The Capitalist will sell you the rope you will hang him with.
THE $20 TRILLION QUESTION: How to Spend It and How Not To
$20 trillion is a lot of money.
One would expect a big bang to follow the spending of twenty-thousand billion dollars. It’s a lot of money! It’s pretty much the total present value of America’s GDP.
This is the sum that was globally spent — largely by Europe and the United States — in a coordinated effort by the developed world to decarbonize the global economy. China, in contrast, sold the world windmills and solar panels while it opened a new coal-fired power plant per month.
What was the net effect of this “Green” Marshall Plan? Hydrocarbon consumption continued to increase anyway. All that was achieved was a tiny reduction, just 2%, in the share of overall energy supplied by hydrocarbons. Put simply, as the energy pie got bigger and all forms of energy supply increased, hydrocarbons ended up with a slightly smaller share of a larger pie.
We also saw the de-industrialization of the European and American economies — not just with higher prices at the gas pump and on electric bills, but a stealth green tax that was passed on to consumers on everything. This is the culprit of our American and global affordability crisis. So much treasure and pain for a 2 percent reduction in the share of hydrocarbons.
Ironically, a byproduct of this Green Hunger Games was political populism.
What a tilting-at-windmills waste. The worst bang for the public and private buck ever. Yet, the Chicken Little believers of the Church of Settled Science and the grifters who profited from it will still sing in unison that it failed because they did not go far enough. If only the global community spent and regulated more!
As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
- Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
- Blocking oil and gas pipelines
- Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
- Cutting U.S. military spending
- Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
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