Analysis: ‘End of a Green Delusion’ – A social ‘bubble’ about ‘to pop’ as people no longer feel ‘pressured to adopt & exhibit ideas they don’t believe in’ & ‘free themselves from false fealty to a nonsolution’ – ‘U.S. net zero would be achieved mainly by shifting U.S. emissions overseas’
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/end-of-a-green-delusion-environmental-policy-52c8fbcb
Flummoxed as always, environmentalists may yet get a carbon tax thanks to Trump.
By – Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. – WSJ
Get out your notepads, social scientists. A “preference falsification” bubble is about to go pop in the realm of climate policy.
The term comes from Duke University’s Timur Kuran, for when people feel pressured to adopt and exhibit ideas they don’t believe in. One such bubble was born under near-laboratory conditions in December 2008. The incoming Obama administration decided, with Republicans vacating the White House, the “existential” threat of climate change no longer merited unpopular energy taxes. Subsidies to its green-energy cronies would suffice.
In haste, the climate movement prostrated itself before this idea, as did the mainstream press, though it was nonsense.
This year Donald Trump has done the world a favor by defunding the green-energy elite and its policy substrate. In the strange way of events, greens now can free themselves from false fealty to a nonsolution. But it’s going to take a long unwinding, especially the morass of electric vehicle subsidies.
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In other words, at the highest levels of the Democratic Party, a climate realist was already drumming his fingers waiting for the green-subsidies preference falsification to pass.
A carbon tax isn’t undoable in the U.S. context, I’ve long argued; it’s been forcibly kept off the agenda by Democrats who can smell but refuse to pursue the obvious deal with Republicans in return for income-tax cuts.
A carbon tax is a consumption tax. So are Mr. Trump’s import tariffs. Already the blogosphere has been lighting up over how Mr. Trump’s chaotic start might be repurposed for a pro-growth, pro-debt reduction tax reform.
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A lagging indicator is the Princeton University-related Repeat Project, previously mocked here for its hard sell of Joe Biden’s worthless Inflation Reduction Act. Today its principal, Jesse Jenkins, and colleagues are making the rounds keening over the death of Mr. Biden’s handiwork. In a New York Times podcast, they rattle on in the usual way: Green energy is good. Therefore subsidies for green energy are good. As in Soviet economics, inputs are rejoiced in—more windmills, more solar farms. Outputs are ignored—rising emissions, artificially goosed energy consumption.
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Though it does nothing for the climate given the shrinking global significance of U.S. emissions, U.S. “net zero” is still a “moral imperative”—never mind that U.S. net zero would be achieved mainly by shifting U.S. emissions overseas.
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In Foreign Affairs, Obama brain-truster Peter Orszag delivers the coup de grace: “Rather than replacing conventional energy sources, the growth of renewables is coming on top of that of conventional sources.”
No kidding. A world-historical boondoggle might have been avoided long ago. It needed only a media that did its job of holding a mirror up to reality rather than pathetically flailing after consumers who’ll pay to have their self-images confirmed.
For some greens the wake-up call will never come.
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