Editor’s note: This commentary originally appeared at LewRockwell.com and is reprinted here with permission. 

All domestic, commercial, and industrial facilities obtain their energy services (e.g. electricity, heating, and cooling) primarily from the nationwide electric and natural gas utility grids. These matrices of wires and pipes that traverse the countryside, towns, and cities evolved during the past century to become true marvels of the modern industrial age providing virtually universal access to effective, clean, abundant, convenient, and inexpensive energy with no more effort than the flick of a switch. Indeed, these energy grids that put an end to the drudgery of foraging for fuel are the very essence of productivity, security, and prosperity in the modern world.

Modernity is the result of capitalistic industrialization, entrepreneurial initiative, and free-market socialization. Its results are eagerly sought everywhere; but its methods and means are just as widely misunderstood, mistaken, misconstrued, maligned, and misused. Among the misguided reactions against modernity are concerns that man’s energy appetite has grown to the point where it is damaging the environment and climate in which he lives. Whether or not this concern has a scientific justification, it has produced sentimental consequences that have become the target of public policy, which has spawned legislation aimed at natural resource conservation, environmental protection, and climate change resistance. The implementation of this legislation has resulted in a degree of industrial regulation that is tantamount to de-industrialization with predictably retrograde consequences. Among other things, these policies have more than doubled the cost of obtaining electricity from its grid in less than a decade, during which time the grid has begun to deny service on random occasions.

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As with most stories, this one begins with some facts. It seems some atmospheric scientists recently discovered that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere nowadays is almost twice what it was at the beginning of the industrial age, when the burning of fossil fuel began to expand and man’s emission of CO2 into the atmosphere burgeoned. Scientists found the CO2 had increased from roughly 250 parts per million (ppm) in about 1800 to about 400 ppm presently, an increase of about 60 percent in a little over two hundred years. Sound the alarm.




One of the most widely promoted ideas of all time asserts that more human-generated CO2 in the atmosphere means a stronger greenhouse effect and an irreversibly warming climate. This idea is based on tacit assumptions: (1) that the greenhouse effect is the principal determinant of the Earth’s temperature, (2) that the strength of the greenhouse effect is proportional to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and (3) that humans are responsible for the presence offending gas (i.e., CO2 is a pollutant, and humans are polluters). It is also assumed that the audience is ignorant of physics and will accept the story as truth ipse dixit (on the authority of the one in charge).

Now riding on the bandwagon of an alleged world-wide consensus of scientists, and impervious to or oblivious to or in denial of the obvious questions raised by skeptics, many are convinced this story is the gospel truth: that a monster heat wave and tidal inundation is imminent unless a promiscuous humanity can be appropriately brought to heel. No typical natural disaster, this public safety crisis-in-the-making is Apocalyptic; and it is attributable to human gluttony, a moral failing that naturally calls for paternalistic government to rein in the offending behavior with broader and more stringent emission regulation and selected life-style changes.



Now we know what the carbon abatement program is all about.
