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Energy

Why Bad Climate Legislation Is Worse Than No Climate Legislation

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13 minute read

From Michael Schellenberger

Moderate Democratic Senators Joe Manchin & Krysten Sinema Are Right to Oppose the Clean Energy Performance Program

Progressives are angry that moderate Democratic Senator Joe Machin has reportedly opposed the inclusion of climate-related legislation in President Joe Biden’s budget “This is absolutely the most important climate policy in the package,” said Leah Stokes, a Canadian political scientist who helped write the legislation. “We fundamentally need it to meet our climate goals. That’s just the reality.”

But that’s not the reality. The “Clean Energy Performance Program” is not needed to meet climate goals, and might actually undermine them.

Consider Waxman-Markey. That’s the name of the “cap and trade” climate legislation that passed the House but failed in the Senate in 2010. It had a climate goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020. Instead, the U.S. reduced its emissions by 22 percent.

Had cap and trade legislation passed in the Senate, emissions would have declined less than 22 percent, because Waxman-Markey so heavily subsidized coal and other fossil fuels. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, “the Environmental Protection Agency projects that even if the emissions limits go into effect, the U.S. would use more carbon-dioxide-heavy coal in 2020 than it did in 2005.”

The same thing would likely have been true for the Clean Energy Performance Program, which lock in natural gas. Consider France. According to the Commision de Regulation de L’Energie, €29 billion (US$33) billion was used to purchase wind and solar electricity in mainland France between 2009 and 2018. But the money spent on renewables did not lead to cleaner electricity. In fact, the carbon-intensity of French electricity increased.

After years of subsidies for solar and wind, France’s 2017 emissions of 68g/CO2 per kWh was higher than any year between 2012 and 2016. The reason? Record-breaking wind and solar production did not make up for falling nuclear energy output and higher natural gas consumption. And now, the high cost of renewable electricity is showing up in French household electricity bills.

Some pro-nuclear people supported the proposed Clean Energy Performance Program. They claimed it would have saved existing nuclear plants at risk of closure. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the closure of nuclear plants including Diablo Canyon in California, will result in nuclear energy in the U.S. declining by 17% by 2025. If the Program had passed, some pro-nuclear people believe, plants like Diablo Canyon could have been saved.

But the Clean Energy Performance Program would not have saved Diablo Canyon for the same reason it would not have saved Indian Point nuclear plant, which closed in New York, earlier this year: progressive Democratic politicians are forcing nuclear plants to close, and at a very high cost to ratepayers.

If the Clean Energy Performance Program had passed into law, Diablo Canyon’s owner, Pacific Gas & Electric, would simply have passed the $500 million to $1.5 billion penalty imposed by the Program onto ratepayers, along with the other billions in costs related to closing Diablo Canyon 40 years earlier than necessary. The same would have happened with Indian Point.

Where there is political support for saving nuclear plants, state legislators and governors save nuclear plants, as they did in Illinois a few weeks ago, and as they have done in Connecticut, New Jersey, and with up-state nuclear plants in New York. In other states, nuclear plants are protected from cheap natural gas by regulated electricity markets. And now, with natural gas prices rising dramatically, any nuclear plants at risk of closure for economic reasons are no longer at risk.

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What threatens the continued operation of nuclear power plants, and nuclear energy in general, is the continued subsidization of renewables, which the Clean Energy Performance Program would have put on steroids. Under the program, utilities would have received $18 for each megawatt-hour of zero-emissions energy it produces between 2023 to 2030, on top of the existing $25 per megawatt-hour subsidy for wind energy.

Under such a scenario, notes energy analyst Robert Bryce, a wind energy company “could earn $43 per megawatt-hour per year for each new megawatt-hour of wind energy it sells. That’s a staggering sum given that the wholesale price of electricity in New York last year was $33 per megawatt-hour. In Texas, the wholesale price of juice was $22 per MWh.”

Manchin is joined in his opposition to the Plan by moderate Democratic Arizona Senator, Krysten Sinema, and understandably so. The legislation would cost Arizona ratepayers nearly $120 billion in additional electricity costs, according to energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling of the American Experiment. “This would result in a 45 percent increase in electricity prices by 2031, compared to 2019 rates,” they note.

As troubling, the Clean Energy Performance Program would increase dependence on solar panels made in China by incarcerated Uighyr Muslims living in concentration camps and against whom the Chinese government is committing “genocide,” according to the U.S. State Department. New research shows that China made solar panels cheaper through the use of forced labor, heavy government subsidies, and some of the dirtiest coal in the world. The Program would have done nothing to shift production of solar panels back to the U.S.

Nor would the legislation have done anything to internalize the high cost of solar panel waste disposal. Most solar panels become hazardous waste, and create dust from heavy metals including lead, as soon as they are removed from rooftops. A major study published in Harvard Business Review earlier this year found that, when the high cost of managing toxic solar panel waste is eventually accounted for, the true cost of solar electricity will rise four-fold.

As troubling, the continued expansion of weather-dependent renewables will increase electricity costs and blackouts across the United States, as they did in California and Texas. Those renewables-driven blackouts were likely on Senator Manchin’s mind when he made his decision to oppose the Clean Energy Performance Plan. He certainly knows about the problems of renewables in Texas and California, since I discussed them directly with Manchin when I testified before his committee earlier this year.

A better approach would be for Congress to seek nuclear-focused legislation to expand nuclear from its current 19% of U.S. electricity to 50% by 2050. It should take as a model the British government’s announcement yesterday that it would put nuclear energy at the center of its climate plans. Global energy shortages triggered by the lack of wind in Europe have led nations to realize that any efforts to decarbonize electricity grids without creating blackouts must center nuclear power, not weather-dependent solar and wind.

Environmental Progress and I met with British lawmakers in 2019 to advocate for a greater focus on nuclear. At the time, many British energy analysts, as well as ostensibly pro-nuclear climate activists, Mark Lynas and George Monbiot, were telling the public that their nation did not need more nuclear, as Britain could simply rely more on wind energy, and natural gas. Now, electricity prices are skyrocketing and factories are closing in Britain, due to a bad year for wind.

It was a strange experience to be alone in Britain, without support from supposedly pro-nuclear Britons, in urging lawmakers to build more nuclear plants, but I was similarly alone in many other parts of the world, and got on with the task. Happily, one year later, former Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Zion Lights joined me in advocating for nuclear, and quickly forced the government to agree to a nuclear build-out.

Today, in the U.S., there is a growing grassroots movement for nuclear energy, one which saved nuclear plants, twice, in Illinois, and other states, and is gearing up to save Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. Doing so will require a new governor, since the current one, Gavin Newsom, made closing the plant a feature of his sales pitch to powerful environmental groups, including Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Fund which are, like Newsom himself, heavily funded by natural gas and renewable energy companies that stand to benefit from the Diablo’s destruction.

Leadership at the national level will need to come from Senators Manchin and Sinema. While a significant amount of electricity policy is determined by the states, the Senate can play a constructive role in maintaining the reliability, resiliency, affordability, I testified to Senator Manchin and other committee members. Senator Sinema is from Arizona, a state with the largest nuclear plant in the U.S., Palo Verde, and which is a model of how to make electricity both low in emissions, and in costs.

With the Clean Energy Performance Program now apparently dead, the Congress, led by Manchin and Sinema, should take policy action to not only keep operating the nuclear plants that have been critical to preventing power outages in recent years, but also expand them.

About Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,”Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress.

He is author of the best-selling new book, Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins June 30, 2020), which has received strong praise from scientists and scholars. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” wrote climate scientist Tom Wigley. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” says historian Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “Within its lively pages, Michael Shellenberger rescues with science and lived experience a subject drowning in misunderstanding and partisanship. His message is invigorating: if you have feared for the planet’s future, take heart.”

Additional Reading:

Why Biden’s Climate Agenda Is Falling Apart

Nuclear Plant Closures And Renewables Increase Electricity Prices & Unreliability, Testifies Michael Shellenberger to U.S. Senate

China Made Solar Cheap With Coal, Subsidies, And “Slave” Labor — Not Efficiency

Why Everything They Said About Solar Was Wrong

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Censorship Industrial Complex

New documentary exposes climate agenda as ‘scam’ to increase globalist power and profit

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Martin Durkin’s new film ‘Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth)’ shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping their alarmist narrative alive – despite the facts.

Martin Durkin’s new film Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) opens a hot topic with some very spicy takes.

“This is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry” – so says Durkin’s voice-over, following a reprise of Greta Thunberg’s infamous “How dare you!” speech. The imagery of those deathly pale women in their blood-red costumes cat-walking doom for the cameras fades into whirling wind farms, followed by some striking claims.

One, from the co-founder of Greenpeace, sets the tone: “There’s no such thing as a climate emergency on this planet.”

Climate scam: Global control?

The film directly challenges the claim that CO2 levels from human activity are causing runaway climate change and shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping this narrative alive – despite the facts. Professor Steven Koonin of NYU asks on behalf of the climate science industry: “If CO2 is not having this impact – how are we going to stay in business?”

Precisely what that business is, and how it is maintained, is also the subject of a film whose central premise is that the world is in fact entering a period of cooling. Patrick Moore, the co-founder of environmental campaign group Greenpeace, says the presence of the polar ice caps shows that “this is an ice age. We’re at the tail end of a 50-million-year cooling period, and they’re saying it’s too hot.”

READ: Texas pulls $8.5 billion from BlackRock over DEI rules, left-wing climate agenda

It is an opinion shared by noted scientists featured in the film, such as Professor Koonin.

This is an inconvenient truth, Durkin argues, which explains the rising alarmism from the green lobby.

“The climate alarm is nonsense. It’s a hoax” – so says William Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton. “I think ‘scam’ is a better word – but I am willing to live with ‘hoax.’”

Alongside other claims in the film that “activists are calling for the criminalization of climate skepticism,” Happer observes that “we see all these kinds of authoritarian measures being adopted, in the name of saving the planet. You’ve suddenly got the population under control all over the world.”

Yet power is not the only motive – there is also profit – for some. Professor John Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022, warns of how “there are not only billions but trillions of dollars at stake.”

Fear, power, and profit

Durkin is no stranger to climate controversy, with his 2007 film The Great Global Warming Swindle being praised in the British Parliament for showing how “anyone not agreeing with the orthodoxy of how climate change levy comes about sees their public funding drying up.”

The motion, supported by seven Conservative MPs, also noted “that one of the contributors [to the film] received a death threat.”

The climate of fear looks set to intensify, with Durkin’s new film showing how the science we are told to follow is made by an inhuman agenda of mandated poverty, food shortages, and depopulation – as this 2023 piece from Spiked makes clear.

READ: Trudeau gov’t paid WEF nearly $500k for report justifying its climate agenda, documents show

Man-made climate of opinion

Yet the tide outside the climate skeptical movement may also be turning.

Durkin gave a pre-release interview on March 14 to the UK’s Daily Telegraph. He told the hosts that the climate science we are told to follow is another example of a locked-down discourse presented as a debate.

“We have such an enormously powerful, publicly funded establishment that is able to control, directly or indirectly, what we hear, what we read, what we’re taught, what is okay to think, and what’s not okay to think,” he said.

The exclusion of dissent has manufactured the scientific “consensus” for the climate agenda.

“The frustrating thing for scientists in this area is you’re not really allowed to point to scientific data or observations published in mainstream journals carried out by scientists from very respected universities and so on, even cited by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body] … if it doesn’t fit the narrative,” Durkin said.

“And the pressure on them to shut up is extreme.”

This is the man-made climate of opinion in which fear has become the latest currency of choice.

Within days of the release of the film, German physicist and science vlogger Sabine Hossenfelder asked her YouTube audience whether “we should be terrified of climate change.” Her answer?

“I am indeed terrified, terrified that scientists support manipulating people.”

She cites several recent sources in mainstream and academic media which advocate “evoking fear” to “spur climate action.”

Instead of fearmongering, she suggests we might best look at what can reasonably done to help preserve natural habitats for wild animals. This seems a reasonable position, and she cites a lack of clarity arising from climate modeling which may conflate natural fluctuations in climate with man-made changes.

Fact-checked

The film is intended to reveal that man-made climate change is a fraudulent operation which can only succeed by censorship and propaganda. It claims this vastly profitable industry – which one Swiss bank estimates will require $270 trillion to realist its goals – reduces to a campaign to enforce global authoritarian control by manufacturing an emergency that is not supported by the evidence.

These are bold claims, and we have heard them before. In this case, however, we can check the record for ourselves with ease.

One climate skeptic has taken the trouble to produce a detailed fact-check of the claims made in the film.

Describing his efforts as an “annotated bibliography.” retired petrophysicist Andy May has supplied information supporting “70 key statements” made in the movie, ranging from natural climate variation through unreliable models to data manipulation – and the existence of a multi-trillion dollar climate lobby which ensures that “skepticism is career suicide.”

May has published four books – most recently The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, which “documents biases and errors in the International Panel for Climate Change assessment.”

May’s book challenges the fearmongering such as that of the UN head Antonio Guterres that “we are on the road to climate hell,” saying instead that the IPCC “seeks to rewrite climate history” to frame a narrative of doom unsupported by the facts.

“The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change,” says the summary for his book, available via May’s website. 

Fact-checker responds

May had this to say about the film whose facts he checked: “From the very beginning of this very well edited and produced movie we learn about the man-made climate change hoax or scam.”

He argues that this agenda is secured by the familiar tactic of demonizing and deplatforming skeptics.

“We learn that anyone skeptical that humans are causing dangerous climate change are to be shunned, or censored, or worse!” he says.

Finally, he shows the method in this madness. The alarmism is all about control.

“We also discover the ugly truth that all this government insistence that we are about to die due to global climate change is not true, and is all about money and power,” he explains. “The logic is that if it is truly a global problem, then it requires a global government, and all nations must submit to global domination by those who know what is good for us.”

Criminalizing dissent?

In one note, not included in the film, May cites evidence of “the U.S. Senate attempting to legislate scientific research outcomes,” saying “it doesn’t get worse than this.”

He directs readers to page 202 of a 2021 book by S.E. Koonin, which documents the attempt led by Senator Chuck Schumer in 2019 to pass bill S.729, which aimed “to prohibit the use of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change, and for other purposes.”

As May notes, “Fortunately, the bill failed to pass, but the political pressure to find humans caused recent climate changes is overwhelming.”

This is an agenda which holds much of government, media, business, and even the scientific community captive. With trillions of dollars and the lives and liberty of humanity at stake, it is a welcome development that Durkin’s film, and the facts behind it, are now reaching a global audience.

You can see Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) here for free.

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Alberta

Oil and gas in the global economy through 2050

Published on

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Ven Venkatachalam

The world will continue to rely on oil and gas for decades to come, according to the International Energy Agency

Recent global conflicts, which have been partly responsible for a global spike in energy prices, have cast their shadow on energy markets around the world. Added to this uncertainty is the ongoing debate among policymakers and public institutions in various jurisdictions about the role of traditional forms of energy in the global economy.

One widely quoted study influencing the debate is the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook, the most recent edition of which, World Energy Outlook 2023 (or WEO 2023), was released recently (IEA 2023).

In this CEC Fact Sheet, we examine projections for oil and natural gas production, demand, and investment drawn from the World Energy Outlook 2023 Extended Dataset, using the IEA’s modelled scenario STEPS, or the Stated Policies Scenario. The Extended Dataset provides more detailed data at the global, regional, and country level than that found in the main report.

The IEA’s World Energy Outlook and the various scenarios

Every year the IEA releases its annual energy outlook. The report looks at recent energy supply and demand, and projects the investment outlook for oil and gas over the next three decades. The World Energy Outlook makes use of a scenario approach to examine future energy trends. WEO 2023 models three scenarios: the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE), the Announced Pledges Scenario (APS), and the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS).

STEPS appears to be the most plausible scenario because it is based on the world’s current trajectory, rather than the other scenarios set out in the WEO 2023, including the APS and the NZE. According to the IEA:

The Stated Policies Scenario is based on current policy settings and also considers the implications of industrial policies that support clean energy supply chains as well as measures related to energy and climate. (2023, p. 79; emphasis by author)

and

STEPS looks in detail at what [governments] are actually doing to reach their targets and objectives across the energy economy. Outcomes in the STEPS reflect a detailed sector-by-sector review of the policies and measures that are actually in place or that have been announced; aspirational energy or climate targets are not automatically assumed to be met. (2023, p. 92)

Key results

The key results of STEPS, drawn from the IEA’s Extended Dataset, indicate that the oil and gas industry is not going into decline over the next decade—neither worldwide generally, nor in Canada specifically. In fact, the demand for oil and gas in emerging and developing economies under STEPS will remain robust through 2050.

Oil and natural gas production projections under STEPS

World oil production is projected to increase from 94.8 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2022 to 97.2 mb/d in 2035, before falling slightly to 94.5 mb/d in 2050 (see Figure 1).

Source: IEA (2023b)

Canadian overall crude oil production is projected to increase from 5.8 mb/d in 2022 to 6.5 mb/d in 2035, before falling to 5.6 mb/d in 2050 (see Figure 2).

Source: IEA (2023b)

Canadian oil sands production is expected to increase from 3.6 mb/d in 2022 to 3.8 mb/d in 2035, and maintain the same production level till 2050 (see Figure 3).

Source: IEA (2023b)

World natural gas production is anticipated to increase from 4,138 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2022 to 4,173 bcm in 2050 (see Figure 4).

Source: IEA (2023b)

Canadian natural gas production is projected to decrease from 204 bcm in 2022 to 194 bcm in 2050 (see Figure 5).

Source: IEA (2023b)

Oil demand under STEPS

World demand for oil is projected to increase from 96.5 mb/d in 2022 to 97.4 mb/d by 2050 (see Tables 1A and 1B). Demand in Africa for oil is expected to increase from 4.0 mb/d in 2022 to 7.7 mb/d in 2050. Demand for oil in the Asia-Pacific is projected to increase from 32.9 mb/d in 2022 to 35.1 mb/d in 2050. Demand for oil from emerging and developing economies is anticipated to increase from 47.9 mb/d in 2022 to 59.3 mb/d in 2050.

Source: IEA (2023b)

 

Source: IEA (2023b)

Natural gas demand under STEPS

World demand for natural gas is expected to increase from 4,159 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2022 to 4,179 bcm in 2050 (see Figures 6 and 7). Demand in Africa for natural gas is projected to increase from 170 bcm in 2020 to 277 bcm in 2050. Demand in the Asia-Pacific for natural gas is anticipated to increase from 900 bcm in 2020 to 1,119 bcm in 2050.

Source: IEA (2023b)

 

Source: IEA (2023b)

Cumulative oil and gas investment expected to be over $21 trillion

Taking into account projected global demand, between 2023 and 2050 the cumulative global oil and gas investment (upstream, midstream, and downstream) under STEPS is expected to reach nearly U.S.$21.1 trillion (in $2022). Global oil investment alone is expected to be over U.S.$13.1 trillion and natural gas investment is predicted to be over $8.0 trillion (see Figure 8).

Between 2023 and 2050, total oil and gas investment in North America (Canada, the U.S., and Mexico) is expected to be nearly U.S.$5.6 trillion, split between oil at over $3.8 trillion and gas at nearly $1.8 trillion (see Figure 8). Oil and gas investment in the Asia Pacific, over the same period, is estimated at nearly $3.3 trillion, split between oil at over $1.4 trillion and gas at over $1.9 trillion.

Source: IEA (2023b)

Conclusion

The sector-by-sector measures that governments worldwide have put in place and the specific policy initiatives that support clean energy policy, i.e., the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), both show oil and gas continuing to play a major role in the global economy through 2050. Key data points on production and demand drawn from the IEA’s WEO 2023 Extended Dataset confirm this trend.

Positioning Canada as a secure and reliable oil and gas supplier can and must be part of the medium- to long-term solution to meeting the oil and gas demands of the U.S., Europe, Asia and other regions as part of a concerted move supporting energy security.

The need for stable energy, which is something that oil and natural gas provide, is critical to a global economy whose population is set to grow by another 2 billion people by 2050. Along with the increasing population comes rising incomes, and with them comes a heightened demand for oil and natural gas, particularly in many emerging and developing economies in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, where countries are seeing urbanization and industrialization grow rapidly.


References (as of February 11, 2024)

International Energy Agency (IEA), 2023(a), World Energy Outlook 2023 <http://tinyurl.com/4nv9xyfj>; International Energy Agency (IEA), 2023(b), World Energy Outlook 2023 Extended Dataset <http://tinyurl.com/3222553b>.

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