Free Republic

Washington homeowners could face tens of thousands of dollars in costs to convert natural-gas homes to electric after the Washington Supreme Court struck down the voter-approved initiative designed to protect natural gas as an energy option. The Building Industry Association of Washington has estimated that converting an existing natural-gas home to all-electric can cost approximately $40,000, depending on the home and upgrades required. Conversion can involve replacing gas furnaces and water heaters, installing electric appliances, and upgrading electrical panels and wiring. The court’s ruling does not itself require homeowners to convert to electricity. Rather, it eliminates Initiative 2066, which restricted...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said that “Energy would be cheaper if we just built a bunch of coal plants,” but “decarbonization is a trade-off.” After Klein said that Texas builds tons of green energy, in part due to its regulatory structure, writer Andrew Sullivan said, “But why aren’t you producing energy from fossils and green energy?” Klein answered, “Because I think climate change is a problem.” And “if you build a lot of coal plants, it’s going to get a lot worse.

“Net Zero” — That’s the two-word slogan that has been adopted as the official goal of every virtuous state or country for decarbonizing its energy system. The “net” part is backhanded recognition that some parts of the energy system (like maybe air travel or steelmaking) may never be fully de-carbonized. Thus some kind of offsets or indulgences may need to be accepted to claim achievement of the goal. But the “net” thing is not for the easy parts of decarbonization. And by the easy parts, I mean the generation of electricity, and the powering of anything that can be run...

A critical element in everything from engines to bodies is in short supply ... Essentially, you can’t make cars without aluminum. You can’t work with aluminum without using magnesium. And as of December, you may not be able to work with magnesium much — if at all. 85% of the world’s supply comes from ... China, ... (which) just ordered 35 of its 50 production facilities to shut down. The remaining 15 have been told to scale back operations by half, leaving production drastically reduced.

Europe has set a clear goal for full decarbonization by 2050, with renewables-based electricity set to become the dominant energy carrier, and that means fossil gas will have “only a marginal role” in the long run, EU climate chief Frans Timmermans said on Thursday (25 March). By 2050, Europe’s energy system will be changed fundamentally, with ten times more solar and onshore wind power than today, said Timmermans, the European Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of the Green Deal. And “at the end of that road, there will be no more space for coal, very little room for oil, and...

The fact that it’s being proposed by Republicans doesn’t make it any more economically palatable. Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule — Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” Barack Obama declared after Democrats’ disastrous losses in the 2010 midterm elections. That shellacking finally killed off the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. From it was born the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration’s war on coal, in turn a contributory factor to Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’...

Bill Gates recently noted that the cost of decarbonization using today’s technology is ‘beyond astronomical.’ On June 30, one day after the Supreme Court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of mercury emissions from power plants, resident Obama committed the United States to the goal of generating 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. This would nearly triple the amount of wind- and solar-generated electricity on the national grid. The EPA ran afoul of the law by failing to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before it acted to reduce mercury emissions from coal-power plants. There is no objective...

Despite the pessimistic headlines on energy, a beneficial long-term trend is underway called decarbonization. In his 2005 book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, writer James Howard Kunstler declared that when peak oil hits, “We will have to downscale every activity of everyday life, from farming, to schooling, to retail trade….Epidemic disease and faltering agriculture will synergize with energy scarcities to send nations reeling.” Nobel Prize winner Al Gore has said that global warming will likely result in “a string of terrible catastrophes.” And in his Academy Award–winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” he implies that...