RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is the global climate-change conference that no one cares about. The latest United Nations (UN) ‘conference of the parties’, otherwise known as COP29, is currently being hosted in oil-rich, authoritarian Azerbaijan. Not many political heavy-hitters have decided to attend but assorted elites, grifters and media have attended hoping it will bring them more financial manna from heaven.

The late-19th-century US political wire-puller Mark Hanna once quipped: ‘There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ Billions, potentially trillions, have been sunk into green projects enriching the already wealthy and their nonprofits, in what outgoing US treasury secretary Janet Yellen has proclaimed the greatest business opportunity of the 21st century.

Hopefully, Yellen didn’t put all her financial eggs in the green basket. The election of Donald Trump as US president only adds to the current woes of the climate industry. The wind-energy sector is increasingly beleaguered and huge numbers of climate start-ups are failing. Despite receiving billions in subsidies, green companies are recording big losses, declaring bankruptcy or avoiding new projects – even in China. Yellen’s opportunity of the century is becoming its most obvious bust, with little apparent impact on the climate.

Of course, the green industry will keep going, as long as there are funds to subsidise it. The alliance between big corporate interests and activist bureaucracies has created what political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has labelled the ‘climate-industrial complex’. As energy analyst Robert Bryce points out, parts of Wall Street have been ‘feeding at the trough’ and will lobby Trump and Congress to keep some of their goodies. At the same time, some deep-blue states, like California and New York, are girding themselves by issuing their own green regulations to replace those that might have come from DC.

The only major country set to benefit from the ‘energy transition’ is China, which continues to spew more greenhouse gases than all advanced countries combined. It is using efficient, cheaper fossil fuels to dominate the solar-panel industry, building its battery capacity to roughly four times the size of America’s while exercising effective control of rare-earth minerals and the technology for processing them.

All this leaves the rest of the world, notably Europe and the UK, embracing a Net Zero strategy that is fundamentally unfeasible without imposing massive costs on the middle and working classes. One particularly dubious aspect of Europe’s all-electric policy lies in the energy grid. According to the Financial Times, UK businesses are already having problems getting extra juice. EVs, which are projected to double the demand for electricity by 2040, will only increase the pressure on the UK’s grid. The Labour government is already looking to ban the use of home chargers during peak hours.

The working classes in Western nations have particular reason for concern. In the UK, the path to lower emissions has been driven by deindustrialisation. The manufacturing sectors’ share of GDP has dropped by 50 per cent since 1990, at the cost of several million jobs. This parallels a two-thirds drop in the UK’s domestic energy production. It now increasingly depends on energy imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.

Arguably, the most traumatic change is taking place in Germany, the last redoubt of European manufacturing and engineering prowess. Overall, Germany’s entire industrial structure is in decline. It is estimated that it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,00 car-manufacturing jobs by 2030.

Given the damage being done to Europe’s industrial base, the political tide is unsurprisingly turning against the greens. The gilets jaunes demonstrations in France in the late 2010s have been followed by large-scale farmers protests in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. This year, voters gave the greens a ballot-box kicking at the European Parliament elections. Even as the technocracy sticks to its green religion, voters are headed in the opposite direction.

The election of Donald Trump, one of whose campaign slogans is ‘drill, baby, drill’, all but guarantees that the war on fossil fuels waged by the Obama-Biden administrations is dead. Whereas his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, was strongly backed by ‘green tech billionaires’, Trump received strong support from oil and gas interests, who may enjoy at least a temporary boom. Delays on new liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities will be lifted, and the tacit mandate for electrical vehicles is also likely to disappear. This shift represents an alternative to the expensive, economy-sapping, ultra-green policies being adopted by Britain’s Labour government and throughout the EU.

Some Biden programmes will no doubt remain in place. But Trump’s control of the Senate guarantees he will appoint judges who will severely limit the power of the environmental bureaucracies and progressive jurists to set fuel and emissions standards. This could prove particularly tough for the left-leaning nonprofits, which can expect their gravy train to stall. ‘This is a massive pushback against the green more than anything’, energy analyst Bryce suggests. ‘They are now on the outside looking in.’

But don’t expect the big green investors, nonprofits and their allies in the media and academia to give up easily. The ‘anti-industry industry’ behind such moves as banning gas stoves, stopping new LNG facilities and cracking down on plastics draws support from the ultra-rich, including Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene, Michael Bloomberg, the Rockefellers, Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr.

Yet, as Bezos himself recently suggested, ‘reality is an undefeated champion’. As the election showed, people prioritise their economic wellbeing over placating the bugaboos of the already rich and powerful. They were concerned about the Democrats’ ambivalence towards fracking, which accounts for the vast majority of the US’s world-leading oil and gas production, not to mention hundreds of thousands good-paying jobs. And they know how few people who lose ‘dirty’ jobs find work in new ‘green’ ones – just one per cent, according to a recent study.

Little wonder blue-collar workers in the ‘carbon economy’ proved critical to Trump’s rise, particularly Latinos. Indeed, Latinos account for more than two-fifths of US food production and the forestry workforce, over a third of ground-clearing and maintenance workers, and a quarter of workers in logistics and manufacturing. In states like California, roughly 60 per cent of manufacturing, trucking and construction jobs belong to Latinos.

Opposition to Biden’s climate policies may have also played a critical role in Trump’s wins in Pennsylvania, a major fracking state, as well as manufacturing-oriented Wisconsin and Michigan. The auto industry’s plan to lay off workers to prepare for the forced march to electric vehicles may also have nudged more working-class voters towards Trump.

Most Americans and Europeans simply aren’t buying the climate jihad. In the US, a recent Gallup poll shows that just three per cent of the population considers climate change and the environment their main concern. Even young people, the group most concerned with climate change, rank it far below issues such as inflation, housing, gun violence, jobs and corruption.

To be sure, most Americans, like Europeans, support the notion of climate mitigation. But they’re rather less willing to pay a high price for it – indeed, a large majority seems unwilling even to pay $10 a month to ‘save’ the planet. In contrast, a recent poll suggested that urban elites – high earners with graduate degrees – favour deeply unpopular notions like rationing gas and meat. Even green bastions like Berkeley and Washington state voted overwhelmingly this month against measures to limit or increase taxes on natural gas. And throughout red America’s vast expanses, communities have been rejecting hundreds of wind and solar projects.

Given the likelihood of mass opposition, what can the alliance of oligarchs and greens do? They must be sorely tempted by Bertolt Brecht’s famous line that it would be ‘easier for the government to dissolve the people, and elect another’.

Of course, their first instinct will be to dial up the climate alarmism and perhaps even threaten violence or court action against ‘climate criminals’. Rather than sober discussion about a very complex topic, the climate lobby and the media will no doubt engage in climate catastrophism. They will talk up the likelihood of mass starvation and a rapid growth in weather-related fatalities, even though decades of predictions of impending, unalterable doom have proved more theatrical than accurate. ‘Climate science’, notes 2022 Nobel Prize laureate for physics John F Clauser, ‘has metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudo-science’.

The powerful ‘anti-industry industry’ can rest assured they will never be called out by big media. Some, like the Associated Press and National Public Radio, are taking money from climate advocates. But many others are only too happy to act as the mouthpieces of the climate lobby for free. This can be seen in the relentless media fear-mongering, writ large in a New York Times piece last year, which talked up a ‘mass climate migration’ away from places like Texas – despite continued migration flows in the opposite direction.

As it stands, the madcap drive to Net Zero in the West essentially guarantees economic decline on a global scale. As other nations seek to grow, the use of fossil fuels continues to increase not only in China, but also in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Some Africans see efforts to stop fossil fuel or nuclear development in their countries as ‘climate colonialism’. As Nigerian vice-president Yemi Osinbajo has noted: ‘No country in the world has been able to industrialise using renewable energy.’

Faced with such competition, the leaders of the West want to spend upwards of $6 trillion annually for the next 30 years on green largesse. But while previous environmental actions to tackle water and air pollution were popular, the current green agenda offers little more than immiseration. It will force the masses to huddle in smaller dwelling units, enjoy less mobility, endure more costly home heating, less air-conditioning and a more austere diet.

Given the unpalatable nature of this choice, Net Zero can only be imposed by what a senior executive at Deutsche Bank calls ‘a certain degree of eco-dictatorship’. Many climate activists, including at the UN, saw the controls governments imposed on their populations during the pandemic as a ‘fire drill’ for what must happen to meet climate goals.

But there is a better alternative. Rather than wallow in climate hysteria, countries can focus on investments, from building dykes and seawalls to planting trees, that will help us to adapt to future climate change. Some other practical steps include expanding nuclear power – a preferable alternative to unreliable wind and solar – and promoting hybrid cars instead of forcing a transition to EVs.

Rather than the poorly devised Green New Deal, Western policymakers might do well to adopt instead models from the original New Deal. The Roosevelt administration faced a climate possibly warmer than ours but addressed the ‘dust bowl’ of the southern plains not by reducing people’s incomes and quality of life, but by eliminating marginal land, planting trees and developing new water and power systems. The government managed to mitigate climate problems while reducing the extensive poverty common to much of rural America.

As market and political support for the strict climate agenda collapses, we need to start investing in numerous new technologies that would make mitigation more cost-effective and less socially destructive. A changing climate poses a challenge. But there are ways to rise to it that will leave humanity better off.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.