Biden and Harris have promised to fight climate catastrophe by transitioning to “clean, renewable” energy. Can they do it? And what would happen if they did?
The magnitude of the problem is shown in the pie chart below.
How could wind and solar, currently supplying 3 percent of the world’s energy, grow to replace the 85 percent supplied by coal, oil, and natural gas?
The percentage could be increased by drastically reducing total energy, as by getting rid of “fossil fuels.” The federal government could conceivably shut down coal mining, fracking, off-shore drilling, refineries, and pipelines—within the U.S., and then ban imports.
In his ABC town hall, Joe Biden said, “There are well over 100,000 [gas?] wells that are left uncapped in the region [Pennsylvania?]. We could hire 128,000 of these people who are working in the industry to cap these wells and get a good salary doing it now, number one.”
We can’t get to 100 percent renewables by 2030 as promised by the Green New Deal, he said. We must transition to a “place where we get to net zero emission including in agriculture. I’ve laid out a detailed plan…. “We can do things like pelletize all the chicken manure and all the horse manure and cow manure and they can be—and take out the methane and use it as fertilizer and make a lot of money doing it.”
What can we learn from other countries that are far ahead of us in renewables? Germany generates more than 30 percent of its electricity from renewables. South Australia has a 50 percent renewable energy generation target for 2025, getting around 40 percent of its electricity currently from intermittent renewables such as wind. What has happened?
- Germany has among the highest electricity prices in the world (3 times those in the U.S.).
- In South Australia, rates have frequently hit above $10/kWh (cf $0.12 in U.S. and $0.35 in Germany). Cold weather caused prices to rise 100-fold.
- Energy-intensive industry is relocating to Asian countries that have reliable, affordable power.
- Brownouts and blackouts can result when intermittent sources generate too much or too little power, causing expensive equipment to fail at industrial facilities. Last year, Germany paid wind farms $548 million to switch off in order to prevent damage to the country’s electric grid.
For more information on the Green New Deal: Civil Defense Perspectives, January 2019.