Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

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Were it not for its impact on industrialized societies’ reliance on hydrocarbon energy, theories of man-made climate change would principally be of limited academic interest. In fact, these theories were first politicized precisely because of the demands they make to decarbonize energy.

Sweden debuted global warming as part of its war on coal when Al Gore was still at law school. It was meant to have ushered in an age of nuclear power. The reason it didn’t, instead becoming an age of wind and solar, is principally because of Germany.

Despite being Europe’s premier industrial economy, German culture harbours an irrational, nihilistic reaction against industrialization, evident before and during the Nazi era. It disappeared after Hitler’s defeat and only bubbled up again in the terrorism and antinuclear protests of the 1970s and the formation of the Green Party in 1980.

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One can admit that cutting CO₂ has a cost, but argue the climate benefits are still worth it. But we need to be honest there’s a trade-off

The concept of trade-offs has become unfashionable. Politicians around the world like to pretend that their choices will bring us nothing but superlative benefits.

Nowhere is this whitewashing more pervasive or accepted than in climate change. There is a prevalent, comforting notion that we can have our cake and eat it too: that cutting carbon need not involve financial sacrifice.

We hear this rhetoric so often that we almost don’t notice it. In announcing plans to make the UK a global hub for “green finance,” the British minister of state for climate change and industry Claire Perry said, “The transition to a low carbon economy is a multi-billion pound investment opportunity.” Norway’s Prime Minister recently claimed climate change offers “an opportunity for development and growth.”

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Donald Trump as saviour not just of American democracy but global freedom? One can imagine tall foreheads exploding everywhere at such a thought. Although he doesn’t express it quite that strongly, this is one inevitable conclusion from Rupert Darwall’s tremendous new book, Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex.

That’s because Trump, by abandoning the Paris climate agreement, and reversing his predecessor’s attempts to bypass Congress on environmental matters, has heaved a mighty wrench into the European-based thrust to impose global bureaucratic “governance” under the pretext of saving the world from climate catastrophe.

Beyond all the blather about Trump’s presidency representing the triumph of redneck ignorance and deplorable racism — and whatever Trump’s personal shortcomings — Darwall notes that one of the main reasons for his victory was that the American left had abandoned working people in pursuit of identity politics and radical environmentalism.

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The Trump administration this week announced it would repeal the Clean Power Plan, former president Barack Obama’s signature global warming program.

The end of the Clean Power Plan — designed to reduce power plant emissions by one-third and establish the Obama administration’s climate bona fides prior to the opening of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 — represents more than another nail in the coffin of the climate change mission. More profoundly, it is another sign that the global warming tyranny that has been compromising the rule of law is coming to a close.

The Clean Power Plan and other global warming reforms could have been legitimate, and Obama wanted them to be. But the global warming bill that he pushed in his first term — the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 — couldn’t muster the necessary votes in Congress.

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There is a disturbance in the troposphere, much perturbation. The little Gore molecules that do so much to keep everybody in the climate change industry in a sweat are slacking off. The results are—let me coin a word—undeniable. The world’s leading climate entrepreneur’s new PowerPoint agitprop, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, hasn’t stirred the waters or warmed the air.

Take note of that bathetic subtitle, Truth to Power. With just about every government and sub-sovereign government in the world on side, every progressive university in full harmony, every pseudo-science radio and TV program treating global warming with the reverence only found these days among Scientologists and faith healing sorcerers, and every celebrity that owns a yacht and a private jet willing to swear, “It’s real and it’s happening,” which side do you think has the “Power?”

Not to mention the annual mass march of the penguins—sorry, my mistake—the annual trek (by jet) of the hordes of NGOs, Greenpeace camp followers, Green parties, and bureaucrats to Rio or Paris or Beijing or Marrakesh to piously intone The End is Near under the illustrious banner of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Conference of the Parties.

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The winds and rains from Hurricane Harvey were battering Houston, so Klein sensed an opportunity to cash in on a timely disaster

On Monday, in my capacity as a Twitter watchdog over the general ideological health of the planet, I spotted a dispatch from Naomi Klein. As readers may know, when it comes to the ideological health of the planet, my advice would be to steer clear of Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and other prescriptions for Dr. Green Statism to conduct full head transplants on the body politic and the global economic system.

The winds and rains from Hurricane Harvey were battering Houston, so Klein sensed an opportunity to cash in on a timely disaster. She sent around a tweet to her followers, but directed at one group: “Any journalists looking for climate experts to interview about #Harvey should read this piece, some very clear and credible voices in it.”

Before we get to the details of Klein’s effort, what seems clear about Harvey is this: it’s not the first time Houston has been underwater from hurricane action; Harvey ranks something like fifteenth-worst in the history of hurricane landfalls in the United States; it’s the first Category 4 to strike in 12 years, despite global warming theories;

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Canada’s NEB expands its review of the Energy East pipeline proposal, while U.S. limited partnership Energy Transfer Equity files a racketeering lawsuit against Greenpeace and other ENGOs

Two developments this week indicate the stark difference in the political climate with regards to energy on opposite sides of the 49th parallel. President Donald Trump wants to continue to unleash the U.S.’s vast fossil fuel potential, which has had a dramatic, positive effect on job creation. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks to a carbon tax and a regulation-forced transition to a land of sunshine and wind-turbine lollypops.

On Wednesday, Canada’s National Energy Board (NEB) announced that it was expanding its review of the Energy East pipeline proposal, which would take Alberta oil to Quebec and the East coast, to include both its impacts on climate, and climate policy’s impact on it.
This promises to make even more complicated what is already a regulatory bog, and represents a major victory for radical anti-development environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) such as Greenpeace.

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