President Biden laid down a climate marker in his inaugural address: “A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.”
He returned to the theme in his speech last week to the Munich Security Conference, calling the climate crisis “existential.”
For environmentalists, those are welcome words. The Trump years saw the U.S. leave the Paris Agreement while pursuing aggressive deregulation at home. Climate change is now back on the national agenda.
There are two mistakes observers can make about this new era of climate diplomacy. The first is to think it won’t last or will be limited to rhetoric.
Climate skeptics and fossil-fuel interests should brace themselves. The fight to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions and to shift the world’s energy systems toward much lower emissions isn’t going away.
Key positions up and down the government bureaucracy will be filled by committed greens who have thought long and hard about how to use the powers of the regulatory state to achieve green goals.
A host of new policies—and new regulations—are sure to come.
Those who dismiss ideas like the “green new deal” as mere left-wing fantasies miss the enormous appeal of these programs for corporations looking for new business opportunities.
It isn’t only renewable energy companies looking for government mandates and funding.
It’s major auto manufacturers dreaming of replacing every gasoline-powered car and truck on the planet with an electric vehicle—and reaping the public-relations reward of looking virtuous. It’s construction companies looking to replace the existing energy infrastructure.
But if skeptics underestimate the effect the climate movement will have on the world’s economy, greens are in danger of overestimating how much their efforts will help the polar bears.
Paradoxically, as climate change assumes a more prominent place on the international agenda, climate activists will lose influence over climate policy.
Geopolitics and greed will get in the way. Greens see climate change as an existential threat to all humanity against which every country should unite.
That is not how the world works. Countries inevitably see even the most urgent global problems through the lens of their own interests.
Countries don’t look at the climate problem with the same urgency or in the same way. Russia likes to sell oil and gas, wants the Arctic to become a major shipping route, and—despite some issues with tundra melt—doesn’t worry that Siberia will grow too warm.
Germany is locked into high-cost energy policies by domestic politics and the facts of geography. German industry would like to protect itself from imports made in countries where energy remains cheaper.
The U.S. is so rich in cheap oil and gas that climate policy is a heavy political lift—and no binding climate treaty is likely to gain the two-thirds Senate majority for ratification.
In New Delhi, no government can accept international agreements that slow India’s economic rise.
Many Brazilians believe that the development of the Amazon basin is essential to their national future and won’t accept international limits on their activities there.
Westerners don’t need to bribe Beijing into environmentalism with political or economic concessions. China has more to fear from climate change than any other great power.
Some of its major river systems depend on vulnerable Himalayan glaciers; its agricultural areas depend on rainfall patterns that climate change threatens to disrupt; its coast is exposed to devastating typhoons.
Reducing China’s dependence on imported fuel eases Beijing’s fear that American sea power could cut it off from necessary resources in the event of a major crisis. China stands to benefit from a shift to electric cars and has invested heavily in solar panel and battery technology.
Yet this green zeal comes with “Chinese characteristics,” to use Deng Xiaoping’s phrase. China’s booming solar-power industry is heavily coal-dependent and based in Xinjiang. Are solar panels built with forced labor OK? Who decides?
Industry will also gain power over climate policy as climate moves up the world’s priority list. Business lobbies around the world are experts in regulatory capture and in diverting subsidies and mandates to serve corporate interests.
It won’t be the greenest possible grid that wins the political contest; it will be the system that provides the most-entrenched interests with the highest rents that the best PR firms can present as sufficiently green.
As lobbyists and green entrepreneurs rush to cash in on one of history’s greatest bonanzas, pigs will be adorned in green lipstick and white elephants dipped in green dye.
When it comes to determining priorities in our new green world, one thing’s for sure. The polar bears won’t get a vote.
Read more at WSJ
Enron was a big time supporter of the Eco-Freaks
Enron.
It is easy to blame this mess on the increasing interest in socialism, but the reality is that a failure of capitalism is equally at fault.
Why would companies not take a government get-out-of-competition-free card? Why would they not take the opportunity to put both feet in the subsidy trough? Why wouldn’t they pander to the mob so that the protests bother their competitors instead? Self-interest is very much in play here, as the roll-call of billionaires buying an eco-morality reputation attest to.
The swamp is a diverse community. That’s what makes it so resiliant to truth and decency.
CO2 is the basic ingredient of life on earth through photosynthesis, arguably the most important biochemical reaction in life on earth. It is the green in the environment, the source of all life’s energy, of all the atmosphere’s oxygen, and of all the carbon in our carbon-based lifeforms (every species on earth). And CO2 has been naturally declining from levels ten to twenty times those of today since the beginning of multicellular evolution. All life dies without CO2. And we’ve naturally come within 30ppm of CO2 lethal lows. You’d think that after decades of babbling about CO2 emissions, they would have at least a simple understanding of where it fits in nature. Apparentily not. In nature, CO2 level changes follow temperatures, they never lead them. Using fossil fuels is entirely beneficial to life on earth. It not only provides the best fed, longest-living, most prosperous conditions human beings have ever had. It recycles life essential CO2 from its millions of years old trap in long-chain carbon compounds of coal, oil, and gas. Journalism babbles on ad nauseam about CO2 emissions while never once realizing their colossal ignorance on the subject. Increasing CO2 emissions have been the best gift to the environment in twelve million years. Because CO2 is essential to life yet inconsequential to climate.
Listing the Polar Bear under the ESA was Politics not science