Feverish, centrally managed energy transition works against itself. The dash for energy-related response to climate change has slowed, and political resistance where it has occurred makes reacceleration doubtful. US lawmakers posturing over the Green New Deal should pay attention.
The World Economic Forum, which calls itself “an independent and impartial international organization for public-private cooperation” and is known for its annual confab of the powerful in Davos, Switzerland, notes balkiness of the energy transition in a report published Mar. 25. Its globally averaged Energy Transition Index (ETI), which uses 40 indicators to benchmark 115 countries, last year recorded the lowest year-on-year increase in 5 years. “Three years after the global milestone of the political commitment through the Paris [Climate] Agreement, this lack of progress provides a reality check on the adequacy of ongoing efforts and the scale of the challenge,” the report says.
Targets challenging
Indeed, meeting the Paris agreement’s targets for Industrial Age temperature rise is challenging. It requires people to change how they use energy and what they eat. People naturally resist change, especially when change means cost imposed from above.
The WEF, in the preface to its report, confidently asserts “the need to accelerate energy transition” and later declares, “Accelerating the energy transition will require coordinated action across economic, technological, and sociopolitical systems.” It leaves open the question whether people resistant to costly change will submit their lives to such official orchestration.
Toward energy management by government, the political mood in Europe has turned expressly hostile. “Arrogance and stupidity have been punished,” declared Thierry Baudet on Mar. 20 as his populist Forum for Democracy party won most votes in provincial elections for the Dutch Senate. “We are being ruined by the people who should be protecting us.” Baudet’s party opposes ambitious energy change, questions the need for urgent response to climate change, and challenges elitists frantic about the subject. “We are being undermined by universities and journalists, by the people who design our buildings,” Baudet said.
Populism surges elsewhere in Europe. It’s central to the UK’s 2016 vote to quit the European Union and to the consequent political turmoil. It motivates continuing weekend protests against policies, especially about energy, of President Emmanuel Macron in France. And it is gaining political clout in Germany, weakening once-impervious Chancellor Angela Merkel. The countries were among the world’s first to implement climate policies that raised energy costs. All three have retreated from their programs or plans. Comparable policies adopted under the persuasion of politicians craving renown for climate leadership have punished energy consumers and roiled politics in Canada and Australia, too.
People rebel against cost devised by elites and forced upon them by leaders preaching caution against distant hazard. This is clear. This is the “reality check” truly needed.
Democrats in the US Senate decried a procedural vote Mar. 26 against the Green New Deal as a “sham” perpetrated by Republican leaders. They called the vote a political ploy. They complained about the lack of hearings. They couldn’t be more wrong.
The reason they’re wrong is not just that the Green New Deal’s call for an economy run wholly on renewable energy within a decade is economically and physically impracticable. It’s not just that the Green New Deal sacrifices economic liberty to the socialization of energy. And it’s not just that it makes open-ended, fiscally impossible welfare promises.
Appalling confusion
That it does all that is horrid enough, of course. It reflects appalling confusion about the fundamentals of economics, energy, and liberty. But the Green New Deal also shows its supporters to be heedless of developments in countries where these excesses of the state have been tried and rebuked by the citizens they hurt. Why repeat the mistakes of others?
The Green New Deal represents liberal fantasy that deserves no hearing in the US Senate. The 43 Democrats who would vote neither for nor against it demonstrated clear lack of seriousness about climate change.
