Saving Climate From the Greens

A pro-fracking, pro-nuclear CEO takes on ‘ridiculously naive’ energy policy

By Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"When Congress launched its first Obama-era climate subsidies, it funded a study by the Nobel-winning climate economist William Nordhaus, who concluded that alternative energy handouts are a “poor tool” for fighting emissions, with negligible effect even before accounting for the inevitable “international spillovers”—i.e., consumers globally using more fossil fuels because the U.S. spends insane billions to subsidize its consumers to use less.

A widely heralded paper by Princeton economists showed subsidizing green energy globally at best would have a “minuscule” effect on emissions."

"They [New York Times editors] say about Joe Biden’s EV policy: “Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.”

Notice how this conflates U.S. car emissions with total transportation emissions, then U.S. emissions with global emissions, to hide that the president’s policy would only reduce emissions by 0.2%, and then only if we ignore those pesky international spillovers."

"Wind, solar and biomass have always existed. All forms of energy consumption are going up, but oil, gas and coal still carry the load and no policy will alter this, especially as China embraces EVs to cut reliance on imported oil in favor of domestic coal."