Is A Carbon Tax The Only Way To Stop The Climate Activists?

Charlottesville

July 9, 2022

The title of this post comes from an opinion piece by Holman Jenkins in today's WSJ. I'm pretty sure if Mister Jenkins and I got together, we would find that we don't agree on much. Yet, I think it would be an interesting conversation so long as I was able to be Zen about it.

Before I get to his opinion, the title made me wonder how many people are considered "climate activists" (which I take it that Mister Jenkins views as a derogatory term). I found a 2021 Pew Research report that gives some insight:

For many forms of political engagement – such as voting in elections – older adults are more likely to participate than younger adults. However, when it comes to climate activism, Gen Zers and Millennials are more likely than Gen X and Baby Boomer and older adults to have taken action to address climate change through participation in a range of activities. Younger adults are also more likely than older adults to talk about the need for action on climate change, and to have been encouraged to get more involved. Among social media users, they’re also more likely to engage with climate social media content and to have strong emotional reactions – such as anxiety about the future or anger about lack of action – to the content they see.

As with most attitudes and behaviors around climate change, partisan differences are also pronounced, with Democrats much more likely than Republicans to have taken steps themselves to help address climate change and engage with climate change content in personal conversations and online.

Overall, 16% of U.S. adults say they have donated money to an organization that is focused on addressing climate change in the past year. One-in-ten Americans have contacted an elected official to urge them to act on climate change, and the same share has volunteered for an activity that was focused on addressing climate change. Somewhat fewer – just 6% of adults – say they have attended a protest or rally to show support for addressing climate change in the past year.

Put together, 24% of Americans say they have done at least one of these four activities to address climate change in the past 12 months.

A third of Gen Z adults (32%) and 28% of Millennials have participated in at least one of these activities aimed at addressing climate change in the last year. This compares with smaller shares of Gen X (23%) and Baby Boomer and older adults (21%).

Democrats are roughly three times as likely as Republicans to have taken at least one of these four actions to address climate change. Among Republicans, Gen Z adults (21%) are much more likely than Baby Boomer and older adults (7%) to have participated in at least one activity to help address climate change in the last year.

This sample would say that roughly 25 percent of us are considered "climate activists" -- not an insignificant number.

(The entire Pew report is located at: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/05/26/climate-engagement-and-activism/)

Here's Mister Jenkins opinion piece:

Note: I don't like Mister Jenkins' acerbic writing style. He writes as though he is better than the people he is writing about. It actually pisses me off. But I try to overcome it because I assume the role of an opinion writer is to be antagonistic -- if so, he's good at it. Historically he is a climate change denier and an overall critic of the media -- not just in the coverage of climate change. He is not having much success in changing "the media" which is perhaps fine with him because it gives him something to write about at least once per month. (BTW, I will agree that some news outlets don't do a good job in covering the science of climate change -- they want to sensationalize the subject and have driven me to read primary sources so I can draw my own conclusions.)

Finally, I'll add that I am hopeful with this article that Mister Jenkins is beginning to show an understanding that we can't just deny climate change -- it's real and we need to take actions to mitigate it.

His opinion piece:

America’s energy crisis is really an infrastructure crisis, and their mau-mauing is to blame.

“The stakes here are high,” Justice Elena Kagan claimed in her dissent from the Supreme Court’s climate-related ruling last week. But the stakes aren’t high. They are the opposite of high unless you imagined the court had interrupted a concerted international effort to do something about CO2 emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose plan was scuttled last week, was never going to affect the climate with its scheme to usher a few more coal plants into retirement. President Biden and his climate czar John Kerry have said as much: Nothing the U.S. government does, both have acknowledged, matters if China and others don’t reduce their rapidly growing CO2 releases.

The hysterical headlines do testify to a real problem, however—the press. An outlier in vulgarity but middle-of-the-pack in shrillness was Gizmodo’s “The Supreme Court Just F— the Planet.”

This illustrates a paradox of our times: Even as algorithms and AI are coming for the jobs of journalists, journalists are turning themselves into algorithms—and not clever algorithms either.

To a thinking human, the Supreme Court decision was a yawn. The political system continues to have nothing useful to say about the possibility that fossil fuels might be influencing the weather. But the carbon tax deal that’s been on the table for decades is also still on the table.

This political compromise has always been the obvious meeting point of Democrats and Republicans, in a trade for pro-growth tax cuts. Such a bargain would be a tonic for the economy whatever its climate benefits. But now it seems, unanticipated by its champions, it might also have been a way to forestall the destructive and nihilistic tendencies of America’s greens coming to fruition in the current energy crisis.

Under a carbon tax, the oil and gas industries, and even more crucially their infrastructure suppliers, would have been free to invest to bring us all the energy we want at the prevailing, after-tax price without running a gantlet of environmentalists trying to shut them down. The price mechanism would do the work of limiting emissions and pernicious activists in and out of government could stop trying to sandbag a drilling project here, a pipeline investment there, as if this were having any impact other than metastasizing fragility through the energy system. What’s hurting America today is not a lack of resources. It’s a lack of pipelines, a lack of refinery capacity, a lack of liquefaction capacity, ships and other supporting infrastructure to move energy supplies to meet booming demand.

With their mau-mauing of energy investments, activists do nothing to reduce emissions, which continue to grow globally. They only shift U.S. emissions offshore. As a political strategy, it’s self-defeating. The public tolerates these hijinks only when energy prices are low. The strategy goes boom whenever gasoline prices rise and a Joe Biden—or Barack Obama or Al Gore —suddenly becomes a cheap-energy enthusiast because he likes winning elections.

We would have a sounder economy. We would have a stable, predictable incentive to produce less CO2 while satisfying our energy needs more reliably and cost-effectively than under the prevailing confused and politicized energy policies. A carbon tax is a technocratic, hardly revolutionary proposal if you think or suspect CO2 is a problem. Unfortunately, it’s become swamped in the culture war. Blame the media, which long ago lost interest in science and economics in favor of name-calling and catechizing the unholy.

This is fine with various “green” businesses that flourish in the hothouse of direct government handouts and suspect they might not fare so well under a general incentive to cut carbon in the most efficient way possible.

It’s fine with many green activists who have turned hostile to a carbon tax because it undercuts the magical, all-embracing green socialism that they have lately talked themselves into.

Contrary to Justice Kagan, nothing in the air suggests our corrupt climate politics was soon going to give way to rational climate policy. The Supreme Court’s decision, while valuable for setting boundaries for the administrative state, is irrelevant to the unfolding puzzle of atmospheric CO2 and the terminally irrational politics that surround it. [I tend to disagree strongly with this point -- the Supreme Court decision has given power to the states to enact their own rules.]

Those who rely on the media could also be forgiven for not knowing it, but climate change is not the end of the world, and the science never said it was. And fortunately so, because despite the on-paper possibility of humans taking steps to lower their CO2 emissions, the world provides no evidence they will.