For years, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has demanded that the U.S. and other industrialized countries cut carbon emissions to 20% of 1990 levels by 2050.
While most countries claim to support huge carbon caps, in practice they have resisted implementing them. The reason is simple: fossil fuels provide nearly 90% of the energy we use--the cheap, abundant fuel that powers modern farming, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and hospitals. The use of fossil fuels is directly correlated to quality and quantity of life, particularly through the generation of electricity ; in the past two decades, hundreds of millions of people have risen out of poverty because energy production has tripled in India and quadrupled in China, almost exclusively from carbon-based fuels. To drastically restrict carbon-based fuels, countries have conceded in practice, would be an economic disaster.
Now, the IPCC claims that the economics are on the side of drastic CO2 reductions. It recently announced that “Close to 80 percent of the world’s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies…”
This announcement is the latest claim by a growing coalition of environmentalists, businessmen, politicians, journalists, and academics that we can ban our fossil fuels and have cheap energy, too--through the panacea of “clean energy”--energy with minimal carbon emissions or other impacts. Clean energy advocates claim that a “clean energy economy” will be far more prosperous than our current “dirty energy” economy. Coal, oil, and natural gas supplies are finite and therefore bound to get more and more expensive as they run out, they argue. By contrast, we have an essentially unlimited, free, never-ending supply of sun and wind available to use--“free forever,” as Al Gore puts it.
What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home? We have such fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses. And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of U.S. electricity demand.
To read the rest of the article, click here.