That is Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., pictured. He writes a regular business column for The Wall Street Journal. To be completely candid, I am not a fan. Still, I do subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, and so I read Jenkins' columns, as they periodically appear. I am always trying to make sure that I "consider the alternatives," even when (and perhaps especially when) I already know what I think!
I think that global warming is a genuine and potentially world-ending crisis, and so when I saw the headline on Jenkins' column in the January 15, 2025, edition of The Journal, I was pretty sure that I was not going to agree with what I was about to read. Here is the headline I am talking about: "End of a Climate Delusion."
In fact, Jenkins does basically dismiss the reality of the global warming crisis, even in the face of the Los Angeles fires. I definitely don't agree with him in his overview perspective on global warming. Jenkins is not much concerned. I am!
Here, however, in an excerpt from Jenkins' column on what he calls the "Climate Delusion." Could this be a statement that is worth thinking about? Could this guy be right?
Green-energy subsidies do not reduce emissions. This will be news to millions of California voters. It contradicts a central tenet of state policy. It isn’t news to the actual enactors of these subsidies. A National Research Council study sponsored by congressional Democrats in 2008 concluded that such handouts were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases” and called for carbon taxes instead.
Unfortunately, the incoming Obama administration quickly discovered it favored climate taxes only when Republicans were in charge. Backers would later engage in flagrant lying to promote Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, knowingly citing bogus predictions that its trillion-dollar spending profusion would reduce emissions.
A 2019 University of Oregon study had already revealed the empirical truth: Green energy doesn’t replace fossil fuels, it enables more energy consumption overall. That same year the EPA calculated that the potential emissions savings from subsidizing electric vehicles had been offset five times over by the pickup truck and SUV boom Team Obama facilitated to assure the success of its auto bailout (emphasis added).
To the degree that Jenkins' column can be read as a statement in support of carbon taxes, I do agree with him. Carbon taxes are something we need. Further, I have to say that I think I am in agreement with the other statements that I have highlighted in the excerpt from Jenkins' column.
It is certainly true that green-energy subsidies do not "reduce emissions." Furthermore, "green energy" does not - at least not automatically - replace fossil fuels. New sources of "green energy," since they provide a new "supply," can indeed lead to "more energy consumption overall."
An effective policy to combat global warming would require a reduction in energy supplied by fossil fuels as new energy sources, not based on fossil fuels, are made available. Otherwise, Jenkins' observation is correct, the new "green" energy sources (absent a corresponding reduction in 'non-green" energy sources) will simply mean that we're going to be using more energy.
What do we actually need? In so many areas, as I have said before in these daily blog postings, what we need most is LESS.
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