Trillions of dollars flushed down the toilet for an energy transition that isn't happening.
Wall Street Journal (6/24/23) editorial: "Despite extravagant hype, the green-energy transition from fossil fuels isn’t happening. Achieving a meaningful shift with current policies is too costly. We need to change policy direction entirely. Globally, we spent almost $2 trillion in 2023 to try to force an energy transition. Over the past decade, solar and wind energy use has soared to record levels. But that hasn’t reduced fossil-fuel use, which increased even more over the same period. Studies show that when countries add more renewable energy, it does little to replace coal, gas or oil. It simply adds to energy consumption. Recent research shows that for every six units of green energy, less than one unit displaces fossil-fuel energy. The Biden administration finds that while renewable energy sources worldwide will dramatically increase up to 2050, that won’t be enough even to begin replacing fossil fuels—oil, gas and coal will all keep increasing, too...Humans have an unquenchable thirst for affordable energy. In the past 50 years, oil and coal energy use has doubled, hydro power has tripled and gas has quadrupled. The use of nuclear, solar and wind power has surged. The current plan underpinning the green-energy transition mostly insists that pushing heavily subsidized renewables will magically make fossil fuels disappear. But such expectations are 'misleading,' as a 2019 academic study concluded. During past additions of a new energy source, the researchers found, it has been 'entirely unprecedented for these additions to cause a sustained decline in the use of established energy sources.'”
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"If the managers of the California and New York public pension systems really believe it is inappropriate for companies to resist politicized shareholder proposals, then they have no business managing huge retirement systems dedicated to the fiduciary interests of current and future retirees. That they have found it appropriate to try to have it both ways, to protect those interests by resisting fossil divestment while pressuring the managements to do what the environmental Left demands, is fundamentally an exercise doomed to failure. They need to display real backbone in the face of the Left’s divestment game, and if they find themselves unable to do so, they should find a different line of work."
– Ben Zycher, AEI
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