Imagine you had been fed climate nonsense your whole life, but now, science has entered the industry. What do you do?
Imagine you had been fed climate nonsense your whole life. Your teachers were emptied-headed little bimbos who had bought into the climate agenda wholesale and tolerated no dissent from their students. By the time that you reached college, you were sure that you wanted a career with “sustainable” or “sustainability” in your title. While in college you discover that you can have a career saving the planet and at the same time make decent money by majoring in “sustainable finance.”
You work hard pleasing your professors who are also true believers, and with luck you impress a hiring manager at the sustainable finance branch of Barclays Bank and land that sweet job that you wanted. Barclays immediately puts you to work spitting out reports professing that the economics driving the clean energy transition is so rosy that it will happen swiftly. So fast that the oil majors will be holding stranded assets totaling trillions of dollars.
Then, one day your boss walks into your office and asks you to take a fresh look at this clean energy transition from a realistic angle. At first, you think that he is joking, but then you realize that he has received his marching orders from above. You have spent your whole life rationalizing wacky ideas to please your teachers, professors, and employers, but this request is different and unsettling. It is asking you to deny your belief system. It is an assault on your identity.
For a moment, you think of resigning, but realize that you have mortgage payments on your condo in the city and cottage at the shore, in addition to private school tuition for your kids at that woke academy. So, you swallow your pride and undertake your task.
If you had read my articles on the subject, you would have an easy go of it, but you refuse to read the work of any climate heretic. You instead skirt the truth by making some concessions that you think will make you look reasonable and give your report the sobering title, Transition Realism: Financing Energy Systems That Work.
However, writing pithy prose like “The result is that the world is discovering that cheap modules [renewables] do not automatically translate into cheap delivered power,” does not make you appear wise. It makes you look like the last guy to know that his wife is cheating on him. Firstly, renewables are not cheap no matter how you cut it. Secondly, from a system perspective, which is the only way to look at it, they are insanely expensive.
Robbed at an early age of the ability to think critically, you fall back on a new mantra that “The real bottlenecks are now in grids – permitting, financing, and system integration – not in the cost of generation hardware.” You miss the reason for the caution exercised by grid operators. It is justified because the addition of renewables has made grids more fragile and prone to catastrophic collapse, as we saw last year in Spain. (For a better understanding, read Kathryn Porter’s brilliant explanation in Net Zero Watch.)
Moreover, even if one were to blanket the countryside with transmission wires, there is no guarantee that renewable energy will find a taker. Alleviating grid congestion does nothing to ameliorate the fact that when the wind is blowing hard and the sun is shining bright, there may be no demand for it, and vice versa.
There is also the question of how you square your current realism with your earlier glowing reports that the energy transition was moving along without a hitch. Your drinking buddies over in tax credit finance, whose commissions have been in the toilet since Trump removed the punch bowl, are not going to be happy with it. You tell them that you have not lost your religion. You still believe in the clean energy transition, but in a more tempered manner. You even feel good about yourself in cutting the Gordian knot. Your boss is happy because Barclays has been able to reposition itself with minimal loss of reputation, and you are happy because you did not come off as a climate denier. Your wife is happy that you did not act rashly and quit your job and your kids can continue enrolled at their woke academy, thus ensuring another generation of empty-headed little fools.
