The Green New Deal – wherefore art thou?
Okay, I was wrong – thank goodness. A few years back I thought we were doomed. The greenie weenies were ascendant. They had taken over politics, government, industry, banking and finance. Al Gore and his buds were enriching themselves at our expense. Fossil fuels were under siege. Nuclear and coal were being shut down. Solar panels were on rooftops and in despoiling our acreage. Windmills were killing birds and disrupting the seas. Laws in the leftist states were banning gas powered appliances. New construction had to be “green.” Regulations were forcing a reduction in carbon footprints. A carbon tax was coming. EVs were subsidized. The banks and the world’s largest financial firms had formed a cabal to force green on industry. No more investing in fossil fuels. Larry Fink at BlackRock was using his considerable weight to force compliance. The EU was fully committed to going green. Only France was keeping its nukes and the once smart Germans turned green. The UN was trying to get the developing world to join the fun but there was resistance. A president of one of those countries rejected the green movement saying “no country got rich using expensive energy.” So those in the west starting trying to bribe resistant leaders to change. There was even a Climate Judiciary Project funded in part by Biden’s EPA which trained and lobbies judges on climate policy. The project says that it is a “first-of-its-kind effort” that “provides judges with authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law.”
In the US, all this was embodied in the Green New Deal introduced by that intellectual giant AOC. I posted on this and said it reminded me of a Saturday Night Live skit or one on Rocky and his Friends. It all seemed like a joke and one that would never be implemented – except by fools or friends of Al Gore. But it was no joke and was soon embraced by the left and started being implemented by the Biden administration and states like New York and California. I was depressed. Larry Fink was pushing Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) down the throats of his clients in the name of “conscious capitalism.” In his 2021 newsletter, Fink dwelled on the climate and called it investment risk and said that the “climate transition presents an historic investment opportunity.” ESG became the DEI of the financial world.
All loved the Green New Deal – and the shower of green (dollars) that flowed from it. The politicians could commandeer more power so those on the left loved it. Larry Fink, his buddies, and the big banks could control investment decisions and gain even more control over financial decisions. All in the name of saving the planet – wink, wink.
Then things started to change. The price tag of going green starting giving consumers pause. They started grumbling about rising costs and their politicians started to listen. Several attorney generals in republican states started threatening to pull their pension funds out for BlackRock and other investment houses over their climate activism. Lawsuits started being filed on whether these green mandates were constitutional. And the political landscape at the national level changed. Donald Trump became president and famously called the Green New Deal the Green New Scam and branded it a hoax. All of a sudden even Larry Fink recanted and said that wind and solar alone “can’t reliably keep the lights on” without “major breakthroughs in storage” and wrote that it’s necessary to be “clear-eyed about our energy mix.”
What caused the change? Was it the actions of the AGs? Was it the consumers complaining about new regulations on small gas powered engines. Was it the construction industry worried about the high cost of compliance? Was it industry and banking struggling with all the new regulations. Maybe. But I think the green movement would have continued unabated if Kamala Harris had been elected. But Donald Trump became president and stopped the all-green juggernaut in its tracks. The focus changed toward more of an all-energy mix with fossil fuels and nuclear added rather than being thrown to the trash heap. Government regulations were being dismantled by cabinet members such as Lee Zeldin at the EPA.
One of Trump’s first actions was to withdraw from the United Nations’ Paris Climate Accords an international treaty to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement
This started the movement toward “net zero” – see netzeroclimate.org – and warnings about longer heatwaves, more intense storms and wildfires, famine and global doom increasing with each increase in 0.1 Celsius.
Here is a list of a few of the calmatives awaiting us: more people dying from extreme heat, higher sea levels as glaciers and ice-sheets melt, increased risks to food security in some regions due to more extreme weather, greater chances of some climate-sensitive diseases spreading, more species being threatened with extinction and the loss of virtually all coral reefs. In other words WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE! Of course, all this ignored a considerable body of research that concludes no such thing – see https://www.climatedepot.com.
In all the EPA has announced 31 actions rolling environmental regulations. The president’s press secretary call this “the most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.” The list of targets includes reconsidering restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, rolling back vehicle emission standards meant to accelerate a transition to EVs, and changing a 2009 ruling that greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane are a threat to public health. Zeldin said “Today the green new scam ends as the EPA does its part to usher in the golden age of American success.”
The question is whether these changes outlast Donald Trump. He withdrew from the Paris Accords in his first administration. Biden promptly rejoined the Accords once he got into office. However, it may be more difficult for a new administration to reinstate all the growth-income-jobs killing regulations of the Green New Deal given the experiences from the recent past. At least we can hope.
haroldblackphd.com 