Next time you hear a politician talk about clean energy or climate change, remember what happened in 2011:
1) The Keystone XL Pipeline was approved. This will allow tar sands and shale, which are dirtier than coal, to be liquified and transported from British Columbia to the Gulf. The pipleine will move close to 200 million barrels of oil a year for decades.
2) Russia and Exxon have agreed to develop the Russian Arctic together and inked a deal to develop an expected 35 billion barrel block. This likely represents the first of many deals that will be struck for decades to come because melting glaciers continue to open up new seabeds for drilling.
3) China and India continued a double digit growth rate in coal imports- each topping 100 million tons. Nearly 100 gigawatts (about 100 power plants) of coal-fired plants will be put online this year.
Next time someone mentions replacing your light bulbs or improving efficiency or driving a prius, think of the globbal context of energy. It is a form of denial when people convince themselves that this is the solution to a dirty, and rapidly growing energy infrastructure. The solution is pricing energy appropriately- not employing another ad agency to sell you "green". We make the future not with our words, but with our actions. What is the true measure of efficiency? When you do not have to perenially increase supply to achieve output gains. So long as the U.S. competes on a global market for energy, and does not invest in domestic renwables, GHG emissions will rise. This looks to be the case for many decades to come.
