The week of March 2, 2026: The death (or not) of net zero, antitrust, AI, tariffs, and much more.
The week of March 2, 2026: The death (or not) of net zero, antitrust, AI, tariffs, and much more.
In a recent article, Javier Blas, Bloomberg’s indispensable energy and commodities columnist, pronounced the “effective” death of net zero. The “race” to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 had been rooted in ideology rather than in “economic or technical realities,” he writes. Those realities are unhelpful and difficult to avoid. Admitting as much is a step that much of the West’s ruling class will not take, especially on the other side of the Atlantic. But what its members don’t say is almost as revealing.
Blas:
When the world’s richest nations got together in 2022 for their biennial energy meeting, their communique mentioned “net zero” 13 times; in 2024, the references went up to 15. After last week’s gathering? Just one occurrence — and that was to underline the lack of universal support.
It is one thing to believe, as Blas does, that man-made climate change is a threat, but quite another to agree with the prescriptions dreamt up to deal with it.
Blas again:
Even at the peak of its popularity, net zero looked far-fetched. One had to believe, as a matter of faith, that consumption of oil, natural gas and coal would drop following stylized cliff-like curves. With current energy-related annual CO2 emissions running above 35,000 million metric tons, reducing them to something that would equal net zero was an impossible task. On current trends, emissions are likely to remain close to current levels for the next 25 years. Even if countries adopt most of the energy policies they’ve announced — a big if — they’ll remain above 25,000 million tons a year until the middle of the century.
To those trying to impose it, net zero by 2050 is an article of faith (Blas is right to use that word), an instrument of social control, or both. The weakness of the case for net zero 2050 helps account for the determination with which its advocates and enforcers try to shut down any opposition to it. Their methods begin, but do not end, with attempts to conflate “denial” of anthropogenic climate change and its (allegedly) existential implications with disagreement over the appropriate response to it. That’s why a loosely defined “delayism” has been added to the list of climate heresies. All it now takes to be consigned to the (metaphorical) flames is sufficiently strong disagreement with policies promoted or implemented by influential climate activists either inside or outside government.
The attempted silencing does not stop with name-calling (or social media jiggery pokery such as shadow-banning). And this is where groups such as the grandly named International Panel on the Information Environment come into the picture. The IPIE, which has received at least some funding from some familiar leftist foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Children’s Investment Fund, and so on), describes itself as “an independent and global science organization providing scientific knowledge about the health of the world’s information environment.” In other words, it is a part of the burgeoning (to use terminology embarrassingly redolent of tinfoil haberdashery) transnational censorship complex.
Damian Carrington, The Guardian’s environment editor, wrote last year about an IPIE report detailing how (my emphasis added) “climate denialism has evolved into campaigns focused on discrediting solutions, such as the false claims that renewable energy caused the recent massive blackout in Spain.”
It has since been confirmed that those claims were not so false after all, but why quibble?
Carrington also reported that Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, has “called for misinformation . . . by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalized.” She also wants to “criminalize media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies.” Free speech is evidently not one of the human rights in Morgera’s portfolio. The UN secretary general would go further. He favors an outright ban on advertising by fossil fuel companies.
Ahead of the COP 30 climate jamboree in Brazil, the UN, UNESCO, and the Brazilian government set up a Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change, in connection with which UNESCO’s Director-General spoke about supporting those fighting “the climate-related disinformation running rampant on social media.”
Social media, in the crosshairs again. That is happening a lot lately.
This initiative is supported by various countries, including some (such as the UK, France, Germany and Spain) not known for their fondness for free speech), a couple of UN entities (UN Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization), the OECD (of which the U.S. is a member), and, a regular presence in post-democratic groupings, “civil society representatives.”
One participant in Turtle Bay’s stand against “climate disinformation” is Verified for Climate, a joint initiative of the UN and the social impact agency Purpose. According to the UN, it promotes “solutions-focused, science-based information to debunk myths and put an end to the narratives of denialism, doomism, and delay.”
“Put an end to.” Something tells me that censorship will be one way in which information “integrity” is to be protected.
Verified’s targets include delayism. Among other offenses, it is allegedly a device “to kick the can down the road.” Not so. While net zero’s critics will not necessarily be at one on how much of a threat is posed by climate change, they do tend to agree that much of net zero represents malinvestment on a gigantic scale. Their recommendations may well involve slowing down — or even scrapping — net zero in its current form, but that is not, in any malevolent sense, a scheme to kick the can down the road. Rather, it is designed to stop it from going any further down the wrong road. This might, for instance, mean rebalancing climate budgets to ensure that a greater percentage is spent on adaptation and resilience, a reasonable strategy that should often pay for itself (full disclosure: I live in a low-lying coastal city).
In many respects, the story Blas is telling about net zero is of that wrong road taken. With, as he puts it, climate change seen as the world’s most important problem, “everything else [was] subordinated” to (supposedly) fighting it. So it was, and the priorities that came with that are a key element in the broader critique of the climate policies adopted, above all in Europe.
But back to Blas:
Renewable projects got green lighted even when the grid wasn’t ready, inflating the costs of transforming the system. At times, European countries shut down energy production — say, nuclear power reactors in Germany — when renewables had not yet matured. The idea that trillions of dollars’ worth of fossil-fuel reserves would be left stranded became pervasive, prompting investors to offload their stakes in oil and gas companies.
Pervasive? Not quite; there were plenty who doubted the scaremongering about “stranded assets,” and some who made good money betting the other way. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to underestimate the extent to which the notion of stranded-asset risk was used to persuade investors and lenders that they had a fiduciary duty to reduce their exposure to fossil fuels.
Investors may be underestimating the risks now associated with renewable energy assets. That’s according to a group of bankers at Barclays, who just published a paper laying out their views on the future of the clean energy transition.
“The classic stranded-asset story focused on fossil fuels, but what we are now seeing is stranded-like outcomes also emerging for renewables,” Daniel Hanna, group head of sustainable and transition finance and a contributing author to the paper, said in an interview.
He says risks are now arising for renewables where “systems integration fails.” And if clean energy can’t connect to the grid, it begins to risk obsolescence.
Oh.
Verified also accuses delayers of pushing “unproven technologies as silver bullets to combat deadly emissions.” Climate change has, indeed, enriched snake-oil salespeople on all sides of the policy debate. But Verified would be wise not to refer to unproven technologies, given the way that the race to net zero has involved the use of massive bribes incentives at taxpayer and/or customer expense and, to a lesser degree (so far) coercion, to boost the take-up of technologies that are badly flawed (wind) or (mass-market EVs) not yet ready for prime time
More generally, delayers (to use that term), both within and outside the climate field, understand the extraordinary opportunity costs of adopting a Paris-style approach. They tend to argue that any energy “transition” should be structured so as not to depress economic growth. (The wealthier humanity becomes, the better it will be equipped to deal with — and innovate its way out of — whatever the climate may bring). And they are often all too aware of the geopolitical windfall that Western climatism has been to China.
Another attribute of “delayism” identified by Verified is the presentation of “fossil fuels as necessary to meet energy demand.”
Well, they will be necessary for a long time. To quote this again from Blas:
Even if countries adopt most of the energy policies they’ve announced — a big if — they’ll remain above 25,000 million tons a year until the middle of the century.
Verified should verify itself.
The Danish academic who co-led the IPIE review also fretted about climate “misinformation”:
“If we don’t have the right information available, how are we going to vote for the right causes and politicians, and how are politicians going to translate the clear evidence into the necessary action?
Who are “we”?
What are the “right causes and politicians”?
What is “necessary”?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The EU is set on muzzling what it deems to be misinformation with the help of its Digital Services Act. Brussels maintains that, when it comes to online censorship, the DSA merely coordinates the different rules applicable in each of the EU’s member-states. It will, it says, not be adding any additional restrictions on expression itself, a deeply deceptive claim that, to use that fashionable term, tips over into misinformation.
Under the DSA, “very large online platforms,” such as, amazingly, X, are required to operate internal controls that, de facto if not de jure, would result in more onerous censorship. The law also provides for fines draconian enough (up to six percent of global turnover) to encourage social media companies to err well to the side of caution regarding what may be posted on their platforms. Additionally, the DSA opens the possibility of civil litigation by aggrieved parties, raising the prospect of both damages and endless lawfare. Moreover, the DSA’s broad language could easily be used as (yet another) path to de facto censorship of legal speech, in the interest of preventing “harms” that can safely be assumed to include what the EU deems “climate disinformation.”
The race to net zero is futile, struggling, and some of those running it are close to mutiny. When the starting gun was fired, the race was broadly popular, particularly in Europe. Apocalypticism sells. People believed that net zero was both sensible and virtuous. Caught up in the moment, they did not think too much about what it would mean for them personally. This was just as well. Polling revealed considerable concern about global warming, but little willingness to make anything close to the sacrifices that climate policymakers were planning to demand.
This misalignment — and the potential for trouble it contained — is why so much of the climate agenda has been advanced through an informal extra-parliamentary “shadow legislature” of the like-minded (committees for this, committees for that, transnational institutions, NGOs, professional standards boards, judicial ideologues, foundations, academia, Davos, the list is endless). It is then enforced in ways — from ESG to lawfare to the use of delegated authority — designed to bypass democratic scrutiny. The hope, presumably, has been to embed the climatist program beyond the point of irrevocability before voters cottoned on.
In any event, voters are waking up. The price they are paying in the name of the climate is no longer an abstraction. And it is not hard for them to see that the pursuit of net zero is lagging far behind where it was meant to be, that it has proved far more costly than promised, and that, outside China, the much-vaunted green jobs bonanza has evaporated as has the prospect of achieving net zero by 2050.
As Blas, who was writing before the Iran war, explains, “global demand for oil, natural gas and coal is at an all-time high and likely to climb further.” The interim (2030) target, too, looks as though it is beyond reach:
On oil, for example, the original net zero scenario called for demand to drop to little more than 70 million barrels a day by 2030, and to about 25 million barrels by 2050. With consumption currently running near 105 million barrels a day and set to hit about 106 million next year, it’s clear the world has no chance of hitting the interim 2030 target.
Speaking in September, Energy Secretary Chris Wright observed that, at the time of his birth, fossil fuels supplied some 83 percent of global energy. They still do.
So, what happens next? In the U.S., the Trump administration has taken major steps in the right direction, but many states continue to cling to as much climatist orthodoxy as they can while awaiting a Democratic restoration. In Europe, the ruling establishment, driven by self-interest, some conviction, and, even now, higher levels of popular support for greenery, will continue to pledge allegiance to net zero, pushed on by the EU Commission, a net-zero hero, for reasons that are both ideological (Brussels remains dangerously fond of the green Kool-Aid) and pragmatic. Net zero is a useful weapon in its perpetual (“ever closer union”) campaign to wrest power from the bloc’s member-states.
That said, to the extent that there is still something that can be done at the domestic level, at least some of the EU’s national governments are likely to take advantage of that space to try harder to trim back some of the more obviously or needlessly self-destructive (and therefore politically tricky) net-zero policies. Thus, Denmark — ironically the country that pioneered wind turbines in Europe — has now formally invited gas producers in its portion of the North Sea to “explore” extending their licenses beyond 2042, the date by which most were set to expire, although a deadline to halt all fossil fuel extraction by 2050 remains (so far?) intact.
Blas quotes the country’s climate and energy minister:
“I would have preferred that Europe could make do with green energy. But the reality is different, and I fundamentally believe that it is better for Europe to get gas from Denmark than from countries outside our continent.”
The logic of that argument continues to ignored in post-Brexit Britain, an EU in one country, where net-zero policy is being steered by the fanatical Ed Miliband, its minister for energy security and, ambitiously, net zero. Its North Sea reserves are steadily being abandoned. That won’t affect the climate, but it will do quite a bit to deepen net zero’s toxic contribution to the U.K.’s economic woes. Spain’s hard-left government, undeterred by a massive blackout attributable to its overuse of renewables, is also sticking with net zero. It is also phasing out its nuclear power stations.
The outgoing Dutch Deputy Prime Minister told Blas that her country’s heavy industry was “struggling” and that “we don’t want [it] to simply relocate to produce elsewhere.” She is not the only European leader with those concerns. Net zero is a threat to the continent’s industrial base and, by extension, a problem for its political establishment. And how can net zero’s damage to the bloc’s industrial capacity be reconciled with the EU’s dream of “strategic autonomy” and, not unrelatedly, a much larger defense sector?
The Commission will, in extremis, concede some ground. Last week, the EU’s member states agreed to cut GHG emissions by 90 percent of 1990 levels by 2040, after (supposedly) hitting a 55 percent reduction by 2030. That won’t be easy. The higher the reduction, the more politically and economically painful each subsequent step becomes. To secure its member-states’ commitment, the Commission agreed that five percentage points of the 90 percent could be “earned” by buying international carbon credits, a latter-day and no less disreputable equivalent to purchasing indulgences half a millennium ago. This allowance might be doubled at a future date. Additionally, the launch of ETS2, Brussels’s contentious new emissions trading system (covering buildings, transport, and other areas), will be postponed by one year, to 2028.
The best that can be said about these arrangements is that they cannot be dubbed a suicide pact. They were approved by a “qualified majority” under EU voting rules, over the objections of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Rather than agreeing to jump off the cliff, the four have accepted that they will be pushed.
But even if net zero is “effectively” dead, it will enjoy a busy and destructive afterlife. Blas argues that the rapid growth in the use of renewables will erode the demand for fossil fuels enough to mean that GHG emissions should peak “soon.” Perhaps he is right, although, based on currently scalable technologies, the ability of renewables to provide reliable power can only be taken so far. Given the chance (and workable economics), nuclear power can help, but net zero by 2050 seems beyond reach.
That will matter less than using the promise of renewables (and nuclear power) to keep the 2050 story alive. And so, buttressed by regulatory pressure, effective messaging, and the arsenal of post democracy, this absurd race is likely to continue in Europe, some American states, and, if the Democrats win back the White House, in the U.S. as a whole. Meanwhile, European leaders are citing the turbulence in oil and gas prices that has followed the Iran war as another reason for staying on net zero’s Via Dolorosa. Every effort will be made to discourage (accurate) talk that Europe’s vulnerability to hydrocarbon supply shocks has been increased by its poorly thought-through energy “transition.”
Even in Brussels, illusions can only survive for so long. The net zero timetable will, much like the financial rules designed to anchor the Eurozone, be tacitly allowed to slip to stave off a dangerous split within the bloc. Areas of wriggle room will be found, and are already being found. Following protests led by Germany, there will likely be some, if inadequate, easing of the EU’s (almost) comprehensive ban on the sale of new combustion engine cars from 2035.
But ad hoc Band-Aids can only stop Europe’s bleeding for a while. If the EU wants to avoid disaster, the race to net zero by 2050 must be called off.
The Capital Record: Sound & Vision
We released the latest in our series of podcasts, the Capital Record. Follow the link to see how to subscribe (it’s free!). The Capital Record, which is hosted by financier David L. Bahnsen, makes use of another two formats to deliver Capital Matters’ defense of free markets. The original podcast continues, but if you want to watch David talk, please click on the YouTube link.
The 287th Episode: What the Right is Getting Wrong About AI (Podcast/YouTube)
David is joined this week by a very special guest, Tim Estes, for a thorough discussion on artificial intelligence. But this is not one of those exhausting conversations about whether AI would take our jobs, whether it is a good investment, or any of the numerous other things that dominate AI discussions these days. Rather, David and Tim use first principles to address the problems that conservatives are missing. The discussion goes all over the map but then ends with a profound idea from our special guest that might just scratch all the itches!
The Capital Matters week that was…
Pharmaceuticals
The FDA’s record of delays and regulatory excess is, among government agencies, hardly unique, but that is no excuse. Likewise, drug development often takes more than a decade and costs more than $2 billion per approved drug, and approval delays can wreck the futures of many promising products. Imagine the effect of such delays for AI or software innovations. If such an approach had prevailed in the latter case, we would still be using our AOL accounts (my apologies to those who still are)…
Tariffs
Phillip W. Magness & Marc Wheat:
On February 20, the Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not confer upon the president the power to impose tariffs. Obviously prepared for the loss, in the same news cycle, the president announced a 10 percent tariff under Section 122, which he increased to 15 percent only hours later. The problem? Section 122 does not empower the president to impose these tariffs either…
Marxism
Few ideas have done more to distort Western political and economic thinking than the claim, most famously popularized by Karl Marx, that economic life is a permanent power struggle among “classes.” In this account, societies are defined not by cooperation, exchange, or mutual gain, but by irreconcilable conflict between groups locked in a zero-sum contest over resources…
AI
It would probably be in the best interests of the Pentagon, Anthropic, and the American public if the two sides could work out an agreement for how the U.S. military could continue using Anthropic’s AI, without running afoul of the company’s concerns about fully autonomous AI weapons systems or mass domestic surveillance…
Defense
Drones have been around for a long time (arguably, the first was the “doodlebug,” Germany’s V-1), but technological advance and battlefield experience in the Russo-Ukrainian war are, as so often is the case, sparking a technological, tactical, and strategic revolution…
Rare Earths
It is telling to see how often acute demand (or acute potential demand) for a resource can lead to discoveries of what is needed. Incentives work…
Energy Prices
The war in Iran, now a full-blown regional conflagration, has disrupted the flow of energy supplies from the Middle East to the rest of the world. Iran is the sixth-largest producer of crude oil in the world, most of which goes to China. Far more is produced by Iran’s neighbors. The Strait of Hormuz — which the Islamic Republic has threatened to block — carries around 20 percent of the world’s oil. If tankers can’t get out of the Persian Gulf, the rise in oil prices will be astounding…
Tax
This morning, the Joint Economic Committee is holding a hearing on the advantages of something called a “destination-based cash flow tax” or DBCFT. This isn’t a new policy idea; it’s a recycled version of the border adjustment tax (BAT), a policy so flawed that it divided Republicans and nearly derailed the 2017 tax reform effort…
Water
There was also analysis by the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia (released by Wikileaks in 2008) that contained a warning about the danger that came with Riyadh’s reliance on a roughly 300-mile water pipeline system originating at the Jubail desalination plant.
Employment
The statistical hits keep coming: Blame can’t be pinned on federal layoffs anymore, because of the 92,000 net jobs lost in January, 86,000 were in the private economy. Downward revisions to December and January numbers lowered the U.S. jobs total by another 69,000. Manufacturing continues to bleed jobs, despite (or, partly because of) Trump’s tariffs that were supposed to spark an industrial resurgence…
Antitrust
If we keep pushing antitrust toward populist storytelling instead of consumer harm, we will get less investment, slower innovation, and weaker competition. Antitrust works best when it is boring. Not toothless, but disciplined…
The States
The Trump administration has prioritized cutting red tape and costs in an effort to tackle an ever-growing federal government and national debt. This means a decreasing flow of funds to states, which have steadily increased their dependency on federal funds — to the point where the average state receives 37 percent of its revenue from federal sources — and are now facing serious budget challenges…
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