Economists Without Calculators

Last week, just before the opening of the U.N.’s Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro, the New York Times ran an op-ed that decried the rapid rise in carbon dioxide emissions during the two decades since a similar meeting was held in Rio.

The authors of the article — Christian Azar, a professor at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, and two economists from the Environmental Defense Fund, Thomas Sterner and Gernot Wagner — claimed that the world needs to “kick its addiction to fossil fuels” and that renewable energy provides the road to salvation because “the seeds of an environmental revolution are being sown.”
The authors’ solution was a familiar one: a carbon tax and/or a cap on carbon dioxide emissions. Never mind that the failure of the meeting at Rio shows, yet again, that a global carbon tax or emissions cap stands absolutely no chance of being implemented. Further, let’s ignore the claim that we have an “addiction” to hydrocarbons, which remain the cheapest, most abundant, most reliable source of energy for billions of people all over the world.
Instead, let’s consider the issue that Azar, Sterner, and Wagner — along with nearly every other proponent of “green” energy — refuse to consider: scale. A simple bit of math shows that even with the rapid expansion that solar-energy and wind-energy capacity have had in the past few years, those two sources cannot even meet incremental global demand for electricity, much less make a dent in the world’s overall demand for hydrocarbons.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/304069/economists-without-calculators-robert-bryce