Climate plan only hot air
President Joe Biden’s climate summit predictably attracted fawning headlines as world leaders tripped over themselves to promise massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Less covered was how extraordinarily difficult it will be to keep those promises.
Reducing global emissions is easier said than done, because almost all human activity emits greenhouse gasses. If you go anywhere by plane, train, bus or car, your actions emit greenhouse gasses. Same goes for turning on lights, cooking food, or heating homes and offices. Burning fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas or coal is what has been powering humankind’s climb out of poverty. Developed economies cannot simply switch on a dime.
Biden’s promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 is going to mean life changes for everyone. To see why, look at the Environmental Protection Agency’s summary of greenhouse gas emissions by sector.
That accounting shows that 29 percent of total emissions from the United States comes from transportation, while a further 25 percent comes from electricity generation and 23 percent comes from industrial use. Dramatically reducing emissions in any one of these sectors would require wrenching, expensive change.
Doing it in all three simultaneously requires more direct government activity and regulation than the country has seen in decades.
These changes in turn will wreak havoc on millions of families whose livelihoods are dependent upon the production, transportation and distribution of fossil fuels. Many of the 133,000 jobs in the gas station industry will go away, and many station owners will go bankrupt. Oil and gas extraction, mining and support activities for those activities employ 684,000 people. How many of those workers, or the 173,000 involved in petroleum refining, will still have their jobs after this?
The changes that will come from altering our electricity production will be as dramatic or more so. Do you use natural gas to heat your home or cook your food? That’s going to have to change if we’re going green, which means massive retrofitting of homes.
Moving away from big plants that burn coal or natural gas to generate electricity and toward other sources will also be expensive and wrenching.
These are only a few of the massive challenges the United States will face if it is serious about dramatically reducing greenhouse emissions. There’s a reason Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) Green New Deal says saving the planet will require “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.” It will.
Politicians today will emit a lot of hot air about addressing climate change. Watch voters’ temperatures rise once they realize how much those words will cost.