In his State of the Union address last week, President Joe Biden declared that he would “finish the job” of what he calls the “incredible transition” from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy.
“The Inflation Reduction Act is the most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis,” Biden said, referring to $370 billion in new government spending for renewable energy, which will result in “lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, and leading the world to a clean energy future.”
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry echoed that sentiment, declaring that the solution to a changing climate was “money, money, money, money, money.” Not to be outdone, former Vice President Al Gore, stated at the U.N. Cop 27 climate summit in November that fossil fuels were “a culture of death” and demanded $4.5 trillion dollars per year to replace the oil and gas industry with wind, solar, and batteries.
The threat to humanity, activists say, is so dire that cost should not be a factor. But for those who may be curious about costs, Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a professor at Northwestern University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, has attempted to calculate them.
The task of replacing fossil fuels is immense: currently oil powers 97 percent of all the world’s transportation; natural gas accounts for 40 percent of all industrial energy use and 25 percent of global electricity; and coal powers 40 percent of global electricity and 70 percent of steel production. Overall, 84 percent of the world’s energy usage comes from fossil fuels.
The transition to renewables entails “going from a system dominated by liquid hydrocarbons and gaseous hydrocarbons to one dominated by solid minerals and rocks and metals,” Mills told The Epoch Times. Because minerals are less energy dense than fossil fuels, he said, “it takes, depending on the machines, somewhere between 1,000 percent and 5,000 percent greater use of minerals to produce the same amount of energy.”
