Decarbonization means depopulation

OPINION:

The most destructive form of carbon isn’t coal, oil or natural gas. It’s the human being.

That’s the sobering takeaway from the omnipresent campaign to rid the world of carbon-based energy sources, which green activists assert are ruining Mother Earth.

“The Folly of Climate Leadership,” a study of Britain’s early adoption of “net zero” policies published earlier this month by the RealClear Foundation, details the economic depredations that followed the U.K.’s 2008 resolution to curtail fossil fuel use. The ensuing period saw “Britain achieve the lowest peacetime growth rate since 1780; and only one previous period (1899-1913) had weaker total factor productivity growth,” study author Rupert Darwall writes.

At the household level, the cost of energy went through the roof: Britons paid $228 per megawatt-hour for coal-generated electricity in 2022, compared with the $27 Americans paid. The $251 per megawatt-hour charge for British electricity generated by natural gas compares unfavorably with the $61 paid in the United States.

The study’s conclusion, according to Mr. Darwall: “Net zero presents a cocktail of higher energy costs, higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, squeezed family budgets, less opportunity, and prolonged public-sector austerity.”

The consequences of the decarbonization movement’s manic effort to expunge carbon reaches far beyond the British purse. In the United States, the youthful set is increasingly torn by a Hobson’s choice: pursue economic prosperity and ruin the environment or submit to a life of deprivation in order to save it.

A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that among childless Americans ages 18 to 49, 44% said they are unlikely to have children in the future. Tellingly, 56% of those rejecting parenthood didn’t explain the reasoning behind their choice, saying simply that they “just don’t want to have children.”

The streams of thought that enter into life’s ponderous decisions can be many, but it is clear a current of pessimism permeates the attitudes of a plurality. Refusal to raise a family, in the U.S. or elsewhere, is a zero-sum outlook on the planet’s future.

For those who believe humankind poses an existential threat to the natural world, self-abnegation is praiseworthy.

Writing in Scientific American, Stephanie Feldstein, director of population and sustainability at the left-leaning Center for Biological Diversity, notes that the populations of dozens of nations are forecast to fall by 2050:

“This is good news. Considering no other large animal’s population has grown as much, as quickly or as devastatingly for other species as ours, we should all be celebrating population decline.”

Human beings are much more than “large animals.” The “good news” is that our species possesses reason and the inventiveness that allows us to adapt to changing environmental conditions. We’re fully capable of enhancing our living conditions, even while expanding the population.

This environmentalist’s attitude shows how short a step it is from decarbonization to depopulation — the loss of a sizable portion of humanity’s 8 billion souls. Rather than simply going along with the scheme that would deprive humanity of itself and its resources, Americans, Brits and others should muster the fortitude to fashion a brighter future. Humanity’s ingenuity, as the economist Julian Simon once said, is “the ultimate resource.”