Barefaced untruths don't help anyone

This results from confusion, perhaps a lack of knowledge, rather than being caused by malevolence, but it’s still true that barefaced untruths aid no one:

Dave Jones, the lead author of the report, said governments must dramatically accelerate the electricity transition so that global coal generation collapses throughout the 2020s.

“To switch from coal into gas is just swapping one fossil fuel for another. The cheapest and quickest way to end coal generation is through a rapid rollout of wind and solar,” he said.

We can look for empirical support for this idea. Germany has spent very much more on the Energiewende than the UK or US has on anything equivalent and German coal usage has not declined - indeed at times it has increased - as much as that in the US or UK.

It is also - arguably, it depends upon what assumptions are made about intermittent supply, the need to provide back up generation, connection costs of a dispersed energy supply and so on - true that the most modern gas generation technologies are cheaper than solar and wind. Thus the substitution of gas for coal is cheaper than that of solar and wind for coal.

Fracking in the US, the dash for gas in the UK, has substantially reduced emissions in both countries at lower cost than attempting to move directly to renewables either has or would have done. It is also true that even by the IPCC’s own assumptions that all that was necessary to avoid the worst of climate change in that RCP 8.5 scenario was to utilise unconventional oil and gas deposits - ie, fracking - and so curb coal use at the lowest cost.

It could be said that not using either or both coal and gas is desirable - we do not agree as yet, renewables technology is insufficiently advanced - and that would be arguable. But to claim that the leap right now to renewables only is the cheaper and quicker method of reducing coal usage is untrue. Both empirically and in theory it’s one of those things which just ain’t.

Barefaced untruths are never useful and the bigger the problem the less so they are. Yea, even when dealing with Gaia we’ve got to start from reality, from facts, otherwise we’ll never be able to craft a solution.