European Conservatives: How Has Fossil Fuel Suppression Worked Out For You?

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Throughout the West, the cult of fossil fuel suppression presents itself as an orthodoxy from which no dissent is permitted.

In the U.S., there has been substantial and growing resistance to the enforcement of that orthodoxy, among Republicans in general and particularly from red and energy-producing states. By contrast, in Europe, there has been little push-back. Somewhere along the line, in country after country, the drive for Net Zero carbon emissions got the backing of an effective all-political-party consensus. In a gigantic political miscalculation, many mainstream center-right conservative parties got fully on board. That mistake now looks to destroy several of these parties in the major countries.

From when it was first proposed, Net Zero was something with which no rational right-of-center party should ever have associated itself. Whatever you think about whether carbon emissions from fossil fuels are “warming the planet,” or even causing a “climate crisis,” the proposed solution of building lots of intermittent electricity generation never had any chance of working at reasonable cost. This was always an unproven socialist central-planning scheme that could only succeed in driving up energy costs and impoverishing the population. Such utopian socialist schemes are the business of the left. If center-right political parties have any purpose, it ought to be to stand up against these kinds of schemes, and for the working and middle-class people who stand to be harmed by them.

But that’s not how it has played out. Consider just two of the leading countries, the UK and Germany.

In the UK, the Conservative Party jumped in with both feet to champion the Net Zero agenda. Although the first Climate Act got passed during a Labor government in 2008, in 2019 the Conservatives took the lead to amend that Act to set legally binding targets, and then doubled and tripled down with new targets and mandates. From a January 2023 House of Lords Report:

In 2021, the [Conservative] government set two additional interim targets to run a net zero power system and reduce emissions by 78% by 2035. . . . In the UK, the policy pathway to achieve net zero was launched in the ‘Net zero strategy’, published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in October 2021. Some of the key policies include:

  • ending the sale of new petrol and diesel cars

  • promoting the use of sustainable aviation fuel

  • investing in clean electricity and hydrogen production

  • providing funding for households to switch to low-carbon heating systems

  • incentivising farmers to use low-carbon farming methods

  • planning to triple the rate of woodlands creation in England

To the surprise of no one who pays attention, the price of energy for UK consumers has soared. Greenmatch here in a piece from March 15, 2024 reports that the average annual electricity bill for a UK consumer rose from £764 in 2021 to £2000 in 2022. By 2023, the price per kWh for electricity for a UK consumer had hit an average of 27 p. That’s equivalent to about 35¢ U.S., or well more than double the average U.S. consumer electricity price.

There are surely other reasons for the current unpopularity of the Conservative government. However, this issue clearly ranks at or near the top. Here is a chart of polling for the next election from Politico’s UK branch:

It looks like the Conservatives are set up to get wiped out.

The situation in Germany is similar. The mainstream center-right parties, the CDU and CSU, under long-time Chancellor Angela Merkel, led Germany to the “Energiewende.” They got massive building of wind turbines and solar panels, and the closing of all their nuclear plants. Result: consumer electricity prices of triple or more the U.S. average. The recent news from Germany is that the CDU and CSU see their popularity fading, while a populist right-wing party called the AFD is on the ascendant.

There is a lesson to be learned here for U.S. Republicans. As the cost of crazy green energy schemes becomes more and more apparent, standing up against them looks to be increasingly a political winner.