In a recent letter to the editor titled “Offshore wind would save money, lives,” the writer advocates transitioning to clean energy as quickly as possible because consuming fossil fuels causes more than $820 billion of damage to human health in the United States each year.
For argument’s sake, I’ll accept the cost as stated. Presumably, we recoup this loss by adopting renewables, but how can we know if we don’t know the cost of the transition itself? I don’t blame the writer for this oversight. Try finding a comprehensive government study that assesses the cost of totally electrifying our grid and depending exclusively on intermittent power sources like wind and solar. It’s almost as if our government prefers citizens stay in the dark. It’s left to intrepid individuals and the private sector to shed light on the magnitude of this cost. Such as this analysis, “The Cost of Net-Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.” published by the Canadian nonprofit Friends of Science in 2022. Its conclusion: $290 trillion, or more than 12 times our annual GDP, and incidentally more than 350 times the purported cost of health damage from fossil fuels. We can quibble over the numbers but not the magnitude of the cost of so-called clean energy. Net zero is a fantasy. We should hold government accountable for perpetrating this lie and ourselves accountable for believing it.
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