President Obama announced in November 2014 what was supposed to be an “ambitious” new climate agreement with China.
The Chinese obligation was derisory: The world’s most populous nation would try to slow the growth of its carbon emissions so that they stopped growing altogether by 2030.
Obama announced that America, meanwhile, would reduce its carbon emissions to at least 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
If you’re wondering what sort of a sacrifice this is going to mean for you, we have some good news. By the time the ink had dried on the sham climate deal, the U.S. was already halfway to fulfilling its end of the bargain.
The federal Energy Information Administration announced last week that as of 2015, the power generation industry, the largest contributor to American emissions, has reduced carbon dioxide emissions to 1993 levels, 21 percent below 2005 levels. This reduction, and a smaller reduction in emissions from motor vehicles, the U.S. has cut total emissions by 12 percent below 2005 as of last year, despite 15 percent growth in the economy.
The same force that began this trend last decade will drive those levels down still further. What was that force? It wasn’t the cap and trade bill that died in Congress early in Obama’s term. It wasn’t Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which remains tied up in court and won’t be implemented for some time.
Rather, it was fracking. And fracking will continue to push carbon emissions much lower for years to come.
As EIA put it, somewhat misleadingly, “A shift on the electricity generation mix, with generation from natural gas and renewables displacing coal-fired power, drove the reductions in emissions.”
But wind and solar power, despite heavy subsidies and mandates for their use, accounted for only about 5.5 percent of electrical generation in 2015.
The main reason for the drop in carbon emissions is that new low natural gas prices, driven by the fracking boom, made it a much more economical fuel than coal. And coal releases 2.5 times more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than does natural gas.
So thanks to market forces of supply and demand, which have also spurred improvements in the technology of natural gas power generation, coal-fired electrical generation is off by one-third since 2005.
Natural gas was used to generate more electricity than coal during seven months of 2015, and 2016 might well be the first year in which natural gas generates more electricity overall. And it gets better, because coal still accounts for 34 percent of power generation. This means there is more room for the market to drive further emissions reductions into the future.
The period since 2005 has seen a dramatic and relatively effortless reduction in carbon emissions from their peak. Thanks to gas prices, America will meet the target set for it by the original Kyoto Protocol (which was never ratified) without adopting any of the economically ruinous reforms demanded by radical environmentalists.
The lesson here is not that markets magically solve environmental problems. They obviously do not. But they do represent the only feasible hope of a solution to those problems that the public at large will accept. Politicians who think they have a better way will merely trade off prosperity for miniscule improvements over what markets will ultimately have to do and sustain.
