Friends,

In this week’s edition of The Charge, we analyze President Joe Biden’s climate hypocrisy, the coming energy famine, and the Supreme Court’s decision on the EPA’s regulatory overreach. Misguided energy policy is global, and we analyze Denmark’s tax on cows and South Africa’s inability to produce consistent energy despite massive domestic resources. The Power Hour podcast welcomes Edward Davis, one of the nation’s leading experts on commercial nuclear energy.

The CECE Team

(Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment)

The Charge is edited by Andrew Weiss

For more information, please contact us at CECE.info@heritage.org.

For media inquiries, please contact heritagepress@heritage.org. 

Biden’s Hypocrisy on Climate Change Is Painfully Obvious

According to Diana Furchtgott-Roth, President Joe Biden has repeatedly called climate change an “existential threat,” including in his debate with President Donald Trump on Thursday night. She wrote in The Daily Caller:

If Biden truly thought that climate change was an existential threat, he would try to lower global emissions through greater U.S. exports of natural gas. This would enable other countries to reduce emissions by substituting natural gas for coal, just as America has reduced carbon emissions by 1,000 million metric tons over the past 16 years.

In addition, Biden would try to expand emissions-free nuclear power if he thought climate change was a threat. He would make uranium mining easier, because uranium is a critical ingredient for nuclear power. Yet he has taken swaths of land off the table for uranium development and made no attempt to solve the problem of nuclear waste.

Instead, Biden blocks a new liquid natural gas export terminal in Louisiana, which results in greater worldwide use of coal, increasing global carbon dioxide emissions. Europe has already been turning to coal to deal with energy shortages in the aftermath of Russia’s cutoff of natural gas.

Yet, Biden’s green energy mandates result in a greater U.S. demand for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric batteries from China, made by coal-fired power plants, increasing the very emissions that Biden criticizes at home.

Read the full article here.

Our Coming Energy Famine

Mario Loyola, in his latest article for National Review, describes how surging electricity demand, combined with the aggressive curtailment of fossil fuels and an anemic rollout of renewable replacements, is propelling the nation toward an unprecedented energy shortfall.

States in the Midwest are likely to be among the hardest hit. In a February report, Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), a high-voltage transmission system that provides power to 15 states in the central U.S., warned of “urgent and complex challenges to electric system reliability,” citing a “hyper-complex risk environment.” NERC, which oversees electricity supply across North America, expects MISO to face a staggering capacity shortfall of 4.7 gigawatts (GW) — equivalent to above five average-size nuclear-power plants—by 2028…

Realistically, the only way that America could make up the shortfall in electrical capacity would be through a massive increase in the number of coal and natural-gas power plants. Alas, those are primary targets of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new power-plant rule, published in May…

Making matters worse, federal subsidies for wind and solar are poisoning the economics for “baseload” generators. Those are the large coal, natural-gas, and nuclear plants on which America depends for sufficient and reliable electricity. Such plants are finding it increasingly difficult to recoup operating costs; at various times of the day, many utilities can get electricity free from solar and wind, which forces baseload generators to go offline.

Read the full article here.

Denmark to Tax Cattle Burps and Flatulence

The Danish government believes that taxing methane that stems from cow burps and flatulate will improve the lives of its citizens by lowering global temperatures. Beginning in 2030, Danish livestock farmers will be taxed 300 kroner ($43) per ton of carbon dioxide-equivalent that livestock emits—increasing to 750 kroner ($108) by 2035.

This means that each cow will cost farmers an additional $116 per head of cattle, given that the average cow emits the CO2 equivalent of about 2.7 tons per year in methane. This tax would reach about $291 per head of cattle by 2035. The tax will only harm farmers and raise the cost of local beef for consumers and will have no effect on global temperatures.

In fact, all 1.5 million cows in Denmark account for about 0.1 percent of the European Union’s annual 3.6 billion tons of greenhouse emissions. Even if the entire European Union halted all emissions (including livestock) the global temperatures would only be reduced by 0.12 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, even assuming the highest climate sensitivity to carbon.

According to William Happer, professor in the Department of Physics at Princeton University, while methane is more potent than carbon dioxide, it only contributes 10 percent of the total warming that CO2 does. Taxing the methane from livestock burps and flatulence will only force small ranchers out of business and make meat unaffordable for low-income Danes.

Nuclear Power’s Past, Present, and Future with Ed Davis

Jack invites one of the nation’s leading experts on commercial nuclear energy, Edward Davis, to The Power Hour this week. With decades of experience in industry and government, Ed brings a unique perspective to nuclear energy policy that you won’t want to miss. Jack and Ed cover everything from nuclear-waste policy, to new-reactor financing, to why the promise of a nuclear renaissance remains difficult to fulfill despite growing support for the technology.

Q: Have renewables worsened South Africa’s blackouts and economic woes?

A: Reliable energy matters. That’s the message that South African voters sent to the African National Congress (ANC), which won less than 50 percent of the popular vote for the first time in its history and is trying to form a coalition government. The coalition must give up the focus on wind and solar energy and ensure resilient electricity supplies.

The United States has given South Africa $1 billion for its Just Energy Transition Project to expand renewables, and the World Bank in 2022 loaned $440 million of a $500 million loan to decommission the Komati coal plant and replace it with wind and solar. But wind and solar farms are not resilient technologies and are more expensive than coal, which South Africa has in abundance.

For more than 15 years, South Africa, whose electricity depends on coal, has been plagued by blackouts lasting anywhere from two hours to eight hours a day. Blackouts have damaged the economy. Between 2012 and 2022, South Africa’s GDP per person declined by 17 percent, from $8,174 to $6,766, and manufacturing output decreased by 9 percent. The latest official unemployment rate is 32.1 percent.

The new coalition government’s task is to revive what used to be the African continent’s most prosperous economy, focusing on agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. The fundamental condition for recovery is access to reliable, resilient, and affordable power. This calls for using South Africa’s domestic supplies of coal, as well as using natural gas from the Karoo region and Mozambique. Renewables are insufficient.

As blackouts rose, so did the share of electricity generated by solar and wind farms. Between 2012 and 2022, as GDP and manufacturing declined, the use of wind and solar energy rose from practically zero to about 6 percent. But because wind mills and solar cells do not run continuously, they need natural-gas plants or batteries as backup to operate, and intermittent energy costs more than continuous energy.

Costly renewables would not reduce global warming, because the share of global emissions emitted by South Africa is only 1 percent. Even if South Africa were to completely abate all emissions, starting now, there would be less than a 0.0101 degree Celsius temperature reduction by 2050, and 0.0213 degree Celsius temperature reduction by 2100, according to U.S. Department of Energy models.

The core of South Africa’s decline has been disastrous energy policy—which has slowed down economic growth and raised unemployment rates. The new coalition needs to move fast to provide a secure fossil fuel–based energy supply to underpin economic growth.

—Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment

The EPA had previously issued strict new air-quality standards for ozone pollution, requiring states to submit implementation plans. Most of the states resisted, and the EPA summarily suspended state authority and imposed a federal implementation plan, without explaining how its plan could be implemented if any of the states successfully challenged the underlying standard. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that the challengers were likely to succeed in their argument against the EPA’s plan, as the EPA had failed to justify its arbitrary imposition of a uniform federal plan that ignored state diversity.

In its first five decades, the EPA become accustomed to federal courts rubber stamping even its most brazen regulatory overreach. The Court’s decision was a good reminder that, thankfully, federal courts are increasingly willing to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law, and rein in the out-of-control EPA.

—Mario Loyola, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation