Death of a ‘Clean Energy’ Debacle

 A new ‘endangerment’ study shows that the climate battle is over except for the lawfare.

 

By 

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

 

Oct. 15, 2025

 

 

Oh, the humanity, I sarcastically thought on reading the names and affiliations of 39 scientist behind a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine finding that, as the New York Times put it, “greenhouse gases are, in fact, a danger.”

Read on and realize their book-length report is concocted for a bureaucratic and legalistic purpose, not a scientific one. It will disappear into the maw of a futile partisan legal squabble over the Trump administration’s effort to repeal the 2009 so-called endangerment finding by the Environmental Protection Agency.

This finding, in the Obama years, would come to justify regulatory actions that have zero impact—none—on climate change. Not only are U.S. emissions too small a share of the global total to matter; in practice, EPA actions mostly just drive U.S. emissions offshore.

Whatever they think, the 39 scientists are part of a machine now defending its own activity and privilege, in one of biggest boondoggles in the history of policy making. Remember the left-wing film director Michael Moore’s 2019 opus “Planet of the Humans”? Of course you don’t. It was shadow-banned by the left and film distributors not because it was short on climate apocalyptics—it was over-the-top on climate apocalyptics.

It was shadow-banned for pointing out that U.S. climate policy was a fraud. It consisted of colossal pork barrel that was having no effect on the alleged problem.

Richard York, of the University of Oregon, is seen marveling in the film at the self-willed blindness of the U.S. policy community to a simple question: Do clean-energy subsidies result in fossil fuels being displaced?

“They don’t even know that that’s a question,” he says in a voice of wonder.

As often happens, truth tellers weren’t really in short supply. As often happens too, we can pinpoint the exact moment and exact dynamics when a policy boondoggle was born.

President Obama was taking office amid the 2008-09 financial crisis. Money printing was popular; new energy taxes weren’t. So he abandoned his party’s long-standing advocacy of a carbon tax in favor of turning green energy into just another thing government money printing could support.

Put it this way: Hot dog consumption would surely rise if hot dogs were subsidized by government. Purely a conceit, though, is any idea that cheeseburger consumption would simultaneously decline. It doesn’t follow. And so it has proved: Energy consumption has simply grown overall.

It’s almost too big a question. Why, under the First Amendment and the special protections it enjoys, does our press still fail us? If the press has any job, it’s policy analysis—to tell us whether government actions are producing their stated aims or devolving into pocket lining by special interests, in this case amounting to trillions of dollars in the U.S. and around the world.

Last year a study put paid to magical thinking. Of 1,500 climate policies adopted in 41 countries over two decades, less than 5% have resulted in any reduction of emissions.

Donald Trump has been good for one thing, showing millions of Americans why they should feel contempt for their media and leadership elites. But he has mostly succeeded at beating these elites at their own game of electoral politics, not changing the game. This week’s partial Hamas defeat may prove a game changer. His productive disabling of the green energy elite may be a longer-lasting game changer.

But he’s no Reagan, who really did let success be his retribution. Mr. Trump’s approval might otherwise be in the 70s instead of the 40s. As in the Reagan years, Democrats might be rushing to align themselves with his policy revolution because the broad mass of voters believe it’s working for them.

The 39 scientists of the endangerment study at least refrain from the outright fraud of failing to distinguish net from gross. A warmer world isn’t only hotter, it’s also less cold. An atmosphere slightly richer in CO2 doesn’t only produce ocean acidification, it also speeds plant growth and terrestrial greening.

This doesn’t mean we should welcome growing CO2. But if you’re not trying to get at the truth, you’re doing something else. “Negative impacts might be more severe in the absence of efforts to adapt,” the report is reduced to nonsensically arguing, as if adaptation is not the definition of being alive for humans and other creatures.

Two lessons are worth drawing from this whole sorry episode: Beings who think themselves independent and science-minded are not immune to the reward system in which they operate. The bigger lesson concerns how democracy’s error-correction function can be impeded when an unnatural uniformity prevails among elites. This has clearly been the case during the 16 years and approximately 350 days of the green energy fraud.