By Gordon Tomb

While listing many of the barriers to abandoning fossil fuels for “green” energy, three writers in Foreign Affairs magazine skip over an important truth: the once ballyhooed but now moribund “energy transition” was and remains unnecessary and undesirable.

Instead, the article’s title, “The Troubled Energy Transition: How to Find a Pragmatic Path Forward,” suggests (1) that the so-called transition has legitimacy and (2) that it still somehow should happen. Both are false.

The writers are distinguished men: Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning energy historian; Peter Orszag, Chairman and CEO of Lazard; and Atul Arya, Chief Energy Strategist at S&P Global. Their 5,000-word essay discusses issues extensively, but the language is less than direct and misses the heart of many matters.

For instance, the authors compare the shift to “green” energy from fossil fuels with coal replacing wood beginning in the 18th century and culminating in the 1900s and with oil overtaking coal as a dominant fuel in the 1960s. Energy sources being supplanted, they note, continued to be used well into the transitions just as fossil fuels have remained in use – even growing in quantity – during today’s introduction of alternatives.

However, the article gives short shrift to energy density, or how much work can be extracted from a unit of an energy source. In past transitions, succeeding sources were required in far smaller quantities than forms being replaced to do the same amount of work – coal better than wood, oil better than coal, and uranium beating the pants off everything.

Regarding the supposed transition of today, the article simply says that “improved functionality and lower costs … are not yet present across much of the entire energy system.”

What that really means is that wind, solar, green hydrogen and so on are utterly useless for supplying large populations with reliable, affordable energy and that physics and chemistry offer no credible evidence of their ability to ever fill that role. Wind and solar, for example, require many times the land and material to produce the same amount of electricity as do coal and nuclear plants. Which is why green energy is failing even with massive subsidies.

About the difficulty of financing green dreams, the writers say, “Part of the problem is sheer costs: many trillions of dollars, with great uncertainty as to who is to pay it.” There is a lack of incentives for private investment, government-imposed carbon taxes are problematic, and the populations of neither rich nor poor countries can afford to pay for any of it.

Not stated is that previous transitions were driven by inventors, investors, engineers, mechanics and tradesmen who employed new fuels to work more efficiently with new machines and processes. New energy sources were developed organically, following the laws of nature and economics rather than the diktats of the deluded drunk on power derived from government sponsorship.

Boneheaded “climate” policies of national governments have made a mess of things. Energy has become more expensive and less available in places like Germany and California, resulting in predictable economic destruction. That is a truth that needs to be said loudly, over and over by more smart people.

The writers’ most fundamental failing is their pretense that moving away from fossil fuels to achieve “net-zero emissions” is a worthy mission only in need of “a pragmatic path forward.” Exactly the opposite is true.

Mountains of geologic and historical evidence and modern research of atmospheric physics show that:

• Increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution have brought the gas to more optimum levels for plant growth. Crop production has improved, and global ecosystems have greened. We should be putting more CO₂ into the air, not less.
• Modern warming is neither unusual nor unprecedented. Vikings grew grain on Greenland 1,000 years ago, and Romans raised citrus in northern England 2,000 years ago. Today, it’s too cold in both places to do either.
• Fearmongering about the “greenhouse” effect is based on exaggerations of the warming potential of CO₂ and other gases and on flawed computer models that have been disproven repeatedly by real-world data. Because of a phenomenon of diminishing returns, even a doubling of CO₂ from the current concentration would result in only modest, beneficial warming.

We won’t guess why such credentialed writers would overlook these well-established facts while perpetuating the false premise of a decades-long disaster in public policy. But there is no “pragmatic path forward” for a sham energy transition, and the authors should know better.

This commentary was first published at Real Clear Energy, April 24, 2023.

Gordon Tomb is a senior advisor with the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia.

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