Say what you will about the myriad confusions and inconsistencies characterizing the overall Biden administration policy agenda, both foreign and domestic, it nonetheless is fair to describe its climate agenda as single-minded, particularly in the context of the intended “clean energy transition” away from conventional energy based upon fossil fuels.
Underpinning much of this agenda is the effort to transform the electric power sector away from coal and natural gas in favor of a large-scale expansion of solar electricity and onshore and offshore wind power. The administration has undertaken massive regulatory efforts, for example, to transform the surface transportation system toward electric vehicles and trucks.
It’s also waging a truly mindless crusade against methane emissions, which are vastly less important than commonly asserted in terms of climate phenomena. And don’t forget the strenuous efforts of the administration to reduce lease offerings for fossil fuel exploration on federal lands and waters as much as possible, often offering the bare legal minimum or even less as a result of the sue-and-settle racket and deliberate misinterpretations of federal law.
If such a “clean energy transition” were efficient economically, there would be no need for the massive subsidies and other policy favoritism intended to achieve it; market forces would effect the “transition” without Beltway interference. But unconventional energy is very far from efficient, and so the administration has not been interested in an honest cost analysis of these policies.
There are available several serious examinations of those real costs, and they are revealing.
My estimate of the cost of transforming the existing electric power sector (in year 2023 dollars), based upon highly conservative assumptions, is about $650 billion per year. (Total retail sales of electricity in 2022 were about $485 billion.) Daniel Turner and Kent Lassman extend that analysis to incorporate the cost of expanding the electricity sector to accommodate the massive additional power demands (e.g., by electric vehicles) to be engendered by the Biden net-zero policy. Their estimate is more than $40,000 per year per U.S. household, or more than $5 trillion per year, which would be almost 18% of U.S. gross domestic product. Different analyses apply different assumptions and methodologies, but the cost estimates uniformly are enormous.
And for what? The “climate” justification for the Biden energy policies is preposterous: applying the Environmental Protection Agency climate model, the entire Biden policy framework to achieve “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would reduce global temperatures by 2100 by 0.104 degrees Celsius, a figure smaller than the normal year-to-year variation in the surface temperature record. It would not be detectable.
Yet the “climate crisis” is the all-purpose excuse for the Biden energy agenda, including the recent announcement of a “pause” in approvals for liquified natural gas export facilities. If the U.S. ceased all exports of LNG, and if there was no resulting international increase in gas or coal use, global temperatures in the year 2100 would decline by less than 0.008 degrees Celsius. To describe this as “perverse” would be a vast understatement.
For those who believe that this would be part of a much more significant international effort (stop laughing), the entire Paris Agreement would reduce temperatures in 2100 by 0.165 degrees Celsius. A 50% emissions cut by the Chinese: 0.111 degrees Celsius. A 50% cut by the entire Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development: 0.129 degrees Celsius.
That is why the Biden administration almost never makes claims about the future climate effects of the “clean energy transition.” Instead, the administration multiplies the reductions in GHG emissions that they assert will result from a given subsidy or regulation by their calculation of the “social cost of carbon,” a wholly fictitious “estimate” of the environmental damage caused by a ton of GHG emissions. The “social cost of carbon” agenda is driven by climate models that cannot predict the past or present temperature record, using ludicrous assumptions about the magnitude of future emissions and their effects. Can anyone be surprised that Beltway climate arithmetic is fundamentally dishonest?
And about the “climate crisis”: there is no evidence in support of it in terms of temperature trends, polar sea ice, tornadoes, tropical cyclones, wildfires, drought, flooding, or ocean alkalinity. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is deeply dubious (pages 12-78 and 12-115) about the various severe effects often asserted as prospective impacts of increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG.
Moreover, NASA reports significant planetary greening as a result of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show that global per capita food production increased 46% between 1961 and 2020, and 20% for 2000-2020. Global deaths from cold vastly exceed those from heat. With a fierce determination, the administration has ignored the benefits of mild anthropogenic warming.
There is nothing “clean” about the “clean energy transition.” Unconventional energy creates serious problems in terms of heavy metal pollution, landfill pollution, wildlife destruction, noise and flicker effects, massive and unsightly land use, and on and on. Again, the Biden administration is determined to ignore these adverse effects.
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The “clean energy transition” in pursuit of a solution to a nonexistent climate “crisis” is purely ideological; that is why the proponents have no interest in basic benefit/cost questions or the deprivations to be inflicted upon ordinary people. As Dogbert reminded us: “You can’t save the Earth unless you’re willing to make other people sacrifice.”
Amen.
Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
