A Brewing Climate Mastery Crisis

Irony Alert: Heatmap, a site that regards what it calls "the great climate and energy transition" as "the biggest story in the world" misses the real story in a story titled "How to Survive a Blackout in a Heat Wave:"

According to new research published this spring, a two-day citywide blackout in Phoenix during a heat wave could lead to half the population -- some 789,600 people -- requiring emergency medical attention in a metropolitan area with just 3,000 available beds. As many as 12,800 people could die, the equivalent of more than nine Hurricane Katrinas.

Power outages can happen during a heat wave for a number of reasons. The most obvious is because of strain on the power grid, as everyone cranks up their air conditioning at the same time. By one estimate, "two-thirds of North America is at risk of energy shortfalls this summer during periods of extreme demand." Blackouts can be both city- and state-wide, like when 11 million people were without power following a deadly grid failure in Texas in 2021; or rolling, to prevent a more catastrophic failure; or localized, like when a wildfire takes down transmission lines. [bold added, links omitted]

The piece then offers advice on how to cope after making sure readers understand just how ugly such a situation would be.

And, in case you don't believe them, history will back them up on that score. For example, energy expert Alex Epstein (whose name appeared nowhere in a search of the Heatmap site) notes a 1911 heat wave in his best-selling Fossil Future. Within, he quotes a report by the New England Historical Society:

A July 1911 heat wave killed thousands of New Englanders and sent many over the brink of madness. ...

During 11 hellish days, horses dropped in the street and babies didn't wake up from their naps. Boats in Providence Harbor oozed pitch and began to take on water. Tar in the streets bubbled like hot syrup. Trees shed their leaves, grass turned to dust and cows' milk started to dry up.

In every major northeastern city, the sweltering heat drove people to suicide.

On July 4, temperatures hit 103 in Portland, 104 in Boston (a record that still stands), 105 in Vernon, Vt., and 106 in Nashua, N.H., and Bangor, Maine. At least 200 died from drowning, trying to cool off in rivers, lakes, ponds and the ocean -- anything wet. Still more died from heat stroke. The 1911 heat wave was possibly the worst weather disaster in New England's history, with estimates of the death toll as high as 2,000. [bold added]

If that account doesn't make you grateful to the long line of inventors who made reliable power and air conditioning possible, I don't know what will.

But while climate catastrophists blame fossil fuels (and us for using them) for every extreme weather phenomenon that pops up, they give very little thought to what Epstein calls climate mastery:

We are typically taught that whatever the benefits of fossil fuels or other forms of energy are, they always come at the expense of our environmental safety and health.

But the history of climate safety shows that fossil-fueled machine labor makes us far safer from climate -- a phenomenon I call "climate mastery."

(Adaptation, the term often used, does not do justice to the power of this phenomenon or its dependence on cost-effective energy.) [bold added]

"[E]veryone cranks up their air conditioning at the same time" is an attempt to exercise this mastery -- and it is being thwarted by the very "energy transition" the likes of Heatmap, Greta Thunberg, and Al Gore advocate with varying degrees of shrillness -- and uninformly outrageous levels of context-dropping.

Here, the context being dropped is the decreased reliability of the grid, something Epstein explains and calls reliability chicken:

Since the same people pushing for these have pushed measures that make electricity less reliable, you might want a car with an internal combustion engine as a cool, effective means of escape. (Image by Ernest Ojeh, via Unsplash, license.)

Is it any wonder that the more solar and wind a country uses, the higher its [infrastructure] costs?

The massive infrastructure duplication costs of intermittent solar and wind are compounded by a further cost problem with solar and wind's dependence on controllable, usually fossil fuel, power plants: a decrease in the fuel efficiency of the controllable power plants.

To the extent a grid is committed to using solar and wind, whenever sunlight or wind increases, the grid has to cycle down controllable power plants, and whenever sunlight or wind decreases or disappears, it has to cycle up controllable power plants.

Rapidly cycling power plants up and down is an efficiency killer, just as stop-and-go-traffic kills your car's fuel efficiency.

The infrastructure-duplication costs and fuel-inefficiency costs caused by solar and wind's reliance on controllable energy sources is the dominant reason why the more solar and wind you use, the higher your costs are.

The reality of solar and wind around the world is that they are not outcompeting fossil fuels in the realm of electricity; they are making electricity generated by fossil fuels and other controllable sources of electricity (nuclear and hydro) more expensive.

This reality leads to a frequent, additional negative consequence: declining reliability.

The reason is simple: governments seeking to lessen the large price increases that come with more solar and wind are trying to get away with fewer controllable power plants as backup.

This is a game of "reliability chicken" that many areas of the U.S. are losing, with disastrous consequences. In the summer of 2020, California, after shutting down several natural gas and nuclear power plants in recent years, experienced widespread blackouts because there wasn't enough controllable capacity available in the region during the evening hours of a heat wave, when both solar and wind were unavailable.

In the winter of 2021, Texas, after subsidizing and mandating wind at the expense of building, maintaining, and weatherizing controllable power plants, had a massive shortfall of supply that, compounded by major operating errors by the grid, caused statewide blackouts for days.

Solar and wind are not, contrary to our knowledge system, proving to be a scalable replacement for ultra-cost-effective fossil fuel energy. They are proving to be a cost-adding, reliability-decreasing supplement -- and just for electricity, at that. [notes omitted, bold added] (Fossil Future, pp. 216-217)

California and Texas were warnings -- about reliability chicken -- that, as far as I can tell, are being ignored in favor of more of the same from our failing knowledge system: catastrophizing climate and taking climate mastery for granted to the extent that it is acknowledged at all.

And so we have, on what could well be the eve of a horrible, man-made catastrophe, some of the people responsible for making it more likely posing as wise and helpful benefactors.

Shame on you, Heatmap!

-- CAV