The Big ‘Green’ Push for ‘Net Zero’ Is Stalling Badly

Among the hallucinations to which some climate alarmists are especially prone, an important one is the “Renewables revolution”

While the truly grim fanatics insist that nothing is being done due to a vast right-wing conspiracy, their perky colleagues just know that the world is switching to wonderful wind and solar and geothermal and ‘green’ hydrogen and whatever and it doesn’t matter what the numbers say.

Thus the New York Times’ David Gelles seeks to cheer up the doomsters with:

“In recent years, the world has begun making rapid strides toward a cleaner, more resilient future, one in which modern society is powered with renewable energy, and the challenges of a hotter planet are not quite so perilous.”

But the numbers get the last word: as Terence Corcoran just wrote in the Financial Post:

“The evidence mounts daily that, regardless of Hurricane Milton and other climate events, neither Canada nor the world are on track to achieve the net-zero fossil fuel emission reduction targets said to be necessary to save the world from the “existential” threat of climate change.

Despite the calls for action, oil and gas production continue to increase as energy corporations boost fossil fuel investments.”

And that’s because in the real world the alternatives are not delivering, whatever one thinks they might be doing or should be.

As Corcoran points out, even those responsible for the emissions reductions are having a very hard time claiming victory:

“In Canada, the national effort to reduce carbon emissions is failing, as acknowledged in a recent report by the federal government-appointed Net-Zero Advisory Body (NZAB).

In a largely ignored paper published on Sept. 26, NZAB essentially concluded that Ottawa’s plan to reduce carbon emissions to 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 would not be achieved. At best, Canada might hit 35 per cent below 2005.”

Now of course if at first you don’t succeed try, try again. Thus:

“To hit the 2030 target, NZAB said, the federal government needed ‘more aggressive and sustained action.’ There is ‘a gap’ in the government’s strategies.

‘To reach the target, we need to do more, and we need to do it now.’ Needed are investment tax credits, emissions caps, clean electricity, green buildings and vehicle sales mandates.”

But we have all that stuff and more, though as he snidely adds:

“Strangely, NZAB does not recommend a consumer-based carbon tax.”

The problem here isn’t political will, it’s physics can’t.

Naturally groups like NZAB focus on the output, emissions. But the big issue is the input, energy. Peak oil is a trendy concept and has been for the better part of a century. Alas, nobody told oil.

As Chris Varcoe wrote in the Calgary Herald; “Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson turned some heads this week by declaring that global demand for oil will plateau soon. As in, real soon. “Oil and gas will peak this decade. In fact, oil is probably peaking this year,” he told reporters in Ottawa. “While that prognostication might fit the narrative that oil demand is faltering quickly and about to peak within months – BP also said recently the plateau is coming around 2025 – that isn’t what the data shows.”

Darn that data. Varcoe notes that even the IEA (which seems to have succumbed to O’Sullivan’s law that all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing become left-wing over time, or possibly his corollary that even organizations that are explicitly right-wing become left-wing over time) does project rising demand for oil.

Hitting a record this year and beating it next year, even while claiming the rise is slowing along with the Chinese economy, and so does OPEC. He adds that “the numbers are all over the map” which has been a problem with prognostication since the invention of the shoulder blade. And then he adds:

“What’s needed is a fact-based discussion about the speed of the energy transition, and whether net-zero by 2050 targets can be reached, the Global Business Forum heard Friday.”

OK. Because as Corcoran details, firms from BP to Suncor to CNRL are tiptoeing away from their woke commitment to renewables and investing in “profitable projects, first and foremost in oil and gas”.

And it’s striking that despite the massive subsidies for the alternatives, it’s those old-tyme fossil fuels that are profitable because (drum roll please) they deliver what people need at prices they can afford. Thus here in Canada:

“While think-tanks muse about reduction strategies, Statistics Canada reports that Canada’s oil output hit a record 286.4 million cubic metres in 2023, led by gains in oilsands output. Production continued to grow in 2024, placing Canada among the top four oil producers in the world.”

As for the non-Canada parts of the world, well, coal does seem to have flatlined in the last couple of years but gas and oil are surging upwards. Some revolution that turned out to be.

You can of course believe in it even while being clear-eyed about some of its birthing pains or other defects. For instance, Blacklock’s Reporter notes that:

“Green technology supply chains are tainted by slave labour, the Commons trade committee was told yesterday. Chinese concentration camp inmates are forced to mine lithium and manufacture solar panels, one witness testified.”

But as that witness, Mehliya Cetinkaya or the Alberta Uyghur Association, rightly added, it would be possible in theory to get the inputs somewhere else, and indeed she enthused about doing so.

The problem is that what’s not possible is making them keep the lights on and the factories humming. (And it’s not an achievement if wind and solar supply more power to the grid than conventional sources if governments force the grid to buy them first while leaving more efficient and affordable plants idle.)

As the Manhattan Contrarian observes acidly:

“The reason should be obvious to everyone although, for some reason I cannot understand, it is not. The reason is that the intermittency of wind and solar generators means that they require full back-up from some other source.

But the back-up source will by hypothesis be woefully underused and idle most of the time so long as most of the electricity comes from wind and sun. No back-up source can possibly be economical under these conditions, and therefore nobody will develop and deploy such a source.”

Hang on, some may say. They can get the job done if only we develop better storage systems to bottle the energy when it’s produced and let it out when it’s needed. Which is true, but only really in the old Depression-era joke that if you had some ham we could make ham sandwiches… if I had some bread.

Canary Media addressed this one fairly directly in an Oct. 3 piece that started with the frank, and frankly not very encouraging, statement that:

“PJM, the largest electric grid operator in the U.S., has a major problem — old, dirty power plants are closing down faster than new clean energy resources can replace them.

This mounting grid crisis is already driving up electricity costs for the 65 million people living in PJM’s territory, which stretches from the mid-Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes. By the end of the decade, the situation could become so dire that it threatens the reliability of PJM’s grid.”

And if that’s a renewables revolution, where do we sign up for the counterrevolution? It sounds like the very definition of failure. But author Jeff St. John holds out some hope, or tries to:

“Existing wind and solar farms and fossil-fired power plants often have more grid capacity than they actually need during many hours of the day or seasons of the year.

Developers could add batteries or other new energy capacity next to these power plants and make use of that surplus grid space. It wouldn’t eliminate the trouble altogether, but it would make a serious dent, clean energy developers say.”

So all they need is “batteries or other new energy capacity”. And if they had some working batteries we could definitely add them along with other capacity… if I had some working new energy capacity, whatever that even means.

Nobody seems very sure. At one moment Canary Media is all excited that “The US battery market is on track for its best year yet” or that “Solar and batteries are helping Texas weather heat waves. Here’s how.”

Then the New York Times moans by email “The U.S. lost the battery race to China. Can it make a comeback?” But the answer seems to be that it depends how aggressively its government pursues an industrial strategy and those have a record even more dismal than that of solar power in running an industrial economy.

Plus the metaphor of a “race” is silly; China lost the “automobile race” to the United States a century ago and was not told to go sit in the stands. And then you hear from The Economist that:

“Energy storage is suddenly all the rage. Consider a few recent developments. SOM, the American architectural firm behind Dubai’s towering Burj Khalifa, plans to build ‘carbon-negative’ skyscrapers kitted out with gravity-based energy storage systems developed by Energy Vault, a Swiss company.”

And you yearn for the days when people just tried to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge because at least it really did exist. Especially when the Los Angeles Times, in the business section not the zealot section, warns that “The power keeps going out at the Port of Los Angeles, raising worries about its green future”. Oh. Just that.

Euronews.green, peddling that “renewables revolution” we cited at the outset, chirps that:

“China is likely to account for almost 60 per cent of all renewable capacity installed worldwide between now and 2030. Renewables are on track to meet almost half of the world’s electricity needs by 2030, according to the latest landmark report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

While solar power in particular is growing at a promising pace, the trajectory still falls short of the global target to triple renewable energy capacity this decade. But the IEA says that crucial goal – set at the COP28 climate summit last year – is still in reach with the right government support.”

So, more subsidies for the ‘renewables’, and more customers for the reliables.

P.S. Gelles made his claim in announcing a new Times feature “The Climate Fix”. But while we’re all for practical solutions, we do think newspapers do neither their readers nor themselves a service by reporting on things that aren’t happening.