Bjorn Lomborg writes in the WSJ, despite extravagant hype, the green-energy transition from fossil fuels isn’t happening.
Our Take, with Doug Sheridan
Bjorn Lomborg writes in the WSJ, despite extravagant hype, the green-energy transition from fossil fuels isn’t happening. Achieving a meaningful shift with current policies is too costly.
Recent research shows for every six units of green energy, less than one unit displaces fossil-fuel energy. The Biden admin finds that while renewable energy sources worldwide will dramatically increase up to 2050, oil, gas and coal will all keep increasing.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any student of history. During the 19th-century transition to coal from wood, overall wood use increased even as coal assumed a greater percentage of energy needs. The same thing happened during the shift to oil from coal—by 1970, oil, coal, gas and wood all delivered more energy than ever before.
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. During past additions of a new energy source it has been “entirely unprecedented for these additions to cause a sustained decline in the use of established energy sources.”
Invariably, the new energy source would need to be better or cheaper. Solar and wind fail on both counts. Unlike fossil fuels they produce energy only according to the vagaries of daylight and weather. At best they are cheaper only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The rest of time they are expensive and mostly useless.
When we factor in the cost of four hours of storage, wind and solar energy solutions become uncompetitive with fossil fuels. Achieving a sustainable transition to solar or wind would require orders of magnitude more storage, making these options unaffordable.
Solar and wind are almost entirely deployed in the electricity sector, which makes up a mere one-fifth of all global energy use. We are struggling to find green solutions for most transportation and haven’t even begun to address the energy needs of heating, manufacturing or agriculture. We are all but ignoring the hardest and most crucial sectors like steel, cement, plastics and fertilizers.
McKinsey & Company estimates that achieving a real transition would cost more than $5 trillion annually. This splurge would slow economic growth, making the real cost five times as high. For rich-world voters, the annual cost could be more than $13,000 a person. Voters are unlikely to welcome that pain.
To Sum It Up: When politicians say the green transition is here, they are really asking voters to support throwing more good money after bad. We need to be smarter.