Climate Policy: Stormy Weather? -- National Review

 When it comes to climate policy, Donald Trump may be less of an outlier than bien-pensant Europeans — or their imitators in California and New York — like to think. Tony Blair, not the worst bellwether in certain circles, has now signaled unease over how things are going — for the second time this year. Blair’s argument does not rest on the reality of climate change, but on whether the current approach toward it makes sense. In his view, it does not. Moreover, he warns that “most people” are coming to the same conclusion.

The Hoover Institution’s John Cochrane would agree. Writing in the Grumpy Economist, his splendid blog-turned-Substack, he describes the growing awareness:

[T]hat that this boy shouted wolf once again, that this emperor has no clothes, that climate change though real is not the civilization-threatening disaster pitched at Davos, Paris, and the media, that hugely expensive climate policies do no good.

This, he maintains, will add “just one more notch” to the popular “view that the elite consensus has been disastrously wrong and politicized about just about everything.” As such it will add more impetus to “our current global rightward political lurch into the unknown.”

It might. But then again “the elite consensus” has already taken much of the West to a place — a bad place — unthinkable only a few decades ago.

A month or so, the writers at the Economist, a magazine that has long since (largely) swapped its classical liberalism for Davos groupthink fretted that “the hard right could [soon] be in office in economies worth getting on for half of European GDP.” This, they warned:

[W]ould be a grave blow to European prosperity…They sneer at technocratic management, vow to protect voters from competition and creative destruction and instead offer a seductive combination of handouts and tax cuts.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about many of the economic prescriptions put forward by Europe’s populist right, but “sneering” at the continent’s “technocratic management” is not one of them. The Economist’s writers appear unaware or unwilling to admit that, like their own magazine, today’s “technocratic management” is characterized by the profoundly radicalized “centrism” that has done so much to provoke the rightward lurch they decry.

Cochrane relates, quite correctly, how “the elite consensus has been disastrously wrong and politicized about just about everything.” Even the Economist, which once hymned Angela Merkel as “the indispensable European,” admits that mistakes were made. But it does not give any examples of what they were.

Well, here are just a few, in no particular order (Cochrane offers up a somewhat different selection. No matter, there are plenty of technocratic blunders to choose from):

The hubristic overregulation that did so much to pave the way for the great financial crisis.

Admitting China to the WTO.

The creation of the Euro.

Turning a pandemic into a generational disaster.

Mass-immigration.

And, of course, it was technocrats backed by an elite consensus, who drove through those “hugely expensive” climate policies.

Cochrane:

The “climate crisis” has been taught as gospel for 20 years. Now the average person can see their teachers have been preaching politics in the name of science. The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth—exactly as degrowthers wish—and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate… California voters can scratch their heads at the assertion that the way to mitigate wildfires, rather than forest management, is to force everyone to buy an electric car, which will make the planet only a tiny bit less warmer than it is already in 100 years.

And they will ask who did this to us?

They will be right to do so.

The trigger for Cochrane’s piece was a fascinating article in the New York Times by David Wallace-Wells, a science writer for the newspaper, and author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (2017), a book which is also available in a version “adapted for young adults.” Gotta get ‘em young.

Wallace-Wells is not known for downplaying the consequences of climate change, and he still doesn’t (“warming is proceeding at a terrifying pace and the task of adapting to future risks is growing by the day”). However, he recognizes that the political climate at least has gotten chillier for climatists, even as he argues that appearances in that respect are somewhat deceptive.

Wallace-Wells also takes a hard look at some of what drove so much of the global elite to embrace climatism a decade or so ago. He records the apocalypticism and the proclamations of doom from just a few of climate policy’s confederacy of dunces — Obama, Kerry, (Boris) Johson and Charles, the fool who is now king.

As so often, apocalypticism and millenarianism galloped side by side:

There were also moralistic, or quasi-moralistic, elements. In the years following Paris came more and more talk of climate justice……rapid warming looked to some like comeuppance for cultural decadence and consumerist excess, with climate attaining sometimes apocalyptic features of a theological morality play. 

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon “liked to talk about how sustainability would be for this century what human rights was for the previous one — the basis for a new moral and political order.”

Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that clerics, Pope Francis, and all the rest, were drawn to the climatism like, to borrow a phrase from George Orwell, “bluebottles to a dead cat.”

Cochrane maintains that the transformation of climate into “a political and moral cause, not a scientific or technical one… sowed the seeds of its demise once people figured that out.” In time, perhaps, but millenarianism has demonstrated broad appeal for centuries and, under the circumstances, remarkable durability. Climate millenarism repels some and it will repel more, but it has attracted many too. Once people adopt such beliefs, they can find it difficult to drop them. Communism has never been tried, or so I am told.

The pandemic broke some of climate policy’s post-Paris momentum, argues Wallace-Wells, but he maintains, it “seemed to give the urgency of climate action an additional existential cast.” Perhaps that was how it seemed to some policymakers and to those in Davos pushing a “great reset” but many others disagreed.

Cochrane:

The pandemic taught people that there might be other more pressing existential threats than a degree of heat in 100 years. The pandemic taught people that another branch of “scientific” consensus was incompetent and politicized. No “science” did not recommend masking 2-year-olds outside. And “the pandemic” coincided with George Floyd, and the unicause moving on to a several-year obsession with race, decolonization, diversity, and gender.

The pandemic also, as Wallace-Wells acknowledges, altered the economics that supported so much of the Paris plan:

Amid the pandemic, a surge of inflation soon brought about a spike in interest rates and, with it, an end to the era in which world leaders felt like public spending was free.

On top of that, it made nonsense of the pricing on which numerous renewable projects, in particular relating to wind power, were based.

Then the war in Ukraine not only drove Europe to, in Wallace-Wells’ words,  spend “more on direct fossil-fuel subsidies than…on green-energy investments” but will lead it to substantially increase military spending, perhaps to the 5 percent of GDP insisted upon by Trump, which “happens to be close to what the I.E.A. once projected would be necessary for a global mobilization on climate.”

It is worth adding that there has also been increasing tension between the West (and above all the U.S.) and China. Much of the assumption about the affordability of “green” technology rests on the cost of the equipment from China to which the renewables sector has become addicted. But, as with Germany’s dependence on “cheap” Russian gas, how cheap will those Chinese exports turn out to be in the end? An extra twist of the knife comes from the critical role played by rare earths and rare earth products in so much green technology, a huge proportion of which also comes from China.

Meanwhile popular support for decarbonization has not grown at the pace expected by policymakers. To oversimplify, as Wallace-Wells explains, they had believed that its growth would be the natural response to “a new era of intensifying climate extremes” and that the “palpable benefits to the public” of large-scale green investment would erode any remaining opposition.

That is not how things have worked out. The effects of the green transition have, all too often, been malign, and the bossiness and hectoring that has accompanied it has done nothing to increase its popularity. To be sure, large majorities in many countries say that they favor decarbonization, but, as Wallace-Wells admits, “other polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about.”

Indeed. But green policies have compounded the irritation caused by their onerousness by their, all too often, obvious pointlessness.

Cochrane:

Why should Europe, or California, substantially reduce its economic prosperity — double its electricity and gas prices, tax to subsidize uneconomical vehicles, houses, and more — when those efforts have no or minuscule effects on climate? The only argument has to be as a sort of demonstration of moral purity, with the hope that China, India and Africa admire our purity and choose to follow that lead. Good luck.

Wallace-Wells notes the ebbing of political support for Paris-style climate policy, but observes that:

On the ground, decarbonization is nevertheless racing ahead. “It’s not about climate politics anymore,” says Christiana Figueres, former head of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change and one of the architects of Paris. “It’s about climate economy.”

Decarbonization is indeed moving forward, and climate politics, if necessarily (once the initial euphoria had passed) more furtively, have quite a bit to do with it, not least in the area of renewables, and often with unhappy results. Nevertheless, renewables have been associated with some genuine success stories, particularly in a number of poorer countries. They at least give some backing to the thesis long advanced, writes Wallace-Wells, “by moderates and skeptics: that decarbonization could not be reliably imposed from above on moralistic terms and would have to be powered instead by market forces, private investment and the informed consensus of a price-conscious public.”

Now turn to Cochrane:

The moonshot [the top-down Paris approach] is the mistake. New technology always starts where it makes economic sense and then diffuses. Solar panels make great sense in out of the way places far from the grid or countries that do not have the state capacity to maintain a centralized grid. EVs make great sense as second city cars, not replacements for the Family Truckster.

Cochrane draws attention to the work of Steve Koonin, a past president of Cal Tech and undersecretary for science in the Obama Department of Energy, no wild-eyed “denier,” he. We published an extract from his book Unsettled a few years back. A recent article he wrote in the Wall Street Journal gives an insight into his thinking.

Here’s an extract:

The use of the words “existential,” “crisis” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data… Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

Inevitably, Cochrane cites Bjorn Lomborg, “who serves up a steady diet of uncomfortable truths, also coming from actually reading the science and deconstructing how it is misleadingly spun.” Central to the case made by Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist,” who appeared in National Review’s pages here, is this from a recent article in the New York Post:

Climate economics clearly tells us that the most effective and cost-efficient approach to climate change is to invest significantly in research and development for low-CO₂ energy. By boosting innovation, we can achieve technological breakthroughs that will eventually make green energy more affordable than fossil fuels. Instead of just rich countries buying expensive green energy to feel virtuous, that can help the whole world to eventually switch because green is cheaper…

Much of Lomborg’s argument revolves around examining the moonshot’s opportunity costs, the trade-offs that, as the 19^th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat put it, are often “unseen.” When it comes to climate policy the reason that they are unseen is not infrequently because they are “hidden,” unmentionable in polite company. How dare we point out that, by slowing economic growth, the moonshot means that there will be less money to spend on research or, for that matter, resilience. Humanity has thrived as a result of its ability to adapt. The richer it is, the better equipped it will be to do just that. To drain resources from building defenses to current weather or climate related risks in order to nudge the climate down a degree in a century’s time makes no sense.

And yet the moonshot endures, protected, not least, by both the rigidity of central planning and millenarian conviction. And there is something else. Wallace-Wells saw the climate fight as offering a “kind of redemptive opportunity to the whole technocratic liberal elite, whose social status and moral claim on leadership had somewhat crumbled since the financial crisis.”

No elite will easily walk away from anything that might boost its role, and so ours set to work on the climate, well aware of how such grand “common tasks” can rally people behind them. Those on the left found the Paris climate regime in line with their approval of ascetism (mainly for others), contempt for consumerism and faith in central planning as economic model, and source of power and paychecks. They also realized that wrapping red in green while shouting about the end of the world was a way of advancing an agenda that otherwise would have gotten nowhere. Wallace-Wells himself regrets the way that the “hands off” green transition he describes might mean abandoning the supposed “second aspiration” of climate policy, “a better, more just, more equitable future for all,” pretty words of a type often associated with a deeply destructive agenda.

The emergence of this “second aspiration” was probably inevitable, but so given the nature of today’s left, were the zanier features that sometimes came with it.

Cochrane:

When a technocratic carbon dioxide reduction merged into the great unicause; when the mantle of “science” was wrapped around de-growth, socialism [and] decolonization…the median voter was sure to figure it out sooner or later.

But what can that median voter then do? Establishment politicians are increasingly willing to press the pause button on selected parts of the moonshot (or to ponder doing so aloud). However, just below the fold “climate politics” continue to propel it along, often by methods that bypass the ballot box, from lawfare, to ESG (dented, but still alive), to the relentless pressure of what Cochrane refers to as the “climate-industrial complex,” a lavishly funded, hugely influential grouping which is also a source of money, power and jobs for the legions of rent seekers who inhabit its ecosystem. They too are not going quietly.

And then there is the EU commission, still (some tactical retreats part) clinging to Paris orthodoxy despite rising discontent among a good number of its member states. This is hardly a surprise. A leftish technocratic institution was always likely to be sympathetic to a leftish technocratic project especially when the all-embracing nature of that project operates to expand the commission’s reach deeper into the governance of its member states and, to the extent that it has the influence or regulatory muscle to do so, beyond. This includes efforts to suppress what the EU labels climate “misinformation,” an effort so contrary to the spirit of scientific inquiry that it is almost perfectly emblematic of how corrupted climate policy has become, and how difficult it will be to change.