Is Green Energy a "Great Ruse"

or just a stampede

If you are a guy that knows a thing or two about energy, it’s a real temptation to believe that the global elite and educated people everywhere are pushing the green energy transition and the fight against climate change as a giant grift. Lee Smith asks why the global elites are pushing us back to the dark ages.

Because it’s an extortion racket. There’s big money at stake for global elites invested in the climate agenda. And the best way to ensure it reaches their bank accounts is to terrorize the world’s population into believing that unless we agree to the oligarchy’s demands to shrink our means while they expand theirs, Earth will burn to a fiery crisp.

I agree that the behavior of the global elites and the faithful educted class that’s buying EVs is indistinguishable from a gigantic extortion racket.

But then every political movement, and every government program is indistinguisable from a gigantic extortion racket. Everything political starts with an existential crisis. Usually the crisis is a human enemy — Nazis, Commies, or ultra MAGAs — but sometimes it’s a claim like climate change: the end of the world unless we act now.

And of course, the way we fight the existential peril is like every government program from World War to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. We mobilize the people to the fight while we shovel money at our supporters.

Usually, I would say, that unless the government is fighting and winning an actual war, the mobilization fails, like like Commie Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward. The reason is because of my Four Laws, about prices, administration, regulation, and political rigidity. A war is a simple thing, and the government can persuade everyone to put their individual needs aside for a while in order to win the war.

But the fight against climate change and its program of the green energy transition is not a war. It is a fundamental top-down transformtion of the energy economy from something that works — although experts agree that it will increase global temperatures by 1.5 degrees C by the end of the cenury — to something imagined by politicians and activists.

The way that the global economy has worked over the last 200 years for what Deirdre McCloskey calls the “the Great Enrichment” is that it features completely unexpected technological revolutions, from machine textiles to steam power to internal combustion engines, to electricity generation and transmission to computers and the internet. Completely unexpected technological revolutions do not spring out of the head of political activists and power players; they are typically the work of unknown anybodies with a good idea and a lot of luck.

The whole green energy / climate change thing has been a top down thing from the start with IPCC founder Maurice Strong at the UN.

And now we have Klaus Schwab of the WEF and his Build Back Better.

The thing is: suppose they are wrong, and the climate is not warming because of fossil fuels? How would we know? And after we knew, how long would it take for governments to reverse their green energy programs?

That’s the big difference between the market economy and government. The market economy is fixing its mistakes every day. And companies that don’t fix their mistakes go out of buiness. But government can never admit a mistake. Because if it does, then it should resign and give the stage of politics to the opposition. Government is always rallying us to unity and one Big Push against the enemy. But never admitting its mistakes.

Humans are groupish; we go along with the opinions of people we know and/or trust. Right now, the people that the educated class trust tell us that we have to phase out fossil fuels or face climate ruin. They are not telling us this because they want to ruin us: heavens no! All they want to do is save us from a horrible fate predicted by the experts.

Of course, there will be lots of jobs for experts and for green energy manufacturers and producers and businesses. But that is downstream from the faith that we are really facing an existential peril, and we must fight to save our lives.