Credit: The Manhattan Institute
An Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, energy expert Mark Mills answered The Princeton Tory‘s questions on energy policy in 2020 and beyond.
None of that level of alarmism is reflected in the primary UN research, the IPCC reports, all of which are far more measured and, well, scientific, so yes, you have to conclude that popular stories over-hype climate.
The media has always made money – – “click bait” today – from selling alarming stories. It’s the nature of that business. ‘Google up’ a history of the dawn of the age of “yellow journalism” and the tabloids; newspapers then (and there were thousands of them, many published several times a day – kind of like today’s 24×7 news cycle) sold papers with stories that were literally fiction, but claimed as news. And when reporting real news, well that of course was itself hyped.
As for looking to politicians for guidance on this or any issue, I think the question answers itself.
In every form and way it is purely aspirational. As the authors and proponents of the GND make clear themselves, it’s about much more than energy; it is about “changing everything” in society. Insofar as changing how society is fueled, my recent paper outlines the many and varied foundational reasons that a GND energy plan is unachievable: “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise In Magical Thinking.”
I take the Bill Gates position: any meaningful actions to fundamentally alter how society is fueled today can’t be achieved with technologies that exist. The most important action that makes sense is to (again, reflecting what Bill Gates has said publicly) radically increase funding for basic research in the pursuit of eventually finding radically new technologies.
Even a casual reading of history will show that the variability in the global climate has been as dramatic as any posited for the future; humanity adapts and responds. It will again. This time – regardless of the proximate reasons or causes for a changing climate — humanity will have both more wealth and more technology for resilience and adaptation than at any time in history. So count me as optimistic that we’ll cope.
If investors don’t want to own stock in public companies, whatever the reason, that merely moves the option for investing to the private markets. Whether or not any university holds stock in, say, Exxon, has no relevance to how much oil the world will use. Consider that in the four years since the Paris Accord was negotiated, and hundreds of nations made pledges to use fewer hydrocarbons – it is notable that world oil use has actually increased by 4 million barrels per day, and natural gas use has increased by a similar amount (in energy equivalent terms).
Read more underlying science, and less in the popular press. Pursue a degree in basic science and work on making foundational discoveries in new technologies.
Every politician, including those on the political right, prefers to have an “answer” that doesn’t involve debating science or explaining nuances that are a necessary part of any complex issue, especially one which has global ramifications.
No, not in the near future. And no, because there are no solutions of the kind or scale that are necessary to achieve the proposed goals.
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