Energy and Economic Efficiency: The Market versus the Politicization of Our Energy Futures
In the book Green Tyranny—a fantastic history of the environmental alarmism movement—author Rupert Darwall lays responsibility for the beginning of this movement at the feet of the Germans and the Swedes.
In 1967, a Swedish scientist published the first ever “theory” on acid rain. Four years later, Bert Bolin, a Swede who would go on to chair the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), wrote the first-ever government report on acid rain. It was a typical government report. Ninety pages long, it starts out with certainty: “The emission of sulfur into the atmosphere . . . has proved to be a major environmental problem.” Fifty pages later, however, Bolin does admit to some doubt when he says, “It is very difficult to prove that damage . . . has in fact occurred.” Nevertheless, the government report concludes decisively, “A reduction in the total emissions both in Sweden and in adjacent countries is required” (emphasis added).
It was in Germany where environmentalists and antinuclear activists entered into holy matrimony. Scaling back on nuclear power, making life difficult for owners of fossil fuel power plants, and subsidizing unreliable and inefficient solar and wind farms has been Germany’s consistent policy in the decades since. The result has been skyrocketing energy prices and an increasingly unreliable electrical grid. German engineers—having designed a bit of redundancy into their system—had historically never had problems with their electrical grid. However, by 2012, the country experienced one thousand brownouts. In 2013, that number was up to twenty-five hundred, and it has continued getting worse since. As a result, Germany’s industrial base, always a world leader, has been sadly declining as businesses choose to leave the country in search of more reliable electrical pastures.
In 1988, the IPCC was established during a meeting in Geneva, presided over by many of the same characters who’d been leading Sweden and Germany’s environmentalist movements during the preceding decades.
One of the primary tasks assigned to the IPCC is to issue periodic “assessment reports” about the state of global climate change. These reports are hundreds of pages long and can be extremely technical. For attention-deficit-challenged politicians and journalists, these reports are issued with an accompanying summary. As a matter of routine, this summary mischaracterizes the substance and even the conclusions of the actual report. It is also regularly subjected to political meddling; for instance, when the IPCC issued its fifth assessment report in 2014, the German delegate to the IPCC insisted that language related to a pause or hiatus in the rise of global temperature be removed because “it would confuse German voters.”
Moreover, the leaders of the environmentalist movement have historically been wrong on just about everything. For laughs:
- 1989—the UN predicted that entire nations would be “wiped off the face of the Earth” by rising sea levels by 2000.
- 2006—Al Gore said humans may have only ten years to save the planet from “turning into a total frying pan.”
- 2018—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that the “world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.”
Despite all this stupidity, corruption, and failure, the emotional pull of “save the world” propaganda remains powerful, and the environmentalist agenda marches on.
One of the biggest goals of
Article from Mises Wire
