The State of Texas has been a leader in the pushback against environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies, passing some of the first anti-ESG laws in the country. Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to protect the coal industry from what Paxton says is an effort on the part of large investment firms to not only shrink coal companies — but also unfairly profit from them.
Read MoreTag: Fossil Fuels
Portion of World Electricity Generated by Fossil Fuels Has Fallen Two Percentage Points in 30 Years
Reports in the legacy media regularly claim that we are rapidly eliminating fossil fuels, and the energy transition is steamrolling its way to success. Data, however, appears to show a different picture.
According to the Energy Policy Research Foundation, fossil fuels remain critical to keeping the lights on. In 2023, coal, natural gas and oil-fired power plants produced 18 terawatt hours of electricity, which was 60% of the total. This was a decline of 62% in 1993.
Read MoreCommentary: Bad Climate Policies Cause More Deaths than Climate Change
During Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent event at the Cato Institute, protestors derailed his presentation by getting on stage and chanting “climate con-man,” among other similar allegations. But it’s not just rabbles of unknown activists accusing Ramaswamy of climate falsehoods.
Last year, Ramaswamy said, “The reality is, more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”
Read MoreCommentary: The Harris Flop Would Be Scarier than Her Flip
Joe Biden won in 2020 on the premise that until the November election, he would pose as good ol’ Joe from Scranton and not scare voters.
So Biden talked about “unity” and “competency.” He erased his prior wild primary pandering to left-wing voters about shutting down fracking and opening the border.
Read MoreCommentary: The World Needs Fossil Fuels
It’s summer, and the Sierra Club says: “This is climate change in action. We are living it.”
The United Nations’ secretary-general declares that “a fossil fuel phaseout is inevitable.” And The Lancet, a respected medical journal, insists that nations must swiftly transition away from hydrocarbons.
Read MoreCommentary: Fossil Fuels Are the Best-Kept Secret in Our World Today
Apparently, you can litigate anything these days, and it’s gotten far more insidious than suing McDonald’s over hot coffee being, you know, hot. A new climate activist group called Our Children’s Trust is suing state and federal government agencies on behalf of individual children, claiming that fossil fuel regulators are negligently ruining their future.
That children should feel entitled to come of age under a specific set of favorable environmental and political circumstances — and to demand punishment for individuals they disagree with — isn’t just a testament to the egocentrism dominating the 21st Century. It also exposes our culture’s deeply warped understanding of climate science, which, surprisingly to many of us, actually shows global warming has no meaningful negative effects on our lives or our environment.
Read MoreIncreasing Copper Production for Green Energy Is Impossible, Study Says
Proponents of the transition to so-called green energy argue that the technology to eliminate the use of fossil fuels already exists and it’s just a matter of scaling it up to meet demand. That sounds simple enough.
Putting aside the impact to energy costs and other challenges of this proposed transition, analyses of what is technically and financially possible in developing the resources needed for this plan show that the energy transition in the timescales that proponents demand is not just difficult. It’s impossible.
Read MoreBig Tech Championed Zero Emissions but Now Its Power-Hungry Data Centers are Straining the Grid
For years, tech giants in California and Washington have been leading the charge to eliminate fossil fuels from the grid. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple, for example, are members of Climate Group RE100, an organization of major corporations who are dedicated to accelerating “change toward zero-carbon grids at scale by 2040.”
In 2018, Apple proclaimed that it was globally powered entirely by 100 percent renewable energy.
Read MoreRenewables Provided 30 Percent of Energy in 2023, but Data Disputes Claims of an Overall Energy Transition
A new report from Ember-climate.org, which describes itself as “an independent energy think tank that aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy” touting that renewable energy provided 30% of electricity generation in 2023 is getting a lot of attention, with reports in The Guardian, Associated Press, and Reuters, and CNN.
“A permanent decline in fossil fuel use in the power sector at a global level is now inevitable,” the report by Ember declares.
Read MoreCommentary: The Case for an Inclusive Energy Strategy
The justification for rapidly transitioning the global energy economy to renewables is to avert a catastrophic environmental crisis. It is based on the premise that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from the combustion of coal, natural gas, and oil, are altering our atmosphere, which in turn is leading to a host of negative consequences too numerous to mention.
It is possible nowadays to find almost anything, from crime and disease and mental health to species extinctions, deforestation and disappearing coral reefs, being attributed to climate change. And if you research almost anything involving the design of civilization, not just the production and consumption of energy but housing, mining, ranching, farming, shipping, transportation, waste management, water treatment, etc., the data most prominently reported are always carbon and CO2. The actual units of energy or water, or tonnage of product, or any other practical data necessary to inform management and logistics, has now become secondary. It’s all about carbon.
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