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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Petroleum engineering is the highest paying bachelor’s degree in the United States, according to a report by Payscale, but despite an average annual salary of $97,500, oil companies struggle to fill positions.
The industry faces a number of challenges. Employees often face cyclical layoffs whenever commodity prices collapse, and that makes the jobs appear unstable. Young people today are also concerned about working in an industry they’re taught is destroying the planet.
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