https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/progressives-green-energy-boondoggle-based-fantasy-bruce-thornton/
Last Thursday Joe Biden posed for a photo op with representatives from automobile manufacturers. They gathered there to mark the Biden administration’s plan to raise the miles-per-gallon standard that gasoline powered vehicles must achieve––52 MPG by 2026. The compensation for automakers will comprise more regulatory credits for carmakers and subsidies for electric vehicle (EV) consumers, which will lead to higher prices for trucks and SUVs to offset their losses on EVs. This means consumers of those popular vehicles will be subsidizing EV drivers. And more taxpayer money will go to increasing available electricity, providing more and faster charging stations, and improving battery capacity.
As the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Behold Big Business colluding with Big Government to grab subsidies and raise consumer prices,” a form of “corporate socialism, or state capitalism.” This unholy alliance calls to mind the “military-industrial complex” Dwight Eisenhower warned about in 1961, a warning still pertinent today.
At least during the Cold War a nuclear-armed Soviet Union posed an existential threat that justified cooperation between politics and the armaments industries. Today, the purveyors of anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW) ––the more accurate label masked by the euphemism “climate change”–– are using a dubious theory riddled with uncertainty to justify such crony capitalist policies. The challenges to ACGW in the last few decades have exposed those uncertainties and the dubious “science” proponents claim to be “settled,” and so can justify spending trillions of taxpayer dollars,
For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer have written, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.” So too physicist Steven E. Koonin, who writes in his new book Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”
On top of the contested rationale for pouring billions of tax-payer dollars into one industry, the logistics of enlarging electricity production for “green” technology like wind turbines, solar panels, and half-ton batteries for EVs, not to mention expanding exponentially the electrical grid, are formidable, as Mark Mills has reported:
