Reports

Joel Kotkin – Spiked Columnist: 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. … 

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. …

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. … 

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.

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. … 

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.’

The leaders of the West want to spend upwards of $6 trillion annually for the next 30 years on green largesse.

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.

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.

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.