Shellenberger back on the podcast, IEA's 'roadmap' to nowhere, birding at Barton Springs
Shellenberger on "Chinese genocide solar panels," the IEA's roadmap to nowhere, Bowerbirds Down Under and herons at Barton Springs
Our home-improvement projects are scheduled to be finished today. That's excellent news because it means I will be able to spend more time writing, podcasting, and speaking instead of hanging out at Home Depot. (Nothing against Home Depot, you understand. I like Home Depot. But my credit card needs a vacation.) Even more good news: a three-day weekend looms large.
Four items today:
Michael Shellenberger on the Power Hungry Podcast talking about Apocalypse Never and SanFransicko
The IEA’s net-zero roadmap is chock full of dead ends
Yellow-crowned Night Herons at Barton Springs Pool
Reminders about Not In Our Backyard and Juice
Michael Shellenberger on the podcast for the second time
In 2009, while working for the now-defunct Energy Tribune, I did an interview via email with Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. (You can read that interview on my website.)
I had great respect for both of them back in 2009 and continue to have enormous respect for them today. Both bring much-needed honesty and intellectual rigor to some of the biggest issues of our day. In looking back at that 2009 interview, many of the same issues we discussed a dozen years ago are still dominating the discussion today, including what they called “climate McCarthyism” and “apocalypse fatigue.”
I didn’t know it back in 2009, but the Breakthrough Institute, which Shellenberger and Nordhaus founded in 2007, would have a big impact on me. It was largely due to contacts I made at the Breakthrough Institute, and their annual event, the Breakthrough Dialogue, that I was inspired to make (along with my colleague, Tyson Culver) the documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains the World. Indeed, some of Breakthrough’s supporters became financial supports of Juice, including Ray Rothrock, Rachel Pritzker, and Roland Pritzker. The Dialogue also allowed me to meet several people who ended up being in Juice, including Jessica Lovering, Joyashree Roy, Priscilla Atansah, Ben Heard, and Steve Brick. Today, the Breakthrough Institute continues to do excellent work on food, energy, and conservation.
That’s a rather long (but relevant) introduction to the latest episode -- number 54! -- of the Power Hungry Podcast, which features another interview with Shellenberger. Shellenberger was on the second episode of the Power Hungry Podcast, which aired on June 29, 2020. Other Breakthrough people have also been on the podcast. I had a good discussion with Nordhaus about climate change in an episode that aired last October. Lovering, Roy, Heard, and Brick have also been on the podcast.
In my first talk with Shellenberger, we talked about the release of his book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, which came out on June 30, 2020. The book has been a hit. Shellenberger told me the book has been (or is going to be) translated into 15 languages, including Lithuanian. It has sold over 100,000 copies and has more than 3,000 reviews on Amazon. On the podcast, we talked about the remarkable success of the book and how it has changed his life. We talked about sobriety, his return to his Christian faith, environmentalism as a religion, “Chinese genocide solar panels,” and why the decline of our cities reflects the decline of our civilization. We also discussed his next book, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, which will be out in October.
Shellenberger has emerged as one of America's most prominent voices for rationality and humanism. We had a wide-ranging and interesting conversation. I encourage you to listen to it and share it.
Real Clear Energy published my piece on the IEA's latest report
Last week, the International Energy Agency released a report which claimed to provide a “roadmap” toward a global economy that doesn’t increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The report got a remarkable amount of media attention but not nearly enough critical analysis. We are awash in all-renewable boosterism. We desperately need more energy realism, a term that my friends at Real Clear Energy are using in their newsletters. Here’s what I wrote about the IEA roadmap for Real Clear Energy:
The academics and bureaucrats who create models that claim we can run the global economy solely on renewable energy live in a different world than you and me. In their world, there is no shortage of money, land, or commodities like copper, cobalt, and lithium.
In the modelers’ world, wind turbines don’t slaughter birds and bats by the hundreds of thousands per year. The scenarios that they produce ignore the fact that the world’s transportation system runs almost exclusively on refined oil products and that about half of the world’s food production relies on ammonia fertilizer produced from natural gas. The models also routinely ignore the myriad supply-chain problems that would come from attempting a massive increase in the use of solar panels, including the sourcing of polysilicon from China, and in particular, from Xinjiang province, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are being forced to work for polysilicon manufacturers. The scenarios also routinely ignore the difficulty inherent in trying to string the hundreds of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines that will be needed to connect wind and solar projects in rural areas to distant cities.
The latest example of this modeling make-believe was delivered last week by the International Energy Agency, which released a report that claims to provide a roadmap to achieving “net zero” emissions by 2050. The IEA calls the report, “the world’s first comprehensive study of how to transition to a net zero energy system by 2050 while ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth. It sets out a cost-effective and economically productive pathway” to a “resilient energy economy dominated by renewables like solar and wind instead of fossil fuels.” The report which received lots of attention, including prominent stories in the New York Times and Bloomberg, also claims “there is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway” because “the unwavering policy focus on climate change...results in a sharp decline in fossil fuel demand.”
To be sure, the IEA’s effort isn’t the first report to ignore the real-world constraints on an all-renewable energy system. Scenarios published over the past few months by academics at Princeton University, Stanford University, and the University of California Berkeley, have all done the same.
But the positive media coverage of the IEA report – and the report itself – glosses over the many strategic and physical constraints that will limit, or rather prevent, any quick transition to renewables. First among them is the world’s ongoing need for oil and gas and how any effort that limits the ability of international oil companies to drill for more hydrocarbons will strengthen OPEC and Russia at the expense of the United States. Furthermore, several Asian countries have already said they will ignore the IEA’s roadmap and continue investing in coal, oil, and natural gas extraction projects.
“Green” technologies will also require an enormous increase in mining to supply the staggering amounts of copper, cobalt, and other minerals that are required by “green” technologies. Indeed, the IEA issued a lengthy report on that latter issuejust last month. Those issues have been covered in other outlets, so I will focus here on what are arguably the biggest immediate constraints: the staggering cost to consumers of attempting such an all-renewable effort and the raging land-use conflicts that are already hindering the growth of wind and solar projects in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
The IEA report doesn’t include an estimate of the total cost of converting the world economy to run solely on renewables. Instead, it notes that “To reach net zero emissions by 2050, annual clean energy investment worldwide will need to more than triple by 2030 to around $4 trillion,” and that “Total annual energy investment surges to $5 trillion by 2030.” But the report doesn’t specify who will be responsible for spending all of those trillions.
Despite that omission, it’s clear that attempting to convert our global energy and power systems to run solely on renewables will likely cost tens of trillions, or even hundreds of trillions, of dollars. Last year, Coilín ÓhAiseadha and Ronan Connolly, two Dublin-based researchers published an academic paper that found that between 2011 and 2018 global spending on solar and wind energy totaled some $2 trillion. “Despite all of this spending, wind and solar energy still produced only 3% of world energy consumption in the year 2018, while the fossil fuels (oil, coal, and gas) produced 85% between them,” they wrote. “This raises pressing questions about what it would cost to make the transition to 100% renewable energies.”
The new IEA report also contains nary a mention of how such an expensive effort will affect low- and middle-income consumers around the world. That’s a notable oversight given that about 800 million people around the world have no access to electricity. And as I point out in my recent book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, roughly 3 billion people on the planet live in countries where per-capita electricity use is less than what’s used by an average American refrigerator.
Despite those facts, the IEA report says “We estimate that around 55% of the cumulative emissions reductions in the pathway are linked to consumer choices such as purchasing an EV, retrofitting a house with energy‐efficient technologies or installing a heat pump.”
Just as important as the cost problem, the IEA report completely ignores the cartoonish amounts of territory that will be needed to accommodate a major increase in wind and solar deployment. It says “Our pathway calls for scaling up solar and wind rapidly this decade, reaching annual additions of 630 gigawatts (GW) of solar photovoltaics (PV) and 390 GW of wind by 2030, four‐times the record levels set in 2020. For solar PV, this is equivalent to installing the world’s current largest solar park roughly every day.” (Emphasis added.)
To put that 390 gigawatts of new wind capacity per year into context, according to the latest data from BP, between 2005 and 2019, the average amount of wind installed annually around the globe was about 41 gigawatts. And yet, the IEA is claiming that global annual additions should be nearly 10 times that figure. That begs the obvious question: where exactly will all those turbines be built? That question matters because the backlash against Big Wind is growing in rural regions all around the world.
As I show in a recent report for the Center of the American Experiment, since 2015, about 300 government entities from Vermont to Hawaii have rejected or restricted wind projects. The center is also home to the new Renewable Energy Rejection Database, which includes details on those 300 rejections or restrictions. Indeed, over the last six months alone, three counties in Iowa – the state that produces more electricity from wind than any other state -- have either banned wind projects or issued moratoria on them.
Some of the fiercest fights against Big Wind are happening in the bluest states. Good luck building a wind turbine in Vermont, home of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the former presidential candidate and one of the Senate’s loudest proponents for renewable energy. In New York, so many communities are rejecting wind and solar projects that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration recently pushed through provisions that will strip local governments of their zoning and taxing authority so that the state can more easily issue permits for big renewable projects. In California, wind turbines are so difficult to site that most developers have simply given up trying to build new projects in the state.
Ontario has been a hotbed of anti-wind activism. In that Canadian province, 90 local governments have declared themselves “unwilling hosts” to wind projects. The anti-wind backlash is also obvious across the Atlantic. In 2010, the European Platform Against Windfarms had about 400 members in 20 countries. Today, it has more than1,600 member organizations in 31 countries. In Germany, where the government is pushing hard for its vaunted “Energiewende,” rural opposition has led to “a dramatic decline in the number of new onshore wind farms.” Nor is the problem limited to the citing of the wind turbines. It also includes resistance to transmission lines. The German government has estimated that it needs to construct about 3,700 miles of transmission lines to accommodate new renewable capacity. But by the end of 2018, less than 100 miles had been built.
In short, the IEA claims it has published the “first comprehensive study” toward a net zero emissions world. But even a cursory analysis of the cost and land-use conflicts shows that the IEA’s “roadmap” is chock full of dead ends.
Again, here's a link to the original article. Please share it.
A Yellow-crowned Night Heron hanging at the pool
About five years ago, I was invited by the Minerals Council of Australia to go Down Under and give several presentations. It was a delightful trip. After my business commitments were finished, Lorin, and our son, Jacob, and I spent a few days in the charming Queensland town of Port Douglas. While there, we hired a birdwatching guide named Doug Herrington to show us around. We had a great day with him. In about six or seven hours, we saw about 70 species of birds, all of which were new to me, including, most memorably, the Bowerbird and the Papuan Frogmouth. For the Bowerbird, we visited a modest RV park located off a seldom-traveled road a few dozen miles west of Port Douglas. While looking at the Bowerbird’s elaborate nest, which included colorful parts of discarded combs and broken glass, Herrington said something that stuck with me: “birds like to be near people.” That might not be a direct quote, but Herrington was making the point that humans often provide many of the things that birds are after, including food, shelter, and water. (And in the case of the Bowerbird, colorful bits of refuse.)
Herrington’s point about humans and birds came to mind on Tuesday night when Lorin and I were at Barton Springs Pool for an evening swim. While there, a Yellow-crowned Night Heron (Nyctanassa violacea) flew past us and then settled on the concrete edge of the pool, close to the platform for the diving board. The heron was unperturbed by us and the other swimmers who were nearby. The bird was so close that I was able to get within a few feet to snap the somewhat grainy photo above. We have seen other herons at the pool, including Green Herons and the occasional Great Blue Heron. But the Yellow-crowned Night Herons seem to be the most at home on the edge of the pool and they are particularly comfortable in the area near the diving board because they can hunt for crawfish, which are abundant in the pool. Indeed, we saw the heron capture, and eat, a crawdad just a few minutes after it landed near us. The shallow water just east of the platform appears to be a particularly good perch for crawfish hunting.
The Yellow-crowned is one of two species of night herons found in the Americas. The other is the Black-crowned Night Heron, which, by the way, has a cool scientific name: Nycticorax nycticorax.
The Houston Audubon Society has this description of the Yellow-crowned’s appearance: “a thick black bill, long and showy plume feathers that drape behind the head, and dingy yellow legs. Immature individuals take three to four years to reach adult plumage; they are brown overall, sometimes with a lightly developing white cheek stripe.” It goes on, saying that the birds “forage in both salt and freshwater, including marshes, ponds, ditches, swamps, and mangroves. As long as they can find crustaceans like crabs and crawfish to eat, they’ll forage, sleep, and nest in that location. The southeastern United States provides many suitable habitats for this species, although they can also be found as far north as Ontario.”
Herons are interesting and a little bit intimidating. They are fierce-looking animals that wouldn’t look out of place in a book about dinosaurs. Given how many times I’ve seen Yellow-crowned Night Herons at Barton Springs, it’s also clear they aren’t overly afraid of humans. Indeed, as Herrington told me at the RV park in Queensland, they seem to like being around us.
I hope you have a splendid Memorial Day weekend.
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A reminder to share this report
I have been pleased with the response to my recent report about land-use conflicts and renewables. "Not In Our Backyard," was published on April 21 by the Center of the American Experiment. The center is also the home of the Renewable Energy Rejection Database, which includes details on the roughly 300 times that local or regional governments have rejected or restricted wind-energy projects. Please share both of them. The only way to bring sanity to the decisions being made by policymakers is to relentlessly pound the facts. Here's a link to the full report. Please share it.
Reminder: You can watch Juice for free on Roku!
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