In his rebuttal, Steve Sawyer claims, incredibly, that while he cannot say “precisely when the governments of the world” will slap a price on carbon emissions, they “surely will”. I can tell him when his hoped-for global tax will happen: never.

Every attempt to set hard limits on global carbon emissions has failed. The reason: developing countries know that any tax or limit on their emissions means reduced ability to provide energy and power to their citizens. China, India and other developing countries have repeatedly said they will never agree to such a limit. The futility of such a tax has convinced the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to give up direct involvement in climate-change talks. Meanwhile, to cite just one example, Pakistan has discovered 2 billion tons of coal which it will almost certainly use to generate electricity.

With no global agreement on cutting carbon emissions, with coal consumption continuing to grow, and with governments around the world cutting subsidies for renewables, the only cost-effective way to limit carbon emissions is with low-cost, low- or no-carbon fuels. That means N2N: natural gas in the near term and nuclear in the long term.

Last year, a coalition in America issued a savvy report called “Post-Partisan Power”. The authors, who come from the left, right and centre, argue, rightly, that attempts to make hydrocarbons more expensive are doomed to fail. Instead, alternative energy must be able to compete head-to-head, unsubsidised, with hydrocarbons.

Mr Sawyer and other renewable energy promoters are soiling their knickers because they see cheap natural gas garrotting their subsidy-dependent operations. And worse for them: cheap gas is going global. India’s ONGC has just announced the first shale gas production from a well in West Bengal. India’s shale gas resources could be enormous—as much as 2,100 trillion cubic feet, or 350 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Even if only a fraction of that gas is developed, India will be able to slow its coal consumption and in doing so pull tens of millions of people out of poverty. India’s poor could enjoy clean, abundant cooking fuel and thereby reduce soot emissions and the threat from one of that country’s biggest killers: indoor air pollution.

The moderator and Mr Sawyer both mention CCS. Capturing and sequestering carbon will not work on a large scale because it slashes the output from coal-fired power plants, requires huge new pipeline capacity, and the volume of material involved is staggering. CCS from next-generation gas-fired generators may work in certain locations, but the captured carbon dioxide is likely to be used for enhanced oil recovery—a move that would help produce more oil and therefore minimise or even negate any carbon savings.

Mr Sawyer once again, without any evidence, claims wind is cheaper than hydrocarbon-based generation and that wind’s costs have come down. That is simply not true. In December, the US Energy Information Administration determined that the cost of new wind projects increased by 21% last year.

My opponent talks about scale and tosses out some percentages, but no hard numbers. Here are some: in 2009, total global wind energy production was about 260 terawatt hours, or 1.3% of global electricity production. (Production from solar and geothermal was so small as to be insignificant.) That is the energy equivalent of about 435,000 barrels of oil per day. Global primary energy consumption averages about 225m barrels of oil equivalent per day. Thus all global wind energy output in 2009 was the equivalent of about 1/500th of global energy needs. Put another way, global wind output in 2009 was less than 1/100th of the amount of energy derived from natural gas. Renewables will grow rapidly, but it will be decades before they can make a sizable difference in global carbon emissions.

Regarding carbon, Mr Sawyer, again, fails to repudiate the biofuels scam. Biofuels are allowed to cower under the “renewables” umbrella despite their negative effect on food supplies, rainforests and wetlands and their questionable—or negative—effect on carbon emissions.

Mr Sawyer and many others in the wind industry fervently pray that they can dismiss the burgeoning backlash against industrial wind as “anecdotes” and “a few cases of NIMBY obstructionism”. He dares not admit the resistance to the visual blight and the deadly serious infrasound-related health issues that make his industry unwelcome in so many rural communities around the world. He should visit Copenhagen, which in 2009 held a headline-grabbing UN-sponsored global climate conference, at which no real agreement was made. The Copenhagen Post recently reported: “State-owned energy firm Dong Energy has given up building more wind turbines on Danish land, following protests from residents complaining about the noise the turbines make.” It appears that Denmark, the supposed Valhalla of wind energy, has many of the NIMBYs that Mr Sawyer so despises. He should also look at the 3,500-signature petition given to the Scottish Parliament a few days ago which opposes “badly sited, industrial scale wind” projects in Scotland.

Does natural gas have environmental challenges? Absolutely. There is no such thing as a free lunch, particularly when it comes to energy and power systems. But with billions of people living in dire poverty, the answer is not expensive, intermittent, unreliable energy from renewables. Instead, those people must be brought into modernity with clean, cheap, reliable, dispatchable forms of power. And the best choice to provide that power over the near term is clearly natural gas.

Original file here: http://economist.com/debate/days/view/647