All for nought and nought for all
The “Manhattan Contrarian” recently observed that, for all its apocalyptic rhetoric, the Biden administration accomplished amazingly little on the climate front.
Unless you count spending huge sums, which we don’t because of his point that “In the big picture, whatever emission reductions have been achieved have mostly resulted from substitution of natural gas for coal in electricity generation. This substitution would likely have occurred by natural market processes without any of the government subsidies and credits for wind and solar power.”
As a result, it’s not just that they didn’t deliver the climate gains, not even in GHG reductions etc. much less the promised improvement in the weather. They didn’t even succeed in building useless green infrastructure. In one particularly laughable case, the Biden administration allocated $5 billion to install between 1,000 and 1,500 EV charging stations in “underserved” areas, especially rural, making them “as easy to find as gas stations are now,” according to the president.
By 2025 they had build, um… 58. This pattern of grand promises, big spending and feeble results is beginning to wear on the people who keep having to pay the bills.
Consider this story out of Australia:
“Employers supplying food to major supermarkets and thousands of cafes, restaurants and pubs have launched a revolt against Anthony Albanese’s energy policies, urging Labor to dump its 82 per cent renewables target and focus on ramping up more gas and coal production to bring electricity prices down in the short term.”
As in Britain, where historic pubs are closing amid skyrocketing energy prices, it’s not just the hypocrisy of those who can afford their bills, often at taxpayer expense.
It’s the pain they’re causing coupled with the qu’ils mangent de la brioche insistence that actually renewables are now cheaper and you’re just imaging that gnawing pain in your stomach and your wallet. And people reasonably conclude that if they got the economics this badly wrong, including the relevant evidence, they might well be scientifically equally muddled.
It turns out reality is tricky, a point unhappily made in a guest post on his Substack by a long-time associate of Pielke Jr. who still seems convinced that man-made climate change is a crisis but admits that he and his ilk dramatically underestimated the geopolitical obstacles to “a world energy transition” driven by “technological solutionism” that would seamlessly blend ecology, economics, culture, science and governance.
Well duh, we are tempted to say who never thought history had ended in 1989. Or for that matter economics, culture and public choice theory. But again, better late than never.
So what is to be done? Well, back to that honesty and straight-talking thing, as so often in life generally, in public affairs and yes here in climate. In a recent Substack post Roger Pielke Jr. warned that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is “at the Crossroads” and “needs to up its game to sustain its legitimacy”.
As those who’ve watched our webinar with RPJ know, he’s not exactly a “denier”. He puts more credence in man-made climate change than we do, for all our respect for his work that we frequently cite. What he is, is a realist. And here he says:
“I have been a strong supporter of the IPCC, testifying before the U.S. Congress that, “if it did not exist, would have to be invented.” That said, the most recent IPCC assessment offered multiple troubling indications that its quality may be slipping — with key parts of the report being unreliable, placing its legitimacy at risk.
In a nutshell, based on my observations as a long-time IPCC outsider1 — the IPCC’s Working Group 1 on physical science has overall played things straight in my areas of expertise, but some cracks are showing. IPCC Working Group 2, on impacts and vulnerability, is deeply politicized and unreliable.2
Its Working Group 3 on mitigation has been largely captured by a narrow academic community, focused on integrated assessment modeling. In today’s post I highlight some of the many issues with IPCC quality control that I have observed in its Sixth Assessment reports (AR6).”
They can of course continue to deny it, with their apparently unstoppable momentum and political-intellectual weaponry able to disintegrate entire planets or so they think. But if so, they may suddenly find themselves floating home.
As, for instance, if in their moment of triumph “Brazil plans to propose social diversity as a global criteria for labeling sustainable investments at the U.N. climate summit it will host this year, a senior official said on Wednesday, despite rising resistance to diversity goals in some corners.” Trump? We don’t see no stinkin’ Trump.
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