GND: An environmentally destructive, anti-human, authoritarian monument to leftist ideology derived from falsehoods

From Mark Perry.

Some money quotes from AEI energy scholar Ben Zycher’s excellent article “The trouble with ‘renewable’ energy“:

"Notwithstanding the romantic view of wind and solar power held by many, they are not cost-competitive, they are very far from clean, and they would do remarkably little to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and anthropogenic climate change, the “crisis” view of which is unsupported by the evidence. Several available analyses show that a major expansion of wind and solar power would increase the emissions of such conventional pollutants as carbon monoxide. Even apart from those problems, the renewable-electricity component of the Green New Deal (GND) is unworkable as a matter of straightforward electrical engineering, unless one believes that the American electorate will accept constant and widespread blackouts.

In the larger context, the opposition to conventional energy that is the core of the GND is fundamentally anti-human, because one major implication of the opposition to fossil fuels is an aversion to increases in the value of human capital and other parameters that have the effect of increasing the demand for conventional energy. Moreover, the authoritarian implications of the GND are serious, however unnoticed.

Expansion of wind and solar power, and the GND is justified constantly on the grounds of a climate crisis for which there is little evidence. Temperatures are rising but, as the Little Ice Age ended around 1850, it is not easy to separate natural from anthropogenic effects. The latest research in the peer-reviewed literature suggests that mankind is responsible for about half a degree Celsius of the global temperature increase of about 1.5 degrees since 1850.

There is little trend in the number of “hot” days (maximum temperatures above 100 or 105 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1895 and 2017; eleven of the twelve years with the highest number of such days occurred before 1960. Global mean sea level has been increasing for thousands of years; the increase may or may not be accelerating. Changes in the extent of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice tell very different stories. U.S. tornado activity shows either no trend or a downward trend since 1954. Tropical storms, hurricanes, and accumulated cyclone energy show little trend since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. The number of U.S. wildfires shows no trend since 1985. (Wildfire acreage is far more driven by federal forest-management practices.) The Palmer Drought Severity index shows no trend since 1895. U.S. flooding over the past century is uncorrelated with increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations. The available data do not support ubiquitous assertions about the dire impacts of declining pH levels in the oceans. 

Two larger observations remain to be made. First: Increases in incomes lead to significant increases in expenditures on energy. For the economy as a whole, a 1 percent increase in incomes is correlated with an increase in energy expenditures of over 0.9 percent. (Correlation is not causation, but no one can argue seriously that this correlation is spurious.) Accordingly, if conventional energy is a social “bad,” as assumed by proponents of the GND, then by implication rising GDP, incomes, and employment are “bads” as well. And so the factors that improve incomes similarly are “bads” in the ideological universe of renewable power and the GND: greater employment opportunity, rising compensation for employed individuals, education and training investment, investment in productivity-enhancing capital, health-care investment, and on and on. The promotion of renewable power and the GND fundamentally is anti-human in that its goals are diametrically opposed to the aspirations of virtually all individuals.

Second: The campaign for ever more renewable power and the GND must engender a massive erosion in the freedom of individuals and businesses to use their resources in ways that they deem appropriate. If the adverse consequences of the GND emerged and grew, government would be driven to circumvent them by increasing explicit rationing and political favoritism, a process that inexorably would expand government surveillance of energy use and erode individual freedom and privacy. Such has been the recent experience in California in the face of perceived water shortages.

The forced expansion of renewable electricity and the adoption of the Green New Deal would yield no positive outcomes. They are all cost and no benefit, derived from falsehoods, environmentally destructive, anti-human, and authoritarian. They are a fitting monument to leftist ideology."