Today, I’m engaging my skepticism of climate change solutions. While I’m pretty confident that climate change is underway, I’m not at all convinced of the solutions that climate change warriors are proposing and, in many cases, implementing. In general, they are not needed, and none of them work. But they do signal virtue, which is no doubt the objective.

TANSTAFL — There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

I picked this up during my four-year Air Force stint. I also picked up several other acronyms, including FUBAR. Look it up.

My USAF experience may be one reason that I detest acronyms. I find them all too confusing instead of fulfilling their supposed purpose of helping to clarify matters and shorten the time for communicating.

Even so, I feel that TANSTAFL fits when it comes to examining the hijinks of our Climate Change Warriors closely. It appears to me that they have been chasing, if not promising, that free lunch for quite some time.

Doom Repeatedly Predicted

In the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich claimed a coming famine because the global population was 3.5 billion. Now it’s 8 billion, and the Green Revolution, as in agriculture, has solved that problem. Next, in the 1970s, he predicted a coming Ice Age. Currently, it’s a predicted toasting of the planet.

No matter the problem, the solution is always putting the intellectual elite in charge, providing more money to fund their endless list of virtue signals, and reducing the population. It also requires an education campaign for children, advising them of the coming horrors if we don’t follow the elites’ directions.

Do What I Say and Send More Money

Of course, all this activity is aided and abetted by our government mavens tossing around dollars for their favorite causes and implementing regulations to drive petroleum businesses into extinction. They’ve already come close to achieving coal’s extinction. Even though China, Japan, and many others continue to build coal-fired electric generation facilities to power their economies and elevate the well-being of their citizens.

Europe has recently tumbled to the fact that natural gas fuels much of their economy now that Russia has stopped supplying their needs. More perversely, many countries have started shutting down nuclear power plants, the one genuinely sustainable and carbon-free energy source.

Here, closer to home, Texas sold its energy soul for wind and solar power subsidies. That extended to using electric-powered pumps for our natural gas pipelines instead of the previous natural gas-powered pumps. All those follies came to light during our massive electrical power outage during the cold snap a few years ago when wind turbines froze, and natural gas couldn’t support the grid due mainly to those failed pumps.

California — Climate Change Free Lunch Advocates

But then there’s California. They account for roughly a fraction of a percent of global warming but refuse to see past the end of their noses, feeling they can lead the way to a cooler climate. Virtue signaling can come at a massive cost to all those within that state or those pulled into its errant ways.

You’ve undoubtedly heard that they banned the sale of petroleum-powered cars effective in 2035. Now comes a proposal by the California Air Resources Board to ban the registration of diesel trucks next year, 2024. The goal is that all trucks will be zero emission by 2035.

Excellent virtue signal, but is this really a free lunch? Here’s the cost/impact bullet list: bullets loaded into a gun and pointed at the state citizens’ pocketbooks and way of life.

• Trucks Needed. California had 272 electric trucks registered in 2022. They would need 510,000 by 2035.
• Truck Cost. The cost of electric heavy-duty trucks is three times that of new diesel rigs, roughly $400,000 to $500,000 each.
• Truck Weight. Electric trucks run on two batteries, weighing 8,000 lbs each. This weight subtracts from the load they can carry over the highways.
• Truck Range. A five- to eight-hour charging cycle results in a range of 150 to 330 miles.
• Electricity Demand. Charging a small trucking fleet can require three times more power than a factory.
• Charger Requirements. There are currently 700 chargers at California trucking depots. They estimate that by 2030, they will need 157,000 more. That will require 450 built each week with grid updates to match the demand.

These data points come from the article California’s Assault on Trucks.

Electric Vehicles vs Hybrid Vehicles

I drove a 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid for three years. I liked the car, including its acceleration and good gas mileage. So, I understand and appreciate that type of vehicle. Plus, I didn’t have to charge it every couple hundred miles. It made perfect sense.

On the other hand, electric vehicles make great virtue-signaling sense but not much else. Forbes Magazine ran a recent article titled Tesla Versus Prius and the Carbon Crisis Long-Game. Here’s a good quote: “Vehicles powered solely by batteries generate less carbon pollution over their lifetime, but each requires thousands of lithium-ion cells made with costly metals including lithium, cobalt, and nickel.” They go on to say that “a 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack like the one used by the Tesla Model S contains enough materials to power more than 90 Priuses.”

They argue that mining all those metals is costly and has a massive environmental impact. The cost and impact of generating electricity to charge those batteries, building the charging network, updating the grid, etc., may not be the wisest move considering the long-term impact.

You can also add to that broad equation that our climate change warriors are working hard to close down mining. They are restricting where mining can happen in the USA and adding regulations that make existing mines too costly to continue in operation.

Where’s That Free Lunch?

No, wait, there must be a free lunch somewhere, right? Perhaps there is. It is served to the manufacturers that take full advantage of all the government dollars being doled out.

I’d offer that all these issues are unintended consequences of actions taken with good intent. But, for any rational being, it merely takes a few hours of research and a calculator to tally at least most of the costs of a proposed regulation. For some, that approach is taken, but the results are often ignored or altered to fit their desired narrative.

Lest you feel that I’m on too much of a rant, look at my earlier article The World Continues to Improve — Impending Doom Delayed. It, too, takes a counterintuitive look at all that is improving lives around the world.

Be of good cheer. Much of this won’t come to pass because it’s either physically impossible or far too costly. Stay tuned for the next crisis.