The ‘Green New Deal’ Will End In Disaster

Written by Climate Discussion Nexus on October 4, 2024. Posted in Current News

The whole Green New Deal/energy transition project seems to be coming apart at the seams because it’s just not possible to live that way

With 2050 rushing toward us, people are giving it a serious go with disastrous results.

No matter where people look, including in the fiscal details of Ontario’s supposed “Net Zero” plans, the costs are too high and the results too feeble even when people accept, or claim to accept, the underlying assumptions about an urgent man-made crisis.

As Catherine Swift of the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers & Businesses of Canada (yes, even their acronym is a mouthful, at CCMBC) recently put it, after pointing out that ‘fossil fuels’ supply about three-quarters of all Canadian energy despite decades of government talk and policy, “More and more estimates of the total cost of ‘net zero’ are also being conducted, and the news is horrific.”

OK, not everyone sees it. The ultra-Establishment Globe & Mail in Canada recently editorialized, in an editorial piece comically credulous about “rapid attribution analysis” including regurgitating the since-repudiated World Weather Attribution paper on the B.C. heat dome, rambled that:

“While reasonable progress has been made, there’s a long way to go to 40 percent, never mind a new, more ambitious target. Pending policies such as Ottawa’s clean electricity regulations must be amended and finalized, and embraced across the country.

Provinces need to work together and connect their power grids, instead of acting like insular fiefdoms. In 2018, the UN warned, ‘Limiting global warming to 1.5 C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.’

Work to show how extreme weather is exacerbated by climate change is key to underscoring the urgent need for change. And most of all, remarkable advances in technology – starting with solar power and batteries – makes such change possible and realistic.”

In short, they have no idea what to do, and are sure it will work. Likewise Faith Birol, head of the IEA which used to stand for International Energy Agency and still claims to, keeps the faith to the point that he insists that it is working:

“As we consider the energy technology pathways available for communities and countries worldwide, it is essential to keep in mind that many of the clean and efficient choices are also the most cost-effective ones – typically because they require much lower day-to-day spending on fuels to operate.”

But if so, what’s with the deindustrialization?

The true policy position was summed up in July by Bjorn Lomborg in a passage worth quoting at length. After noting that most of the world does not share the “myopic focus on climate change” of Western elites, including leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, happy to watch us cripple ourselves but with no interest in joining in, he observes that:

“across Europe and North America, single-minded zealots who were born of a world of relative calm of the 1990s continue to push for deindustrialization and immiseration to tackle climate change – including for the world’s emerging economies.

This attempt is doomed to failure, not least because carbon reductions need to be sustained across decades and through shifting majorities. The economics of strong climate action was always deficient – and today this is blatantly obvious.

More politicians are realizing what former UK energy and net-zero secretary Claire Coutinho acknowledged: ‘you cannot heap costs onto struggling families to meet climate targets.’”

Ah: former UK energy and net-zero secretary. The courage of the ex-politician is not something we much enjoy seeing. But what of the present one? Because the UK really does still have a “Department for Energy Security & Net Zero” as if the two were seamlessly integrated instead of fighting like cats in a sack.

And the incumbent is the clueless Ed Miliband, to whom Chris Bayliss just attempted in vain to explain that you can’t go about demanding the transition away from ‘fossil fuels’ continue with or without alternatives then express baffled dismay when oil refineries close rather than retooling at huge expense, throwing thousands of potential Labour voters out of work.

It gets worse. His colleague the Foreign Secretary just said in his first formal speech, held in Kew Gardens, that:

“Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have dominated my time in office so far. But I was very clear in Opposition that, in this job, I would focus on the most profound and universal source of global disorder – the climate and nature emergency.”

And so in an increasingly dangerous world his top priority will be to cut Britain’s economy off at the knees and hope it doesn’t somehow finish off its already withered defence capacity:

“So our goal is progressive – a liveable planet for all, now and in the future. But we need a hard-headed, realist approach towards using all levers at our disposal, from the diplomatic to the financial.

And I say to you now: these are not contradictions. Because nothing could be more central to the UK’s national interest than delivering global progress on arresting rising temperatures….

The threat may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or an imperialist autocrat. But it is more fundamental. It is systemic. It’s pervasive.

And accelerating towards us at pace…. today, I am committing to you that while I am Foreign Secretary, action on the climate and nature crisis will be central to all that the Foreign Office does.”

Or fails to do, if history is any guide.

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