Time to Tell America’s Climate Cult ‘Stop!’

A solar panel range is seen in what was once a field used for agriculture, in California's drought-stricken Central Valley near Huron, Calif., on July 23, 2021. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Describing the mission of his National Review magazine in its inaugural edition on Nov. 19, 1955, the then-not-yet 30-year-old conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that his new magazine “stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Rishi Sunak, Britain’s Tory prime minister, seems to have bravely adopted at least some of that mission by challenging the UK’s radical climate agenda. It’s a lesson for the United States.

Addressing Britain’s sanguine climate policy, Mr. Sunak said, “There’s nothing ambitious about simply asserting a goal for a short-term headline without being honest with the public about the tough choices and sacrifices involved and without any meaningful democratic debate about how we get there.”

Mind you, Mr. Sunak isn’t what the climate cult types call a “climate change denier”; far from it. But he understands that aspirations without means are merely pipe dreams. He also understands that imposing climate mandates without public discourse or debate is antithetical to the democratic principles that underlie his republic, as they do ours.

What Are We Doing?

Unfortunately, the mismatch between means and aspirations, as well as the disregard for democratic principles, characterizes much of what passes for the national climate policies of both the UK and the United States.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency set the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards for model year 2026 automobiles at 55 miles per gallon for sedans and 39 mpg for trucks and light-duty trucks/SUVs. Those are enormous increases of 25 percent and 28 percent, respectively, just since 2020.

Source: Environmental Protection Agency/CAFE Standards by Year 1978–2025

The clear intention in raising the CAFE standards so quickly is to force consumers into buying new cars that are either fully or partially electric, hybrids, or fully electric (EV). But there’s clear resistance, as reflected in this comment even from Kyle Bass, an avid environmentalist and chief investment officer of Conservation Equity Management, a private equity fund focused on “facilitating conservation investment.”

“The advertised ranges of EVs have turned out to be pure fantasy (we own two Teslas). After a couple of years, the batteries degrade even more (think about your iPhone). I will never give up my combustion engine.”

State and local governments in “blue” states have been even more aggressive in forcing radical lifestyle changes on the people in their jurisdiction. In New York, for example, it’s something of a race to “make history,” with elected officials lauding the city’s status as “the first city in America to [insert costly, new, crackpot, ‘green’ energy notion here].”

For example, in a social media post on June 27, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul lauded an expensive “congestion pricing” tax scheme that the city will impose next year, in which drivers who travel below 6oth Street in Manhattan will have to pay a congestion pricing toll of $26 to “reduce fuel consumed and pollutant emissions.”

“New York City is leading the nation by becoming the first city in America with a congestion pricing program—setting the standard in the fight for cleaner air, better transit, and less traffic,” Ms. Hochul wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “As we so often do here in New York, today, we’re making history.”

Another “green” initiative bans new construction in New York City from having natural gas hookups, even though natural gas reserves are estimated at 300 years and natural gas burns far cleaner than many alternatives. New York’s legendary pizzerias, some serving pizza from coal-fired ovens for more than a century, will likely be forced to adopt electric pizza ovens.

Another initiative will force New Yorkers to hold onto their garbage for up to a week for mandatory composting of organic waste, since the city’s plan only allows for compost pick-ups just once a week. Imagine the smell. And the vermin!

At least two council members are starting to pay attention to the mismatch between means and ends, and the enormous costs of compliance to their constituents, but they’re well in the minority in the council.

Got Democracy?

Mr. Sunak stated, simply, that “it cannot be right ... to impose such significant costs on working people, especially those who are already struggling to make ends meet, and to interfere so much in people’s way of life without a properly informed national debate.”

We should all cheer, “Hear! Hear!”

These new CAFE standards and other climate-related mandates weren’t decided by referendum or consensus; they were decreed by bureaucrats. New York City Council, which is imposing mandate after mandate, is dominated overwhelmingly by Democrats, and most of those are “woke” progressives whose principal life experience is working in politics or at not-for-profits funded by the city. Their inexperience and inability to see anything beyond their altruistic objective personify the kind of thinking that overstates aspirations without regard to means—exactly as Mr. Sunak described in his talk.

The Means to Ends

So let’s look at means.

Few would argue that it’s better to reduce hydrocarbon emissions, if we can, for the general health of the people, if not to achieve climate goals. But we also need to maintain an economy to feed, clothe, and house hundreds of millions of people and ensure our national security.

We can’t do those things if we overburden the nation’s electric grid. We can’t do those things relying on “renewables” such as wind and solar power—not even with the best of those technologies that we have available today. And we can’t do that with Americans abandoning their gasoline-powered internal combustion engines in favor of electric vehicles that most of them can’t afford and that require a charge from an overburdened electrical grid. We might be able to generate all the required electricity that the climate cult demands with nuclear energy and a massive investment in the electrical grid, but progressives abhor the former and have made no provisions at all to pay for the latter.

At an average cost of $64,000, the cost of the EVs that the climate cult would have us all adopt is now, and will likely continue to be, well beyond the financial means of most Americans. They’re also extraordinarily heavy, going from hundreds to thousands of pounds more than gasoline-powered cars. That makes EV crashes far less survivable than their gas-powered counterparts and raises concerns about the structural integrity of roads, bridges, and vertical parking garages.

That’s to say nothing of how vulnerable an “all EV” economy would make us. First, the inputs necessary to make EVs are at risk, as they come largely from a geopolitical adversary, China. Other EV inputs depend on mining in countries in the Third World where China is aggressively developing geostrategic advantage, but where we have no other interest except for EV inputs. The United States simply can’t rely on that supply chain. Nor can we afford to further exacerbate our balance of payments deficit with China by buying its batteries or to go tit-for-tat with China for aid and investments in countries where we have no other geopolitical interests. Challenging China for these EV supplies could present grievous fiscal, geopolitical, and geostrategic challenges, even war. And for what? EVs?

Mr. Sunak, who accepts the hypothesis that human activity is responsible for climate change, may not be yelling to “Stop!” in the manner that Mr. Buckley described; he may simply be saying “Slow down.” And reasonably so. For now, though, it’s enough.

We need to ensure that the technology that we have to fulfill the climate cult’s ambitious agenda is viable, affordable, and secure from a geostrategic perspective. Major elements of the “green” supply chain can’t be in the hands of those who would use it to force their political ends upon us. We learned that lesson with the OPEC oil shock in the 1970s.

But we’re just starting to do that. NASA has developed a prototype for a light battery for use in aircraft. Small modular reactors—technological cousins of the type that we use in our nuclear Navy that have been used safely for nearly 70 years—are less costly, more efficient, and more easily deployed, as well as arguably safer, than their large counterparts.

But bringing those and other technologies to bear to power cities, factories, and, yes, EVs, will require another 30 to 50 years. In the meantime, we'll have wasted trillions on technology that’s effectively obsolescent the moment it comes online.

Listen to William F. Buckley: “Stop!”