Signs of energy sanity: China says phasing out fossil fuels is unrealistic and top EU official says U.S. gas will be needed for decades.

The hard facts that fossil fuels cannot be replaced anytime soon are finally being recognized, except by the United States and Europe.

More countries are ignoring calls for them to reduce their CO2 emissions and are becoming vocal about why they are not bending to such pressure. For years, China has been cagey about its climate goals, saying that it will not pledge to be carbon neutral by 2050 but maybe by 2060. India has declared that it might be at net zero emissions by 2070. Other countries in Asia have been mostly silent about their climate goals as they continue to open new coal mines and build new coal-fired power plants. But that is changing as many countries are becoming outspoken that they are not bending to international pressure to reduce carbon emissions because they want to develop economically.

China, the world’s biggest consumer of coal and the largest importer of crude oil has recently become defiant that it will not reduce its carbon footprint and that fossil fuels will continue to play an essential role in its economy and the global energy supply. China’s special climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, who will represent China at COP28 in Dubai in November, recently said, “It is unrealistic to completely phase out fossil fuel energy.”

To underscore that fact, China is opening new coal-fired electrical generation plants at the rate of two per week. China is also building or planning to develop 366 gigawatts (GW) in new coal generation capacity, accounting for some 68% of global planned new coal capacity as of 2022. China is building more coal capacity than is left in the U.S. According to the Energy Information Administration, U.S. coal power capacity is currently 188,000 MW, meaning China is building twice the coal generation capacity the U.S. EPA will forcibly retire with its proposed New Source Performance Standards by 2040. In addition, India and most of the other countries in Asia are building coal-fired generation as fast as possible.

China’s Climate Envoy Xie said:

the intermittent nature of renewable energy and the immaturity of key technologies like energy storage means the world must continue to rely on fossil fuels to safeguard economic growth.

Completely phasing out fossil fuel is unrealistic. We should build the new before discarding the old. (Emphasis added)

There are other sane voices as well. The top EU energy official, Ditte Juul Jørgensen, recently said that the EU had

the instruments that we need to endure another winter energy crisis in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war. These included conservation and more renewable energy. But the bloc’s reliance on exports of US liquefied natural gas would persist.

The U.S. is on track to close half of its coal-fired generation capacity by 2026, while China is on track to build more than that within their country.

Unfortunately, two of the more coherent voices appear to be China’s climate envoy, who sounds more coherent than the U.S. climate envoy, John Kerry, and the chief EU climate official. It is sad that it takes an autocratic ruler and an EU climate official to state the obvious: the Western world may feel virtuous about its climate policies, but those policies will have no impact on total global CO2 emissions because China and the rest of the developing world will offset them. The U.S. and Europe are destroying their power grids along with their economies for a goal that is impossible to achieve.

The U.S. needs to stop pretending that wind and solar can power the U.S. economy. The low power density of wind and solar is being revealed daily and can no longer be ignored. It is time to start expanding the U.S. natural gas infrastructure in order to reduce CO2 emissions while the nuclear power infrastructure is being built.

The climate zealots in the U.S. may feel virtuous about their climate policies, but the facts are that those policies will have little impact on total global CO2 emissions. What those policies will do, if left unchecked, is destroy the United States’ energy sector and, along with it, the economy.

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