Bless Paul Krugman’s little birdbrain. The disgruntled propagandist disguising himself as an economist is once again departing from his normal economic mudslinging schtick to kvetch over the climate change boondoogle.
Krugman’s latest move was to sling sludge at those who dared defend the utility of fossil fuels in an economy that’s being jawboned into an eco-friendly future.
“Fossil Fuels and Fossilized Minds,” read Krugman’s hilarious September 30 Substack headline, ironic given that this is the same person who told President Joe Biden before his term in office, “Don’t worry about inflation.” Who exactly has a “fossilized” mind again, Krugman?
After cringeworthy praises of “Wind power” and how he “likes” the eyesore “sight of wind turbines,” Krugman proceeded to attack President Donald Trump because he “hates wind power and loves coal. Both passions are deeply irrational. Yet they are shaping policy.”
Krugman’s new beef was that Trump was trying to revive a dying coal industry that he argued was just phased out by typical market shifts towards natural gas and renewables. “The truth, however, is that coal is a dying industry for very good reasons, and anti-wokeism is unlikely to revive it. Coal stopped being a significant source of jobs decades ago.”
But as Climate Depot founder Marc Morano told MRC Business: “Krugman needs to examine how energy is produced to understand why coal is a crucial component in reviving American energy dominance.”
It's unclear why he considers himself any kind of authority on this matter when he had just finished nuking his own credibility on economics during the Biden administration, but whatever. Then again, this is the same Krugman who stupidly advocated that Americans should “politicize the weather.”
Firstly, said Morano, “a healthy coal industry is crucial for any nation's national security. Domestic coal production is a strategic asset that does not depend on importation. Coal helps achieve economic stability and supply chain resilience.” But in Krugman’s ignorant world, trying to maintain a thriving coal sector is just about a “culture war. Trying to bring back coal is all about owning the libs. And if it damages the environment, well, from MAGA’s point of view that’s a plus.” Morano slammed Krugman’s take as completely false.
One of the biggest boo-boos Krugman made was when he asserted that “Wind power is, in fact, far cleaner and safer than burning fossil fuels.” Morano took that narrative to the cleaners:
Not even close: the documentary Juice explained: ‘Just to produce one turbine, we have to extract 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of non-renewable plastic. Then we’ve got to transport that and burn fuel, getting it all carried across the world and put up. And none of these things that go into a turbine are renewable.’
Krugman also bleated that it was supposedly a “simple fact that coal is no longer cost-competitive, while wind and solar are…Trying to keep coal alive will make energy more expensive, not less.” But Morano pointed out that Krugman’s argument hinges on a red herring:
The goal of America’s energy sector isn’t to create as many jobs as possible (as Krugman would apparently have us believe), especially the politically-favored and heavily-subsidized renewable energy jobs. Instead, the goal is to produce as much electric power as possible at the lowest possible cost, and that means we want to choose the most productive energy like coal, which requires fewer energy workers.
If that wasn’t clear enough, economist Mark Perry concluded in a 2017 analysis for the American Enterprise Institute that it takes 79 solar workers to produce the same amount of electric power as one coal worker. See the issue with Krugman’s argument yet?
While natural gas and technological advances in fracking have certainly contributed to the market shift away from fossil fuels, Morano argued that “there was also a deadly effective ‘war on coal’ unleashed by the Obama administration and continued by the Biden administration.”
Last year, energy journalist Robert Bryce also undercut the “Western conceit” of a phony energy transition that Krugman made the centerpiece of his thesis: “[D]espite massive federal subsidies and numerous mandates at the local and state levels, wind and solar energy aren’t keeping pace with the growth in natural gas.”
Bryce further wrote that “The U.S. and Western European countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the [German] Energiewende to fund buildouts of solar, wind, batteries, and tutti-fruity-colored hydrogen, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world will do the same.”
Kind of hard to argue that it was just market forces phasing out coal when one sector was getting pumped with hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies while another was being stymied by intentional overregulation, eh Krugman?
