The whole “net-zero by 2050” narrative that cranked up in earnest in early 2021 has now become a public relations problem for the climate-alarm movement, according to a senior official at the United Nations.
Chris Stark, the outgoing chief executive of the UN’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), said as reported by the Guardian: “Net zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it. That wasn’t something I expected.”
As seems to always be the case among the globalist sponsors of this government-subsidized rush to saddle the world with unreliable power grids and short-range electric cars, the conversation among the leaders of the movement immediately moves not to perhaps reconsidering the approach to address public concerns, but to rejiggering the narrative. Stark recommends shifting the label and the narrative to more of a focus on investment and how renewables and EVs somehow improve energy security.
“We are talking about cleaning up the economy and making it more productive – you can call that anything you like,” he said.
That would be a neat trick, inventing a narrative about benefits that don’t really exist. But it wouldn’t be the first time it’s been tried.
At last November’s COP 28 conference, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres floated the term “climate collapse” as a new name for what the climate alarmists have successively called “global warming,” “climate change,” “climate crisis,” and “climate emergency.” Each successive label has been replaced as its cache’ with the public has faded; and apparently the whole “climate emergency” has lost its punch, so another fright narrative must be concocted.
The trouble there, of course, is that the climate is not collapsing. But then again, it isn’t in any sort of an emergency, either, or a crisis.
The climate is always changing, though, so at least the long-abandoned “climate change” label had the ring of truth to it. Maybe let’s go back to that and try to deal with something that is at least a real thing? But, no, that would cut down on the alarm and make it harder for political leaders to enact bad “solutions” and subsidize them with debt combined with skyrocketing utility bills for average citizens.
So, as Stark says, call it anything you want, just so long as it is alarming. Stark’s boss at the UN, Guterres, used the term “global boiling” to describe the current climate situation. So, maybe we change “net-zero by 2050” to “no bubbles by 2050.” That would at least have the advantage of some semblance of consistent thought.
A colleague suggested that we simply change the problematic label to “Stone Age,” since that is where we are heading if the alarmists continue to get their way. She has a point.
The most amazing thing about Stark’s concerns is that anyone is really surprised that “net-zero by 2050” has become a problematic term. How else would officials at the UN and other governments expect the public to react to what has become the umbrella label for a set of authoritarian government actions that have destabilized power grids, caused the cost of living to rise rapidly, reduced consumer choice, and begun to rob citizens in nominally “free” countries of their individual rights?
The central problem today with this climate change narrative is that it has gone on for so long that is has become a bit of a joke with an increasingly aware and skeptical public. And the reason they’re skeptical is not due to any disbelief in science, as the alarmists invariably claim, but because they have seen nothing but bad outcomes and personal deprivations from the alleged solutions being subsidized into existence.
Stark assures us that, “the lifestyle change that goes with this is not enormous at all,” but painful results to date tell another story.
If Stark were truly thoughtful and serious about wanting to deal with the increasing unpopularity of the “net-zero by 2050” construct, he would suggest that everyone take a step back and re-evaluate the nature and effectiveness of the solutions being pushed.
By merely advocating for the concoction of yet another shift in the narrative, a troublesome lack of sincerity is laid bare.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
A new survey conducted by Bain & Co. finds a rising percentage of energy executives willing to recognize the reality that the world will fail to achieve the “net zero by 2050” drop-dead goal pushed by the globalist community.
Bain & Co. surveyed more than 600 executives in oil and gas, utilities, chemicals, mining, and agribusiness during last November’s COP28 conference in Dubai and over the weeks following that event.
2050, of course, is the alarm-driven drop-dead date given to us by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the year we must achieve global net zero carbon emissions to prevent disastrous levels of global warming. But everyone knows that such alarmist projections have always been quite malleable and tend to shift to later dates in time once it becomes clear that the predicted disasters by certain dates aren’t actually coming about. You know, like all those alarms about the end of snow, the melting of the polar ice caps, Greenland’s ice shelf sliding off into the ocean, and Manhattan being inundated by rising sea levels. Al Gore kind of stuff.
Similarly, Bain & Co. finds that a rising percentage of energy executives now expect the ballyhooed “net zero” date to be pushed well past 2050, with fully 62% now anticipating it won’t be reached before 2060 or even later. That number is up from just 54% expressing the same opinion a year ago, and we can be sure it will keep rising in every subsequent year as the impossibility of reaching that 2050 goal becomes increasingly obvious to even the truest of true believers.
Here is how Bain puts it in its press release: “Clearly, the longer that executives on the front lines of the energy transition grapple with the challenges of putting decarbonization plans into action, the more sober they’re getting about the transition’s practical realities.”
Yes, pesky practical realities do have a way of intruding on the fantasy thinking that underlies so much of the energy transition’s prevailing narratives. In its next paragraph, Bain cites factors like rising interest rates and growing concerns about lack of “policy stability” in the US and other western democracies, i.e., democratic elections, as factors causing more and more of these executives to become skeptical about achieving the alarmist goals.
But weren’t those and other factors completely foreseeable to anyone who understands how the world really works? Of course, they were, but we must recognize that the key decisions related to this heavily subsidized transition are not being made by such people, but by politicians and bureaucrats. And therein lies the real trouble. Politicians look at impractical “solutions” like wind, solar, and electric vehicles and see shiny objects that they might be able to leverage with voters. Whether or not the solutions have any practical value is a secondary thought if they consider it at all.
We see this survey’s findings now reflected in remarks by industry executives at this week’s CERAWeek conference in Houston. CEOs from companies like Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Shell, and others stated their views that the world will require more and more oil, natural gas, and coal for decades to come, and discussed their plans to rededicate more of their capital budgets to their core businesses and less to pleasing ESG investors by throwing away money at unprofitable green ventures.
Reality is setting in, slowly but surely. When Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tells an interviewer from E&E News that the Biden administration is trying to bring about “a managed transition,” as she did this week, more and more smart people in the energy space are coming to realize the threat that really represents.
Speaking to the CERAWeek audience Monday, Granholm claimed strong public support for the Biden Green New Deal agenda, saying, “Consumers are calling for change. Communities are calling for change. Investors are calling for change.” Again, Bain finds a rising percentage of executives actually in the business increasingly skeptical any of that is accurate.
What we are seeing here is a return to energy realism in the business community. That’s good news for everyone, whether the Biden administration and its alarmist supporters approve of it or not.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Imagine this: You invest a couple of hours towards watching “Juice: Power, Politics, and the Grid,” the excellent new documentary produced by Robert Bryce and Tyson Culver.
It’s a documentary that advocates for greater use of nuclear energy, but also has positive things to say about the need to continue using natural gas and coal to maintain stability in our energy grids. Or, you read the outstanding book by author Alex Epstein, “Fossil Future,” which advocates for the proposition that oil, natural gas, and coal will play significant roles in the global energy mix well into the future.
But then, you wake up the next morning only to find that these three men have been arrested and charged with the crime of, well, of saying nice things about fossil fuels.
Don’t laugh: If one Canadian member of parliament has his way, that will become law up in the Great White North. That MP, Charlie Angus of Timmins-James Bay, Ontario, introduced a bill Monday that would invoke criminal penalties for saying positive things about oil, natural gas, and coal, even when those things are manifestly true. The bill reads, in part, “It is prohibited for a person to promote a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel-related brand element or the production of a fossil fuel.”
The Toronto Sun reported this week that Angus made repeated promises to treat the oil, gas, and coal industries in the same way western governments went after the big tobacco companies in the 1990s. The liberal member of Justin Trudeau’s New Democrat Party claimed his bill was about stopping the spread of falsehoods about these fossil fuels, which the climate alarmist movement has done its best to turn into global boogeymen to which every environmental and weather ill is to be ascribed.
“The Big Tobacco moment has finally arrived for Big Oil. We need to put human health ahead of the lies of the oil sector,” Angus told the House on Monday.
So, Angus says the bill is about “stopping the spread of falsehoods by the oil industry,” but the bill actually says it is about making it a crime to “promote a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel-related brand element or the production of a fossil fuel.” The actual language in the law would make it a crime to advertise the price of gasoline on gas station billboards or for Chevron to run TV ads bragging about the additive it calls “Techron.”
The language in the bill would make it a crime for advocates like Bryce and Culver to produce their documentaries and for Epstein to publish his books. All these would be deemed illegal and indeed heretical to the doctrines of the climate alarm religion under Angus’s bill.
The actual language, in other words, has nothing to do with objective truth. It has to do with banning speech this Canadian MP doesn’t like.
For several years, the great standup comic Jeff Foxworthy hosted a TV show called, “Are You Smarter Than a 5th-Grader?” Obviously, MP Angus would flunk that show since every 5th-grader who ever appeared on it would immediately notice the logical conflict between the bill’s language and the promotion of it by its author.
The simple truth is that Bryce, Culver, Epstein and many other advocates who try to bring some level of sanity to our energy and climate debate are right about the future for fossil fuels and nuclear generation. Those energy sources currently supply roughly 85% of the primary energy mix, a level that has been intractably consistent for the past quarter century despite the spending of trillions of dollars on subsidies and tax breaks for wind, solar and electric vehicles.
Indeed, the nuclear renaissance advocated for by Bryce and Culver could even cause that percentage to rise in the coming decades.
Here’s a thought: Perhaps a better approach here would be for Canada’s Parliament and America’s congress to enact laws making it a crime for MPs or members of congress to spread falsehoods about the bills they’re trying to pass.
That would be a real public service, which of course means it can never happen.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
In a story that seems to be becoming increasingly common as time goes on, The Western Journal reported this week about a Canadian EV owner experiencing some massive sticker shock over the cost of replacing the damaged battery in his electric vehicle.
Now, those of us who have always driven internal combustion engine (ICE) cars have at one time or another been faced with big repair bills for some of those vehicles. I can remember spending $4,000 on a new radiator for a 10-year-old Infiniti QX 50 with 220,000 miles on it that I just couldn’t bear to part with several years back. I did finally retire that wonderful vehicle when faced with the prospect of a $6,000 tag for a rebuilt transmission.
So, all cars will eventually cost you or your insurance company big money to repair — no one is saying that’s unique to EVs. But where EVs are concerned, it’s the magnitude of the price for replacing a damaged or worn-out battery that is often quite eye-popping.
I wrote a story in September about a fellow in the U.S. deciding to junk his paid-off EV when he got an estimate of $30k to replace his battery. We now see frequent reports that auto insurance companies are charging higher rates for EVs than for comparable ICE cars due in large part to this extravagant battery replacement cost.
If you think that $30,000 is extravagant, well, get ready, because it apparently isn’t even close to the worst-case scenario. Per the Western Journal, a Canadian man, Kyle Hsu, paid roughly $55,000 Canadian ($41,583 US) in 2022 to buy a brand new Hyundai IONIQ 5. But, less than a year later, Mr. Hsu was involved in what seemed to be a minor accident resulting in superficial damage to his beautiful EV.
Unfortunately for Hsu, it turned out that the battery protector cover on his car’s undercarriage was warped, a problem that could in certain instances cause the battery to explode. This meant that he would have to replace his car’s battery pack in addition to fixing its structural damage. Hsu says he was shocked when the estimate to replace the battery came in at $61,000 Canadian, or about $46,000 in US dollars. That’s almost $6,000 more than he paid for the car when he purchased it brand new.
Even worse, because the damage was caused by an accident, the bill was not covered by the car’s warranty, leaving Hsu with the alternative of filing a claim with his insurance carrier. But the resulting insurance implications were enormous, with Mr. Hsu facing a rate increase of up to 50% if he filed the claim. His only other choice would be to foot the repair bill himself and now have over $87,000 US dollars invested in a $41,000 car.
This is insane. This is not sustainable. The EV industry simply cannot have stories like this one popping up with increasing frequency and hope to sustain growing demand for its products.
When you combine horror stories like this one with:
range anxiety that pops up any time the weather isn’t perfect;
the lack of charging infrastructure;
the unreliability of the infrastructure that does exist;
the non-recyclability of the battery materials;
the increasing restrictions on charging due to the massive load EVs place on the grid;
and all the other significant issues EV makers have yet to address,
you see an industry that is almost doomed to failure before it really gets up and running.
I frequently remind readers that EVs have been around since the 1880s. They are not a new idea in any sense of that word. If they were really the answer to displacing ICE cars at societal scale, it seems likely they would have already done so. What we see popping up with increasing frequency now in the form of stories like this one are simply manifestations of the reasons why that has not already happened.
EVs today are what they have always been: A niche product, a luxury item suitable to fill discreet purposes for the upper 5% or so elites in any society. The technology simply is not there yet to make them anything more than that.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) recently announced a new program in which the Xi Jinping government will subsidize the building of new coal-fired electricity generation plants. Part of an effort to ensure power grid reliability and stability into the future, NDRC’s notice says the program will commence January 1, 2024.
The program will enable new coal-fired power plants to recover about 30% of their capital costs in just the first two years of operation. The government subsidies will be funded from tariffs directed to operators of coal-fired plants by the country’s various electricity grids, using monies collected from commercial and industrial users.
The new program is just another proof point that China is continuing to increase the pace of expansion of its coal-fired power sector as time goes on. Indeed, a report released earlier this year by Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) showed China permitted more coal-fired power plants in 2022 than it had since 2015, and has six times more coal-fired power plants under construction currently than the rest of the world combined.
Meanwhile, as the Xi government continues its massive expansion of coal-fired electricity to ensure grid reliability, the Biden government in the U.S. remains intent on destroying its own coal sector. The Institute for Energy Research (IER) notes that this effort is being underwritten by liberal billionaire philanthropists like former Democrat presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has now pledged $1 billion from his personal fortune to, as he put it, “finish the job on coal.”
In September, Bloomberg Philanthropies stated, “With 372 of 530 coal plants announced to retire or closed to date—more than 70 percent of the country’s coal fleet—this next phase will shut down every last U.S. coal plant.” The effort also targets cutting natural gas-fired generation capacity by half, and would block any new plants from being built in the future. Noting that coal and natural gas power plants account for 98% of U.S. plant closures during 2023, IER points to the fact that the federal government’s forcing of those closures is now negatively impacting reserve margins on the nation’s power grids.
Until the recent hyper focus on cutting atmospheric carbon dioxide, it was customary for grid managers to work to maintain a reserve of up to 20% of total dispatchable generating capacity to be available to come online during severe weather conditions and other instances during which demand threatens to overwhelm supply. Grid managers are finding it increasingly difficult to avoid blackout conditions as grids become increasingly overwhelmed by intermittent, unpredictable wind and solar capacity at the expense of reliable dispatchable baseload.
The problem of lack of dispatchable reserves was highlighted in a deadly way in Texas during February 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, a series of three severe cold fronts that froze most of the state for almost a week, leading to blackouts in which an estimated 300 Texans died. In the storm’s wake, the legislature and regulators identified a series of issues on the grid and at grid manager ERCOT that needed correcting, many of which were dealt with in that year’s legislative session.
But the grid’s shortage of dispatchable thermal capacity – a long-known issue – was left unresolved that year. The 2023 legislature enacted a ballot proposal (Proposition 7) creating a fund to subsidize the rapid building of up to 10 GW of new natural gas generation capacity in the coming years. It is exactly the opposite approach being pushed by the Biden government and its political funders in the climate alarmist community, like Bloomberg.
Texas voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 7 in the November 7 election. In doing so, Texans rejected the notion that their state, which produces more natural gas than all but two other countries, should ever be subjected to an unreliable, unstable power grid that causes hundreds of deaths during weather emergencies.
Sadly, Americans living in other parts of the country will remain saddled with the destructive Biden approach, with little hope for anything improving until at least 2025.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
