Crisis Actors

The LA Times editorial board recently urged President Biden to declare a "climate emergency" and do via executive order things that Congress has not done. This call to action, issued ahead of the just-passed Inflation Reduction Act but after the Supreme Court told the EPA "Congress did not grant you the authority to do what you've been doing," raises a question:

Are these people fanatics or cynics? True-believers or carnies? Do they really believe in what they demand, or are they using "climate emergency" simply as a smokescreen to advance a hidden agenda?

Consider, first, some global realities.

The "green" world, i.e. the nations that have prioritized decarbonizing their energy economies, consists of Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand, and comprises 17% of the Earth's population. By contrast, the BRICS nations, a grouping that is decidedly not emulating the West's suicide-by-green policies, comprises 41%. Add in the totality of Africa, which I assure you will not keep carbon energy off its grid as it develops, and you're up to 56% of the planet. The balance - Central and South America, the swathe of nations from Turkey to Pakistan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, aren't awash in green fanaticism, either.

This means that the current approach to mitigating anthropogenic climate change, i.e. replacement of of coal, oil, and gas energy with wind and solar, is being implemented by only one-sixth of the planet. With even that one-sixth slamming against the wall of economic and technological realities - wind and solar are simply not ready to be anything more than supplemental/niche power sources - the impact of this approach on the climate will be negligible.

In short, this form of "green" simply makes no sense.

If the goal is indeed global warming mitigation, that is.

The realities of that green fanaticism are already rearing their heads, with a collapsed government in Sri Lanka, a collapsed power grid in Ghana, a farmer's revolt in the Netherlands, and a restarting of carbon power plants in Germany serving as bellwethers for what other nations that coerce their economies and their people down paths of privation and energy misery. As I recently observed, "green" in its current incarnation is doomed.

The Democrats just enacted the farcically named Inflation Reduction Act, a $700B monstrosity that's much more about "green" than about inflation. Nearly $400B therein is about "energy and climate," much of that in the form of scale-tipping, i.e. tax credits and targeted spending. On top of that, there's a petroleum tax that further tips those scales. More accurate by far to call this a "green" bill than an inflation bill, and realize that it is yet another effort to push the green string by undermining the carbon energy industry.

So, again, the question - is this driven by fanaticism or cynicism? Are the Democrats in the Senate, to a person, so certain of the WASABI remedy to climate change that they enacted this legislation despite all reality?

Framed thus, the question becomes rhetorical.

The Inflation Reduction Act (I don't see it being called IRA, but I'll go ahead with that acronym) is just a scaled-down version of Build Back Better. Its purpose certainly isn't inflation reduction, since the inflation we are experiencing (as is all inflation) is the result of too much spending, borrowing, and printing of money. About the only way it'll reduce inflation is via the economy dampening effect of tax increases - but telling us that they're going to tame inflation by further squeezing an economy already in recession would be political suicide. Indeed, only idiots would raise taxes in a recession.

Oh, and just for the record, this IRA is purported to reduce the deficit. Democrats talking deficit reduction would be quite amusing were it not so tragically absurd. Reality check - tax revenue projections rarely pan out as predicted, usually because people change their behaviors in response to changing rules, and rest assured, Corporate America will not simply say "OK, we'll keep doing exactly what we've been doing, even though it'll hurt our shareholders."

A fair assessment of the IRA, and of the LATimes exhortation for executive climate action, concludes that this is about motivating the blindered loyalists come Election Day. That this is about the appearance of "doing something," coupled with a "pwning" of the Right, which generally opposes pointless climate action, economy-damping taxation, and favoritism for green industries that would otherwise fail (and may still collapse when reality refuses to yield to fantasy).

We all know that politicians are cheats and liars, so why would we even for a moment believe that tax-and-spend monstrosities like the IRA serve the public good?

I've gone into, time and again, the actions that would be both "green" and benefit the nation (promote, via deregulation and obstacle-removal, nuclear power and natural gas use, and export both to the world), but such actions neither feed favored constituencies nor impose privation on the deplorables, so they serve no useful political purpose. This latest bit reaffirms that those running the government today are not working in the nation's best interests.

Keep that in mind come November.

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Peter.