The latest Middle Eastern war has cut the supply of and therefore raised the price of gasoline and other hydrocarbon fuels. Which the naïve might think would please the people who’ve spent a quarter of a century trying to raise the price of gasoline and other hydrocarbon fuels in order to cut the supply. Moreover, it should surely be a further bonus that those jurisdictions that most aggressively tried to get rid of oil, gas and coal are now conspicuously short of oil, gas and coal, whereas retrograde jurisdictions like the United States that missed out on the green transition are stuck with more of the stuff. Serves them right, you might expect climate-panic types to sneer. Stranded assets. Loooosers. And yet for some reason their reaction is somewhat different. Almost as if, when they finally got what they wished for they realized there was a downside. Just as they were inexplicably furious not grateful when Donald Trump cut off Venezuelan oil to Cuba, surely a boon to that socialist and now by constraint climate paradise as it rushes to install cheaper, better wind and solar. No es verdad?
As Maurice Cousins of Net Zero Watch posted:
“Reminder that Labour’s architects of the UK’s climate change politics openly welcome high oil and gas prices. They believe that letting cheap oil reach consumers would ‘reintroduce bad habits’ and put people back in their SUVs. The transition depends on preventing fossil fuels from becoming affordable again. We should remember this when Labour MPs express sympathy for motorists and prioritising the cost of living. Source: Anthony Giddens, The Politics of Climate Change (2009).”
And Heatmap on March 2 emailed “Trump’s Iran war could send oil prices past $100 per barrel”. But they didn’t say so triumphantly. Instead their newsletter seemed to regard it as a bad thing except in making Trump look bad.
You may recall that climate alarmists thought there was at least one bright side to COVID, beyond the opportunity to train the masses in passive obedience: the major dip in economic activity would also reduce the amount of “greenhouse gases” the masses were stupidly releasing. It didn’t actually work; if you look at the famous Mauna Loa observatory atmospheric CO2 data, there’s no sign of the pandemic lockdowns. Which might lead lesser souls to suspect that, since human emissions are under 5% of the natural and complex emission-absorption carbon cycle, it’s not us driving trends. But never mind. If COVID was good, surely the Iran war is better. Certainly it seems to promise an even larger shock to production generally and world oil supplies in particular. So why aren’t they happy?
The difficulty here, or one of them anyway, is that in the wacky world of climate alarmism, all news is bad. Hence the New York Times cheer-booed that:
“How War in Iran Could Remake the Global Energy Landscape/ The oil crisis in the Middle East could spur countries to invest in wind, solar and other renewables. It could also spike reliance on coal, a cheap and polluting fossil fuel.”
Yeah. Unless it doesn’t. Could and might are not words we find useful in news stories, even though it is a good thing to admit what you don’t know. Unfortunately something else the Times doesn’t know it doesn’t know is that “countries”, a word here meaning “governments”, have been investing massively in “wind, solar and other renewables” for decades, at enormous cost and with enormous hype. Only to find that when the oil stops flowing, the energy of the future is still stuck somewhere in the future.
The Times also doesn’t know that modern coal plants are far cleaner than their ancestors in the days of Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. Or, evidently, that when a war exposes your need for fuels that actually work, a lot of people react with a certain plausibility by saying we’d better get a more secure supply of fuels that actually work.
By contrast the Times heeds the voice of Binky and says toss them out of the window:
“The war in Iran is choking off oil and gas supplies and spiking energy prices across the globe. And for many environmentalists, that’s a powerful argument for countries to curb their use of fossil fuels and shift to wind, solar and other renewable sources.”
No. It’s a powerful demonstration of the mess that results when you curb your use of fossil fuels and especially production. And isn’t insanity famously doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
Mind you that publication’s “Climate Forward” helpfully served up a big helping of paranoia, exposing the merchants of death. Under the heading “Who stands to profit from an energy crisis?” Claire Brown wrote:
“‘The politics here is that it certainly works out well for a handful of people who kissed Trump’s ring at Mar-a-Lago,’ said Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director at the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth. ‘But it stands to be a disaster for consumers and the climate,’ he added.”
Boo kissing Trump’s ring. Also boo the 1 percent (remember them?) who evidently stand to make money from being rich. But what about the makers of alternative energy? Oddly, the piece doesn’t say one word about them although you’d think their rivals facing surging costs would make them rich… if you understood economics.
A curious piece in Bloomberg Green conceded that people like themselves should be happy that their wish came true, if not at how. But alas, the real world turned out to be more complicated than their dream world:
“On the face of it, the unrest and price spikes are another argument for why renewable energy like solar and wind – produced at home and insulated from external tensions – is a more secure bet. But experts warn that the picture is more complicated than that.”
Maybe the experts who warn should have spoken up sooner. But here’s the complexity, or so they warn:
“Higher energy prices could spark inflation, leading central banks to raise interest rates and make it more expensive to deploy clean energy, especially since the industry is so capital intensive and sensitive to borrowing costs.”
Um no. If they’re cheaper, then the worse the economy the more urgent it is to switch. Unless of course that “capital intensive” is code for “really expensive”. And um uh see more expensive actually reliable hydrocarbon energy:
“would tighten government spending and limit funding of clean technologies that depend on subsidies to compete with dirtier alternatives, said Antony Froggatt, director for energy and climate at Transport and Environment, a think tank.”
Oh. Depend on subsidies, do they? Strange problem for a superior technology. And one that evidently doesn’t affect coal.
Also for some reason in the left’s beloved alleged alternative energy rising giant:
“China’s government has told the country’s top oil refiners to suspend exports of diesel and gasoline as an escalating conflict in the Persian Gulf disrupts the arrival of crude from one of the world’s largest producing regions.”
Why? Why not limit exports of solar or wind? Is there something you’re not telling us?
It gets worse. Heatmap complained that fully five days into the war (“Patience? How long’s that gonna take?”):
“Oil Is Surging. Clean Energy Stocks Are Down Anyway. The attacks on Iran have not redounded to renewables’ benefit. Here are three reasons why.”
Oh good. Do tell. Or don’t, since the reasons are “1. It’s the market” and “2. It’s interest rates” and “3. It’s energy security”. None of which make any sense.
On the first, apparently everyone’s selling everything. But to whom? On the second, renewables have this problem that although they’re cheaper they’re way more expensive. Bummer. And on the third:
“While in the long run it may make sense to respond to an oil or natural gas supply shock by diversifying your energy supply into renewables, political leaders often opt to try to maintain stability, even if it’s very expensive.”
Also known as in a crisis you turn to what works not what some projector said might someday if you spend money you don’t have on stuff you can’t count on.
This problem of costs is a big mystery to some people. Like the New York Times columnist and former Biden Administration official who sneered:
“If it seems confounding that a president would start a war that’s guaranteed to raise the prices he had repeatedly vowed to lower, well, it’s not the first time, because the Trump administration was already doing battle against the single surest path to cheaper energy: renewables.”
Cheaper, except for the expensiveness. And then there’s Reuters “Sustainable Switch” [with the usual no link] emailing on March 3:
“From a sustainability perspective, United Nations Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change Simon Stiell, said this was the moment for nations to stop relying heavily on fossil fuels and that everything must be done to avoid further escalation. ‘Along with its brutal human costs, this newest upheaval shows yet again that fossil fuel dependence leaves economies, businesses, markets and people at the mercy of each new conflict or trade policy lurch,’ said Stiell. ‘But there is a clear solution to this fossil fuel cost chaos – renewables are now cheaper, safer and faster-to-market, making them the obvious pathway to energy security and sovereignty.’”
If they’re so obvious, why aren’t they working? It’s not as though governments in mental lockstep with the Simon Stiells of this world haven’t been pouring resources into them and shutting down coal, oil, gas and even nuclear. But the strange thing is they’ve found themselves with crushingly expensive energy prices and much-diminished sovereignty. Almost as if you were as addled as you are trendy.
"But there is a clear solution to this fossil fuel cost chaos – renewables are now cheaper, safer and faster-to-market, making them the obvious pathway to energy security and sovereignty."
Which highlights the fact that most politicians, especially the lefties, can't do arithmetic and have never realized that solar energy doesn't work very well at night or when it's cloudy, and wind energy needs the wind to be blowing. Also that grid-scale batteries are impossibly expensive and resource hungry. All of this seems to apply as well to experts who warn.