Climate activist Michael E. Mann believes Australia’s prime minister and America’s new president both pose an “existential threat” to humanity, thanks to their embrace of fossil fuels.
Mann, a professor of meteorology at Penn State, has co-written a Guardian op-ed opining about the Trump administration’s focus on an all-of-the-above energy approach that includes clean coal. Even though Trump made energy independence a tent pole in his campaign.
Mann is also worried that President Donald Trump will leave the Paris climate accord, even though it’s neither a treaty nor binding. He believes this is the direct opposite of President Obama’s global warming agenda, which focused on the “decarbonization” of the U.S. economy.
But this green agenda has hardly succeeded in recent years, with renewables increasing by only two percent since 2009 while costing taxpayers billions of dollars. It’s a harsh truth that compelled Obama to admit that natural gas is preferable to other choices.
Sticker shock
Nations that have employed widespread wind and solar farms, like those now in use in southern Australia, are reeling from sticker shock. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has begun a campaign to build more coal-fired power plants.
His actions come in response to the high electricity prices Australians are now paying. And renewables like wind and solar are proving unreliable, intermittent, and incompatible with traditional power grids.
Ironically, coal-fired power plants are now burning as clean as natural gas-fired plants thanks to advanced scrubbing technologies.
