Green going out of fashion

Javier Milei, who made his views clear by withdrawing the Argentine delegation from the UN-sponsored climate conference in oil-producing Azerbaijan, is far from being the only prominent person who thinks global-warming activists have rather more in mind than an understandable desire to prevent the entire planet from going up in flames. Another is Donald Trump. They, along with many supporters, believe that rising temperatures are not a direct result of industry, aeroplanes, cars and cows pumping huge amounts of carbon or other noxious substances into the atmosphere but part of a natural process that has been going on for millions of years. They may be wrong – “the science” is complicated – but by and large most people agree with them, or at least behave as though they did. Despite the apocalyptic warnings churned out by the powerful and well-funded green lobby and its allies in the media, climate change remains a niche concern.

This would not matter much if, as politicians who are on board keep telling us, “transitioning” to clean energy will be easy and already makes good economic sense. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Solar panels only work when the sun is shining and unless the weather obliges, wind turbines stop turning, which is a relief for the birds they regularly slaughter but a headache for energy-producers who rely on them. What is more, the Chinese (who dominate the solar-panel business) get the energy they use to make the many they flog off to worried Westerners from old-fashioned fossil fuels, thereby bringing the overall reduction in greenhouse gases nearer to zero.  Perhaps this will change thanks to new technologies, but until then, going green will continue to be an expensive luxury.

As things stand, the most reliable alternative to coal, oil and gas is nuclear power, but hardcore environmentalists tend to dislike it every bit as much as the dirty stuff they say is turning the planet into a pressure cooker. Fears that nuclear power plants will explode or go into meltdown, as did the Soviet one in Chernobyl in 1986, or start leaking as one did after an earthquake accompanied by a tsunami in Fukushima in 2011, weigh heavily upon many minds, although experience elsewhere has shown they are safer than most other energy sources.

Milei, Trump and others suspect that what climate activists really want is to cripple the West which, to the unabashed delight of its enemies, is going through a phase of anguished self-criticism, with its past, its social arrangements and modes of production coming under relentless attack from within and without. They certainly have a point. As soon as it became clear that “debunking” could earn one prestige and money, large numbers of fairly bright people decided to take advantage of the opportunities thus offered. Before long, they took control of much of academe, the top media outlets and the entertainment industry.

For a time, they contented themselves with identifying, shaming and boycotting alleged racialists, misogynists and the like. They then moved on to condemn the entire “Western project” as a wicked colonialist enterprise rooted in the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution it eventually engendered, which they say is guilty of poisoning planet earth. After digging even deeper, foes of the West came to the conclusion that the rot began to set in millennia ago when ancient Greece and Imperial Rome departed from the true path. They are still at it; unless they have done so already, trendy archaeologists will soon find much that is damning for the West back in prehistoric days. Perhaps the Neanderthals, whose genes are still with people of European descent, had something to do with it.

As was to be expected, Western concern about climate change is being busily exploited by countries in “the global south,” most of which are tyrannies, whose representatives are demanding trillions of dollars in damages from those who say they or their forefathers were responsible for driving temperatures up in places like Somalia or, by causing the seas to rise, threatening the very existence of small island nations. They also say they should be paid to make whatever changes will be required to enable them to rely entirely on renewable energy.

This confronts Western governments with some unpleasant dilemmas. Having convinced themselves that climate change is due to their own countries’ misbehaviour, they agree that they should feel morally obliged to satisfy those who are loudly demanding to be compensated for the allegedly caused by industrial development. However, Western leaders also see themselves as reformed sinners who owe it to the world to set a good example by cutting their own carbon emissions to “net zero.” In countries like the United Kingdom, where Boris Johnson was as keen on doing this as is the latest prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, the costs of this endeavour are becoming enormous. They are especially painful for people in the bottom half of the income pyramid. As was predictable, the Labour government is already as unpopular as was the Tory one before the July parliamentary elections in which it was swept aside.

Throughout the West, green policies are greatly riling the working class and much of the middle class that are increasingly prone to see them as part of a plot by well-off metropolitan elites to keep them down. In the United States, Trump – who while campaigning regularly shouted “Drill, baby, drill!” – won plenty of votes by opposing measures that, in addition to putting an end to jobs in oil-consuming industries, increased prices at the petrol pump. In Germany, going green and anti-nuclear is making an economic crisis (which has been aggravated by the cut-off of cheap Russian gas) even worse, undermining that country’s once world-beating manufacturing sector.

For Argentina, which hopes to supplement the money earned from farming, in which belching ruminants and fertiliser-enhanced grain products play an important role, with even larger amounts from the sale of oil and gas, all the talk about the need to replace fossil fuels with something far cleaner is bad news. However, the way things are going, nothing much will happen until technological progress solves the many problems faced by advocates of doing away with the energy sources that continue to power the international economy and replacing them with something entirely different.