Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained. Yet sometimes the inevitable turns out to be not so.
Over the past few years green policies — notably the drive for “net zero” — have been failing. Both markets and politicians have seen the light. What
Joe Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen once called “the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-first century” has revealed itself to be something of a disaster.
The new American President is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension. Well before November the opportunity of the century was going bust — not least because the policies were having little apparent impact on the actual climate. On Wall Street, ESG-approved (environment, social and government) stocks have been tanking, according to leading studies, shackling firms with massive losses.
Climate activists still insist that Trump’s departure from the green mantra is hubristic, like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground as the inevitable climate apocalypse comes closer. But many voters in America as well as Europe have had second thoughts about spending upwards of $6 trillion annually for the next thirty years on green largesse. It doesn’t help that these spending pledges are so often advocated by jet-setting billionaires.
Well-funded campaigners will continue to try to shield Europe’s environmental policies from Trump, but this is not a passion among voters on either side of the Atlantic. Most people don’t want to huddle in smaller dwelling units, enjoy less mobility, more costly home heating, no air-conditioning, and a more austere diet. Already a growing economic dislocation — such as the energy-driven decline of the German industrial machine — is sparking opposition to green policies throughout the West, first expressed by the gilets jaunes movement in France in 2018, now spreading further across an increasingly distressed Europe. Even some on the left are reconsidering their policy agenda. In ultra with-it Berlin, a referendum on tighter emissions targets recently failed to win over enough voters.
The decline of the greens is a clear sign of change. Once seen by Foreign Affairs as “reshaping global politics,” the greens have suffered devastating defeats across Europe. There are now moves to boost fossil fuels in eastern Europe and Japan.
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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: illustration from the Spectator
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