The coming Drill, Baby, Drill Era

If you're a Green New Deal advocate, prepare yourself for greater use of fossil fuels. It's just a matter of time. That's Holman Jenkins' conclusion in his latest column. That's what history teaches us. According to Jenkins' column, "Energy sources are additive and symbiotic, he writes. Coal, oil, gas, wood, nuclear and renewables all grew together, they didn’t replace each other. An increase in coal provided steel piping to enable oil and gas production. More wood than ever was consumed to support British coal mines. The world’s biggest maker of wooden barrels at one time was John D. Rockefeller. A car in the 1930s consumed more coal via its required steel than it would consume in fossil fuels in its lifetime."

Yes, climate change exists. No, it isn't an existential threat to civilization. Quite the opposite. Thanks to ever-emerging technologies, we keep getting cleaner air. Fossil fuel production hasn't stopped since the introduction of AOC's Green New Deal. It's increased.

The emerging Drill, Baby, Drill Era

The faulty assumption here is that phasing out fossil energy will be any easier in 50 years when the world is consuming twice as much energy and half is still fossil energy, producing the same emissions as today. A likelier outcome: When the green subsidies stop, as inevitably they must, the result will be a burst of emissions as the formerly subsidized users shift to fossil energy to stay solvent.

Why think that fossil fuels will diminish when comsumption keeps increasing? Microsoft is re-opening the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, presumably in order to power their AI needs. In this panel discussion, one of the panelists lets the cat out of the bag by saying Microsoft's energy needs are rapidly increasing:

What's interesting is the fact that this panelist describes nuclear power as a renewable energy. Today's nuclear power is significantly different from the nuclear power of the 1970s. Storage requirements for spent fuel rods are dramatically different today compared with those from 30 years ago. Today's nuclear power plants are much more efficient, too. There's no reason not to integrate nuclear power into America's all-of-the-above energy policy.

In the short-term, the power that we'll need will need to be natural gas and oil. That's a big portion of why VP Harris did an about-face on fracking. That's why she lost Pennsylvania. If Democrats want to be competitive in the Rust Belt, they'll need to dump the Green New Deal activists. They'll need to become solidly pro-fracking. It's that simple.