We noted a few weeks back Bjorn Lomborg’s complaint that over the last few decades governments worldwide have spent a staggering $16 trillion or more on climate and, as Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation asked, “And for what?” Now people we suspect would struggle to say how many zeroes there are in a trillion, or know there’s a silly rival British one, are suddenly cuss-posting things like “How stupid is it that we’re fighting even more wars over oil when we could have spent the same amount of money and transitioned the entire g*^&*#n planet to renewables?” Now to be fair such people are not just ignorant about climate numbers. Their apparent belief that a month of the US-Israeli war against Iran has cost $16 trillion, and do not ask them what share of American GDP that number would represent (plot spoiler: about half), suggests they are equally ignorant of military and economic statistics. Unfortunately the list of people who misunderstand the scale of the numbers includes most those who have been making the big decisions for the past few decades. And everyone else who still thinks, despite everything, that it would be cheap and easy to get to Net Zero and the only reason we haven’t is that nobody really tried.

The whole blithe “Net Zero” project was driven by people who didn’t have a clue what it would take to overhaul the generation and transmission of energy for entire massive First-World economies in mere decades. They didn’t know how big the footprint of the needed solar panels and wind turbines would be, the scale of the grid and the challenges of making it, pretty much anything requiring mathematical intuition if not long calculation.

Speaking of economic ignorance, Heatmap does try to express some sympathy for New York governor Kathy Hochul’s urgent efforts to weaken her state’s climate laws to mitigate the affordability crisis they have played a major role in causing. They’re not happy, of course, that “If she gets her way, New York would be the first state to renege on its climate goals.” And they’re right that there’s some serious jiggery-pokery in play:

“Hochul pitched moving the law’s deadline for enacting climate regulations from 2024 to 2030. She wants to establish a new emissions target for 2040 to replace one for 2030 that will now be all but impossible to meet, and to revise the existing 2050 target. She also wants to change the official accounting method the state uses to calculate emissions... That would ease pressure to cut natural gas use and make the state look further along on its climate goals than it currently does.”

But what they don’t grasp is that the reason you either have to abandon the goals or fudge the metrics is that renewables are not cheaper. Not in some petty accounting way, but in the big sense that it takes more things that are valuable, including resources and of course people’s precious time and effort, to get energy from them. Instead they deploy some airport-paperback-economics clichés:

“The dispute is emblematic of the way the cost of living crisis is deepening a tension at the heart of climate politics: Decarbonization often imposes real costs now in exchange for diffuse benefits later, which is a tough sell to voters who are finding it increasingly difficult simply to keep themselves afloat.”

But where is the evidence that these “diffuse benefits later” exist at all, let alone are not mostly diffuse and only slightly benefits? Well, they assert that:

“environmental groups are right that reliance on fossil fuels is a big part of why energy costs are increasing for New Yorkers.”

Fine, then. Get rid of them and watch prices fall… not. As they semi-admit:

“There will never be a good time to price carbon; it could feel as politically painful, or more so, in 2030 as it did in 2024, 2025, and 2026. It will be up to the legislature to decide whether New York will take the leap now and recommit to the ambition it had during an earlier, more auspicious moment for decarbonization, or to wait. If there’s a third option, it hasn’t been articulated yet.”

The third option is stick to power that’s reliable, affordable and proven. But they don’t know it because they don’t know physics or economics or statistics (for instance that thing where every jurisdiction that went heavily for renewables has expensive energy compared to those that stuck to the fossil fuels Heatmap claims are driving up New York energy prices).

There’s something else they also don’t know. As Michael Shellenberger wrote recently, “The Iran conflict is a reminder that we must accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, say many in the media.” And he conceded that with Iran disrupting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the world has lost about 13 million barrels of oil and refined products a day, more than a tenth of global consumption. Plus a cyclone hit three key Australian LNG facilities. But then he quoted a quip by New York Times marquee columnist David Wallace-Wells that “No one has ever started a war over solar panels” only to deliver this crushing retort:

“But nobody goes to war over solar panels for the same reason nobody goes to war over candles: they cannot power the things that economies, civilizations, and wars run on. A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds. That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations not superiority.”

But of course people don’t do calculations of energy density if they do not know what it is or even that it is. Just as people who do not know what “error bars” are do not worry when they are absent from findings where they were obviously mandated by the imprecision of the inputs.