And it’s About Time
For all his many flaws, Donald Trump has served a larger good by shifting the Overton Window. Topics that were once sacred cows, about which no contrary opinions were permitted—DEI, all things trans, climate change, net zero, to name a few—are once again up for discussion. They are not faring well under renewed scrutiny. This is not surprising since few people who were thinking clearly ever really believed in any of them.
Energy is also once again an important topic. Which is appropriate since we depend on an adequate supply of it to keep us from starving in freezing darkness. For the last few years the narrative has been that old forms of energy, principally oil and gas and coal, were poised to be replaced by shiny new forms of renewable energy, mostly wind and solar, with a sprinkling of hydropower and geothermal. Renewable energy was everywhere, we were told, easy to capture, clean, and best of all, free. There was a sense of inevitability. Which has now been overturned, thanks to Trump.
How did we get here?
Humans have always used energy in various forms. But a couple of hundred years ago, people figured out that coal, fossilized plant matter containing concentrated carbon, could, if burned, produce a great deal of heat, an extremely useful form of energy. You could used that heat to warm your domicile or your bathwater or maybe fire up your blacksmithing forge. Or you could use it to boil water to produce steam that could push a large piston back and forth, which could be connected to a shaft or a wheel or some other simple machine, and made to do a lot of work, more work than could have been done by a thousand strong men or a hundred strong horses. Many clever machines were invented to take advantage of this sudden abundance of motive force. The industrial society was born. This was a revolutionary thing, which pushed history in an entirely different direction, forever.
Within a century, people would discover that a steam engine could also be used to move a magnet inside a copper coil, which if attached to a closed loop of copper wire would produce a strange, previously unknown form of energy. This form of energy could be made to move other magnets inside other coils to do work, or to make a thin wire glow so brightly you could read by its light. Best of all, you could do all this at a distance: uphill, downhill, around corners, close by or over the horizon, it didn’t matter, as long as the loop of conductive wire was unbroken. Eventually this form of energy was dubbed “electricity.”
Around the same time, people figured out that natural petroleum could be refined into all sorts of useful products, including liquid fuels like kerosene, gasoline, and diesel, which would eventually be used to drive reciprocating engines, such as the one in your automobile. And it was discovered that natural gas, almost always found in association with petroleum, made excellent fuel for street lamps, furnaces and stoves.
As it turns out, the byproduct of the combustion of carbon is carbon dioxide (CO2.) And since we’ve been doing a LOT of combusting for the last few decades, a great deal of this gas has been released into the atmosphere. As a consequence, CO2’s share in the atmosphere has gone up from around three parts out of every ten thousand to around four. Still very much a trace gas, just slightly less trace-y.
It was discovered late in the 19th century that carbon dioxide has the property of diverting some fraction of the sun’s radiant energy, theoretically adding additional heat to the atmosphere. Sure enough, since about 1850, when the Industrial Revolution really got going, the overall temperature of the planet has gone up a little. You could argue that this is actually good news, because it put an end to the Little Ice Age, that 400-year period of abnormally low temperatures that made life miserable for anyone living in the Temperate Zone.
Nevertheless, some found this trend alarming. Thus the Global Warming movement was born. Carbon became the enemy. Something must be done, RIGHT NOW, to break this dependence on carbon-based energy, we were told, or the Earth would burst into flames. Or something.
Hence “Green” energy, which has become a cause celebre for millions. Unfortunately, many of these know little about science, history, or economics, do not understand cause and effect, have not really thought this thing through, or perhaps just stand to profit. For the most part they have not been elected, have no lawful authority, and wouldn’t take responsibility were the system to come crashing down, which it would if they had their way. Nevertheless they persist.
They aren’t really strong on details, so they forget that this advanced, highly complex, interconnected society of ours is absolutely dependent on a steady supply of energy of truly gargantuan scope, roughly 100 quadrillion BTUs (British Thermal Units) worth of it every year. That’s the equivalent of 40 million train cars full of high-grade coal, which would circle the earth about 16 times.
A bit over 80 percent of this energy is derived directly or indirectly from fossil fuels. A significant fraction of these fuels are burned to generate mechanical motion to propel cars, trucks, trains, and planes. A somewhat smaller fraction is used to provide heat for homes and businesses. Mostly, though, fossil fuels end up being converted through a series of steps into electricity, to be distributed via the electrical grid, which has been described as the most complex machine ever built.
For the grid and all its billions of dependent devices to work correctly, the electricity must be of exceptionally stable quality. To be dependable, the generation systems that produce the electricity must also be dispatchable (can be turned on or off at will,) and scalable, (can be dialed up or down as demand dictates.) There is also this Very Important Thing called baseload, defined as all the stuff that never gets switched off like hospitals, fire stations, airports, police stations, HVAC systems in large buildings, key manufacturing facilities and so on. You must be able to supply baseload, at a minimum, all the bloody time, or things grind to a halt. At which point your advanced, smooth-running society comes crashing down.
Green energy advocates are fond of pointing out that sun and wind are “free” sources of energy, which is technically true. However, the technology to convert them into electricity most definitely is not. This matters because solar and wind are very diffuse forms of energy. Meaning that you need a lot of land surface, covered with expensive machinery, to capture enough “free” energy to be useful. Next time you take a plane ride, make it a point to look down. In many parts of the country, you will see, all over the place, wind-turbine fields and solar arrays, often covering thousands of acres, notably unoccupied by humans because these “green” energy devices make their immediate surroundings basically uninhabitable.
Energy demand is somewhat predictable, which eases the problem of providing an adequate supply of it. In an average day, electrical demand is highest in the early evening, as people make dinner, fire up their televisions or computers, and turn up the AC. Demand is lowest in the middle part of the day, when people are typically at work. In an average year, electrical demand is highest in the summer, with hundreds of millions of AC units pulling billions of watts. It is also high during intense cold snaps in the winter. Knowing these things, electrical utilities can be ready to supply electricity sufficient to meet demand.
Herein lies the problem. Not all generators of electricity are dispatchable. A defining characteristic of conventional form of electrical generation is that they are. Turn some valves and press some buttons and your conventional power plant springs to life. But no amount of wishful thinking can make the sun shine or the wind blow. No wind or sun, no power. So when you need power the most, you may not be able to generate it. Yet green-energy advocates want to completely replace high-reliability, dispatchable energy with weather-dependent, non-dispatchable, renewable energy.
Even under the very best conditions, there are major limitations to renewables. Solar panels produce usable electricity for only two to three hours either side of solar noon, or about 25 percent of a given day, max. Recall that this is also the time of lowest demand. Solar is essentially useless for frequently cloudy and/or high-latitude locales, which describes most of Europe and Canada. Wind turbines only function properly when the wind is just right, neither too fast nor too slow. Average uptime, also known as the power factor, of land-based wind turbines is about 24 percent. Offshore is slightly higher. Which means power is not being generated roughly three-fourths of the time.
But but but STORAGE!
Fair enough. And if your intermittent energy sources were predictably available on a day-to-day basis there would be no problem. But the the skies can cloud up and the wind can stop for long periods at a time, without warning. One hundred percent reliance on renewables requires that you plan for the absolute worst case, or risk catastrophe.
Having sufficient battery capacity to offset three weeks of downtime, the minimum to be reasonably safe, would require gigantic, quite expensive, quite fragile battery arrays. More to the point, a battery system that would meet 100 percent of the United States’ electrical demand for this amount of time would require more of certain constituent minerals than are known to exist in the entire world. That’s current needs, never mind future needs, which are expected to grow by at least 40 percent by 2030. You’d need at least a few additional Earths to meet demand. But even if you could magically provide the materials necessary to build the storage, you can’t get past the horrendous expense, which would inflate your cost of your grid by double-digit multiples.
The only practical way to make renewable energy work on a large scale is to back up every single kilowatt generated by it with conventional generation. So you end up having to build the equivalent of two grids to get just one. But watt-for-watt, your backup conventional generation is going to be far more expensive than it ordinarily would be because you will have to pay down its cost on an accelerated schedule. You must also also bear all costs incurred during frequent downtime. You’d get just one grid for the price of two or three.
Having two quite different generation systems also creates unique difficulties. You must carry out the hand-off between renewable sources and conventional very carefully, because the grid is a surprisingly delicate thing, and easily disrupted. To begin with, the grid requires alternating current, which flows one way half the time and the other way half the time, switching direction sixty times every second. This makes it easy to transform, or change voltage, a huge advantage. But for the grid to function correctly, the frequency must be extremely stable throughout. If the frequency strays out of a very narrow range, the grid cannot function properly and will shut down.
Renewable energy compromises the grid’s stability in three different ways. (1) Renewable sources produce direct current, which flows in one direction only, in a different voltage than conventional generators. Electricity from renewable sources must be constantly, stringently processed before it is suitable for the grid. (2) The random switching on and off of thousands of individual generators has a disruptive ripple effect throughout the entire grid. (3) Renewable sources lack physical inertia, which conventional spinning generators provide. Inertia acts as a damping mechanism to offset sudden changes in electrical demand or supply. Over-reliance on solar generation, and too little damping from conventional generators, let to a massive power failure on April 28, 2025 that blacked out all of Spain and Portugal and part of France for more than 10 hours.
While every one of these problems could probably be solved with clever engineering, there is a larger issue. The entire point of green energy is, of course, to reduce the emission of CO2. Yet the US could reduce its carbon output to zero and it would barely make a dent. Because our country produces just 14 percent of the world’s human-generated CO2, a share that is dropping year over year. China already produces more CO2 than the rest of the world combined and is busy building a couple of new coal-fired power plants every week to meet surging demand, a trend that will continue for at least the next 10 or fifteen years.
Only the West, principally the US, is reducing its carbon output. Literally everyone else is doing business as usual. They have chosen to provide the security and higher standard of living for their people that comes with reliable energy, rather than submit to fear that there might be some undefined climate-related difficulty a hundred years from now. Climate panic is a Western thing only. Nobody else is buying it.
And for good reason, because, objectively, there is no climate crisis. Since about 1850, when the Little Ice Age finally sputtered out, the planet has warmed, unevenly and mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, by a piddly 1.7 degrees F or so. It’s such a slight difference that had it happened in 170 seconds rather than 170 years, you wouldn’t even notice. Yes, manmade CO2 probably played some role in this because it is a minor greenhouse gas. But the effectiveness of CO2 as a GHG declines very rapidly with increased concentration. The difference in heat retention between 280 PPM, the pre-industrial average, and the current 400-ish PPM is very slight, adding less than one percent net to the planet’s heat budget. The climate system, being a fluid mechanism, easily dissipates the small amount of extra heat a thousand different ways. The most likely effect is a few extra thunderstorms here and there, which route the surplus heat to space.
What warming there is mostly takes place at higher latitudes. You know, the really cold places near the poles. The most visible result is that some frigid locales have measurably warmer, slightly shorter (but still very cold) winters. Summers are unaffected. Low and middle latitudes are unaffected to slightly affected. The agricultural belts have enjoyed slightly longer growing seasons, resulting in increased crop yields. And humanity is flourishing as never before in history. It’s mostly upside.
Furthermore, the Obama-era EPA committed a scientific atrocity by ruling that CO2 was a pollutant (the Endangerment finding.) It is exactly the opposite. This gas is absolutely essential to life, because it is required for photosynthesis. Without a sufficient supply of CO2, all surface life would perish in a very short time. This almost happened, twice, during the most recent glacial outbreak, which ended only about 12,000 years ago.
In reality, CO2 levels have been declining for more than 100 million years. And even with the recent 40 percent increase over the pre-industrial average, we are still uncomfortably close to that critical cutoff value. For perspective, the current value of around 420 parts per million (PPM) is lower than 99 percent of Earth’s history. Furthermore, at this moment in history, we are smack dab in the middle of the most intense ice age in at least 250 million years. That’s why we have large ice caps at both poles. By pure luck, we happen to be alive during a rare (and temporary) “interglacial” period of relatively mild conditions. But it is a statistical certainty that the ice will return, for the next 120,000 years or so. The only question is whether this happens in 500 years or 2500. The last thing we need to worry about is a little extra warmth.
The re-election of Trump brought many changes, including a sober reassessment of energy and climate issues. In a long-overdue reassertion of common sense, the Trump Administration is poised to reverse years of unwise, scientifically incoherent policy, beginning with the Endangerment finding. Revoking it is a necessary step in formulating sensible, comprehensive climate and energy policies based on real-world data, not exaggerated fears nor overrated, fallible models.
Idealism is fine until the bill comes due. It would be historic waste of money and resources to replace a reliable, cost-effective, but imperfect grid with an exorbitantly expensive, patched-together, unreliable, “green” one in order to shave a fraction of a degree off the global temperature a century from now.
Climate panic is the vehicle by which the hard Left hopes to control the rest of us. Make no mistake: Hard-core Greens hate humanity. They think of it as a cancer on the planet. They want the human race to be so miserable it loses the will to live and just kind of dies out. And they have calculated that the best way to do this is to destroy humanity’s chief source of energy, fossil fuels.
It’s time to put the hard Left in its place. And it’s past time to get real about so-called green energy, which has a role to play, but is not even remotely suited to be a 100-percent solution. Green energy is supplemental, fair-weather energy at best, comprising 10 or 15 percent of the overall mix.
Sometime in the next few decades, nuclear fusion may become commercially viable and solve our energy problems for good. But until then it’s fossil fuels plus nuclear fission with an assist from renewables.