“When something is unsustainable, it eventually stops,” former Vice President Al Gore said in an op/ed published by The Wall Street Journal. Given recent events, one might think Gore was referring to the ruinously costly attempts by governments of the Western world to force an energy transition via trillions of debt-funded dollars in subsidies for unreliable, intermittent energy sources like wind, solar and green hydrogen.
It has become obvious to most in the energy business now that the stick-and-carrot approach to a forced transition implemented by the Biden administration is not just unsustainable but a colossal failure. The stick of heavy-handed regulations and mandates combined with the carrot of economically ruinous government subsidies has resulted in a massive uptick in the national debt along with a playing field littered with dozens of bankruptcies by both startups and pre-existing green energy companies alike. Collectively, their waste of federal dollars makes the Obama-era Solyndra failure look like pocket change.
As critics of the Biden Green New Deal suite of policy choices repeatedly warned, the rent-seeking industries that became the chosen clients of the Democratic Party over the last four years – wind, solar, electric vehicles and green hydrogen – cannot displace fossil fuels in any scalable sense because the laws of physics don’t allow it. Too many companies in these industries also cannot be sustained for more than short periods of time without constant new injections of additional government subsidies, all of which in the U.S. have the impact of increasing the national debt.
When the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act passed on party line votes in congress in 2022, I and others warned that the Democrats in congress and the Biden White House viewed the bill as just an initial down payment on their long-term goals. A steady succession of new IRA-type debt-funded bills would be required in the coming decades to sustain the transition, and without those added tranches of trillions of dollars in additional subsidies, most startups in those non-competitive energy businesses would ultimately fail. It wasn’t hard to see this coming.
In his op/ed, Gore writes all this financial carnage off with his typical climate alarm fearmongering, saying things like “treating the transition to a sustainable economy as optional isn’t an option,” and “the cost of inaction is indefensible and unbearable.” To which the only proper response is to ask Gore to tell that to all the lower income Americans who have seen their utility bills and food prices inflate to unbearable levels as they have borne the brunt of the inevitable outcome of the policies Gore, Biden and their cronies have happily forced onto the public. It’s one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poor to the wealthy in global history. If you want an example of unsustainability, there it is.
Most hilariously, Gore states that “in the U.S., the fossil-fuel industry, its allies and captive policymakers seek to punish companies and investors pursuing sustainability goals with frivolous lawsuits, smear campaigns and the withdrawal of state-controlled funds under management.” Holy smokes, talk about a prime example of Clintonian projection, there it is.
No industry has been subjected to a decades-long constant stream of frivolous lawsuits and smear campaigns from critics quite like the coal and oil and gas industries have sustained in modern times. Right now, today, the oil industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars defending itself against a well-organized lawfare campaign in which left-wing law firms recruit friendly, mostly-Democrat officials in cities, counties and states around the country to file frivolous lawsuits claiming billions of dollars in unsubstantiated damages related to climate change theoretically caused by emissions coming mainly from China. That is the very definition of a frivolous smear campaign and lawfare campaign rolled into one.
But it is Gore’s complaint about the effort by the Trump administration to implement a “withdrawal of state-controlled funds under management” that really takes the cake here. Apparently, this former vice president believes that elections really don’t matter at all.
But elections do matter, policies can change and billions of dollars in funds awarded to political cronies of one president can indeed be clawed back by another. Gore can rage against these winds of change all he likes, but that is American democracy in action.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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