At least, installing the current generation of renewables isn’t the way to try to tackle climate change. It just makes both us and those in the future poorer than necessary. Any method of trying to reduce emissions which is more costly than the social cost of those emissions does this. Thus we shouldn’t be doing it as our aim is to make all humans across time as well off as possible.
Renewables so far don’t do this:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]I’ve written often about the economic nightmare that are renewables, specifically wind and solar power. They are terribly inefficient because they are intermittent, and they are diffuse. The intermittency requires maintaining substantial backup capacity. Their diffuse nature means that they are incredibly land intensive. I should also add that renewable energy sources are not miraculously located where loads are. Indeed, they are often located far, far away from load, and therefore necessitate substantial investment in transmission.[/perfectpullquote]It’s certainly technically possible to install more renewables. So is everyone eating nothing but tofu as a protein source. But that’s not the issue at hand. It’s whether we should:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) are the largest and perhaps most popular climate policy inNo, we shouldn’t.
Amazing what science can tell us, isn’t it?
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I think you are making a courageous proposition here because it is very difficult to correctly calculate the external costs of CO2 production. You are on safer ground when you argue that a Carbon Tax is the correct solution. Regrettably no-one even talks about that any more.
Perhaps that's because the only changes we are seeing are indistinguishable from natural variation, ALL of the predictions that something dangerous is happening have not come true, and the climate activists are quite open about simply using this scare as a lever to push their left-wing agendas.
If you really wanted to cut CO2 emissions (which would be a bad thing) then you would do it with nuclear power. No one talks about that either...
'ALL of the predictions that something dangerous is happening have not come true, and the climate activists are quite open about simply using this scare as a lever '...can you point me to some sources please?
If you followed this topic you would not need such basic education as this. I assume that you want some cites for the second point I made, since the first is so obvious. Here are some, but you should do your own research in future...
Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S Undersecretary of State for global issues, addressing the same Rio Climate Summit audiencein 1992: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (Wirth now heads the UN Foundation which lobbies for hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries fight climate change.)
Also speaking at the Rio conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department said: “A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
In 1988, former Canadian Minister of the Environment Christine Stewart told editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald: “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
In 1996, former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev emphasized the importance of using climate alarmism to advance socialist Marxist objectives: “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.”
Speaking at the 2000 UN Conference on Climate Change in the Hague, former President Jacques Chirac of France explained why the IPCC’s climate initiative supported a key Western European Kyoto Protocol objective: “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.”
IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/may/22/wealth-redistribution-and-population-management-are-the-only-logical-way-forward