Destroying Jobs to Save the Planet

You would think, in a putatively democratic country, that we would take a vote before repealing the Industrial Revolution-- in order to save the planet. And yet, the environmentalist transformation of the American economy proceeds apace, regardless of the damage it does to American jobs and industry.

Apparently, we are going to destroy the world's people in order to save the planet. Someone is clearly not thinking here.

In truth, no one really voted for this, but the Democratic administration and the media is all-in on shutting down fossil fuel production. For now, witness Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic, they are wringing their crying towels over the job loss. 

She considers the transformation to be absolutely necessary, and that means, beyond debate and discussion.

The United States is embarking on an epochal transition from fossil fuels to green energy. That shift is necessary to avert the worst outcomes of climate change. It also stands to put hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people like Feldermann out of work. The result could be not only economic pain for individual families, but also the devastation of communities that rely on fossil-fuel extraction and a powerful political backlash against green-energy policies.

At the least, she understands that communities will be destroyed by this apocalyptic folly. But still, she never questions the wisdom of imposing it on the American people, without their consent.

Lowrey understands the impact of these new policies:

Virginia Parks, a professor at UC Irvine, and Ian Baran, a doctoral student, tracked the consequences of the Marathon shutdown in near-real time, getting more than 40 percent of the workers to return surveys and a smaller group to sit for interviews. They found that, more than a year after the shutdown, one in five Marathon workers was unemployed. Their earnings had declined sharply, with the median hourly wage of employed workers plunging from $50 to $38. Some workers were earning as little as $14 an hour. And those new gigs came with more dangerous working conditions.

The same is true in Appalachia, where coal jobs have been erased in order to clean up the air:

Appalachia lost its coal jobs and gained an opioid epidemic. Detroit deindustrialized and fell into poverty and disrepair. The decision to open up trade with China sent millions of American manufacturing jobs overseas, and policy makers did little to create any in their place. Now the planned obsolescence of the fossil-fuel industry threatens to create new Rust Belts in regions economically dependent on extraction, such as the Permian Basin, in Texas, or the Bakken Formation, in Montana and North Dakota.

Lowrey does not question the wisdom of the climate change agenda. She does understand that the agenda is going to cause a massive amount of human suffering.

Joel Kotkin, however, understands the folly in these policies; his analysis requires our interest and attention. And, dare we mention, as we often do when quoting Kotkin, he is not a right wing conservative. Anything but.

In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. 

Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.

Working people are going to lose their jobs. No one, as even Lowrey admits, has a reasonable plan to produce enough replacement jobs. And yet, Kotkin identifies an important point, namely that some people are going to get very rich from this transformation:

Their programme calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.

For example, Germany just shut down its last three nuclear power plants. The cost of electricity has spiked by something like 45%.

The new technologies are being imposed on the public, without the benefit of a vote:

 Although improvements are being made to low-emissions vehicles, consumers are essentially being frogmarched into adopting a technology that has clear technical problems, remains far more expensive than the internal-combustion engine and depends primarily on an electric grid already on the brink of blackouts. Green activists, it turns out, do not expect EVs to replace the cars of hoi polloi. No, ordinary people will be dragooned to use public transport, or to walk or bike to get around.

Among those who are going to be enriched by the new regime, is China. And, of course, China is not going to immiserate its people in order to save the planet:

Building cars from primarily Chinese components will have consequences for autoworkers across the West. Germany was once a car-manufacturing giant, but it is expected to lose an estimated 400,000 car-factory jobs by 2030. According to McKinsey, the US’s manufacturing workforce could be cut by up to 30 per cent. After all, when the key components are made elsewhere, far less labour is needed from US and European workers. It’s no surprise that some European politicians, worried about a popular backlash, have moved to slow down the EV juggernaut.

And also,

The West’s crusade against carbon emissions makes it likely that jobs, ‘green’ or otherwise, will move to China, which already emits more greenhouse gases than the rest of the high-income world. Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership is looking to adapt to changes in the climate, instead of undermining economic growth by chasing implausible Net Zero targets.

For Americans the sustainability agenda is going to produce misery:

Rather than the upward mobility most have come to expect, much of the West’s workforce now faces the prospect of either living on the dole or working at low wages. Today, nearly half of all American workers receive low wages and the future looks worse. Almost two-thirds of all new jobs in recent months were in low-paying service industries. 

Dare we mention that the general public is not on board with this radical transformation. We can only hope that in America democracy will out, as it has in some European countries:

This opposition to the Net Zero agenda was first expressed by the gilet jaunes movement in France in 2018, whose weekly protests were initially sparked by green taxes. This has been followed by protests by Dutch and other European farmers in recent years, who are angry at restrictions on fertilisers that will cut their yields. The pushback has sparked the rise of populism in a host of countries, notably Italy, Sweden and France. Even in ultra-with-it Berlin, a referendum on tighter-emissions targets recently failed to win over enough voters.

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