POSTED ON JULY 5, 2017 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN ENERGY POLICY

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY: LOOKS LIKE IT’S STILL COAL

One of the refrains of anguish following Trump’s sagacious decision to ditch the Kellogg-Briand Pact Paris Climate Accord was that the United States would be “ceding world leadership” in promoting “clean energy,” along with some fancy-sounding statistics about how renewable energy is soaring in China.  Well, about that:

As Beijing Joins Climate Fight, Chinese Companies Build Coal Plants

By Hiroko Tabuchi

When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to “bring back coal” in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change.

But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.

These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.

Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent. (Emphasis added.)

The climatistas like to say that anyone who dissents from the narrow orthodoxy of Al Gore is a “denier,” yet amidst the Paris Climate Accord’s provision that every nation will soon submit its plan for how to essentially de-carbonize their entire energy infrastructure by the year 2050, I notice that all of the long-range forecasts of our Energy Information Administration, the International Energy Agency in Paris, and just about every private sector forecasting firm, expect that in 2050 three-quarters of the world’s energy will still be provided by traditional hydrocarbons. Just who are the deniers now?

I think we should start calling the climatistas “reality deniers.” Especially when you see stories like these about how the “unstoppable” renewable energy revolution looks to be stopping in lots of places:

New proposals would kill solar and wind in the European Union

In mid-May, European grid regulators spoke out against priority dispatch for renewables. If the proposals are adopted, it will be hard to add more wind or solar capacity.

Have I mentioned lately that Germany’s CO2 emissions are going back up, because they are burning more coal to replace the nuclear power they are shutting down? I guess wind and solar just don’t cut it, despite over $100 billion in subsidies over the last 15 years.

And this:

North Carolina Legislators Pass Two-Year Ban on Wind Turbines

North Carolina state lawmakers passed a two-year-long moratorium on the construction of new wind turbines early Friday morning.

If enacted, the measure will be the longest statewide halt on wind energy development ever passed in any state. Tennessee passed a year-long moratorium on new wind turbines in May.

At least as far as energy goes, the answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind.