DO YOU BELIEVE IN UNICORNS?

I view many efforts at energy conservation as enforced deprivation.  To Stan Cox, that's probably a good thing.

To achieve mutually assured protection against both global broiling and global war, humanity will have to purge oil, natural gas, and coal from our lives as quickly as possible, a future reality the Ukraine disaster seems to be making less probable by the day.

Meaning what? Fighting wars with lasers and nuclear weapons? Or fighting and harvesting like the days of the Thirty Years' War?  That's what the Davos set has in store for us.

Three days before [U.N. Secretary General António] Guterres’s remarks, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a 10-point conservation plan to address the oil-supply issue, a welcome antidote to the ever more insistent “drill, baby, drill” policies of U.S. officials. In it, the IEA, an institution no one could mistake for a band of climate activists, recommended reduced speed limits; increased work-from-home arrangements; extra incentives for biking, walking, or taking public transportation; car-free Sundays in cities; ever more carpooling; more rail and less air travel (including deep cuts in business air travel); and other energy-saving policies.

Better yet, most of its proposed measures could be put in place with immediate effect. If that were done, the IEA’s experts estimate that “the advanced economies alone can cut oil demand by 2.7 million barrels a day within the next four months.” That would exceed Russia’s pre-embargo oil exports, helping keep global supply and demand in balance amid the Ukraine war. But even that wouldn’t be enough, given what’s already happening on this planet. For the affluent world to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases rapidly and deeply enough to save us from a climate disaster, government policies would have to go far beyond the measures on that IEA list.

Sadly, decades of procrastination have so narrowed our range of options for heading off climate catastrophe that humanity now faces the necessity of a far steeper mandatory phase-out of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Indeed, the current disruption of world oil and gas markets makes this the optimal time to start driving fossil-fuel use down to zero on an expedited schedule, while ensuring universal, equitable access to affordable (and, as time passes, increasingly renewable) energy.

Here they go again with their end of the world talk.  The way to avoid the end of the world the doomsday environmentalists fear is to restore the sustainable life of the primitives.  No, really.

Significant increases in renewable-energy capacity are needed to see us through a decline in fossil-fuel use, but such renewables can’t be relied upon to bring about that decline in time. There’s no reason to believe that such increases in green electric capacity will work fast enough through market forces to drive fossil fuels out of electricity generation, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and construction. History and scientific research showthat, when such transitions are left to the market, new energy sources mostly go toward increasing the total supply of energy, not displacing older sources of it.

The climate crisis has already reached a point where fossil fuels must be driven out of the energy supply far more quickly than full-scale new energy systems can be developed. The rate of phase-out now required is astonishing. The United Nations Environment Program has estimated that global greenhouse emissions must be reduced by 8% annually, starting immediately, if the heating of the planet is to be held to reasonably tolerable (though still too harsh) levels. In fact, to achieve global equity, affluent nations like the United States would need to phase out their fossil fuels even faster, at perhaps a 10% yearly rate.

As far as I can see, there will be no way to reach that precipitous rate of reduction without pushing fossil fuels out of the economy speedily and directly by law. Only then could renewable energy development, electrification, efficiency, and, crucially, deep reductions in the wasteful production of military armaments play their crucial roles in helping us compensate for the shrinking of fossil-fuel supplies.

"Increasing the total supply of energy" translates into "higher living standards for more people."  The "global equity" Mr Cox suggests is a widespread reversion to nineteenth century living standards worldwide.  "Or for people, worldwide, to go cold turkey on fossil fuels, and return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when knighthood was in flower and life, even for the titled nobility, was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?"  You go first, Stanley.  Get on your unicorn and take your dirigiste impulses with you.

Like today’s disruption of global oil markets, a future phase-out of fossil fuels would indeed push energy costs up. In both cases, the best remedy would be to keep energy affordable through price controls and rationing to ensure sufficient, equitable energy access for all. Price controls and rationing were used this way with much success during World War II. Indeed, if such rationing had been employed during the energy crisis of the 1970s, it could have prevented the endless gas-station queues and the resulting misery for which that decade is now mostly remembered. Back then, gas rationing drew bipartisan support.

Plans drawn up on blackboards by technocrats always look better than messy implementation of them does in practice. How quickly we forget "fifteen days to slow the spread."  As an exercise: what is the effect of keeping the price lower while stretching out the available supply through strict rationing on the development of replacement technologies?