If you think Donald Trump’s victory is hard enough on Kamala Harris’s campaign staff, spare a thought for the world’s climate activists and their assorted luvvie hangers-on. Just Stop Oil lost no time in spraying the US embassy in Battersea, claiming that democracy has been ‘hijacked by corporate interests and billionaires’. Billy Porter, an actor presenting the Prince of Wales’s Earthshot Prize, said he had been ‘crying all day’ over the result.
The activists and lobbyists heading for the Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku over the next few days shouldn’t worry too much – contrary to popular imagination, US carbon emissions per capita continued to fall over the course of Trump’s first presidency, from 16.1 tonnes per person in 2016 to 14.9 tonnes per person in 2021 – in part thanks to coal being displaced by cleaner gas, much of it shale gas. If you want to see more electric cars on American roads, Trump is unlikely to be standing in the way of that, given his closeness to Elon Musk.
But what Trump’s election does do is to put Britain, and Ed Miliband, even further out on a limb with our dogmatic and inflexible net-zero targets. It must now be clear, as if it wasn’t already, that the rest of the world is not going to be following our example and committing themselves to industrial decline in order to reach arbitrary targets. Many countries may be building wind turbines, solar farms and electric cars – China especially – but they are not going to be sacrificing economic growth.
This week the National Energy System Operator (NESO), the newly nationalised body which has been set the task of overseeing Miliband’s dream of decarbonising the grid by 2030, published a report emphasising just how difficult and expensive it would be. While it said a 95 per cent target for clean energy (note, not Miliband’s 100 per cent target) was just about ‘achievable’ – it could hardly do anything else given that it is a public body doing the government’s bidding – the details were less than convincing. The target cannot be achieved, concluded NESO, without a contribution from carbon capture and storage (CCS) and green hydrogen – technologies which still do not yet exist on an adequate commercial scale anywhere in the world and probably are not going to be magicked into existence in the next six years, even with £22 billion of government investment in CCS. Moreover, NESO concludes that we will have to maintain as much gas-generating capacity as we have at present, so that we can use it as backup in calm, overcast weather conditions such as we have had this week. To keep gas stations on standby when they are only going to be used for generating 5 per cent of our electricity, NESO recognises, would require hefty intervention.
We should be thankful to Donald Trump – and Barack Obama and George W. Bush before him – for promoting an unashamed policy of US energy self-sufficiency. It was only thanks to a surge in US shale gas production over the past 15 years which helped Britain and the rest of Europe avoid an even more severe energy crunch after the invasion of Ukraine. It is that gas which we are now importing in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG). That has gone a long way to make up for the decline in North Sea production and the failure to exploit our own shale gas reserves – although of course our reliance on it is making the US richer at our expense. Miliband says he wants to free us from ‘fossil-fuel dictators’, but even the NESO is now saying that he will still need gas even if we do pursue the government’s nirvana of zero-carbon electricity in just six years’ time. Trump is one fossil-fuel ‘dictator’ we will continue to need.
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