By Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett
A recent post by The Hill, “Disaster as Trump’s energy policy totally disregards climate change,” claims that President Donald Trump is implementing “irrational and profoundly destabilizing energy policies” by prioritizing traditional energy and deprioritizing renewables, leading to increases in weather disasters. This is false on all fronts. First, data shows that weather is not becoming more extreme. Second, there is no evidence that the growth in wind and solar power has done or can do anything to alter the course of climate change. Third, Trump’s America First agenda promotes energy dominance, focusing energy reliability and abundant, secure, domestic supplies. Trump’s energy plan is a stabilizing factor in energy costs.
William Becker, a former regional director at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama administration, makes many false claims in a rapid-fire fashion in his post in The Hill. For brevity’s sake and as a matter of focus, this Climate Realism post focuses on one segment of his article:
While we can thank fossil fuels for the lifestyles and conveniences most Americans enjoy today, the legacy of their long dominance is the destabilization and degradation of environmental systems critical to life. The atmosphere is one of those systems. Unprecedented weather extremes are the result of dumping fossil-fuel pollution into it. As the dumping continues, weather disasters become more frequent and destructive. The American people have been hit by an average of 23 major weather disasters (those with damages exceeding $1 billion) annually over the last five years, compared to only nine in the previous 45.
Every point Becker made in this statement after the opening clause of the first sentence is false. It is true that we can thank fossil fuels for our lifestyles and not just conveniences but essentials for modern life. It is false that fossil fuel use is causing unprecedented weather extremes, and that they are becoming more frequent and destructive.
Becker, who currently runs a climate policy lobbying organization, uses a deceptive metric for calculating increasing weather disasters, which looks at the monetary value of losses due to weather. Becker does not attempt to claim that these weather events are becoming more frequent or extreme themselves – because they aren’t. Data on the most common weather extremes like hurricanes and wildfires show no increase, as Climate Realism has covered dozens of times. Instead, Becker cites misleading calculations of billion-dollar price tags from weather damage.
Scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains the misuse of the “billion dollar disaster” metric as a proof for dangerous climate change. He has called the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) is “a national embarrassment,” for using that misleading metric, explaining that the NCA overestimated the number of disasters by a factor of three by re-counting individual events when they struck multiple states. So, if a hurricane passed through Florida, then into Georgia and South Carolina, the NCA would count this as three separate “billion dollar disasters” – even if the hurricane did not cause a billion dollar in of losses in each state it struck.
In reality, populations have increased in states like California and Florida, which are prone extreme weather. More infrastructure has been built in susceptible areas, so there is more to annihilate when a storm strikes. To the extent that there has been any rise in billion dollar costs attributable to extreme weather events, as estimated by Becker and the sources he uses, it is due, not to changes in weather, but rather a well-known phenomenon labeled the “expanding bulls-eye effect,” which Climate Realism has discussed dozens of times previously, such as here.
Going further, an analysis from Pielke, Jr. of insurance data presented in another Climate Realism post disputes the claim that the costs of natural disasters, when measured fairly, have risen. Relative to global GDP, the trend in property losses has declined as the Earth has modestly warmed over the last several decades. (See the graph, below)
Becker’s additional claim that Trump’s focus on reliable energy rather than intermittent renewables will raise costs and result in less energy security, is as false as his claims about worsening disaster costs. The wind and solar technologies that Becker promotes rely heavily on materials and technologies produced by foreign powers that are not friendly to the United States, like China. A grid powered by wind and solar is not cheaper than gas, it isn’t even cheaper than nuclear. A study by energy modelers at Always On Energy Research found that wind and solar both suffer from massive costs associated with the overbuilding necessary to overcome the intermittency issue. Load balancing, using battery storage, carries very high costs, as well. These make nuclear less expensive per megawatt hour than existing wind or solar, despite high upfront costs.
Similarly for fossil fuels, full system LCOE show that wind and solar in Texas costs far more per megawatt hour than nuclear, coal (of which the United States has hundreds of years of domestic supply that isn’t dependent on foreign sources), or the cheapest source – natural gas, which is also sourced domestically.
Grid stability is damaged by high penetration of solar and wind and the closure of traditional energy, according to utility companies and federal energy regulators.
Almost every claim made in Becker’s article in The Hill is provably wrong. The post is long on hyperbole and misinformation, but short on facts and data. Real world weather data shows no increase in extreme weather, incidences of weather disasters, or weather disaster costs as a percentage of economic growth. Trump’s reliability focused, America First, energy policy will not harm our energy security or the planet, but it will buttress the United States against the hostile intentions of any foreign government that might use our dependence on them for renewable energy materials and technology to extort economic or geopolitical concessions. It will also allow the U.S. to become energy dominant, a force for good in the world by supplying our abundant domestic energy supplies to allies, especially to developing countries in need of reliable energy sources to bring their populations out of energy poverty.
