Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, discusses the difficult trade-offs in energy policy on this week’s broadcast of “Get Real” on RAV.

MARK MILLS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR ENERGY ANALYTICS: Two quick things. I agree entirely with the reversal of the order, affordable, reliable, and clean. The point of any policy that tries to balance the three goals that are always in conflict, these things are not… My friend and our mutual friend, Scott Tinker, is fond of constantly saying, for good effect, that everything involves trade-offs in life, but it’s especially true in energy. So you have to be clear about the trade-offs and what you’re trading off, which gets to the point, by the way, that Madeleine made, which is that Germany, as an example, decided to prioritize cutting CO2 emissions. Well, what happened, in fact, is that it caused their economy to de-industrialize. Direct investment, both foreign and domestic, in the industrial sector is collapsing. Germany has weakened its economy, impoverishing its people. There’s a very high price to pay, and a lot of people are rethinking it in Germany right now. They’re reshifting their priorities actively, certainly behind the scenes, because you can’t get where you want to easily or quickly or cheaply. Where you want to, then, is the lobby, as it were, that wants to decarbonize. And, of course, as a practical matter, Germany hasn’t decarbonized. They’ve exported their carbon dioxide emissions significantly to China, which its grid is notoriously two-thirds coal-fired, where 90% of silicon photovoltaic cells are made on coal-fired grids. So when you buy solar panels, you’ve purchased the combustion of coal in China. These are just trade-offs. They’re real. They’re unavoidable. It’s one atmosphere, as they say. So I agree. Regulations are important. But there’s a distinction with a difference. You can’t over-regulate and hamstring an economy. You can regulate on the basis of false premises. There are many examples in history. So transparency with people matters. Being monomaniacal about one particular emission ignores the truth in the world we live in. There’s always trade-offs. You can get less CO2. You’re going to get something else, more land, more pollution in Africa from mining copper. Something will happen. There’s no magic unobtainium that gets us to some nirvana. It’s going to be hard to balance. So I’m 100% on board with ARK. That order is the priority order. People, economies, and our ability to afford environmental protections come from affordable energy.

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