Brace for impact

I haven’t always made the best decisions. Let me give you an example.

When I was a 12-year-old spudling, I had my best friend paint PIMP on my back with wite-out before spending a sunny summer day outside. I thought PIMP meant “cool” and that it’d look funny.

Before the sunburn started to set in, my Dad caught a glimpse of my back and, without missing a beat, blurted, “Did you run out of room trying to spell PIMPLE!?”

The moment he uttered that dad joke, reality poured over me. I learned 3 lessons that fateful day:

1. Learn the meaning of words before you say them or brand them onto your body.

2. Don’t intentionally get 2nd-degree sunburn.

3. Wite-out doesn’t come off skin easily.

Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, I was lucky. I had a stupid thought, did a stupid thing, and experienced the consequences. But I learned from it. I experienced pain, but pain was a necessary component of the learning experience. It caused new neurons to connect in a part of my brain that clearly wasn’t fully developed.

But what would’ve happened if I didn’t experience any negative consequences? What if I didn’t have to scratch the wite-out off of my blistering back?

I wouldn’t have been forced to learn so quickly. Emboldened by a sense of invincibility, perhaps I would’ve gone on to do something dumber.

Learning from decisions is part of life. Luckily, the older and wiser we get the more we’re able to think through consequences without having to actually experience them.

The net-zero policy debate is all about this basic life skill of foreseeing and reacting to consequences. While the net-zero movement is compelling on the surface, a backlash against it is inevitable.

The rationale behind net-zero policies is easy to grasp, especially given its ubiquitous prevalence in our educational system and mainstream media. It goes like this:

• Burning fossil fuels creates CO2.

• CO2 has a “greenhouse effect” that traps heat in the atmosphere.

• A warming atmosphere causes all sorts of calamity — more extreme weather, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, etc.

• Given these negative impacts, we need to swiftly reduce CO2 emissions.

• Even if the probability of catastrophic impact is somewhat low, the pain would be so high that net-zero policies are still justified. Plus, we’re going to run out of fossil fuels eventually so we might as well wean ourselves off of them.

On the other hand, the opposition argument goes a lil’ something like this:

• The modern world depends on affordable and reliable energy. America runs on Dunkin’ and Dunkin’ runs on energy.

• Energy powers the digital and physical infrastructure that ultimately protects us from the whims of Mother Nature.

• We need much more energy to lift billions of people out of poverty and to continue progress in the developed world.

• Net-zero policies will make energy more expensive.

• If we make energy more expensive standards of living will drop.

• Given all of these factors, we should do everything we can to make energy more abundant. Abundance requires more freedom for companies and entrepreneurs to operate.

• Energy freedom doesn’t mean freedom to pollute, it means no carbon taxes and less unnecessary red tape.

Ironically, both perspectives are saying the same thing:

The other side is, for some reason or another, unable to envision the negative impacts of their policies and not reacting fast enough when real impacts are felt.

However, you can only brace for impact for so long before you get tired of waiting for doom that never comes. Saying storms will get worse or energy prices will increase in the future is much less compelling than proving such things are happening today. It’s the time value of pain.

The goal is to convince you that harm is happening now. That’s true for both sides of the debate.

But who’s more likely to win?

It’s no contest. Energy freedom wins every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

The implicit assumption of the net-zero movement is that rapid decarbonization can occur without raising energy prices. We’re just switching to cleaner energy, what’s the big deal? But that’s the hidden lie.

People feel the impact of higher energy prices more than climate change. The impact is more direct and understandable. If energy is more expensive, life is more expensive. If that last heat wave was slightly worse, how did that impact you exactly?

As a natural consequence of this massive disadvantage, the net-zero movement attempts to tie everything back to climate change. It’s hard to compete against life being more expensive. The barrage of “climate change caused this” headlines is endless. Here are a few from the past couple days:

Isn’t it weird that you never see any good news about climate change? What are the odds that every impact of climate change is negative? If you believe climate change is an existential threat, you will look for data and information to confirm that bias.

But even if you concede that all of the headlines are true, the debate outcome doesn’t change.

Hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, and floods all occur with or without climate change. So it’s about how much can you attribute the number and/or severity of these events to climate change. This is a challenging scientific exercise and people know intuitively that attribution claims often have an underlying political motivation. And even if the underlying events are getting worse, there certainly isn’t overwhelming evidence that the human impact (deaths, economic toll) is getting worse.

The case for net-zero policies is simple and seductive. Who could argue with prudent risk reduction? However, the fatal flaw in the logical chain is that it doesn’t value energy nearly enough. Everything flows downhill from there.

When we don’t value energy, we’re blind to what keeps us safe and prosperous.

When we don’t value energy, we don’t take the time to understand how difficult it is to produce on a global scale.

When we don’t value energy, we don’t appreciate how much more of it we need.

When we don’t value energy, we don’t understand that the “energy transition” raises energy prices.

That being said, it’s difficult to decipher cause-and-effect with all of the competing propaganda out there. Did renewables almost cause blackouts in Texas or natural gas? Is solar the cheapest form of electricity or is it making electricity more expensive everywhere it’s deployed at scale?

Regardless of cause-and-effect and what the so-called pundits say, people vote for change when they feel pain. The net-zero movement causes pain because rapid decarbonization cannot occur without inhibiting economic growth. Said more bluntly, without keeping people in poverty or lowering their current standard of living.

The price of not valuing energy is pain and the impact of pain is change.

Thanks for reading my fellow potatoes!