Are they serious?

Jan. 14, 2019
Will Democrats now controlling the US House of Representatives act seriously about climate change or remain stuck in high-minded futility? They promise to make action on climate change a priority for the new session of Congress, during which a presidential election will be held.

Will Democrats now controlling the US House of Representatives act seriously about climate change or remain stuck in high-minded futility? They promise to make action on climate change a priority for the new session of Congress, during which a presidential election will be held. Does that mean they’ll seek policies with reasonable hope for enactment and effectiveness? Or do Democrats want only to leverage hopelessly extreme positions to make themselves look righteous and Republicans wicked?

Answers soon will be clear.

Green New Deal

For climate-change policy, developments since the November congressional elections have not been promising. A liberal concoction branded the Green New Deal forces Democrats to begin discussion from left of the political fringe. Newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez (D-NY) pushed it into mainstream attention by circulating a draft resolution calling for creation of a select committee on the subject.

The young socialist’s version of the Green New Deal attempts to convert the US economy to carbon-free energy by 2030, in part by generating all electrical power with energy from renewable sources and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. And it would guarantee everyone health care and a job with a “living wage.”

This iteration of the Green New Deal reprises all the mistakes that trap climate policy in a meaningless name-calling contest between “believers” in climate change and “deniers”:

• It is physically impossible. Renewable energy, mainly wind and solar, cannot meet demand for electrical power at anywhere near projected rates. And they need back-up from natural gas.

• Elimination of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation requires the rapid electrification of vehicles, which increases demand for electrical power and puts the all-renewable goal for electricity even further out of reach.

• The forced use of renewable energy increases costs three ways. It increases the need for consumers or taxpayers to pay for subsidies, without which solar and wind, despite their declining costs, remain uncompetitive. It blocks the use of competitive energy. And it forecloses incomes from resource development.

• Assumptions that these costs can be compensated by infrastructure development are wishful. They’re based on the classically liberal illusion that spending by the government represents investment. It doesn’t. It represents the transfer of money from profitable enterprise to unprofitable activities—always a losing proposition.

• And the initiative betrays an unsavory motive of climate activism: the desire to empower government at the expense of individual freedom, to use amplified worry about climate change as an excuse to supplant capitalism with central economic planning.

For any of or all these reasons, implementation of anything like the Ocasia-Cortez version of the Green New Deal is very unlikely. No indication exists that Americans in meaningful numbers want to surrender control over their economic lives to politicians and bureaucrats. And except in the heady realms of aloof academia, liberal politics, and bedazzled media, climate change seems not to frighten people much. Most people seem to recognize that the climate changes and that human influence grows. Most people also seem skeptical about claims that humans account for all observed changes and that they can meaningfully alter trends still strongly influenced by chaotic nature. They express this skepticism by balking politically when confronted with costly demands accompanied by implausible assurances of painless energy conversion.

Still, the Ocasia-Cortez initiative has received expressions of support from at least 40 Democratic lawmakers. That’s enough to make Democrats give lunacy serious consideration, even as Yellow Jacket protests in France show how nonelites act when forced to shoulder the cost of panic fabricated in high places.

Extreme prescriptions

The extreme prescriptions of climate activism have not worked and will not work. They cannot survive politically because they’re too costly and too authoritarian.

If House Democrats genuinely want to redress the worst possibilities of climate change, which are real, they’ll renounce what doesn’t work and begin discussing what might, about which more will appear here next week.