"The only obvious point to Biden’s ‘Green’ New Deal is lining the pockets of crony capitalists and keeping lobbying rent seekers happy.
Hundreds of $billions more are set to be squandered on utterly pointless wind and solar.
A point which ought to be pretty obvious to Americans, after millions experienced the mass blackouts suffered across Texas and the American Midwest back in February.
Blackouts that occurred when millions of solar panels were plastered in snow and ice, thousands of wind turbines were left frozen solid and breathless, frigid weather meant that those that weren’t frozen stiff, produced no power at all.
Green Dreams
City Journal
by Mark Mills and Daniel Kennelly
20 March 2021
Mark Mills:
What impact will Biden’s energy policies have on global climate?
Daniel Kennelly:
The short answer: none.
The key issue is unrelated to anyone’s opinion about global warming.
What matters is whether the kinds of efforts proposed can arithmetically make any meaningful difference in world energy use.
I emphasize “world.”
Cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, for example, didn’t eliminate oil use.
It just shifted where it’s shipped to, and how it’s shipped—somewhere else, and more expensively.
And even if efforts to strangle Keystone’s output were successful, eliminating that much oil use wouldn’t change anything in the global context.
For example, China plans to build more coal power plants that will, in carbon terms, equal about 20 Keystone Pipelines.
And about one-third of those new coal plants are already under construction.
That’s just China.
Similar plans for more coal, and more oil, and more natural gas use are afoot in South Asia and the rest of the world.
Mark Mills:
The administration has proposed spending $2 trillion on its climate programs.
Does this represent the true cost of “decarbonizing” energy production in the U.S.?
Daniel Kennelly:
That’s not even close to the true cost, either directly or indirectly in terms of overall economic consequences.
... the electric grid ... accounts for about one-third of America’s energy use, it would cost at least $5 trillion to build enough wind, solar, and battery systems to replace all the power plants that currently burn natural gas and coal.
And, in broad economic terms, all that money will have been spent to produce the same quantity of the same product—kilowatt-hours.
That kind of spending is the polar opposite of improving society’s productivity.
This matters because increasing productivity is, as all economists know, the key to increasing society’s overall wealth.
Even if such programs create jobs, and they would, we’d be putting more labor into producing the same output which, ultimately, is negative for economic growth.
Mark Mills:
How will these policies affect cities?
Daniel Kennelly:
If they’re implemented as envisioned, it will mean both more expensive and less reliable electricity.
A realiable grid is more important in our increasingly everything-digital age, and also as more electricity is used for transportation.
Roughly speaking, we’ll nearly have to double the grid to replace all the oil used on the roads.
Mark Mills:
What lessons should we take away from last month’s cold snap and rolling blackouts in Texas?
Daniel Kennelly:
Eventually ... there were multiple relevant factors in the domino of events that happened.
... all disasters start with a trigger.
In Texas, it began with a near total loss of output from the state’s huge wind farms.
... there wouldn’t have been an outage if just a fraction of the Texas wind capacity had instead been the kind of power plants that grid operators can call on when they’re needed.
And those would be things like winterized natural gas turbines.
... the hallmark of all critical infrastructure is reserve capabilities that are available when needed.
I know that some people are seriously proposing that batteries can do that job for wind.
Texas is planning to build the world’s second biggest battery-storage system for a “next time.”
... that planned, huge storage system will be able to store just three minutes of the electricity produced by Texas wind farms."