My latest in the Wall Street Journal (Web | PDF).
‘Net zero by 2050” is more than a slogan of climate activism. It has become a chief organizational principle for multinational corporations and the BlackRock-led cartel pushing environmental, social and corporate governance investing.
“Net zero” was mentioned in more than 6,000 filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 and countless other times by publicly traded corporations and investor groups in statements and on their websites. The SEC says its proposed climate disclosure rule will help investors “evaluate the progress in meeting net-zero commitments and assessing any associated risks.”
“Net zero” and its corollary, the “energy transition,” are talked about so often and so loosely that many take them for granted as worthy goals that could be accomplished with greater buy-in from political and business leaders. But two new reports from the utility industry should put an end to such loose talk.
In September, the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the U.S. electric utility industry, released a report titled “Net-Zero 2050: U.S. Economy-Wide Deep Decarbonization Scenario Analysis.”
The EPRI report concludes that the utility industry can’t attain net zero. “This study shows that clean electricity plus direct electrification and efficiency . . . are not sufficient by themselves to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions.”
In other words, no amount of wind turbines, solar panels, hydropower, nuclear power, battery power, electrification of fossil-fuel technologies or energy-efficiency technologies will get us to net zero by 2050.
Even to achieve “deep decarbonization”—which isn’t net zero—by 2050, EPRI says, “a broad portfolio of options that includes low-carbon fuels and carbon removal technologies will be required.”
But “low-carbon fuels”—efficient biofuels—don’t exist. “Carbon removal technologies” aren’t possible to scale up, and if they were, it would cost about $1 quadrillion—a million billion dollars—at today’s prices to remove the 1.6 trillion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said needs to be sucked “out of the atmosphere even after we get to net zero.”
There’s more. The EPRI report states: “This study does not include a detailed assessment of factors such as supply chain constraints [and] operational reliability and resiliency” of a net-zero electricity grid.
How a net-zero grid could be built and function would be an issue worth studying if it were possible in the first place. But it simply isn’t.
So, barring some unforeseen miracle technology, “net zero by 2050” won’t happen.
The curious thing about the report is that it has largely remained an EPRI secret. There has been no media coverage of it. I found out about it only after I filed a shareholder proposal about net zero with the electric utility Alliant Energy. The company offered the report as a defense against my proposal that management explain how it planned to reach its goal of net zero by 2050.
The other recent report is “2022 Long-Term Reliability Assessment” from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a government-certified grid-reliability and standard-setting group. NERC concluded that fossil-fuel plants are being removed from the grid too fast to meet continuing electricity demand, and that is putting most of the country at risk of grid failure and blackouts during extreme weather. The U.S. just got another taste of this during the Christmas electric-grid emergency.
So there you have it: We are dangerously dismantling our electric grid while burdening it with more demand in hope of attaining the goal of “net zero by 2050,” which the utility industry has admitted is a fantasy.
Congress should hold hearings on “net zero by 2050” goals before real disaster happens. It should bring in witnesses from utilities, public-service commissions, grid operators, regulators and the ESG cartel and have them explain under oath how they plan to accomplish the impossible.
Mr. Milloy is a senior fellow with the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.
Appeared in the December 29, 2022, print edition as “A Quiet Refutation Of ‘Net Zero’”.
BUT, Net Zero achieves nothing but poverty. Man made Atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels consist of 0.04% of greenhouse gases and is saturated anyway. It has a negligible effect on the climate. Climate has always changed and always will due to the sun and nature, not man. We must continue to adapt to it as we always have. There is no crisis.
It is almost impossible for me to believe that intelligent, grown men who are well-respected in their field can put out a “net zero by 2050” proposal as an actual serious proposal. It’s fantasy even in the world of fantasy. But here we are.
A guy I know about made $44.9 billion in one afternoon just recently, while wearing only a sweatshirt and cargo pants, using this one weird trick: http://www.theresoneborneveryminute.com/clickhere/sucka.
“Demand the impossible” was a slogan of the Yippies, i think. It does fit the goals of the greens, which seem to be an ever receding climate change goal.
Even if the “CO2 is the thermostat” models are true, the goal went from 2C to 1.5C.
Yippies, Yuppies, Dinkys, ….. .
I always wanted to be a Bobo – Burnt Out But Opulent. The burn-out happened as required but I’m still waiting for the opulence ‘cos the cheque from Big Oil hasn’t arrived yet.
Blackouts and brown outs will be the new normal and the corporate media will shape our perception to accept it just like in California, IMO.
When blackouts and brownouts are the new normal, who will be shaping whose perceptions? The corporate (or any other) media require electric power to originate and disseminate their propaganda, and we peons need it to view and listen to it.
Media types are already finding themselves out of a job (see CNN) because no one wants to watch or listen to them: i.e. the market is speaking. How much more rapidly with the media disintegrate when they are physically unable to communicate their propaganda to people who are physically unable to view or listen to it – in other words, when no one can watch or listen to it?
They don’t seem to have thought through the long term consequences of their bullying…
How is this folly different from the promise of bogus Biden not to increase the taxes in 2023 on those earning under $400 000 yet he has introduced various energy and other taxes?
• methane tax 17% increase on the average family’s natural gas bill
• a 0.16c/barrel tax on crude oil and imported petroleum products
• $1.2 Billion Coal Tax Which Will Increase Household Energy Bills
• a new federal excise tax when Americans sell shares of a stock back to a company
• $225 Billion Corporate Income Tax Hike Which Will Be Passed on to Households
A president who signs a $1.7 Trillion Omnibus bill is a moron or a mindless puppet.
[Thanks to Zero Hedge Here’s A List Of Biden Tax Hikes Which Take Effect Jan. 1]
“A president who signs a $1.7 Trillion Omnibus bill is a moron or a mindless puppet.”
Buyme is both, along with his shadow handlers who are further being controlled by the folks with the really BIG money.
2023 is not going to be a good year for the “We the People” folks of the world. Unless, someone wakes, smells the coffee, and sez “enough is enough”. And decides to take action to turn this mess around.
That will probably happen in the EU sooner than the US. Folks in the US know the guvmint has their finger on the info for every citizen and will quickly squash any rebellion via martial law and lockdowns.
The climate crap is losing its flavor with folks as the reality of blackouts and shortages(created by government policies) affect the man on the street.
Just sayin’.
“Affecting the man in the street”. Just not fast enough to forestall disasters.
That isn’t good advertisement for the second amendment. Millions of firearms for WHAT?
You will be poor
You will be cold
You will be hungry
You may lose your car
You may lose your job
You may lose your home
All for attempting net zero
“And you WILL be happy”
Oh No You Won’t!
Replace may with eventually
The real slogan should be…
Make Do With Less
And by less we mean 1930’s crushing poverty.
“”Carbon removal technologies” aren’t possible to scale up and if they were, it would cost about $1 quadrillion“
Trees and plants? Or the boondoggle ones that don’t do much?
Not that I care about an increase of .02 percent of carbon in the atmosphere, but if it came from the soil then there’s a natural way to put it back. The BLM controls millions of acres. They could heavily plant that acreage and remove more carbon for a few million vs the 800 billion stimulus. Managing the California forest system to stop them from burning up would be another cost effective solution.
But it’s not really about carbon it’s about money and control.
If the existing deserts (5e13 square metres) were treated with some pulverised basalt and planted with (for example) Douglas Fir and those trees grew as well as they do in their native Oregon, at 5 tonnes CO2 per acre/year, they’d pull down 62Gigatonnes of CO2 annually
If all the ground that is presently being ploughed/tilled & poisoned with Glyphosate were similarly treated and just allowed to grow perennial grass, (thus saturated fat and animal-protein instead of sugar) you’d pull down another 30GTonnes pa,instead of actually releasing that amount.
We’d need fleets of nuclear stations simply to cook Limestone (release CO2) so as to keep all that green shit we’d planted alive.
Just think, instead of minus 2 Celsius in the middle of the Sahara at night, it would be low/mid 20’s Celsius (all year round 24/7/365) and Buffalo might have to invest in snow-making machines.
(If they felt the urge, somehow I don’t think they will)
I see you are still trying to push the nonsense that deserts aren’t caused by a lack of rain.
Hi Peta on the sherry again?
Douglas Fir will not grow in deserts , all trees need moisture .That is why there are palm trees around oasis .
Permanent grass land does sequester Carbon but governments won’t recognize this fact .
I have bulldozed access tracks and exposed red clay but within 5 years their is 3 inches of black top soil built up over the red clay .
We have thousands of hectares of perennial grass land in New Zealand but we cannot get one carbon credit allocated to farmers for soil carbon sequestration .
Cultivating land does release carbon and that is why farmers are using glysophate and strip tilling to conserve fuel and soil carbon .
Adam and Peta, If, if, if … Ignore natural processes, feasibility, scale-up, cost, etc. In that case, I’ll take fairy dust. It’s a lot cheaper to imagine. Besides, why conjure up “solutions” to a non-problem?
I happen to like a mildly warmer world, as do most people. But despite the relentless cold outside the windows of high latitude dwellers, propaganda has somehow convinced the masses that cold is good (helps preserve your carcass and limit the stink when you freeze to death inside your own home).
Just glance at California. Today well over 800 million vehicle road miles are driven daily. If you assume the fleet averages 2 miles per kWh (remember, many heavy trucks, buses, and trailer-towers are in there) then than will require 400,000 extra mWh daily supply from the grid which will almost double grid demand. A grid which becomes less stable and reliable daily as intermittent supply is added.
This does not consider the electrification of domestic and industrial heating, trains, ships, aircraft, lawn equipment, etc, etc.
“Congress should hold hearings on “net zero by 2050” goals before real disaster happens. It should bring in witnesses from utilities, public-service commissions, grid operators, regulators and the ESG cartel and have them explain under oath how they plan to accomplish the impossible.”
add to the witness list the climate jackals and ask them under oath to prove co2 is the control for temperature.
good article. states the obveous we the thinking already knew. what really scares the crap out of me, is this carbon sequestration scheme of sucking co2 out of the atmosphere. geoengineering at that level is madness.
CCS requires massive infrastructure, compressors and motors and pipelines so they are just money wasting make-work projects, storing plant food for the future glaciation.
There is no way we can afford systems that will make a noticeable difference in atmospheric co2.
The real geoengineering insane are the ones who want to start spraying stuff in the atmosphere and oceans to “see what happens”.
Those people need to be given the full William Wallace treatment.
ONLY subpoena climate jackals and regulators (government employees).
Put them under oath.
Find out WHO is directing them to push the CAGW BS.
Subpoena THEM to testify, and bring out all their connections to the unreliable industry.
Then RICO prosecutions. Of the whole cabal. Including Gates and all the other people and foundations that have funded the scam. BUT find the MOST conservative town possible, one who’s livelihood has been decimated by the unreliable scam, as the location to file the criminal and civil cases.
We have already had hearings on carbon zero here in New Zealand .
A select committee traveled around the country and conducted hearings in major cities..
They then conveniently forgot or ignored any submissions that did not support nut zero .
I attended one of the hearings and presented a sound paper on methane emissions from farmed animals .
It had no effect on their thinking as we are still going to be taxed on our methane emissions .
When you have the inmates in charge they will destroy any countries economy to save us.
A red team blue team national debate on climate might be a better solution .
“add to the witness list the climate jackals and ask them under oath to prove co2 is the control for temperature.”
Yes, let’s have some proof of what these climate scaremongers claim. Just saying something is so, doesn’t make it so.
Congress, even with a Republican majority in the House, isn’t really interested in the facts. Congress needs an angle to either advance the aggregation of power or acquisition of money by the members in order to decide to expose the delusional fallacy of “Net Zero”. What that angle is, is unknown to me. So … onward we march to the cliff, like lemmings.
Too many Republicans entertain the idea that CO2 needs to be regulated.
They do so without any evidence to show CO2 needs regulation.
They are captive to the climate change meme.
I don’t see any of the Republicans challenging the basic CO2/Climate Change premise. The only one who did that was Senator James Inhofe, and he’s just retired.
There are not many climate change skeptics among Republicans. I can’t name one right now.
Good morning
John Wilson , I’m not sure where you got the information that California is accepting brown out or outages of any nature . I live in the Central Valley and we have not had one, even though we have been warned they may occur. My brother in law lives in Santa Anna and they have not had any either . It’s a big state but I have not heard of any shortages. Those virtuous enough to own electric cars have been asked not to charge them at peak hours, and if liberal Democrats get their way we will soon have many more virtuous people. Then I suspect those outages will become common.
This is why I have a reserve of fuel for my non virtuous vehicles.
I just want the lights to go on, my clothes washed, my food cooked, my car to run, my house heated and cooled and my garbage to disappear. I don’t think that’s too much to ask because I have that now.
Remember, people who want to lower your standard of living are not your friends.
We’re unable to do all that and at the same time welcome tens of millions of unskilled destitute peasants and pay for their food, housing, healthcare, education, and broadband access.
So you will just have to give those things up, naturally. What kind of a monster are you?
Actually, without the unskilled destitute peasants the US, and most of the west, would have no one to do the menial jobs since the welfare states provide more than enough for many of the useless citizenry to stay home and be happy not working.
Many of those stay at homes have big student loan debt they can’t pay back.
When states pay more than $80,000 to welfare slugs, why should they work? Until the welfare rolls are severly reduced, peoole will not work. As for the student loan mess, get government out and let the slugs fend for themselves.
I’m not against immigration, I’m against importing wards of the state and giving them things that hard-working taxpayers often can’t afford. They’re being imported, supported, and promoted for citizenship by deeply cynical power-hungry politicians who count on them voting for their sugar daddies once they eventually get amnesty.
Depending on public support should be something shameful for anyone capable of work. It should not be more than an unpleasant bare subsistence that nobody would ever choose over a productive life. That those parasites exist among our citizens is no reason to add to the problem.
‘….count on them voting for their sugar daddies once they eventually get amnesty.’
They’ll be voting long before they receive amnesty.
Alert! Democracy under attack!
No silly, not that tens of millions of illegal immigrants are allowed to get driver’s licenses and could easily register to vote or be registered to vote without their knowledge and then have their votes harvested. Oh course that has NEVER happened. I’m talking about you and your insurrectionist ATTACK on democracy!
Also, never forget that those who want to emiserate the middle and working classes in the West ( not even to mention the unemployed, children, the retired), are not only insoucient about the effects of their mad scheme on the millions who somehow exist on a dollar per day, they actually hope for massive famines to depopulate to world.
Those people and the media, academia and politicians who support this nonsense must be held to account and punished.
Makes you wonder how many other reports are quietly secreted in the dusty filing cabinets of numerous dark basements.
in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
We’ve heard this all before. From May 2021 …
https://www.iea.org/news/pathway-to-critical-and-formidable-goal-of-net-zero-emissions-by-2050-is-narrow-but-brings-huge-benefits
Meanwhile there’s this costly war in Ukraine …
Except that the IEA report is delusional, while EPRI is facing the fact that IEA’s “vision” can’t be done.
I reckon Fatih Birol at the IEA is angling for the top job at the UN so will keep putting forward these delusional reports.
Net Zero is just another facet of the (not so) Great Reset and its depopulation goals. If CO2 levels are dropped low enough (they won’t be), plants die, crops fail, and people starve. Fewer “useless eaters” results in nearly limitless resources, power, wealth, and control for the globalist elite cabal. Don’t worry about their well being. They will undoubtedly believe they will construct huge greenhouses and pump in the planet-killing CO2 to grow their crops, feed their wagyu beef cattle, and ensure their own food supply. Their arrogance in believing they can can dictate and control weather and climate will be their downfall. Earth’s hugely complex systems and resiliency will guarantee their puny, pathetic efforts will not achieve their tyrannical goals.
Net Trillion in redistributive change to reach flatline energy and environmental blight.
Nature has it’s most effective net zero when it comes to atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Natural emissions of CO2 are at least 20 times greater than athro emissions and there is no accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere from year-to-year. All the sinks for natural CO2 emissions (trees, grass, wet soil, clouds, and any cold water surface) act equally as well on anthro emissions. The open cold polar waters of the Arctic and Antarctic are the ultimate sinks for atmospheric CO2. To prove it, compare Arctic atmospheric concentrations of CO2 with Arctic sea-ice concentrations.
“In other words, no amount of wind turbines, solar panels, hydropower, nuclear power, battery power, electrification of fossil-fuel technologies or energy-efficiency technologies will get us to net zero by 2050.”
Net Zero will inevitably lead to a sub-zero economy. But isn’t that their goal? They’ve been saying for a long time that we need to become agrarian again.
become agrarian again? Haven’t you been paying attention? Farming is bad. Find your bugs and slugs under rotting logs.
“Within agrarian societies, the primary source of energy is plant biomass. This means that like hunter-gatherer societies, agrarian societies are dependent on natural solar energy flows. Thus agrarian societies are characterized by their dependence on outside energy flows, low energy density, and the limited possibilities of converting one energy form into another.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_society
So yes, the simplest hunter-gatherers did the grub thing. And were non-capitslist and non-industrial. By “agrarian” of course they don’t want modern agriculture, or modern anything.
And, lest we forget, on the way to nowhere hundreds of thousands (to millions) will have died owing to fuel poverty. https://tinyurl.com/mr2rmvfv
Amazing. There was a perfect balance between natural CO2 emissions and adsorption until human came on the scene.
For billions of years CO2 levels never changed so any change we see now must be from humans.
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but CO2 levels changed wildly over Earth’s history. Just look at the Quaternary alone.
“Not sure if you’re being sarcastic,”
He is being sarcastic.
All of these schemes require tripling the grid load, that is what electrification means.
With the intermittent generators installed so far they cannot keep the lights on reliably today.
In the UK developers of unreliables are being told that they can face up to 15 years waiting for their projects to be connected to the grid because the grid infrastructure is not being developed as fast as the unreliables are coming on stream. As one person put it ” there are not enough cables, poles, wires and transformers to transport electricity from one part of the country to another.”
Yet the number of unreliable projects getting approval continues to increase almost daily. Madness!
It fascinates me as what heads of companies which want “net zero” think their customers are going to use to get to their company location?
How do Disney’s customers get to the parks? How the parks operate? How does Carnival take anyone on a cruise? Every RV manufacturing company and the KOA’s that live off the traveling public can’t survive.
The fight for the truth seems to be a losing battle as we know the reality of CC but get no help from outr elected officials. Blue in the face at this point with an army of words to prove our point and they don’t care. This is how communism works along with technocracy and I feel lost as they take away everything that made us strong in the past. JUST SAY NO. the climate pushers are drug dealers and nothing can come out good from them
Why is this all about electricity generation? How are the idiots going to decarbonise aviation and road transport? Shipping? Agriculture? I cup my ear. Blithering nonsensical stupidity.
“Even if it’s wrong, we still need to pursue Net Zero” paraphrasing the former esteemed Senator from Colorado and other policy jihadists.
Nowhere is an unincorporated community in Caddo County, Oklahoma, United States. Nowhere is located at the southeast end of Fort Cobb Reservoir, 5.5 miles (8.9 km) south-southwest of Albert and 14 miles (23 km) northwest of Anadarko.
Oklahoma also contains the Center of the Universe.
‘“Net zero” and its corollary, the “energy transition,” are talked about so often and so loosely that many take them for granted as worthy goals that could be accomplished with greater buy-in from political and business leaders.‘
Where, exactly, in US Federal legislation or regulatory law are these ‘goals’ actually spelled out and mandated?
Not very much is spelled out in Alarmist Climate Science. The alarmists have a goal, Net Zero, but they have no idea how to get there from here, so they are light on the details.
Net Zero is societal suicide.
Can anyone point to even a single negative effect over the last 40 years due to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
Yes, politicians have vowed to spend trillions removing it. For some reason, they feel it should always be sequestered in the ground.
Too much additional kudzu in the Southern US 🤣. It’s too green on Earth these days, lol.
“Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?”
The answer is “nobody” CO2 cannot be connected to any negative effect..
Net zero won’t work, ever – there are not enough natural resources to build the amount of unreliable renewables and their storage systems and not enough money to even try – net zero simply refers to political competence and understanding of global energy systems
“Net zero won’t work, ever – there are not enough natural resources to build the amount of unreliable renewables and their storage systems and not enough money to even try”
That’s exactly right.
Net Zero is an impossible dream.
Attempting to implement Net Zero policies would be a nightmare for the public.
The planet needs more atmospheric CO2, not less. CO2 is still at starvation levels, and now that the sun has dropped into a quiescent phase, the rational expectation going forward is for cooling, not warming.
The alarmists don’t care. The pretense of dangerous human-caused global warming is just an excuse for them to try to unplug the human race.
Their eco-religious world view is fundamentally anti-human. They see human population (and more specifically human economic growth) as gobbling up the planet, and will embrace any excuse to drastically reduce human population and unplug our economies.
They are not actually climate scientists at all. They are just really, really bad economists, following the second wrongest economic theory ever devised. It’s hard to be worse than Marxism, but Malthusian anti-populationism sure does try.
It took economists more than 150 years to figure out why Malthus’ theory that population growth must always lead to poverty was wrong. It is because the primary driver of prosperity is technological progress, and technological progress is created by people, and hence by population.
As for gobbling up the planet, technological progress allows us to do more with less. We can have more of everything we want, including the health of our environment.
Thus the absolute best thing that anyone can do for the environment is have children. That is what real economics says.
Unfortunately we have a fake climate science that is actually bogus anti-human economics and true to form, its proponents are destroying mankind as fast as possible, which in turn will destroy nature.
From the article: “NERC concluded that fossil-fuel plants are being removed from the grid too fast to meet continuing electricity demand, and that is putting most of the country at risk of grid failure and blackouts during extreme weather.”
This is the bottom line. Our ignorant politicians are putting us all at risk with their insane, unnecessary drive to eliminate CO2. It’s an impossible task and the only thing they will eliminate by continuing this course is our current way of life.
“The company offered the report as a defense against my proposal that management explain how it planned to reach its goal of net zero by 2050.”
I hope you were nice to them. They probably thought “Oh Jeez, why don’t they leave us alone. WE know it won’t work but govt and investors like Black Rock are telling us we have to say it will.”
Somewhat cowardly, but understandable in the current political climate.
In all the discussions and media articles on Net Zero, including the stupidity of trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, there is never any discussion about the essential characteristic of CO2 for all life on this planet.
CO2 is the basic molecule upon which all life on this planet depends, from is absorption by plants through photosynthesis, it’s provision of carbon for the organic make up of all animals that devour those plants and to man itself that eats those plants and animals. Record grain and vegetable crops over the last two decades, thanks to increased CO2 and slightly warmer conditions, are seldom discussed in the media.
The heat absorptive effect of CO2 is now close to saturation and increasing CO2 will make little, if any, difference to temperature.
We need more, not less, Al Gore.