Green Elites Face Trump Threat A chance to clean up rampant cronyism in the energy sector won’t soon return. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/green-elites-face-trump-threat-1478650057
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his candidacy represents an important opportunity. It’s a chance to dismiss a very particular elite about whom it could be said, borrowing from Cromwell, “For any good you have been doing . . . in the name of God, go!”
We are referring, of course, to America’s green-energy elite.
With a Hillary Clinton victory on Tuesday, America’s ludicrous Tesla subsidies would be certain to continue—because so many Democratic politicians aligned with the company, especially in California, are themselves too big to fail.
Washington’s Kafkaesque fuel mileage rules would only become more Kafkaesque. By forcing car makers and their customers to invest in economically unjustified fuel-saving technology, they’ve already perversely contributed to last summer’s breaking of a decade-old record for miles traveled and fuel burned.
Ethanol’s alleged greenhouse benefits have long since been scientifically debunked. Its putative contribution to America’s “energy security” has been rendered a joke by the fracking revolution. Never mind. Corn farmers like a handout, and corn-state senators like being re-elected. The cost to American motorists: $10 billion a year.
And making sure it remains so—we hardly needed the latest WikiLeaks dump to tell us—have been a handful of activist hedge-fund billionaires like Tom Steyer and Nat Simons. In the recent dump of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, we see these men, in return for being willing to write four-figure checks to Democratic candidates, fishing for reassurance that policies that cost the American people billions, with no benefits, will be embraced by the next Democratic administration.
We see climate saints like Bill McKibben and Joe Romm conspiring at their behest to silence a scientist for saying perfectly accurate things about the lack of evidence for a worsening of extreme weather events. We see Mr. Podesta himself trying to orchestrate a media mugging of liberal Harvard Law Prof. Larry Tribe for representing the coal industry.
And to what end, exactly?
Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, is hardly a green-energy naysayer. Yet last week he estimated that even if electric vehicles accounted for half of global auto sales (currently EVs account for less than 1%), oil consumption would nevertheless continue to rise because the “demand growth is not coming from cars, it’s from trucks, aviation and the petrochemical industry and we don’t have major alternatives to oil products there.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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