Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Daniel Hannan looks at the deeper philosophical and cultural forces currently driving the “race” to net zero greenhouse-gas emissions and doesn’t much like what he sees. The background to his article is the energy crunch now being faced by the U.K. (and the rest of Europe), a fiasco that American climate policymakers seem only too keen to emulate:
[W]e are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality in pursuit of theatrical decarbonisation. Actually, no, that understates our foolishness. Decarbonisation will happen eventually, as alternative energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels. It is proper for governments to seek to speed that process up. But this goes well beyond emitting less CO2. Our intellectual and cultural leaders — TV producers, novelists, bishops, the lot — see fuel consumption itself as a problem. What they want is not green growth, but less growth.
As Amory Lovins, perhaps the most distinguished writer to have been involved in the move away from fossil fuels, put it in 1970:
“If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
The idea that cheaper energy is a positive good – that it reduces poverty and gives people more leisure time – has been almost wholly lost. We have convinced ourselves that if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. The reason we slip so easily into talk of banning and rationing is not just that the lockdown has left us readier to be bossed about. It is that we have come to regard the use of power as a sinful indulgence.
“Sinful indulgence”: Try as hard as one might (and I’m not inclined to try very hard), it is difficult to avoid the religious subtext that runs through so much of what passes as thinking by many climate policymakers, let alone those who cheer them on. On reflection for just a second, however, “subtext” is too mild a word. Much of climate activism bears an uncomfortably direct resemblance — down to the opportunities for grift that it offers — to the various millenarian movements that have sprung up over the centuries, sometimes with horrific results.
Hannan:
[R]aising the price of energy is not something we can do in isolation. When power becomes more expensive, so does everything else. Fuel is not simply one among many commodities; it is the enabler of exchange, the motor of efficiency, the vector of economic growth…
The high-status view is that we are brutalising Gaia, that politicians are in hoc to Big Oil and that we all ought to learn to get by with less – a view that it is especially easy to take if you spent the lockdown being paid to stay in your garden, and have no desire to go back to commuting.
The reference to Gaia, particularly in way that term is popularly used, is, of course, more than a nod to animism, yet another a reminder of the religiosity (or, in that case, spirituality) that saturates so much of climate activism. The same can be said about the way that some prominent British environmentalists, echoing misty-brained Edwardian pantheists, like to go on about “nature.”
Back to Hannan (my emphasis added):
Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and assorted anti-capitalist frondistes are openly and unashamedly anti-growth. For them, low-cost energy has dragged humanity away from the closed, local economies that they want. As Paul Ehrlich, the father of modern greenery, put it in 1975:
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialise, and exploit every last bit of the planet”.
Tories don’t put it that way, of course, even to themselves. But they are still tugged by the cultural currents of the day. So they find ways to rationalise higher taxes, higher spending and anti-market measures with which they would normally have little truck.
Typically, they do so by playing up the economic opportunities that green technology will supposedly bring. Boris Johnson extols them with such gusto that he seems genuinely to have convinced himself. But it is pure hogwash. If there really were such opportunities, investors would find them without needing the the state to ban some fuel sources and subsidise others.
Green growth is a fallacy for the same reason that, as Frédéric Bastiat showed in 1850, you can’t make a city wealthier by smashing its shop windows. Doing so might immediately generate growth – nominal GDP often rises sharply in the aftermath of a natural disaster — but every penny spent by the shopkeeper on new windows (and by the glazier who now has extra income, and by the people he buys from and so on) is a penny that would have been spent more usefully without the breakages. In the same way, every penny spent on green “investment” is a penny that has been taken out of the productive economy through taxation.
None of this is to argue that governments shouldn’t seek to mitigate climate change. They should. I just wish they would admit that doing so is expensive. Green jobs are a cost, not a benefit. If you banned the use of diggers and had lines of workers with spades instead, you could argue that you had “created” jobs; but you would have made everyone worse off.
Conservatives should approach climate change in neither a masochistic nor a messianic spirit, but calmly, transactionally, hard-headedly. If there is good reason to believe that advances in technology will lead to sharply reduced costs, then let the timetable slip accordingly. . . .