The “green” mandates and subsidies are only affordable by the prosperous developed nations
There is a tight correlation between poverty and “deprivation” of the entire range of basic products and services that are taken for granted by wealthy people. A personal car is the iconic energy-dependent product that is highly correlated with freedom of mobility and independence, as well as improved personal and national economic outcomes. In the United States, there are roughly 800 cars for every 1,000 people; in poorer developing nations, there are only a few cars for every 1,000 people.
Much of the rhetoric one hears from representatives of wealthy nations at global gatherings is focused on the goal of lowering global CO2 emissions. Such a singular focus not only ignores the realities of multidimensional environmental issues, but more importantly ignores energy poverty and the central need for access to a sufficient supply of affordable products made from fossil fuels, and affordable electricity. This is the only way to increase well-being everywhere and reduce destructive global disparity. For the foreseeable future, much of the energy to achieve this will come from oil, natural gas, and coal.
The high price of wind and solar deployed just to generate electricity at society-scale illustrates an important cost of supply principle. Because everyone needs affordable and reliable energy—whether electricity, gasoline, diesel, aviation, or heating fuel—the higher the overall costs, the more damaging it is proportionally for those who can least afford it.
Economic growth is propelled by imagination and invention. Many processes are made possible by the ability of fossil fuels to deliver the extremely high heat required to fabricate cement, steel, and other vital materials, and as feedstock for many critical materials, not least of which are fertilizers and plastics. The latter, while often vilified, are essential in a myriad of products, including in medical domains and vehicles of all kinds.
Improving the well-being of the billions on this planet who live in poverty will vastly increase the demand for, and thus the energy associated with, all conventional products and services from home heating and cooling, to transportation, health care, and more. In wealthy nations, there is a further effect on energy demands from continued invention of new kinds of products and services.
Making products and services more energy-efficient effectively makes them more affordable and accessible for more people and thus increases overall energy demand around the world.
Policymakers in wealthy nations recognize that outsourcing to emerging nations the mining of basic materials, the refining of those materials, and the manufacturing of associated components simply shifts CO2 emissions somewhere else. More than half the world’s CO2 emissions come from Asian nations, which also produce more than half of the world’s goods. Similarly, mining has in recent decades increasingly shifted to emerging economies, many with fragile or often compromised political and social structures. Dependence on imports does not make the world “greener,” it just moves environmental and other impacts elsewhere.
When wealthy economies export the production of minerals and metals to less wealthy nations, they impose environmental impacts and the exploitation of human atrocities on those developing countries.
We want our products to be inexpensive, but it is naïve and myopic to ignore the reality that those products are being produced using coal-fired electricity and energy for coal-fueled manufacturing, transported by diesel burning trucks and ships to stores and front doors.
All products and goods are moved to markets on transportation equipment using oil somewhere in the supply chains; overall, petroleum powers more than 95 percent of global transportation. Exporting industrial and environmental challenges from wealthy to developing countries is not a solution, it is a “shell game.”
Thus, while wealthy countries have spent more than two decades and trillions of dollars trying to “transition” from fossil fuels to reduce CO2 emissions, the fact is that global emissions have risen, predictably.
The history of foundational innovations is not correlated with, nor does it arise from, mandates or subsidies. Subsidies and mandates tend to lock in yesterday’s technologies.
The building of electric vehicles (EV) has two distinctive features, the motor and battery, which require about 500 percent more specialty metals and minerals that are mined, refined, and transported around the globe using hydrocarbons, as well as more energy-intensive aluminum in the vehicle body to offset the weight of a typically half-ton EV battery.
There is, similarly, a huge increase in critical metals needed to fabricate wind and solar hardware, compared with conventional fossil fuel electricity production. That translates into far more mining of natural resources, which is not green, regardless of labels and aspirations—and often done in poorer, less regulated countries where human rights violations and environmental degradation are all too common.
No energy system is “renewable” because all machines that access, convert, move, and store energy—drilling rigs, dams, mining trucks, wind turbines, solar panels, trains, boats, planes, pipelines, batteries, electronics, and beyond—wear out, produce waste, and require replacement and disposal of materials, some of which can be hazardous.
Recycling consumes energy, takes time, is limited in terms of useful recovery, and is often more expensive than producing something new. That is why the idea of a “circular economy” with near-perfect recycling is profoundly unrealistic, and even with aggressive recycling, there remains the challenge of new supplies needed to meet net new demands that come with growing economies.
Society needs simultaneously products and electricity that are affordable and reliable for the eight billion people on this planet. The real impediments to progress are an underlying obliviousness to energy realities and associated denial of trade-offs.
Furthermore, the impact on land, materials, and water tends to:
- Decrease with denser forms of energy such as hydrocarbons and nuclear, and
- Increase with less dense energy such as wind, solar, biomass, and batteries.
Delivering affordable and reliable energy to society is made possible by technologies that can capture natural forces and materials and convert them into a useful form.
Forecasting long-term possibilities for supplies of products and electricity are thus determined by future innovations that can take advantage of the underlying scale of those primary natural resources. Scientific estimates of those quantities illuminate the reality that enormous amounts of energy may exist in the natural world around us for several centuries.
The central challenge of our time is thus illuminated by the simple fact that about one fourth of the world’s population accounts for three-fourths of global GDP. Our goal should be to ensure that the whole population, both the less fortunate in already developed countries as well as those in emerging and developing nations, can obtain the material wealth and social conditions enabled by reliable, abundant, and affordable energy, and in so doing have the economic wherewithal to invest in environmental protection. That will require significantly more energy to address the needs of the eight billion people on this planet.
The article was originally published at AmericaOutLoud.News
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