Extreme Debt Climate Warning

To avoid “climate catastrophe,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the world—which mostly means the United States—must spend an additional $3 trillion in capital per year through at least 2050.

That would be 3% of world gross domestic product (GDP), and 12% of U.S. GDP. This amount, astonishingly, will mean less than a 50% increase in the federal budget, which will pass $6 trillion in 2024.

Not to worry. The Secretary of the Treasury, speaking in Brazil at a meeting of G20 finance ministers, reassures us that this investment represents “the single greatest opportunity of the 21st century.” Lots and lots of money is to be made off of green government programs. So, printing and disbursing all that money for windmill totem poles and druidical sun henges, among other atavistic religious pursuits, just makes us richer.

However bizarre the notion that men who say they are women must be given access to women’s locker rooms and be allowed to claim all the victories in women’s sports; however strange it is to see the morbidly obese praised for their beauty and a female confabulation portraying Christ in the Paris Olympics; however odd it is to live in a world in which everyone is entitled to “my truth,” however many genders we count up, whether 22, or 64 or 128; however sickening it is to have kindergarten classrooms turned over to sexual grooming; or siccing the FBI on parents who object as terrorists, none of these things violate common sense any more than the idea that jacking up energy costs by $3 trillion per year amounts to an “opportunity.” The most plausible explanation for the climate cult beyond Janet Yellen’s credulity is theft and corruption on a vast scale.

And yet just as the bizarre sexual notions of the chattering classes and the media go essentially unchallenged except by the already marginalized, Ms. Yellen’s remarks in Brazil apparently attracted no dissent. No outrage greets laying that $3 trillion yoke on those who pay to support the lifestyles of the credentialed and infamous.

Meanwhile, among the makers of the world, the scaremongering of the takers appears increasingly absurd. Whether or not human emissions of carbon dioxide are discernibly affecting the planet, it becomes ever more obvious that proliferating government mandates, regulations  and taxes only obstruct the enterprise and innovations that are always the solution.

Human beings don’t need energy. Energy can neither be created not destroyed. They use power, energy applied to a purpose at a particular time and place. Fossil fuels have dominated because they are stores of energy that can be released in a convenient time and place.  Alternatives such as wind and solar produce nearly useless energy difficult to convert to power. Even nuclear power has been less convenient because of the difficulties of ramping a reactor up and down for “peak power”.

The progress of battery technology is changing all that. As the graph below shows the cost of battery storage per kilowatt hour has fallen by almost 99% in a quarter of a century. The coming decade will see not only comparable declines in price but gains in safety. Companies such as Solidion (which we cover in George Gilder’s Moonshots) are replacing dangerous liquid electrolytes—the reason lithium-ion batteries blow up and burn—with solid state devices immune from that risk. Graphene components, combined with aluminum ion batteries heralded last week by Elon Musk, promise to boost battery efficiency by an order of magnitude.

Data: public sources.  Graph: the authors.

Just 20 years ago, solar looked as silly as it does today except in local applications. Wind looks silly and dangerous even now. But the drastic improvements in battery efficiency promise to make those energy sources as portable—in both time and space—as fossil fuels. Nuclear becomes more universally plausible as the problem of peak power goes away.

And while we will eventually rebuild the American electrical grid with new materials, including graphene, to the extent batteries in every home and enterprise moderate or eliminate the need for peak power, rebuilding the grid becomes less urgent.

Secretary Yellen can save her $3 trillion for a rainy day. Our energy future is as sunny as can be, and that’s one less “problem” the government can tax us for solving.