For three decades, climate campaigners have fought to make fossil fuels so expensive that people would be forced to abandon them.
Their dream is becoming reality: Energy prices are spiraling out of control and will soon get even worse. Yet we are no closer to solving climate change. [bold, links added]
Energy costs increased 26% across industrialized economies last year and will rise globally by another 50% this year.
While Western governments are blaming Russia’s war on Ukraine, prices were already rising because of climate policies designed to choke fossil-fuel investment.
Since the 2015 Paris agreement was inked, the world’s 1,200 biggest energy corporations have slashed capital investment in oil and gas by more than two-thirds.
Huge price rises are the inevitable result of forcing more energy out of an increasingly starved system.
The climate-policy approach of trying to push consumers and businesses away from fossil fuels with price spikes is causing pain with little climate payoff, for two reasons.
First, solar and wind are still only capable of meeting a fraction of global electricity needs. Even with huge subsidies and political support, solar and wind delivered just 9% of global electricity in 2020.
Heating, transport and vital industrial processes account for much more energy use than electricity. This means solar and wind deliver just 1.8% of the global energy supply.
And electricity is the easiest of these components to decarbonize: we haven’t yet made meaningful progress greening the remaining four-fifths of global energy.
Second, even in the rich parts of the world, it is clear few people are willing to pay the phenomenal price of achieving net-zero carbon emissions. Soaring prices are hiking energy poverty in industrialized economies, and prices are set to climb even further.
Germany is on track to spend more than a half-trillion dollars on climate policies by 2025 yet has only managed to reduce fossil-fuel dependency from 84% in 2000 to 77% today.
McKinsey estimates getting to zero carbon will cost Europe 5.3% of its GDP in low-emission assets every year — for Germany, more than $200 billion annually.
That’s more than Germany spends annually on education and police, courts and prisons combined.
Western leaders can’t continue to push expensive policies without a backlash. As energy prices soar, risks grow of resentment and strife, as France saw with the “yellow vest” protest movement.
For the poorest billions, rising energy prices are even more serious because they block the pathway out of poverty and make fertilizer unaffordable for farmers, imperiling food production.
The well-off in rich countries might be able to withstand the pain of some climate policies, but emerging economies like India or low-income countries in Africa cannot afford to sacrifice poverty eradication and economic development to tackle climate change.
Globally, the inability of green energy to compete means the world is on track to remain fossil-fuel dependent.
Analyzing all current and promised climate policies, the International Energy Agency finds that fossil fuels will still provide two-thirds of global energy use by 2050, only a modest drop from 79% today.
And green energy’s failings are why carbon emissions are still increasing. Last year saw the highest global emissions ever. This year is likely to be higher again.
Climate policy is broken. By forcing up the price of fossil fuels, policymakers put the cart in front of the horse. Instead, we need to make green energy much cheaper and more effective.
Humanity has relied on innovation to fix other big challenges. We didn’t solve air pollution by forcing everyone to stop driving but by inventing the catalytic converter that drastically lowers pollution.
We didn’t slash hunger by telling everyone to eat less but through the Green Revolution, which enabled farmers to produce much more food.
Yet innovation in green energy has been neglected for three decades. In 1980, the rich world spent more than 8 cents of every $100 of GDP on low-carbon technologies.
As climate policies focused on making fossil fuels more expensive, green research spending halved to fewer than 4 cents of every $100.
Copenhagen Consensus researchers, including three Nobel laureate economists, have shown the most effective climate policy possible is to increase green research-and-development spending fivefold to $100 billion per year.
This would still be much less than the $755 billion the world spent just last year on often-ineffective green technology.
We don’t know where the breakthroughs will happen. They could come in nuclear energy, which can provide reliable power around the clock unlike the intermittency of solar or wind but remains much more expensive than fossil fuels. …
The best example of game-changing climate innovation is the 10-year, $10 billion public investment in shale gas President George W. Bush launched, which ultimately led to energy companies embracing the technology.
Not intended as climate policy, it led the way for a production surge of cheap gas, outcompeting a significant part of coal. Gas emits about half the CO₂; this was a major reason America has seen the single-biggest emission reduction in the past decade.
We will not solve climate change by making fossil fuel energy unaffordable but by innovating down the price of green technologies so everyone will be able to switch.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”
Read more at NY Post
Well done Dave in totally ignoring what I actually posted.
what was I referring to? The numbers lying Lomborg was using, but you Wilfully ignored that basic fact, didn’t you, Dave. Because you too are a liar, aren’t you.
what you claim has some element of fact to it but totally ignores what the alternativer is, which is far, far more of what you describe does to staying with FF, isn’t it. So why are you totally ignoring that?
I have asked you and others to do a cost benefit analysis of renewables vs FF, but you all run away because you know that proves all your claims to be, at best, disingenuous.
“That is without the damage to flora and fauna in vast areas around the world but no one seems to worry about that as long as the likes of you get the say.” Have look around you Dave at the disastrous effects FF has had over the years and is still having, which you somehow ignore.
“And electricity is the easiest of these components to decarbonize: we haven’t yet made meaningful progress greening the remaining four-fifths of global energy.”
From 2005 to 2019 solar energy production increased from next to zero to nearly 700 TWh, with 220 of that in the PRC. To a sane person that is considerable progress.
For wind the numbers are from around 100 TWh to over 1,400 TWh.
so to boldly claim “we haven’t yet made meaningful progress” is typical Lomborg misinterpretation.
You must be joking that energy is the easiest to decarbonise. The vast majority of solar panels and wind turbines are made in China which has a enormous number of coal fired power stations operating to produce the energy to make the finished products. All non recyclable of course. Then the massive mining for rare earth which is not done with pick and shovel. Then there is the manufacturing of steel for the enormous base blocks to hold up these monstrosities. Plus the energy to manufacture the concrete and the powered vehicles and cranes used to instal them. Plus the massive damage to the environment like in Germany’s 1000 year old forest and here in Australia at the top of Queensland. That is without the damage to flora and fauna in vast areas around the world but no one seems to worry about that as long as the likes of you get the say.
Twobit Lying Cxkr Dave Boffey wants to prove something
amazingly
he actually is
haha haha
Heh Boffey, keep repeating the same thing and same poor science and ignore all science that refutes it and you are just a parrot that repeats and repeats with no idea what they said.
This site is not about science it is just political rhetoric.
I have injected science into things and you deniers hate it, because you have no answers, do you.
Once again Boffey proves their ignorance with their typical amount of the misinformation we get from the NYT’s and CNN
Yet again you totally ignore what I post and for some reason cite news outlets I have never cited.
Amazing isn’t it.
David B.
I have a question for you.
Do you believe that Planet Earth’s water cycle cools the earth?
Yes or No?
He won’t, he only selectively answers and bags everyone. Ignore him. Just a troll trying to deter people from this excellent website.
Yes and no is the correct answer, isn’t it.
How long is a piece of string?
” CO2 is insignificant in climate. 0.04% of the atmosphere is barely enough to sustain life,” We evolved at 200 ppm, it is now 415 ppm so it is obviously plenty to not only sustain but to actually let it deve[ope.
” EVERY ONE OF OVER 100 CO2 DRIVEN CLIMATE MODELS OVERESTIMATES TEMPERATURES COMPARED TO ACTUAL WEATHER BALOON AND SATELLITE DATA, ILLUSTRATES THE FAILURE OF A CO2 DRIVEN CLIMATE. Ooooh, shouty hissy fit.
Climate models Accuracy. Projections
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming
https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/primer/climate-models
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-climate-models-have-not-exaggerated-global-warming
https://www.universetoday.com/142324/nasas-long-term-climate-predictions-have-proven-to-be-very-accurate-within-1-20th-of-a-degree-celsius/
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly/#7e88813a6614
Could you please share your expertise with Beijing, Mumbai and the Kremlin? All our efforts and sacrifices are being squandered by that other half of the world, and they don’t care.
So you agree that AGW is real and a major problem. OK.
I’m a lifelong farmer with a biology degree. So when I hear journalists call CO2 “pollution”, I know they have no clue of the science of the environment. They have no clue that life began in CO2 concentrations more than twenty times those of today. And they don’t know that all life on earth is literally made from the stuff! Today, we know that photosynthesis is arguably the most important biochemical process in life on earth. It literally paints our environment green with its green pigmented enzyme chlorophyll. It transforms sunlight, CO2 and water into the high-energy chemical bonds of sugar. It creates the energy that allows life to live. And it “exhales” atmospheric oxygen, as a waste product to plants. Without either CO2 or water, all life dies. All life. And without photosynthesis’ waste byproduct oxygen WE COULD NOT EXIST! Yet you’d think listening to modern media, 0.04% of the atmosphere CO2 determines climate and is only significant to the environment as a greenhouse gas. THE EXACT OPPOSITE IS TRUE! Our environment, and every living species in it, is entirely composed of little carbon sacks of water we call cells. 85% of life’s mass is made of the main elements of CO2 and water – carbon and oxygen. Life is long-chain carbon structure containing a near perfect solvent – water. Whose mass is nearly entirely the oxygen in H2O. For one hundred years, we have known that CO2 is absorbed by green plants. Today we know that CO2 is essential to life on earth. We know that every living thing begins to die at CO2 levels below 150ppm. And we know that all life gets greener, stronger, more drought-tolerant, and abundant with any addition of CO2 to an atmosphere below 2,000ppm. Except for “journalists” of course. Because their profs in their wisdom don’t teach even the basics of science. Sadly.
Thanks Barry, the troll has been silenced.
Yes Barry, we all know that but you wilfully ignore the far more important facts, and one has to wonder why.
It was also established long ago that small changes in CO2 have a great affect on the atmosphere, so why don’t you mention that?
You seem to believe that small quantities aren’t important or massive changes in them. Medicines in very, very small quantities have massive effects on the human body, whiuch you must know as you keep bangiong on about your biology degree.
“They have no clue that life began in CO2 concentrations more than twenty times those of today. ” Why are you lying? Of course that is known, but your problem there is that the Cambrian Explosion was aquatic not terrestrial or avianan and the CO2 levels in the oceans were quite low, so you argument is moot, isn’t it.
All extant flora and fauna evolved when the CO2 was around 200 ppm, then with the onset of the Industrial Revolution it started to rise, to 295 ppm a hundred years ago to 415 ppm today, so the CO2 is double the quantity we evolved for.
Yes, additional CO2 can be good for vegetation but only with the addition of vast quantities of water and chemical fertilisers.
You have been told these facts a number of tines and yet you continue to totally ignore them Why? They are science Barry, something this channel lacks.
“And we know that all life gets greener, stronger, more drought-tolerant, and abundant with any addition of CO2 to an atmosphere below 2,000ppm.” No we don’t.
https://news.mongabay.com/2016/06/rising-co2-is-reducing-nutritional-value-of-food-impacting-ecosystems/
https://www.mongabay.com
https://news.mongabay.com/?s=rising+co2
https://phys.org/news/2015-06-carbon-dioxide-air-restrict-ability.html
https://carnegiescience.edu/news/co2-effects-plants-increase-global-warming-0
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569568/pdf/rstb20051743.pd
Climate Change and Global Food Security: Prof David Battisti
Studied by climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry, during interglacial phases, there is a much shorter temperature cycle within a cycle she calls “Eddy cycles”. Temperatures rise and fall four degrees C over nine hundred years. There have been several hundred of these interglacial warming and cooling cycles. The latest iteration of this “Eddy” cycle has had temperature warming since the “Little Ice Age” in the 1600s. When you could ice skate on the Thames River in London. The thermometer was invented a hundred years later. So is today’s warming trend unprecedented and alarming? Hardly. CO2 is insignificant in climate. 0.04% of the atmosphere is barely enough to sustain life, let alone drive the climate. And the fact that EVERY ONE OF OVER 100 CO2 DRIVEN CLIMATE MODELS OVERESTIMATES TEMPERATURES COMPARED TO ACTUAL WEATHER BALOON AND SATELLITE DATA, ILLUSTRATES THE FAILURE OF A CO2 DRIVEN CLIMATE. When climate alarmists frighten schoolchildren and the general public, they are talking about these failed climate model projections. Not actual temperatures. You’d think after thirty years of climate paranoia the world would get a climate clue. Apparently not.
Barry, your articles are great, thank you. Great reading actual facts and reality. Love the last paragraph in the above article, says it all really. However many are now so brainwashed that if they were standing waist deep in snow they would be crying ‘hottest year ever!!!”
Dr. Judith Curry,? Really?
She claimed “The models are broken.” but after being proved wrong she backed down about this on her blog, saying she was misquoted and “had no idea where it came from.”
Currty :”We should use the satellite data. It’s the best we have!” Knowing full well we do use that data.
And “The BEST team tried to “hide the decline,” because there has been “no warming since 1998.” Another blatant lie.
Also “One of the unfortunate consequences of the focus on anthropogenic forcing of climate is that solar effects on climate have been largely neglected.” Another blatant lie.
“Scientists tried to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperature” The ‘decline’ refers to a decline in northern tree-rings, not global temperature, and is openly discussed in papers and the IPCC reports.
“”There is no consensus””
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0270467619886266
Abstract
The consensus among research scientists on anthropogenic global warming has grown to 100%, based on a review of 11,602 peer-reviewed articles on “climate change” and “global warming” published in the first 7 months of 2019.
The study on 11,602 peer-reviewed articles on climate change is a typical example of climate fraud. Only the articles that disputed climate change were counted as being against it. All other articles, including those which didn’t even mention the subject, which was the vast majority, where counted as supporting the climate change narrative.
David, please, such dishonesty. such a lack of understanding.
A similar study is described here
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-scientific-agreement-anthropogenic-nature-climate.html
And this from 9 years ago.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130515203048.htm
You can wibble all you like but reality says you are incorrect.
As Bjorn Lomborg says, climate related deaths have improved tenfold over the last century. There is no crisis. Historically, climate events have always killed. As Bjorn has summarized, a century ago, climate killed about 500 thousand a year. Now, it kills only about 56,000! A lack of energy kills MORE THAN 300 TIMES WORLDWIDE THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE KILLED BY CLIMATE. As many as 12 MILLION a year – and that’s just from cooking over indoor fires. Further, climate crisis alarmists completely ignore both one hundred years of the science of CO2 biology and the entire science of our naturally driven climate. The climate naive believe that the today’s warming is unusual. It isn’t. They claim that this warming trend is unusual and that it is caused by more CO2. It isn’t on either count. Our climate today remains well within the 12 degree C ongoing natural temperature range of our 2.6 million year Pleistocene/Quaternary Ice Age. It is the coldest range of temperature earth has experienced since multicellular life evolved nearly 600 million years ago. It is driven by Milankovitch Eccentricity, the one hundred thousand year cyclical variation of the shape of earth’s orbit. A variation of the warmest near circular, like today’s Holocene interglacial. In warm fifteen thousand year interglacials, ice sheets thousands of feet thick recede to current polar latitudes. During cold glacial 85 thousand year phase oblong orbits, ice reaccumulates thousands of feet thick as far south as NYC.
As Bjorn Lomborg incorrectly says by. taking facts out of context and twisting others, “climate related deaths have improved tenfold over the last century.”
As anyone capable of critical thinking knows Lomborg is infamous for misrepresenting pretty much everything, that is why he has no published papers to support his wild flights of fantasy.
“The climate naive believe that the today’s warming is unusual. It isn’t. They claim that this warming trend is unusual” Wrong again. Barry, it is unusual in both being global and relatively quick.
Lomborg’s statement about climate deaths is incorrect. I have read a number of articles on this and most give the reduction of deaths as much larger than 10%.
It is wrong to attack the content of an article based on the author as David Boffet did by saying, “Lomborg is infamous for misrepresenting pretty much everything.” Consider Joseph Stalin. I think we can all agree that he wasn’t a reliable source of information and opinions. Yet, just before Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Stalin gave a speech about the capabilities of the German military that was dead on accurate. So even with Stalin, it is not the author that important, but the content. This same is true of climate change.
What a load of bollox.
Lomborg is infamous for misrepresenting pretty much everything, as he does here.
“that is why he (Bjorn Lomborg) has no published papers to support his wild flights of fantasy.” When the vocal actors such as Jane Fonda, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Leonardo DiCaprio speak out in favor of the climate change narrative despite having no published papers, the climateers think nothing of it. Yet, when Lomborg makes statements against the narrative, some climate change advocates say that not having published papers is a big issue. I say “some” advocates because I don’t that they are all at the high level of hypocrisy.
More bollox. The sort of person you mention will speak asa lay person and give their lay opinion, that is all. They do not publish non-peer reviewed papers like Lomborg, publish articles and speak at conferences as an expert, as does Lomborg.
So, no hypocrisy at all, it is the deniers who are the hypocrites.
That you are incapable of understanding the difference speaks volumes, doesn’t it.
Here is hoping alll those who opposed Fracking and Drilling those keep it in the Ground idiots with their stupid signs with the stupid finger pointing at the ground are now having to pay higher prices to heat or cool their homes Here comes reality you Eco-Freaks