This week, the International Energy Agency made what was at least taken as a stunning announcement: Unless all investment in new coal-fired power plant construction and oil and gas development are immediately halted, the world will fail to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
In a sense, this headline item might seem obvious. It is literally true that carbon emissions will continue as long as we burn carbon-based fuels. But beyond that, the report is so filled with foolishness that it is difficult to know where to start debunking it.
The future it envisions, specifically of a 90% solar- and wind-driven world, is unattainable and ridiculous. World leaders should not try to pursue it because it cannot work.
You can have all the solar- and wind-generation capacity in the world, but it all becomes useless when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining. The moment Texas’s natural gas pipelines failed earlier this year, the power went out and could not be brought back online, even though the Lone Star State is a national leader in wind-generating capacity. The lesson is that no matter how much you subsidize renewables, the sun and wind are not reliable sources of energy and can only supplement reliable sources, not replace them.
The IEA’s vision is also politically ridiculous because, like so many environmentalists, it fails to confront the real problem: China, the world’s largest emitter by far, is building hundreds of new coal-fired power plants even as you read this and has no plans to curb emissions before 2030. China is not honoring its carbon commitments and will not do so. Despite the report’s insanely optimistic claim, China will not be reducing coal consumption by 85% steadily between 2020 and 2050.
Remember Greta Thunberg, whom the national media was trying to turn into the next messiah before the pandemic? Even she failed to receive her customary fawning media coverage earlier this month when she accurately criticized China’s lusty embrace of new carbon pollution. The green world is in denial about China, but it cannot afford this delusion. Global warming alarmists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have claimed the world will end if we don’t do something by 2030. China is already calling her bluff, and its emissions increases are significant enough that no action by the United States could possibly offset them.
In short, this IEA report has the wrong focus and the wrong vision for the future.
If you care about reducing carbon emissions, then the correct model for the future is France. Its electrical grid is almost entirely nuclear and has been for decades. Those who reject nuclear are clearly not serious about carbon emissions and should be ignored.
Any sustainable low-carbon future will have to depend on some combination of next-generation nuclear power, new technologies involving low- and zero-carbon natural gas, carbon capture, and emerging technologies such as fusion. That model will work; others are just so much sunshine and rainbows.
With its statement that “no new oil and natural gas fields can be approved for development,” the IEA is only encouraging the “keep-in-the-ground” extremists who just want to see American consumers live in a perpetual state of shortage. On an international basis, the environmental extremists would cause the world’s poor to continue living in cold and darkness, just to suit their narcissism. It isn’t worth it.
If you want to maintain your current standard of living and elevate the world’s poor to a better life, then this report’s warning is one that you ought to ignore.
