End of a Green Delusion

 Aug. 20, 2025

 

Get out your notepads, social scientists. A “preference falsification” bubble is about to go pop in the realm of climate policy.

The term comes from Duke University’s Timur Kuran, for when people feel pressured to adopt and exhibit ideas they don’t believe in. One such bubble was born under near-laboratory conditions in December 2008. The incoming Obama administration decided, with Republicans vacating the White House, the “existential” threat of climate change no longer merited unpopular energy taxes. Subsidies to its green-energy cronies would suffice.

In haste, the climate movement prostrated itself before this idea, as did the mainstream press, though it was nonsense.

This year Donald Trump has done the world a favor by defunding the green-energy elite and its policy substrate. In the strange way of events, greens now can free themselves from false fealty to a nonsolution. But it’s going to take a long unwinding, especially the morass of electric vehicle subsidies.

A lagging indicator is the Princeton University-related Repeat Project, previously mocked here for its hard sell of Joe Biden’s worthless Inflation Reduction Act. Today its principal, Jesse Jenkins, and colleagues are making the rounds keening over the death of Mr. Biden’s handiwork. In a New York Times podcast, they rattle on in the usual way: Green energy is good. Therefore subsidies for green energy are good. As in Soviet economics, inputs are rejoiced in—more windmills, more solar farms. Outputs are ignored—rising emissions, artificially goosed energy consumption.

Though it does nothing for the climate given the shrinking global significance of U.S. emissions, U.S. “net zero” is still a “moral imperative”—never mind that U.S. net zero would be achieved mainly by shifting U.S. emissions overseas.

OK, I’ve been beating this sickly horse for a while. But I came to understand something after a long-toothed veteran of Democratic politics and top Biden official visited our offices in 2022. I launched my usual critique of clean-energy subsidies, and he finished my sentence, adding that “I have to believe that putting a price on carbon” will return to center stage. To my further surprise, he approvingly noted House GOP interest in a carbon border tax, a second cousin to Mr. Trump’s beloved import tariffs.

In other words, at the highest levels of the Democratic Party, a climate realist was already drumming his fingers waiting for the green-subsidies preference falsification to pass.

A carbon tax isn’t undoable in the U.S. context, I’ve long argued; it’s been forcibly kept off the agenda by Democrats who can smell but refuse to pursue the obvious deal with Republicans in return for income-tax cuts.

A carbon tax is a consumption tax. So are Mr. Trump’s import tariffs. Already the blogosphere has been lighting up over how Mr. Trump’s chaotic start might be repurposed for a pro-growth, pro-debt reduction tax reform.

You didn’t have to look far for the truth. It was everywhere except the mainstream media, the New York Times being the worst. I’ve pointed frequently to the 2013 National Science Foundation report funded by congressional Democrats themselves. Richard York of the University of Oregon, no apologist for capitalism or fossil fuels, has also shown why green energy doesn’t displace fossil fuels. French energy historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s previous book decried the anthropocene—i.e., humanity’s effect on the planet. His new best-seller explains the fraudulence of the so-called energy transition.

Last year the prestigious journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science should have closed the verdict on this faulty experiment. It found virtually all the world’s climate policies to be failing. Why? They mistook concessionary funding of green energy for cutting emissions.

In Foreign Affairs, Obama brain-truster Peter Orszag delivers the coup de grace: “Rather than replacing conventional energy sources, the growth of renewables is coming on top of that of conventional sources.”

No kidding. A world-historical boondoggle might have been avoided long ago. It needed only a media that did its job of holding a mirror up to reality rather than pathetically flailing after consumers who’ll pay to have their self-images confirmed.

For some greens the wake-up call will never come. They’re little more than shills for industries that know they won’t be favored under a carbon tax. Their survival depends on direct government support for fake solutions to a climate problem that itself remains inescapably, in some sense, theoretical.

The damage to other things Americans care about, such as jobs and economic dynamism, has been incalculable. On the eve of the Obama preference-falsification election, this column said the only live question was how much the U.S would spend on climate change to have no effect on climate change. The answer will be in the trillions.

End of a Green Delusion - WSJ