Money to ‘Decarbonize’ as Useless as Gym Memberships and Extended Warranties

By Gary Abernathy

This article was originally published at The Empowerment Alliance and is re-published here with permission. 

Nearly all of us have fallen prey to schemes, scams or even well-intentioned projects that come up short of the results promised for the money spent.

For instance, the new year has undoubtedly brought the annual rush of gym memberships from Americans convinced they’ll shed those holiday pounds and get back into shape. Or there’s that extended warranty we were talked into on a large kitchen appliance that wouldn’t go bad unless it was dropped from the top of a 10-story building. How ‘bout that costly monthly charge we incur for a streaming service so we can enjoy the one show we’re really going to watch?

Time and again, Americans find themselves on the short end of the stick, paying through the nose for services that never live up to their promise. Nowhere is that more evident than in the decades-long climate-based hoax that promised a revolution in the energy industry to save us all from extinction.

A recent column by William Murray, former chief speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a past editor of RealClearEnergy, lays bare how promises made by far-left environmentalists fell far short of their assurances. Murray points out that $20 trillion – that’s $20 trillion – has been spent (over the last couple of decades, according to his source), largely by the U.S. and Europe, to “decarbonize” the global economy. Murray notes that the expenditure is “pretty much the total present value of America’s GDP.”

The result? “Hydrocarbon consumption continued to increase anyway. All that was achieved was a tiny reduction, just 2%, in the share of overall energy supplied by hydrocarbons. Put simply, as the energy pie got bigger and all forms of energy supply increased, hydrocarbons ended up with a slightly smaller share of a larger pie.”

If such a pitiful return on investment happened in any other walk of life, companies pushing the scheme would go bankrupt and reputations would be in shambles. But the “climate warriors” just grow more emboldened.

Haven’t renewables made great strides? That’s what we read in the mainstream media, parroting the renewables industries. But read the careful wording used by most advocates of renewables when they boast about advancements.

For instance, The Renewable Energy Institute featured a story headlined, “Renewables Account for 90% of US Power Generation in 2024.” Wow! But the details were a little less impressive, clarifying that “renewable energy made up nearly 90% of the total US power generation capacity added during the first 3 quarters of 2024, as per a review conducted by the SUN DAY Campaign using Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) data.”

At first glance, readers not carefully parsing the language – or relying only on the headline – might think that renewable energy accounted for 90 percent of total power generation in the first three quarters of 2024. Of course, that’s not the case. The story was merely claiming that 90 percent “of the total US power generation capacity added (emphasis added)” was from renewable energy.

In fact, as reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “In 2024, the United States produced a record amount of energy, according to data in our Monthly Energy Review. U.S. total energy production was more than 103 quadrillion British thermal units in 2024, a 1% increase from the previous record set in 2023.” In other words, the renewable industry is claiming responsibility for 90% of the 1% added (at least during the first three quarters). Fine.

In reality, the top sources for energy in 2024 continued to be natural gas and natural gas plant liquids (47% combined), crude oil (27%) and coal (10%). In fact, natural gas plant liquids (9% of total energy production when broken out alone) were up 7% from 2023.

“Domestic NGPL production have increased every year since 2005 as U.S. natural gas production and processing capacity have increased,” according to the report. Meanwhile, all “renewables” (wood, waste, wind, solar, geothermal) combined accounted for the remaining 16% of total U.S. energy produced. Wind blew in at just over 1.5% of all energy produced, with solar just over 1%.

Here’s the kicker: Even just a 1% capacity increase from 2023 to 2024 meant that the U.S. produced record levels of total energy capacity. However, electricity capacity powered by wind and solar provides “almost no reliability to the grid.”

That’s according to Mitch Rolling and Isaac Orr of the “Energy Bad Boys” Substack, who point out that “wind and solar capacity is not the same as dispatchable capacity due to their intermittency. Intermittent generators are inferior to dispatchable resources for a number of reasons, but mainly
because operators cannot control when they produce electricity and when they won’t.”

As an example, “Despite having more capacity installed than ever before, reliable capacity in PJM (the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland regional transmission organization) has actually decreased by 2 gigawatts (GW) since 2016, from 198 GW to 196 GW, and is down 6.8 GW since firm capacity peaked in 2018. This comes at a time when peak demand hit new records in 2025 at over 160 GW, according to data from the EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor.”

The $20 trillion investment in “decarbonization” in the U.S. and Europe has been an abject failure. It would be a wiser expenditure of tax dollars for governments to subsidize lifetime gym memberships for every citizen. At least then there’d be a slight possibility of some return on investment.

Gary Abernathy is a longtime newspaper editor, reporter and columnist. He was a contributing columnist for the Washington Post from 2017-2023 and a frequent guest analyst across numerous media platforms. He is a contributing columnist for The Empowerment Alliance, which advocates for realistic approaches to energy consumption and environmental conservation.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.