Why Pretend Green Pork Will Stop Climate Change?

Because organized groups and politicians want the money, and the public wants to be a sucker

By Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"Take the Joe Manchin-sponsored climate compromise coming together in the U.S. Senate. Despite panegyrics in the press, this euphoric proposal amounts to exactly the sort of subsidy regime the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, after a similar splurge, judged to be a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”

One analysis pinpointed in the fewest possible words why: “Alternative energy is not replacement energy.”

Such packages are sold on the public’s faulty intuition that an erg of green energy consumed is an erg of fossil energy that stays in the ground. But it does not follow. The most widely celebrated paper in recent years on the economics of climate change concludes that green-energy subsidies mostly just increase total energy consumption rather than displace fossil fuels. The impact on CO2 and temperatures is “minuscule,” according to Princeton’s José Luis Cruz Álvarez and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg."

"No, total energy consumption is growing—last year it jumped a walloping 5.8%, the biggest increase ever, including a 2.6% increase in renewables and a 5.7% increase in coal.

The demand for energy will keep growing as a billion-plus humans seek to rise from poverty."

"Oxford University’s Eyck Freymann, a careful reader of Chinese policy statements in the original Chinese, delivers the bad news: Beijing has already decided it makes more sense to live with rising CO2 levels than combat them."

"Right now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change bases its forecasts on 40 or so climate simulations, none of which the IPCC believes is right. For the first time last year, it refined their averaged output by consulting the real-world track of temperatures, narrowing the long-predicted range of expected outcomes by half a degree on either end. The IPCC now sees an increase of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius late in this century over the pre-industrial average.

As good as any other estimate, a U.S. government study in 2018 predicted that a worst-case increase of 6.1 degrees would cost the U.S. economy about $500 billion a year by 2090, or less than 1% of expected GDP.

These are the costs only for mitigating the effects; the green subsidy money is assumed to go down the drain. In the meantime, though, it does produce consequences that go unmentioned to the public.

The handouts to wind and solar are so giant in relation to underlying project costs, they drive investors to build over-large installations far from consumers, which destabilize the grid and result in electrons being dumped wastefully into the ground."