Contrary to the claims of climate activists, a revolution in energy use is not inevitable. While politically inspired change is certain, it won't be what activists have in mind.
Assertions of inevitability drive a new attack by liberal state attorneys-general against speech unsupportive of climate extremism. Eric Schneiderman of New York and Maura Healey of Massachusetts allege that ExxonMobil insufficiently accounted for oil and gas reserves that might become stranded by policies implemented to combat climate change. Schneiderman led earlier investigations of ExxonMobil and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, alleging the organizations knew of the supposedly certain perils of climate change but resisted aggressive precaution anyway.
Outliving witch hunts
Like that stunt, the new effort lacks substance. Schneiderman and Healey have no reason to suspect ExxonMobil violated rules for reserves accounting. The company, like many, postulates a carbon price to discount reserves evaluations-which are interpretive by nature and not audited. Calling the practice deficient is capricious. ExxonMobil has filed motions to invalidate the New York and Massachusetts actions.
Likely to outlive the AG witch hunts, though, is the notion that movement toward carbon-free energy is rapid and irreversible. An industry marked for extinction by this vision has strong reason to dispute it. Economics helps the effort.
Eventually, possibly soon, economics will moderate climate politics. Unlike economics, politics can change profoundly and quickly. Economics sustains political buffets but holds course. When the forces collide, politics yields.
Further undermining climate politics is the populism ascendant in the US and Europe. Climate prescriptions flow from the rich and powerful. Wealthy movie stars and financiers fund the well-organized extremism now defining the movement. In lavish diplomatic settings, national leaders convene to compete for recognition as defenders of the planet. Accolades flow to those trumpeting national sacrifice.
A triumph of this process, of course, is last year's climate summit in Paris. For the first time, top officials of world governments agreed to legally binding targets for cuts in emissions of greenhouse gas. They produced no enforcement mechanism, of course, but they made history by reaching any agreement at all-an agreement that aspires to premature curtailment of fossil-energy use without actually saying so.
Signatories to the Paris accord legitimately can claim to have led boldly in the company of colleagues at topmost official tiers. When affiliated costs materialize back home, however, working people who buy energy won't be impressed.
The UK, which once proudly led the international quest for renewable-energy utopia, now has quit the climate-obsessed European Union and is making new room in the energy mix for hydrocarbons. British energy prices became intolerable.
Canada, too, has lowered its ambitions under economic pressure. After promising in Paris to treat emission targets of the former government as a floor, the government of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided the floor looks challenging enough. Still, Trudeau recently said he'd impose carbon prices in provinces with cap-and-trade or taxation schemes inflecting less pain than he wants on energy consumers. Many provincial leaders are unhappy.
Backlash looms
Like Canada, the US has jurisdictional fractures in its climate politics. Implementation of President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan awaits a Supreme Court decision on a challenge to federal authority over state energy decisions. If the plan isn't scuttled, electricity bills will rise. Americans then will begin hearing they must consume less animal protein. Expensive energy alone won't achieve temperature goals expressed in the document Obama signed in Paris. Animal agriculture will have to shrink, too, to cut emissions of methane and nitrous oxide. When Americans realize what climate politics ultimately demands, many who didn't pay attention last year will ask why they had no say in the Paris agreement. They won't like the answer: Obama proclaimed it wasn't a treaty and therefore didn't need Senate ratification.
The shaky politics of climate can't continue to usurp liberty and impose hardship without provoking a backlash against elitist extremism. That's what's inevitable. That's also what's best for the planet.