Pirate's Cove

Just another reminder that the climate cult is pretty much based on hardcore Big Government principles. That this is not about science

Capitalism Can’t Solve Climate Change

Amidst the gathering gloom about climate change and continuing growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions, the one bright spot appears to be clean energy development. 2023 saw another, much-trumpeted record for renewables installations worldwide, with an estimated 507 GW of new generating capacity being nearly 50 percent higher than 2022’s figure.

The positivity is misplaced. Even on the transition from dirty to clean power, the world is still failing. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that both electricity generation from coal and gas, and total power-sector CO₂ emissions, continued to grow in 2023, to all-time highs of 17,252 TWh and 13,575 Mt CO₂, respectively. In other words, even as renewables are growing fast, they are not yet growing fast enough to displace dirty power generation, which remains the single largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Worse still, the world is failing on the energy transition for reasons that strike at the heart of capitalist economies, and which will therefore be very difficult to surmount. The core issue here is easy to state. Most countries are relying predominantly on the private sector to drive faster renewables investment; private firms invest on the basis of expected profits; but profitability in renewables is rarely attractive.

Stick with an approach to climate change mitigation in which the private sector continues to be seen as the savior, and we are setting ourselves up to continue to fail.

Is there any need to continue on? These people hate capitalism, and want Government in charge of everything

Veiled by discussion of headline global trends in new renewables capacity investment is the fact that almost all the incremental progress is currently being made in one country: China. Trumpeting 2023’s 50 percent growth in annual global capacity installations as a global achievement is wrongheaded, given that China by itself delivered nearly 80 percent of the increment. (snip)

The main answer is that in China, such development is capitalist in only a very limited sense. Certainly, the entities centrally involved in building out new solar and wind farms in China are companies. But almost all are state-owned. Take wind. Nine of the country’s top 10 wind developers are owned by the government, and such state-owned players control in excess of 95 percent of the market.

Moreover, the state is far from being a passive shareholder in these companies. The companies are best seen as instruments wielded by the state in the service of achieving its industrial, geopolitical, and – increasingly – environmental objectives.

They love them some authoritarianism. I wonder if the climate cultists at Time can explain how well this authoritarianism is working out for the people of China?