The Green Movement And Energy Prices: The Theory Of “Effective Pain”

Your humble author has pretensions to theory and here is one for your consideration dear reader. Bear with me, but here it is in a nutshell. Governments and policymakers keep drumming it into our ears that fossil fuels are bad and will lead to the “end of days”. The ultimate cause of climate change, it is argued, appears in the form of oil, gas and coal. Ordinary Joe Blow will listen to the self-proclaimed climate change experts and their official sponsors. He will bear higher gasoline and electricity prices, higher airfares for his modest holidays, and even pay more for his beef since cows belch methane. After all, Joe Blow – a decent and humble fellow — wants to be a responsible inhabitant of the planet.

But there comes a point in time when the burden on Joe hits a nerve, that node of effective pain, when he explodes. It seems that is where the Germans are with the ban on oil and gas heating systems from 2024 by the Scholz coalition government. And ditto for the Americans with the loss of their natural gas cooking stoves threatened by the Biden Administration. Peak green seems to have come about as the shards of effective pain hit citizens in the West.

Let me elaborate.

The Green Movement

The Green movement has been long in the making. Maurice Strong, a Canadian environmentalist and principal architect of the 1972 Stockholm conference – the first global summit to make the environment the central issue – proclaimed in 1997 that “If we don’t change, our species will not survive… Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.”

Strong’s prophetic words on industrial civilization are already seeing fruition. Germany, the epicenter of the Greens, is actively de-industrializing at the altar of “renewable” energy and “fighting” climate change as we speak. Former Economics Minister of Saxony-Anhalt Dr. Horst Rehberger of the FDP party, sharply critical of the country’s “energy transition” ambitions, said in 2021 that “Inexpensive and secure energy is essential for competitive industry. Expensive and unstable energy supply forces companies to migrate to other countries that allow competitive production with coal and nuclear energy.”

In an interview in 2020, Professor Fritz Vahrenholt – a towering if critical voice on German environmental policies — had this to say of the main party in the coalition government: “Unfortunately, the SPD no longer has its clientele in mind. There is already a party for the hip, green urban crowd. But the employees in the steel, chemical or car industry have been lost from sight. The little people will now be punished with a CO₂ tax starting in January.”

Perhaps the best meme of the green movement is the picture of an EV charging point running on a diesel generator.

Only Carbon Dioxide Matters!

Over the past few decades, it has been argued by NASA for instance that it does not matter from a climate change point of view that the earth orbits the Sun elliptically and at varying axial tilts, as described by Milankovitch cycles. The term was coined and named after Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković in the 1920s. He hypothesized that the earth’s cyclical variations strongly influenced the Earth’s climatic patterns.

According to Scientific American, solar activity (frequency and strength of sun flares) which affect the cosmic-ray flux and cloud formation processes on earth described by the European Organization For Nuclear Research matter very much to global warming. A study by Oregon State University argues that it also matters little that an estimated million volcanoes spew materials and gases into the oceans, even if we wonder what might be heating the oceans. For advocates of human-induced global warming, heat distribution between the oceanic and atmospheric systems with highly complex and variable ocean-atmosphere coupled global circulation also has little causal role in climate change.

The focus is on the carbon dioxide emitted by humans combusting fuels for industry, cooking, heating and transport. For the green movement, CO₂ is indeed the control knob of climate and, by extension, our cataclysmic future, unless we listen to the wisdom of a Swedish school drop-out who deleted her 5-year old June 21^st predictive tweet about the end of the world. Along with Greta Thunberg are the assorted “climate scientists” who construct global warming “hockey stick charts out of their climate models duly adopted by the UN’s IPCC.

Nor does it matter that the Vikings grew barley (for their malted beer) in their heyday in 1000 AD. And if the Romans grew grapes in northern England (800 – 1300 AD) during the Medieval Warm Period, why that was a one-off, only relevant to a restricted geography and irrelevant to our common global climatological history. What really matters is industrialization and the human contribution to the dreaded CO₂, or so the climate change experts tell us.

It may well be true that fossil fuels helped our forefathers to escape endless backbreaking labour, grinding poverty and a life expectancy of 30 to 40 years. It is also true that fossil fuels brought us the steam engine, the locomotive and the automobile. They brought us healthier and longer lifespans. And they allow the world to feed 8 billion people (from 2.5 billion people in 1950) quite comfortably with ever growing yields in crops.

But all these miracle stories of our increasingly improving lifestyles since the industrial revolution pale into insignificance for the green net zero advocates. Our planet is destined for an economic catastrophe 10 or 50 or 100 years from now (take your pick) as the oceans rise, extreme weather afflicts the nations and leading to mass deaths and migrations. The celebrated doomsayer Paul Ehrlich has warned us of Armegeddon ad nauseam over the past several decades.

The Theory of Effective Pain

The Joe Blows, the working and middle classes, duly abide by the findings of “consensus science” of the experts. They patiently curtail their use of energy; they pay higher prices for everything (since the price of energy seeps into every good and service consumed) and they make do. They share their roads with cyclists who are preferred for their “green” habits. But that is not enough, it is never enough. And one day, sooner than they think, regulations are imposed on their winter heating devices fuelled by natural gas and oil. Similarly, their natural gas stoves are mandated out of existence, to force a switch to electric cookers.

But as with Marie Antoinette’s dismissive advice to eat cake if you cannot afford bread, it can only lead to societal pushbacks. So, the Green party does badly in the polls. And the US Republican party comes up with a House bill that counters the EPA move to ban gas stoves and launches actions against those that push green ESG investments.

The theory of effective pain carries a falsifiable hypothesis as Karl Popper, that methodologist of good science, requires. The theory of effective pain states that while frogs can indeed be slowly boiled without their awareness, they will not just die a boiling death. There will come a point of inflection, when the frog jumps out of the boiling pot.

Indeed, since we are not talking of frogs but of people, when they get past that point of inflection, their responses, in the ballot box and in social discourse, will have consequences. The Greens and parties pushing onerous climate change policies will be punished at the polls in some form or fashion. Enough is enough, the Joe Blows will say. It is our world, and we shall claim our place in it.

Long Live The Common Man

We are hopefully reaching critical mass. Those sporting their luxury beliefs as their badge of climate virtue dominate the institutions — from government to universities, mass media to popular culture — but for not much longer. Real debate, as called for by William Happer and others, will increasingly take its rightful place in scientific discourse to expose junk science. Rationality and good economics shall prevail. Long live the common man!