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January 7, 2025 - 10:00am
The perennial battle between reality and platitudes is going into its next round, and if the past is anything to go by, reality will win again. The Dutch politician and architect of the “Green Deal” in Europe, Frans Timmermans, has recently proposed that the wealthy should pay for the much vaunted “energy transition” to stop the growing support for “dishonest” radical Right-wing parties.
Calling for the rich to foot the bill is certainly better than saying the poor should pay, but Timmermans fails to specify who he has in mind. If he has further taxes in mind for corporations and manufacturing industries, it will only accelerate the decline in Europe’s competitive edge. What sounds nice in principle is a little harder in practice.
The Dutch politician added that “the [ecological] transition will be stopped by European voters” who are angry at how much it costs. Given the fact that energy costs determine the price of everything else, it is no surprise that a misguided energy policy would at some point lead to a political backlash. By Timmermans’s own admission, rising energy costs have become a boon for Right-wing parties, such as the AfD in Germany, the Freedom Party in Austria and the National Rally in France. But he doesn’t believe that the cost of the energy transition — around $9.2 trillion per year until 2050 (7.5% of global GDP), according to McKinsey estimates — should result in a slower transition. Indeed, he forced through green policies at breakneck speed as an EU bureaucrat.
Timmermans is not the only European politician to subscribe to utopian ideas of clean energy abundance. Recall UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s “rooftop revolution” of solar power or former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s claim that Britain would become the “Saudi Arabia of wind”. Meanwhile, Germany has experienced first-hand the disaster of abandoning nuclear only to be reliant on Russian gas and burning coal. The crux of the matter is that unless there is a revolution in battery storage technology, the energy transition will be plagued by high prices and rationing.
In whichever areas the Right-wing populists have been dishonest — and there are no doubt many — Europe’s ruinous energy policy is not among them. Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s AfD might be exaggerating when she calls for the destruction of wind farms, but many voters remain frustrated with the price of renewables and the undemocratic ways that the green transition has been forced upon them. Timmermans himself implicitly admits that one of the core promises of the green transition, namely cheap and reliable energy, cannot be fulfilled. If something is getting cheaper, why would you need the wealthy to subsidise it for the poor? The truth is that despite their noble intentions, the proponents of the Green Deal pushed for an inflationary policy that was always bound to hurt low-income earners the most.
What is frustrating, however, is the persistent unwillingness of Timmermans and his ilk to admit their mistake. Instead, they double down and insist on a continuation of the very policies that are failing. It is no wonder that people are increasingly suspicious of whether this is by design or not. If energy prices are three to four times what they are in China or the US, and certain politicians still claim that Europe’s strategy is working, those making these claims must be driven either by malice, incompetence, or a combination of both.
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SubscribeSo the man who no doubt claimed for years that his “Green Energy” transition would save people money now claims that the “Radical right wing parties” are “dishonest”.
What does it actually take for these people to see reality and learn from it ?
You have to suspect that this class of politicians don’t pay their own energy bills and just expense them for however many homes they have.
In whichever areas the Right-wing populists have been dishonest — and there are no doubt many — Europe’s ruinous energy policy is not among them.
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Dear Ralph, examples of dishonesty, please… Many 🙂
I want to see the difference between you and Frans Timmermans
In all of the discussions about ‘transition’ costs there’s never a real discussion of the environmental impact of replacing one generation capacity with another, or replacing ICE cars with EVs. Its all assumed away and yet we will require massive investments in mines all across the world (many in terribly sensitive regions where ecology is an after thought) to provide the raw materials required for solar panels, batteries, windmills and the vast replacement of electricity distribution infrastructure. We won’t simply turn off today’s economic model and march without consequence into a beautiful, harmonious, zero-emission future . Vastly more children in Africa will be enslaved in dirty cobalt mines.
Exactly. One the one hand we have proven environmental and social impacts from mining and related activities necessary for “green” technologies; and on the other, some dubious theories about possible future climate changes based on (clearly rather dodgy) computer predictions. Greenies are happy to impose the first-mentioned on the world in order to potentially “cure” the second. Bizarre. Verging on evil in fact.
“What is frustrating, however, is the persistent unwillingness of Timmermans and his ilk to admit their mistake.”
Cultists and ideologues never believe they’re wrong. They’re like the people who claim that “real” socialism has never been tried. That alone should expose them as frauds who have no interest in greening anything, just in controlling as many as possible. While exempting themselves, of course.
There’s one glaring omission in your catalogue of those for whom being wrong is just not possible. Politicians. Suspend appealing to logic and rationale argument. The ear is deaf. Politicians who commit to an idea or policy, especially those in power can then never, never, ever row back. The dire and often disastrous consequences of continuing down a particular path may be so obvious to anyone with a scintilla of objectivity. But for the politician to reverse course and admit they got it wrong won’t happen. Just not in their DNA.
> By Timmermans’s own admission, rising energy costs have become a boon for Right-wing parties, such as the AfD in Germany, the Freedom Party in Austria and the National Rally in France.
I always love when this type of thinking gets trotted out. “The problem is not the problem, the problem is that the problem gives our rivals credibility.”
There will not be a fast change in battery technology. By definition, batteries have to be slow to charge because of explosions. Imagine, in our land of health warnings when the wind blows, the media reactions to the first plodding battery.
Climate scientists last year issued a shock declaration that the “climate emergency” is over.
A two-day climate conference in Prague, organised by the Czech division of the international Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel), which took place on November 12-13 2024 in the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic in Prague, “declares and affirms that the imagined and imaginary ‘climate emergency’ is at an end”.
The communiqué, drafted by the eminent scientists and researchers who spoke at the conference, makes clear that for several decades climate scientists have systematically exaggerated the influence of CO2 on global temperature.
The high-level scientific conference also declared:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.”
The declaration supports the conclusions of the major Clintel report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC [presented to the Conference by Marcel Crok, Clintel’s co-founder].
Moreover, the scientists at the conference declared that even if all nations moved straight to net zero emissions, by the 2050 target date the world would be only about 0.1 C cooler than with no emissions reduction.
So far, the attempts to mitigate climate change by international agreements such as the Paris Agreement have made no difference to our influence on climate, since nations such as Russia and China, India and Pakistan continue greatly to expand their combustion of coal, oil and gas.
The cost of achieving that 0.1 C reduction in global warming would be $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ worldwide gross domestic product.
Finally, the conference “calls upon the entire scientific community to cease and desist from its persecution of scientists and researchers who disagree with the current official narrative on climate change and instead to encourage once again the long and noble tradition of free, open and uncensored scientific research, investigation, publication and discussion”.
There’s only so many times that they can recycle the claim that renewables make energy cheaper, before people start to notice that, actually, renewables have made energy hugely more expensive, and yet still make up a minority in terms of energy production, despite 25-30 years of large government hand-outs. Not surprisingly, when voters do notice, they also stop voting for people who make those kinds of false claims, and they get much more skeptical of any subsequent claims along the same lines. That provides an easy open goal for any political parties taking a counter-point-of-view. If you want a winning green policy, stop chasing wind and solar and direct the money to the one area that will generate clean, abundant, cheap electricity.