Will 2019 See Climate Maturity?

The left favors green socialism, while the right discovers the uses of a carbon tax.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Dec. 24, 2018 5:23 p.m. ET

A wind farm in Altentreptow, Germany, Aug. 16. Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Innocent news consumers may be impressed to learn that Germany has reduced carbon-dioxide emissions by 27% since 1990. This is the standard the German government itself has employed, and it has been glibly endorsed by many news organizations. Never mind the obvious: 1990 was picked because it was the year of German reunification, and the entirety of the decline is due to the collapse of East German heavy industry.

The real punch line is to be found in two sentences in a recent piece by the nonprofit magazine Yale E360: “In just the past five years government support and costs to consumers have totaled an estimated 160 billion euros ($181 billion),” says the article. And a bit later: “Germany’s carbon emissions have stagnated at roughly their 2009 level.”

That’s right. German consumers and taxpayers spent $181 billion on wind and solar to achieve no net reduction in emissions.

Sadly, the press is too busy elsewhere to draw any lessons. As long as a single blogger or Twitter user anywhere doubts a pending climate catastrophe, 100% of media firepower must be devoted to mowing down “deniers.” Lip service is paid to “science,” but climate journalism today is a liturgy of doom and salvation, not costs and benefits. Only when every last voice of skepticism or opposition is silenced can anything else can be discussed. Ritualized scapegoating is the order of the day.

That’s why, as a public service, we bring you some of the important debates you’re not being told about.

For almost 40 years, science has failed to advance on a basic question: how much warming can we expect from a given increase in atmospheric CO2? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the anointed United Nations authority on climate science, employs the same estimate as the Charney Report of 1979: A doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide corresponds to a temperature increase of between 2.7 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

Though often reported wrongly, this “equilibrium” temperature would actually be reached only decades after the corresponding CO2 benchmark is reached. And nowhere does the IPCC say its estimates are reliable, only that they emerge consistently from the array of climate simulations that it consults. What does this imply? Those who persist in suspecting a human impact on climate is no big deal may yet be proved right.

The IPCC would make an invaluable contribution in its next big report, due in 2022, by narrowing this range of so-called climate sensitivity. Alas, an interim report in October indicated that the latest science remains polarized, some studies pointing to less warming, some pointing to more.

Another debate more consequential than the media’s denier-believer sock puppetry is the argument within the green movement about the future of nuclear power. Germany’s failure is due partly to an insane decision to close its nuclear plants. President Obama himself touted atomic energy as necessary to fight global warming, yet U.S. nuclear plants are being mothballed because they are excluded from the subsidies available to wind and solar. That granddaddy of climate alarmists, retired NASA scientist James Hansen, valiantly preaches to his green allies that meaningful emissions cuts won’t happen without nuclear.

A new battle line is forming that even climate devotees may be unaware of. A carbon tax, for decades the recommended policy of economists of every political disposition, is increasingly dismissed on the hard-bitten left as a “right-wing dogma.” We kid you not. Those exact words were recently used in a BBC radio discussion. A grand left-right bargain on climate policy based on tax reform was once imaginable. Not anymore. The left sees a carbon tax as a corporate plot against the all-encompassing green socialism championed by activists like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Never mind every lesson of history: The left’s command-and-control program to remake global energy is not politically realistic; anything enacted would quickly devolve into corrupt rent-seeking (see Germany). And even if it could be passed, its plan would consign billions to a poverty that would leave the world less green.

Meanwhile, conservatives have begun to notice a thing or two. A carbon tax is better than many of the taxes we have, which punish work, saving and investment. Had a carbon tax been on the table during the Bush and Trump tax-cut debates, those cuts could have been deeper and (importantly) made permanent for budget-scoring purposes. Hmmm.

When Donald Trump finally exits the building, the left assumes he will leave behind a politics of troglodytes vs. the woke: All the left’s dreams will finally become actionable. Don’t buy it. If climate politics reaches its overdue maturity, it will advance on the right rather than the left, and under the barely noticed aegis of tax reform, which the Western world will need anyway to get its economies growing again.