“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman
An Open Letter to UN FCCC, UN Secretary Guterres and all national delegations, environmental non-profits, and other attendees at COP 28:
What if the “business as usual” CO2 emissions scenario (RCP8.5) that was used to scare the world into “climate action” was never realistic, and the planet’s population was never going to exceed 12 billion?
What if the global organization responsible for objectively evaluating the science and advising world leaders on “climate change” was complicit in trashing the scientific method and fueling a media fear mongering machine?
What if advanced nations spent trillions of dollars they did not have to change their functioning energy systems into something far more costly, unreliable, and incapable of supporting the industries on which the world relies?
What if the “alternative” energy technologies used to do so had absolutely no chance of replacing the energy quality, supply, and reliability of the present systems?
What if the global “leaders” who devised this plan failed to understand the first thing about energy systems, their resource requirements, or the impacts it would have on the environment?
These are not rhetorical questions.
The worst-case CO2 emissions scenario (envisioned by RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5) was always unrealistic. Among other problems, it relied upon UN population estimates that were flawed from the beginning and never validated by climate scientists. You allowed the science of the six UN Assessment Reports to be politicized in the “Summary for Policymakers” and made little to no attempt to stop twenty years of incessant fear mongering by a complicit Western media.
Intermittent, diffuse “alternative energy” from wind, solar, biomass and biofuels is not capable of replacing dense, high quality, reliable, on-demand, storable forms of energy. Battery storage does not change that reality.
Coal, oil, and natural gas fuel almost 80% of the world’s ~170,000 annual terawatt hours of primary energy consumption. Only ~18% is consumed as electricity. Coal, oil, and natural gas consumption is still growing rapidly in China and India.
Despite trillions in “investments” by advanced nations, hydrocarbons still provide nearly 100% of the fuel for certain sectors. Maritime shipping relies almost entirely on bunker fuel. 99% of the world’s fleet of about 1.6 billion commercial and personal vehicles use gas or diesel for fuel. All of the world’s aviation relies on jet fuel or aviation gas (for small aircraft).
Industrial applications critical to humanity from cement to steel to polysilicon manufacturing rely on coking coal, with no present scalable alternative. Electric arc furnaces, “green hydrogen” from wind energy, and ammonia as fuel solve none of the transportation or industrial process heat applications at scale on the time frames being promised for net zero (2050, or any time near then). Plans for a hydrogen future ignore enormous problems in terms of pipelines, storage, and transportation. “Green hydrogen” via electrolysis powered by wind will not replace diesel, gas, jet fuel, avgas, and bunker fuel for transportation at the scale or cost currently provided by hydrocarbons.
The advanced nations on which the entire UNFCCC process and the Paris Agreement rely for funding do not have the money needed for your plans. Sovereign debt exceeds 120% of GDP in the U.S. and the outstanding debt of all European countries is over 104% of their GDP. Debt-to-GDP is 100% in the UK and over 200% in Japan.
Ironically, the very means by which your plans have been funded in this century created the conditions that now doom them. Trillions of taxpayer subsidies advanced nations lavished on “alternative” energy, fueled by debt and artificially low interest rates, helped create inflation in everything. European, U.S., and other Central Bank’s dramatic interest rate hikes trying to tame the very inflation your plans (and theirs) created is crushing all forms of “CO2-free” energy projects, from offshore wind to advanced nuclear power.
The cost of your “net zero” ambitions ranges from $60 trillion to over $100 trillion, or 1-4% of advanced nation’s GDP annually, from now to the year 2100. Setting aside the fact that such sums will simply not exist, we ask a serious and sober question: “what good could be done for the lot of humanity with a fraction of the money you are spending on ‘climate change’ “?
Your own human welfare agencies are documenting the consequences of these policies worldwide. There is no escaping the fact that financing the forced “alternative energy transition” through subsidization, energy market manipulation, and monetary policy supporting both contributed to these consequences.
You have woefully underestimated the resource requirements required to achieve your goals. Global annual production of the metals required is a fraction – for some rare earth elements a tiny fraction – of that required. Detailed analysis puts the enormity of your failure to understand the resource requirements in stark relief. The far-right column in the table below from geometallurgist and mining expert Simon Michaux shows the number of years needed to produce each metal critical to the “energy transition” based on 2019 global annual production.
Assume Michaux’s calculations are off by an order of magnitude. The world is still not going to produce the copper, nickel, cobalt graphite, lithium, germanium, vanadium to reach “net zero” by 2050. Note that the figures shown are for a single generation of the “alternative energy” technologies necessary to replace hydrocarbon energy systems. Few onshore wind turbines and solar installations last 25 years. Salt air will destroy offshore wind turbines even faster.
Attempting to mine the necessary metals to support your plans would cause enormous and unacceptable environmental risks. Mining consumes enormous amounts of diesel and electricity, and is one of the dirtiest industrial activities on earth. The risks to soil, surface water and groundwater are non-trivial, and acid mine drainage is a persistent problem that can last for hundreds of years at some sites. Those very real risks would be faced in the here and now, not 50 or 100 years in the future.
As European biodiesel-driven destruction of rainforests for palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia proved more than a decade ago, biofuels are the opposite of a solution to environmental problems. Subsidizing crops for fuel results in land conversion, soil erosion, increases fertilizer application (and corresponding nitrogen and phosphorous loading to surface waters), destroys wildlife habitat, and compromises groundwater filtration and aquifer recharge, the retention and building of soil nutrients, and natural sequestration of CO2.
The world’s energy, transportation and economic systems rely on dense, affordable, on-demand, storable, high-quality energy. None of the present “alternative energy” systems have any hope of replacing the vast array of energy services currently provided by hydrocarbon and nuclear energy at the scale necessary to even maintain current levels of wellbeing for 8 billion humans. They have zero chance of lifting the entirety of humanity to the right side of the environmental Kuznets curve.
You have not considered that a forced “phase out” of hydrocarbon energy would have cascading consequences ending in widespread death. About half of the nitrogen in your bodies comes from the Haber-Bosch process and the food it fertilized. Advanced pharmaceutical ingredients depend on crude oil derivatives. These examples merely skim the surface.
To the COP delegations and “leaders” of the U.S., Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia:
Your Presidents, Prime Ministers, and legislatures cannot formulate a sane, reasoned energy policy that actually works within the confines of physics and economics. When an energy plan articulated by a clip art chicken on the internet is more practical, cost effective and will lower CO2 emissions faster than anything you’ve come up with in 28 years, you’ve gone so far you’ve lost the sun.
You have sown the seeds of your own demise by joining the UN’s energy suicide pact. Look no further than Germany, how Putin played Europe, and wake up to the strategic advantage you have unwittingly handed to China at your own peril.
What did Germany’s 2008 “Energiewende” and shutting down its last nuclear plants in April this year achieve for Europe’s self-proclaimed climate “leader”? The graph below breaks down electricity generation by source for German utility RWE at ~2 p.m. local time two days ago. 7,855 out of a total of 8,414 megawatts – over 93% of RWE’s electricity generation - was fueled by lignite (the dirtiest form of thermal coal for power generation) and natural gas and virtually none from “renewables”. If this is what passes for “success” after fifteen years and ~$1 trillion, we do not care to see failure.
In the same way Russia took advantage of Europe’s green ignorance, your choices have merely given China an advantage and shifted your CO2 emissions there. In the process, your subsidies helped them corner the market as the low-cost producer of the very commodities and technologies on which your plans now rely. Having done the same with the critical minerals you eschewed mining within your own borders, China now has a literal supply chain stranglehold on your doomed-to-fail energy transition.
“Environmentalists” make it impossible to mine within your own borders. Meanwhile, at your expense and that of the planet, China uses the environment and atmosphere as a sewer for economic advantage to corner the market for the commodities you require. Tariffs on Chinese imports, “domestically made” legislation and other schemes will not overcome this. They will make matters worse by only further distorting the very markets you have already warped.
You have set the West on a collision course with energy scarcity, de-industrialization, and worse. Your sovereign debt is a claim on future productivity, which is ultimately a claim on energy. By constraining energy to “carbon free” sources, it is not obvious to us those claims can be repaid. This is a key threat to your fiat currency systems. And weakening your industrial base and economies will not produce the energy surplus to help billions in the developing world adapt to climate change.
We close with a message for the UNFCCC. Even if 193 nations agreed to further reduce their emissions to your 1.5-degree Celsius ambition, actually achieve those reductions (they can’t), and the Paris Agreement were legally binding, it will do nothing to “solve” climate change as long as China and India keep increasing their emissions. They will not stop until millions of their citizens are pulled out of poverty.
It is time to acknowledge the Green Elephant in the room. An unhealthy portion of your ideologically-driven participants – two specific groups - who pretend to be “environmentalists” are not engaged in goodwill efforts but instead using “climate change” as a political tool. The first are Neo-Malthusians pining for a population crash, who consider earth as a petri dish and humans as microbes in it. This is an empirically wrong and dangerous view.
The second and more malevolent group are remnants of a failed ideology, for whom “climate change” and “environmentalism” have always been about one thing. After Communist ideology in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and the Khmer Rouge left 100 million people dead in the twentieth century, Marxists/ Communists/Socialists realized their ideology was a political loser and many went underground in the early 1990s. They reemerged in, and coopted, the modern “environmental” movement by 2000.
EcoStatists realized that energy is the life blood of advanced liberal societies. They set out to influence energy policy under their age-old faux altruism ruse, with fear around “climate change” as the lever. They understand control over markets, capitalism, industrialization, consumption, economic growth, and society through energy policy is a means to their ends, with no need for guns, blood, revolutions, or even polling booths.
We have reached a point where the two groups are not hard to identify. Objections to both nuclear energy and carbon capture and sequestration make it clear.
We urge you to carefully examine the makeup of your ranks. Misanthropic, malevolent, EcoStatist ideologues have no business influencing policies on which billions of lives depend globally.
Climate change may indeed be a problem for humanity later this century. But the medicine you have prescribed will not cure the patient and is far worse than the disease.
Our advice may be ignored. If so, but we are correct, the consequences will be on your shoulders.
Change course. Go back to the drawing board. CO2 emissions are not the denominator in this equation. Humanity is.
The planet is going to be fine. Worry about the people.
- environMENTAL
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Look man. As a scientist, the Gvt came to me and asked I prove that Anthropogenic Climate Change existed. After I told them the science was inconclusive, they pulled my funding. So I doubled down and went back to the drawing board, and Eureka! I proved it and gave the Gvt my new findings. They reinstated my funding. I really didn't prove it, I just stated it, and they nodded approvingly as I told them exactly what they wanted to hear.
My latest project is proving that Male and Female biology is all a fantastical construct and in reality gender does not exist. The funding has been off the charts.
This is a terrific piece of work. It should be sent to the WSJ for publication.