Greening the Void: Climate Change and Political Legitimacy - American Affairs Journal

Out of all the contemporary social and political movements extant in the West today, the sprawling “green” movement ranks as one of the most—if not the most—influential. As an ideology and a cultural zeitgeist, the green movement holds great sway among a large segment of the college-educated “knowledge workers” of Western economies. (Noticeably lower enthusiasm for green causes among working-class constituencies reflects wider cleavages between educated and affluent urban-dwellers and the various left-behind hinterlands.) But while the green movement today often prides itself on its youthful, rebellious character—perhaps best embodied in the career arc of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg—it is far from being a countercultural force in opposition to the political or economic establishment. Embracing green ideas is now seen as a basic requirement for membership in many public institutions.

Accordingly, the green movement today drives—or at least seems to drive—significant economic and political decisions, particularly those relating to Western energy policy. Most notable in the United States is the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—which the EPA describes as “the most significant climate legislation in US history.” The IRA allocates nearly $400 billion in total spending, of which over $300 billion goes to energy, environment, and electric vehicles, according to McKinsey. For every $1 that goes to “normal” manufacturing, $6 goes to green sectors. Seen in this light, the IRA could be considered a watered-down version of the Green New Deal that has been discussed by the left wing of the Democratic Party for many years.

The IRA’s Unprecedented Energy Tax Preferences

The IRA is an enormous undertaking that makes previous energy policies pale in comparison. Yet the IRA is not the first time that the green lobby has secured significant subsidies from Congress. After the financial crisis of 2008, the Obama administration passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). ARRA was a Keynesian stimulus package designed to prevent the American economy from falling into a depression. The thinking behind it was simple enough: the financial crisis and meltdown in the housing market led to a sharp uptick in unemployment and fall in aggregate demand. In order to counteract this, the federal government would step into the breach and replace this lost aggregate demand with debt-financed spending.

The ARRA was huge, floated at $787 billion when it was first passed and then revised up to $831 billion between 2009 and 2011. There is little doubt that it sped up the American recovery from the Great Recession, as can be seen if U.S. growth is compared with growth in European countries that engaged in austerity around the same time.

ARRA spending went toward a number of different ends. The largest line items were tax relief for individuals and companies ($288 billion), state and local fiscal relief ($144 billion), and infrastructure and science spending ($111 billion). But there was also a $43 billion carve-out for spending on energy, of which $27.2 billion went to “energy efficiency and renewable energy research and investment.”

Even though spending on renewables was only around 3.3 percent of the total spending in the bill, it had an enormous impact on the energy sector. To get a sense of just how large the ARRA spending is, consider figure 1, which compares the total energy-related tax preferences given to the fossil fuel sector with those given to the renewable sector.¹ We see the impact of the ARRA spending in the 2009–16 numbers, and we see that even this 3.3 percent of total spending gave rise to by far the largest energy-related tax preferences on record since 1985—and probably in U.S. history.

But as the chart also shows, the ARRA stimulus is only a drop in the bucket when compared with what the IRA would do for the renewable energy industry. The chart shows what the IRA energy-related tax preferences will look like between now and 2030 if they are distributed on roughly the same schedule as the ARRA tax credits were distributed.² The result is like nothing ever seen before in the history of the American energy industry. The largest tax credit ever granted to the fossil fuel industry was in 1985, when the federal government provided $8 billion in credits (about $19 billion in today’s dollars). With the IRA, we expect to see tax credits for renewables peak in 2023 at $36.2 billion, or $41.5 billion if we include nuclear. It is not clear that either the American public or policymakers comprehend just how large and how radical these subsidies are. The picture becomes more dramatic still if we consider the entire IRA stimulus package. In the seven years between 1985 and 1992, the tax preferences assigned to the fossil fuel industry added up to around $31 billion (or $70.2 billion in today’s dollars); this is a far cry from the $230 billion that will be spent on renewables in the coming years ($260 billion if we include nuclear). Note as well that while fossil fuel subsidies went to a tried and tested industry, the renewables subsidies are going to an experimental industry.

The “Virtue Premium” in Green Lobbying

It is no secret that Washington, D.C., is a pay-to-play system, and that lobbying can be thought of as a dollar-in, dollar-out business. To put it in business terms, lobbying can be considered a “cost of revenue,” and the end revenue is the amount of subsidies, tax credits, or spending the lobbying secures. Figure 2 compares the renewables industry and the fossil fuels industry in this regard.³ It measures how many dollars in tax credits each industry secures for every dollar spent on lobbying.

What this chart shows is that, since 2000, the fossil fuel industry has in its very best year managed to secure $84.69 for every $1 spent on lobbying. This is not a bad return on investment, and clearly the money that the fossil fuel industry is spending on lobbying is well worth it. But when we look at renewables, the picture that emerges is on a different scale entirely. In 2012, during the ARRA stimulus, the industry received $690.95 in tax preferences for every dollar spent. In 2023, we are on track to see that rise to $740.38 thanks to IRA distributions. Although the fossil fuels industry still spends more on lobbying in absolute terms, the returns on green lobbying are significantly higher. We call the green lobby’s outsized capacity to extract money from the government the “virtue premium.”

The IRA is not just much larger in the total spending it provides to the green lobby; it is also a wholly different beast than the ARRA stimulus. The ARRA stimulus had a genuine macroeconomic rationale. Keynesian theory tells us that, in a deep recession, any and all government spending is good government spending. Since the economy lacks aggregate demand, any additional spending just deploys resources that would not otherwise be employed. In Keynes’s famous example, even burying bottles full of cash and having people dig them up is superior to having those same people unemployed. But the IRA was not passed at a time of deep recession. As the spending from the bill comes online in 2023, unemployment is seeing record lows of 3.4 percent in some months—these are rates of unemployment not seen since the late 1960s.

So what exactly is the rationale of the IRA? It is not a straightforward Keynesian bill to lift aggregate demand. Aggregate demand is doing just fine, as seen in the low unemployment numbers. In fact, given that we have experienced high inflation recently, there may well be too much aggregate demand in the economy. We cannot but conclude that the IRA is not really a macroeconomic stimulus policy at all. Instead, it is aimed at something else entirely. It appears to be a radical attempt to restructure the American economy in line with green ideology. This raises two related questions: First, how has the green lobby acquired such awesome power in the past two decades? Second, what is their rationale for wielding this power? It is only by answering these two questions that we can understand where the virtue premium in lobbying came from.

The green lobby appears distinct from other industry lobbies, like defense or pharma, both in terms of its lobbying model and popular perceptions. Consider one of the most common and long-standing “folk conspiracy theories” in the United States: that of the American military-industrial complex secretly pulling the strings. The theory holds that Lockheed Martin or Raytheon use their profits to bribe politicians to increase spending on defense, spending that can then be transformed into profits for these companies, which in turn is recycled into even more lobbying, leading to a self-licking ice cream cone of cronyism and subsidy. Put another way, when people say that defense contractors run America, they imagine that this is done through a fairly simple pay-to-play scheme: a powerful industry with lots of money uses its resources to influence politicians, who then use their offices in order to entrench that industry and make it ever-more powerful.

Whatever one may say about the truth-value of this narrative (or how much the wishes of defense contractors actually govern U.S. policymaking), it is obviously insufficient to explain the subsidies that are today going to various green companies. In the defense industry case, the large industry precedes the political lobby; for the green industry, the political lobby precedes the formation and growth of the industry itself. The idea that American solar panel start-ups or algal biodiesel companies could somehow muster enough institutional heft to grab the reins of the U.S. political process behind the scenes is simply not credible; most of these companies are fragile hothouse plants, only capable of surviving in an environment of cheap credit and generous government subsidies. Thus, the question that really needs to be asked is why, exactly, has the green lobby been so successful in securing state support, even without much in the way of an actual industry to support it? Why is this industry able to extract vast quantities of money from Congress with much lighter lobbying expenditure than similar industries? Or, to put it in even more basic terms, what’s actually in it for the politicians?

Trusting the Science

The most common explanation for the growth of the green movement in the West is simple: climate change is a real phenomenon that threatens humanity with large-scale death and destruction. Why wouldn’t mitigating this be appealing and important to politicians? Yes, Congress isn’t perfectly good, and often the way money is spent and appropriated has little to do with the general interest. But surely Congress isn’t perfectly bad, either—who’s to say that this isn’t one of those cases where American politicians have actually come together to do the right thing?

Yet the rhetoric and behavior of green activists themselves suggests that something else is also going on. In their rhetoric, climate change is a matter of “settled science”; it is not even a political question but an empirical one, and thus disagreeing with the green movement (or even green policies in general) is not an act of voicing a political disagreement but one of denying basic fact. This accusation is highly ironic, however, given that the climate change movement engages in a form of climate-change denial of its own: the downplaying or outright suppression of non-anthropogenic climate change.

If one enters the term “non-anthropogenic climate change” into a search engine, the results will include various sites aimed at “debunking myths” about climate change. The World Wildlife Federation, for example, writes:

Myth 1. the earth’s climate has always changed. Over the course of the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, the climate has changed a lot. This is true. But the rapid warming we’re seeing now can’t be explained by natural cycles of warming and cooling. The kind of changes that would normally happen over hundreds of thousands of years are happening in decades. Global temperatures are now at their highest since records began. In fact, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have all taken place since 2001. . . .

Other environmental organizations will generally echo this argument: while non-anthropogenic climate change technically exists, it is a nonfactor compared to anthropogenic climate change, either because it is very slow, or because it involves much less dangerous shifts in environmental conditions.

The basic problem here is that this simply isn’t true. Paleoclimatology—that is, the scientific discipline concerned with studying past climate conditions—is absolutely unequivocal on this point. To take merely one example, the Younger Dryas period included both a sudden cooling of global temperatures, as well as a sudden shock of extremely rapid global warming, estimated at about seven degrees celsius over just a few decades. It’s useful to contrast this with the information contained on Wikipedia’s page for the topic of “Climate Apocalypse,” which poses a three-degree temperature change by 2050 (i.e., a three-degree temperature shift playing out over more than a century of industrial civilization) as a “doomsday scenario.” Claiming that these kinds of dramatic changes take place over “hundreds of thousands of years” is a particularly amusing mistake for an NGO like the WWF to make, which purportedly aims to educate the public and to debunk various “climate myths.” The last glacial maximum, during which all of Scandinavia and most of Britain were covered by glaciers, occurred twenty thousand years ago.

In theory, the field of paleoclimatology and the climate change movement should make natural and obvious allies. The fact that our planet has a rich history of both long-term and sudden, dramatic, and lethal climate change would presumably only buttress the argument that the climate movement seeks to make. The basic empirical truth, that non-anthropogenic climate change is (1) often quite dramatic and (2) often very dangerous, in turn, supports the argument that anthropogenic climate change deserves to be taken seriously as well. Yet it also makes the distinction a bit of a moot point. Climate change is climate change; no matter the cause, it is always worth taking extremely seriously. In practice, however, this is seldom the case that’s made.

In actually occurring climate change activism, basic paleoclimatological facts about planet Earth and climate change are either ignored or suppressed in order to craft a moralizing story. Specifically, in this story, humanity faces two stark options: either certain political and social changes are implemented and apocalypse is averted, or all human civilization collapses.

The climate change movement thus engages in a curious mix of constant, habitual catastrophizing of some aspects of climate change, while simultaneously under-catastrophizing other aspects of it. On the one hand, it usually posits that three degrees of warming over a century is an apocalypse that life on Earth has not seen before and cannot possibly survive. On the other, it insinuates that non-anthropogenic climate change—including cases of six or seven degrees of warming taking place over ten or twenty years!—is not really something to worry about. Taken together, this makes for a narrative about the world in which climate catastrophe revolves exclusively around human sin and human hubris, and for which the only solution is the moral tutelage of the climate movement itself. Earth’s climate, far from being a titanic, uncaring, and fantastically complex system that can easily cause massive and sudden harm to humans for any number of reasons, is instead cast as a moral, human-centric actor: whatever punishment it doles out is, in this view, merely our own human sins being reflected back at us.

There is a very recent analogue to this kind of morality-play “science” in America: the Covid-19 pandemic. That the Covid-19 virus existed and could be harmful or deadly to humans are basic empirical facts. But everything else about the virus, from its origins to what should be done about it, was almost gratuitously politicized. During the years of the pandemic, America was told to “trust the science,” even as “the science” and particular sectoral and political interests clearly merged together, abandoning all pretensions of empiricism or objectivity. In the earliest days of the pandemic, anyone who worried about it was an enemy of science, and probably a racist against Asian Americans as well. Later on, this dynamic shifted, and anyone who wasn’t ready to embrace lockdowns was in violation of the science. Then, as the George Floyd protests sprang up in American cities, “the science” declared that, actually, protests were not liable to spread the virus, as long as the protests were against racism (and not, say, against lockdowns). What we thus increasingly see in the West is a form of interest-group politics that does not dare to speak its own name. The Covid-19 virus was apolitical in and of itself—all viruses are—but the many policies and decisions taken in its name were clearly anything but.

Ruling the Void

The curious astigmatism that climate change activism displays regarding the science of studying Earth’s (very real) history of climate change seems less like an omission and more like a necessary—if perhaps not always conscious—choice. Climate change, once you remove all the annoying details that scientists have gleaned from studying Greenland’s fossils or the carbon content of millennia-old glaciers, stops being a natural process and becomes a tale of human morality. What follows from this is that every new environmental disaster becomes further proof of human wickedness, and every new proof of human wickedness becomes a new claim to rule for a certain moral and intellectual elite. Conveniently enough, it also frees politicians from any pesky responsibility to prevent or mitigate disasters; if floods are interpreted as being a form of divine punishment sent directly from Mother Nature herself (as opposed to the completely normal kinds of floods that humans have always had to deal with, even before the advent of the industrial economy), then rejecting those punishments by trying to mitigate the flooding is sinful in and of itself. Only by accepting that the flood is your own fault can you attain moral salvation, according to this view of the world.

This constant catastrophizing that has now become such a routine feature of Western politics—and which is used to justify both unpopular policy and to shift state resources toward sectional interests—is perhaps best understood through the lens of an Irish political scientist by the name of Peter Mair, who spent much of his life tracing the political changes of postwar Western societies. Mair’s final book, Ruling the Void, was sadly unfinished when he passed away in 2011, but the core arguments were fleshed out enough to make posthumous publication possible.

To summarize Mair’s argument, long-term structural changes inside the West—with labor unions atrophying and political parties going from broad membership organizations to small, insular organizations dominated by the professional classes—have over time hollowed out the function of mass democratic political systems, and engendered a fundamental transformation in the character and outlook of Western politicians. The “void” that Mair refers to in the title is the void of popular participation as well as the lack of democratic legitimacy that remains once the political system has been vacated by the great majority of the population, leaving bureaucrats and politicians unmoored from—and unaccountable to—the people. This, in turn, leads to the political system facing a growing problem in how to justify its own existence; the European Union’s so called “democracy gap” is well known, but the term itself hints at a very basic dilemma. The “gap” here is not so much a gap between the intended level of democratic control over EU institutions and the actual reality (because EU institutions were designed to not be democratic), but between European citizens’ residual expectations (that their political system should be democratically accountable) and the reality that has been constructed for them.

Around the time that Mair died, the old political order—wherein politicians legitimized themselves through appealing to democratic and popular power—had more or less completely fallen away. What replaced it in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union was an order in which politicians increasingly legitimized themselves as technocratic “experts.” Efficiency, not democracy, was the watchword of the day. This was the time of central banks “freeing themselves” from the democratic yoke in order to be able to fulfill their apolitical, efficiency-maximizing mandates. This was an age that had supposedly settled the big political questions (in favor of liberalism, free markets, and global integration), and now all that remained was to administer this best of all possible worlds as well as possible. The new elites might not be willing to listen to your amateur ideas about monetary policy any-more, but they would make you and your society rich, or so they claimed.

But this world, which was so clearly in view at the time of Mair’s death, has also ceased to exist today. In a time of economic stagnation, inflation, and resurgent great power competition, the relatively hopeful idea of a meritocratic and politically distant technocracy justifying its rule through economic and social progress has become increasingly untenable. And as the prestige of unelected, technocratic institutions has fallen—while their power in determining policy remains—moralistic sources of legitimacy increasingly fill the void.

Neither the politics of Covid nor the politics of climate change can be said to represent a form of purely technocratic politics—rather, we are looking at a politics of morality, almost a form of soothsaying. Its narratives deal less with expertise and policy and more with sin and damnation; its proponents behave more like itinerant preachers than stodgy professors, regardless of what their job title actually is. If the question that occupied Peter Mair in his last years was how political elites would justify their own rule in a time when they had detached themselves from—and lost the respect of—the majority population, then both Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion now seem more than willing to provide an answer.

The Green Flamines

In ancient Rome, religion was a matter of public policy, and a sprawling and often confusing state apparatus existed to carry out the sacrifices and ritual offerings that the various gods demanded. The Romans were notoriously superstitious, and the correct observance of signs, the performance of rituals, and the interpretations of various forms of auguries were used both to bolster morale and to strengthen political legitimacy.

While modern people look back on these civilizational practices with amusement, it’s actually an open question how far we have really progressed compared to our forebears from antiquity. While green activists still prefer to cast themselves as plucky underdogs fighting against entrenched industry interests, the actual reality is quite different. Indeed, the massive spending now taking place on a grab-bag of green initiatives seems to completely defy the basic “cost of revenue” logic of organized political lobbying in Washington, D.C. A few centuries ago, Voltaire’s quip that “If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him” was meant as a rebuke to a cynical and materialistic Catholic church. Today, America’s politicians seem to be driven by the need to engage in precisely this process of invention: the green industry, when and where it does not already exist, has to be created, at massive taxpayer expense if need be.

The Romans, for their part, sacrificed bulls not as an economic sop to “Big Animal,” nor did they perform divinations using the entrails of birds as a hidden handout to the poultry industry. In both of these cases, the primary needs being served by the practitioners were building legitimacy and making sense of the world. Two thousand years separate us modern humans from the ancient Romans, but those basic needs haven’t changed. There is still a need for both rulers and the ruled to make sense of the world they live in, and there is still a need for the rulers to make the argument that they deserve to rule. It is out of this question of state legitimacy that we believe the “virtue premium” in Beltway lobbying emerges. Legitimizing the governing elite is fast becoming big business.

Millions of years ago, Antarctica was home to subtropical forests and the planet was essentially free of ice; twenty thousand years ago, the land Chicago sits on was buried beneath the massive Laurentide glacier. That climate change is a real process is simply true. Factually, it’s beyond all reasonable discussion. But climate change does not write policy or fund appropriations or donate money to NGOs. As an environmental process, it is silent on how human societies should look and who should get to rule them.

But the specter of looming apocalypse does serve to paper over the growing contradictions of the current political system: the old methods of expertise and economic growth that were used to “rule the void” in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union are simply no longer available. In the golden age of end-of-history technocracy, a figure like Greta Thunberg would have been politely told to go back to school and focus on her studies. Economists and scientists were the masters of the world then, not precocious children claiming some sort of metaphysical mandate. Today, however, the charismatic child prophet increasingly seems to be what the doctor has ordered.

Perhaps the sprawling, impractical, and often completely nonsensical nature of many climate subsidies and policies today is not so much a bug as a feature: like the labyrinthine religious offices, auguries, and haruspicy of ancient Rome, what is being produced for the money is not economic efficiency, nor even practical outcomes, but rather meaning and legitimacy. To ask whether algal biodiesel or lab-grown meat or solar panels installed beneath highway surfaces for eye-watering costs will ever actually “work” is to miss the point. These things are “working” right now—and doing so at great public expense—to achieve their political objective: to give the appearance that the technocrats-turned-priests of the current order are performing the correct rituals and making the proper sacrifices, and that doom and disaster surely threaten anyone who would dare to interrupt their work. It may be that the “animal spirits” of Western market society have simply given way to animal spirits of a more traditional kind.

The problem with allocating so many resources to the construction of Roman idols, however, is that it means that these resources cannot be deployed elsewhere, even when there are pressing needs that aren’t being met. Clearly, the United States today faces a number of economic problems. Recent attempts to hobble Chinese development by restricting access to semiconductor technology are failing, as the Chinese state plows money into its domestic industry and innovation. It is becoming increasingly clear that America cannot maintain global dominance through (self-defeating) trade policies alone, and that the only viable strategy is to engage in industrial policy on the same scale that the Chinese state engages in.

But the nature of IRA spending shows that this is probably impossible in the current political environment. The political class today is fixated on extracting subsidies for Big Green as well as funding various NGOs and climate initiatives, with little room left for tax credits for actual industry. The stark reality highlighted by the IRA is that the green movement is now not only steering Western energy policies in a dubious direction, but it is also interfering with effective statecraft and industrial policy. Political energy, and with it much needed resources, is being used to create monuments and altars to the gods, rather than to build roads, bridges, or industry. The peak of the “trust the science” ideology is a sharp descent into pagan irrationalism.

To take just one example, consider the attempts to ban internal combustion engines. Here, the EU led the charge, intending to pass a ban on these engines by 2035, not particularly far from now. Germany, concerned for its car industry, pushed to include a loophole that would allow these engines to still be used, as long as they were running on synthetic fuels. California has followed suit, announcing its own ban, also to begin in 2035. But both the electric car and the synthetic fuel have two basic problems: the infrastructure to support their mass adoption simply does not exist in America, nor are there credible plans to get there. To replace cars running on gasoline with electric cars doesn’t just require the capacity to manufacture the new cars, but it requires a much more robust power grid that can handle the additional loads that would be placed upon it, as well as additional power generation capacity. So why start with the ban, rather than with the infrastructure that would make such a ban possible in the first place? Why not consider something less dramatic but more achievable as a first step, such as pushing industry toward hybrids or improved fuel economy?

The answer, at least in part, is that the West is now clearly moving away from “performance legitimacy” as a political concept. If politicians can no longer aspire to “rule the void” by promising increased living standards or more rational government, then creating irrationality makes a perverse sort of sense. As ruler legitimacy is increasingly transformed into a game of soothsaying, natural disasters can be recast as punishment from above, and sharp drops in living standards can be justified by simply recasting them as taking responsibility for the planet (this has, to some extent, already happened with increased gas prices in Britain).

Today, in the more feverish corners of the internet, there is a cottage industry of conspiracy theories which claim that the elites have a plan to intentionally lower living standards, to usher in a new world order where people own nothing and are happy about it. But that is to fundamentally misunderstand what is going on. EU politicians are not trying to ban cars without having a replacement or funding for infrastructure because they desire dysfunctional outcomes; they have simply moved to a calculus where “functionality” and “performance” are increasingly irrelevant as a yardstick for political success. Our politicians are recasting themselves as priests, not experts, and thus arguments along the line of hybrids being better and more efficient at reducing carbon emissions across the entire production chain are completely beside the point. The spectacle, not the material performance, is the yardstick by which green policy ultimately justifies itself.

As a piece of industrial policy, Joe Biden’s seminal piece of legislation—the IRA—clearly misses the mark. As a program of economic stimulus, many parts of it seem questionable in the extreme. But as an attempt to build a new kind of legitimacy industry for the political class, it makes a certain bit of sense. For it is now becoming apparent that the only solution Western politicians have found to the issue of ruling the void that has been created by the death of mass democracy is to paint that void green.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 4 (Winter 2023): 191–204.

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