The global meeting of governments set to begin Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, to negotiate national carbon dioxide emission limits in the coming years will fail, says a leading conservative thinker, because the carbon limits set by government just won’t work.
“I believe COP26 is going to fail. Climate policy globally is [failing] and is going to continue to fail unless they change their policy paradigm,” said Rod Richardson, co-founder of the Clean Capitalist Leadership Council and president of the Grace Richardson Fund, a North Carolina-based nonprofit dedicated to creating free-market policies to solve issues locked in partisan gridlock.
Speaking during a webinar presented by OurEnergyPolicy, Richardson continued, “I agree with Gretta Thunberg that the leaders are failing, but they are failing because they are using the wrong paradigms. They’re using market-based paradigms that are punishment-based.
“They impose costs on people. They raise prices. They raise inflation. They diminish the number of jobs. They make it so that throughout the economy, [fewer] businesses can succeed because their costs are higher.”
Richardson, a champion of “clean capitalism,” was responding to questions about the meaning of “free market” posed by moderator Edward Morse, managing director and global head of commodity research at Citigroup.
Drew Bond, co-founder and president of C3 Solutions (Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions) and former chief of staff for the Heritage Foundation, argued that limited government is crucial to a “cleaner” environment.
Citing Heritage’s Index of Economic Freedom, Bond said that “over the course of almost 30 years, you see that countries around the world that are more economically free are actually also more clean. …
“I think there is a misperception that when we talk about free markets, we mean simply no government. That’s not the case. We’re talking about limited government. We’re talking about the appropriate roles for government. Fundamentally, the question is: Can businesses compete unimpeded by the government? When you see that happen around the world, you see tremendous prosperity. You see a great environment,” he concluded.
Katie Tubb, senior policy analyst at Heritage, backed up Bond’s assertions. “Data can tell you a lot of things. The data just bears out that economically free countries can afford to care about the environment. That is the trend that we need to pay attention to.”
Tubb pointed to the shale gas revolution that occurred in the U.S. Driven by small, independent drillers rather than the multinational oil and gas companies, its impact made national headlines beginning in 2009, less than a decade after natural gas prices hit record highs, setting off a national crisis that “basically disappeared,” she said.
The shale revolution has attracted a lot of overseas investment in the U.S., she added. “In the next year or two, we’re going to see three new hydrocarbon fracking plants open up in the United States, in parts of the country that could use some serious economic reinvestment.”
Tubb also pointed to the role that cheap natural gas produced in Pennsylvania — a state in which electricity markets are deregulated — in lowering power prices compared to the national average.
“Natural gas went from an irrelevant source of generation to now over half of the state’s power generation,” she said, a reference to the growth of combined cycle gas turbine plants that easily produced less expensive power than old coal power plants.