Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Hi @fmanjoo @nytimes

Your recent article claims “fossil fuels... get more expensive as we pull more of them from the ground”

But that’s falsified by the tech revolution which dramatically lowered the price of natural gas (graph below)

Isn’t a correction merited?

https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1387983505888620550

You might be interested in research I did into the origins of the fracking revolution which resulted in radical price declines of oil & gas. It was cited by your colleague a few years back:

nytimes.com/2015/01/21/bus…

You might also be interested in reporting done by your newspaper into the use of forced labor to make solar panels, which may be responsible for a significant share of their price decline, alongside dumping, neither of which is mentioned in your column

nytimes.com/2021/01/08/bus…

They wrote a follow-up story recently that you might have missed

“In the past few years, Chinese polysilicon manufacturers have increasingly shifted to Xinjiang, lured by abundant coal and cheap electricity for their energy-intensive production.”

nytimes.com/2021/04/20/bus…

You may also be interested in learning and writing about how and why, even as solar panels and wind turbines themselves become cheaper, they make electricity more expensive

Every place that deploys renewables energies at scale makes electricity more expensive.

California has seen its electricity prices rise 7 times more than they did in the rest of the U.S. since 2011.

Germany saw its electricity prices rise 50% as it deployed renewables and today they are the highest in Europe.

France spends about half as much for electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions as Germany.

After generating just 23% of its electricity from solar panels, California is suffering from blackouts and price spikes stemming from over-dependence on weather-dependent energies.

Imagine what tripling solar production would do.

While you might look at all the evidence and still support transitioning to weather-dependent energies, your column requires a correction.

Best wishes,

Michael

PS: One reason renewables make electricity expensive is bc they are weather dependent and thus produce electricity when we don’t need it and not enough when we do:

neon.energy/Hirth-2013-Mar…

Another reason is because they require so much land:

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/finally-they…

Still another reason is their unreliability

All in all, seven years after passage, consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of renewable energy mandates policy

forbes.com/sites/michaels…