For years, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) has been the stomping ground for the left to push its Green New Deal Agenda. In fact, it was just over two years ago when the commission quietly released its plan to impose California-style energy mandates in our state. Their goal was to ban fossil fuels and require most electricity companies to provide “clean” energy by 2050. Thankfully, the commission voted down these energy mandates in January 2022. But that hasn’t stopped the left from trying to find other ways to exploit the ACC.
One of their latest efforts has centered on Tucson, and as part of its Green New Deal agenda, Tucson Electric Power (TEP) asked the ACC for rate hikes to subsidize electric vehicles. But TEP didn’t get everything it wanted…
By cutting off oil and gas exploration as part of a global campaign to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, policymakers aligned with climate activists are “misdirecting scarce innovation resources,” according to an analysis of energy transition efforts.
While proponents of Environmental, Social, and Governance investing continue to seize upon the International Energy Agency’s (IEAs) “roadmap” for reaching net zero as a plug for their ambitions, the authors of a new study probing into the agency’s projections find that they are based on faulty assumptions.
The net zero initiatives that IEA foresees can only materialize if demand for coal, oil, and natural gas plummet while consumers gravitate toward so-called renewable energy in the form of wind and solar. But as the report from the RealClearFoundation and the Energy Policy Research Foundation makes clear, this is a dubious proposition.
“Rather than being a plausible description of the future, demand for hydrocarbons withering away is best thought of as an expression of a political or an ideological aspiration, as opposed to an objective assessment of the future,” the report says. “The failure to invest in increased supply is far more likely to result in upwardly spiraling prices as demand increasingly exceeds supply, as the Biden administration understood when it used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the nonstrategic purpose of tamping down gasoline prices.”
The foundation is a nonprofit group founded to examine energy economics and policy with an emphasis on energy security. The geopolitical implications of net zero policies and ESG investing figures into its analysis of IEA’s roadmap. A big part of the problem lies with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, widely known as OPEC, and the leverage it could gain over western nations including the U.S.
If the demand for petroleum is higher than what is projected in IEA’s roadmap, which is highly likely, the foundation estimates that OPEC’s share of global oil market could rise to an astonishing 82 percent by 2050. OPEC includes Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
“Wittingly or otherwise, ESG investors are undermining the security interests of the West during a period of rising geopolitical tensions,” the foundation warns in its analysis. The upshot is that the west is well positioned to maintain a healthy level of independence from OPEC with the right mix of policies. The foundation points out that IEA was initially established in response to the “first oil price shock” in the early 1970s “to act as a buyers’ group of western nations in an attempt to counteract OPEC market power.” But given how politically fashionable “net zero” efforts have become, the agency has clearly strayed from its mission.
“The IEA could have chosen to remain faithful to its original mandate, but as the Energy Policy Research Foundation report shows, in seeking to become a cheerleader for net zero, the IEA has allowed itself to be used as a tool for climate extremism, has misled policymakers, and has endangered the world’s economy and Western security, all while forsaking the purpose for which it was created.”
A key part of the foundation’s report focuses on the negative consequences that would flow from halting investment in new oil and gas fields based on the idea that a seamless transition can be made to renewables. American energy consumers can expect to take it on the chin.
In the first decade under net zero emissions, the foundation estimates that global oil and gas fuel receipts will be between $12.2 trillion and $52.6 more than what IEA envisions under its policy scenarios. Put simply, consumers will have to pay more for less oil and gas along with all the costs associated with making the energy transition.
The foundation’s analysis also highlights the environmental degradation that could result from a headlong rush toward net zero that does account for financial and technological realities.
“Reducing oil and gas supply will contribute to various environmental and health effects around the world. First, it will likely lead to a resurgence of coal consumption, as many low- and middle-income countries may struggle to afford higher-priced natural gas for heating, cooking, and electricity generation,” the report warns. “As a result, coal-to-gas switching in many countries may regress, increasing local air pollution and exacerbating health crises in many urban areas.”
Self-described environmentalists might also want to take a hard look at the amount of land wind and solar could gobble up. The foundation calculates that solar and wind generation capacity needed to achieve net zero requires an area equivalent to the combined size of California and Texas while the bioenergy needed for electricity production would be about the size of France and Mexico combined.
Apparently, there’s more than just raw economics at stake. What environmental advocacy groups typically describe as clean, and green is neither.
The geopolitical, economic, and environmental costs of net zero call out for a political course correction.
Kevin Mooney is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and the Senior Investigative Journalist at the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank. He writes for several national publications. Twitter: @KevinMooneyDC
During her May 15 speech to The Beyond Growth Conference held by the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen, citing a 1970s de-growth plan published by the Club of Rome, made reference to the European Union’s “social market economy” five times in a span of less than 150 words.
A “social market economy,” of course, is a reference to the sort of central economic planning engaged in by authoritarian socialist governments throughout history. “And this is exactly why we put forward our European Green Deal,” Von Der Leyen told the conference. “Building a 21st century clean-energy circular economy is one of the most significant economic challenges of our times.”
The agenda of the Beyond Growth Conference focused on devising plans to manage the destruction of economic growth that is a centerpiece of the real agenda of the energy transition. Limitations on energy minerals and other resources required by wind, solar and electric vehicles, and on the ability to continue printing trillions of debt-funded dollars and Euros in a vain attempt to subsidize them to the scale required to displace fossil fuels inevitably means the forcing of common citizens in the Western world to scale down their standards of living and limit their mobility to meet the net-zero by 2050 goals being dictated at the global level. Thus, the need for the EU to move “beyond growth” and back to a more primitive mode of living.
Rising recognition and acceptance of these limitations, along with the success by Western governments in enforcing authoritarian edicts on their populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, is now leading to a rapid evolution in the overarching narrative and talking points related to the energy transition. The former energy transition narrative of “we will scale up renewables and EVs and you won’t even notice the difference in your daily lives” has been transformed to “we will scale everything down and you will just have to live with it” with stunning speed during 2023.
A report titled “The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility” issued by the World Economic Forum in May is another great example. Based largely upon a 2017 UC Davis report titled “3 Revolutions in Urban Transportation,” the WEF report advocates for authoritarian governments to force the reduction of the numbers of vehicles on the road from the current global estimate of 1.45 billion to just 500 million. The UC Davis report went largely unnoticed in 2017 because the climate alarmist lobby had not been sufficiently emboldened at that time to publicly discuss its real goals. But that mask is now coming off.
The authors of the WEF report claim citizens who can no longer own cars would still be allowed to move away from their planned cities of the future, but only via “shared transport,” i.e. electric buses and a new network of thousands of miles of high-speed rail. But California has clearly shown that thoughts of building a huge network of tens of thousands of miles of new high-speed rail in the western world in the next 27 years is a complete fantasy. California’s own high-speed rail boondoggle, originally proposed 27 years ago in 1996, has seen its budget blossom from $8 billion to over $130 billion, and still hasn’t managed to lay a single mile of rail.
The real world simply does not conform itself to fantasies like this plan, and everyone at the WEF is fully aware of that reality. Thus, what this plan really amounts to is a scheme to enable the speeding-up of implementation of socialist/authoritarian governments in the West to enforce the new restrictions on the lives of common citizens, an effort that began to accelerate during the COVID pandemic. Authoritarian governments always endeavor to restrict the free flow of information outside of approved propaganda, and restricting mobility is a key means of achieving that goal.
As we see the EU and the WEF now freely admitting, economic de-growth and forcing citizens of Western nations to live smaller, less prosperous lives are the real end goals of this energy transition. The narrative has officially shifted, and we would do well to take them at their word.
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.
Arizona State University (ASU) will house the next clean energy facility, established by $70 million in federal funding from the Department of Energy (DOE).
The facility will be the seventh established Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Institute, housed within ASU’s Electrified Processes for Industry Without Carbon (EPIXC) in the Ira Fulton Schools of Engineering.
In a press release issued last month, DOE Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alejandro Moreno said the goal of EPIXC is to result in zero industrial emissions through total replacement of traditional energy sources, namely fossil fuels, with electrical energy. The $70 million will extend over the next five years.
“Achieving the nation’s climate goals will require an all-hands-on-deck, multidimensional approach to eliminating industrial emissions,” said Moreno. “Our newest institute, EPIXC, will focus on one of the key pillars of industrial decarbonization—electrification—to dramatically slash emissions while helping to strengthen and secure America’s leadership in the global clean energy economy.”
In a separate press release, ASU shared that they partnered with University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Tuskegee University, North Carolina State University, Navajo Technical University, Idaho National Laboratory, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Strategic guidance for the proposal came from KB Science.
The senior associate of KB Science, Scott Boyce, hails from the same company, Dow Chemical Company, that helped launch the Obama-created organization associated with this DOE initiative: Manufacturing USA. Boyce helped oversee the organization and is characterized as “instrumental in supporting the Dow partnership with the DOE.”
The senior consultant of KB Science, JoAnn Milliken, worked as the program manager, office director, and senior executive for the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy for over 21 years.
A significant portion of benefits derived from this clean energy initiative won’t be returned to the general public, but rather be repurposed for equity-oriented causes. Justification for this flow of taxpayer dollars comes from Biden’s executive order issued on the day of his inauguration, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
This $70 million in funding coincides with the DOE’s “Decarbonization Roadmap” released last year. EPIXC will comply with President Joe Biden’s Justice40 initiative (issued a week after his inauguration) to prioritize equity in all clean energy initiatives. The initiative directs 40 percent of benefits derived from federal investments into clean energy — as well as clean transit, affordable and sustainable housing, training and workforce development, remediation and reduction of legacy pollution, and development of clean water infrastructure – will go to disadvantaged communities (DACs).
DACs include any communities the government classifies as “marginalized, underserved, or overburdened by pollution.” The Biden administration clarified that racial demographics don’t factor into DAC classifications. However, they also noted that “communities of color suffer disproportionately from some of these burdens.”
Leading EPIXC is ASU professor Stacy Esposito and University of Texas in Austin professor Bruce Eldridge.
All seven of the DOE’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Institutes are part of the Manufacturing USA initiative. The organization was established in 2014 under the Obama administration, formerly named the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, for the purposes of spurring domestic manufacturing. Initial planning for the network began in 2011 when Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recommended the formation of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP). Leading the AMP were former Dow Chemical Company President, Chairman, and CEO Andrew Liveris and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Susan Hockfield.
The other Manufacturing USA organizations are Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts; American Institute for Manufacturing (AIM) Photonics in Albany, New York; America Makes in Youngstown, Ohio; Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; BioFabUSA in Manchester, New Hampshire; Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE) in St. Paul, Minnesota; CESMII in Los Angeles, California; the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII) in San Antonio, Texas; Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI) in Knoxville, Tennessee; LIFT in Detroit, Michigan; Manufacturing times Digital (MxD) in Chicago, Illinois; NextFlex in San Jose, California; National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) in Newark, Delaware; Power America in Raleigh, North Carolina; Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment Institute in New York, New York; and Reducing EMbodied-energy and Decreasing Emissions (REMADE) in Rochester, New York.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs published her plan for reimagining Arizona energy if she’s elected governor this November. Some of the major changes desired by Hobbs included total elimination of fossil fuels, creating a new bureaucratic body to oversee water and “clean” energy, tree planting in all neighborhoods, and rebate clean energy programs for those 150 percent below the poverty line.
Overhauling the state’s energy and water infrastructure to combat climate change will cost the state and Arizonans more than it would to maintain the status quo. Hobbs’ plan comes as Arizona voters feel increasing pressure from inflation. At present, Arizonans pay an average of over $5.35 per gallon for gas, with Maricopa County residents feeling the gas hike more acutely at $5.65 a gallon. They’re also paying an average increase of over $700 a month on household goods. That latter figure amounts to an average of nearly $8,800 more a year, according to the latest congressional research.
As AZ Free News reported earlier this month, the cost of electric vehicles alone haven’t proved feasible for most Arizonans, let alone Americans — a reality becoming more apparent with inflation. In March, less than 15 percent of Americans were estimated to afford an electric vehicle.
Hobbs’ plan didn’t include an estimated total cost. However, Hobbs did give dollar amounts for certain initiatives, amounting up to $295 million if she serves one term, and up to $575 million if she serves two terms:
up to $5 million a year to remove toxic chemicals from water
a one-time allocation of $15 million to build wells for rural Arizonans, Latinos, and indigenous communities
$15 million a year to restore forests and watersheds
$25 million a year in grants for communities and private landowners affected by wildfires
up to $25 million a year for preserving cultural and historical heritage spaces
Associated with some of these planned funding initiatives were disclosures that preference would be given to those aligning with certain social justice aims, such as combatting the urban heat island effect.
“Katie Hobbs’ Plan for a Resilient Arizona” proposed three overarching priorities: securing and modernizing the state’s water infrastructure, addressing wildfires and sustaining natural resources, and building a “clean energy economy.”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) research team issued a lengthy rebuttal of Hobbs’ plan. In a statement, spokesman Ben Petersen criticized the timing of a plan that would raise energy prices in the context of inflation increasing prices on everything, most noticeably gas and groceries.
“Democrat Katie Hobbs will struggle to explain her ‘Green New Deal’-esque scheme to voters paying record-high gas prices under Biden,” asserted Petersen. “Arizonans want more energy production and relief from the Biden Gas Hike, not Katie Hobbs’ far-left scheme to raise gas prices and energy bills.”
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero endorsed Hobbs’ plan. Last year, the city undertook a number of efforts to expand “clean” energy usage, which included requiring new homes to have electric vehicle charging ports.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.