RUTHFULLY YOURS

Marxism had many trappings of a religion. But fortunately, its major claims were of this world and could be falsified. Karl Marx argued that under capitalism, the living conditions of workers deteriorate and that only by seizing the means of production can they improve their lot. After a few generations of communism, nobody in Europe believed that anymore.

The climate-change movement has a similar vulnerability. Its religious trappings are plain enough: the attribution of natural catastrophes to human wickedness, revelations of the apocalypse, persecution of heretics. But at the end of the day its claims are material — and falsifiable.

With climate change, we are told, living conditions will deteriorate, and only by decarbonizing the economy can we avoid those losses. It may take several more generations to convince people one way or the other, but in the meantime there is a quick way to discredit the claim, and that is for government to implement a policy that is so costly and catastrophic in the near term that people generally start wondering whether climate policies might not be considerably more dangerous than climate change.

Such is the thin silver lining on President Biden’s latest round of climate policies, by far the most ambitious yet. In April, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed two rules that, if implemented simultaneously, would wreck America’s electricity grid. The first was vehicle-emissions standards that would require two-thirds of all vehicles made in America to be fully electric by 2032. That’s barely eight years from now. The second would require the large natural-gas and coal plants upon which the nation’s electricity depends for “baseload” power to adopt carbon-capture-and-storage technology (CSS) (in which carbon dioxide is removed from the power-plant exhaust by a chemical process, then transported by pipeline to be injected deep underground) or switch to “green” hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced by renewable sources) by 2038 at the latest.

Both rules rest on thin legal ice. For the vehicles rule, the EPA is defining each “class” of vehicle as including fully electric cars of the same size as the relevant combustion-engine vehicle; then it sets the emission standard so low that no combustion-powered car can possibly meet it. As a result, there is no way for carmakers to comply with the “fleet average” standards by improving emissions in their existing vehicles, as the Clean Air Act contemplates. Rather, carmakers will have to switch to producing fully electric vehicles (EVs), regardless of whether the charging infrastructure is in place and the grid can handle the ballooning demand. The Supreme Court insisted last year in West Virginia v. EPA that the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA power to require utilities to switch to different kinds of power plants; the same principle should apply to the engines in our automobiles.

The power-plant rule is on even thinner ice. The EPA claims that the efficacies of carbon capture and green hydrogen are “adequately demonstrated,” as the Clean Air Act requires. But in fact, neither technology has demonstrated its viability at the scale and for the purpose that the EPA proposes. All of the EPA’s cited examples are of much smaller carbon-capture-and-storage operations; and in no example has CCS reached the 90 percent carbon-emissions reduction that the EPA proposes to require. The proposal is full of accounting tricks, such as subtracting the amount of federal renewable subsidies from its compliance-cost estimates, as if costs disappear when you push them onto taxpayers.

Each rule would be ruinous on its own. But an EV mandate that suddenly increases grid-capacity requirements, on top of a power-plant rule that suddenly diminished grid capacity, would be a societal disaster. Ultimately, it couldn’t work, and in any case the next Republican administration would certainly rescind the rules. But if President Biden wins reelection and proceeds with the simultaneous implementation of both rules, it will have a catastrophic effect on America’s electricity grid, ushering in an era of painful scarcity, renewed inflation, and job losses for America’s families and industries.

With the new federal subsidies, the Edison Electric Institute had previously estimated that there would be 26 million EVs by 2030. That would require an extra 100 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, or about 2.5 percent of what the U.S. grid produces now. The EPA estimates that under its vehicle rule, 67 percent of all vehicles produced in the U.S. will be EVs by 2032. Sometime later that decade, two-thirds of the perhaps 400 million vehicles on American roads would be EVs. That would require on the order of 1,000 TWh more electricity, an increase of 25 percent of what the U.S. grid currently produces, which in turn would require a doubling or tripling of installed capacity, since the rated output of renewable plants is much lower than their nameplate capacity.

The basic problem here, as with other aggressive climate policies, is that if you throttle fossil energy before renewable substitutes are available at a similar price, all you’ve done is constrict the supply of things that people can’t do without. If the production or sales of EVs fall short of EPA projections, the result will be far fewer new cars available, leading to a massive increase in the demand for, and the cost of, used gasoline-powered cars. If the number of charging stations, transmission lines, or power plants fails to keep pace with demand for electrical capacity, the result will be “scarcity pricing” for electricity, meaning a small reduction in supply sends prices soaring.

The benefits would be meager indeed. Extracting critical minerals from the 100,000 pounds of ore that need to be mined to build a single EV battery is an energy-intensive process. Combining that use of fuel with the energy required to charge a battery throughout its life cycle means that the upstream carbon emissions of EV batteries are far from zero. They are likely at least half the carbon emissions of regular vehicles and could prove to be higher than that, depending on how the grid manages the chaotic transition to renewables that Biden has in store.

The ultimate purpose of the new EPA rules is to force a countrywide shift to renewable energy. Standing in the way of that goal are at least two virtually insurmountable obstacles.

The first is a suffocating amount of red tape. Most studies estimate that the U.S. needs to deploy about 500 gigawatts of solar power by 2035 to achieve Biden’s clean-electricity goals. That’s on the order of 1,000 utility-scale solar plants, which would cover an area the size of New Jersey. Most of the bigger projects would have to be built on Bureau of Land Management land in the western states, where the sun shines all day and all year. Each of those would need its own permit in time to build and go operational before 2035. So in order to reach Biden’s clean-electricity goals, the BLM would have to issue hundreds of solar permits in the next seven or eight years, to leave enough time for construction. But the permit-review process consumes so much in agency resources that the BLM can issue at most two or three solar-project permits each year, and that’s operating at full tilt. The permitting bottleneck alone makes Biden’s green dream a sheer fantasy.

The second obstacle is that, even if you could get all the permits you needed, there is a physical limit to how much solar and wind you can put on the grid and still keep it stable. Solar and wind are intermittent sources, with output that is highly variable throughout the day, whereas demand follows a much more stable “duck-shaped” curve, with demand highest in the morning and early evening. So when solar power or wind power unexpectedly drops off, you need to be able to dial up what we call a “dispatchable” source. And right now that means coal, natural gas, or nuclear.

If climate activists were serious about the climate, they would be putting all their energy into a massive push for nuclear power, the one source that can get us to net zero without endangering grid reliability or affordability. The U.S. would need to double or triple its current nuclear fleet of about 100 reactors. Alas, federal regulations have made it basically impossible to build any nuclear plant in America, dramatically pushing up capital costs with a Homeric regulatory odyssey that takes at least 15 years to navigate. Only a small handful of new reactors have been built since 1980. And when you try to fix that problem, you face a familiar obstacle, namely the environmental Left. If there is one thing Senator Bernie Sanders has always hated more than the Vietnam War, it’s nuclear power.

It would be virtually impossible for the grid to accommodate the EV mandate and simultaneously undertake a renewable-energy transition even without the EPA’s power-plant rule. Ironically, that rule would make it even harder and more expensive for grid capacity to increase and could lead to an overall reduction. Utilities are already expecting to shutter a lot of current grid capacity in response to regulations designed to kill coal plants. The new rule will make large new combined-cycle natural-gas plants prohibitively risky and expensive for many utilities, just when new capacity will be most needed. With nowhere to turn, utilities will have to institute scarcity pricing to choke off demand.

Capacity is already insufficient to meet demand in California, where 800,000 customers experienced blackouts in the summer of 2020; a repeat was avoided in 2022 only by Governor Newsom’s begging Californians not to charge EVs or use appliances. California’s grid woes, and those that caused the deadly Texas power crash of 2021, are purely the results of too much intermittent solar and wind power thrown onto the grid without enough “dispatchable” capacity to back it up. In other words, the deployment of more solar and wind requires the deployment of more natural gas or coal at an equal rate, but the enviros can’t bring themselves to admit it, perhaps because they hate fossil fuels more than they love renewable energy. Meanwhile, with 30 percent of their state’s power coming from renewable sources, Californians have electricity bills that are twice the national average and three times what Texans pay.

According to data from the National Energy Technology Laboratory, requiring existing coal plants and new natural-gas plants to adopt carbon capture and storage, as the EPA proposes to do, would roughly double the cost of producing electricity at the source, in part because carbon capture is an energy-intensive process that reduces power output by as much as 30 percent. That doesn’t take into account the cost of building and operating the massive carbon transport and storage infrastructure that would be needed outside of the power plants, which the Princeton Net-Zero America study has estimated at perhaps 70,000 miles of new CO2 pipelines. The EPA’s other option, replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, could triple the cost of electricity, but nobody knows because the technology barely exists even in pilot demonstrations.

The International Energy Agency, which has joined the ranks of climate activists, warned in its 2022 World Energy Outlook: “If supply were to transition faster than demand, with a drop in fossil fuel investment preceding a surge in clean technologies, this would lead to much higher prices — possibly for a prolonged period.” Sure enough, both gasoline and electricity prices are soaring again.

Climate activists think that by taxing or otherwise restricting production, they are hurting fossil-fuel companies. But when you take a commodity for which demand is inelastic, such as oil, and restrict the supply even a little, the price will go through the roof. That is what OPEC does for a living.

Besides creating huge windfall profits for oil companies, the most immediate consequence of limiting production is to make people very angry at you, and you haven’t significantly reduced oil supply. Environmental regulations are supposed to make sure that polluters internalize the social costs of their pollution, but pushing fossil energy to the “must have” part of society’s hierarchy of needs is less likely to “end oil” than to end your political career. France’s “yellow vest” protests were a warning to climate-minded elected officials everywhere.

Restricting fossil energy so that renewable sources become more competitive can’t work if renewable substitutes are not available. That is why the Clean Air Act requires new technologies to be adequately demonstrated before the EPA can require their implementation. The EPA’s insistence on pushing ahead anyway means that dire consequences will not take long to materialize. Like Marxists, climate advocates often seem at war with human nature. This spells doom for the movement in the long run, once people have suffered enough.