Robert Bryce offers a takedown at National Review Online of Paul Krugman’s ill-informed analysis of energy policy.
In 2014, in these pages, I debunked a Krugman column that claimed that due to cost reductions in solar energy, “drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions are now within fairly easy reach.”
Unfortunately, Krugman is again making similar claims. The problem is that Krugman doesn’t bother to provide any hard numbers to bolster his arguments. Instead, Krugman claims that we’ve seen a “miracle” in energy technology because the “cost of electricity generated by wind and sun has dropped dramatically” and that the cost of the batteries needed to store electricity are “plunging as we speak.” He goes on, claiming “we are only a few years from a world in which carbon-neutral sources of energy could replace much of our consumption of fossil fuels at quite modest cost.” The key words in that line are, of course, “much” and “quite modest.”
Equally remarkable is Krugman’s claim that “the Paris agreement from last year means that if the U.S. moves forward on climate action, much of the world will follow our lead.”
Let’s take that last claim first. The Paris deal that Krugman cites so approvingly was, in fact, meaningless. As my Manhattan Institute colleague, Oren Cass, has noted, the Paris meeting resulted in nothing more than a “pledge and review” process that called on each country to provide a document outlining possible emission cuts. There was no binding agreement to enforce those cuts, nor were there any baselines for determining how the cuts might be measured. For example, the document submitted by Pakistan (known as an “Intended Nationally Determined Contribution”) consisted of a single page in which the Pakistanis said they would “only be able to make specific commitments once reliable data on our peak emission levels is available.” In other words, Pakistan said: “We’ll get back to you.”