The energy new green deal is thus not about energy or energy scarcity. It is a push to panic Americans into bad energy policies as a globalization vehicle to transfer trillions in cash and technology from rich to poor countries, while cynically developing the world’s poorer nations. As China has no intention of following the U.S. lead, markedly lower economic growth in the United States will result, even as Chinese growth expands.

In short, climate change has been weaponized, and any instance of adverse weather is blamed on the consumption of fossil fuels. And all the while, the unnoticed decoupling between enforced environmental law and specific action limits the importance of causality, a principle that ought to be restored. Instead, rather than connecting a specific harm to specific actions taken, the connection between climate change and fossil fuel energy use is broadly assumed—despite that those past scare stories of a looming ice age and then a warming planet have both been discarded.  

Peter Huessy is President of GeoStrategic Analysis and Senior Defense Fellow at the Hudson Institute. In 1970, he worked for Senator Gaylord Nelson, the creator of Earth Day. And from 1973-5, he was a research assistant for both the Columbia Law School Legislative Drafting Research Fund and the UNEP Office of Energy and Environment.

Image: Reuters.