In any rational world, a candidate proposing the energy plan that Joe Biden has proposed for the United States would be laughed out of the race for President on that ground alone. The word “unserious” does not remotely begin to describe the situation. In essence Biden says he will cause a complete transformation of the U.S. energy economy within 30 years — or maybe it’s 15 — with no idea what technology might be able to accomplish that, how much it might cost, or how much poorer the effort might make the American people. We have moved from the real world into the realm of fantasy and gaslighting. And yet, at least as of today, Biden continues to lead in most polls.

The Biden campaign calls his proposals the “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Climate Justice.” A few excerpts:

Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. . . . As president, Biden will lead the world to address the climate emergency and lead through the power of example, by ensuring the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050. . . . He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that. He will lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets. . . .

Read through the whole thing, and you will find next-to-no specifics as to how such goals might be accomplished. However, if you do get deep enough into the document, you will begin to realize that the promises made depend totally on fantasies about the development of technologies that don’t currently exist and in all likelihood never will exist, at least in any economically viable form:

Bring together America’s top talent to innovate on climate. . . by target[ing] affordable, game-changing technologies . . .:

• grid-scale storage at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries; . . .

• refrigeration and air conditioning using refrigerants with no global warming potential; 

• zero net energy buildings at zero net cost; 

• using renewables to produce carbon-free hydrogen at the same cost as that from shale gas; 

• decarbonizing industrial heat needed to make steel, concrete, and chemicals. . . .

And on and on and on. Or maybe, you could just “bring together America’s top talent” to make fairy dust. Of course, if any of these things were actually feasible and economical, “America’s top talent” would already have developed them, or at least would be far along in the process. The whole nature of a freedom-based economic system (aka capitalism) is that good ideas that are feasible and economical get developed without need for government intervention or assistance. The fact that none of these things are anywhere near fruition tells you all you need to know.

For a dose of reality, I recommend the new Report just out from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, written by Martin Livermore, titled “Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The global picture.” (Full disclosure: I am on the board of an affiliate of the GWPF.) For starters, check out the chart of global CO2 emissions by year that appears on page 3. In 1988 — the year that the IPCC was created and the climate scare really got going — global CO2 emissions were about 23 gigatons. In the most recent year, 2018 — with all the hype and hand-wringing that we have gone through for three decades about the critical need to reduce emissions — the actual level of global emission had increased by over 60% to about 38 Gt. Although in recent decades the developed countries of Europe and the U.S. have achieved some reductions in emissions, the problem is that those reductions have been overwhelmed by large increases in the developing world:

[The] naïve implicit assumption [of Europe and the U.S.] appears to be that where they go, others will follow. Unfortunately for policymakers, emerging economies can continue to boost their own growth via further expansion of their use of fossil fuels, while paying lip service to a cleaner, greener future.

Not only have emissions increases in the developing world swamped any minor reductions in the U.S. and Europe, but the prospect is for more of same as far as the eye can see, irrespective of how much fairy dust might be produced by the rich countries. Livermore discusses separately the prospects in China, India, Africa, and other countries; but some of the data from China are particularly revealing:

[T]he situation [in China] in 2018 moved even further from the hoped-for downward trend. According to the latest analysis from the International Energy Agency:

In China, CO2 emissions grew by 2.5%, or 230 Mt, to 9.5 Gt. A jump of over 5% in electricity generation from coal-fired power stations drove up emissions by 250 Mt, which more than offset the impact of a decline in coal use outside of the power sector. An 80-Mt growth in emissions from gas combustion came predominantly from outside of the power sector, as gas was increasingly chosen as a substitute for coal-based heating.

It defies logic to believe that the current Chinese regime would close these power stations while they are still economic to run, or that it would compromise the economic growth that helps it keep a secure hold on political power.

And then there is China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” where it is building dozens of coal power plants in developing countries around the world:

China’s large-scale programme of overseas investment via the Belt and Road Initiative is putting far greater resources into building coal-fired capacity than into renewable energy projects.

And finally, China made no promises at all in the Paris Climate Agreement to reduce its emissions, but only agreed to cease increasing emissions after 2030. No other developing country made any meaningful promises of emissions reductions either. India essentially told the U.S. and Europe to buzz off. (Indian Minister of the Environment and Forests Prakash Javadekar, quoted in the Guardian in May 2015 (in the run-up to the Paris Agreement): Our emissions will grow because we are not developed and we have a right, every person on this Earth has a right, to develop.)

In his Plan, Biden says that he will “rally the rest of the world to meet the threat of climate change.” The prior effort of the Obama-Biden Administration — the Paris Climate Agreement — achieved exactly nothing on this issue. So Biden thinks he is now suddenly going to convince, say, the Indians to foreswear air conditioning? It’s completely ridiculous.

And even as to prospective continuing large emissions reductions in the U.S., the Biden plan mostly relies on the fantasy of future fairy dust. This is a reality that even the New York Times is having difficulty ignoring. The Times ran a Reuters piece just yesterday with the headline “U.S. Utilities Say Biden Plan to Cut C02 Hinges on Breakthroughs.” “Hinges on breakthroughs” means “we have no idea how to do these things or whether they can be done at all, and frankly we’re not even working on them and have no plans to.” Excerpt:

The country’s top power producers said rapid advances in nascent technologies - such as batteries to store power for lean times, carbon capture to trap waste from fossil fuels and advanced nuclear power - will be critical to reaching net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. But these technologies are currently either too costly for mass deployment or not yet commercially viable, the companies said. Historically, utilities have invested little in emerging technologies because they are required by regulators to keep costs low.

Read the Times/Reuters piece, and you quickly realize that the strategy of the utility companies is universally to give lip service to promises to get to “net zero” carbon emissions some time long after the people currently running the place are comfortably retired. Sooner or later, reality will prevail. But meanwhile, will we need to endure a Biden presidency where trillions, if not tens of trillions, of taxpayer dollars are completely wasted on this nonsense?