In his April 2 Press Club Speech, outgoing Net Zero Economy Agency head Greg Combet set out the government’s grand vision for our future. Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050; an electricity grid dominated by cheap and morally superior wind and solar power; a reinvigorated manufacturing sector (producing green steel and solar panels); and a new age of economic prosperity as a renewable energy superpower no less.
This vision is plainly and obviously utopian. Uniquely in recorded human history, it seems, and contrary to everything we know of political and economic reality, we will be able to have our cake and eat it too. No competing objectives will need to be traded off or compromised. No heavy or even significant economic price must be paid in the form of higher taxes and lower living standards (all Combet was prepared to concede was that some displaced coal workers could suffer a pay cut). And no cherished freedoms or attachments have to be sacrificed.
It gets better. This economic miracle will be meticulously planned, directed, and if necessary compelled by government employing the extensive armoury of mandates, regulations, subsidies, taxes, grants, loans, and equity investments at its disposal. Business and government will be joined at the hip, the former’s returns being underwritten by taxpayers. What could go wrong?
A visitor to Australia might be forgiven for thinking this was satire. Not only are we being promised a utopia that would make Soviet propagandists blush (at least they never had the chutzpah to claim their ideal could be achieved at no cost). We are being told it will be delivered by a government of mortals, not philosopher kings or gods. A collection of antipodean Jim Hackers and Humphrey Applebys, no less.
How can this delusion be taken seriously in contemporary Australia: a country which prides itself on its scepticism and its instinctive distrust of authority?
I think four things explain climate utopianism’s powerful psychological appeal. 1. Its claim to unimpeachable truth (based on a misunderstanding of the nature of science) and moral perfection. 2. A reliance on historicism: the belief in a pre-determined direction of world history, the Net Zero transition, that is beyond dispute. 3. The mobilisation of all organs of the state, backed by educated opinion, in support of its key assertions – founding myths if you like – regardless of the intrinsic truth or empirical validity of these. 4. The silencing of dissenting views, typically through ad hominem attacks on those expressing them.
We’ve seen a similar movie during the Covid pandemic. In this case, of course, a threatened dystopia had to be avoided. But this lie had a short shelf life for most of the public. As soon as they realised the virus was relatively benign (for all but the elderly and infirm), popular support for lockdowns fell away.
In this case, the people led and our political leaders, together with the bureaucratic, academic and corporate elites who had cheered Covid-era abuses on, reluctantly followed. I think this same dynamic will put paid to the climate change utopia, but suspect this myth will take longer to discredit. It will be more stoutly defended by those with an ideological and commercial stake in it.
Whereas the costs of Covid-era lockdowns were self-evident and impossible to deny, the costs of the Net Zero transition are not only denied, but – in a nod to Orwell – sold to us as benefits. If our power prices have been sky-rocketing as more wind and solar generation have been forced into the grid, the answer, we are told, is not less intermittent power (or at least a slower rate of increase), but much more of it and with a greater degree of urgency. Wind and solar suppliers may need massive subsidies to survive, and intermittent power (without back-up from dispatchable power sources) cannot reliably serve consumers, but these facts must be ignored.
This reminds me of the Soviet leaders, who, when confronted with the catastrophic economic effects of the collectivisation of agriculture, responded by doubling down on this very policy. Or Lyndon Johnson’s belief during the Vietnam War that just one more troop commitment or bombing campaign would break the will of the North (after everyone before had failed to have this effect), despite the quagmire that was obvious to those at the front.
In each of these cases, current costs and sacrifices were justified by appealing to a cherished goal, always just beyond reach. And in each, an obvious reality – that the chosen policies were catastrophically counter-productive – was denied by the political-bureaucratic complex.
In her brilliant 1971 essay on the Pentagon Papers (a secret 47-volume history of the Vietnam War leaked to The New York Times), the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that they revealed ‘the extravagant lengths to which the commitment to non-truthfulness’ was present at the ‘highest level of government’ and ‘permitted to proliferate through the ranks’ of a bureaucracy.
While media reporting on the Papers focussed on the deliberate lying of US leaders they revealed, Arendt dwelt upon the ‘self-deception’ at work within government. She singled out two groups for particular criticism. Arrogant political advisers who, ‘because of their high station and their astounding self-assurance’, believed in the ‘unlimited possibilities of manipulating’ public opinion, but who, in their ‘defactualised world’, could not see that ‘their audience refused to be convinced’. And technocrats who ‘did not judge’, but merely ‘calculated’ as they prepared misleading progress reports for decision-makers, giving wishful thinking the appearance of statistical truth.
As Arendt’s wryly put it, ‘no ivory tower of scholars has ever better prepared the mind for wholly ignoring the facts of life’ than the ‘internal world’ inhabited by these actors.
If elite groupthink is invariably behind the persistence of policy utopianism, the good sense of everyone else is its ultimate antidote. As we know, this is starting to assert itself. Grassroots opposition to wind and solar factories is growing and, as power bills continue to rise, support for nuclear energy is building. More important still, elite ranks are now divided on the nuclear question.
Do the self-deceived deceivers, to use Arendt’s label, recognise this? No. Will reality ultimately catch up to them? Yes. The only question is when, not if. And for the community, at what economic and social cost.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary. He was Treasury’s senior representative in Washington DC during the global financial crisis.
