We're stumbling our way right into an energy crisis and I think it's going to be very bad

I think of all the political things progressives obsess over—the transgender stuff, the genital mutilation of children, the seizing of guns, the universal healthcare—none are so frightening and potentially ruinous as the climate thing. We now have a few generations of young voters and activists who are genuinely convinced that the world is on the cusp of some sort of extinction-level event, that the planet is “dying” and we have to take extremely drastic measures in order to save it. It is hard to overstate just how seriously they take these claims, and the lengths which they think it’s necessary to go in order to address them.

I mean look: The whole thing is pretty obviously bogus. I care deeply about the environment and I think we have a mandate to steward it as best we can. But scientists have been predicting climatic catastrophe for decades and it simply never comes to pass. Thirty-five years ago one top U.N. official predicted that the world had 10 years to reduce greenhouse gasses “before it goes beyond human control” and “entire nations [are] wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels.” It never happened! All your favorite nations are still here, un-wiped. Mega-climate professor James Hansen said in 2008 that the Arctic would be ice-free in the summer as early as 2013 but no later than 2018. That, of course, failed to happen. (They’ve learned from their mistakes and have now pushed the date up to 2035.) In 2006 Al Gore was predicting we had until around 2016 before the world passed a “point of no return” from which catastrophic climate change was inevitable. Needless to say that date has also been continuously moved up, for obvious reasons. We could go on and on. I just don’t know what to tell you. These people have been wrong, constantly, for decades, and they don’t seem to be getting any righter. But the sum total of all this wrongness is nevertheless a few generations of people who think we’re at the same terrifying tipping point they’ve been predicting since like 1965. There’s just no accounting for it.

It would be kind of funny if the stakes weren’t so deadly serious. What has happened is the constant hysteria and fearmongering has pushed policymakers and industry leaders to rush headlong into renewable energy fanaticism, with the result being that a larger and larger share of our energy grid is becoming reliant on as-of-yet unreliable energy generation that hasn’t been adequately tested at scale. To be sure, I like green energy. New, clever, ingenious, lifesaving technology is always exciting. Obviously renewables are the future of energy; the fossil fuels are going to run out at some point and we’ll need something else to power our modern civilization. We need to invest in this stuff, develop it, refine it. What we don’t need to do is rapidly replace our reliable fossil fuel network with one of spotty solar panels and crummy wind turbines. There’s no emergency. We have plenty of fossil fuels for the coming decades and the planet isn’t about to die, regardless of what your 19-year-old claims after coming back from his first year at UCSF. If we rush this sort of thing then we’re going to end up with a power grid incapable of sustaining the level of demand placed upon it, and people will die.

That’s not just speculation. At the Senate last week, a panel of experts warned the Energy Committee that a headlong rush into a green grid is risking significant catastrophe. As one midwestern cooperative executive put it, we “have this push for new renewables and this push to shut down plants that work, and there’s nothing there in the middle to save us. I fear we are going to have blackouts, and I’m afraid we’re going to see a significant number of lives lost.” What he’s delicately trying to say is that you’re going to see significant parts of the country plunged into darkness and a ton of people are going to die.

Don’t scoff: That’s what will happen if the power grid fails. This isn’t a mathematical model or a theoretical prediction; it’s the predictable, comprehensible result of population-scale electrical failure. The energy grid is life. Electricity powers the things that save lives. The lifesaving things you take for granted come through the power lines. For decades those lines have been reliably wired up because of highly dependable utility coal and petroleum generation. The climate hysteria is pushing to make that not so. That is how people die, lots of people. It’s not rocket science.

Activists don’t want to believe this. They say insane things like, “We can have 100% renewable energy in less than five years if we want it!” There is no awareness of the deadly delicacy of the situation, the precipice upon which the entire thing is perched. The U.S. energy grid is a sheer modern miracle— “the largest machine in the world” and one that, more than anything else, has transformed the formerly rude and unavoidable griminess and shortness of life into the healthy, long-lasting, brightly lit marvel that is now daily living. A thing like that is always delicate, always just a few bad ideas from ruin. Allowing climate mania to wreck this precious thing, and end countless lives, would be a catastrophe of our own making. We are actually already in the process of making it. The stage is being set for something really awful to come next. I would love to be wrong, of course. If I’m not, of course, I won’t be able to gloat about it here, because—well, you know.