Jason Whitman/NurPhoto via AP
Pollution from a coal-fired power plant is seen filling the sky near a wetland area on September 6, 2022, near Cleves, Ohio.
One of the key energy slogans of the Obama administration was “all of the above.” The idea was that, rather than focusing strictly on zero-carbon energy, the sensible thing was to invest in all kinds of energy to provide maximum flexibility—particularly fracked natural gas. In a presidential debate with Mitt Romney, President Obama boasted that under his watch the oil and gas industry had “built enough pipeline to wrap around the entire Earth once.” Sure enough, during his two terms U.S. oil and gas production sharply accelerated, and America became the world’s top producer of oil and gas in 2015.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) resurrected this argument in an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle last week announcing that he would vote against any of President Biden’s nominees whom he deems “climate activists.” Characterizing the Inflation Reduction Act as not “climate change legislation” (which is not remotely true, but never mind), he argued that the law “is critical to America’s energy security because it codifies an all-of-the-above energy policy that invests in energy innovations, rather than energy elimination.” That article teed up a speech at last week’s CERAWeek energy conference, where Manchin said, “I want to decarbonize but I’m rational, I’m reasonable. I want to do it with fossil.”
Manchin’s other arguments aside, this point about energy security is a complete crock. In fact, relying on carbon energy is a direct threat to American national security, no matter how one might characterize it.
First and most obviously, burning carbon fuels releases greenhouse gases that warm the planet, which damages the United States and the world. Climate change is not just some airy scientific prediction of future doom—it is here, with its signature herky-jerky combination of drought followed by flooding followed by more drought (California), chronic heat waves with occasional bursts of extreme cold (Texas), more powerful weather disasters (Puerto Rico), terrible wildfires (Oregon), disruption of agriculture (Iowa), and rising sea levels that threaten America’s coastal cities.
The Army Corps of Engineers, for instance, recently released a $52 billion plan to build sea protection systems all around New York City—and that’s the cheap option. Failing to do so will cost dramatically more when extreme storm surges sooner or later cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to vital city infrastructure (like what happened during Hurricane Sandy, only worse), or when rising seas actually drown some of the most valuable real estate in the world. And that’s just in New York City, to say nothing of the numerous other metro areas located just off the coastline.
The more carbon we burn, the worse the damage will be—and it will accelerate in a nonlinear fashion. We’ve currently experienced just one degree Celsius of warming, but the second one will be much worse. Phasing out carbon energy as fast as possible (and persuading the rest of the world to follow suit, particularly China) is by far the most important task for the security of this country.
Second, carbon energy exposes consumers to considerable price risk. The thing about fossil fuels is you burn them up, and so have to go buy more all the time. People like Manchin—that is, people who own enormous stakes in carbon businesses—often pretend that when fossil fuels are mined in the U.S. they somehow are preserved solely for American consumers. In reality, as I recently argued at Heatmap, these are commodities traded in a global market where high price volatility is the norm. Americans got a lesson about this fact the hard way last year when gas prices shot up across the country after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted global oil supplies.
Anybody using carbon energy leaves themselves highly vulnerable to awful dictators around the world.
Price risk used to be less of an issue with American natural gas, because it is so difficult to transport, but thanks to the pell-mell construction of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals under Obama and Trump, U.S. gas customers are now much more exposed to global market trends.
Europe was hit much harder by Putin’s war, because he directly cut off much of Russia’s supply of natural gas to the EU in an attempt to bully it out of supporting Ukrainian defense. The extortion did not work, but it did cause a gigantic spike in the price of European gas and energy bills. U.S. LNG terminals have turned out to be a godsend for Europe, which needs all the gas it can get in the short term, but that came at the expense of jacking up bills for U.S. consumers as well. Natural gas prices soared threefold in Southern California in January.
The bottom line is that anybody using carbon energy, especially oil and gas, leaves themselves highly vulnerable to awful dictators around the world.
Renewable energy, by contrast, is far more secure. Most of the cost of windmills and solar panels is in the purchase and installation, with relatively little maintenance needed and above all no constant supply of fuel sourced from power-mad despots. Energy production is somewhat erratic, depending as it does on the weather, but it can be forecasted with reasonable accuracy, and compensated with energy storage, upgrades to the grid, and so on. Batteries do require supplies of lithium and other materials, but that is a one-time purchase that can be reused hundreds of times, and they can also be recycled.
All this is a major reason why Europe is investing so heavily in renewables in response to Putin’s aggression. Currently, renewable power is much, much cheaper than energy coming from gas-fired plants, but even if it ends up requiring some expensive additional investments to fully replace that capacity, it will be worth it to ensure that Putin can’t yank the continent around by its pipeline leash.
Incidentally, nuclear energy is similarly predictable—it does require continual supplies of uranium, but the quantities are small relative to the expense of the rest of the facility, and so the price of ore has only a modest effect on the price of produced electricity.
Finally, there is the broader political context. It’s no coincidence that the largest fossil fuel–producing nations tend to be authoritarian and/or deeply corrupt—a centralized supply of valuable resources sold on the global market is a perfect tool for a would-be dictator bent on enriching himself and his cronies, and the resulting cash can also buy quiescence from the population. The brutal, fossilized Saudi monarchy could not possibly have survived as long as it has without its vast oil wealth. Similar effects can be seen in the U.S. itself, where right-wing oil billionaires have been a major source of funding for conservative politics for generations.
Ending the use of carbon energy would not just provide countries around the world with genuine energy security, it would strike a major blow against the forces of reactionary authoritarianism. It can’t happen soon enough.
