In ancient Roman mythology, Jupiter (Zeus in Greek mythology) was the King of Gods, above the fray of mere mortals and the lesser gods. Over the last few weeks, the Jupiter effect in energy and climate policy was evidenced twice over. President Emmanuel Macron, who first took office in 2017 as the “imperial and icy” leader with the self-proclaimed mantle of Jupiter, asked the fuel industry last month to “sell at cost price, that is to say that no one makes a margin”.
On the other side of the world, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed in March the “first-in-nation” law “to root out illegal price gouging by greedy oil companies”. Then, last month, he signed another “first-in-nation” law that requires companies operating in the state that have over $1 billion in gross annual revenue to report greenhouse-gas emissions from their own operations as well as from their entire supply chain including all their vendors and customers.
What is it about imperious “green” rulers who inflict impossible rules on demonized fossil fuel businesses that undermine the very foundation of their existence – namely, their capacity to deliver profits for their shareholders – to “fight climate change”? The hubris of leaders who imagine that their punitive “decarbonization” actions can have even the slightest impact on climate change is breath-taking. To the average man on the street, the constant peddling by “experts” of electric vehicles, solar and wind power, batteries and unproven technologies like “green” hydrogen, amplified by adulatory if scientifically illiterate journalists in the mainstream press, is overwhelming.
King Canute apocryphally commanded the incoming waves to halt and not wet his feet or cloak. As the waves inevitably drenched him, he said: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but he whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.” The humility and wisdom of Canute and his respect for eternal laws is evidently lost on the likes of Macron and Newsom.
Big Oil Profits Are Evil
It is not just the French intellectual crème de la crème who have graduated from the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration like President Macron or virtue-signaling Californian Democrats like Governor Newsom that support calls for “Big Oil” to self-immolate by giving up on profits. As rising prices at the pump put pressure on US motorists last year, President Joe Biden mounted attacks on oil corporations that he claimed were over-charging motorists to line their corporate pockets. This was after he blamed the usual scapegoat Russian President Vladimir Putin whose invasion of Ukraine in February last year led to higher oil prices which were already on a sharply upward trajectory long before Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border.
The inimitable economist Thomas Sowell confessed “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not ‘greed’ to want to take somebody else’s money.” Milton Friedman, Sowell’s one time teacher at the University of Chicago, asked Phil Donahue during an interview “is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?” Friedman’s question takes on an added significance in an age when politicians claim “the science” on their side as they impoverish their constituents by imposing “net zero by 2050” in what energy analyst David Blackmon calls a “faltering, fantasy-based energy transition.”
The Penny Is Finally Starting To Drop
A cursory survey of media headlines in the energy space over the past few weeks provides ample evidence for Blackmon’s adjectives attached to the so-called “energy transition”. In the UK, the over-the-top response of the legacy media (here, here and here) to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision last week to slow the move towards net zero emissions was not surprising. Sunak’s “betrayal” to the green cause included delaying a ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035 and pushing back the ban on new oil boiler sales from 2026 to 2035 among other tweaks.
Backing Sunak’s move, Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho remarked on Monday that ‘net zero’ has “become a religion” and that it would be “immoral” to “impoverish” people in the UK. Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch concurred, “We can’t deliver our net zero targets with magical thinking, expecting those who can least afford it, to not have cars or heat their homes.”
The hype over electric vehicles has become ever more threadbare. Unsold models are “piling up” in showrooms and dealer lots across the US despite massive government subsidies. The Ford Motor
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As if this were not enough to take the shine off EVs, UK media reported on Monday that the country’s biggest chain of motorway service stations has started recruiting marshals to break up rows between electric car drivers over limited charging points. To add further woes to EV owners, insurers reported last week that they may face a “shocking 1,000% rise in insurance premiums” to reflect higher costs for spare parts and repair charges compared to diesel or gasoline vehicles.
Net zero advocates such as the International Energy Agency have long claimed that costs of wind, solar and battery technologies are “rapidly plunging” and will soon displace fossil fuels which currently account for well over 80% of the world’s primary energy supply. Francis Menton is among a number of analysts that have exposed how the claims of the “new energy economy” constitute an exercise in “magical thinking.” He points out that to power the modern economy with unreliable, intermittent renewables (wind and solar) and banish fossil fuels and nuclear use, the only option is to have viable energy storage on a massive scale. This “fatal defect” is “almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire ‘net zero’ project.”
The viability of mass scale battery storage was examined in a report published last month by The Royal Society of Great Britain. Examining 37 years of wind patterns, the learned Society concludes that mass-scale battery storage is not a viable proposition for the national grid powered by intermittent wind and solar sources. Yet, as Menton remarks, a “quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future” leads the Society to propose the latest pie-in-the-sky technology on offer: hydrogen. This, as engineer Simon Richards puts it, is “an idea only slightly less dumb than digging up the planet to produce vast quantities of limited-life batteries”.
The recent scrapping of Western Australia’s first commercial green hydrogen project despite a large government grant is testimony to the failure of this hyped-up technology. Australia’s Sky News host Rowan Dean commenting on the project said that “The wheels are coming off for a lot of the climate mob.”
Jupiter And The Central Planners
The economics Nobel Laureate Friedrich von Hayek remarked in his book on the fatal conceit of central planning that “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design”. Hayek’s “curious task” informs us of the true nature of the radical transformation of entire societies pushed by green central planners and their Jupiterian overlords declaring “climate emergency”. An “emergency” proclaimed by a “climate science” which has “metastasized into shock-journalistic pseudoscience” as John Clauser, the joint recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, put it. The central planners, with the pretensions of Jupiter, must fail if they are not to threaten the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.
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