The president wants to decarbonize the planet by killing fossil-fuel production and its high-paying jobs. Almost no other nation is following his lead despite the promises that will be made at the Paris climate summit.
Last week we learned in a Reuters report that Asia will build 500 coal-burning electric generation plants this year alone. An additional 1,000 are planned in China, India, Japan, Indonesia and other countries. The latest projections are that 40% of the added power generation in Southeast Asia by 2040 will be coal-fired.
Does this sound like a continent that’s taking the alarm bells of catastrophic global warming seriously? So America shuts down its coal plants, while the rest of the world builds them.
If that isn’t bad enough news for the climate change lobby, the Times of London reports the world can “nearly double the available supplies of oil and gas in the next 35 years.” And oil giant BP has issued a report that concludes: “This impending glut of hydrocarbons has demolished fears that the world is running out of oil.”
The world’s reserves of oil are going up and are now just shy of 3 trillion barrels. The well is not running dry, in other words, and countries are going to burn more fossil fuel in the years to come.
Meanwhile, negotiators in Paris are trying to keep their game faces on and pretend they’re making great progress in reducing emissions.
Are they living in the twilight zone?
Here in America, Obama has put a regulatory straitjacket on American producers of oil, gas and coal. But just the expected increase in coal production over the next decade in China and India could surpass the total the U.S. consumes each year.
Globally, carbon emissions are likely to rise way above treaty pledges because coal is becoming cheaper to produce. Then there’s fracking, which produces massive quantities of clean-burning and cheap natural gas that competes directly with coal.
Why won’t the climate lobby rally behind fracking and natural gas as a planet saver?
What’s clear is that Asia’s priority right now is growth — and rightfully so. Nations there hope to soon move nearly 1 billion more of their citizens into a Western middle-class living standard. That requires cheap energy, not expensive and unreliable green energy.
When the Paris meetings end, expect happy talk from the leaders of the world that nations have made iron-clad commitments to move away from fossil fuels.
Alas, the only person on the planet who’s still naive enough to believe the fantasy is Barack Obama.
And he calls us deniers!