#LookItUp: Global electricity generation

Written by OP ED Watch on May 25, 2025. Posted in Current News

In the New York Times “Climate Forward” David Wallace-Wells asks “Can we really fight climate change when we’re not scared of it?” To which one might well retort “Probably not, but why would you want to?”

Which takes us down the post-modern rabbit hole because the author goes on to cite an “energy consultant” on “the possibility that the cultural and political momentum behind climate action is several years past its peak.

‘It’s a 2021 thing,’ he wrote”. But how can it be losing its coolness and appeal if the evidence has only gotten stronger than strength itself, having already we were told been overwhelming in 2021 (and indeed in 2007), with a hideous onslaught of even more unprecedentedly unprecedented bad weather in the four years since? Do the zealots not believe in evidence? Do they no longer trust in their fellow citizens to think?

In posing this question we do not ask whether they believe there is evidence. Of course they do, and say it repeatedly. The problem is that they don’t believe people, other than people like themselves, are rational. Thus Wallace-Wells writes:

“Lately I’ve found myself wondering whether warning about future impacts itself contributes to the problem – familiarizing the public with horrifying-seeming possibilities that, when they do come to pass, seem less horrifying for having already been processed. How else can we make sense of the seeming banality, just three months on, of the January firestorms in Los Angeles, which incinerated whole neighborhoods in some of the richest and most well-connected corners of one of the world’s cultural capitals? Were those fires unthinkable, as so many of us suggested, or did the fact that we had imagined some version of them before make it easier to watch them burn their way through reality?”

Now in one fairly obvious sense this statement is bunk. Well, two, if you count the fact that the LA fires were quite clearly not related to climate. But the one we’re focused on here is that what he’s saying is that if a theory predicts something and then it happens, people will be less likely to believe the theory. Goodness gracious. How would science ever proceed if such a thing were true? And how could democracy work?

In fact Wallace-Wells does believe the green energy transition is soaring even as the rhetoric is sagging, along with:

“the S&P Global clean energy index, corporate E.S.G. commitments and the number of climate policies springing up around the world, all of which are dramatically down in recent years.”

Alas, his evidence for the transition is things like:

“Last year worldwide spending on the energy transition was almost twice as high as it was in 2021, for instance, surpassing $2 trillion.”

But governments spending a fortune on shiny stuff isn’t proof that the stuff works or is a good deal. Normal people find it hard to get enthused that, say, “In Pakistan, nearly five times as much solar power was imported in 2024 as in 2022”. And indeed many of us aren’t that impressed that “In 2024, more than 90 percent of all new power installed globally was clean.” What it really means, as the recent debacle in Spain and Portugal shows, is that governments are buying the wrong stuff and suppressing the right stuff. But there’s a deeper issue here.

The reason we would be scared of climate change, if humans are rational, is that it’s scary. The hideous predictions we’ve been inundated with for 40 years would be coming true, filling us with dread and a sense of urgency.

For instance, Climate Cosmos bellows at us that:

“The year 2024 stunned scientists, with monthly global temperature records being broken again and again. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2024 became the hottest year ever recorded, with global temperatures averaging 1.52°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. This number is alarmingly close to the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement, which scientists warn is a critical tipping point for dangerous climate impacts.”

What scares us is that it immediately cites none other than “Dr. Friederike Otto” of World Weather Attribution, fast becoming the human equivalent of RCP8.5 in that she increasingly lurks behind every trendy exaggeration. But from the point of view of rational debate about climate, if that sort of thing really is going on, then people would naturally be scared of climate change because they’re melting in the heat. If they’re not, again, it either means it’s not really happening and Copernicus is fudging the data or else people are morons not to be trusted even with their own well-being.

If instead, as Wallace-Wells says at the outset of his piece, “climate urgency has cooled as a rapid but inadequate green rollout continues”, it’s presumably because for all the hype, both about weather extremes and alternative energy, people just aren’t seeing the apocalypse out their windows, or wind and solar getting it done.

Our own view is that climate alarmism is collapsing because it can’t deliver what it promised, either on the bad side with floods and fires and hurricanes a-blowin’, or on the good side with lower power bills because we went from workhorses to unicorns. It’s a slow process but, we say, a rational one.

If the alarmists think it’s collapsing because it has delivered, they don’t believe human beings have working brains. In which case it’s hard to see the argument for self-government or newspapers.

See more here Climate Discussion

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