the foreseeable future.
“And then you have to ask the question if we’re going to phase out all fossil fuels, how much storage does it take to get us through an entire year with just a wind/solar system. That can be calculated,” he said. “There are a number of people who have taken a crack at it. It is not an exercise in fancy science. It is an exercise in basic arithmetic. It's fairly complicated. You would want to have a spreadsheet program rather than a pencil and paper, but it is not fancy math or fancy science. It's just arithmetic."
The simple reality is, he argued, that the sun shines much more in the summer than the winter, and if Americans want to build a solar system to get through the whole year, they will need to store up a lot of power from the summer and save it all the way to the winter.
“Or you could build the solar panels by overbuild by a factor of 30 to try to get through the winter,” Menton said. “Even then you’re going to have nothing at night. It's going to take you basically about 30 days of power. Now how much is that? Texas’ average usage is around 30 gigawatts. Multiply that by 8,760 That’s the number of hours in a year, and you find out it’s about between 253,000 gigawatt hours in a year. Thirty days' worth is like 30,000 gigawatt hours.”
Examine the cost of Tesla batteries for that amount of storage and it comes to approximately double the nearly $2 trillion gross domestic product of Texas, Menton said.
Is electricity the solution? He was skeptical.
“Oh, you’re going to electrify everything. Electrified cars triple everything,” Menton said. “That'll be $10 trillion to get you the batteries and by the way, no battery exists that can actually store power in the summer and have it waiting for you when the winter comes six months later."
Isaac said the costs are “just astronomical.”
He said Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recently said that the best way to handle this is to get everybody driving electric vehicles, which critics say are prohibitively expensive.
Menton said it left him shaking his head.
“It's astounding that we have a secretary of transportation who thinks that the answer to the problem of storage for renewables,” he said. “How are you going to charge your electric car at night in the winter?”
Isaac asked Peiser if European countries are still focusing on renewable energy.
Governments are still doing business as usual, issuing the usual same sound bites about doubling the number of wind farms, Peiser said.
“But my impression is by just reading the papers, the commentators and the columnists, it’s quite clear that we are at the beginning of a dramatic shift in the energy policy debate,” he said. “There are growing concerns that the current trajectory that current obsession with prioritizing renewables, regardless of the cost implications and regardless of the geopolitical implications that that is no longer feasible.
“We don't know how Europe is going to actually address this enormous cost crisis,” Peiser said. “But it’s clear that more and more people, including ministers and members of parliaments are beginning to say we have to completely rethink 30 years of energy policy because for the last 30 years, there was a general consensus in Europe that the only way is, you know, getting rid of fossil fuels and building a system of essentially renewable energy. I think that consensus is now breaking up, and there are more and more politicians and lawmakers saying, ‘We have to think what is more important, our national security, our energy security or the green agenda and the jury's still out how this is going to pan out."
Isaac said these policies seem rooted in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and a commitment to effort to decarbonize everything.
“The deeper question is why would Europe have taken that route in the first place?” Peiser said. “What was the driving force of the decarbonization agenda? And of course, there were three assumptions. All of them failed terribly.
“The first assumption was that the world is running out of fossil fuels," he said. "That was the basic assumption 30 years ago, and everyone agreed. Prices will go through the roof because there isn't enough fossil fuels available. Therefore we have to go to renewables and they will be so cheap that Europe will export them all over the world. Europe will become the world’s first exporter of the green technology. “No one at the time considered that China can do that for half the price. That was the first assumption, then came the shale revolution, and the rest is history.
“The second assumption was there will be a global agreement where every country, every nation of the world will sign up to legally binding cuts in CO2,” he said. “There will be a level playing field, we’ll all cut CO2. That has failed, as we know, because most of the developing countries and China, India are just not agreeing to any binding targets.
“And the third assumption was that renewable energy could actually power an industrial society that you don’t need any anything else other than renewables and batteries,” Peiser said. “They will come, there’s no question. They said that 30 years ago, and we know that they haven’t really advanced very much until now.”
Putin propaganda
Isaac asked if Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “propaganda machine” pushed to ban fracking in the United Kingdom.
“I think I read just a couple of weeks ago that they were plugging their last well, a well that could have produced 10% of the needs, or it could have produced enough energy for 50 years for the UK,” he said. “That the European Union depends on Russia for 40% of its natural gas, half of its coal and nearly a third of its oil. Do you think that these policies that are being put in place around the EU, and they’ve flown to other parts of the world, are part of this Putin propaganda machine? From my perspective, I think it’s a brilliant sales job, but the cost of a lot of lives and extremely expensive energy.”
Peiser said although Russia has promoted anti-shale gas campaigns, that was not the driving force behind the opposition to fracking.
“In reality most activists have done this for free. They didn't need to be paid for that,” he said. “Most green activists are staunch anti-shale gas campaigners, regardless of whether they’ve been paid by Putin or not. Most of them are just convinced that any progress in an affordable fossil fuel is bad and that the only solution is to get rid of fossil fuels altogether. So they do this for free. They don't need to be paid.”
Menton said Third World nations are desperate for power and aren’t persuaded to conserve by countries with much higher consumption rates and histories.
“I did go to Vietnam and Cambodia," he said. "Vietnam was definitely building a lot of coal power plants. I took some great pictures of those, there with lots of smoke that was clearly not just steam coming out of the top. In Cambodia, one of the interesting statistics they gave us was they are still suffering from the Pol Pot time period in which the country is remarkably poor.
“About 40% of the agricultural work is done by draft animals rather than tractors," he said. "That was four years ago. I’m sure it’s going up a little for the tractors since then, but truly remarkable. “So there is a long way to go for the Third World to get into a modern economy and wind turbines and solar panels are not going to do it. These people are going to build coal plants. They might build some natural gas plants, too, but coal is nearer. It’s very abundant. It’s cheap, and the benefits of electricity are immediately obvious to everybody.
Issac pointed to an article on energy poverty published on the Life:Powered website that was written by communications manager Katie Tahuahua.
“Katie writes in there that reliable electricity impacts women more than anyone else around the world, that they face the burdens associated with not having electricity — 200 million hours a day spent walking to collect water,” he said. “The average woman on the face of the Earth walks over three miles every single day to collect water. “That doesn’t include the time they spend collecting animal dung to burn over a fire, to heat that water to make it somewhat possible.
"I’ve heard climate alarmists … I refer to them kindly as the climate cult … talk about deaths from air pollution and the real deaths from air pollution,” Isaac said. “There’s 3.8 million people that die every year from lung illnesses attributed to indoor air pollution. And if you watch any of Scott Tinker’s movies ‘Switch’ or ‘Switch On,’ there’s some very graphic scenes of a young child coughing, and you look at the inside of what could be classified as at home in Bangladesh, and it's black because they’re cooking with wood and animal dung and anything they can find to heat water. And it’s just heartbreaking.
Isaac said while critics worry about harmful pollution from coal plants, he thinks of a scene in “Switch On,” in which Tinker visits with people in a Vietnamese town that has electricity powered by a coal-fired plant.
“And I’ve joked with members of Congress and said, of all the technologies that the Chinese steal from us, it’d be nice if they would utilize our pollution control technology and they don’t. And that would be extremely helpful,” he said. “And I do that, for one thing, because my personal opinion is the focus on CO2 is anti-human. We should be focusing on things that actually improve the quality of human life."
Peiser said all OECD countries have more or less agreed they will not invest in any new coal- or gas-fired power plants, even the cleanest ones.
Isaac noted that while CO2 emissions continue to rise, the severity of storms and the strength of storms continues to remain flat, if not decline in the last decade. Many climate scientists disagree with this view.
“But the media won’t report on that,” he said. “They report on the cost because costs are more expensive now. People are moving to places where there are hurricanes and other wildfires and building homes surrounded by trees with poor forest management.”
They agreed that arguments against fossil fuels are losing steam.
“The radical Green movement has driven the kind of exaggerated fear campaign on many issues, but they are beginning to be on the back foot on this crisis because people, there’s a limit to how many fears people can have,” Peiser said. “And if you live in a fairly stable, wealthy society, you can have the luxury to fear about all sorts of things. But once people are beginning to be really concerned about whether they are able to heat their home next year or next winter, they have to prioritize fear."
Menton said he sees evidence of the same shift in the Northeast U.S.
“Believe it or not. New York passed a statute in 2019 adopting these green targets like we are going to have a carbon-free electricity grid by 2035 and I think 80% carbon-free by 2030 and other such targets and completely carbon-free economy by 2050,” he said. “They just came out with what they called the scoping plan. It’s 800 pages long and it says how they’re going to do it."
There is a stunning lack of detail on how these grand concepts will be enacted, Menton said.
“Will they figure it out? Yes, I've got the year about 2025 when they hit the wall. They are going to hit the wall,” he said. “They’re talking about how about thousands of gigawatts of offshore wind turbines? Do you know how many they have today? None. I think we ought to start a pool on when it's going to be. It could be as early as about 2024, ‘25, ‘26, somewhere in there. It will become obvious that this is not going to happen."
Isaac said reality about to hit them right in the face.
“Somewhere about that time they’ll realize that the coastal wind is going to be an abject failure,” he said. “We’re actually involved in litigation and suing the federal government because they are basically giving away our coastline to foreign countries and to foreign companies with our tax dollars. I visited Rhode Island late last year and saw the Block Island wind farm, which is the first coastal, first and only coastal wind farm installed in the United States. There are five turbines that are installed in over the last two years. Only one has worked."
Isaac noted that the cost of wood has skyrocketed, and wood-burning stoves are on a six-month back order.
“We burn entire American forests." Peiser said. “And there are scientists who are claiming that this is actually causing more CO2 emissions than burning coal. But the point is that all these alternative forms of energy generation are heavily subsidized and they’re not profitable or sustainable.
"If you were to cut subsidies and that is a clear proof that they’re not cheap because they can't compete, if you were to cut subsidies for wind or solar overnight, which some governments might eventually do," he said. "No one is going to build a wind turbine or build a solar farm without subsidies. That is just not economic.”
Peiser said there is another side to this that is rarely reported.
“China is the biggest beneficiary of our green policies because what Europe has done over the last 20 years is claiming that they have cut emissions, without explaining that a lot of that happened simply by shifting manufacturing and heavy industry abroad,” he said. “What it means is that a lot of the stuff we buy in Europe, most of the products we buy are produced abroad are produced in Asia, mainly China."
He said another element is the relative shortage of natural resources in China.
“They have coal, but they are increasingly reliant on energy imports," Peiser said. "Energy will play one of the biggest geopolitical roles in coming decades. And if the West isn’t careful, then we could see, and we are already seeing this with a cooperation between Russia and China. We could be in a very, very dangerous situation if we don’t take energy seriously enough as a security issue."
Isaac said these unintended consequences can be very, very dangerous.
“I often refer to the carbon tax as a pro-China carbon pricing policy, because that’s what it boils down to,” he said.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation was founded by Lord Nigel Lawson, Britain’s former chancellor of the exchequer, who served in the cabinet of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It calls itself a nonpartisan organization and considered among the world’s leading climate policy think tank based in London in the United Kingdom. Peiser has written extensively on international climate policy.
Menton, currently retired, was a partner in the law firm of Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York for more than 30 years. On his blog Manhattan Contrarian, he writes about elite political ideologies on climate change, the purpose of government, New York state news, the basic principles of economics and other topics that catch his eye.