WaSaBI Green and the Snowpiercer

Consider the story of Snowpiercer, a French graphic novel turned into a Hollywood movie and basic cable series. Per Wikipedia:

In 2032, 18 years after an attempt to stop global warming via stratospheric aerosol injection catastrophically backfires and creates a new ice age, the remnants of humanity have taken to a self-sustaining circumnavigational train, the Snowpiercer, run by reclusive transportation magnate Wilford. The passengers on the train are segregated, with the elite in the extravagant front cars and the poor crammed into squalid tail compartments overseen by armed guards.

The premise is farcical on many levels, but the story was a hit in all three formats, and the series is in its third season. It's also metaphorical on many levels, but the obvious-as-a-brick-to-the-head metaphors are trite, tired, cliche, and ripe for rebuttal.

One metaphor the creators likely never pondered crept into my head as I read a recent column by Bjorn Lomborg, a frequent commenter on climate matters who "gets it" re the remedies being pressed upon us. Lomborg deconstructs, with stark numbers, the premise of "net zero" via wind and solar power. In brief, solar, wind, and battery tech is far too costly, and the drive to coercively displace carbon energy with these sources would have a terrible impact on human living standards, and especially on the poorest.

The Bank of America has found that achieving net-zero will cost $150 trillion over 30 years, almost twice the combined annual GDP of every country on Earth. The annual cost of $5 trillion is more than all the world’s governments and households spend every year on education.

This isn't a secret. Anyone with half a brain, a modicum of attention span, and the will to question dogma can figure out that this wind-and-solar-and-batteries (let's call it WaSaBI ("I" for Idiocy) Green) push simply doesn't add up. Wind and solar are niche sources, utile in some locales and circumstances, but not any sort of "solution" to the potential threats of anthropogenic global warming.

Why, then, are our political leaders cramming this 'net-zero' fantasy down our throats? Why is Corporate America apparently all-in on WaSaBI Green? Why was the Super Bowl festooned with electric car advertisements?

Here's the best metaphor I’d draw from Snowpiercer.

WaSaBI Green is the train. The train is moving. Not only moving, but accelerating. People of power see it moving, and don't want to miss out, lest they end up in the back with the grubs, peons, serfs, etc, so they're hopping on board.

In the movie Margin Call, John Tuld, a character composite of Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld and Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain (played splendidly by Jeremy Irons), told his team:

There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

This rush to wind-and-solar reeks of "first." Big companies are cowards when it comes to public perception, and with the green train being flogged along by the 'smart' set that is more self-righteous than actually smart, getting on the train ahead of your competitors means your competitors are more apt to draw ire than you. Moreover, when the government sends a message, Big Business is often better off heeding it voluntarily and proactively than waiting to be coerced.

The hard realities of this flavor of green are already landing on Europeans' backs. WaSaBI Green plus the obviously stupid move of shutting down nuclear plants have driven energy costs to record highs. France, a long-time user of nuclear power, is building six new nuke plants, where just a few years ago, there was talk of doing as Germany, and winding down nuclear power.

Meanwhile, over here, in just a short span of time, the WaSaBI Green directive of the Biden administration reversed years of progress toward energy independence, stifled (and continues to stifle) the oil and gas industry, and certainly contributed to the sharp rise in energy costs seen domestically.

Again, all these outcomes are no surprise. Obama, in one of those rare moments of political honesty that bubble up from the swamp, informed us back in 2008 that,

Under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.

So... why is everyone still hawking WaSaBI Green?

Because it has a momentum of its own. Because the Snowpiercer is rolling, and it's "hop on board now or end up in the back, or miss the train entirely." Because politicians are as craven as corporate CEOs when it comes to the scolding of a small but loud pack of hyenas (who aren't nearly as smart as actual hyenas). And, because there's more (Other People’s) money to be had in being in the front of the train than in the back or chasing it after it has left the station.

Problem is, if the train's going in the wrong direction, say, towards a cliff rather than to a sunny and spiffy "Perfect Place" of Yogi's Ark Lark, then everyone getting on board is abetting catastrophe.

A good and visionary motorman, if he can make his way to the head of the train, can avert the cliff-run. Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan, and others have done so in the past, and a leader who can manage to scream "stop the insanity!" with sufficient aplomb and authority might reduce us from getting burned by WaSaBI Green.

When and if such a person appears on the scene, we'd do the world justice by helping turn the train instead of riding it in disgruntled passivity.

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Lomborg argues that we need to "innovate down" the price of green energy. While I don't disagree that such investment has potential benefit, I also know that you cannot predict or force an invention, and it'd take a pretty disruptive invention to get WaSaBI Green cheap enough that it'd be adopted voluntarily and for economic reasons.

In the meantime, we should also, as I've argued repeatedly, not only reverse this anti-nuclear-power trend, but invest in researching the geo-engineering technology that the Snowpiercer story unfortunately makes the prime culprit of the Earth's cold-demise. That this, rather than a failed promise of WaSaBI Green, is the MacGuffin of the tale is its own telltale: The mandarins and apparatchiks of Green actually worry that successful geo-engineering would allow people to keep living free and capitalistic lives, so they oppose its research.