Obama and United States Energy

You couldn’t make it up even if you try. One day the UK Energy Secretary Ed Milliband sets out his proposed expansion of the UK’s wind power-led alternative energy revolution, the next, Vestas, the UK’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, closes for business citing “low demand” and public opposition to onshore windfarms.

Just bad luck or bad PR? Not quite. Simply another blatant example of the on-going ‘disconnect’ over energy between those suffering from WTS (Wishful Thinker Syndrome) and the hydrocarbon-fuelled present and future energy realities.

Driven by panic-inducing IPCC theory on the man-made CO2 threat – after a decade where the scientific data shows a downward trend in global mean temperatures – and supplemented with irrational fears over early peak oil theories, Western politicians and others remain consistently obdurate to the energy (and economic) facts of life.

A compendium of prophetic failure

In 2006 Germany’s Angela Merkel was hailed as the ‘Green Chancellor’ for promising to rid her country of coal and nuclear power in its bid to give a clean energy and climate change “world lead”. Three years on and Merkel’s government actively supports the construction of a new generation of 26 coal-fired power plants as well as keeping Germany’s nuclear power stations open. In addition she wants special protection for German heavy industry via free cap and trade permits. A powerful German industry, the need to remain competitive and a desire to work with the lights on, all combined to help Ms Merkel ‘re-connect’.

In 2008, Italy, to everyone’s surprise, reversed its decades long ‘no nuclear power stations’ policy in the interest of their power needs. And Italy’s PM Silvio Berlusconi, along with leaders from Austria, Poland and a rolling bandwagon of other countries, also now demands protection for its heavy industry when it comes time to handing out free cap and trade permits. Across in the UK, the government has been wriggling out of its Kyoto ‘clean energy’ commitments for years as the country inches towards building an urgently needed new generation of coal-fired power plants. To help critics swallow the bitter pill of yet more coal usage, the UK Government is subsidizing ‘clean coal’ technology strategies via CCS (Carbon Capture Sequestration). But adding $1 billion to the cost of each plant for a hugely speculative unproven technology that may, as one recent study reveals, prove downright dangerous, has already created a politically paralysing impasse in the UK energy strategy. The spectre of the UK facing “South African-style power cuts” and being plunged into “third world darkness” now looms. Hence the UK’s grand wind power plan. Unfortunately, last December, the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) was forced to scale down its calculation of harmful CO2 emissions “displaced”, from 860 to 430 grams for every kilowatt hour of electricity produced. With more coal use in prospect and less help from wind sources the UK has no chance of getting near its Kyoto CO2 commitments. In fact, with less than 2400 wind turbines in operation across Britain currently, the UK would still require a further 100,000 to meet its targets. Plenty of scope for massive wind turbine growth we might think. So why the Vestas pull-out?

Not that Eurocrats are easily deflated by wind power facts on the ground. Speaking at a key European wind power conference in March 2009, EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs, claimed, “Wind energy can replace a large proportion of the polluting and finite fuels we currently rely on. It makes good sense to invest in indigenous sources of power which hedge against unpredictable fossil fuel prices and in which Europe has a real competitive advantage.” Windbag Piebalgs adds pompously, “Wind energy is Europe’s contribution to peace, progress and prosperity.”

Mr Piebalgs’ claims entirely epitomise the energy disconnect. As Michael J. Trebilcock has shown, wind power is a complete disaster with the much-vaunted ‘Danish green energy miracle’ turning out to be a well-worn myth in an industry that would blow out tomorrow without on-going and massive public subsidy. And all for an energy source that can, in the next few decades, provide only a tiny amount of the world’s power. For all the political bluster, the best energy estimates suggest that by the year 2030 energy demand will rise by a further 50 percent and that oil, gas and coal will still fulfil 87 percent of the world’s energy needs. Shell has dumped its alternative energy program (except for biofuels) in part of a broader trend of European alternative energy companies already heading their ‘wagons’ West, drawn by the far richer cash pickings in prospect on the new frontier of President Obama’s stimulus billions. Germany’s REpower US subsidiary has just relocated its US HQ to Denver, Colorado to take full advantage of the “supportive business climate” – read government cash – along with (surprise, surprise) Vestas, late of the UK.

Today, the Obama White House is recycling all the same European political energy rhetoric so familiar to Europeans. Yet the US has its own instructive case study. One day billionaire T. Boone Pickens has a Grand Wind Plan for Texas, with further plans to forest the nation with turbines “from Canada to Mexico”. The next, T. Boone drops his wind plan in favour of ... a hydrocarbon (natural gas) solution instead.

Meanwhile the political energy disconnect has fuelled an almost ethereal, religious vision among those who seek to appease the earth and climate gods. In 2003 Al Gore predicted we had just 96 months (ten years) before fossil-fuel assisted climate Armageddon kicked in. We have just four years left. In 2006, Greenpeace’s Steven Guilbeault said, “Time is running out to deal with climate change. Ten years ago, we thought we had a lot of time.” Yet back in 1997, Greenpeace’s Chris Rose was claiming, “Time is running out for the climate.”

The UK’s Prince of Wales ruminates that, “Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse”. The Prince adds, “The age of convenience is over”. As international columnist Mark Steyn comments, “The Prince then got in his limo and was driven to his other palace.”

Meanwhile, NASA’s James Hansen, continues to lead the war against the green’s bête-noir of fossil fuels: coal, at the very time Europe and the UK, indeed much of the world, is again turning to the black stuff as the fuel for a new generation and to nuclear power stations. For millions in India and elsewhere cheap coal is the answer to ending their poverty. Yet, last year, Hansen was not at all concerned for what this key energy resource is doing to pull millions out of poverty, obsessing instead with his private vision that burning coal could “accelerate floods, droughts and heat waves” and “lock us into future climate disasters”.

For men like Hansen, the reality that coal power is a key energy resource in the war on global poverty means little if it clashes with his climate-appeasing, prophetic insights. And given the eco-alarmist capacity for failed prophecy thus far, we might offer the sage advice of one Lao Tzu, a 6th century BC Chinese poet that “Those who have knowledge don’t predict. Those who predict don’t have knowledge”.

Old fossils and Copenhagen

In August 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon ramped up the politico-energy disconnect further, claiming, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet. If we fail to act, climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters. Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest even violence could follow.”

Moon’s ‘four months’ is a reference to December’s Copenhagen conference when alarmists want binding international CO2 targets to trigger a global switch to alternative sources of energy. As we have seen, however, national leaders will ultimately refuse to impoverish their industries even to save the planet. Neither will Copenhagen provide impetus for a speedier move to alternative energies. The still ‘disconnected’ flower power generation and its idealistic offspring would do well to grasp that the energy future is not green it is hydrocarbon, and will continue to be for another century, at least. Perhaps it’s just that we have yet to learn a language they’ll understand? Maybe we should run the energy stats past them one more time, make a peace V-sign and (gently) ask: “Re-connected yet, man?”