By Outlier Artifacts @Adobe Stock
To Save the Planet, Stop Exhaling
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes of the late Dwayne Andreas, longtime CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. Mr. Anreas told the WSJ’s opinion columnist, “It’s like we were an idiot country.”
(Andreas) raised a question of enduring interest. Why does government persist in demonstrably failed and foolish efforts? It took billions of dollars in subsidies from carmakers and federal taxpayers to get early adopters to buy electric vehicles, so it’s pretty clear car buyers aren’t that keen on EVs. They’ll put one in the garage if the price is right, but the right price is thousands less per vehicle than it costs to build them.
Americans were sold a bill of goods based on reducing emissions. “It was always nonsense,” Mr. Jenkins assures readers.
When Congress launched its first Obama-era climate subsidies, it funded a study by the Nobel-winning climate economist William Nordhaus, who concluded that alternative energy handouts are a “poor tool” for fighting emissions, with negligible effect even before accounting for the inevitable “international spillovers”—i.e., consumers globally using more fossil fuels because the U.S. spends insane billions to subsidize its consumers to use less.
Crafting Words to Mislead Supporters
From the NYT on Joe Biden’s EV policy:
Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.
Notice how this conflates U.S. car emissions with total transportation emissions then U.S. emissions with global emissions, argues Mr. Jenkins. “It hides that the “president’s policy would only reduce emissions by 0.2%, and then only if we ignore those pesky international spillovers.”
Mr. Jenkins introduces readers to Chris Wright, CEO of a fracking services provider testifying before the House Financial Services Committee:
Mr. Wright was suing over an impertinent SEC rule on corporate climate disclosure, but his real goal (Wright tells Jenkins) was to seek progress against a “ridiculously naive” climate and energy debate, dominated by the cant phrases that prevail in the media.
- “Clean energy,” as Americans increasingly understand, is a two-word phrase for the extremely dirty industrial business of delivering a consumer a car with no emissions at the tailpipe or electricity manufactured without the help of a fossil-fuel power plant.
- “Energy transition” describes a nonexistent, mythic phenomenon found nowhere in the data. Wind, solar and biomass have always existed. All forms of energy consumption are going up, but oil, gas and coal still carry the load and no policy will alter this, especially as China embraces EVs to cut reliance on imported oil in favor of domestic coal.
- “Decarbonization,” likewise, is a polysyllabic prettifier for sending gas-fired U.S. and German heavy industry to China to run on coal, with twice the emissions.
The West’s Energy Suicide
Mr. Jenkins describes the energy suicide of the West as a “Sophistiated State Failure.”
Jenkins, not a Donald Trump fan, did warn WSJ readers:
Though not a fan, I told readers during the long election night of 2016:
“Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his candidacy represents a chance to dismiss a very particular elite about whom it could be said, borrowing from Cromwell, ‘For any good you have been doing . . . in the name of God, go!’”
Mr. Jenkins was referring to the green-energy elite.
If you believe no cost is too great to avoid this outcome, please stop exhaling. Otherwise, you’ve already accepted that some things are worse than CO2 emissions.
Welcome to humanity, points out Mr. Wright, which by its actions has shown that its adaptations won’t come at the expense of affordable energy that helps solve real problems for eight billion humans.
