Excellent news from the liberal bastion that is the University of California, Berkeley: Climate change is solved. We can all stop marching and demanding fundamental changes in the structure of society because the problem is done and dusted. Which is nice, of course, but what makes it better is that we just can’t argue with such a source of establishment orthodoxy, can we? Surely, Berkeley must be entirely unbiased and unimpeachable on climate change, no?
True, this isn’t quite what they announced, but it is the obvious outcome of what they say. Their point is that new solar and new wind generation is cheaper today than even new gas, let alone coal or nuclear, as methods of producing the electricity we desire. They go on to say, “Let’s not build any more gas, let alone coal or nuclear” — and given that cheapness, that’s a jolly good idea. At which point, we do get to insist that climate change is solved.
Think through the problem. The emissions made from using fossil fuels to produce the electricity we like apparently cause global warming. We need to do something, anything, to stop that. Okay, anything might include being poorer, turning socialist (which might be repeating myself), electing people such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (ditto), and any number of other things. Not making emissions is one of those options. So, replacing our power generation system with something that doesn’t emit cures the problem.
Sure, we can talk about cars and planes and all that, but if we’ve got cheap electricity without emissions then that gets solved too (so Elon Musk keeps telling us at least). And on through all of the other manifestations of evil that will, in the end, boil us in our beds. Cheap, no-emissions power is the one true solution.
It’s, therefore, most cool (pun intended) that Berkeley insists that this joyful day is here.
If it’s truly cheaper to go green, then green we’ll all go. We don’t actually need to do anything else to encourage this. No one at all is stupid enough to emit just for the fun of it, and money-making capitalists won’t do it either. By being cheaper, these new technologies have ensured that all new plants will be of these non-emitting kinds. Because, you know, cheap, and cheap means profits, so we can rely now as we could not before on simple human greed dealing with the rest of the problem for us.
Which is excellent news, don’t you think? That grand and species-threatening problem has now been dealt with. We’ve done all the hard work that needed to be done, and can now just observe as the simple processes of market competition and lowest cost production methods chew through the scraps of difficulty that remain. This also means we don’t have to turn socialist, become poorer, nor elect Ocasio-Cortez-types, but tastes will differ, no doubt.
Except there’s just one problem: It isn’t true that those new and wondrous solar and wind technologies are, as yet, cheaper than fossil fuels. At least we can’t be certain of it.
If those renewables aren’t cheaper yet, then they’re not the solution yet either, are they? Which does give us something of an interesting dilemma. Either we’ve already solved climate change, or we’ve not got the solution to it yet. Those only two possible answers still militate against our having to have a Green New Deal, don’t they? Either we’ve already done all that is necessary, or we’ve not got the right things to do so yet.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
