Does recent reporting at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, among other major media outlets, indicate that, after 2021’s huge rollout and focus on the “energy transition” narrative, and all the massive rises in energy costs of all kinds that materialized largely as a result, 2022 might become a year during which a new energy realism begins to take hold? We can only hope.
In a recent story titled “Europe Sleepwalked Into an Energy Crisis That Could Last Years,” Bloomberg, whose editorial slant puts it at the forefront of advocates for this energy transition to renewables, admits that Europe’s current crisis was “years in the making” because governments there engaged in massive virtue signaling initiatives that involved “shutting down coal-fired electricity plants and increasing its reliance on renewables.”
At the Wall Street Journal, where the news reporting advocacy often conflicts with positions staked out on the publication’s editorial page, it comes as no surprise that a new opinion piece this past week by Holman Jenkins is highly critical of Europe’s “crazy” climate politics. But the piece, titled “Europe’s Energy Crisis Goes Global,” also references a new study by commodities research firm CMT, very much an advocate of man-caused climate change theory. That study argues that 2022 will be a year in which real events on the ground, inevitable impacts from this rush to prematurely destroy energy sources we negatively call “fossil fuels” and nuclear, and to try to replace them with renewable sources that are not capable of filling the bill, will cause a new energy realism to take hold not just in the U.S. and Europe, but globally.
Again, we can only hope.
Jenkins quotes CMT as stating that electric vehicles that virtue-signaling politicians like Joe Biden are moving to subsidize with trillions of newly-printed dollars, Euros and other currencies around the world “will not significantly reduce carbon dioxide output, only shift its location...There are real constrains to moving toward clean energy industries.” Predictably, CMT cites the reluctance of voters and consumers to keep footing the massive bills for all of it as perhaps the single major constraint.
But EVs face a far more immovable constraint to their ultimate ability to displace a significant portion of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars than mere voter and consumer attitudes. That constraint comes in the form of the eternal, immutable laws of supply and demand.
I spent a good deal of time during 2021 researching, interviewing key players and writing about the challenges the electric vehicles (EVs) industry is likely to face in the coming years related to supply of an array of critical minerals that are essential to their manufacture. With the International Energy Agency projecting demand for lithium, antimony, graphite and other key minerals to rise by as much as 900% by 2030 and 4,000% by 2040, and the supply chains for them all mostly in control of the Chinese government, questions about the future viability of EVs to meet aggressive targets being set by governments around the world were bound to arise.