Trump is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension
Excerpt: Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained. Yet sometimes the inevitable turns out to be not so.
Over the past few years green policies — notably the drive for “net zero” — have been failing. Both markets and politicians have seen the light. What Joe Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen once called “the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-first century” has revealed itself to be something of a disaster.
The new American President is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension. Well before November the opportunity of the century was going bust — not least because the policies were having little apparent impact on the actual climate. On Wall Street, ESG-approved (environment, social and government) stocks have been tanking, according to leading studies, shackling firms with massive losses.
Climate activists still insist that Trump’s departure from the green mantra is hubristic, like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground as the inevitable climate apocalypse comes closer. But many voters in America as well as Europe have had second thoughts about spending upwards of $6 trillion annually for the next thirty years on green largesse. It doesn’t help that these spending pledges are so often advocated by jet-setting billionaires.
Well-funded campaigners will continue to try to shield Europe’s environmental policies from Trump, but this is not a passion among voters on either side of the Atlantic. Most people don’t want to huddle in smaller dwelling units, enjoy less mobility, more costly home heating, no air-conditioning, and a more austere diet. Already a growing economic dislocation — such as the energy-driven decline of the German industrial machine — is sparking opposition to green policies throughout the West, first expressed by the gilets jaunes movement in France in 2018, now spreading further across an increasingly distressed Europe. Even some on the left are reconsidering their policy agenda. In ultra with-it Berlin, a referendum on tighter emissions targets recently failed to win over enough voters.
The decline of the greens is a clear sign of change. Once seen by Foreign Affairs as “reshaping global politics,” the greens have suffered devastating defeats across Europe. There are now moves to boost fossil fuels in eastern Europe and Japan.
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Even hipsters are ditching the green agenda. Bastions such as Berkeley and Washington State voted overwhelmingly last fall against measures to limit or increase tax on natural gas. Even Californians seem to be losing their passion for renewable energy.
Throughout red America, communities have been rejecting wind and solar projects, over seven hundred times since 2015. The crux of the green dilemma lies in part with the realities of physics as well as geopolitics. Renewables suffer a low power density which, as Siemens energy CEO Christian Bruch recently suggested, requires ten times as much material to work effectively, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.
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Repeated claims of impending, unalterable doom tend to undermine the seriousness of the issue. Certainly warming has not impacted food production, as is frequently suggested. Since 1960 wheat production has quadrupled. Rising sea levels remain a concern, but that has been happening since the last glaciation over a few hundred thousand years ago. It has not accelerated substantially in recent decades. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own report concludes that a signal of climate change has not yet emerged beyond natural variability.
Perhaps equally critical are geopolitical considerations. The West will pay a price for its green fantasies given that its greatest competitors, including China, use coal and gas to power their economies. China now emits more greenhouse gases than Japan, the EU and North America put together.
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By far the biggest beneficiary of the mandated switch to “renewable” energy is China. The countries which are critical for providing the necessary resources are often dominated by Beijing. The Chinese regime uses efficient, cheaper fossil fuels to dominate the solar-panel industry, building its battery capacity to roughly four times ours, while exercising effective control of rare earth minerals and the technology for processing them.
Unlike their Chinese counterparts, politicians in Washington, London or Brussels have to listen to their own constituents. These people are being forced to pay high energy prices, which are more expensive everywhere that green policies have been most aggressively pursued: Denmark, Germany and, in the US, California.
In Britain last year, where energy costs are some of the highest in Europe, more than ten million households fell behind on their energy payments due to soaring bills. Immiseration has become central to green ideology. According to Robert Jackson, a Stanford professor of earth system science, Americans should learn to like living on onequarter of their current energy, essentially turning the clock back to consumption patterns of the 1950s. This does not make an appealing proposition to the public, as the likes of Bill Gates and even the head of a powerful and prominent UK trade union have noted.
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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
