Speaking of admitting reality, and also of Heatmap, we want to semi-praise them for an article headlined “Why We’re So Bad at Predicting the Future of Energy”. Given how wrong climate alarmists have been about what’s going to happen, and why, from policy to science, it’s welcome to see some of them continuing to admit error or starting to. Or not, because the subhed is “A climate scientist goes back to the numbers to argue that we’re overestimating the cost of the energy transition.” Now we could sneer that the author, Andrew Dessler, is not qualified to be an energy analyst, just as Heatmap will so readily dismiss the views of energy analysts on climate science because they are supposedly not qualified. But let’s hear him out first, though plot spoiler: his arguments fail.
Casey Stengel is famous for saying “Never make predictions, especially about the future”. But it seems to be dangerous to make them even about the past since according to the Quote Investigator the expression actually originates, at least in documented form, in volume four of an autobiography by Karl Kristian Steincke, which might explain why it is not widely known since you never heard of him and four-volume autobiographies are asking a lot of an audience. And because he wrote “Det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden” (which again might explain its obscurity and not because he was quoting himself from the late 1930s and he was a Danish politician and eugenicist). But we digress.
The point is, Dessler starts out with:
“I’ve long been struck by how hard it is to predict the evolution of our energy system even a few years in advance, never mind 25 or 30 years. I still remember the ‘peak oil’ craze in the mid-2000s, when people were telling me the end of oil was nigh. It sounded convincing right up until it turned out to be wrong.”
To which we would reply that one reason historians make such good climate scientists is that, among many other things, we know that people have confidently been predicting peak oil since John D. Rockefeller’s day.
Dessler also produces a chart of people’s predictions of coal use in the United States including the embarrassing observation that:
“In 2008, coal was expected to produce increasing amounts of electricity into the future. Instead, it immediately started to decline. It took until 2023 for the EIA to begin predicting a long-term decline in coal, despite the fact that coal had been declining for 15 years.”
So again they bungled a prediction about the past. Oops. And he adds that people did not foresee the American boom in natural gas because they didn’t foresee fracking.
Now here it is not a digression to observe that if any number of people were in the habit of predicting technological developments they would be making themselves fabulously wealthy in the stock market or, if you are very lucky, making you fabulously wealthy by selling their wisdom as investment advisors instead of cashing in as market participants. It is therefore safe to assume that the ability to do so is not widespread. And indeed even the most revered of investment oracles, as they will admit, are far from infallible.
As Dessler also points out, if you combine the coal and natural gas predictions the result looks less absurd. Except it also covers such a wide range that it actually isn’t less absurd.
He’s not done… being absurd. He then shows predicted generation from solar and wind and comments that:
“For both energy sources, predictions before 2015 were really bad. What changed after that I can’t say — my guess is they got sick of being so wrong.”
Right. That simple, huh? Like how you get sick of blundering pieces and become a chess grandmaster. Except you don’t.
What really happened is that the US government started massively subsidizing “alternative” energy so it started generating more and more power while consuming more and more subsidies. Dessler cites the “Levelized Cost of Energy” that supposedly does some mathematical wizardry and tells you renewables are cheaper. The problem is that LCOE, as insiders call it, estimates the cost of production to the producer so obviously the level of subsidies is crucial. And if you think predicting economics is hard, try predicting politics.
As he admits:
“if the forecasting failures of the past 20 years have taught us anything, it’s this: We simply have no idea how much decarbonization will cost.”
Which rather suggests that they have not taught him anything, not even to look back further than 20 years. Especially as after listing major reasons you can’t make predictions he does, confidently:
“Overall, the uncertainty in these long-term forecasts is enormous. And if history is any guide, the errors are not random. They usually point in the same direction – they overestimate the cost of the energy transition.”
Oh really? Did history overestimate the cost of the transition to water and especially wind power in the Middle Ages? Or from carrying stuff on your head to using pack animals at the dawn of agriculture? Or even of switching to oil and gas? Sure, some blowhards said it would never work, others that it would transform life in a couple of decades. And if you’re going to try to tally up who was right and wrong, don’t just look at things that worked. Look at ones that failed. Because if you scoff at all those who said it couldn’t be done of something that it turned out could be, remember that they were drawing on a long history of human failure and fatuity.
For one simple example, from actual history, there were starry-eyed promoters of canals and of railways in the antebellum 19th-century United States. They sounded remarkably similar, and raised huge sums including from governments. But one group was wrong and the other right. As with steam cars versus gas engines.
The trick, therefore, is to recognize that in the face of uncertainty, the people who have generally done best over a very long time and a wide range of activities are the ones who were prepared and capable of adapting, not those who overinvested in one vision.
At this point we must introduce you to the pachyderm taking up the rug and most of the rest of the room. The main reason people get predictions wrong, and we are not immune but we are at least careful, is that they develop enthusiasms and then turn them into forecasts, including with the aid of “mathiness”. And so it is that the climate zealots are forever telling us something is about to break out and transform the economy, whether solar, wind, “green” hydrogen or nowadays geothermal. Tomorrow, who knows what they will hype without recalling their past blunders or their cost to their fellows.
Like the economists who have predicted seven of the last four recessions, they do sometimes get something right. But not because of their exceptional vision, in either sense. Indeed, when it comes to eyesight they have other problems than motes and beams.
It’s that too often they see what they want to see. Including this shimmering prospect of alternatives gliding elegantly past clunky, smelly old hydrocarbons. In fact, as Bjorn Lomborg just observed in a retrospective on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that we refer to in some detail in the next item:
“The data show we are nowhere near a green transition. In 2006, according to the International Energy Agency, the world got 82.6 per cent of its total energy from fossil fuels. In 2023, the last year for which global data are available, the share was 81.1 per cent. On this trend, it will take over six centuries to get to zero. Yet Gore’s message was that climate solutions were already at hand — if only rich nations would summon the political will to implement them swiftly and decisively.”
And that his acolytes, successors, admirers or what have you continue to insist not only that it could be, but that they can actually see it happening now when it’s not, suggests a problem that is psychosomatic not physiological.
And while we’re all for the power of dreams, you also need to be awake to what’s happening, what might, and what to do especially if you get an unexpected and disagreeable result.
