Keystone Is a Fake Green Victory If abundant fossil fuels is what affords such victories, well, you see the paradox.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/keystone-is-a-fake-green-victory-1447199960
By all means, read Bill McKibben’s victory proclamation on Keystone XL posted by the New Yorker, first for its infantile analysis.
• He sees Keystone as a harbinger, which it surely is: President Obama waited seven years to kill the pipeline, then did so when he no longer had to face voters and when gasoline prices are near an all-time low in real terms. If abundant fossil fuels is what it takes to afford Mr. McKibben such victories, well, you can see the paradox.
• He celebrates the divestment movement as if it means anything. But buyers will always materialize for profitable businesses. Anyway, 80% of the world’s fossil-fuel reserves are not held by publicly traded businesses, but by state-run companies—run by states that have never shown interest in anything but revenue maximization.
• He is fooled by warnings from the BlackRock investment house and Mark Carney of the Bank of England about fossil-fuel reserves becoming “stranded assets,” as if energy shares are priced in the expectation that 100% of hydrocarbon reserves will be produced.
All assets are liable to become stranded, i.e., not profitable. This is called risk. There hasn’t been a day in the past four decades when energy investors haven’t complacently priced into shares the prospect of legislation or regulation depressing their returns. Remember the Clinton-Gore BTU tax proposal?
The colossal lie that greenies tell themselves is that the machinations of Exxon are what’s holding up climate policy. Big Oil is an attractive villain to eco activists because Big Oil is already a villain to the public, but mainly because the public suspects Big Oil of conspiring to hike gas prices.
Guess what? Environmentalists are also suspected of wanting higher gas prices. Maybe this is why setting themselves up as the enemy of oil companies hasn’t gelled into public support for their energy policies.
The obstacle isn’t Exxon, or even the uncertainties of climate science, which are interesting only to a handful of reporters who actually take climate science (as opposed to climate religion) seriously. Standing in the way has always and only been the politics of energy prices. Even Mr. Obama has shown no interest in risking his political career over climate, explaining, “Gas prices are one of those things that really bug people. . . . The gas tax hasn’t been increased in 20 years. There is a reason for that.”
Or consider America’s absurd, convoluted policy of regulating vehicle fuel mileage, which exists as a continuing, 40-year testament to the impossibility of enacting higher gas prices.
Making fossil fuels the villain is silly anyway. We need fossil fuels until and unless we find a technological substitute. Picking on Exxon is attacking an available punching bag, but the reality is that coal is the primary greenhouse offender. Even with current technology, coal could realistically be pushed out of the power generation market by natural gas (it emits half the carbon dioxide) and nuclear (it emits none). In fact, it’s partway happening thanks to fracking despite shrinking nuclear output (the only category that shrank in 2014). In such a world, the 8% of carbon dioxide produced by running the world’s passenger cars on gasoline is a rounding error.
This is not a counsel of despair for climate worriers, but a counsel to grow up. Given the rate of technological change, who really wants to bet that they know what systems of energy storage and distribution earthlings will be using 50 years on?
But likely the revolution won’t be happening in the U.S., as Microsoft founder Bill Gates implicitly testified when he brought his supersafe traveling wave reactor prototype to China because America wasn’t interested. China needs such technology because it likes to breathe, never mind any concerns about global warming.
The carbon dioxide problem, if carbon dioxide is a problem, isn’t going to be solved by banning fossil fuels or begging them to stay in the ground. The problem will be solved by coming up with alternative energy technology that improves on fossil fuels in a sizable share of applications not only for environmental reasons, but for cost and utility reasons.
If this happens or it doesn’t, Mr. McKibben’s moaning and histrionics will be seen in retrospect to have been magisterially irrelevant. Like lab rodents learning to push a lever for a cocaine injection, today’s climate activists operate on a very low kind of learning. They’ve learned how to attract attention and dramatize themselves but not how to enact policies that might actually be useful in the long run.
For serious, non-narcissistic climate worriers, the only hope is that the discredit that many of today’s activists and scientists have brought on the cause will come out in the wash.
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