by Stephen Moore
President Barack Obama raised a lot of eyebrows when
he declared in his United Nations climate change speech: “Over the past
eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution
by more than any other nation on Earth.”
That’s absolutely true. And it’s remarkable because
we as a nation didn’t ratify the Kyoto Treaty, pass a carbon tax or
enact Obama’s cap and trade agenda.
It’s all the more remarkable because Americans have
been scolded nearly every day for being a major source of all these
satanic gases that are allegedly burning up the planet. Instead, since
2005, our emissions are down by roughly 10 percent and almost twice that
amount on a per capita basis. Not bad.
How did that happen? If you think the answer is that we’ve transitioned to green energy, you are completely wrong.
The game-changer for the U.S. has been the shale oil
and gas revolution over the past six years brought about through new
smart drilling technologies. The U.S. is now the largest natural gas
producer in the world. And as America has produced more natural gas, we
have shifted away from coal.
This, according to the Energy Information
Administration, accounts for more than 60 percent of the carbon emission
reductions in the United States. Obama never mentioned that.
Here’s the real stunner: if we want to reduce carbon
emissions further, investing in natural gas is a far more efficient
strategy than going all in for so-called “green renewable energy”
sources.
Over the last seven years, the U.S. government has
spent almost $70 billion in tax, regulatory and spending subsidies to
the renewable energy sector. But wind and solar energy after this
avalanche of government support account for only about three percent of
electricity production.
By contrast, the shale gas explosion has been almost entirely devoid of subsidies–yet its output has exploded.
That’s great news for the environment because
natural gas emits only about half the carbon as coal, even though coal
is much cleaner than it once was.