Obama misleads students about the climatic impact of energy choices
By Bob Carter and Tom Harris
In his major address on the economy at Northwestern University in
Illinois on Thursday, President Barack Obama told students, “If we keep
investing in clean energy technology, we won’t just put people to work
assembling, raising, and pounding into place the zero-carbon components
of a clean energy age; we’ll reduce our carbon emissions and prevent the
worst costs of climate change down the road.”
But what has climate change got to do with energy supply? Almost
nothing.
Climate change issues are concerned with environmental hazards, whereas
energy policy is concerned with supplying cheap and reliable electricity
to industry and the public. Where is the relationship?
Until the 1980s, there was none. That one is now perceived testifies to
the effectiveness of relentless lobbying by environmentalists and
commercial special interests towards the idea that carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions from power-generation using hydrocarbon-based fuels will cause
dangerous global warming.
This idea has become so entrenched that even prime ministers and
presidents now misuse “carbon” as a shorthand for “carbon dioxide”, and
often refer to it a pollutant. For example, during his 13-minute address
at the UN’s Climate Summit 2014 in New York City on September 23, Obama
referenced “carbon pollution” seven times and “carbon emissions” five
times. That’s almost one misnomer per minute.
In reality, CO2 is environmentally beneficial; it is the elixir of life
for most of our planetary ecosystems. No evidence exists that the amount
humans have added to the atmosphere is producing dangerous warming, or,
indeed, any measurable temperature rise at all.
Many negative consequences flow from wrongly connecting energy and
global warming issues. Foremost amongst them has been a lemming-like
rush by governments to generously subsidize what are otherwise
uneconomic sources of energy, solar and wind power in particular.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) asserts that worldwide
investment in renewables (not counting large hydropower) amounted to an
incredible $214 billion in 2013. IRENA explains that this rate of
expenditure needs to more than double by 2030 in order to achieve the
impossible goal of restricting ‘global temperature’ rise to 2 degrees
Celsius by the end of the century.
Obama paints alternative energy sources as environmentally virtuous
because they are claimed to reduce CO2 emissions, and are both renewable
and supposedly clean sources of power.
Wind and solar energy are certainly renewable when the wind blows and
the Sun shines. But they are absent otherwise, so it’s tough luck if
that’s when a hospital needs power to perform emergency surgery. Such
intermittency also makes these sources entirely unsuitable to be major
contributors to a national energy grid.
Besides dramatically increasing the cost of electricity, alternative
energy sources are far less environmentally friendly than the President
would have us believe. Wind turbines kill millions of birds and bats
every year, and some rare species will undoubtedly be vulnerable to
extinction if the pace of wind power expansion continues. Massive solar
power stations have a disastrous effect on desert ecosystems, especially
during construction.
These problems are becoming apparent even to the European Union,
originally the world’s green energy leaders. For example, EU Energy
Commissioner Gunther Oettinger recently stated in Berlin that European
energy policy must change from being climate driven to being driven by
the needs of industry.
All nations need to return to the historic separation that previously
existed between energy policy and climate policy, analyzing and planning
for each in accord with their own distinct requirements and resources.
This means abandoning the Obama’s naïve mantra that our energy choices
affect global climate.
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Dr Bob Carter is former professor and head of the School of Earth
Sciences at James Cook University in Australia. Tom Harris is Executive
Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science
Coalition.