Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, in his frequent disquisitions on the city’s ever-deepening “progressive” and “ecocratic” public policy prescriptions, keeps insisting that adhering to the tenets of the Paris Climate Accord is a necessary and good thing.
But as a New York Post commentary by Jonathan Lesser recently reminded, “the Paris Agreement’s lofty goals are unlikely to be met” – largely because many foreign nations have thumbed their noses at destroying their own economies.
But, more importantly: “Worse still, even if (the goals) are met, the accord will have been as successful at ‘solving’ climate change as King Canute was at holding back the tide.”
That is, implementation of such goals would do virtually nothing to affect “climate change.”
And despite all the “greenies’” talk of government-created “markets” that will reap “great economic benefits” leading to some kind of ‘Nirvanic State of Social Justice,’ the same Post commentary put the push into perspective:
“What the Paris Agreement will do is impose huge costs on American consumers and taxpayers, while other countries” – think China – “exploit those self-imposed higher costs,” notes Lesser, president of Continental Economics and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
“Energy costs will rise as fossil-fuel use is placed in a regulatory stranglehold and huge subsidies for wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, batteries and much else are shoveled out to the politically well-connected,” he says.
“And higher energy costs will mean higher costs for, well, just about everything: food, clothing, medical supplies, you name it.
“Those higher costs will reduce U.S. competitiveness,” the economics scholar reminds. “Manufacturing industries will move abroad in search of more relaxed regulations, eliminating thousands of domestic jobs. Higher energy costs will mean fewer dollars available to invest elsewhere.”
Part and parcel to Peduto’s embrace of “green energy” are subsidies – rationalized as “public-private partnerships” – to facilitate the transition and aid displaced fossil-fuel workers.
But as Lesser also reminds, such efforts to “ease the pain of a green-energy transition” ignores this fundamental economic fact: (N)ations can’t subsidize their way to prosperity; there is no free lunch; the bill will eventually come due.”
Yet Peduto and his acolytes continue to fervently believe they know better and can and alter the fundamental economic facts as they yet again attempt to command the economy to their social re-engineering whims.
We’ll all be poorer, not richer, for such public policy machinations — and in every way.
And finally, as this Thanksgiving week like no other bows with new coronavirus pandemic-related “advisories” that very well may become renewed restrictions, a few words to ponder from The Wall Street Journal:
“Americans have peaceably accepted coercive limits on their daily life that they couldn’t have imagined nine months ago.
“Yet a pandemic doesn’t negate the Constitution. As Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said (the week before last), the longer emergency powers are in use, the more they become questionable under the law.
“The bars may be closed, but too many governors are drunk on power. Perhaps federal courts can sober them up.”
Hear! Hear!
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
