OPINION:
These last few months have been, for climate warriors, the winter of their discontent, unlikely to be made glorious summer anytime soon.
Their bête noir, President-elect Donald Trump, soon will taking the oath after winning pretty much every contested state and the popular vote. They can now anticipate that Mr. Trump will withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord and, ultimately, from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In anticipation of this, finance companies such as Morgan Stanley and BlackRock have walked away from efforts to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. The People’s Republic of China has made it clear that it has no intention of achieving net zero. The United States, which has never as a nation committed to a net zero goal, will certainly not commit to one during a Trump administration.
Back in the physical world, data centers needed to capitalize on the promise of artificial intelligence, will use power generated by new power plants, some or most of which will be fired by natural gas. So we will need more pipelines. At the same time, sales of battery-powered vehicles are less robust than they need to be to meet Team Biden’s goal of all new vehicles being battery-powered 10 short years from now.
Even in California, people are not attributing the fires to climate change. They seem to intuitively understand that when you build houses in the dry brush, bad things can happen when the Santa Ana winds come out of the desert. Oddly enough, political scientist Roger Pielke has pointed out that attributing the fires to climate change is a little shaky. Or, in his words: “The IPCC has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change.”
Finally, the trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions suggests – whatever you might think about climate change – that by its own metrics, the developed world’s decades-long attempt to “address” climate change has been a failure. Globally, we emit about 50% more greenhouse gas emissions than we did in 1990. If you’re serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, you need a better approach.
The foundational problem is, of course, that most people throughout the world value reliable and affordable energy more than they value reductions in greenhouse gases. That’s understandable: fully 3 billion people on this planet still use biomass (wood or manure) as their primary source of energy. They aren’t worrying about climate change killing them. They are a lot more worried about starvation, malnourishment, disease, etc.
In the developed world, the climate warriors have obviously not made a strong enough case explaining why people should reduce their standard of living in exchange for reducing greenhouse gases. For many, mitigation seems like the better, more economically sound approach. Team Obama and Team Biden both knew this, which is why they never even bothered to propose a carbon dioxide tax, or anything that looked like a carbon dioxide tax. It took out-of-touch Republicans to do something that careless.
Back in California, the houses in Pacific Palisades, Altadena and elsewhere will be rebuilt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, showing what he really cares about, exempted rebuilding efforts from the fearsome hand of the Coastal Commission. That’s the right answer. But it is not going to make the climate change warriors feel any warmer.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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