The Green Zombie Apocalypse: Here and Now

Yesterday Floyd linked to a post from Reason that celebrated the death of cap and trade (yay!) and suggested that this could be a turning point, to wit: the beginning of the end of global warming hysteria. As reasonable as that reasoned conclusion seems, there are many reasons to suggest that this is not the reasonable case. (I’ll stop that now). The fight over cap and trade was not the climactic climatic battle, it was rather an over-hyped skirmish in a much larger war that – as painful as it is to say it – our side has been losing for some time.

As is the case in any war, momentum means a lot and the Green Armies of Good have established a hurtling freight train’s worth of momentum over the past decade. Sure public opinion is turning against them. Sure Congress handed them a defeat. So what? If the Sierra Club and their pals accomplish nothing more going forward, it does not matter. Not a whit. All of the things they have already done – in the name of battling the chimera we call “global warming,” or “climate change,” or whatever the hell we are calling it today – have changed this nation more than anyone seems to realize and the rate of change will continue to accelerate. Those changes are already costing us, in terms of jobs and prosperity, and the costs will only increase.

I wish I could say that there is some way of rolling all this crap back, but how do you roll back a swamp, especially when you can count the number of people who understand that the swamp is actually there on one hand? Unless somebody organizes a Fossil Fuel Liberation Front sometime soon (which isn’t a bad idea) the net result of all the global warming induced goofiness that we have already put in place will be more expensive energy, the continued decline of the industrial sector in America and – consequently – a weaker economy over the long run. And – oh yeah – you’ll be driving craptastic cars too. The Chinese, who stand to benefit from this disaster more than anyone, are laughing their asses off right now.

So what happened while we were sleeping? Let’s review:

• Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) happened. Over half of the states in the Union have RPS now, and more will be developed. A state that has RPS requires it’s electric utilities to generate more and more electricity from “renewable” sources every year. So, for example, a particular state’s RPS might require 5% renewable power this year, 7% next year and so forth, till they get to 25% by 2020.

• Regional cap and trade programs happened. There is a regional cap and trade program in operation right now among east coast states and we’ll see programs go live on the west coast and in the Midwest within the next couple of years.

• Subsidies for renewable fuels (mostly wind and ethanol) happened. Energy is thus more expensive, but since that expense is filtered through your tax dollars, you don’t actually know it.

• Increased fuel efficiency standards for vehicles happened. Your cars are about to get more expensive as a result and, history suggests, less reliable.

• The Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) happened. The EAB isn’t really a new thing, but over the last 10 years the Sierra Club (and some other enviro-heads) have learned how to work the EAB to obstruct, delay and ultimately kill projects it doesn’t like. Yeah we can build innovative power plants that use cheap coal and emit practically nothing, but the Sierra Club will use the EAB to kill those projects anyway, so why bother trying?

• The Lisa Jackson/Carol Browner EPA happened. Buried in the details of seeming innocuous environmental regulations that the EPA has been promulgating over the last couple of years are dozens of regulatory “Trojan horses.” These are obscure, poorly-understand provisions that effectively make it virtually impossible to build any new coal-fired power plants in the country and almost as hard to construct new heavy industry of any kind.

• The national cap and trade debate happened. Yeah, we won that one, but it kept us distracted for a long, long time and it allowed the states, the feds and the environmental groups to lay the foundations of Green America anyway.

A final note: between 2000 and 2009, per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the United States dropped over 15%. That’s more than any industrialized nation in Europe (which has cap and trade) and of course more than China or India, where per capita greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. The majority of that decrease occurred before the onset of the Great Recession. And that’s without all the stuff I described above kicking into high-gear. Do you suspect that might have something to do with our declining industrial base the lamentable state of the economy today?

I sure do.

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