Saving The Planet From the So-called ‘Greens’
“It’s like we were an idiot country,” the late Dwayne Andreas, longtime CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., once told me, referring to some systematically self-defeating policy out of Washington
He raised a question of enduring interest. Why does government persist in demonstrably failed and foolish efforts?
It took billions of dollars in subsidies from carmakers and federal taxpayers to get early adopters to buy electric vehicles, so it’s pretty clear car buyers aren’t that keen on EVs.
They’ll put one in the garage if the price is right, but the right price is thousands less per vehicle than it costs to build them.
And remember why we sold ourselves this bill of goods: to reduce emissions. It was always nonsense.
When Congress launched its first Obama-era climate subsidies, it funded a study by the Nobel-winning climate economist William Nordhaus, who concluded that alternative energy handouts are a “poor tool” for fighting emissions, with negligible effect even before accounting for the inevitable “international spillovers”—i.e., consumers globally using more ‘fossil fuels’ because the U.S. spends insane billions to subsidize its consumers to use less.
A widely heralded paper by Princeton economists showed subsidizing green energy globally at best would have a “minuscule” effect on emissions.
Even Biden officials will say as much off the record.
Yet look at the Washington Post’s recent contortions to let readers know the administration’s proclaimed U.S. “climate goals” are meaningless when the U.S. simultaneously exports large amounts of hydrocarbons and imports emissions-intensive manufactured goods.
The Post could apparently publish these caveats only by attributing them to “big oil” lobbyists.
Or take the room where New York Times editors craft sentences to mislead readers. They say about Joe Biden’s EV policy:
“Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.”
Notice how this conflates U.S. car emissions with total transportation emissions, then U.S. emissions with global emissions, to hide that the president’s policy would only reduce emissions by 0.2 percent, and then only if we ignore those pesky international spillovers.
Do no harm, the most cited advice of the Hippocratic Oath, is also a pungent observation on human nature. People want to be seen helping even when they aren’t. Much self-interested mischief is advanced under the guise of helping.
In search of relief, meet Chris Wright, CEO of the fracking services provider Liberty Energy, testifying Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee.
He’s suing over an impertinent SEC rule on corporate climate disclosure, but his real goal, he tells me, is to seek progress against a “ridiculously naive” climate and energy debate, dominated by the cant phrases that prevail in the media.
“Clean energy,” as Americans increasingly understand, is a two-word phrase for the extremely dirty industrial business of delivering a consumer a car with no emissions at the tailpipe or electricity manufactured without the help of a ‘fossil-fuel’ power plant.
“Energy transition” describes a nonexistent, mythic phenomenon found nowhere in the data. Wind, solar and biomass have always existed.
All forms of energy consumption are going up, but oil, gas and coal still carry the load and no policy will alter this, especially as China embraces EVs to cut reliance on imported oil in favor of domestic coal.
“Decarbonization,” likewise, is a polysyllabic prettifier for sending gas-fired U.S. and German heavy industry to China to run on coal, with twice the emissions.
I’ve borrowed the term “sophisticated state failure” for the energy suicide of the West. Though not a fan, I told readers during the long election night of 2016:
“Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his candidacy represents a chance to dismiss a very particular elite about whom it could be said, borrowing from Cromwell, ‘For any good you have been doing . . . in the name of God, go!’”
I was referring to the green-energy elite.
Mr. Wright’s company provides fracking to North American oil and gas producers in ways that reduce their total impact on the environment. His real passion, though, has been ‘carbon’-free nuclear ever since his undergraduate days at MIT.
He endorses the estimates of the U.N. climate panel, which weighs dozens of computer models, none of which seem to get the climate exactly right. If so, the coming century will see 1 or 2 degrees Celsius more warming and 8 to 17 inches of sea-level rise.
If you believe no cost is too great to avoid this outcome, please stop exhaling. Otherwise, you’ve already accepted that some things are worse than CO2 emissions.
Welcome to humanity, points out Mr. Wright, which by its actions has shown that its adaptations won’t come at the expense of affordable energy that helps solve real problems for eight billion humans.
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