Senate Democrats and former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton have joined US President Barack Obama's escalating campaign to sacrifice welfare from fossil energy to newly sanctified fear about climate change. Coinciding with a papal visit to the US, moves by the lawmakers and their former colleague, now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, offer political clarification Republicans should find useful.
Pope Francis wasted no time. He addressed climate change in a White House welcome ceremony, telling Obama, "I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution," by which he clearly meant emissions of greenhouse gases. The president responded, "You remind us that we have a sacred obligation to protect our planet-God's magnificent gift to us." The day before, Clinton had declared her opposition to the border crossing of the Keystone XL pipeline. Unsurprisingly, she aligned herself with environmentalists who say the pipeline would aggravate global warming by accommodating Canadian oil sands. On the same day, Senate Democrats introduced sweeping energy legislation that included increased taxation of oil and gas and incentives for energy forms deemed climatologically righteous.
The radical agenda
Obviously, Democrats want to own the radical energy agenda. Republicans should welcome the chance to separate themselves from this quest for futile deprivation, embraced though it is by the leader of Roman Catholicism. Even popes get things wrong. The oil and gas industry, meanwhile, must understand that, in the politics of climate, middle ground doesn't exist.
Clinton's opposition to the Keystone XL project shows the industry why moderation is impossible. Climate fear has become a tool of obstructionism. Restriction of the cheapest transport option lowers upstream bitumen values in Alberta and damps oil sands production. It's no coincidence that most pipeline projects now encounter environmentalist opposition. With their Keystone XL success, activists have discovered a way to keep hydrocarbons in the ground. The same motive shapes a torrent of regulatory initiatives in the US.
The Senate bill, which stands no chance of passage, conforms to this carbon-free vision. The legislation would codify a strategy Obama espouses in the federal budgets he has proposed in each year of his presidency: spending public money on conservation and nonfossil energy and taking private money from oil and gas. The approach guarantees its own failure by relying on state-centered energy choice, which never works. It would be intolerably expensive. And it's uninformed. Among "tax incentives for major integrated oil and gas companies," listed in a summary document appears "the use of percentage over cost depletion for oil and gas wells." Congress repealed percentage depletion for integrated companies in 1975.
A papal blessing does nothing to solve practical problems of the energy overhaul Obama and Senate Democrats want to force on the US. The pope is wrong to claim that answering climate change with state-sponsored energy would help the poor. Replacing economic energy with costly substitutes while limiting economic choice helps no one, the poor least of all. But that judgement betrays trust in free markets, of which the pope has little.
For advice on his June encyclical on climate change, Francis invited to the Vatican Naomi Klein, a Canadian activist whose intellectual foundations are clear in the title of her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Like Klein, Francis was outspokenly critical of capitalism before he spoke out on climate change. Both share a political goal toward which energy and the climate are just tactical steps.
What works?
Capitalism isn't perfect. No system of human behavior can be. No such system is immune to criticism. Imperfections notwithstanding, capitalism happens to work best for most people. From the Vatican, this lesson of history might not be clear. From anywhere else where people can think for themselves, it should be.
Republicans eagerly should note these connections while assuring Americans that Democratic energy proposals, engaged as they are with transformative objectives, would make the US not cooler but poorer and less free.
