The Truth About Net Zero, at Last Climate enthusiasm hits the political wall as voters face the costs.
The great and good of politics and business have converged on Dubai this week for the global climate conference known as COP28, and by now they must wish they hadn’t. The event has done the one thing such confabs are supposed never to do, which is expose the truth about climate change and the race to net-zero carbon emissions.
The truth-teller in chief is the event’s host, Sultan Al Jaber. He’s become a figure of hate on the eco-left since letting slip that he’s a net-zero skeptic. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” he said of the climate industry’s global temperature target during a virtual event last month. He warned that attempting to wean the world off fossil fuels would “take the world back into caves.”
The net-zero apostles say the political leader and head of the state oil company in a major petroleum-producing country never should have been invited to host COP28. But then someone has to drill the oil that powers the private jets that ferry the bigwigs to these confabs.
The bigger embarrassment for the climate left is that voters agree with Mr. Jaber. If you haven’t paid much attention to COP28 this week, perhaps you’ve read about the collapse of the net-zero agenda around the world.
In no particular order:
• The European Union’s Green Deal is on the rocks, barely four years after it was unveiled to great fanfare. Key elements of the program, especially concerning land conservation, have withered on contact with the European Parliament, and enthusiasm for the rest is waning. Brussels frets it can’t keep pace with the subsidies in America’s Inflation Reduction Act—because Europe doesn’t have the money.
• In the United Kingdom in September, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ditched an electric-vehicle mandate that had been due to kick in by 2030. This still didn’t spare him a revolt by his own Conservative Party members of Parliament this week as more than two dozen voted against a backdoor attempt to impose on auto makers a quota for sales of new EVs. The quota passed but Mr. Sunak is on notice.
Mr. Sunak’s administration also promises to issue new licenses for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea—a policy the opposition Labour Party seems unlikely to reverse if Labour wins an election expected next year. Labour has scaled back its own green spending pledges because the party suspects voters would be wary of such a large fiscal commitment.
• The goal is to avoid the embarrassment that befell the center-left in elections in the Netherlands last month. That vote was a rebuff of Frans Timmermans, the politician previously in charge of the EU’s Green Deal. Voters instead turned to a politician on the right, Geert Wilders, who has little time for net zero. The election may have been motivated more by immigration concerns, but voters previously had elevated a new anti-environmental-regulation farmers’ party to be the largest faction in the Parliament’s upper house as a protest against emissions restrictions in agriculture.
• Germany is slipping into political disarray after a court ruling in mid-November disallowed the budget gimmick Berlin planned to use to finance its net-zero pledges. By forcing tens of billions of euros of green spending back onto to the government’s balance sheet from the slush funds where politicians hoped to hide the expense, the ruling has confronted voters with the true costs of net zero. The choice now will be between social welfare and climate, and the fiscal and political math imperils Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition.
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The common denominator is reality. European countries, like the U.S., are discovering that no matter how hard they push on the net-zero string, costs never come down, green jobs never materialize to replace industrial employment, and the subsidy bill never declines. Meanwhile, Europe’s economies already are highly efficient in carbon emitted per euro of gross domestic product—and China and India keep building coal-fired power plants anyway.
Developing economies don’t have the luxury of net-zero fantasies and understand they need fossil fuels for their people to enjoy rising prosperity. The alternative is the cave of Mr. Jaber’s telling, and it turns out that no number of elaborate climate summits will persuade ordinary people to return to the darkness.
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