Keep natural gas in climate plan
The outcome of the Glasgow climate summit is dispiritingly predictable.
Democratic leaders will make promises beyond what their domestic politics will accept.
Autocrats will cynically make promises they have no intention of implementing, viewing the whole thing as an exercise in managing international public opinion.
After it is over, climate activists will proclaim that even the undeliverable promises fall short of what is needed.
At some point, some sobriety about coping with climate change needs to seep in.
Green politicians, and some incautious or disingenuous climate activists, depict a carefree and costless abrupt transition away from fossil fuels. Everyone who wants one will be able to get a high-paying green energy job. The cost of power will go down, not up. The economy will be boosted, not slowed down.
It is ironic and instructive that Glasgow is taking place in the midst of a global energy shortage.
In the United States, gas prices are becoming a political issue. The price of natural gas to heat homes this winter will soon become one.
Elsewhere, conditions are worse. China is suffering from electricity blackouts. Europe is teetering on them. Suddenly, across the globe, there’s a frantic scramble to secure the whole gambit of fossil fuels.
The notion that they can easily and painlessly be done away with by 2030, just nine years from now, or even by 2050, a more remote 29 years away, has received a timely rebuke.
The key to a sober approach to coping with climate change is natural gas.
In the United States, we have been subsidizing renewable power generation and electric cars for some time now. President Joe Biden proposes to double down on that approach in his Build Back Better framework.
However, the significant reductions in carbon emissions per unit of output the United States has achieved hasn’t resulted from attempts to nurture renewables though subsidies. It has occurred from a market transition from coal to natural gas in the production of electricity. Natural gas has about half the carbon emissions as coal.
The United States has an abundance of natural gas. There are significant additional gains to be had in terms of decarbonization from producing it for domestic use and export.
Climate activists used to accept a role for natural gas as a transition to a renewable future. That acceptance passed quickly. These days, climate activists, as a general rule, are trying to shut down natural gas production and its use to produce electricity. Witness the opposition locally to a sensible decision by Salt River Project to modestly expand its natural gas portfolio.
I have no doubt that solar is the future here in Arizona. But until there are quantum improvements in battery storage capabilities, its intermittency requires a natural gas backup. And it makes no sense to build natural gas generating plants but not run them to full capacity. That’s unfair to ratepayers.
Biden is acting on the new hostility to natural gas, withdrawing approvals for pipelines and shutting down fossil fuel exploration on federal land. But then, to relieve the political pressure on gas prices, his administration went hat in hand to entreat OPEC to increase production.
Some conservatives who treat climate change seriously advocate expansion of nuclear power, which has no carbon emissions. But, at present, investors aren’t willing to assume the liability risk of building new nuclear power plants without a government guarantee or backstop.
There’s not a persuasive case that taxpayers should assume nuclear power risks investors aren’t willing to take.
The most immediate step the United States could take to reducing global carbon emissions is to return to going full out on the production of natural gas and substantially expand exports.
The next best step would be to impose a small carbon tax and tariff. A carbon tax stimulates economywide innovation. The subsidy approach Biden is doubling down on has the government choose particular approaches and particular companies.
The world will beat a path to the doors of the innovators who create battery storage capacity sufficient to overcome the solar intermittency gap. The notion that government can reliably pick them out in advance defies what is known about government and invention.
I think that might very well happen by 2050, widely regarded as a target date for net zero. But don’t turn off the natural gas until it does.