Human welfare or lower emissions? Pick one

The recent deviation of Bill Gates from strict green orthodoxy must have come as a shock to Europe’s eco-elites.  A leading advocate and funder of climate campaigns around the world experienced a Road to Damascus conversion to common sense that puts him at odds with the rules now deeply embedded in EU law.  His observation that human welfare is more important than restricting carbon emissions threatens to unravel the philosophical justification for Europe’s Green Deal.  The core vanity of the net-zero project is that human welfare depends on it. That it might in fact threaten human welfare is simply impossible for true believers to contemplate, hence the social media storm that greeted his comments.

Yet the revelation that prompted Gates’ dramatic turnabout is a simple recognition of the obvious. Improving the material circumstances of people around the world depends on their access to cheap and reliable energy.   Enhancing measures of human welfare, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, access to clean water and sanitation requires abundant energy, which is most reliably provided by fossil fuels.  Foisting net-zero programmes on societies that are still burning wood and cow dung for cooking condemns them to continued poverty and chronic dependence on aid programmes.  Wealthy societies can afford the subsidies needed to experiment with alternative energy, at least until these expenditures threaten funding for the social spending needed to ensure (yes) human welfare.  The great improvements in human welfare over the past century required cheap energy, as does the continued prosperity needed to assure future human welfare.

The proposition that net-zero legislation might be in opposition to human welfare has been heresy since the beginning of what might be termed the Thunberg Era of European politics.  A vast array of NGOs, academic experts and subsidy grifters comprising the eco-industrial complex warned us that climate change posed an imminent threat to human survival.  Drastic action to limit carbon emissions was needed to avoid a future beset by killer heatwaves, devastating floods, destructive storms, and crop failures.  The industries that created European prosperity must be punished under a neo-Calvinist regime designed to atone for past sins against climate orthodoxy and ensure entry into a green Eden of windmills and organic farms. That those dread fossil fuels which reduced the cost of artificial light from roughly €130 an hour in 1800 to four cents an hour in 2000 may have benefitted human welfare more than the associated carbon release is a consideration outside the ideological purview of Europe’s eco-zealots.

What has since become apparent to the average European autoworker is that his personal welfare is now endangered not by weather events but by the strictures of net-zero regulations.  The massive job cuts besetting German industry derive from high energy costs and EU regulations designed to put the entire internal combustion sector out of business in a decade.  The public dole awaits a generation of highly trained machinists, engineers and tradesmen.  Competitors in China, India and the United States can count on cheap energy and freedom from onerous carbon restrictions that threaten to reduce Europe to an industrial artifact surviving on tourism and sales of luxury handbags.  Cheery promises of emerging green industries in Europe fail to reckon with either China’s extreme cost advantages in these exact industries, or the long-term drag on public finances required by Europe’s pet green projects.  The mass industrial employment needed to ensure ongoing European prosperity is impossible to sustain absent cheap energy deriving from gas, nuclear and coal.

Bad policy choices like the EU’s Green Deal are made by every government. What amplifies bad policy in Europe is the lack of a corrective mechanism.  The elites who designed the European project never foresaw a moment when their grand plans would need to be dumped and replaced.  They were elite after all, and so their policy prescriptions would never need correction. The engine driving the project was functionalism, whereby discreet areas of cooperation would “spill over” into broader cooperative institutions.  This lovely model explained the transformation of the original Coal and Steel Community into the quasi-federal European Union.  But functionalism never allowed for the possibility that this inexorable integration might generate bad policies that would need to be reversed and replaced, as if integration and progress were one and the same. In a liberal democracy, bad policies prompt an election that spanks the ruling party, which is replaced by reformers who undo failed programs.  The EU lacks the popular participation needed to effect this sort of institutionalised rebellion, and so it finds itself stuck with bad policies, even after their dire effect becomes manifest.

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola believes her institution provides this sort of corrective mechanism.  In her recent declaration that “Europe means business” she declares that the parliament is equivalent to the American Congress as “the institution that represents its people.”  But it doesn’t: Most EU countries are a single constituency, meaning parties carve up the national allocation proportionate to their share of the vote.  Parliamentarians are loyal to their rank on party lists and represent their party bosses, not actual voters.  An angry American can complain to his Congressman about local problems while most Europeans can’t even name their ostensible representatives in the European Parliament.  A laid-off German autoworker cannot buttonhole his parliamentarian at a Wolfsburg town hall meeting because there is no Wolfsburg constituency represented in the Espace Leopold.    This lack of local responsiveness prevents the body from serving as a corrective mechanism to European Commission overreach, or as a useful means of channelling populist anger.  Metsola boasts of her Parliament’s actions to reduce the impact on small business of the climate laws enacted while she was serving as Vice President of the body, but the large companies employing most European industrial workers will still suffer the full, deadening impact of the legislation.

Europe’s climate rules are only one part of a constellation of pain aimed at European industry by EU lawmakers. Unlike Bill Gates, the EU has no easy means of changing its mind or its previous policy decisions. Metsola may fiddle around the edges of onerous environmental policies but she cannot save European workers from the consequences of these profoundly anti-growth policies.  Human welfare is not just a consideration for poor African farmers, but for European workers seeing their own welfare endangered by an officious and unresponsive EU.  The EU will discover that its efforts to transform its fossil fuel dependent industries lag far behind its capacity to turn formerly docile Socialist voters into rabid populists.