Reuters admits net zero goals have failed despite trillions spent on renewables, with energy prices rising and fossil fuels remaining dominant.
Wow, who knew that setting insane and arbitrary emission goals to “net zero” would be an exercise in utter futility, eh Reuters? [emphasis, links added]
The climate-obsessed Reuters had somewhat of a red-pill moment in a February 28 item when it admitted that the “pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure.”
For an outlet that once advocated for the Nobel Peace Prize to be doled out to juvenile eco-delinquent Greta Thunberg, this must have been a hard pill to swallow.
Reuters conceded that “[d]espite trillions of dollars spent on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for over 80%, opens new tab of the world’s primary energy and a similar share of recent increases in energy consumption, according to The Energy Institute.”
Coal, oil, and natural gas production, reported Reuters, “are at record highs.”
Good for Reuters to come around to the obvious, er, finally. But the meaningless nature of such economy-crippling standards was already circulating in the ether long before Reuters did its about-face.
As Climate Depot founder Marc Morano told MRC Business in June 2024, “Net zero in the climate agenda is really nothing short of Soviet-style central planning. Every sector of our economy is subject to long-range planning to meet net-zero goals.”
Even by leftist standards, net zero emissions were already speculated to achieve next to nothing.
Then-Secretary of State under President Barack Obama John Kerry conceded in 2015 during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21): “If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions – remember what I just said, all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions – it wouldn’t be enough.”
No kidding. Reuters, of course, didn’t bother resurfacing Kerry’s comments in its latest piece. But the outlet did admit that the enormous push toward renewables hasn’t necessarily resulted in lower costs for consumers:
Solar and wind power have grown to a mere 3.5% of primary energy production. The levelised cost of renewable energy – which measures of the net present value of electricity produced over a plant’s lifetime – has declined sharply over the years. But this has not resulted into lower electricity prices. In fact, as the share of the energy mix provided by renewables has risen, electricity prices have tended to increase. That’s because wind and solar power are intermittent. Since storing energy in batteries is uneconomic, traditional sources of power are still needed as backup, which is expensive.
Thanks a lot, Captain Obvious!
Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow Bjorn Lomborg told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow in 2021 that even if all U.S. presidents for the next seventy years were to follow then-President Joe Biden’s extremist emissions-cutting policies, “it will reduce temperatures trivially.”
Lomborg said the reduction would only be a meaningless “0.07° Fahrenheit. And this is through the UN climate model. So, it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be very costly. It’ll have virtually no impact.”
Noted Lomborg, “[Y]ou’ve never solved a problem in history by telling people, ‘Could you live with less?’ You were just talking about that. ‘Could you please — you know — celebrate your Fourth of July in a way you’d hate?’”
Apparently, Reuters couldn’t really grasp this concept totally until around now, given that it was pumping out net zero agitprop as recently as October 2024, such as the following item headlined: “Net zero target needs $3.5 trillion in annual green energy investment, Wood Mackenzie says.”
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