"Experts" Weigh In On The Zero Carbon Energy Plan

Within a few short hours, we will know who our next President will be. Maybe, with any luck, this will be my last chance to be horrified by the prospect of a Biden presidency.

Lately, I’ve been focused, perhaps too much so, on Joe Biden’s manifest corruption, his selling out U.S. foreign policy to our worst geo-political rivals to benefit his family financially. But we mustn’t forget that Biden also represents a prospective public policy catastrophe, nowhere more so than in the arena of energy policy.

If you listened to Biden at the debates, you would have heard him promise that his energy plan for rapid elimination of fossil fuels would bring hundreds of thousands (or maybe it was millions) of new high paying green energy jobs. Did this sound to you like a good idea? If you go over to the Biden campaign’s web page for “A Clean Energy Revolution And Climate Justice,” you will find that the promise is for a “100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050,” supposedly creating some 10 million new jobs in the process:

If executed strategically, our response to climate change can create more than 10 million well-paying jobs in the United States that will grow a stronger, more inclusive middle class. . . .

But wait a minute. The total number of jobs in the energy and energy efficiency sectors of the U.S. economy recently has been around 6.7 million, according to 2019 figures from the U.S. Energy & Employment Report. Adding 10 million jobs to these sectors would mean well more than doubling the number of workers, to produce essentially the same amount of energy. Wouldn’t this necessarily mean that the cost of the energy to consumers would inherently be well more than doubled?

Into this mix on October 27 there dropped something called “America’s Zero Carbon Action Plan.” That’s mighty convenient timing! The ZCAP comes from a large group of certified geniuses calling itself the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Who are these people? The SDSN home page has this description:

The ZCAP was designed by a cohort of nearly 100 researchers and 19 Chairs who make up the Zero Carbon Consortium, who are experts in their fields of climate change policy; clean energy pathways modeling; industrial policy high-employment green economies; legislative and regulatory policy; electricity (power) generation; transportation; industry; buildings; sustainable land-use; and sustainable materials management.

Well, that’s certainly impressive. You will not be surprised to learn that the SDSN operates under the auspices of the UN. The head of the ZCAP effort is economics professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who has specialized for decades in giving bad Keynesian economic advice to developing countries to keep them perpetually poor. Others on the list of about a hundred contributors include top professors from places like Yale and Georgetown.

Inside EPA (paywall) from October 29 contains an excited response to the new Report, with the headline “Experts’ Mid-Century Climate Roadmap Estimates Massive Job Gains”:

A new report by sustainability experts touts an array of short- and longer-term strategies to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, estimating that job gains under the approach would dwarf job losses and that the effort would not increase oil and gas sector unemployment over the next decade. The proposed Zero-Carbon Action Plan (ZCAP), released Oct. 27 by almost 100 researchers as part of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), includes immediate action items for next year that the federal government and states could pursue, largely echoing plans cited as possible priorities for a potential Biden administration.

Go over to the ZCAP Report at page 59 to find tables projecting job gains from the program by mid-century. Hey, scrap that paltry 10 million new jobs — now it’s 11.6 million. (Another table at page 72 shows potential job losses in the fossil fuel industries of about 2.5 million. So it’s a net gain of over 9 million.) And, according to incredibly detailed and sophisticated model calculations, the 11.6 million new jobs will only require about $389 billion annually of incremental federal spending. Don’t worry, that part won’t cost you anything; it’s coming from the infinite pile of free federal loot.

But how about the inevitability that, in addition to the annual $389 billion of subsidies from the feds, energy that takes more than double the number of people to produce is going to cost consumers more than double to buy? Believe it or not, in a highly detailed Report of some 383 pages, they never get to covering that subject. Somehow, you are meant to be left with the impression that “job creation” is the final measure of net economic benefit to the people.

How could such a large collection of such highly-credentialed certified geniuses fall for such an obvious fallacy? I can’t really answer that question. On the other hand, with “experts” like this giving him advice, you can see how a dim bulb like Biden could easily lead his flock of 300+ million people over the economic cliff. God help us.