A Pro-Human Column on 'Green' Policy

Over at Spiked! is an excellent piece titled "The Inhumanity of the Green Agenda," by Joel Kotkin. Much of this will be familiar to fans of fossil fuel advocate Alex Epstein, who curiously goes unmentioned.

But there is a ray of hope that might be new even to us:

Image by David Thielen, via Unsplash, license.

There are clear class implications here. California’s regulators recently admitted that the state’s strict climate laws aid the affluent, but hurt the poor. These laws also have a disproportionate impact on ethnic-minority citizens, creating what attorney Jennifer Hernandez has labelled the ‘green Jim Crow’. As China’s increasingly sophisticated tech and industrial growth is being joyously funded by US venture capitalists and Wall Street, living standards among the Western middle class are in decline. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has recently fallen for the first time in peacetime. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heymann suggests that the only way to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050 is by squelching all future growth, which could have catastrophic effects on working-class and middle-class living standards. [bold added, links omitted]

I am not, of course, cheering on a new form of Jim Crow or relishing falling living standards: What I am happy to see is that people are beginning to notice these things, even on the left. Even if cracks aren't forming in that seeming monolith, it's beginning to get chipped away as ordinary people realize what a green agenda actually means.

It is unfortunate that "populists" (whatever that means) are the chief beneficiaries so far, but some well-placed persuasive efforts could course-correct the politics to a more pro-freedom agenda. It is good to know that "many ordinary folk are far more worried about the immediate effects of climate policy than the prospect of an overheated planet in the medium or long term."

Read the whole thing.

-- CAV