Ben Zycher’s letter in the Wall Street Journal is superb:
Alex Flint and Kalee Kreider admit that ordinary central planning won’t reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet despite “the incredible ingenuity of people and markets,” they suggest a different form of central planning is needed: namely, adaptation in the form of “changing where and how we grow crops, and where people can safely live,” among other government-driven dislocations (“We Can’t Stop Climate Change, So We Need to Prepare for It,” op-ed, Oct. 20). Do Mr. Flint and Ms. Kreider believe people and markets can’t adapt over time without the diktats of officials and experts?
In any case, none of the “dire predictions” to which they allude has come to pass. The purported “safe” limit on warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius is a political construct. There is no “science” underlying it.
Despite the authors’ assertion that “climate is easy to forecast,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models predicting massive temperature increases by 2100 have overstated the satellite temperature record by a factor of more than two. They are driven by assumptions that even the IPCC describes as unlikely.
“Adaptation” driven by central planning will yield more misery.
The Northeastern states face an immense shortfall in conventional electrical generation capacity, leaving the power grid extremely vulnerable at times when wind and solar power are offline. This precarious situation is expected to continue for at least the next decade.
“We cannot operate the system in the wintertime without a dependable energy source that can balance the system when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. I think policymakers sometimes lose sight of that fact,” Gordon van Welie, president of Independent System Operator (ISO) New England, which manages the region’s power grid, said at a recent energy conference in Washington, D.C.
In order to function, power grids require demand to exactly match supply, which is an enormous problem for variable wind and solar power, as the amount of energy they produce cannot easily be predicted in advance. Wind and solar can burn out the grid if they produce too much — or not enough — electricity, leading to brownouts or blackouts.
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Blackouts have previously killed hundreds of New Englanders, especially in the winter. Until New England’s political leaders rediscover the value of reliable power, their citizens will keep paying the price for ideological energy experiments, sometimes with their lives.
Even Bill Gates is cooling his overheated rhetoric on the climate. Two slices:
The climate conformity caucus is breaking up at long last, and the latest evidence is a change of mind by none other than Bill Gates. The Microsoft billionaire turned liberal philanthropist now says the “doomsday view” about the climate is wrong, and “it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
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Now, on the cusp of the latest COP30 climate conclave in Brazil next month, Mr. Gates offers different advice. An essay released on his website promises “three tough truths about climate,” the first of which is that rising temperatures are “a serious problem” but “will not be the end of civilization.”
Wait—this is a hard truth? You mean humanity isn’t doomed? The only people for whom this is a “tough” message are the climate zealots who remain committed to the idea that rising temperatures are a totalizing emergency. They say this to intimidate politicians into giving them billions of dollars in green subsidies, along with other powers to remake the modern economy and society.
Mr. Gates now sounds like Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist” whose writing often runs in these pages. Mr. Lomborg has been arguing for years that while warming temperatures are a reality, the world’s poor in particular face far more urgent challenges. He believes, as these columns have also long argued, that the best way to cope with rising temperatures is through innovation, adaptation, and policies that continue to spread economic growth and prosperity.
Democrats will inherit the expansive presidency Trump is modeling and turn it to their own ends.
For an idea of how some members of the Democratic elite are thinking about how to use executive power, see a new report from the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. The authors interviewed 45 “senior political appointees from the Biden-Harris administration” in agencies including the Justice Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the White House Domestic Policy Council. The focus was “lessons learned,” especially on economic policy. One takeaway: Trump’s break-glass presidential model holds significant appeal on the left, including on some surprising specifics.
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The Roosevelt Institute report reflects the appetite in influential circles for an executive after Trump who is much more willing to break procedural norms to achieve progressive ends. As one former official said, “The process should support the goal, or you blow up the process.”
This populist, presidentialist vision of governance now seems entrenched in the elites of both parties. Some of the ideas in the report — such as subjecting fewer executive branch officials to Senate confirmation, curbing forum-shopping in lawsuits and creating agency offices in the heartland — might even earn bipartisan support in a populist era.
Justin Amash tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
“The Constitution vests the power of declaring War with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorised such a measure.”
—George Washington
