Curiouser and Curiouser

Strange decisions are being made by numerous global governments which have committed under the Paris Accords to reduce CO2 emissions in an effort to limit the increase in the global average temperature anomaly to 1.5°C.

China is building numerous new coal-fired electric generating stations and plans to build numerous additional coal-fired generating stations. China is also funding construction of new coal-fired generating stations in numerous other countries in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa under its “Belt and Roads’ program. These new coal-fired generating stations would be expected to have useful lives of 40-60 years, suggesting either that they will continue to operate beyond the “Net Zero by 2050” timeframe or that their operation will be discontinued before the end of their useful lives, resulting in very large deadweight losses. Operation of these new coal-fired generating stations will obviously increase annual CO2 emissions, even if they are offset, in part, by emissions reductions achieved by other nations.

Russia is proceeding with construction of the Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline, with the support and encouragement of the Western European nations which will be its customers, rather than replacing existing fossil energy consumption with renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar.

Several nations in western Europe are proceeding with plans to discontinue operation of their existing nuclear electric generating capacity, though many of those plants have not reached the end of their useful lives and the early closings will result in massive deadweight losses. This issue has the greatest potential impact in France and Germany, which have been heavily reliant on nuclear generation.

Numerous nations are encouraging a transition from gasoline and diesel vehicles to electric vehicles, though this transition would place additional pressure on electric generating systems already struggling to deal with the impacts of increasing intermittent wind and solar generation and the loss of baseload and load following generation capacity.

The actions announced by the US might perhaps be the most curious. The US Administration has committed to Net Zero electric generation by 2035. Numerous states are requiring the closure of nuclear generators, several of which have not reached the end of their useful lives. The Administration recognizes that the transition to solar and wind generation and to electric vehicles would require vast amounts of rare earth minerals but has announced that the mining of these minerals will not occur in the US, leaving the US dependent on other nations, primarily China, for these materials. The decision not to mine in the US also reduces the opportunities for the creation of “high paying union jobs” for miners displaced from high paying union jobs in the coal mining industry.

The US Administration also intends to incentivize installation of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations and announced that these charging stations would be installed preferentially in disadvantaged and rural areas, even though these areas are not where electric vehicles are being purchased and operated, or where their owners would likely choose to go to charge them.

The US Administration has apparently decided to adopt the approach of starving markets of fossil fuels to force adoption of electric end use appliances and equipment, assuming that renewable electric supply will grow rapidly enough to meet the increased demand and consumption.

What could possibly go wrong with that scenario?