“Going green” has essentially become inescapable. Place an order on Amazon, and a “carbon-friendly” delivery option will be suggested. Buy an item from Etsy, and they’ll let you know that they “offset carbon emissions from every delivery.” Buy an airplane ticket, and you will be told about the flight’s carbon footprint. Go onto the Uber app, and you’ll see an estimate of how much CO2 you saved from being emitted.
Even the arts cannot escape being “green.” While you and I might find the Mona Lisa’s smile captivating and beautiful, others might see it as her mocking indifference toward the state of 21st-century earth’s agricultural ecology. In fact, during one of several protests targeting priceless art, right before throwing soup at the painting, one activist even shouted, “What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” As for the Mona Lisa’s smile, it remains unchanged. However, I am sure the Da Vinci and the heavens frown upon individuals attempting to desecrate a great achievement of civilization in the name of so-called “climate justice.” It also must be noted that this is not the only occurrence of this activity.
This trend goes far beyond culture, though. While one may chop up this issue as simply another distraction in culture war fights between left and right, the truth is that this has not escaped politics either. While it may not seem so to the casual observer, issues of energy and the environment have come to invade all other policies.
In 2023, the EPA raised the estimated social cost of carbon to nearly quadruple its previous level, in part because of a faulty understanding of crop yield projections. Former President Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 12866 requires a cost-benefit analysis for all proposed legislation. With the increase in the social cost of carbon, every proposed policy must now consider its climate impact more significantly. An IER analysis states that “It is, at root, a contrived number, allowing its designers to ‘cherry-pick’ numbers and features in order to restrict carbon dioxide. The higher its number, the less favorably the government looks upon production, transportation, and use of hydrocarbons.”
This was by no means the only decision made by the Biden administration under the framework of “climate justice” and “environmental protection.” In Biden’s first 100 days in office, the US rejoined the Paris Agreement, and the permit for the Keystone Pipeline was revoked. Additionally, Biden’s Department of Labor allowed for the use of Environmental, Social, and Governance scores (ESG) in retirement and pension funds. Naturally, these funds generally underperform traditional funds. Putting employee’s well-being and retirement security below the importance of using ESG funds seems dubious. The Biden administration also made $11 billion available to “advance clean energy across rural America.” At the same time that rural Appalachia was utterly devastated by the effects of 2024’s Hurricane Helene, Biden made a trip to the Amazon to announce more funding for fighting international climate change. All of this while Americans were drowning. Additional federal grants, authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act, went to fund asinine projects such as “tree equity” and “food forests for environmental justice.”
The philosophy of making all policies and societal considerations subservient to environmental quotas goes beyond the Federal level. At the state level, 24 states have either net-zero plans or 100% clean-energy goals on the books. As new laws are considered, they must always take into account the state’s carbon target levels. Sadly, this is not just an American phenomenon. The EU has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050 with many European countries themselves having net-zero mandates. 107 countries worldwide have adopted some sort of net-zero pledge or mandate.
These mandates will raise prices and affect every aspect of life in a state. Blackouts, for example, may become a common issue. On January 8th, the UK just barely averted a blackout. Naturally, this results from pursuing an energy policy that puts environmental needs above human needs. Energy is baked into the production structure of virtually every modern comfort and necessity. And when energy is not abundant, people can die. See 246 dead from the 2021 Texas blackouts. Humans simply cannot thrive in an environment where energy is highly scarce or unreliable due to laws and regulations. In other words, energy suicide means civilizational decline.
With the recent executive orders, cuts, and deregulation that have been occurring over the past few months, one can see results that energy and environmental policies are heading in the right direction. Rather than being the paramount issue by which all other policies are interpreted, climate policy should be brought down from the pedestal they were placed. Trump’s executive orders withdrawing from the Paris Agreement indicate that the epoch of energy and environmental policy as the paramount lens by which all other policies are interpreted and judged is over. This may not be the case in Europe as issues of net zero and other climate mandates force an energy transition to less reliable and more expensive forms of energy production. However, energy freedom seems to be returning to the land of the free.
