The reduction of CO2 emissions should not come at the price of putting America’s energy industry in a straitjacket.

By Dan Negrea, Sam Buchan, and Nick Loris

September 16, 2022

President Joe Biden needs to rethink his energy-climate-prosperity paradigm. His current thinking holds that the U.S. fossil fuel industry needs to be restrained because its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing imminent and catastrophic damage to the Earth. His solution is to hamstring the fossil fuel industry while pushing a government-financed accelerated transition to renewables. That is neither the way toward a reliable energy supply nor reduced emissions. Instead, the new paradigm should be an expansive “all-of-the-above” energy policy that promotes the growth of all American energy sources: fossil, solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, and more.\

America’s economy needs plentiful, reliable, varied, and cheap energy to remain strong. It must ensure the security and prosperity of the American people. Renewables just aren’t ready to meaningfully replace fossil fuels in our energy mix, and they won’t be for some time. Fossil fuels account for 78 percent of total U.S. energy consumption, while renewables register only 10 percent (excluding hydroelectricity). Little is expected to change in the next several decades given global energy demand growth and existing policies. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2022, in 2050, fossil fuels are still expected to provide 74 percent of total U.S. energy needs, while renewables will grow to just 16 percent.

Biden no doubt would like to boost the share of renewables, so his administration has introduced a raft of policies that discourage domestic oil and natural gas production. But some of his steps are not climate solutions at all and may even increase global emissions. When Biden asks Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to increase supply while shutting down domestic producers, he is turning his back on American companies that supply cleaner energy than their foreign counterparts.

There is a national security dimension to climate policy, as well. As Biden noted in a speech on his hundredth day in office: “[T]he climate crisis is not our fight alone; it’s a global fight. The United States accounts, as all of you know, less than 15 percent of carbon emissions. The rest of the world accounts for 85 percent. That’s why I kept my commitment to rejoin the Paris Accord—because if we do everything perfectly, it’s not going to ultimately matter.”

All countries must bear the burden of fighting climate change, but not all countries have produced a strong record so far. China has been the world’s largest emitter for years and has no short-term plans to change this. According to a Rhodium Group study that ranked countries on their share of global net greenhouse gas emissions, China was first with 27 percent, followed by the United States with 11 percent, India and the European Union (EU) at about 6 percent, and Russia and Brazil producing about 3 percent each. Note that China’s emissions exceeded those of the United States, India, and the EU combined. Some Chinese companies pollute more than entire nations. The United States’ climate-energy-economic growth policies should not weaken the U.S. economy—the basis of national security—while China continues to strengthen its power projection capabilities, all the while ignoring climate considerations.

Increasing American fossil fuel production will also serve U.S. and Western interests in the face of Russian aggression. Russian president Vladimir Putin is withholding energy exports and creating economic problems for European democracies through shortages and higher prices. Biden should remove the growth-inhibiting impediments that discourage increased domestic energy production to increase availability for both Americans and Europeans and reduce global prices. Lower energy prices would help U.S. consumers and choke off the revenues with which Putin finances his wars. Further, faster approval of export terminals will help an abundance of cleaner American liquified natural gas force dirtier Russian gas off the market.

Biden has political room to maneuver on a policy change. The American people clearly want the government to focus on economic prosperity more than on climate change. In a January Associated Press poll asking Americans to pick their top priorities, climate ranked eighth of eleven choices, far behind Covid-19 and the economy. In a July Gallup poll, only 2 percent of respondents selected climate change as the top issue, while inflation and poor leadership were tied at the top at 17 percent, followed by the economy in general at 12 percent. Respondents in a January Pew Research study that presented eighteen priorities ranked the strength of the economy first and climate fourteenth. A pivot towards a new energy policy that helps both consumers and the planet is politically feasible.

Climate Change Isn’t an Imminent Threat

Many critics will claim that dramatic changes in the climate warrant an equally dramatic makeover of the global economy. Instead of bending to specious arguments, the emerging field of climate economics provides a badly needed context to climate discussions, using facts and figures instead of adjectives to create more accurate frames of reference. Practitioners of climate economics have developed models showing that climate change is not the urgent threat to humanity’s future some make it out to be. There is no need for drastic changes in America’s economy, and there is time to develop technological solutions.

To wit: last year, two of us published an article reviewing several climate economics studies that estimated the impact of climate change on the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States and of the world in 2050 and in 2100. The general message of these studies was that the impact of climate change on future GDP levels appears to be manageable.

This year, a white paper produced by Biden’s own Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) points in the same direction. It notes that the president’s fiscal year 2023 budget states that the American GDP twenty-five years from now will be 4.5 percent lower because of the effects of climate change than it would have been without climate change effects. But the level of the GDP will still be higher than it is today. The white paper concludes that Americans would be 1.71 times richer in twenty-five years without climate change effects but only 1.66 times richer when reflecting climate change damages. This scenario is based on research by the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), an international collaboration comprised of more than 100 central banks and financial regulators.

The Biden white paper also addresses the impact of several climate change policies on the global GDP for the year 2100, again using research from the NGFS. The harshest GDP impact is under the scenario that assumes the continuation of current policies, in which case the global GDP at that time will be 13 percent lower because of climate change.

What does this mean? A 2021 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study projects that without the impact of climate change, global GDP will be $529 trillion in the year 2100. A 13 percent loss reduces it to $460 trillion. If we compare these two numbers with a 2021 global GDP of $96.1 trillion, we find that the world would be 5.5 times richer in 2100 without the impact of climate change, compared to 4.8 times richer under the most severe climate change scenario. A study published in July 2020 by Danish climate scientist Bjorn Lomborg has comparable findings: “Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today’s welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.”

This is not to say that climate change does not matter. Nor should policymakers ignore low-probability, high-impact scenarios—a lesson we can learn from the Covid-19 pandemic. Policymakers should instead learn that the projected economic decline caused by climate change appears to be manageable and should be addressed in a cost-effective manner.

Furthermore, national, and especially global, aggregated climate projections mask large potential disparities. Moody’s Analytics Global Macroeconomic Model shows that over the next several decades, some countries will be climate winners, and others climate losers. The GDP of several developed countries in colder climates, such as Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, will be higher because of climate change, while that of many developing countries in warmer climates will be lower. Of course, climate change doesn’t stop after a few decades, and it is difficult to project costs several decades (let alone centuries) into the future. In many respects, climate change is risk management, and accurately communicating its risks and uncertainties is critical for policymakers to make better decisions.

Policies for Enduring American Leadership

The Biden administration has framed the fight against climate change as a defining challenge of the twenty-first century. Indeed, our present time is a generational moment requiring leadership, resource mobilization, and innovation on a level not witnessed since World War II—but not in the ways climate alarmists would suggest. We need bold action to develop more American energy resources and new infrastructure responsibly, expeditiously, and at a global scale. Our primary aim must be to mitigate the current global energy crisis’ effects on the American consumer and to secure American energy leadership.

The solution to the Covid-19 pandemic was not found in government lockdowns, but in unleashing the innovative capacity of American science to discover vaccines and the ability of American industry to produce them. Similarly, the solution to the climate challenge will not come from growth-inhibiting government regulations in a smaller and poorer America that produces less carbon dioxide. It will come from a powerful and prosperous America, with a vibrant private sector spending generous amounts of research and development money on technological solutions.

Private sector competition and innovation must drive progress, not the government picking winners and losers through myriad incentives, tax credits, and distortionary subsidies. Embracing a policy approach of encouraging competition and innovation will also enable America’s fossil fuel industry to both expand and become cleaner and more efficient—as it has already been doing for decades, with extraordinary results. For instance, the United States led the world in emissions reductions between 2005 and 2020, reducing its emissions by 1,423 million metric tons—a 24 percent decline. Compare this to the world’s second-largest economy, China, where emissions increased by 3801 million metric tons over the same period.

In keeping with these principles and a commitment to an “all-of-the-above” model, three policy recommendations stand out:

First and foremost, permitting regulatory modernization and reform is critical. Despite three recent bills on energy and related issues and outlays of more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending, these barriers to growth are still there. A prime example is the forty-year-old and heavily litigated National Environmental Policy Act. At present, infrastructure permits face average delays of more than four years (five years for nuclear) because of environmental impact statements alone. The permitting process also costs the applicants millions. Streamlining environmental reviews and permitting will bring more natural gas, nuclear, renewables, transmission, efficient manufacturing, and resilient infrastructure online faster. In fact, NEPA red tape disproportionately affects clean energy, transmission, and conservation-related projects.

Congress must also take on a difficult fight and establish statutory guidelines for executive agencies to halt the anti-growth climate-related mission creep at nearly every agency. This would protect the industry from regulatory uncertainty such as that initiated by the State Department’s revocation of the Keystone XL pipeline permit. New statutory guidelines would also help halt the Securities and Exchange Commission’s flagrant attempt to impose regulations akin to social credit programs, such as its climate-related disclosure rule. Congress would also be wise to embrace policies like the One Federal Decision Framework, which would eliminate redundancy in environmental assessments.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) must quicken the pace to approve and certify small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) and advanced reactors. The NRC recently certified NuScale’s SMR for use in the United States, but it took six years. NuScale spent over $500 million and two million labor hours to complete the applications. SMRs are a promising technology to meet the world’s energy needs and climate objectives but the current pace for approval is far too slow. Holding back American nuclear energy companies could also cede ground on the international stage to China and Russia, whose state-owned nuclear firms are building facilities in places like Africa.

Second, U.S. policies must reject outsourcing emissions to adversarial nations like China, Iran, Russia, and OPEC that extract, mine, process, and refine less efficiently than the United States. The United States must ensure a stable base from which to grow and expand innovation to responsible mining and processing of uranium, critical minerals, and rare earth elements. U.S. allies, through the process of near-shoring, should also play a critical role in establishing resilient supply chains. Americans should never be presented with the false choice of picking between child labor in Congo or Uyghur slave labor in China.

Third, beyond continued investment into critical science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) early educational programs, state and federal policies must also encourage a new generation of innovators and engineers to carry the torch farther. At present, market opportunities for nuclear engineers are set to decline 8 percent by 2030 while the number of new entrants in petroleum engineering has declined for seven consecutive years. Embracing an all-of-the-above energy policy, in which policymakers and elected officials do not pick winners and losers, will go far in reversing this trajectory.

Conclusion

The reduction of CO2 emissions, a worthwhile objective, should not come at the price of putting America’s fossil fuel industry—or the energy industry writ large—in a straitjacket through government regulations, which in turn will lower economic growth and could realistically increase emissions by offshoring them. On the contrary, the solution to the climate change challenge will come from innovation generated in the private sector, especially in America’s energy industry.  An “all-of-the-above” energy policy will unleash the potential of all segments of the U.S. energy industry, the solid foundation needed for a strong and prosperous America.

Dan Negrea served at the US State Department as a member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff and as the Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs.

Sam Buchan is the Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the America First Policy Institute.  He served as the Director for International Economic Policy at the National Economic Council and as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy.

Nick Loris is the Vice President of Public Policy at the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions. He testifies often before Congress on energy, climate, and environmental issues.

Image: Reuters.