The End of Climate Hysteria

We all hope that the recent election has finally put an end to DEI. It might take some time, but the bell is tolling for DEI. 

The same seems true regarding climate change hysteria. A current international climate change conference, taking place in Azerbaijan, has been largely ignored, by both the press and even politicians.

Now, Joel Kotkin explains that the rush to renewables is petering out, and that, without important government subsidies, wind and solar energy will soon be going the way of Solyndra.

Kotkin takes the measure of the state of the Green New Deal:

The wind-energy sector is increasingly beleaguered and huge numbers of climate start-ups are failing. Despite receiving billions in subsidies, green companies are recording big losses, declaring bankruptcy or avoiding new projects – even in China. Yellen’s opportunity of the century is becoming its most obvious bust, with little apparent impact on the climate.

That last is the most unkindest cut of all. For all the shrieking and hollering about the end of the world, our efforts to pretend that we control the climate have been for naught.

The Green New Scam seems largely to have been perpetrated by activists and corporate interests:

The alliance between big corporate interests and activist bureaucracies has created what political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has labelled the ‘climate-industrial complex’. As energy analyst Robert Bryce points out, parts of Wall Street have been ‘feeding at the trough’ and will lobby Trump and Congress to keep some of their goodies. At the same time, some deep-blue states, like California and New York, are girding themselves by issuing their own green regulations to replace those that might have come from DC.

Perhaps you will not find it shocking, but China has taken the lead in greenhouse gasses. Moreover it has taken over the solar panel industry:

The only major country set to benefit from the ‘energy transition’ is China, which continues to spew more greenhouse gases than all advanced countries combined. It is using efficient, cheaper fossil fuels to dominate the solar-panel industry, building its battery capacity to roughly four times the size of America’s while exercising effective control of rare-earth minerals and the technology for processing them.

The Green New Scam wants to turn back the Industrial Revolution. This war on manufacturing has hurt the job prospects of those who are working in industry. For countries like Great Britain, the shutdown of drilling means being more reliant on foreign source of oil and gas:

The working classes in Western nations have particular reason for concern. In the UK, the path to lower emissions has been driven by deindustrialisation. The manufacturing sectors’ share of GDP has dropped by 50 per cent since 1990, at the cost of several million jobs. This parallels a two-thirds drop in the UK’s domestic energy production. It now increasingly depends on energy imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.

Deindustrialization… that is what happened to Germany. 

Arguably, the most traumatic change is taking place in Germany, the last redoubt of European manufacturing and engineering prowess. Overall, Germany’s entire industrial structure is in decline. It is estimated that it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,00 car-manufacturing jobs by 2030.

Dare we notice that the people are rejecting the green agenda. Ironic or not, democracy has become the enemy of the environmentalist cause:

Given the damage being done to Europe’s industrial base, the political tide is unsurprisingly turning against the greens. The gilets jaunes demonstrations in France in the late 2010s have been followed by large-scale farmers protests in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. This year, voters gave the greens a ballot-box kicking at the European Parliament elections. Even as the technocracy sticks to its green religion, voters are headed in the opposite direction.

In America, Kotkin explains, the incoming Trump administration will put an end to Biden administration climate policies:

Delays on new liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities will be lifted, and the tacit mandate for electrical vehicles is also likely to disappear. 

Some groups will continue to resist. That includes environmentalist judges and bureaucrats. Here, Trump will surely have some influence.

But Trump’s control of the Senate guarantees he will appoint judges who will severely limit the power of the environmental bureaucracies and progressive jurists to set fuel and emissions standards. This could prove particularly tough for the left-leaning nonprofits, which can expect their gravy train to stall. ‘This is a massive pushback against the green more than anything’, energy analyst Bryce suggests. ‘They are now on the outside looking in.’

After all, the people voted down the green agenda. Blue collar workers rejected it:

Little wonder blue-collar workers in the ‘carbon economy’ proved critical to Trump’s rise, particularly Latinos. Indeed, Latinos account for more than two-fifths of US food production and the forestry workforce, over a third of ground-clearing and maintenance workers, and a quarter of workers in logistics and manufacturing. In states like California, roughly 60 per cent of manufacturing, trucking and construction jobs belong to Latinos.

Also,

Opposition to Biden’s climate policies may have also played a critical role in Trump’s wins in Pennsylvania, a major fracking state, as well as manufacturing-oriented Wisconsin and Michigan. The auto industry’s plan to lay off workers to prepare for the forced march to electric vehicles may also have nudged more working-class voters towards Trump.

Considering the constant drumbeat about the pending end of the world, it is not surprising that most people find it all to be rather hysterical. You can only run around screaming that the sky is falling for so long before people notice that the sky has not fallen:

Most Americans and Europeans simply aren’t buying the climate jihad. In the US, a recent Gallup poll shows that just three per cent of the population considers climate change and the environment their main concern. Even young people, the group most concerned with climate change, rank it far below issues such as inflation, housing, gun violence, jobs and corruption.

The indignity of it all. For all the hue and cry Americans, like their European soulmates, have largely rejected climate hysteria.

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