The Green Energy Apocalypse
Plunging ourselves into extinction.
December 5, 2024 by Bruce Thornton for Frontpage Magazine
Someday our descendants will look back on the Age of Climate Change and marvel how a civilization with so much wealth, scientific knowledge, and sophisticated technologies could have willfully wrecked their economies and plunged themselves into poverty or extinction.
More astonishing to them, this civilizational suicide had been based on an unproven hypothesis like Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming––the idea that human-produced atmospheric CO2 emissions would destroy their civilization unless fossil fuels, the cheap, abundant energy that created the modern world, were abandoned.
Moreover, the portents of that future apocalypse are relentlessly multiplying across the rich Western nations, despite the ever-growing evidence that the hypothesis radically simplifies how a complex global climate works over space and time. More troubling, the proposed solution for lowering emissions enough to stave off the alleged disaster cannot be realized by eliminating fossil-fuels.
Thankfully, the election of Donald Trump offers hope that the suicidal “renewable” energy programs and policies will be rolled back.
For now, resistance to the zero net carbon narrative is growing. Even at the U.N.’s grand climate powwow held in Dubai in January, the UAE’s Minister of Industry, Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber, made the classic gaffe of speaking that truth out loud in front of the conclave of true believers. The Paris Accords’ goal to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 was a chimera: “‘There is no science out there, or no scenario out there that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,’ Al-Jaber said at an online event on Nov. 21, “adding a pointed barb to the hosts that it would be impossible to stop burning fossil fuels and sustain economic development, ‘unless you want to take the world back into caves.’”
And if a government minister is an untrustworthy witness, listen to MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer, who wrote in 2021, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.”
But despite numerous other exposures of how dubious the science is, the Western nations continue to double-down on transitioning to “clean energy,” mostly by phasing out gas-powered automobiles and mandating they be replaced by electric vehicles through taxpayer-funded subsidies and draconian government regulations.
This distortion of the free market enriches a few green corporate rent-seekers, at the expense of consumers who have to pay more for electricity, gasoline, or the gas-powered automobiles they prefer to EVs dependent on intermittent energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines. Meanwhile, the higher costs for energy harms the whole economy, especially the automobile industry.
Just look at the straits that some of the world’s largest economies have put themselves in by pursuing net zero use of carbon. Great Britain, the seventh biggest economy in the world, “is killing its auto industry,” as the Wall Street Journal’s headline reads. Automaker Stellantis is closing a plant, at the cost of 1100 jobs. America’s Ford is shedding 800 at its British plant, and Nissan has warned the government that it also might scale back production.
Why? “The culprit,” the Journal writes, “as always these days, is the forced political march to electric vehicles. Britain requires manufacturers to steadily boost the proportion of EVs in their annual sales. Currently the quota is 22% and rising every year. Rishi Sunak’s Tory administration tried to push the final phase-out of new internal-combustion cars to 2035, but the new Labour Party government vows to bring the deadline back to 2030. Even the current quota is proving impossible to meet as consumers spurn EVs.”
An economy managed by government fiat, as the U.S.S.R. and every socialist country have shown, in the end will fail and drag the people’s wealth down with it. And bribing customers and manufacturers to purchase and build an unwanted product further burdens a nation’s fisc with more debt and misallocated resources. In the U.K., “The total cost to manufacturers of the mandate has hit nearly £6 billion this year, SMMT estimates: about £4 billion in discounts and sales incentives car companies offered to boost EV sales, and £1.8 in outright fines for each ‘excess’ internal-combustion car sold.”
Britain is just one of several European economies that are falling deeper and deeper into the “renewable energy” rabbit hole. In Germany, Volkswagen has been forced to shut down three factories at the cost of 10,000 jobs. And the U.S. during the Biden administration also took the country on a “renewable energy” and net-zero carbon bender as well. True to its status as the bellwether of every lefty lunatic fad, California under its failed governor is binging on the same toxic “global warming” brew, driving its economy and citizens towards a fiscal cliff.
Under the aegis of “climate action,” Governor Gavin Newsom, as the Wall Street Journal reports, and the Democrat-controlled state government have targeted two critical industries for California’s economy comprising “a perfect storm of laws, regulations and lawsuits designed to eliminate oil and farming.” But that’s not all: “Every essential foundation of a healthy, affordable economy is under attack. But rather than acknowledge this storm, California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom is doing everything in his power to make it worse.”
Key to this assault is the unholy grail of net-zero carbon emissions, supported by billions in subsidies for “renewable” energy, and regulatory attacks on fossil fuel energy. “As a result, California’s households and businesses pay for the most expensive electricity and gasoline in the lower 48 states. It’s all for nothing. California still relies on oil and gas for 80% of its energy, a reliance on fossil fuel that is the same as the national average.”
That astonishing paradox of trying to get rid of the energy resources that provide 80% not just of the U.S.’s energy, but the whole world’s, is powerful evidence of how unscientific and incoherent the whole net-zero carbon pursuit is. Moreover, what reductions of carbon emissions that have already occurred result not from pie-in-the-sky expensive mandates or bribes to consumers and manufacturers to buy and produce electric cars, but from the development of shale fracking, which produces cleaner natural gas for generating electricity.
But that’s not all: California is “sitting on tens of trillions of cubic feet of reserves” of natural gas. “California used to produce 60% of the oil it consumed, but despite reserves estimated as high as 30 billion barrels, in-state production is down to 23% of consumption.”
As the Journal concludes, “These are the consequences of a state run by rent-seeking renewable-energy firms and the environmentalist fanatics that offer them political cover. Mr. Newsom’s climate action is hitting every industry and every household.”
Finally, these feckless “renewable energy” policies are damaging economies most of which are already confronting huge loads of debt, amassed over the years to pay for entitlement transfers that few politicians dare to pare back and reform. These costs also make financing the West’s military preparedness more difficult, exposing us to our enemies’ adventurism.
Adding the expense of discarding cheap, abundant fossil fuel energy––and the difficult, if not impossible, task of replacing carbon energy with “clean energy” and electric cars, for which there are nowhere near enough transmission lines, charging stations, and high-capacity battery storage––make our fiscal straits dire to the point of being suicidal. For as economist Herbert Stein famously said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
That’s especially true in our case, given our geopolitical rivals like China and Russia, who want to usurp the West’s preeminent role in global affairs. The former is perfectly happy to burn tons of dirty coal to generate electricity; while the latter sits on the world’s 8th largest oil reserves. Both are ruled by ruthless realists, and care nothing for our romantic environmentalism, and are immune to our arrogant virtue-signaling.
Thankfully, the election of Donald Trump offers hope that the suicidal “renewable” energy programs and policies will be rolled back. Apocalypse, like decline, is not a destiny but a choice. Trump established his realist climate policy bona fides during his first term, and strengthened them by his cabinet choices so far. By reprising those policy changes and making others, Trump can rein in the suicidal war on fossil fuels, and rev up our production and exports of energy to our allies, reducing Iran and Russia’s geopolitical leverage.
That’s how we can make the West––the freest and wealthiest civilization in history––great again.
If current news can be believed, which is always suspect, this hoax may be dying. Slowly but countries do not seen as eager to dump money into the idiocy.