Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

A lot of people believe that the reason for the global energy crisis, which is threatening economic recovery, is because we didn’t do enough renewables, but the opposite is the case. Nations overinvested in weather-dependent renewables & under-invested in reliable power sources

https://twitter.com/bjornlomborg/status/1448206402120527872

Renewables will constitute 70% the $530 billion spent globally on new electricity generation capacity in 2021

It’s been that way for years. Had that money gone to reliable energy sources, there would be no global energy supply shortage

Climate activism helped create the energy supply shortages directly through pressure on companies and indirectly through policies that subsidized unreliable renewables and disincentivized reliable power.

“There are strong pressures on companies to keep oil and gas portfolios in check. Despite higher prices, oil companies are holding aggregate oil and gas spending flat in 2021, and their share of overall upstream spending is now at 25%, compared with nearly 40% in the mid-2010s.”

Both China and India today face coal shortages after years of over-investing in unreliable renewables and under-investing in reliable energy .

“The rising share of renewables in new power generation investment has been accompanied by a sharp drop in approvals for new coal-fired power plants, which are some 80% below where they were five years ago.”

iea.org/data-and-stati…

All of that has changed within a matter of days

China is now rapidly expanding coal production to meet energy supply shortages

All of this is awkward given the Kabuki theater nations had planned for the big climate summit in November

Global elites who have been propagandizing for renewables now find themselves on the defensive

Their message? Double down on the tech and policies that created the energy crisis.

Classic.

Faced with a massive credibility crisis over having created a global energy and economic crisis, elites are doubling down on hysteria and pseudoscience:

https://twitter.com/bjornlomborg/status/1447988929534304257

I testified before Congress six times since January last year and repeatedly warned that over-dependence and over-investment in unreliable renewables, and under-investment in reliable energy, was causing blackouts, and that they would worsen

environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2021/…

The global energy crisis proves that I was more right than I knew.

It wasn’t just Calif. & Texas that over-invested in unreliable energies & underinvested in reliable ones, but many big nations had done the same

And the sum of such under-investment was greater than its parts

Meanwhile, both media and expert elites continue to undermine their credibility by urging the use of *more* unreliable energy in response to the crisis

The head of the International Energy Agency, @fbirol , is actually urging nations to spend *more* on unreliable energy, following the lead of climate activists in the news media.

It’s not just bonkers, it’s dangerous. They are proposing to worsen the crisis they created

https://twitter.com/thomas_m_wilson/status/1448221494488748032

“No foreign bogeyman offers a satisfying explanation for Europe’s gas crisis. There is another plausible, albeit controversial, explanation found closer to home: the continent’s headlong rush to decarbonise its energy system.”

economist.com/europe/2021/10…

“What Europe’s leaders are hiding from on the eve of the UN’s big climate summit next month is the first crisis of the energy transition. As it embraces renewables, the region has not properly dealt with the need for redundancy on the grid.”